A Murder of Crows (13 page)

The Dean:
DID YOU KILL HIM?

Hicks’ reply:
NO.

The Dean’s reply:
YOU SHOULD HAVE.

Another message followed seconds later:
YOU WILL HAVE TO KILL HIM EVENTUALLY.

Hicks put the phone back in his pocket. He looked out the window and watched the city blur as the cab moved up Park Avenue.

He was beginning to believe the Dean might be right.

And that’s what worried him most.

F
OR THE
second day in a row, Hicks spent two hours switching subway trains in the outer boroughs of Manhattan to make sure he wasn’t being followed. When he was as confident he wasn’t being followed, he ventured back to his Twenty-Third Street facility.

He got off the train at Fifty-Ninth Street and Columbus Circle and took a cab straight to his front door. Security be damned. He had already been away from the facility for too long and needed to get to work.

He checked his handheld the entire cab ride to see if OMNI had picked up any secure signals in his immediate area. Nothing came up. If anyone was following him, they were doing it old school. Eyeballs and shoe leather. No hacked feeds and no secure communications. He had the cab leave him at the corner and he walked the rest of the way to the facility. If anyone was paying attention to him, they were doing a hell of a job of hiding it.

Hicks had always seen the Twenty-Third Street location as simply a University facility. He had never called it home, even though he slept and lived there. He’d never placed any frames of family photos on the desk or personal mementos on his bedside table. There had never been a family to photograph and he’d never had the kind of personality where he collected things. To Hicks, the facility was nothing more than a workspace.

Right after becoming head of the University’s New York Office, Hicks had managed to blackmail a young developer into allowing him to build the facility beneath the foundation of three townhouses he was rehabilitating. The University had arranged for secure contractors to work beneath the structures quietly and quickly. Some creative manipulation of the City’s Building Department’s records had allowed the extra construction to occur without government interference or knowledge.

The garden apartment on street level looked convincingly cozy to any of the thousands of people who walked or drove past it each day. There were curtains on the windows, furniture in the living room, and a bookcase crammed with books. Renters on the upper floors paid market rates for rent, which brought in a nice sum each month to fund the University’s Bursar office.

Once inside the garden apartment, Hicks took the stairs to the basement, where a working boiler served the two apartments above. But the basement’s principle function was to serve as a stopgap for Hicks’ sub-basement facility.

The facility was secured by an ordinary wooden door with a large knob and lock. But there was no key to the lock and the knob didn’t turn. The door could only be opened when a scanner in the knob read the biometrics of Hicks’ left hand while a camera scanned his facial features. When the two results matched, the door opened inward like an airplane hatch.

The sub-basement facility was a large, steel-reinforced concrete vault constructed beneath the basements of the three town houses above it. The facility slowly bled power off the city’s grid and stored it in its three backup generators. It also had its own HVAC unit complete with filters and radiation sensors to detect any poisonous emissions from the outside world.

The facility had been designed to survive, even if the entire building above him was obliterated. Hicks would still be able to operate for weeks before he would have to venture outside. He made sure he always had enough food, weapons, and equipment in the facility for such an eventuality. The Dean had originally called it overkill. But in a post-9/11 world, he had come to see it as a wise investment.

Hicks knew a fixed location was never fully secure, but the Twenty-Third Street facility was as close to secure as anyone could hope to get. He had never brought anyone there, not even Tali, though the idea had crossed his mind once or twice.

Once he finally sat at his desktop, Hicks checked OMNI to learn what he had missed in the two hours since his run in with Stephens.

He saw Jason had already directed OMNI to identify all cellular and Wi-Fi devices located in the immediate area of his altercation with Stephens on Nineteenth and Broadway.

Any image of the incident on any device or any footage uploaded to social media had already been subtly distorted by OMNI to obscure Hicks’ identity. Deleting the images would have been easier, but it also would have created suspicion. Poor images meant the media would quickly lose interest. Tonight’s film at eleven would be forgotten by lunchtime tomorrow.

Poor images would also make it more difficult for Stephens’ people to see where he’d gone after the standoff.

Hicks was more concerned about where Stephens’ van had gone after it sped away. He accessed OMNI’s tracking display and overlaid the van’s path on a street map of Manhattan.

He was impressed the van had managed to speed toward Manhattan’s West Side Highway at a decent clip despite the sluggish rush hour traffic. The van had stopped briefly on Thirty-Ninth Street and Eleventh Avenue before it headed into the maze of streets leading to the Lincoln Tunnel. The van was currently parked at an old storage facility on the other side of the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Why the hell did they stop at Thirty-Ninth and Eleventh Avenue?

Hicks clicked on the tactical screen and saw Scott and his Varsity squad was already halfway to the tunnel on their way to Weehawken. University protocol dictated they would report in for further instructions once they were on site.

Next, he checked OMNI to see which Faculty Members and Adjuncts in the tristate area had checked in since Jason had issued the alert two hours before. Of the forty active Adjuncts and Faculty Members working in the city for the University, thirty-nine had checked in, including Tali Saddon.

Only one hadn’t checked in. Roger Cobb.

Hicks wasn’t worried. Roger would have seen that Jason had issued the alert. Roger had never liked Jason, and Jason had never liked him. Roger was already fed up with the University and its protocols, so his silence could be an act of rebellion. He had done this before.

But a Code Red was a rare event. Rebellion or not, he should have responded.

His silence made Hicks begin to make connections he hoped weren’t real.

OMNI showed Stephens’ van had stopped on Thirty-Ninth Street and Eleventh Avenue. Roger’s club, The Jolly Roger, was on Thirty-Third Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. The van had stopped close by, but not outside Roger’s club.

It was close, but not exact. And Roger hadn’t checked in yet.

He had OMNI attempt to locate Roger’s handheld device, but the search came up empty.

The University’s handhelds had a much stronger signal than normal cell phones, so it should have registered somewhere, even in a subway tunnel, although he doubted Roger had been near a subway in over a decade.

Hicks tapped a coded text message directly to Roger’s phone and waited for him to respond.

Sitting and watching the phone to buzz like a teenager waiting for his girlfriend to respond was a waste of time. With a long night behind him and the promise of an even longer day ahead, he decided he needed caffeine. Fast.

He pushed himself away from his desk, went to the kitchen area, and began to make a pot of coffee.

He scooped in the coffee grounds and filled the machine with water. He heard his desktop pinging from all the new messages he was receiving. He hoped one of them was from Roger.

But Hicks didn’t allow himself to rush back to his computer. He forced himself to stay in the kitchenette and watch the coffee brew. He hadn’t meditated or performed his yoga routine in days. His mind now felt sluggish at a time when he needed to be sharper than he’d ever been before.

He knew he didn’t have time for a yoga routine or a meditation session now, so he used these few quiet minutes to take in the aroma and watched the water slowly fill the pot. He fought to keep his mind blank and the Carousel of Concern from spinning. Brewing coffee was the task he was doing now. He had to remain focused on the task at hand and on all of the other individual tasks at hand in the hours and days to come.

He had already been out of touch from the University for over two hours. A few more minutes wouldn’t matter. His mind required quiet balance and the simple act of making coffee was as close to it as he was likely to get.

Balance and planning would give him his best chance of staying ahead of the Barnyard. Balance would give him the clarity to avoid the jumbled confusion which led to mistakes.

The coffee machine began to gurgle. Hicks shut his eyes and slowly rolled his neck to keep himself from getting tense. He paused. He breathed. He remembered his training.
Keep focused. Work the problems one by one. Move cautiously. Stay calm.

He waited until the coffee pot was full before pouring a cup. The desktop kept pinging as more messages came in. He brought his coffee with him as sat at his desk. He took a sip and began wading into the responses.

Tali Shaddon had sent him several messages even before Jason’s alert went out.
I have not received the daily report on Bajjah’s progress today. Has something happened? Please advise.

She had sent even more messages after the alert went out.
What happened? Is Bajjah safe? Should we move him to a secure location? We have resources in the area to make this happen. Please advise.

He wanted to tell her Bajjah was safer now than he’d ever been in his life because the son of a bitch was dead. But the death of the terrorist she had come to view as her co-prisoner wasn’t the kind of news delivered via text or an email. He would have to break the news to her when he gave her the redacted report on Bajjah’s network. He hoped the personal touch might take some of the sting out of the bad news. For now, Tali’s ignorance was bliss for Hicks.

Hicks scanned all of the messages he’d received in the last ten minutes, but none of them were from Roger. He hadn’t replied to his text message. Something was wrong.

Stephens’ van stopping so close to the Jolly Roger Club looked more ominous as the minutes passed.

He checked OMNI again to get a location on Roger’s handheld, but still no luck. Hicks decided to call Roger directly. The phone rang until it went to voicemail. Another red flag. Hicks called him so rarely, he always picked up.

He waited a moment and dialed again. This time, a man answered.

“Hello?” It wasn’t Roger’s voice.

Hicks killed the connection and, from his desktop, immediately ran a trace on the location of Roger’s handheld. The map showed Roger’s signal had briefly overlapped with an old storage facility in Weehawken.

The same location of Stephens’ white van.

Stephens had Roger.

While out in the field, Hicks needed an Operator to run complicated OMNI procedures he couldn’t easily do from his handheld. But at his desktop, Hicks was as good as any Operator, if not better.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, opening an instant message window to Scott, the Dean, and Jason:

PRIORITY ONE ALERT. ROGER COBB IS IN DIA CUSTODY. LOCATION MATCHES SAME WEEHAWKEN FACILITY AS THE WHITE VAN. VARSITY SQUAD TO STAND BY ON SITE FOR FURTHER ORDERS.