A Murder of Crows Read Online Free

wasn’t looking up at her mother. She was looking at him. ‘Help me.’
    The University had captured The Moroccan and helped thwart a greater attack, but didn’t have the resources to perform autopsies on all of the bodies. Instead, OMNI tracked the CDC autopsy reports. None of the bodies bore signs of struggle or confinement. Each of the infected appeared to have taken the injection willingly.
    That was what scared Hicks the most. Each of these people had willingly come to this country to kill him and any other American they encountered. He should have hated each of them, but he didn’t. That scared him, too.
    The Dean had passed along the information on the virus to the CDC via backchannels, which helped hospitals take the necessary emergency procedures to limit the spread of the infection. But some of Allah’s Faithful had managed to live long enough to infect others. Twenty nurses, emergency room doctors, EMTs, and police officers throughout the city had died after coming in contact with the infected before hospitals could be alerted to take precautions.
    He knew the number would have been much higher if it hadn’t been for the intelligence Hicks and his people had gathered. The number was a mere percentage point of the how many the Moroccan had planned to kill, but still too high for Hicks to tolerate.
    The Dean had also exerted enough influence to get the Federal government to quash news reports of the event as being nothing more than a horrible strain of Legionnaires Disease.
    It was an easier ruse than Hicks though it would be. The media ate what had been fed to them with few questions. The whole incident was forgotten within a week.
    The families of the dead first responders had been told their loved ones had died doing the jobs they loved. The Dean had worked with federal agencies to quietly arrange a foundation dedicated to offering healthy settlement packages in exchange for their silence under the guise of national security.
    None of The Moroccan’s followers had family in the country. There was no one to make public appeals for answers on the six o’clock news. They were the anonymous dead and Hicks knew the outbreak would soon be forgotten. The public didn’t like to be reminded of the fragility of their existence. The news cycle had since focused on covering celebrity deaths and pregnancies and political scandals. The world had moved on. The world had forgotten.
    But Hicks didn’t have the luxury of forgetting. Neither did the University.
    After raiding the house, Hicks had been able to track The Moroccan and his accomplice to a motel in Philadelphia. He brought both of them into custody following a bloody gun battle in the motel’s parking lot. Data he had been able to retrieve from The Moroccan’s cell phone and computer led Hicks to discover plans to infect people in D.C., Atlanta, and Miami.
    Despite successfully hiding the attack as an outbreak of Legionnaires Disease, Hicks knew the scientist who The Moroccan had hired to engineer the virus had figured out their mistake. And if they were clever enough to create it, they were clever enough to perfect it. He had to stop it before that happened.
    Which was why he had assigned Roger Cobb to get The Moroccan to tell him what it was. No one could lie to Roger. Not for long.
    Roger liked to employ a variety of established and new methods—a delicate mix of sleep deprivation, water boarding, time confusion, mild electrocution and narcotic injection all designed to break the prisoner’s will and make him talk.
    Another of Roger’s favorite tactics was time distortion. The Moroccan may have only been in custody for two weeks, but thanks to Roger’s tactics, the prisoner was convinced he had been jailed for over two years.
    Roger’s methods had caused The Moroccan to yield some results about the scientists who had engineered the virus, but Hicks needed more. He had to know about the Moroccan’s superiors, his network, and where they were located.