A Murder of Crows (22 page)

At least, that’s what he’d always told himself until now.

She had brought down over a dozen plots since she’d worked for the University and she had always lived up to her word.

Tali and her supervisors in Tel Aviv had heard the rumblings in the intelligence community following the shootout in Philadelphia. They’d deduced Hicks had been involved and, in exchange for their silence, Hicks had agreed to give them access to Bajjah after the University was done questioning him. He knew she wouldn’t take the news of Bajjah’s execution well. He hoped he’d figure out a way to tell her the truth. He hoped she didn’t try to kill him afterwards.

They were having such a pleasant evening.

“
You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “What brought this on?”

Hicks hoped his news was enough to distract her from asking about Bajjah. “I was named Dean today.”

Tali sat up. More strands of dark hair fell over one eye and she didn’t make any effort to push it behind her ear. He felt himself stirring again.

“Don’t joke about something like that, James. It’s not funny.”

“Who’s joking? The Dean handed over authority to me this afternoon a few hours after Jason sent out the alert. I’m now in charge of the whole damned show.”

He hadn’t expected her to react and she didn’t disappoint. Her only emotion was to tuck the loose strand of hair behind her ear. “How does this kind of thing work? Did you meet the old Dean? Did you…”

Hicks saw no reason to go into details. The more he told her, the more she could report back to her supervisors in Tel Aviv. The University and the Mossad had always had a cordial relationship based more on mutual benefit than trust. “It happened for a lot of reasons, but none of them are important now.”

If she was impressed, she hid it well. “Did he resign because of the alert from earlier today?”

“No. I issued the alert because someone tried to grab me on the street.”

“Why would someone try to grab you out of the blue?” Hicks could practically hear her mind working. “Bajjah. It had something to do with Bajjah, didn’t it?”

Hicks decided to dodge the question with humor. “Stop worrying about me, will you? I’m fine. They didn’t even leave a mark on me.”

He jumped when she punched him in the side. Not as hard as she could have, but harder than he’d expected. “Imbecile. I know you’re fine. I asked about Bajjah. Did they take him?”

Hicks honored an old University custom. He didn’t lie. He simply framed the truth. “He wasn’t involved in the attack that triggered the alert.”

She seemed to buy the excuse for the moment. “But how did they find you? You’ve always been so careful.”

He knew she wouldn’t let it go until he gave her an answer. She and her supervisors had been smart enough to figure out he had been responsible for grabbing Bajjah when news broke about the shootout in Philadelphia. He’d already been through the story so many times that day, he kept it brief. “The DIA was conducting passive surveillance of Bajjah in Philly when I grabbed him. They got a lock on my face from a security camera our Operators missed and traced me back here to Manhattan.”

She moved further away from him. The only emotion he’d ever seen her outside of their lovemaking was self-preservation. “Are our covers safe? Do they know who we are? Are you being watched now?”

“They know what I look like, but not who I am or who I work for,” he told her. “They don’t know anything about the University, either, but suspect I’ve got Bajjah for some reason but they don’t know why. I got away clean and spiked their remote surveillance. No one is following me and there’s no proof they know anything about me, the University, or our operatives. But the Barnyard will be hyper-vigilant for the time being, so everyone should keep a low profile for the next few days. Avoid people you know or suspect might be working for the Barnyard. I don’t want anyone’s cover blown on a lucky guess by a nervous CIA asset. Jason will give the all clear sign when we can go back to normal.”

“I don’t care about normal. I care about debriefing Bajjah. Your last report said Roger was going to attempt new techniques to get him to talk. Did they work?”

Hicks chose his words carefully. Israel already had a ten million Euro bounty on Jabbar’s head for masterminding dozens of terrorist acts against the country. The slightest mention of Jabbar would get Tali on the phone to her superiors back in Tel Aviv before Hicks’ feet hit the bedroom floor.

The mere possibility of grabbing Jabbar would become the entire focus of the Mossad. They would dedicate all of their resources to finding the elusive mastermind, including bringing in their allies in other intelligence agencies around the world. The CIA, British Intelligence and other agencies. Their quest for Jabbar would disregard the University’s need for secrecy and discretion. The Mossad wouldn’t care who they pulled down in their quest to get one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.

Hicks needed to give Rahul enough time to investigate Shaban in London. Even though there was a slight possibility Bajjah’s money man might lead them to Jabbar, it was enough reason to stall Tali.

Hicks suddenly regretted coming to Tali’s apartment at all. He should’ve sent her an email before going home and taking a cold shower.

“You are stalling me again,” Tali said. “You always stall when you are trying to hide the truth.”

“Who’s stalling?” he stalled. “I told you Bajjah didn’t react well to Roger’s enhanced tactics. He had a setback, a stroke, to be specific, but we’re going to take a second run at him as soon as he heals. We plan on taking another crack at him tomorrow morning.”

Tali’s green eyes narrowed. “No. You’re lying.”

Shit.
“What?”

“Yes, you are lying. You did that thing with your face. You always do that thing with your face when you lie.”

Hicks had been schooled by some of the best interrogators in the world. He’d had any giveaway gesture, any ‘tell,’ trained out of him a long time ago. He knew Tali was fishing. His face hadn’t changed. “I tell lies for a living. How the hell would you know what tells I have?”

“Because you’ve never lied to me before, but you did now.” She moved even further away from him in bed. “Bajjah finally told you something, didn’t he? You’ve had Bajjah for two weeks and I know Roger must have gotten something out of him by now. She looked at him closer. “Bajjah broke last night, didn’t he?”

He decided lying to a trained assassin while naked wasn’t in his best interests, so he told her a version of the truth. “He didn’t exactly break, but he gave us information on parts of his network.”

“I knew it. What parts?”

“We’re in the process of vetting the information as we speak. If we uncover anything that even remotely affects your country, you’ll be the first to know.”

“We will not wait for your analysis,” she said. “Whatever Roger got out of Bajjah, my people will be able to get more. We will talk to him as soon as possible. I demand access to the prisoner immediately. Tonight at the latest.”

“You’re not in a position to demand anything. He’s my prisoner. I granted you access to him after we’re finished with him as a courtesy.”

“A courtesy you extended in exchange for our silence about your possession of him,” Tali added. “If you refuse us access to the prisoner, I see no reason why we should not inform the CIA you are holding Bajjah. So, either allow me to interrogate the prisoner in my own way or face the consequences.”

Hicks knew he couldn’t delay the inevitable any longer. He braced himself for the storm he knew would follow when he said, “I can’t do that.”

Tali bolted off the bed and stood over him. The muted lamplight showed the lines of her lean body. She was stark naked and angry and gorgeous all at the same time. A few minutes before, Hicks would have found it erotic. Now, it was something else, something closer to dangerous than enticing. “You can’t or you won’t?”

Hicks puffed up his pillow and tucked it behind his head. Since any possibility of romance was gone, he decided to make himself comfortable. “If you want to talk to him, be my guest, but you’re going to need a Ouija board to do it. Your prisoner is dead.”

Her body went rigid. “How?”

He decided another amalgamation of omissions and the truth might smooth it all over. “We’d finally broken him when he began to hold back. Roger hit him with a little more voltage than normal, but it turned out to be too much. Bajjah had a stroke and died early this morning.”

“No. I don’t believe it. Roger may be a vile deviant, but he is not incompetent. He has never been careless with his prisoners.”

“It’s not about carelessness, my love. It’s about how much he was able to take at a particular moment. We’d put him through a lot in the past two weeks.” Hicks remembered Roger’s explanation and used it. “It happens.”

Tali walked away from the bed. He watched her pace back and forth at the foot of the bed, mulling over all he’d told her. He didn’t know if she had believed him or not until she stopped and faced him. “I demand to see his body.”

“We cremated his body this morning. You can have his ashes if you want, if Roger didn’t already dump them.”

“How convenient.” Tali crossed her arms. “You knew this when you got here and still you fucked me.”

“I didn’t do anything you didn’t want to happen, remember? Besides, Bajjah’s got nothing to do with what happened here tonight. I told you I’m in the process of vetting the information he gave us. I’ll send you a full report by this time tomorrow. I know I promised you’d get the chance to work him over yourself, but this is the best...”

“This is unacceptable. We demand complete, unrestricted access to OMNI’s research. We demand full disclosure in real time.”

Hicks may have enjoyed the sight of a naked woman giving him orders, but not enough to make a fool of himself. “Give a foreign agency direct access to OMNI? Never going to happen.”

“You don’t want to force a confrontation with us, James. Not with so many of your own country’s agencies working to take you down. It would be a shame if Langley learned who you were and about your association with the University.”

Hicks hadn’t expected her to take Bajjah’s death well, but he was surprised she was pulling out the sharp knives so soon. “Threats are more effective when they’re believable, my love. Anything you tell Langley about the Mossad’s agreement with the University will ruin your credibility with them. You’d be further out in the cold than you already are. Their distrust of you is why our organizations have worked together for so long, remember?”

She balled her fists at her bare sides.

But annoying her could only complicate his life even further, so he quickly added, “I’m not going to give you raw data without vetting it first.”

“Why?”

“B
ecause I know everything I give you will go straight to your bosses back in Tel Aviv, who will try to vet it through their contacts at the CIA or another agency. Hell, I might as well post it on WikiLeaks myself at that point. I’ve given you my word on this, Tali. The word of the Dean of the University himself.” He tried a smile. “Come on. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”

Hicks couldn’t tell by her reaction how much it counted, but it was enough to make her open her fists.

He took it as an encouraging sign and held out his hand to her. “Enough shop talk for one night. Come back to bed.”

Tali snatched her silk robe off the end of the bed and pulled it on as she walked out of her bedroom. “No. The lid stays on the honey pot until you make good on your promise. You have exactly five minutes to get dressed and get out.”

Hicks swore as he dropped his head back on the pillow.
So much for romance.

A
FTER HE’D
gotten dressed and was ready to leave, he found Tali on the sofa in her living room typing away at her laptop. Her back was to him. Her laptop had a screen guard, so he couldn’t see what she was typing, but he didn’t need to. He knew it was most likely an email to her bosses back in Tel Aviv, reporting every detail he had told her about Bajjah’s death.

Her email might lead to an order from her bosses to lean harder on Hicks for more information. They also might order her to wait for Hicks’ report and see what it said. It was nearly impossible to predict how the Mossad might respond to bad news.

He wanted to resent her for sending the email, but he couldn’t. She was on loan to the University and she was getting paid by the University, but she was still technically and legally an agent of the Israeli government. Hicks had always been mindful of the loyalties of University Faculty Members from foreign governments. Now he was the Dean, he would have to be even more careful. Tali was the kind of woman where a smart man had to keep a lot of things in mind or risk losing himself in her charms. Seduction was one of the many reasons why she had been such an effective agent. Hicks knew he wasn’t immune.

Perhaps that was why keeping the details about Jabbar’s network from her had bothered him, though he couldn’t explain why. He knew it wasn’t love. Tali was a tough woman to forget and nearly impossible to love.

But while they had been together in bed, he had sensed something different between them, something real and deep even though it had only lasted for the briefest of moments. Something in her gasps or a flutter of her eyes, something unguarded and real they had never shared when they had made love in the past. Something more than lust, but shy of love.