A Conspiracy of Ravens

by Terrence McCauley

  “You’re paralyzed from the waist down. Your left arm has been shattered and we’ll have to amputate it. Your left eye is gone, and you’re probably going to die within the next few hours if I let you.”

  The Russian looked away as a tear streaked from his right eye. “Be merciful. I am a soldier. Kill me.”

  “Not until you tell me who sent you. If you don’t, I’ll keep you alive for weeks. I’ll make sure you suffer every minute of pain and every indignity you’ve got coming. But if you tell me who sent you to light up my building, and you’re truthful, this will end quickly and painlessly.” He leaned in closer, close enough to smell death approaching the man. “The choice is yours.”

  It took a couple of tries for the Russian to get enough breath to say, “A man sent us. I don’t know his name…gave us your photo…your address…the laser. Told us to shoot you if you came out of the house…but you didn’t. Not in time for us to get away from the blast.”

  “Where did the order come from?”

  “From…Berlin. We…” The man’s body went rigid as he seized up, and the machines began to beep wildly.

  From the doorway, Fischer called out, “He’s going into cardiac arrest!”

  The Russian’s body slumped as the machines emitted a steady tone, and all the lines on all the screens went flat.

  Fischer walked back into the room, his hands behind his back. “Do you want me to try to bring him back?”

  Hicks watched the last breath escape the Russian’s body. “No. I got enough.” The tattoo told him a lot. The fact that he was Russian told him more. Berlin only made him certain.

  The Vanguard had tried to kill him.

  The only question was how they had found him in the first place.

  He pulled out his handheld, took a picture of the dead man’s face, and then scanned his fingerprints from his ruined left hand. He doubted OMNI would turn up anything, but he had to try. Every corpse was another link in the chain leading back to the Vanguard. Every lead had to be explored, even dead ones.

  After he was finished, Hicks told Fischer, “Follow standard protocol. Dump him in the incinerator downstairs. Analyze his effects to see if we can find out where they were bought. Clothes, shoes, everything. Run a toxicology report, too. Anything could help.”

  He looked at the doctor until Fischer looked back. “Then get some sleep. You’ve earned it. I wouldn’t have gotten anything out of him if it hadn’t been for you. You did a hell of a job today, Fischer.”

  The doctor looked down at the Russian’s corpse. “All of that effort to save a dying man’s life for a single name. We are sons of bitches, aren’t we, James? The both of us.”

  Hicks was already on his way out the door. “We have to be.”

  HE FOUND Scott in one of the living rooms downstairs, seated on a faded couch, thumbing through his handheld. The Varsity man didn’t look up when Hicks walked in. “Your Russian dead?”

  Hicks dropped onto an equally dilapidated overstuffed chair. “Yeah.”

  “Get anything out of him?”

  “I got enough. Your men get anything off the SUV?”

  Scott kept looking through his device. “Nope. Stolen from a garage in midtown about a week ago. Belonged to a dentist. The security cameras in the garage were miraculously on the fritz that day, so nothing on who stole it. We stripped it down to the steel and didn’t come up with anything. No tracking devices, no modifications. Just a stolen vehicle with phony diplomatic tags. Good fakes, though. Would’ve fooled a cop on a traffic stop. Whoever did it has resources and knows what they’re doing.”

  “I know. That’s why I want you to pack a bag. We’re going to Berlin.”

  Scott’s eyebrows rose as he looked up from his device. “How did I get so lucky?”

  Hicks ignored the sarcasm. Scott and he had always had a terse relationship. Scott had always been a field man. He saw Hicks as management, a sellout who’d given up the field for a cushy desk job. If he only knew.

  “Why me?” Scott went on. “You’ve got your new playmate Stephens to help you with those kinds of things. I just do what I’m told, remember?”

  Hicks closed his eyes. Scott’s ego was still bruised from when he’d ordered him to take Rahul Patel to the airport a few weeks ago. The simple task was an affront to his skills, and he was still holding on to the grudge all these weeks later.

  “Stephens has a role to fill here as head of the New York Office, at least until things settle down. I need you on the ground with me because things are going to get dicey over there. Now, if you’d prefer to stay here where it’s nice and safe, I’ll get someone else.”

  “How dicey?”

  “Your kind of dicey.”

  Hicks couldn’t swear to it, but he thought he saw Scott smile. “Well, count me in.”

  It was the closest thing to good news Hicks had heard in a long time. “Good. Be ready to go in thirty minutes. Then be ready to pick me up within the hour.”

  Scott watched him stand up. “Where are you going?”

  “To see a man about a phone.”

  St. Mark’s Place, New York City

  ST. MARK’S Place was one of the last sections of the city that had successfully fended off gentrification. Times Square had become an amusement park. SoHo had devolved from quaint local shops to little more than an outdoor mall for high-end retail chains. Even the Meatpacking District had swapped out hookers and junkies to become a binge-drinking Mecca for Millennials and aging Generation X-ers who lied to themselves about still being hip.

  But St. Mark’s Place had managed to dodge modernity. Technically, it was just another street on the map, a section of 8th Street that ran between Third Avenue and Avenue A. In reality, it was one of the last places on the island of Manhattan where people who didn’t fit in anywhere else could find a home.

  Populated by bars and restaurants, small shops and tattoo parlors, St. Mark’s offered something for everyone looking to either lose themselves or find themselves, be it for a few hours or a lifetime. The inked and the pierced, the androgynous and the artistic, the punk rocker and the Emo, and even the occasional banker looking to slum.

  A few tourists invariably found their way there, of course, but a lack of kitsch left them little to cling to, so they rarely stayed long, preferring the elegant architecture of Fifth Avenue or the bright lights of Broadway. St. Mark’s made no pretense of being anything more than what it was, which was whatever you wanted it to be.

  It was the perfect place for Hicks to speak to the CIA.

  Sarah had texted him that Demerest’s contact would be waiting for him on the steps of the old brownstone at 80 St. Mark’s Place. It had been a speakeasy at one time but now housed a small theater and museum.

  The weight of the Ruger in the holster beneath his left arm gave Hicks a measure of security when he spotted a homeless man on the brownstone stairs half a block away. The black man’s shaggy beard and filthy clothes would have made him stick out in any other part of the city, but on this street he blended in. That was the point. Just another member of New York’s forgotten class.

  The man made eye contact with Hicks for a full second longer than a homeless person normally would. Hicks knew this was Demerest’s man. He watched the vagrant pick up a brown paper bag from between his feet, drain the bottle hidden inside it, and set it down on the step. He let out an epic belch that Hicks heard from half a block away.

  He watched the man stand up, straighten out his filthy coat, and stagger off in the opposite direction. Hicks eyed the street as he approached the stoop before sitting down next to the bag. He spotted a black flip phone wedged between the bag and the concrete stair.

  He looked around as he picked up the phone, finding it thicker and heavier than most cheap burner phones.

  The phone began to buzz. He flipped it open and the connection was made. The voice on the other end belonged to Charles Demerest. “This is an encrypted phone, so we can speak freely.”

  “How comforting.”<
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  “Make sure you keep it with you at all times,” Demerest said. “It’s got an international calling function on it. Don’t worry. It’s not an official agency device so I can’t track you on it. It used to be my daughter’s phone. This is how we’ll communicate from here on out.”

  “From here on out?” Hicks repeated. “Sounds permanent. We going steady now, Ace?”

  “Maybe,” Demerest said. “Sarah already told you the Jabbar information you gave us was golden. That means we need to work together, especially after today’s attack. I know we don’t trust each other yet. That’s understandable. Trust has to be earned on both sides. But we’re in this together whether we like it or not. We’ll win a hell of a lot sooner if we’re both pulling in the same direction.”

  Hicks felt his breath catch. Because, just like that, the CIA had agreed to work with the University.

  Every action Hicks had taken for the past several weeks had led up to that moment. It was something the University had fought for and against numerous times over the decades since Eisenhower’s executive order in the fifties. From the moment Colin had died in the snow in Central Park all those weeks ago, through the Bajjah mess, and right up until the previous night, Hicks had been pushing for CIA cooperation. Now he finally had it.

  It should have been one of the finest moments of Hicks’s career. He’d proven the previous Dean wrong and now had the full support of the most powerful intelligence agency in the West.

  And it didn’t mean a damned thing to him.

  Because his facility had been destroyed and his people had been killed and the University’s entire operation was frozen in place. All because he asked Tayeb to investigate a man who no longer existed except on a forgotten server in a police station in Bonn.

  Tessmer.

  Demerest snapped him out of it. “You still there, son?”

  “Yeah,” Hicks said. “But after what happened this morning, I don’t want anyone being able to track me.”

  “We won’t be tracking you. You have my word.”

  On any other day, Hicks would have laughed. The word of a spy was worthless. But this was no time for laughter. “How about you start building good will by telling me how Washington is responding to the attack?”

  “The gas leak story seems to have satisfied the media,” Demerest explained, “but none of the department heads are buying it. Everyone from NORAD right down to the NYPD know it was a missile attack, but no one wants pandemonium so they’re keeping a lid on it for now. Every member of the cabinet is scrambling to find out how this happened and why. I wouldn’t count on that lasting, though. With the Agency under investigation, it’s only a matter of time before someone at Langley tries to curry favor with the committees and leaks the truth about the attack.”

  Hicks caught that. “Maybe someone who’s already depending on those committees for a cabinet post. Someone who’s up for Director of National Intelligence, maybe.”

  “That’s not funny, son. An attack on the homeland was exactly the last thing I needed right now. And any information I pass along to them will only reinforce their idea that we must have missed something here at the CIA. Besides, my confirmation is the least of our worries now.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning international relations were strained in the last twenty-four hours or so, even before this attack. The State Department reports relations between Russia and Israel are devolving at a rapid pace. The Russians are furious that a Mossad unit was operating in their hometown. The Israelis are blaming the Russians for the massacre of their people. Some members of the Knesset are beginning to grumble about the mysterious plane explosion that killed Mossad chief Schneider a few weeks ago. They’re grumbling that maybe the Russians were involved. If you had come to me later, a lot of people might be looking at you in a whole different light. You would make a convenient scapegoat for a lot of people right about now.”

  “Yeah,” Hicks said as he lit another stale cigarette from the pack he’d found at the Annex. “Lucky me.”

  “I’ve opened my kimono,” Demerest said. “Now it’s your turn. Sarah told me you grabbed one of the guys lasing your building. Have you gotten anything out of him yet?”

  Since Hicks didn’t have much to tell him, he decided not to hold anything back. “He had a Spetsnaz tattoo on his arm and said he received his orders from Berlin. He didn’t live long enough to give me a name.”

  “Shit, Hicks. We’ve got to teach you boys how to keep your prisoners alive.”

  “He was half dead when I brought him in.” Hicks didn’t tell Demerest that OMNI hadn’t been able to find their identities in any databases in the Western world. The less Demerest knew about the University’s abilities, the better. At least for now. “But I’ve got pictures and prints of all the men who took a run at me. I’ll send you everything in a few minutes. Maybe you can identify them. I don’t have any proof, but based on the ordinance and the coordination these boys had, it makes me think this was a Vanguard show.”

  “You and I know that,” Demerest said, “but it’s not that simple. One of the F-16s we scrambled was about to blow the drone out of the sky over a field in New Jersey when the damned thing exploded on its own. Whoever was piloting the drone had rigged it with a self-destruct proximity sensor. That explains why the drone had to fly so high that it showed up on our radar systems. It would’ve self-destructed if it got too close to a building. Fortunately, we were able to map the debris field immediately and our people have managed to find a few things. The wreckage is almost identical to Valkyrie knock-offs we’ve recovered in Syria and Iraq. Our people think the drones have been supplied by—”

  “Iran,” Hicks said. “Which buys similar systems from people working with the Vanguard. Just like Jabbar’s evidence proves.” He took a drag on the cigarette. “Sometimes I hate being right.”

  “You can take a victory lap later,” Demerest said. “The Joint Chiefs and several Agency brass are looking to pin this on Iran. I’m doing what I can to keep that idea from getting traction, but until I can produce solid evidence of Vanguard involvement, Iran’s looking like the villain here. And you know what that means.”

  It made sense to Hicks. Iran had been denouncing the United States for decades. They had been funding the other side in the War on Terror since the beginning. Proof that an Iranian drone had targeted an American city would raise public outcry for a response, probably even all-out war.

  The Vanguard would get the Middle East distraction like they wanted. They would also make millions off new arms sales that would spike throughout the region. The mission that had begun with Bajjah’s failed biological attack on New York would be complete. “These bastards are smart.”

  “Which means we’ve got to get smarter, and fast,” Demerest said. “You provided me with a lot of important information about the Vanguard and the biological attack on New York. But I need something to tie them to the attack today, and an Iranian drone only muddies the waters. I can’t go to the president or even my director with a hypothetical about a mysterious group of arms dealers firing a missile into New York. They’d laugh me right out of the room and keep blaming Iran for this.”

  Demerest cleared his throat. “You’re not going to like this, but I need to know what kind of facility you had at 23rd Street. They’re already wondering why the building was targeted in the first place. They’re going to find out when they clear the rubble away in a day or two anyway. If I know what was there, I can explain whatever they find.”

  Demerest was right. Hicks didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a choice. Everything was destroyed, but he decided to hedge the truth for the sake of the University. “It was a communications center we were using to run down leads on the Vanguard. A generator and some computer equipment. A small armory, too. I fried the electronics before I left, but the hardware is still there so we’ll need to explain it.”

  He got the sense Demerest was writing this down. “That’s fine. I can spin that. I can say it w
as one of our facilities in use since the Cold War. They’ll buy that, especially since it wasn’t a debacle like Black Site Friday. No one minded we had the place in Jersey, just that the media found out about it once we torched it. We couldn’t get ahead of that story, but we can get ahead of this one. How many people knew it existed? Who else knew it was there? Sarah swears she didn’t know about it.”

  “That’s because she didn’t,” Hicks said. “No one knew about it except me and the previous Dean. I don’t even know how the Vanguard knew about it or how important it was, but I intend to find out. In Berlin.”

  “And I take it you’re heading there personally?”

  “Within the hour.”

  Demerest paused. “Any chance I can talk you into waiting a day or so?”

  “Absolutely none whatsoever.”

  “Yeah, I figured you’d say something like that. Look, everything we do from here on out needs to be coordinated if I’m going to be successful in keeping people here from pinning the attack on Iran. They’ll act on it very quickly, and I won’t be able to stop them unless I have proof the Vanguard did this, not Iran. Now, I can have a hundred people in Berlin by morning. Your group and mine can coordinate with Germany’s state police.”

  “No.” Hicks let the cigarette smoke drift from his nose.

  “No? What the hell do you mean ‘no’? You can’t do this on your own. Your group isn’t big enough to handle the Vanguard on your own. You said so yourself.”

  “We’re not coordinating with anyone because that’s exactly what the Vanguard expects us to do. A rapid response. SWAT teams kicking in doors and rounding up the usual suspects all over the world. That’s why we’re not going to give it to them. We’re going to head-fake them and change the narrative.”

  Demerest was silent a beat longer than necessary. “Have you been checked out by a doctor? I think there’s a good chance you’re in shock, because you’re not making any sense.”

  “My people in Berlin and I will keep working the bank lead on the Vanguard we told you about yesterday. We keep the footprint small and the response quiet. I don’t want anyone knowing we’re there, especially your people.”