Sympathy For the Devil (25 page)

“You’re going to have to prove you’ve got something worth selling first,” Hicks said. “Tell me about Saudi Arabia.”

“I know where it is,” Kamal said. “Even spent some good times there.”

“You and Omar took a large manila envelope from his storage container yesterday. It was on the bottom shelf against the wall. My people are analyzing it now but we were able to figure out the manufacturer had shipped that lot number to a distributor in Saudi Arabia.”

Kamal shook his head. “Damn, you guys are good. Who the hell are you people anyway?”

“Right now, one of us is a guy with a gun to your belly. And you’re the guy who’s going to tell me what was in the envelope.”

“I’ll be glad to tell you everything you want to know as soon as you meet my price.”

“Omar told you a lot, didn’t he?”

Kamal nodded. “That money you gave me put me in real good with him. Spilled most of the operation to me, but not all. Give me what I want and I’ll make sure that cell phone is on the whole damned time when I give him the rest.” He checked his watch. “Clock’s ticking, boss man. We’ve got less than fifty minutes before Omar’s men come pick me up. So do we have a deal or not?”

“No,” Hicks said, “we don’t.”

Kamal reached back for something under his coat as Hicks fired twice. Both flat-head rounds from the Ruger punched through the left side of Kamal’s chest; lifting him off his feet and sending him to the wall.

Kamal collapsed to the floor and sagged to one side.

Kamal struggled to prop himself up on an elbow. Hicks planted his foot on his chest and pushed him back down to the floor. He showed him the Ruger. “Cored a charging Grizzly, remember?”

Hicks pulled on his gloves and patted Kamal down for weapons. He found a .9mm tucked in Kamal’s belt and showed it to the dying man. “This a present from Omar?” He put it in his coat pocket. “Lot of good it did you.”

Kamal gurgled as he patted at his chest wound, but Hicks pinned his hand to the floor beneath his shoe. “Don’t fight it. Just let it happen.”

Kamal gasped one last time before his eyes went vacant; fixating on that indeterminable point in space where people always looked when life finally left them.

Hicks pulled Kamal’s corpse onto its side to check for exit wounds. Both rounds had exited his back and went into the wall without much splatter. Hicks took the calendar Kamal had hated from the table and hung it back on the wall where it belonged. It covered the holes nicely. Just like he’d planned.

There wasn’t too much blood, either. Less splatter meant less time spent cleaning up. And Kamal had been right about one thing: Hicks didn’t have much time.

He picked up his handheld and Jason answered on the first ring. “Is he dead?”

“What do you think?”

Jason sounded like he stifled a curse. “I hope he told you something before you killed him.”

“He told me more than he thought he did. Whatever Omar’s working on is low tech, which explains why we can’t hack it or track it. That rules out radiological, so it’s probably biological. We’ll know more when we track the money and get the lab results on the envelope.”

“We should have those within the hour,” Jason said. “Did you place the isotope with the money?”

“I did that before I gave it to Kamal two days ago,” Hicks said. Unless Omar’s men ran the money through a Geiger counter, they would never know the bills had been marked. “Time for our African financier to contact Omar directly. Have him tell Omar that Kamal had to tend to other business and already left the city. He should still have his men come by at ten to pick up the money Kamal left behind. I’ll make sure everything is cleared out by then.”

“But they’re watching the building,” Jason said. “They saw Kamal enter, but not leave. How will he explain that?”

“Omar wants the money. He’s not going to give a shit about what might’ve happened to Kamal. They seem to be on a tight a timeframe to pull the trigger on whatever scheme they’re planning. Too tight to worry about some stranger they met yesterday.”

“I hope you’re right, but I still don’t like the idea of letting them leave with the money.”

“If Omar comes for the money himself, I’ll grab him, Hicks said. “But he’ll probably keep playing it cautious and send someone else for it, probably armed. In the meantime, get a Varsity squad to sit on Omar’s safe house in Midwood. We don’t have to protect Kamal’s cover anymore, so we should be sure they’re ready to hit the place at a moment’s notice.”

“A Varsity squad has been in place at Omar’s house since last night,” Jason told him. “I took the liberty of ordering them in place when Kamal refused to meet you.”

Hicks should’ve been angry, but wasn’t. It was a sound move that had put them in a better tactical situation. He only regretted that he hadn’t thought of it earlier. “Who’s leading the team?”

“Scott. He and his men have been fully briefed on the tactical situation and have been watching the building from a converted truck a block away for hours. A few people have gone in and out, but none of them Omar. The house reads at least thirty heat signatures, so if they’re planning something, they may already have all of their people in place.”

Hicks couldn’t add anything to what Jason had just told him. “Let me know when our friend contacts Omar. In the meantime, I’ve got some work to do.”

H
ICKS HAD
already been on the roof with Kamal’s corpse for fifteen minutes when Omar’s men reached the apartment. He was glad the fourth floor was the closest to the roof because moving Kamal’s dead weight up the stairs had damned near killed him.

Hicks had wrapped Kamal’s body in a blanket from the hall closet and placed the corpse under the building’s water tower. It wasn’t a perfect hiding spot, but it didn’t have to be. It just had to keep him out of sight until he could get a Facilities squad to come retrieve the body later. But University resources would be busy with the Omar business until it was resolved. There was a very real chance that the birds or rodents might get to Kamal first, in which case the body would most likely be discovered. By then, it probably wouldn’t matter.

He sat with his back against the door leading to the roof while he watched the scene unfold on the street on his handheld via satellite. A late model Honda—not Omar’s Corolla—double parked in front of the building. The man who got out from the passenger side was tall and lanky and bald. He certainly looked Somali, but he looked nothing like Omar.

Hicks was about to assign the satellite to pick up in the Honda’s black box signal, but he could see Jason had already done that. The young man was beginning to overstep his bounds. First sending the woman to study him, and then ordering the Varsity into the field without consulting him. Now this. He was using the fog of war to broaden his boarders. When the Omar mess was over, Hicks would make it a point to knock him on his ass.

Through the thin wood of the roof door, Hicks could hear the man from the car running up the stairs. He tried to get the satellite to focus in on the driver, but the angle wasn’t right. It wasn’t Omar’s car, but he still could’ve been behind the wheel. The angle was too steep to see for sure.

A text message from Jason appeared in a thin band at the bottom of Hicks’ screen:

LESSON PLAN AMENDED. TERMINATE ALL PARTIES ON SCENE.

Now Hicks saw Jason’s incursion for what it was. He’d probably been lobbying the Dean until he got approval for the bloodbath he’d wanted all along. Kick in doors, guns blazing. Sift through the wreckage and write a report. Jason would look to come out of this a hero and expand his influence in the University.

Not if Hicks could help it.

Hicks typed back:

WE NEED TO KNOW WHO OMAR SENT FIRST. STAND BY

Hicks heard the passenger bound up the stairs. Hicks switched the OMNI image to thermal and saw the heat signature of the man only a few feet below Hicks’ position on the roof. The man stood outside Kamal’s apartment, to the side of the doorframe. He turned the knob. He let the door swing in on its own. He stood with his back against the wall, listening, waiting, before looking around the doorframe and entering the apartment. This man wasn’t one of Omar’s rookies.

A new message crawled at the bottom of Hicks’ handheld:

TERMINATION LETTERS APPROVED. IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED.

But Hicks ignored the text. Killing Omar’s messengers wouldn’t do anything except scare off Omar and make him change his plans. Omar still had a man watching the apartment and a man in the alley. There was no way Hicks could kill all of them without it turning into a bloodbath. Omar had already gone underground once after Colin got killed. Hicks knew he was too close to uncovering Omar’s plot to let him get away now. They had to know what kind of threat they were dealing with.

Hicks ignored the text and kept watching the feed.

Via the satellite’s thermal imaging camera, Hicks saw the man exit Kamal’s apartment.

The man held the bag of money in one hand and closed the apartment door with the other. But instead of heading downstairs to the car, he surprised Hicks by simply standing still for a moment. Quiet once more. Listening.

Hicks didn’t move. He was already sitting with his back flat against the roof door. He didn’t have to worry about the gravel moving under his feet and giving his position away.

Hicks watched his thermal image; he saw the man had his head down; maybe closing his eyes as he listened for any sudden sounds that might tell him where Kamal might be. He probably knew that none of Omar’s spies had seen him leave the building. He had to be somewhere close. Where could he have gone?

And then Hicks saw the man look up the stairs toward the door to the roof.

Hicks pulled the Ruger from his belt. Jason just might get his bloodbath after all.

T
HE MAN
looked down the stairs, then back up toward the roof. He shifted the bag of money from his right hand to his left, clearly trying to decide what he should do. Take the money back to the car, or take a look around. He probably knew Omar would ask him questions, and he didn’t want to lie. Hicks knew from surveillance that Omar was very good at spotting lies. His men knew it, too.

Hicks knew what the man was thinking because he would’ve been thinking the same things in the same situation. The money was important, but at what cost? Knowing where Kamal was would help erase lots of question marks later on.

The satellite’s thermal image showed the man had drawn a weapon. Details were tough to see, but it looked to Hicks like it might be a nine millimeter. He heard the creak of the old wooden treads as the man began to walk upstairs to the roof.

Hicks pocketed his handheld and quietly got to his feet; slowly stepping away from the door. One sound could set the man firing, or worse, running. Hicks didn’t want to risk either if he could avoid it.

Hicks slowly put one foot behind the other as he kept the Ruger aimed at the door. The other side of the door was plastered with warning signs that the door was alarmed and would emit an alarm if opened. A red sign on the alarm bar said an alarm would sound if the bar was pushed.

But Hicks knew the door hadn’t been locked and no alarm had gone off when he had come in that way to surprise Kamal in his apartment. The signs were all bullshit. All Omar’s man had to do was turn the knob and pull it open. It would be the last thing he ever did.

He could imagine his handheld was full with messages from Jason telling him to TERMINATE as he watched the whole thing from the safe comfort of his den in Maryland or wherever the hell he lived. But Hicks wanted the money man alive. He wanted him to bring the money to Omar so they could track it and learn whatever they were planning. But all of that depended on the money man leaving here alive.

If possible.

Hicks carefully backed up far enough away from the door so he couldn’t be seen when the door opened, but not close enough to the edge to be seen from the street. A delicate balance, but one he was used to walking.

A cold wind picked up, filling his ears. He couldn’t hear if the man was close to the rooftop door or if he’d given up and gone back downstairs. But as the wind died down, he didn’t hear anything.

He stole a quick look at his handheld. The man was still on the other side of the door, looking at the signs about the alarm.

He didn’t know if the man could read English, but he’d probably seen warning signs before and knew what they meant. An alarm sounding would bring attention—maybe even police—and an armed man holding a bag with ninety grand in cash didn’t need attention. He needed to get that money to the man who was waiting for it.

The wind finally died down enough for Hicks to hear the stairs squeak again as the man went back down to the car. Via the handheld, he watched the man put away his and pick up his pace.

Both of them had come within the width of a door of having a bad day.

Knowing Jason was watching, Hicks thrust a middle finger up at the satellite.
Terminate that, you son of a bitch.

He stayed on the roof until the moneyman got in the car and drove away. He knew he’d get a lecture from Jason about disobeying orders, but that didn’t matter. They had a solid lock on Omar and where he was going to be and when. Now, all they had to do was find out what that bastard was playing at.