A Murder of Crows (6 page)

Hicks noticed the prisoner had acquired the same hollowed-out look most of Roger’s patients eventually acquired. Knowing his hair and his beard had great religious significance to him, Roger made sure The Moroccan was restrained and shaved each morning, including his scalp. He had looked painfully thin with a full head of hair and a beard when Hicks brought him to the safe house. Now that he was bald and clean-shaven, he looked skeletal and haunted.

His skin once had a rich tan, but now was much paler. His cheeks were fallow and his dark eyes had sunken deeper into his skull, giving him an almost feral look.

Hicks knew Roger had worked hard to make The Moroccan look this way. Any sleep the prisoner had enjoyed since his capture had been chemically induced and regularly interrupted as part of the standard University interrogation regimen. Disorientation and discomfort were the cornerstones of Roger’s tactics. They had yielded impressive results with many other patients over the years and stopped dozens of attacks throughout the world. The patients never lived long after he was through, but at that point, they usually didn’t want to.

Despite the silence, Hicks could almost see The Moroccan’s mind working; trying to piece things together. There was something familiar about this stranger, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe he had interrogated him years ago. Maybe not. So much had happened since.

Hicks saw a glimmer of change in the prisoner’s eyes; something close to awareness. The Moroccan was beginning to put things together as his broken mind drifted back through all the perceived years of pain and anguish and loneliness and blood. The sight of Hicks had triggered his mind to force itself to go back to the time before all of this began. To a time when he had been someone else. To when he had been someone at all.

His eyes flared as the pieces of memory finally fell into place. This man in his cell was the man who had delivered him to the hands of his infidel tormentors all those years ago. This man had brought him to this hell he now called home.

Hicks saw a glimpse of the man who the prisoner had once been. It was the one innate part of The Moroccan’s psyche which all of the drugs and the pain and the torment hadn’t dulled. It was the one thing that had turned him radical in the first place, an element as critical to his being as oxygen.

Hate.

Hicks saw hate was the only thing keeping this man alive.

And hate would be the hammer Hicks used to break him.

Hicks returned prisoner’s stare. “Hi. Remember me?”

The prisoner didn’t say a word, but his eyes screamed
HATE.

Hicks gestured at the left side of his face. “Sorry about your face. It was a mistake on our part.”

“Are you sorry because it happened?” The Moroccan’s British accent was subtle and tempered by Islamic inflections. “Or sorry because it was a mistake?”

“Because it was a mistake.”

The prisoner’s right eye blinked as fluid from his sagging left eye overflowed his eyelid and into the towel at his cheek. “You are a barbarian, but at least you are honest.”

“Of course I’m honest. I’ve never lied to you, have I?”

The look again.
Hate.

Hicks went on. “When I caught you over two years ago, I told you what would happen if you didn’t cooperate. I also promised you a quick and painless death if you worked with us. Do you remember what you did? You spat at me.”

The good part of The Moroccan’s face smiled at the memory.

Hicks looked at the wet towel The Moroccan held against his cheek. “Now you’re sitting in a cell drooling on yourself. If anyone knows I’m a man of my word, it’s you.”

The Moroccan adjusted his grip on the towel and propped up his sagging face. “Yours is a harsh truth.”

“The truth is rarely gentle. Comforting, at times, but never gentle.” He decided to begin increasing the pressure. “I also promised you’d crack eventually. It’s taken a couple of years, but you finally have. You’ve turned into a hell of a chatterbox lately.”

“Lies.” The prisoner jammed the towel tighter against his face. “I have told you
nothing
. You have taken all that I have. You have left me with nothing and nothing is what I have given you.”

“Don’t be so modest. You’ve been a big help to us. And I’m not talking about the bottom feeders you tossed us at the beginning. You’ve told us important details about you and your work.”

“And who exactly is this ‘we’ you and your torturer refer to? CIA? NSA? None of your people have ever properly identified themselves.”

Hicks looked at the prisoner’s sagging face and limp leg. “What difference does it make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world, for under the Geneva Convention, I have a right to be told who my captors are.”

Hicks laughed. “Geneva’s a long way from here, Ace, and whatever convention they held doesn’t mean shit to us. You’re not part of an army, and neither are we. You’re not even important to anyone, I’m sorry to say.”

He began to turn the knife. “Do you know no one has ever come looking for you? Your name has never been mentioned on any of the chatter we’ve intercepted from your known associates. You weren’t mourned or missed or even prayed for by anyone. No one took hostages demanding your release. After all your hard work to strike at the heart of the infidels, your own people simply forgot about you and moved on. Guess they don’t like failure.”

“As is our way.” The Moroccan used the towel to prop up the dead side of his face as he leaned forward on his cot. “We both know if you have not gotten me to talk by now, you will not be able to do so. I have grown too weak to withstand any of your torments and tactics, so you might as well kill me now and save us all a lot of time and bother.”

“There you go again being modest. I already told you how helpful you’ve been.” He folded his hands on the steel table, like a bank manager turning down an applicant for a loan. “For example, you already told us your name is Mehdi Bajjah and you’re thirty-six years old,” adding two years to the prisoner’s current age.

Bajjah’s eyes widened. “There is no way I told you this. I never told you my name. Never. I…I know I didn’t.”

He may have said the words, but his eyes weren’t so sure. Bajjah had, in fact, never given them his real name. The other man Hicks had apprehended with Bajjah at the Philadelphia motel had given them Bajjah’s alias which had been enough to lead them to discover Bajjah’s true identity. Once they had a name, OMNI began to spit out all accessible details about the Moroccan’s background in nanoseconds.

Hicks stayed on message. “After all this time and all the drugs and all of our methods, how can you be sure of anything? You told us you were born in Morocco, but your family moved to England when he you were an infant. Mom and Dad moved because they wanted to give you and your sister a better way of life. You were a great student, educated at Eton and later Trinity College. After graduate school, you came to the United States and found work as a software engineer.”

Bajjah drew his good leg closer to him. “How do you know all of this? I never told you any of this. I know I didn’t.” He began babbling to himself. “I know I didn’t.”

“How else would we have known? You burned off your Fingerprints. All of the identification we found on you was false. How else would we know so much about you unless you told us?”

Bajjah turned toward the mirrored wall of his cell, his own ruined face staring back at him.

Hicks kept reciting the results of OMNI’s search. “My biggest question is why you’re doing all of this. You’ve already admitted you weren’t particularly religious growing up. Hell, you didn’t even marry within your own faith. You married an Irish Catholic girl soon after you moved back to London. Guess outcasts attract. Mom and Dad didn’t even mind she wasn’t Muslim. You also told us you had two kids together. Well, one and a half, I guess. You didn’t stick around long enough to see your second child come into the world, did you?”

Although Bajjah wasn’t looking at him, Hicks tapped the tablet and the screen came alive with a picture of a pretty woman with dark brown hair and pale skin rolling around in a pile of leaves with a little girl around seven years of age.

Bajjah may not have turned to look directly at the screen, but Hicks saw him watching the tablet via the reflection in the mirrored wall.

Hicks tapped the screen again and showed a picture of the same woman and girl, but with a little boy about five years of age. Hicks hadn’t needed to alter the images. Bajjah had abandoned his family years before he’d been apprehended. He knew for a fact Bajjah hadn’t had any contact with his family since the day he’d left.

From his cot, Bajjah finally turned to look at the screen.

This was the first time he was seeing his son.

Hicks decided to rub salt in the wound. “Cute kid, isn’t he? Too bad you abandoned him for the
jihad
before he was born. Did you even know it was a boy? I bet it must sting. I know sons are a big deal to you bastards.”

The Moroccan slowly pushed his legs off the edge of his cot. His dead left leg flopped down; his foot smacked on the floor, but he barely noticed. His eyes remained fixed on the image of the son he had never seen. The son he had abandoned for his war against the West.

When he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “Don’t.”

Hicks folded his hands again. “Don’t what?”

“I know how men like you operate. Don’t threaten them or hurt them in any way. If you do, it will say more about you than about anything I have done.”

Hicks waived it off. “You’ve been with us long enough to know we don’t make threats here, Mehdi. We make promises. Back in the hotel room in Philly all those years ago, I told you I’d bring you and your friend back here alive and I did. When I dumped you in this cell, I promised you’d know more pain than you ever believed possible. You have. I promised you would eventually talk and you have. Today I’ve told you this will go on for years and, believe me, it will. I don’t threaten people. I don’t have to. I break them and throw them away.”

Hicks motioned back to the picture of the children and their mother on his tablet. “Besides, you’re the guys who kill women and children. Remember all the people you infected in Queens two years ago? Your followers of Allah? Well, the good news is they all grew too sick to infect anyone before I had them brought into isolation. The only people you killed were your own. No one else got hurt,” he lied. “All those men, women, and children who believed in your cause died horrible deaths for nothing. All of your planning and expense wasted on a few dozen peasants no one gave a shit about anyway.”

“Americans love their statistics.” Bajjah used the towel to wipe the drool and tears from the left side of his face and propped it up again. “My movement is more than one man. More than a million men. Next time, there will be many more.”

“More innocents,” Hicks motioned to the image on the tablet, “like your wife and daughter and son. Your wife named him Alan, by the way.”

Despite the paralysis in the left side of his face, the Moroccan managed to sneer. “Before he was born, his mother and I agreed his name would be Ali, not Alan. How typical of an American to Anglicize names.”

“Guess she must’ve changed her mind after you left her high and dry. She called him Alan when she had him baptized in the Catholic Church.” The fact gave Hicks the desired response and he kept going. “That’s right, Ace. Your son is going to be raised Catholic by your wife. Or should I say ex-wife, since she had you declared legally dead years ago. I forgot to mention it earlier. She’s moved on. Got herself a new husband, too.”

Hicks tapped the screen and a new image appeared: Bajjah’s ex-wife in a white dress standing next to portly man a bit taller than her. Bajjah’s daughter clung to her mother’s leg. The groom held Bajjah’s infant son. Hicks hadn’t needed to alter that image, either.

The Moroccan’s good eye flashed.
HATE!

Hicks kept going. “The new husband’s a bit of a simpleton, but a nice guy. Systems Engineer from Dublin. Guess she’s got a thing for computer geeks. Hope she has better luck with this one than she did with you. Your kids love him, by the way.”

Bajjah looked away. “If she took another, it is only because Allah willed it so. I never expected her to remain celibate the rest of her life. I knew what I was giving up when I left to take up a cause far greater than myself.”

“A lost cause which cost you your job, your family and, pretty soon, your life.” Hicks tapped on the screen and cycling through a couple of more pictures of the family at birthday parties and school plays in the years since Bajjah had abandoned.

Hicks saved the best picture for last. The family’s most recent Christmas card, showing a large, pale man with his arms around Bajjah’s ex-wife and the two little ones hugging either side of him.

Hicks saw the look on Bajjah’s face and twisted the knife. “What’s it like to know another man has taken your place and is enjoying the fruits of your labor? Another man is raising your children. Your children, my friend, who will never know their father ever existed and all for a lost cause.”

Bajjah tried to lunge at him from the cot, but his limp leg wasn’t strong enough to hold his weight. Hicks watched him collapse; his head smacked off the hard plastic floor of The Cube.