A Murder of Crows by Terrence McCauley Read Free Book Online Page B

in sweat. Crime scene videos of men writhing on cots, covered in sores. He had intentionally kept the image of the dead young girl out of the mix. He didn’t need to see her again. She was always with him. She was with him now as Hicks pushed the man who had killed her. Help me.
    Bajjah looked away, but Hicks didn’t stop. “Those images will leave a mark, especially on your daughter.” Hicks thumbed the tablet screen so a new image appeared of an Arab woman and two small children outside a marketplace. “And I’ll tell your old family about your new family in Karachi.”
    Bajjah banged the back of his head into the wall and buried his face even further into his towel. Hicks had seen this reaction from prisoners before. Everything they had once cherished was now being used as a weapon against them.
    Hicks talked over Bajjah’s sorrow the way a parent talks over a toddler throwing a fit. “I’ll go to Karachi and tell your new family and all the people of your village how you have become an informant for the West. I’ll show them proof you died a sniveling coward right here in this cell, all too willing to betray your cause for the sake of a few hours of peace. I don’t have to tell you what will happen to your family in Karachi after that. You’ll be remembered by anyone who ever loved you as a fanatic and a coward and a traitor. Your own flesh and blood in both the west and the east will curse your memory for the rest of their lives because they’ll know their misery meant nothing to you.”
    Bajjah’s screams turned to retching before becoming quiet sobbing. The death throes of impotent rage.
    Hicks folded his hands again. “Is this what you want, Mehdi? To be remembered as a coward and a traitor? Do you want to have your soul cursed by your own children?”
    Bajjah crammed his face into the towel. His body shook with silent sobs.
    Hicks thumbed the screen to the final image: a split-screen of his old family and his new. He watched Bajjah’s torment ebb into nothing.
    Hicks didn’t offer him solace. He made no attempt to console him. Because what was happening right there—in a mirrored cell in a rundown building in Manhattan’s Alphabet City—was the essence of the University’s mission: to acquire information on threats to the West through any means necessary.
    Breaking the Moroccan’s body hadn’t yielded them much, but breaking his mind might.
    Hicks could practically read his prisoner’s mind as he watched The Moroccan lift his face from the soaked towel.
    Bajjah had once been the trusted commander of a bold strike against the Great Satan. He had been chosen from many to drive a dagger deep into the heart of the infidels. Now, his mission had failed and he was alone. His followers were dead. His men scattered or captured or dead. He had been forgotten for years. There was no one left to pray for his soul. He was nothing but a crippled prisoner lying in a cell in his own drool and mess. He was more alone now than he ever had been in his life. Whatever God had brought him to this place had long since forsaken him.
    Bajjah looked once more at the split image on the tablet screen. Hicks watched him change from the hardened ideologue to a father looking at the children he had never known huddling against the woman who had once been his wife. The woman from whom he had walked away had taken up with another. He looked at his new family. Both sons. Three sons in total. Allah would be pleased.
    Hicks watched a single tear run from the Moroccan’s right eye and down his cheek. He could almost hear Bajjah’s soul crack.
    “If I do as you ask,” the prisoner whispered, “how do I know you won’t tell them about me anyway?”
    “Because I promised I wouldn’t, and you know I always live up to my promises. Tell me about your organization and what you were planning and I promise none of your children will ever know what happened to their father.”
    Bajjah wiped at his sagging eye and mouth with his