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I made up a spreadsheet, showing both Fugher’s and Stella’s accounts, with a paragraph summarizing where Fugher’s money came from, and sent it to Murray. I didn’t like being the only person to know something about a man with ties to Nabiyev.

I was pacing around my office when my phone rang, an unknown caller.

“Is this the detective? . . . I’m Aliana Bartok. At the Virejas Tower project.”

Oh, yes, the promising young engineer with beaded braids. “What’s up?”

“You know how we were all trying to figure out what Sebastian was doing here so early in the morning the last day we saw him? I think I know. It’s—I can’t explain it on the phone. Can you come to the job site?”

SOUND CHECK

Aliana met me
at the entrance to the hoist. She’d refused to answer any questions on the phone, just saying that I had to be at the computer to understand it. While we waited for the hoist, she fiddled nervously with the ends of her braids, looking aslant at my bruised face.

The hoist operator remembered me. “You go ten rounds with Nabiyev?” he asked jovially. “He was in early this morning looking same as always, so you must not have landed any of your punches.”

“I hit the kidneys,” I said. “My face looks spectacular but it’s blows to the kidneys that leave the other person limping for a week or two.”

The operator laughed more heartily than the comment merited, expanding on the fight theme all the way up.

They’d poured three more floors since I was last here. When we got off at twelve, the rough work on the walls was done and carpenters were marking off spots to start building interior walls. As she led me across the floor to the engineers’ room, Aliana asked if I’d really been in a fight with Nabiyev.

“No. Your hoist operator seems to have a one-string guitar that he likes to keep plucking. I was jumped by some street punks and fortunately the cops drove up before they murdered me. You know Nabiyev?”

“Not personally, but when he’s on the job site everyone gets tense.” She knocked on the door to the architects’ and engineers’ room, which had a sign on it that read “Temporarily Off-Limits to All Personnel.”

A couple of the engineers I’d seen the first time I was here were hovering nearby and were infuriated when Tyler, the senior man, unlocked the door for Aliana.

“Hey, man, what gives?” one of them demanded, trying to muscle past us into the room. “I need to get to my machine. There’s an array whose specs I have to check—”

“The room will be open in fifteen minutes, Clay. I’m sure you can do the calculations on your tablet, right?” Tyler pulled the door shut behind Aliana and me, and slid the dead bolt home.

“Aliana brief you on what she found?” he said.

“I didn’t think I could explain it on the phone,” Aliana said.

She took me to one of the computers set up on a work counter that ran the length of the far wall. “We each have our own laptops, of course, but these are machines we can all access during the project to see what everyone is doing—the files are shared pretty much among the design and structural people. The computers aren’t assigned—anyone can use any machine—but we all get in the habit of sitting at one particular spot, set up our coffee mugs there, that kind of thing.”

The cloth board that lined the wall behind the computers was filled with photos and cartoons. Personal items—coffee mugs, pencil cups, action figures—sat on the shelf that ran the length of the counter. A faded photo of Cubs legend Ryne Sandberg, signed to Sebastian, was pinned behind the computer where Aliana was standing.

“So this was the machine that Sebastian mostly used. And this morning Tyler asked me to go through the files, make sure anything Sebastian worked on was, well, was correct and to get it uploaded to the project database if Sebastian hadn’t already taken care of it.”

She tapped the keyboard and the monitor came to life. “It all looked straightforward, and then I found this audio file in a hidden sector. When I heard it, I got Tyler and he said I should get you.”

She clicked on the play icon. The recording was scratchy; two men were talking, but the mike had been fairly far from their mouths. The recording was too muffled to follow well; I had Aliana replay it several times but still couldn’t get it all.

“All we want is a chance to bid [words unclear],”
the first one said.

“We’re not talking to new [players?] now,”
the second man said.

“[Unclear] permits are [unclear] and even for this job there can be [unclear] obstacles. We can [unclear] for you
.
”

“Is this a threat?”

“Of course not, but everyone has to pay to play. No one gets something for nothing.”

A pause, then the second man said,
“
I
don’t make these decisions. I’ll have to get back to you.”

Another pause, longer, then the first speaker said, so quickly that he was even harder to understand,
“You work with us and we work with you. You don’t want to work with us, just remember we gave you [unclear—maybe ‘a chance’].”

That was the end of the file.

I looked at Aliana. “Was that Sebastian?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know who either of them was.”

“Would you know Nabiyev’s voice?” I asked.

“He has a very heavy accent, Russian, Uzbeki, whatever,” Tyler said. “And his voice is deeper.”

“Where could this have taken place? Is there some project your engineering firm is trying to bid on?”

“I don’t know either of those guys,” Tyler said sharply. “And my firm doesn’t do business that way, not with threats. There’s plenty of work for construction engineers in this city. We don’t get one project, we go after a different one.”

“Any idea where the original of the recording is?” I asked.

“It’s not in this room—it would be on a thumb drive, likely, not in the Cloud,” Tyler said. “Otherwise, Sebastian wouldn’t have been in here early to upload it. But after I heard it, I shut this office. Aliana and I scoured the place. While she was waiting for you, I checked the contents of all the drives we found.”

He pointed at a carton that held a good thirty or more USB drives. “I discovered that some of our architects and engineers are too bored—I saw a staggering amount of porn as well as video games—but not the audio file.”

It hadn’t been in the gym bag he’d left in his locker, so either someone had taken it from the room, or Sebastian had been carrying it when he disappeared. Or it had been taken by the person who ransacked his and Viola’s apartment last week.

Uncle Jerry had promised if Sebastian did something difficult for him, he’d make sure the debt was forgiven. Fugher and his handlers hadn’t asked Sebastian to deliver the threat, but they must have had some assignment connected with the threat, otherwise why had he recorded it? Or had the assignment been to record the conversation so that someone—Fugher? Nabiyev?—could use it for blackmail?

“I can’t figure out background noise on this,” I said, listening to the recording again. “Was Sebastian in the room with a device, or did he plant a bug, or was he eavesdropping?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was standing on his head juggling beer bottles while he recorded it.” Tyler’s expression was fierce. “He’s a punk. As of this morning, he is barred from this job site. If he’s smart, he will find a new line of work, because I will make sure no one hires him again as an engineer.”

I had an uneasy feeling that Sebastian wasn’t ever going to work at anything again, but I only said, “It would help to know what project they’re talking about, even if it isn’t one that your firm, or the contract firm Sebastian works for, cares about.”

Tyler said, “This is a needle in a haystack, Warshawski. Too many projects, too many building and zoning permits in play all over the Metro area.”

He turned to Aliana. “Make a copy of the file for Warshawski. Put another on a thumb drive for me and then delete it from the hard drive. And then we’d better stop wasting the Virejas project’s money and get back to work.”

While Aliana uploaded the recording to a couple of clean drives, Tyler unlocked the door. Angry—and vocal—young architects and engineers crowded into the room.

“Easy, boys and girls,” Tyler said. “Aliana discovered a security breach in one of our machines this morning. We called in this woman here to try to sort it out. We’re good to go now, so let’s get going.”

I put the drive into my hip pocket. All the way down to the ground, all the way across the pockmarked dusty ground, I felt as though the device were burning through my jeans into my butt. I drove quickly to my office, keeping a jittery eye out for tails, and got the file uploaded to the Mac as soon as I was in the door. It wasn’t until I’d stored it both in my backup drives and in the Cloud that I finally stopped to think.

Pay to play. That is the phrase that defines Illinois politics. The speaker was threatening to block permits for some kind of project. The recording was unclear, but the word might have been “zoning” or “building.”

Zoning permits are the fiefdoms of Chicago’s aldermen. Pay isn’t great for service in City Hall, but contractors put campaign donations into the pockets of their alderman in exchange for zoning permits and zoning exceptions. Rory Scanlon was the Tenth Ward committeeman, which meant he played a role in routing those donations to the Tenth Ward alderman’s nest egg.

Uncle Jerry, down there on the South Side, he could have been doing dirty work for Rory Scanlon. I tried to imagine a big project in South Chicago that some crony of Rory’s needed to bid on, something big enough that it was worth threatening the project owner. There was a lot of talk of putting housing, offices and even a theme park on the two thousand acres where the old USX Works had stood, but if Scanlon wanted friends of his considered for those jobs, he’d go directly to the project owners himself. No threats necessary, just his friendly offers to make people feel at home in the Tenth Ward.

And if a project was outside the Tenth Ward, Scanlon wouldn’t have any power to block permits, not unless he was involved in a conspiracy with the city or with the other ward’s officers. I didn’t know if Scanlon was a crook, or a pedophile or neither or both, but whatever he was, he was too savvy a player to put himself at the mercy of a lot of weak links—the other aldermen, or Sebastian Mesaline himself.

Pay to play. Spike Hurlihey, Speaker of the House, was the consummate paymaster. He couldn’t help or hinder a Chicago building project, unless it was through the shenanigans he’d pulled on Virejas Tower—getting a special law passed exempting the project from an environmental assessment. But he wouldn’t have needed intermediaries to threaten the Virejas project. He was an owner himself, for one thing, so he had a say in who bid on the work, and besides, work was too far along to add new players. It had to be a project where work hadn’t started yet.

Looking for a big project not yet underway seemed like a really good way to waste a couple of months. It might be easier to start at the other end: Uncle Jerry had promised Sebastian he’d clear the debt forever if Sebastian did something connected to this meeting.

It was frustrating not to know whether Sebastian had been in the room, secretly recording the conversation on behalf of one of the threateners—or the threatened—or hovering outside, trying to get a version of events he could use for his own purpose.

I took out one of my burn phones to call Viola. She didn’t want to come see me: it was the middle of a workday, she couldn’t keep taking off, she was a clerk, not a manager, she could lose her job.

“Sebastian recorded a meeting and loaded the file onto one of his computers at work; they found it this morning and gave it to me. I’m hoping you can tell me who’s speaking, and what they’re talking about.”

I hooked my speakers up to the computer and played the file through for her, twice. At the end, when she didn’t respond, I realized she’d ended the call. I took that as confirmation she knew who was speaking, although maybe it merely meant her supervisor had walked by. I turned off the speakers with an angry twist—Viola was at least as tiresome to work with as the Guzzo family.