A Murder of Crows (7 page)

Hicks didn’t try to help him up. He simply craned his neck to look over the table and watch Bajjah struggle to get to his feet. The slick surface made it difficult to get traction with two good legs. With one paralyzed leg, it was nearly impossible. Still, Bajjah managed to flop over onto his left side and use his right foot to push himself into something of a seated position against the wall.

In his years with the University, Hicks had interrogated dozens of men like Bajjah. He knew abandoning their family for the Cause was easier if they cut off all ties and buried themselves in their mission. The memory of the family they’d left behind stayed frozen in time. Rarely were they confronted by the reality of their choices.

In only a few minutes, Hicks had shown Bajjah what his zealotry had cost him. The sudden palpability of it was all too stark and real. Even extremists had egos and Bajjah’s was taking a hell of a beating.

Hicks made a show of ignoring the prisoner’s struggle by examining his own fingernails. “You know, that’s the first glimmer of emotion you’ve shown since we brought you here, Mehdi. I could be forgiven for congratulating myself for hitting a nerve right now.”

The prisoner picked his towel off the floor and held it to his left cheek, still panting from the effort of sitting up straight. “You and your cheap parlor tricks. Do you believe you can make me talk by showing me pictures of my family? Do you think a few snapshots will weaken my faith and my resolve? I won’t beg you to keep your filth away from them. I won’t beg for their lives, either and I despise you for trying to make me do so.” He tried to spit at Hicks, but his sagging mouth turned it into a feeble dribble. “Allah will protect them if it pleases Him. He will allow you to harm them if He chooses. Either way, they are in His hands and beyond your feeble grasp. Sentimentality is a Western emotion.”

“Baptism makes them Catholics, Mehdi,” Hicks reminded him. “Muddies the religious waters a bit, doesn’t it? But I already told you I’m not threatening your family. Hell, as far as they’re concerned, you’ve been dead for years. Your daughter is too young to remember you, and your son doesn’t even know you existed. Your ex-wife told them you died in a car crash on your way home from work one night. She doesn’t even have a single picture of you in the house anymore,” he lied. During a search of her home, the University’s Varsity squad had found their wedding photo in the copy of the Koran he’d given her on their wedding day.

Hicks stood up and sat on the edge of the table. It closed the distance between him and the man on the floor. The gesture showed he didn’t view Bajjah as a threat, striking another blow to the prisoner’s already damaged ego. “Your own children know less about you than they do about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. You mean nothing to your own flesh and blood. And if you want it to stay that way, you’re going to tell me what I want to know about your network. And you’re going to do it right now.”

“Never!” he screamed into the towel. “I will never tell you anything!”

Hicks spoke over his muted screams. He was closer to breaking now than ever before. Hicks couldn’t let up now. “You’ve already told us a lot, and now you’re going to tell us the rest of it.” He reminded himself to speak in the past tense. “You’re going to tell us the names of the men you worked for and the men who served under you. You’re going to tell us where they lived and what they were planning.”

“Anything I tell you will be years old!” Bajjah’s voice was hoarse from screaming. “I would not tell you even if I knew.”

Hicks already had an answer ready. “All the more reason for you to tell me. I need to compare your information with more recent intelligence we’ve uncovered. If you don’t, or if I catch you in a lie, I’ll know. I’ll show your family your file. I’ll make sure they know about your attempt to spark a disease epidemic. I’ll show them the pictures of the bodies of all your followers who you ordered to be injected with disease. The women and the children. And I’m going to tell them you let those poor people die.”

Hicks tapped the screen to activate a slide show. Crime scene pictures of dead women and children; bug-eyed from suffocating to death. Their corpses soaked in sweat. Crime scene videos of men writhing on cots, covered in sores. He had intentionally kept the image of the dead young girl out of the mix. He didn’t need to see her again. She was always with him. She was with him now as Hicks pushed the man who had killed her.
Help me.

Bajjah looked away, but Hicks didn’t stop. “Those images will leave a mark, especially on your daughter.” Hicks thumbed the tablet screen so a new image appeared of an Arab woman and two small children outside a marketplace. “And I’ll tell your old family about your new family in Karachi.”

Bajjah banged the back of his head into the wall and buried his face even further into his towel. Hicks had seen this reaction from prisoners before. Everything they had once cherished was now being used as a weapon against them.

Hicks talked over Bajjah’s sorrow the way a parent talks over a toddler throwing a fit. “I’ll go to Karachi and tell your new family and all the people of your village how you have become an informant for the West. I’ll show them proof you died a sniveling coward right here in this cell, all too willing to betray your cause for the sake of a few hours of peace. I don’t have to tell you what will happen to your family in Karachi after that. You’ll be remembered by anyone who ever loved you as a fanatic and a coward and a traitor. Your own flesh and blood in both the west and the east will curse your memory for the rest of their lives because they’ll know their misery meant nothing to you.”

Bajjah’s screams turned to retching before becoming quiet sobbing. The death throes of impotent rage.

Hicks folded his hands again. “Is this what you want, Mehdi? To be remembered as a coward and a traitor? Do you want to have your soul cursed by your own children?”

Bajjah crammed his face into the towel. His body shook with silent sobs.

Hicks thumbed the screen to the final image: a split-screen of his old family and his new. He watched Bajjah’s torment ebb into nothing.

Hicks didn’t offer him solace. He made no attempt to console him. Because what was happening right there—in a mirrored cell in a rundown building in Manhattan’s Alphabet City—was the essence of the University’s mission: to acquire information on threats to the West through any means necessary.

Breaking the Moroccan’s body hadn’t yielded them much, but breaking his mind might.

Hicks could practically read his prisoner’s mind as he watched The Moroccan lift his face from the soaked towel.

Bajjah had once been the trusted commander of a bold strike against the Great Satan. He had been chosen from many to drive a dagger deep into the heart of the infidels. Now, his mission had failed and he was alone. His followers were dead. His men scattered or captured or dead. He had been forgotten for years. There was no one left to pray for his soul. He was nothing but a crippled prisoner lying in a cell in his own drool and mess. He was more alone now than he ever had been in his life. Whatever God had brought him to this place had long since forsaken him.

Bajjah looked once more at the split image on the tablet screen. Hicks watched him change from the hardened ideologue to a father looking at the children he had never known huddling against the woman who had once been his wife. The woman from whom he had walked away had taken up with another. He looked at his new family. Both sons. Three sons in total. Allah would be pleased.

Hicks watched a single tear run from the Moroccan’s right eye and down his cheek. He could almost hear Bajjah’s soul crack.

“If I do as you ask,” the prisoner whispered, “how do I know you won’t tell them about me anyway?”

“Because I promised I wouldn’t, and you know I always live up to my promises. Tell me about your organization and what you were planning and I promise none of your children will ever know what happened to their father.”

Bajjah wiped at his sagging eye and mouth with his sleeve. “It has been years since I knew these men. Some may have moved elsewhere. Some may already be dead.”

“That’s my concern, not yours. I still need to know who and where they are.”

Bajjah closed his eyes. “I have conditions.”

Hicks didn’t react. He waited until Bajjah was ready to speak.

“If I tell you what you want to know, I want the torture to stop immediately. I want my food properly prepared according to my beliefs. I want to be taken outside this place one final time so I may pray my morning prayers properly. I want my prayer rug and allowed to pray at sunrise. And then I want to be killed painlessly and quickly.”

Hicks had heard many strange requests in dozens of interrogations all over the world. He’d never had a prisoner make their death part of the bargain.

The Moroccan went on. “I ask you to promise me you will live up to each of these conditions now because, as you have said, you have never lied to me.”

None of the Moroccan’s terms were impossible, but Hicks wouldn’t give in so easy. Killing him would complicate his agreement with Tali and the Mossad, but only if Bajjah’s information was true.

“I’ll consider your requests if the information you give us proves to be accurate. But I’m willing to promise the torture will stop the moment you begin cooperating with us.” He looked at his watch. “Your next session with Roger is in fifteen minutes. What’s it going to be?”

Bajjah flipped his towel to a drier side and held it up to his face. A dying man’s vanity. “Promise me all I have asked for, including my painless death, or there is no deal.”

Hicks took a risk. “I promise.”

“Good. Tell your effeminate deviant to stay where he is. I wish to begin my session now.”

S
IX HOURS
later, in the old kitchen Hicks used as his office, Roger poured three fingers of Bushmills into two reasonably clean glasses. “You were masterful in there today, James. I’ve never seen you better.”

Hicks didn’t touch the whiskey. He was too busy typing the ten names Bajjah had given him into the OMNI system. Five men in the continental United States, four spread out through the Middle East and one in London. They could have been ten random names he had pulled out of the air. They could also be working closely together as part of Bajjah’s organization. Either way, Hicks had to know. The information was too promising to wait.

Roger sat down in an old kitchen chair next to Hicks. “Take a break for God’s sake. Have a drink. You’ve just put in six hours with that fucking animal in there. You deserve it.”

But Hicks kept typing. “No time for breaks. And we have a phone call with the Dean in an hour. We, as in you and me, Roger. I’ll need you sober until further notice.”

“Shit.” Roger took a drink. “Yet another one of Dad’s semantic kabuki dances where he never comes right out and tells us what he wants us to do. He never cuts the bullshit and makes himself clear. He always talks around things and expects us to divine his true meaning. He’s as inscrutable as a mad Pope and just as infallible.”

“Knock it off.” Hicks didn’t like Roger calling the Dean ‘Dad’ and he didn’t like hearing him criticize the Dean, either, although Roger did have a point. The Dean was a deliberate man, but not an explicit one. He refrained from using contractions and hyperbole and comparisons during briefing calls. He believed a higher form of speech led to a higher level of problem solving. Given the results the University had generated since Hicks had signed on over twenty years before, it was tough for him to argue with his methods.