A Murder of Crows (3 page)

He kept his mind blank as he waited for any new red icons to appear on his screen. He didn’t allow himself to dwell on who was tracking him or why. He didn’t allow himself to worry that they had hacked the camera inside the cab and now had a clear image of his face. An image they could now use to identify him through any airport in the world.

He didn’t allow himself to ask who ‘they’ might be because he didn’t have enough information yet. Pondering the unknown might throw him in a panic, which could only get him killed. He remained focused on what little he could control. He remembered his training:
Blend in. Disappear. Resurface when safe. Get back to work. The Moroccan is close to breaking. He’s all that matters now.

He looked down at the handheld when it buzzed in his hand. The pattern of the vibration indicated he had received a secure text message from the Operator who had spiked the surveillance signal.

The terse message followed the University’s protocols for field communications:

SIGNAL TRACED BACK TO THE BARNYARD. FULL REPORT TO FOLLOW VIA EMAIL.

Hicks stopped walking.

He hadn’t decided to stop. His legs had simply refused to keep moving.

Two words had been enough to stop him cold.

THE BARNYARD.

Stopping suddenly in the middle of a busy street was a mortal sin to New Yorkers who were always hurrying to or from someplace. A few people cursed him for blocking their path without warning. One gave him the finger and called him an asshole.

But Hicks didn’t apologize or respond. Instead, he read the text several more time to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake. He hadn’t. The two words didn’t change:
THE BARNYARD.

Other intelligence organizations always referred to The Barnyard by different names, like The Firm or The Farm or, simply, The Agency. But the Dean of the University had always resented the arrogance and inefficiency of this organization, which was why he insisted upon its official University designation being The Barnyard.

Hicks knew calling something a different name didn’t change what it was. The Barnyard was The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The CIA had been tracking him through Manhattan all morning.

Hicks also knew the CIA was forbidden from operating within the continental United States. Domestic surveillance fell under the jurisdiction of the National Security Agency (NSA) and similar agencies. The CIA and the NSA enjoyed a healthy sibling rivalry, but usually cooperated with each other on matters of domestic surveillance.

If the CIA was tracking Hicks unilaterally, there had to be a reason.

The reason could have been their investigation into the location of The Moroccan. The reason also could have been James Hicks.

But technically, James Hicks did not exist. And neither did The University. That’s what bothered him.

His training kicked in once more.
Get moving.

Hicks put the handheld away and resumed walking toward the subway, trying to ignore the questions flooding his mind.
How did they find me? Why were they looking for me? The CIA. Fuck me.

He forced his mind clear as he walked down the stairs to the subway. He couldn’t begin to get answers until he was sure he was clear of surveillance. He couldn’t question The Moroccan until he was sure he wasn’t being followed, otherwise he might lead them right to his prisoner.

Fuck Langley. He had a job to do. He had a terrorist to interrogate.

And it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

A
FTER TWO
hours of changing trains to make sure he wasn’t followed, Hicks finally made it to the University’s safe house where they were holding The Moroccan.

At some point in the 1970s—for reasons lost to history—the University had acquired a dilapidated three-story walk up in Alphabet City. None of Hicks’ predecessors had ever used it for anything more than a temporary hideout for Assets and Faculty Members in need of a place to lie low for a couple of days.

But when Hicks had become head of the University’s New York office, he decided to put the building to use. The Dean of the University, who had always resisted having actual facilities or campuses of any kind, surprised him by agreeing to fund it. Hicks’ secure facility at Twenty-Third Street was the only other University facility in Manhattan.

The building had long been deemed an eyesore in the community and for good reason. Layers of graffiti marred the building’s masonry; the doors and windows had been boarded up for years. It had served as a squatters den for the homeless, a shooting gallery for junkies, a flop house for runaways, and a den where crack whores brought their johns.

Hicks had decided to put the building to good use the day he took over. Knowing any activity in front of the building would only bring unwanted attention, he had purchased the old tenement building behind it and had University contractors enter through a common basement both buildings shared. This way, work could go on inside the original dilapidated building without drawing unwanted neighborhood attention. The University had always emphasized secrecy at all costs.

Secure contractors had worked around the clock to secretly reinforce the decrepit building’s interior. Steel plating was installed behind the wooden boards. All other access points had been sealed, save for an old door at the back of the building which could only be accessed through a dim, grimy service entrance. Here, a state-of-the-art security portal was welded to the newly-re-enforced infrastructure.

Security cameras and motion detectors were subtly installed at the perimeter to make sure no one tried to gain access. No one could get in or out without biometric permission.

Except for extensive rewiring and a few improvements to transform part of the safe house into a holding area, the Dean’s funding ended there. Few of the old apartments had been gutted and much of the abandoned furniture had remained as the junkies and vagrants had left them.

Periodically, neighborhood activists still called for the building to be revitalized or turned into a homeless shelter or school. Hicks saw to it they were subtly—but effectively—convinced to turn their attention elsewhere. Over the years, several developers had tried to buy the property but were told the owner had no intention of selling. Few had taken “no” for an answer. Hicks hadn’t been as gentle in changing their minds.

Junkies and drug dealers and homeless still tried to gain entrance to the building. They were dealt with in a far more permanent manner.

After arriving at the safe house, Hicks spent the next several hours alone in one of the building’s former kitchens as he scrolled through Roger Cobb’s latest interrogation reports of the prisoner they had dubbed ‘The Moroccan.’ The only light in the kitchen came from his tablet and a graying florescent bulb high above in the ceiling.

Roger’s report made for somber reading. Two weeks before, The Moroccan and his followers had carried out the first biological attack on the continental United States. The operation was as simple as it was evil: inject thirty immigrant men, women, and children with a weaponized amalgamation of the MERS, SARS and Ebola viruses, then send them throughout the metropolitan area to spread death simply by breathing.

The infected had all been Islamic refugees The Moroccan had smuggled into the country from Sierra Leon, Mogadishu, and Somalia. They were desperate, faithful people looking to secure a better place in the afterlife. The Moroccan had called them ‘Allah’s Faithful.’ Each one of them had endured countless hours in a cargo container at sea simply for the opportunity to die a martyr.

The Moroccan had planned to send the infected children to schools to spread the disease among other children and their teachers. He planned to send the men and women into the subway system at rush hour to infect as many riders as possible. He had ordered them to go to fast food restaurants, train stations, bus terminals, and airports to spread the disease as far and wide as possible before the virus ultimately wore them down and killed them.

The Moroccan’s plan did not end there. As they were brought to emergency rooms and hospitals throughout the city, their infected corpses would spread the disease to the first responders and hospital staff who treated them. They would unknowingly bring the virus home to their families at the end of their shift, spreading the disease even farther and wider.

The Moroccan had hoped his genetically-engineered plague would grow exponentially, infecting thousands before doctors might recognize it as something more than the flu. Thousands more would be dead or dying before a treatment protocol could be implemented.

But The Moroccan hadn’t counted on his monster being too perfect. The scientists he had paid to create the strain had done too good a job. The virus burned through the hosts’ immune systems too fast for them to be effective carriers. Many were incapacitated before they could leave the house where The Moroccan’s men had been allowing them to live before they carried out their mission.

Hicks had seen some of the victims when he had led the Varsity raid on the house. He had seen the contortions of the dead and the dying. He had also seen the crime scene photos of the would-be martyrs who had coughed themselves to death as the virus ravaged their bodies as the fever drove them mad. He saw the corpses of mothers clutching the bodies of their dead children.

The face of one of the victims haunted Hicks most of all, a little girl whose dead eyes looked up at her mother’s corpse as if to ask
‘Why, Mommy? Why?’

Death was as much a part of Hicks as his own life. He had seen hundreds of dead bodies in his career, men and women and children caught up in conflicts and wars around the world. Death was nothing new to him, but that particular little girl visited him in his nightmares each night. She wasn’t looking up at her mother. She was looking at him. ‘Help me.’

The University had captured The Moroccan and helped thwart a greater attack, but didn’t have the resources to perform autopsies on all of the bodies. Instead, OMNI tracked the CDC autopsy reports. None of the bodies bore signs of struggle or confinement. Each of the infected appeared to have taken the injection willingly.

That was what scared Hicks the most. Each of these people had willingly come to this country to kill him and any other American they encountered. He should have hated each of them, but he didn’t. That scared him, too.

The Dean had passed along the information on the virus to the CDC via backchannels, which helped hospitals take the necessary emergency procedures to limit the spread of the infection. But some of Allah’s Faithful had managed to live long enough to infect others. Twenty nurses, emergency room doctors, EMTs, and police officers throughout the city had died after coming in contact with the infected before hospitals could be alerted to take precautions.

He knew the number would have been much higher if it hadn’t been for the intelligence Hicks and his people had gathered. The number was a mere percentage point of the how many the Moroccan had planned to kill, but still too high for Hicks to tolerate.

The Dean had also exerted enough influence to get the Federal government to quash news reports of the event as being nothing more than a horrible strain of Legionnaires Disease.

It was an easier ruse than Hicks though it would be. The media ate what had been fed to them with few questions. The whole incident was forgotten within a week.

The families of the dead first responders had been told their loved ones had died doing the jobs they loved. The Dean had worked with federal agencies to quietly arrange a foundation dedicated to offering healthy settlement packages in exchange for their silence under the guise of national security.