In this era, whether you were in the business of moonshine, mining, or any other high-profit industry, without sufficient private military strength, your empire would eventually crumble to dust. Henry's first step would be to build his own detective agency.
At 8 PM, the sky was completely dark. Henry climbed back into his perch in the camphor tree. He reloaded his Sharps rifles, then continued to read through the intelligence files.
A little after nine, his keen hearing picked up the sound of approaching riders.
He put away the files and raised one of the Sharps.
A few seconds later, a convoy of nine riders escorting a hardtop carriage appeared at the bend in the road. Even in the faint starlight, Henry's sharp eyes could make out the Pinkerton's unblinking eye on the side of the carriage. The window was open, and a figure was silhouetted inside.
He took aim. The familiar feeling of perfect, zen-like balance settled over him, and he squeezed the trigger. He immediately swapped to a second rifle and fired again.
Two seconds later, the figure in the carriage slumped sideways.
One by one, at a steady rhythm of one per second, the nine guards were blasted from their saddles.
In less than a minute, every man and every horse in the convoy was down.
Under Henry's gunsight, life was as fragile as an ant.
Half an hour later, after he had looted the bodies, he piled them, along with the dead horses and the carriage, under two large camphor trees. He doused the pyre with three hundred liters of kerosene and set it ablaze. He had already confirmed the identities from the photographs in the files: Allan Pinkerton and his son, Robert, were both among the dead.
He waited for the fire to become a raging inferno, then rode off toward the black market headquarters in the northwest of the city.
He arrived in the vicinity of Jefferson Park, dismounted, and stored his horse. He walked the rest of the way.
He saw the sign from a distance: a large, cartoonish raven, the emblem of the "Raven Brotherhood."
He pulled on his mask and walked to the guardhouse at the main gate. He presented his B-rank identification plaque.
The guards led him through a side gate, into a long, narrow building. He was searched again, this time by three more guards.
When they were finished, one of them said, "Go straight to the main building. Don't wander. You'll get yourself killed."
He stepped out into the main courtyard. It was a massive, 120-by-100-meter kill box. The main building stood in the center. On either side were five-meter-high fortified bunkers, with firing slits every four meters. Two of them housed ten-barreled, military-grade Gatling guns. On the roofs of the four surrounding buildings, he counted twenty-four sniper positions, providing a 360-degree field of fire. The entire courtyard was bathed in the bright, even light of three dozen gas lamps.
This was a fortress, far more brutal and efficient than the one in New York. Chicago, after all, had long been known as the "Murder Capital." Henry knew from the files that this headquarters had been attacked or had suffered an internal riot six times in the nine years since it was rebuilt after the Great Fire.
The building itself was a maze. He knew the layout from the files. The first two floors were for public-facing operations: the mission hall and the private consultation rooms. The upper floors and the sub-basement levels, which housed the intelligence center, the vault, the armory, and the prison, were only accessible via a separate, internal staircase.
He couldn't just fight his way to the top this time. He would have to be more clever.