A Conspiracy of Ravens

by Terrence McCauley

  “Fine by me.” Demerest sat back on the bench like he didn’t have a care in the world. Just another citizen on a park bench, enjoying the beautiful day with his lady friend, ignoring the bum on the next bench over. He spoke loud enough so Hicks could hear him. “Last night, Sarah told me all about you and the University. She even showed me that executive order from Eisenhower that she believes gives your group authority to operate independent of government oversight. I think my lawyers would beg to differ, but…”

  “A great many of your lawyers have begged to differ with the order over the years,” Sarah said. “Some attorneys general and presidents, too. The last president who tried to bring us under his heel was forced to resign in disgrace. Of all the avenues we should be exploring here today, the legality of the University’s authority shouldn’t be one of them.”

  Demerest closed his eyes. “I forgot it’s impossible to win an argument with you.” He looked at Hicks. “Sarah told me that you were the one who grabbed Bajjah in that motel in Philly. I saw the footage, son, so I know you’re not just another one of Sarah’s policy geeks writing white papers on foreign affairs.”

  “Damned right I’m not.”

  Demerest went on. “She told me you had an interesting story to tell me in exchange for cooperation between our two organizations. Since I’ve been hunting Bajjah for over a decade, you’ve got exactly five minutes to tell me where he is before I bring the wrath of God down on your head. If I like what I hear, we can talk about cooperation.”

  Hicks stole a quick glance down at his handheld to see if Stephens had sent him any security warnings. He hadn’t. OMNI hadn’t detected any secure signals in the immediate area, either. For all intents and purposes, Demerest had lived up to his end of the bargain. Hicks saw no reason that he shouldn’t live up to his.

  Hicks tapped the jamming icon on his device, tucked it away, and started the abbreviated script he and Sarah had agreed upon beforehand. “A couple of months ago, one of my top operatives infiltrated a cell of suspected Somali zealots working out of a cab company in Queens. After being there a few months, we agreed they were probably harmless. I was about to shut down the op and reassign my man somewhere else, when he sent me an emergency message requesting a meeting ASAP. Since he was one of my best people, I knew he wouldn’t hit the panic button unless it was important. When I showed up at the meet, I found he’d not only been drugged, but had also been forced to set me up for an ambush. He died in the resulting shootout, along with two of the men who’d brought him there.”

  Demerest surprised him by asking, “What was his name?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I’ve had good people turn on me in the field, too, son. I never forgot their names, even after they died. I’d like to know his.”

  Hicks hadn’t expected such sincerity this early in the conversation. Maybe it was part of his plan to establish a rapport. Maybe it was just a way to throw him off balance. “His name was Colin.”

  “Colin,” Demerest repeated. “It’s never easy losing anyone, especially in a situation like that. I hope you got the bastards who turned him.”

  “That’s the reason we’re here,” Hicks went on. “I tracked a third man who fled the scene. Turned out he was working for the same Somalis who Colin had infiltrated at the cabstand. I caught up to them just as they launched a biological attack on New York City later that week. I know the cover story was that it was a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak but…”

  “No one in the community really believed that,” Demerest said. “Our sources at the CDC told us someone had infected about two dozen Somali illegals with an amalgamated contagion of the SARS, MERS, and Ebola viruses. It was exactly the kind of attack our sources reported Bajjah had been plotting for years. You deserve a lot of credit for catching him. Now it’s time to step aside and let the grownups handle this. Hand him over.”

  “Not much to hand over,” Hicks said, “unless you brought a baggie with you.”

  “You mean he’s dead?” Demerest’s left eye twitched. “You fucking killed him? Why?”

  “Dead and cremated. Happened during questioning.” Hicks decided the details would have only made him angrier, so he skipped them. “Don’t worry. We got enough out of him before he died. You play nice, maybe we’ll tell you what he told us.”

  “You son of a bitch.” Demerest’s face reddened. “Why didn’t you hand him over to us? Why did you have to kill him? You stupid—”

  Hicks cut him off. “I needed to find out if he was planning another wave of attacks and I needed to know fast.”

  “In case you haven’t heard, my people are pretty good at getting people to talk.”

  “Which people?” Hicks asked. “The NSA? CIA? DIA? Don’t forget the FBI since the son of a bitch was taken on American soil. Hell, by the time you people decided which agency would talk to him first, another outbreak could’ve happened in Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles. We decided bureaucratic red tape was a luxury we couldn’t afford, so we interrogated him ourselves.”

  “Based on an executive order a paranoid old man signed back in the fifties.” Demerest looked at the Trustee. “You disrespect the Constitution one minute and hide behind it the next. You people are something else.”

  The Trustee said, “But he’s got a point, Carl.”

  Demerest looked like he wanted to argue, but didn’t. As a career Agency man, he knew Hicks was right. The American intelligence community had some of the most talented people in the world on its payroll, but it had many stakeholders…and stakeholders all wanted a say in how things were done. And if Bajjah had lawyered up, it might have been months before they got anything out of him. “So, what did he tell you?”

  “In broad strokes, he confessed he was behind the entire bio-attack. Smuggling the Somalis into the country, paying for the safe house where he kept them before he injected them with the toxin. He even paid for the scientists who manufactured the virus. The only real question was who funded him and why.”

  “Jabbar’s organization funded him,” Demerest said. “Bajjah is his best fighter. Or at least he was. Jabbar wouldn’t trust anyone else to lead an attack of that magnitude.”

  “Except Jabbar kicked Bajjah out of the organization a year before the attack was even finalized. He’d grown too radical, even for them. They were afraid he’d do something stupid and bring even more heat on their organization, so they cut him loose. Cut all funding from him, too, hoping that would shut him down and make him listen to reason.”

  “We never heard about that,” Demerest admitted. “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I can be. Jabbar told me directly. Gave me proof, too.”

  The Agency man grew very still. “Careful, son. Jabbar is nothing to joke about.”

  “This isn’t Comedy Central,” Hicks said, “and I’m not laughing.”

  Demerest looked at Sarah. “Is this real? Are you telling me this guy caught both Bajjah and Jabbar?”

  Sarah placed a thin hand on Demerest’s arm. “Hear him out, Carl. Believe me, you’re going to want to hear what he has to say.”

  Demerest jerked his hand away. “Enough fucking around, damn it. No more hints or maybes or talking around things. If you have Jabbar, I want him. This isn’t one of your academic exercises, asshole. I want him right now.”

  Sarah folded her hands on her lap and looked at the ground. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Of course it’s possible. In fact, it’s mandatory. If I don’t have that monster in custody by….”

  Demerest stopped. His eyes narrowed, looking first at Sarah, then at Hicks. “Holy shit. You mean he’s dead, too?” The redness drained from his face as quickly as it had appeared. “Jesus Christ. You killed them both, didn’t you? Why in the hell would you…?”

  “We didn’t kill either of them,” Hicks said. “Bajjah’s heart gave out during questioning. But before he got his forty virgins, he gave us enough to find Jab
bar.”

  “Died during questioning,” Demerest repeated. “How fucking convenient. And what about Jabbar? Slip in the shower? Fall down an elevator shaft?”

  Hicks was beginning to lose his patience. “The Mossad shot Jabbar when they tracked me to our meeting in Toronto. A little over a month ago.”

  Demerest eased himself back on the bench. A group of teenagers sharing a joint skittered by while the Agency man digested the information.

  Hicks figured it might have been the biggest news Demerest had ever received. It wasn’t every day that a complete stranger from an organization he’d barely heard of told him two of the most wanted people in the world were already dead.

  Demerest waited until the teenagers were further down the path before saying, “You expect me to believe you managed to single-handedly find someone who has evaded the entire intelligence community since the late eighties, but the Mossad killed him without telling anyone about it? After all he’s done against Israel?” Demerest shook his head. “They’d never keep something like that quiet. They’d have a fucking parade. Sounds like you’ve been had, son.” He looked at the Trustee. “I expected better of you, Sarah.” He began to stand up. “This conversation is over and you’re both in custody as of right now.”

  Sarah stammered a response as Hicks made one last stab at salvaging the entire thing. “Your own people can validate everything I’ve just told you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sure at least a few of your analysts have reported a change in the Jabbar chatter in the past month. Subtle things like a difference in tone or slight variations in syntax. Maybe details of the types of orders given. Someone in your shop must have raised the possibility that a completely different person might be in charge of the Jabbar network. There is someone else in charge since Jabbar was killed by a Mossad sniper at the CN Tower over a month ago.”

  The details seemed to be enough to get Demerest to remain seated on the bench. “Congratulations, son. You’re finally making sense. I’ve received reports speculating there may have been a change in the Jabbar organization.” He leaned closer. “But you’re shit out of luck on the CN Tower shooting. The Canadians reached out to us when the victim was a young Pakistani woman who’d been killed with a high-powered rifle. She didn’t have any ID and her fingerprints had been burned off, so the Canadians thought we might have a line on who she was. We didn’t. And we sure as hell don’t think she was Jabbar.”

  Sarah said, “The original Jabbar died of natural causes a few years ago. This young woman was a niece who took his place and continued her uncle’s work in anonymity. Since Islamic extremists aren’t exactly feminists, I’m sure you can understand why she operated in secrecy. Quite clever of her, actually, in an evil sort of way.”

  But Demerest hadn’t gotten past the part about Jabbar’s death. “How the hell did the Mossad find out about the meeting?”

  “I’m still trying to find that out,” Hicks lied. There was no point in telling him that the Mossad sniper was not only a Faculty Member of the University, but his lover, Tali Saddon. Telling him she might be carrying his child may have given him a coronary, so he skipped that part, too. He kept it simple. “All I know is that they somehow tracked us to the meet and listened in. As soon as they realized the girl was Jabbar, they took her out.”

  “So why haven’t the Israelis made a bigger deal about it? They’ve wanted Jabbar dead longer than we have.”

  “Maybe because they don’t want to get the reputation of executing people on foreign soil?” Hicks had brokered a deal for the Mossad’s silence, but that part could wait. “It doesn’t matter how the Mossad found out about the meeting. Jabbar’s death doesn’t even matter. What matters is the reason Jabbar wanted to meet me in the first place. She wanted to give me evidence that proved neither she nor her group had anything to do with Bajjah’s attack on New York. Evidence that proves her group had ruled out a bio-attack like Bajjah’s because they didn’t think it would work.”

  “So Jabbar gave you evidence that exonerated her organization,” Demerest observed. “Another convenience. You believe it, of course.”

  “Everything she gave us checks out,” Sarah told him. “We didn’t just want to hand you a hard drive full of files and PDFs and reports from a dubious source. I’ll admit I was skeptical at first, but I wouldn’t have asked to meet with you today, much less put my own freedom at risk, unless I was absolutely convinced that Jabbar’s information proves we are facing a new threat from an enemy we barely knew existed.”

  “And down the rabbit hole we go.” Demerest considered that for a moment. “Okay. I’ll play along for a bit. If Jabbar wasn’t pulling Bajjah’s strings, who was? And if the next words out of your mouth aren’t specific, I swear to Christ I’ll have both of you in a cell within the hour.”

  Hicks ignored the threat. He knew the facts would stick better if Demerest arrived at his own conclusions. “Someone who had the resources to help Bajjah obtain access to a bio-weapon, smuggle two dozen people into the country, and house them while he put his plan into place.”

  Demerest had a ready answer. “I can think of about half a dozen wealthy families in the Middle East who’d be more than happy to bankroll an op like that, especially with someone who had Bajjah’s pedigree. He was one of Jabbar’s best people.”

  “But none of those families would bankroll an operation without Jabbar’s blessing,” Hicks said, “Any time Jabbar blesses an attack, it sets off an increase in chatter overseas. Since you didn’t hear any increase, that means Bajjah received funding and support from somewhere else.”

  Sarah removed a thumb drive from her purse and placed it in Demerest’s hand. “Jabbar told us who was funding Bajjah right before the Mossad killed her. She gave us a laptop that contained proof her organization had nothing to do with it.” She looked down at the small plastic device in Demerest’s palm. “This thumb drive is a summary of the evidence we’ve spent the past month vetting. It provides enough information to prove the Jabbar group had nothing to do with this. And it tells us who did.”

  Demerest didn’t close his fingers around the drive. He just let it sit there, as if it was a bird that had landed on his shoulder. As if the slightest movement might make it chirp, shit, or just fly away. “I’m going to ask this just one more time. For the very last time. Who supported Bajjah?”

  Hicks felt sweat break out across his back. This was the moment he had feared since becoming Dean of the University, the moment when his actions and his judgement would decide the future of his organization.

  If Demerest believed the evidence, he would become an important ally in the fight ahead. As Director of National Intelligence, Demerest would oversee every intelligence agency in the nation. If he became an ally, he would give the University more influence than it had ever had before.

  But if Demerest didn’t believe the evidence, then the University would find itself squarely in the crosshairs of every intelligence organization in the western hemisphere.

  Hicks swallowed hard. “A group of ex-Russian and ex-Chinese intelligence officers that calls themselves the Vanguard.”

  Given OMNI’s access to some CIA files, Hicks knew Demerest was at least aware of the Vanguard. He hoped that would be enough to convince him to keep listening.

  It wasn’t. “The Vanguard? Are you kidding me? That’s your bogeyman? They’re a bunch of mercs and arms dealers and drug runners spread throughout Asia and the Baltic. Our people have infiltrated their organization dozens of times over the years. They’re businessmen, not ideologues. They’re certainly not radicals. Hell, we haven’t even been able to prove they’re actually a group, much less looking to attack a nation.”

  Sarah said, “You barely had any proof that the University existed until I handed you the executive order last night. Why is it out of the question that an organization like the Vanguard could have more sinister aims in mind? It could only take a small change in operations to make them political instead of crimina
l.”

  “There’s a big difference between running guns and running a proxy war against the United States,” Demerest said. “You know that.”

  “And what if it’s a mixture of both?” Hicks asked. “If Bajjah had lived long enough to claim responsibility for the attack in New York, we would’ve had no choice but to re-double our military presence in the Middle East. That would’ve pulled our focus away from Russian expansion into the Ukraine and Syria, not to mention China’s expansion into the Pacific. That means more weaponry flowing into the region while their mother countries continue their expansion at will. The Vanguard could profit financially and politically at the same time.”

  “That’s one hell of a big if, son.”

  “Which is why we wanted to make sure Jabbar’s evidence was solid before we contacted you.” Sarah placed her hand over Demerest’s again. “I’ve never wasted your time before, Carl. And believe me when I promise you that I’m not wasting it now.” She tried a smile. “Read the evidence on the thumb drive and you’ll see we’re right. Work with us, Carl. I promise you won’t regret it.”

  Hicks could almost see the machinations of the Agency man’s mind working. He now had a complete understanding of why they had scheduled the meeting. He knew the players, he knew the game, and he knew he had been given clear evidence to review. But he still needed a clearer picture.

  “If you were smart enough to bring this to me now,” Demerest said, “then you’re smart enough to have people on the ground digging around for information about the Vanguard. And if you deny it, I’ll get up and walk away right now.”

  Hicks decided to tell him the bare minimum. “I have small teams in place in the field.”

  “Where?”

  “Berlin, Moscow, and London.”

  “Why there?”

  Hicks shook his head. “Not until you agree to cooperate. You read over the information on the thumb drive and you’ll understand why. If you agree to work with us, the kimono opens all the way. Until then, the obi stays tied. That’s more than fair.”