Sympathy For the Devil (13 page)

He brought up the location of Devron’s phone, backtracking to where it had been answered when he and Junior traded texts. Only one location popped up for that number all day long: an abandoned railroad substation in the middle of Queens.

In the old days, Hicks would’ve had to drive over to the place to get a good look at it. Today, someone would’ve just pulled up the street view of a search engine map. But Hicks activated the OMNI satellite parked over Manhattan to give him a live image from a satellite two hundred and twenty miles above the earth.

He typed the address into the interface and the satellite zoomed in on the exact building. Given that it was night, there wasn’t much he could see under normal view, so he switched to the thermal view of the building. It revealed about a dozen or more shapes milling around the ground floor of the substation. Most of the heat signatures came up as dull red blobs on the floor. They were alive, but unconscious. Probably junkies on the nod.

He spotted the two red shapes walking in between the people on the floor and Hicks pegged them to be watching over the customers, making sure none of them tripped too hard and choked to death on their own spit. Like the old saying goes: Dead men don’t buy smack. The satellite also picked up two more skels posted at the entrance and one in the back. Probably keeping watch to make sure no one robs the customers. Safety was priority one to these fuckers.

Judging by what he could see via the OMNI feed, the place looked like a shooting gallery. The protection looked minimal, but present. Hicks would respect it, but didn’t fear it. And it wasn’t going to keep Hicks from bringing Junior home quickly. People were going to have to die before that happened. But everyone in the substation had already signed their own death warrant a long time ago.

Hicks tried to access Junior’s phone. It was off, but there was still signal. He pinged it to turn it on remotely, but it came up dead. That meant the phone wasn’t just off. The battery was completely drained. The junkie bastard must’ve forgotten to charge it before he grabbed daddy’s jewelry and bolt out of the house. So much for heroin junkie reliability.

So Hicks had the satellite sweep the building for smartphones or tablets; anything that might have a wireless connection and a camera. He got hits on several phones belonging to some of the junkies passed out on the floor.

Hicks accessed each one in turn, but all phones were either in pockets or bags. None of them gave him any idea of what the room looked like. All he heard was muffled farts and snores while their owners tripped the light fantastic. Hicks closed his eyes. His was a charmed life.

But Hicks scored a hit on the second to last number he tried. The signal corresponded with a red thermal signature of a man who was walking among the images of junkies on the floor. Hicks activated the phone’s camera and got a clear, but jerky, picture of the inside of the place. It looked like the man was talking while he was moving through the people scattered on the floor.

Hicks had OMNI record the images that came over the feed; dark images of shapes lying prone on the floor. The cavernous old substation was only lit by weak candlelight and whatever streetlight filtered in through the boarded windows. The images didn’t look clear to the naked eye, but Hicks knew OMNI’s image enhancement programs would pick Junior out of the crowd, if he was there at all.

The man’s phone conversation appeared to have ended because the camera panned down to a view of his shoes. White sneakers. Laces pressed. Blue jeans cuffed just so. Hicks bet that was Devron. He was patrolling the gallery like a boss.

Hicks didn’t care about Devron’s conversation, so he didn’t bother listening to it. But he kept the camera feed active as he uploaded Junior’s Facebook profile picture to OMNI and asked it to match the image to anyone in the substation. Hicks watched the system go to work as tiny hexagons flashing on faces Hicks couldn’t see with the naked eye as the drug dealer threaded his way among his customers.

The system quickly seized on one image of a figure slumped against the wall. OMNI froze the image and automatically enhanced it. The program lightened it and compared it to the confirmed image of Junior’s face. A green status bar crawled across the screen from left to right as the program went to work. The original image was nothing but a blurry profile shot of a kid passed out against the wall. OMNI cleaned it up, brightened it, and matched the profile with Junior’s known facial characteristics. It came back with an eighty percent match. Not perfect, but close enough for him to make a decision.

Hicks had found Junior. Now he’d have to go in and get him.

Hicks checked his watch. It was already going on ten o’clock and he figured Junior would be on the nod for hours; probably well after sunrise. Plenty of time for him to pull together a quick raid of the place. He selected Junior’s heat signature on the thermal feed and had OMNI keep an eye on him. If Junior so much as scratched his balls, OMNI would notify him.

He activated another of the satellite’s lenses to scan the perimeter again. It looked like there were at least three guards at the place, probably more. All of them probably armed. Hicks knew he could probably shoot his way in there alone if he had to, he didn’t need to risk it. New York was his town and, Colin’s betrayal aside, he still had plenty of resources.

Because Colin hadn’t known everything about the New York Office. He didn’t know all of the assets and he certainly didn’t know all of their skills. It was Hicks’ first rule of intelligence work: never tell everyone everything. Always hold something back. He still had a few people he could call for help. A job like hitting a drug den would require a special kind of backup.

And he knew just the right man for the job. Except in this instance, the right man just happened to be a woman.

I
T WAS
almost eleven by the time Hicks got to the The Mark Hotel on Seventy-seventh and Madison. He’d stopped by his place first so he could change into a shirt and blazer before heading uptown. The Mark Bar wasn’t the type of place you trudged into in a parka and gloves, not even when the weather called for it. Not for the kind of role he’d be playing, anyway.

He had no problem spotting Tali as soon as he entered the bar. She was exactly where she’d texted she’d be; alone, nursing the same cocktail she always ordered, but rarely finished: Hendricks martini straight up with a twist of lemon.

She was wearing a classic black cocktail dress that could be found in almost any dress shop or department store in the world, but she somehow managed to make it look
couture
. She had dark hair, light olive skin and high cheekbones and green eyes one might not expect an Israeli girl to have. She was more striking than beautiful, but exotic enough to draw quick glances—both desirous and envious—from most of the men and women in the place.

Yet, despite the empty stool next to her, no one sat near her. Despite her beauty, there was something about Tali that didn’t invite company.

Despite appearances, Hicks knew Tali wasn’t one of the pros who cruised the Cocktail Circuit of Upper East Side bars looking for a sugar daddy on a Thursday night. She wasn’t looking for someone to buy her drinks or help with the rent or listen to her sob story about her sick kid at home.

Hicks knew Tali for who and what she really was—a highly trained operative from Israeli Military Intelligence on an extended liaison mission to the University. And Hicks knew she was killing time while she waited for her latest assignment to meet her at the bar for a nightcap before heading back to her place for the evening. Her current assignment happened to be a Texas real estate investor looking to buy his way into a couple of development projects in the Middle East. The man was long on cash, but short on discretion, which made him a good source of information. Hicks doubted that Tali shared every bit of information the man told her—she was an Israeli agent first and foremost—but she passed along more than enough intel to keep Hicks funding her stay in New York.

Hicks and Tali had slept together once in London six years before. It was before he’d been named the head of the New York Office and before Tali had been loaned out to the University. They’d both been working on a related project and wound up stuck at a romantic hotel on a rainy London evening. It hadn’t been casual, but it hadn’t been serious, either. Neither of them had mentioned it since she’d arrived in New York, though Hicks often wondered if she’d ever given it any thought. He didn’t want to know the answer, so he never asked the question.

Tali didn’t pay Hicks any mind when he sat one stool away from her, but he knew she’d been trained to see everything. He’d always admired her focus and discretion. There was no telling who might be watching either of them or why. And, in Hicks’ experience, someone was always watching.

He caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a scotch on the rocks. Since that’s what he’d had at Russo’s house, he decided it was safer to stick with it. The bartender served it to him with a glass of water on the side, then took his credit card and kept the tab open for him.

Knowing the bartender was probably listening; Hicks looked Tali’s glass and said, “That looks awfully dangerous.”

Tali looked at his scotch and exaggerated her accent. “That doesn’t look like buttermilk, either.”

Hicks cued her by asking, “Your accent is familiar. What is that? Russian?”

She answered in Russian in a pleasant tone that didn’t reflect what she said. “What the fuck are you doing here? I told you I’m working.”

Hicks responded in Russian. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”

She cocked an eyebrow as she looked back at her martini. “Why are we speaking Russian anyway? Your accent is dreadful. Your French is better.”

“But we’re in a French hotel, my love. Why take chances on someone understanding us?”

“I’m not your ‘love’ and if you’re so worried about taking chances, you’re taking a big one by coming here tonight. That redneck pig will be here any minute, and he won’t like you being here when he walks in.”

Hicks knew her assignment was six-and-a-half feet, two-hundred-sixty pounds of pure Dallas bluster. He had a particularly mean, protective streak where Tali was involved; which Hicks knew was more about his pride than her honor. “Don’t worry about me. I can handle myself.”

“I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about you putting him in the hospital if he swings at you. He won’t be much use to me if he’s in a coma. I’m too close to getting him to tell us who he’s working with, and I can’t risk you blowing that in a lousy bar brawl. Now, for the last time, why are you risking my cover like this?”

Hicks winced as he sipped at his scotch. “Because I need a favor. A big one that utilizes your particular set of skills.”

He watched her stir the lemon rind in her martini with her pinky nail and found it surprisingly erotic. “I’ve told you before I’m not a whore. I do what I do for my country and that is all.”

“I never said you were, and I’m not asking you to be one now. I’m talking about your skills with a rifle.”

She broke character and looked at him quicker than she should have. “Is this about the alert you sent out earlier?”

Since Hicks was asking for her help, he decided to tell her the truth. He only had a certain level of authority over her anyway and asking him to serve as a sniper was outside the mission parameters the University had agreed upon with her superiors in Tel Aviv.

“Colin got turned by the people I’d assigned him to watch. He set me up to take a bullet last night in Central Park, and I don’t know why.”

It was the first time he’d ever seen Tali betray any kind of sincere emotion. “Are you hurt? Is Colin okay?”

“I’m fine, but Colin didn’t make it. Neither are the two men he’d brought with him to kill me.” Hicks took a sip of scotch to take a little of the sting out of the memory. “I don’t know how much he told them about any of us before he died, but since he didn’t know much about your assignment, you’re one of the few people I can trust in New York right now.”

Tali went back to looking at her drink. “I still can’t believe Colin turned. Do you know why he did it?”