A Murder of Crows (35 page)

All of this had been for nothing.

Hicks watched the chaos of the scene unfold from OMNI’s satellite feed. Rahul’s B- Team had finally been able to filter itself through the panicked crowd—guns out looking for any secondary shooters who might be backing up Arap. But the only people in frame were Rahul and his people. Most of the passengers had forgotten their luggage as they scattered to safety. Some of them had run back into the station building in a blind panic, but most had put as much distance between them and the shooting as possible.

A few brave or curious passengers had gathered around Shaban’s body, obscuring his corpse from OMNI’s view. Hicks didn’t need verification from Rahul that Shaban was dead. The amount of blood pooling onto the pavement around the feet of the onlookers told the story.

Hicks was glad to see the female member of Rahul’s cover team had managed to push her way through the crowd and rejoin her male colleague as they walked away from the scene. She had Shaban’s bag over her shoulder.

Hicks could tell by the view from Rahul’s camera that he had slipped away unnoticed as well. He grabbed his headset when he heard Rahul speaking to his team in his native tongue. Rahul gave Hicks his report in English. “Shooter and suspect are both dead. All ten members of my team are accounted for and moving away from the scene. B-Team is falling back to their vehicle and will meet us at the rendezvous point in London. Only Arap was armed.”

“His fucking gun was empty, Rahul.”

“We didn’t see it until after we put him down.” Hicks could hear the growing wail of distant sirens through Rahul’s earpiece. “In the meantime, if you could do something about the surveillance video…”

“I’m already on it.” With a few keystrokes, Hicks directed OMNI to erase a week’s worth of footage from the camera’s servers. One day of missing footage would raise eyebrows, but five days’ worth would be written off as a technical glitch, especially on such an antiquated system. “Were your people able to search Shaban?”

“We retrieved his computer and cell phone and will examine them on the way back to London. We’ll perform a more in-depth study of them in my hotel room later.”

Hicks had wanted Arap and Shaban taped to chairs in an interrogation cell somewhere. He wanted Roger pulling the truth out of them. He wanted to feed them to Tali and the Mossad when they were finished. In the end, all he had was two more corpses, a cell phone and computer OMNI had already hacked.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. “What else did you find in his bag?”

“Nothing,” Rahul said as he jogged across a quiet intersection. “I checked Arap and the car, too. The trunk had popped open when it struck the cab. There was nothing in the trunk, nothing in the back seat and nothing on his body, either. He either left his bag on his ship or he stowed it elsewhere. I couldn’t grab his phone because there were too many people paying attention and taking pictures.”

Hicks wanted to order him to go back and tear the Ford apart. He could always have OMNI erase the pictures taken by bystanders later. There had to be something back at the scene to justify all this. A message, a letter, something to link Arap directly to Jabbar. Something more powerful than a common number between burner phones. Something to explain why Jabbar had sent one of his best people to kill Shaban.

He didn’t know exactly what they should look for, but all of his instincts told him there had to be more to this than two dead Iranians outside an English train station.

Rahul must have taken Hicks’ silence as a cue, because he added, “If there was something else to find at the scene, we would have found it, James. This looks like a simple textbook hit to me.”

Hicks sank back in his chair, because he saw it the same way. But it didn’t make any sense. All of this for a simple murder? Had Arap sailed across an ocean to shoot some low-level operative? It didn’t make sense.

There had to be something more to justify all of the trouble with Stephens and the Barnyard and the obfuscation and the worry of the past few days. It couldn’t boil down to a common hit.

Hicks wanted to throw his monitor against the wall and stomp the fucking thing to bits. He wanted to scream at Rahul for killing a man with an empty gun.

But Hicks no longer had the luxury of emotion or rage. He had a team on foreign soil still in harm’s way at an active scene. He set emotion aside and let his training take over. He forced the storm in his mind to calm so the facts could rise to the surface.

His team was getting away clean. They had Shaban’s phone and his computer. There was no trace of a biological agent on site. A terror attack did not appear to be imminent. The entire event seemed to only involve two men and both men were dead. He hoped Rahul could find something on the hard drives of Shaban’s devices might give them something to help find Jabbar.

“Turn off any device you got from Shaban before you get in the vehicle,” Hicks told Rahul. “Remove the batteries if you can. I don’t want anyone tracking you on your way back to London.”

“Consider it done,” Rahul said. “And I’m sorry, James. I know you didn’t send me over here to have it turn out like this.”

Hicks could hear the police sirens growing louder through Rahul’s earpiece. “There’ll be plenty of time for regrets later. For now, get your asses back to London and let me know when you’re safe. That’s your priority now.”

Hicks killed the connection and tossed his headset back on to the desk. He watched the silent aftermath of the shooting on his screens. He saw the situation slowly transition from a chaotic killing ground to an active crime scene under the authority of local police. One cop began stringing up crime scene tape to keep the spectators away from the bodies while another checked the dead men for pulses.

Questions began to flood Hicks’ mind. Not the Carousel of Concern, but more basic questions.

Arap couldn’t have travelled all that way to simply kill Shaban. And why make it so public? Shaban trusted Arap. He would’ve gotten into the car without question. Arap could have driven him someplace and killed him quietly. Why gun him down at the train station in front of more than a dozen witnesses?

It would only be a matter of time before news of the shooting hit the BBC, and eventually newswires around the world. It wouldn’t generate any Breaking News bulletins, but it would be covered and the members of the Barnyard would know about it before it hit the newswires. The shooting would be featured on news sites throughout the world and on the crawls at the bottom of the screen on CNN and Fox News and MSNBC. Two Arabs shot dead in a sleepy English port town would make news.

Local police would soon identify Shaban and discover he was on numerous terror watch lists. They’d learn Arap was a Turkish national working on the
Regent Star
. The British intelligence apparatus would begin the process of digging deep into the lives of both men. Those details would be left out of the reports, but the damage would have already been done.

By the next morning—if not sooner—British Intelligence would issue a general inquiry to their counterparts in the intelligence community around the world in an effort to learn what the other countries knew about both men. In a day or two, they may even discover Arap and Shaban had a common connection to the Jabbar profile.

The Barnyard Apparatus and every intelligence agency in the world would join the active hunt for the infamous Jabbar. The only advantage the University had on Jabbar was already dead.

Jabbar would be long gone by then, of course. The second he caught mention of what had happened, he would fry his hard drives and disappear. The terrorist would be twice as careful next time around and he had already proven elusive for more than twenty-five years.

Hicks shut his eyes and ran his hand across his brow. None of this made any sense. Arap was obviously valuable to Jabbar. Using him on a common hit was a waste of valuable resources and Jabbar was not a wasteful man.

Hicks sat up straight.

No, Jabbar was not a wasteful man.

Nothing in his profile showed he had ever acted out of vengeance or anger. Agencies all over the world had tried to lure him out into the open by killing or torturing his suspected associates. He never acknowledged any of their deaths or suffering. He never responded to any kind of provocation whatsoever. He never took revenge.

Jabbar was not a rash man. He was a planner. It was one of the many reasons why he had never been caught.

Shaban’s death must have been planned with a specific purpose in mind. It had happened exactly as Jabbar had wanted it to happen. Arap’s mission
was
to publicly execute Shaban.

But why?

Hicks looked at his screen when he heard an alert ping and saw a window open on his tactical screen:
INCOMING TEXT MESSAGE ON SUBJECT PHONE.

He clicked on the window and saw it was from the hack OMNI had placed on Shaban’s phone. Rahul may have turned off the phone and removed the battery, but the account was still live. The message to Shaban’s account read:

TO WHOMEVER KILLED MY MEN. WE SHOULD MEET.

Hicks stared at the screen. He directed OMNI to run a quick trace on the source of the text. It was a long shot, even for OMNI’s capabilities, but it might give him something.

Whoever had sent the text already knew about what had happened at the train station. Was this one of their handlers? Or was it Jabbar himself?

Of all the questions flooding his mind, Hicks typed only one word:
WHY?

The reply was almost immediate:
BECAUSE IT WOULD BENEFIT BOTH OF US.

Hicks decided to push a little to see how far he could get.
HOW DO YOU KNOW WE AREN’T POLICE?

The first reply came as quick the previous response.
BECAUSE YOU TOOK SHABAN’S COMPUTER AND PHONE BEFORE THE POLICE ARRIVED.
YOU ARE TOO ORGANIZED TO BE COMMON THIEVES. YOU ARE TOO STEALTHY TO BE BRITISH. THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY FRIEND.

Whoever this was knew what they were talking about, but they obviously didn’t know who Hicks was. He typed out the only response he could:
WHERE AND WHEN?

The answer:
NOON TOMORROW AT THE BASE OF THE TALLEST LANDMARK OF THE CITY WHERE YOU WILL TRACE THIS TEXT MESSAGE. COME ALONE. DON’T BE LATE.

One question remained for Hicks:
HOW WILL WE KNOW EACH OTHER?

The answer came as a photo attached to the text message. It was a screen grab from the ATM camera footage of Hicks crossing Third Avenue a few days before.

A text followed:
I WILL KNOW YOU. SEE YOU TOMORROW – JABBAR

Jabbar.

Hicks checked the trace on the location of the message. OMNI detected it had been bounced around half a dozen communication towers and satellites throughout North America before it settled on one location.

The CN Tower in Toronto. The same city where OMNI had estimated they’d find Jabbar all along. The same city where Hicks decided Jabbar’s office park must be.

Jabbar had contacted him. Jabbar had known to contact him through Shaban’s phone. Jabbar knew what he looked like. He had the ability to hack a CIA operation.

He knew what, but he didn’t know why.

He hoped he’d find many of the answers he sought the next day.

T
HE NEXT
morning, Hicks decided he needed to return to his routine now more than ever.