Sympathy For the Devil

by Terrence McCauley

  When they got to the mouth of the alley, Scott’s men began to lever out the shoulder guards on their AR-15s. In the trot through the alley, Scott had managed to fall in right behind Hicks.

  “How do you want to call it?” Hicks asked him. “It’s your show from here on in.”

  Scott gave his men the orders. One stays behind and covers the rest of the team from the alley. Three work behind the house and come in the back door. Hicks, Scott, and the last man go in through the front.

  Hicks spoke into the wireless earpiece. “Jason, you on the line?”

  “I am and in position,” he said.

  He’d never had Jason bird-dog an operation like this. He hoped he was a better spotter than he was a Department Head. “I’m going to need a final thermal check before we go in. Copy?”

  “Copy. I still count ten heat sigs remaining inside. Four in the basement. Six clustered upstairs from what I can tell. Sigs all register calm colors. Doesn’t look like you’re expected. First floor reads clear. Copy?”

  “Copy,” Hicks said. “Go team is ready. Scott is assuming command of the breach.”

  Hicks glanced back at Scott. “Just make sure Omar stays alive.”

  Scott tapped Hicks on the shoulder, signaling him to break from the alley. Hicks sprinted out fast and low. He didn’t bother going for the Ruger until he got to the side of the front door.

  Hicks had been conducting raids since he was eighteen years old, but the speed of Scott’s team impressed even him. They’d already broken around the back by the time Hicks turned to see where they were. He pulled the Ruger from his hip holster and looked to Scott for what he wanted to do next.

  “Since the first floor shows blue on thermals, the two of us will clear out upstairs,” Scott said. “You take care of the basement.”

  “That’s four on one,” the other man said. “That’s a lot for one man to cover.”

  “But he ain’t just another man, now is he?” Scott grinned. “He’s Faculty and that makes all the difference. Isn’t that right, Mr. Hicks?”

  Hicks pulled on his gas mask and reached for the doorknob. “Goddamned right it is.”

  THE DOOR swung in silently and slowly. It didn’t creak or bang into the wall.

  Scott went in first; his AR-15 leading the way. He paused at the foot of the stairs. His second came up behind him and began sweeping the first floor. Hicks trailed in after him and went for the basement stairs.

  The first floor was covered with area rugs, so there was minimal chance of the men downstairs hearing a cracking floorboard above their heads.

  Hicks found the door to the basement beneath the stairs was open and headed down; the Ruger at his side. The stairwell was well lit by a single yellow bulb; the basement just as dark.

  The stairs were flimsy and creaked beneath his weight as he descended, but he kept moving at a good clip. He heard the din of excited chatter coming from deep within the basement so he doubted any of them could hear him anyway.

  The landing at the base of the stairs was dark and the windows were boarded over. The only immediate light came from the broken wooden walls on his right.

  Despite what he’d seen of the official building plans on the city’s database, the basement looked as if it had been sectioned off into rooms some time ago. But now, the plaster was cracked and all of the walls had gaping holes.

  Hicks took cover behind a fractured wall and looked through the holes at what was happening in the center of the room.

  He saw Omar holding a syringe as he stood in front of five men lined up in a row. All three men were black and short and painfully thin; probably Somali. Their clothes were faded t-shirts and cheap jeans that didn’t fit them right. Not baggy in a fashionable gangbanger way, but in a poverty way. Like a missionary handed out a garbage bag full of clothes from the back of a truck in a village a long time ago.

  One of the men moved off to the side, rubbing his right arm. The other three held their right arms, veins-side out, waiting for Omar to inject them.

  Hicks braced himself against the wall. The son of a bitch was injecting them with the virus. Making them carriers. Signing their death warrant and the death warrants of anyone who came in contact with them.

  Through the cracked wall, Hicks scanned the room for guns or guards. He saw neither. He came around the wall and stepped into the light behind the others. He brought up the Ruger and aimed at Omar’s chest.

  Omar saw him and froze; the needle and vial still in his hand.

  The other men turned to face him and slowly backed away.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Hicks said. “Just set it down on the table, nice and easy and we can all walk out of here alive.”

  Omar gave him that crooked, gaping smile Hicks had seen in countless surveillance images, but had never seen in real life. He still held the syringe and needle. “Walk out of here? And walk into what? A cell? Guantanamo? One of your black sites?”

  “I’m not with the CIA and neither was Halaam,” Hicks said, using Colin’s cover name. “No Guantanamo and no jail cell. Just the two of us working this out as soon as you put that shit on the table and step away.”

  Omar surprised him by laughing. “How do I know?”

  “Because if I wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be talking.”

  He caught the glint in Omar’s eye; the quiver of the needle and vial in his hand. If he dropped that vial, everyone in the room would be infected, including him. For his own sake, he added, “I don’t want to kill you.”

  Omar wasn’t smiling anymore. His eyes flat; committed. “How wonderfully American of you. As if the choice is your own. But it isn’t. It’s mine. A purposeful death is glorious and far better than a life spent in…”

  Hicks fired.

  The round tore into Omar’s right shoulder; the impact lifting him off his feet and spinning him back. The syringe stayed in the vial and flew out of his hand. Both the vial and the syringe hit the floor, but neither of them broke. Hicks remembered what Djebar had told Roger: the vials were plastic.

  The five men bolted through a doorway on the other side of the room. Hicks brought his gun around as he called for them to wait, but they were too panicked to hear him and ran up a flight of stairs. He stepped over Omar’s body as he ran to see where they were going.

  He watched them trip over each other as they scrambled up the back stairway that led to the small yard behind the house. Where Scott’s men were already in position, waiting for them.

  Hicks heard the muted coughs of the silenced AR-15s as the men hit daylight. The poor panicked bastards ran right into a wall of lead fired at eight hundred rounds a minute. They never had a chance.

  One of the Somalis scrambled back down; the same man he’d seen Omar inject with the virus. He might’ve been the first he’d injected or he might’ve been the last. It didn’t matter. He looked at Hicks, then at the stairway up to the house. Hicks was standing between him and that doorway.

  Between him and freedom.

  “We have a vaccine,” Hicks told him in French. “We can cure you. You don’t have to die.”

  But the man either didn’t speak French or he was too scared to understand. Instead, he screamed as he ran straight at Hicks, teeth bared and hands flailing. Hicks fired before he got two steps. The shot caught him right between the eyes and took the back of his head with it as it left his skull. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  Hicks went back to Omar. He was still splayed on the floor, unconscious. He’d hit his head when he fell and was out cold. The shot from the Ruger had obliterated his shoulder socket. He was pumping blood but still alive.

  The vial and the syringe were safely out of his reach, but Hicks didn’t take any chances. He dragged Omar over to the heater and slip tied Omar’s left hand to a pipe.

  He didn’t know if Omar was infected with the virus. He didn’t know if he might catch it by touching him, but he had to check his condition. He pressed two fingers against Omar’s carotid artery and his puls
e was strong. Hicks slipped on his gloves and quickly field dressed the wound to minimize some of the bleeding. He figured it would hold the Facilities group’s HAZMAT team arrived.

  Hicks stood up and hit the comm link to the rest of the team. “This is Hicks. Two down in the basement. Four more in the backyard. Prime target has been hit but stabilized. Over.”

  Scott clicked in from two stories above. “Top floor has ten souls. No hostiles. All of them appear to be sick. The stink up here is horrible. Team Beta, report.”

  But Jason overrode the frequency as Scott’s men began reporting in. “Hicks, what condition is Omar in?

  “He caught a round in the right shoulder, but he should last until Facilities arrives,” Hicks said as he headed upstairs. “He’s stable and secured to a radiator in the basement. How far out is Facilities?”

  “Have you had the chance to question him yet?” Jason asked.

  “Negative. He’s out cold, and I’m not spending any more time down there than I have to. We’re evacuating the house now and will wait for Facilities to run their tests.”

  “Copy that,” Scott said. “All teams evac to the street, then back to the van. Over.”

  “Facilities unit is en route under the guise of a ConEd team,” Jason said. “They are less than thirty minutes away. Did the virus breach the perimeter, over?”

  “No perimeter break,” Scott said. “All targets contained inside the building. We are evacuating back to the van. All units: move out.”

  Scott met Hicks at the base of the stairs and they went off the tactical link to Jason.

  “There’s a shitload of sick women and children up there,” Scott said as they went into the street, “and it looks like there’s room for at least thirty more people. Many of them look like they might’ve been kids, but there’s no sign of them up there or in the house. What the hell’s going on here?”

  Hicks had some ideas, but didn’t want to waste time guessing. He pulled off his gas mask when they reached the street, glad to be able to breathe in fresh air. “Were you exposed long?”

  Scott removed his mask as well. “Just long enough to sweep the area and boogie back into the hall, but we kept our masks on the entire time. We’ve got a hot dose of anti-virals back in the van which ought to kill anything we might’ve caught, but there’s some real far-gone shit going on up there. I think a couple of them might already be dead.”

  The rest of the team was already crossing the street and heading through the alley, back to the van.

  As they walked, Scott broke down the shoulder stock of his AR-15 and carried it close under his arm. “Damn it, Hicks. What was that in there?”

  “I think Omar was making the most of the samples he had,” Hicks said. “He was using those people to breed the diseases. After he got the samples, he injected his people with it and used their blood to infect others. I saw him injecting at least one and possibly all five of the men your boys just shot coming out of the basement. The other thirty you said could be staying upstairs are probably out in the world somewhere. Schools. Work. Buses. Subways.”

  “Shit. They’re probably all over the city by now.”

  Hicks didn’t want to think about it. There was nothing he could do about it yet, anyway. All he could do was wait for the Facilities team to show up, seal the place and tell the Dean and Jason what he was dealing with. Until then, guessing could only lead to panic and panic would make a bad situation worse.

  Besides, he still had one more plate spinning. “Check in with Team Two. Where are we with the ten bastards who left here?”

  Hicks checked their position via the OMNI feed on his handheld while Scott raised them on the comm. “Team Two this is Leader One. What’s your position?”

  “Leader One, we are heading east through Brooklyn and we’re heading toward the on ramp to the Belt Parkway. All five cars are still moving in a loose formation. We have eyes on the targets and are trailing at a fair distance with the OMNI feed as backup.”

  Hicks pulled up the live OMNI feed on his handheld. He saw the five cars moving along in the center and left hand lanes. None of them were moving particularly fast or particularly slow. They were driving slightly over the speed limit, but probably not enough to garner any attention from the cops.

  Hicks wondered aloud, “Why the hell were they heading east onto the Belt Parkway? Manhattan is west. What the hell was east of the city? Where…”

  Hicks stopped walking; stopping dead in the street before he reached the van.

  Scott had already climbed inside, but jumped down again and came back to Hicks. “What’s the matter?”

  Hicks changed the OMNI feed to a map view of where the five cars were headed. He zoomed out and saw that heading east on the Belt Parkway could lead them to one of two places. And Hicks bet they were going to both.

  “What is it?” Scott demanded.

  “The bastards are in five cars on the Belt Parkway.”

  Scott shrugged. “We already knew that. So?”

  “Belt Parkway is the best way to get to two places from here. One of them is JFK Airport and the second is LaGuardia Airport.”

  “You think they’re looking to pick up the samples at the airport?”

  “Either that or they’ve already been injected and sent out to infect people at the airports.”

  Scott looked back at his men in the van, then at Hicks. “What can we do about it from here?”

  Hicks looked back through the alley at Omar’s safe house. The house and the street were as quiet as they had been right before Scott’s team had raided the place. There was no way of knowing there were five dead men in the basement or ten people coughing themselves to death on the top floor. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. Until then, make sure your men keep those cars in range. We may need them.”

  HICKS DRY-SWALLOWED the anti-virals Scott had insisted on giving him as he walked back to the house.

  Scott spoke to him via the comm on his handheld. “I’m telling you for the last time this is a bad idea. You don’t know what the hell you’ll be breathing in there.”

  “I just downed your anti-virals,” Hicks said. The pills were horse pills and stuck in his gullet. “Given what we’re up against, it’s an acceptable risk.”

  “I’ve got five of my best men trailing those cars. We can intercept them right now and find out for sure.”

  Hicks knew if Scott said his men were good, they were. Scott had been trained by Tomczak and Tomczak had been trained by Hicks. But there were too many factors involved with stopping the five cars on a busy highway like the BQE. Getting all five at once would be difficult, if not impossible for one car, even a car filled with highly trained men.

  He knew he could have the locals stop traffic, of course, but all that would do is pen in ten desperate, possibly infectious men in a traffic jam with hundreds of civilians. Some would be bound to be killed in a shootout. Some of the infected would likely get away. If they weren’t infected, the damage was minimal. But if they were, it could turn into a much bigger problem.

  Hicks simply didn’t know enough to make a decision yet. But Omar knew. And Hicks was going to make sure Omar told him everything.

  Over the comm, Scott said, “You know we’ll come in after you if you need us.”

  “Everyone in there is either dead, dying, or tied to a radiator. What the hell would you rescue me from?”

  Hicks heard Scott call him a son of a bitch as he killed the connection.

  HICKS WALKED up the stairs and went through the front door, closing it behind him. Now that he didn’t have the adrenalin coursing through his system, he could hear the wet, gagging coughing of the people upstairs. Women and children, from what Scott had told him, though Hicks had no intention of checking for himself. He didn’t need to. He already had all the motivation he needed to throw Omar the beating of his life.

  He’d left the door leading down to the basement open and walked downstairs, slowly this time, not worrying about making noise. He
took out the Ruger and held it at his side; just in case.

  But when he got to the bottom of the stairs, everyone and everything was just as he’d left it. And Omar’s left hand was still slip-tied to the radiator pipe. His shoulder wound hadn’t bled through the bandage yet. A good sign. It meant he’d probably live long enough to be transported to a University facility for a more elaborate interrogation.

  Omar struggled to lift his head when he heard Hicks coming down the stairs. His thin face was even more gaunt than normal and his skin was slick with perspiration. But he still managed a smile when he saw Hicks. “Ah, it is you, American. You came back to finish what you started. I knew you wouldn’t just walk away.”

  Hicks kept the Ruger at his side. “What did you inject those people with upstairs?”

  “I injected them with a solution.”

  “What solution?”

  “The solution to all of my people’s problems,” Omar laughed. “God (God? Not Allah?) will remember those who have brought about His justice.”

  Hicks knew Omar would waste half the day talking this gibberish if he let him, so he cut it off. “What about the ten men who left here a little while ago? Did you inject them with the same solution?”

  Omar coughed a wet cough. “You will find out about them soon enough.”

  “You’re not hurt bad enough to die, and there’s still plenty I can do to hurt you.” Hicks aimed the Ruger at Omar’s right foot. “This is the last time I ask nicely.”

  “Or what?” Omar spat. “You’ll hit me? Beat me? Shoot me? Don’t be a fool. This is America, and I have rights. You are a policeman and policemen obey the law.”

  “What makes you think I’m a cop?”

  “Cop, FBI, CIA, NSA, what difference does it make? You have rules about how you can treat me. So get out of here and bring me a lawyer. You don’t scare me.”