Collision (15 page)

Pilgrim swung the gun up again, but now they were on top of him, moving as one. De La Pena launched Green again, swinging the smaller man, and Green’s feet slammed into Pilgrim’s chest. Air whooshed out of Pilgrim’s lungs, and as Green fell, De La Pena launched a well-timed kick that smashed Pilgrim’s gun out of his hand. The weapon slammed into the far wall.

Pilgrim collapsed against the wall and the two fell on top of him, sliding to the hardwood floor, De La Pena pinioning Pilgrim with his weight, the men’s joined hands closing on his throat, strangling him in symphony.

He jammed a finger into Green’s eye.

Green howled and twisted away. De La Pena raised and lowered their joined hands, closed a circle around Pilgrim, tried to crush him between himself and Green. Pilgrim punched Green, short and brutally hard, again. He felt Green’s lip tear and nose break under his blows. De La Pena pushed all his weight against Pilgrim.

Pilgrim’s lungs and his throat were suddenly empty of oxygen. Fresh agony flamed in his shoulder.

Pilgrim’s feet lifted off the hardwood, and he shoved them between his opponents and the wall and pushed, knocking them all off balance. The tangle of men collapsed to the floor again and De La Pena’s choking hold broke, for just a second. Breath, sudden and sweet. Pilgrim hammered an elbow hard into De La Pena’s face, once, twice, pain rocketing up his hurt arm. De La Pena tried to head-butt him, hit the shoulder instead, nearly made Pilgrim faint from the pain. Pilgrim rolled atop De La Pena, pulling Green on top of him.

“Grab his throat!” De La Pena yelled at Green.

Pilgrim’s and Green’s faces were an inch apart and Pilgrim closed his hands around Green’s neck, and Green was trying to squirm away from Pilgrim’s reach, panic in his eyes.

“No, no, don’t,” Green grunted, knowing what the grip meant.

Pilgrim closed his fingers around the jaw, around the head, with precision and care, and the crack was audible. The dying sigh went straight into Pilgrim’s face.

Green lolled, a limp weight attached to De La Pena’s hands, lying atop them. Pilgrim slid lower, seized Green’s dead head, rammed it against De La Pena’s face. Pilgrim writhed, ducked from between the bodies, but De La Pena grabbed at his hair and throat.

But Pilgrim twisted free of the clutch of the living man and the weight of the dead man. He clambered to his feet as De La Pena lunged for his legs, delivering a powerhouse kick to De La Pena’s jaw, then to the stomach.

De La Pena doubled up, tried to pull Green on him as a shield. Pilgrim let him. Then he grabbed the dead man’s head from behind, pounded it again and again into De La Pena’s face.

“I’ll talk!” De La Pena finally screamed. “I’ll talk!”

Pilgrim hit him twice more for measure, then dropped Green’s body to the side.

De La Pena stayed still.

“If you move, if you look at me funny, I’ll kill you. Son of a bitch.”

“I understand,” De La Pena said through bloodied lips. The blood was not all his own.

“Who sent you?”

“Teach did. But . . . there’s a man. This guy, ex-military, kidnapped me last week. Brought me here. Kept me in a conference room, beat me. Beat me for no reason.” He blinked through the blood. “He knew I was ex-CIA. Knew my real name. Said Teach would be here soon to talk to me.”

“And she was.”

“Last night. She looked like she’d been in a fight. She told me the new guy was a partner, we’d be working with him. I could read the writing on the wall. He’s muscled his way into the Cellar and she’s letting him.”

“You know the guy’s name?”

“No. She didn’t tell me. He’s older but you can tell he’s definitely from our line of work. Cold eyes. He smiles like how I think a ghost smiles.” He paused. “His house is fancy.”

“Describe him.”

“Tall, late forties or early fifties, silver-haired, but very fit.”

“Anyone else?”

“There’s one other guy. Young. Irish accent.” He shrugged.

“Dressed in black? Like Johnny Cash?”

“Yeah. This new guy’s got Teach deep in his pocket. You may say she’s kidnapped but clearly she’s working with him.”

“Only because he’s threatened her or us. She’s being coerced; Teach wouldn’t ever betray us.”

“Doesn’t matter if it’s voluntary,” De La Pena said. “Teach loses control of the Cellar, I go with the flow. Whoever runs the Cellar runs me.”

“Tell me where this house is.”

“You’re entirely missing the point. These guys, they’re not keeping her at the point of a gun. They’re keeping her because
they found us.
This guy owns our asses because he can expose us.” De La Pena stared up at him through the blood. “What’s the CIA going to do when we come to light? Wash their hands of us. You know we can’t be acknowledged, we all made the deal when we signed up. We’ll get brought up on federal charges.” He spat a trickle of blood. “You should just vanish. Give up on trying to get Teach back. It’s a new day, man.”

“Your loyalty is an inspiration. Teach gets you out of the gutter, gives you a second chance, and you won’t fight to help her get free.”

“She’s not fighting this guy.” De La Pena shrugged. “Why should I?”

Pilgrim stood, went to the far side of the room, retrieved his gun.

De La Pena said, “Uncuff me, man; he’s dead, uncuff me.” He jerked his arm, and Green’s dead arm moved in unison. “I told you what you need to know, let me go; I never saw you, and we’re square.”

Pilgrim stood unsteadily, groped in his pocket for the weight of Barker’s passports. “If you move, I’m going to leave him bound to you and lock you out of this house. I can’t wait for you to explain to the neighbors why you’re walking the streets with a dead guy chained to you.” He picked up the phone, hit redial, listened to the phone beep a number. The number display showed 504. New Orleans area code. After the third ring, a woman briskly answered: “Hotel Marquis de Lafayette, how may I assist you today?”

“I’m trying to locate your hotel but I think I’ve taken a wrong turn.”

“We’re near Poydras and St. Charles, sir. Where are you coming from?”

“Oh, I had the address down wrong, I can find it. Thanks so much.” Pilgrim hung up the phone. He tried to imagine Barker’s last day in this house, preparing for a traitorous operation, one where he had to fool both Teach and Pilgrim, set Pilgrim up for death, isolate Teach for a kidnapping. And the last phone call he makes is to a hotel in New Orleans.

Who was there? Why New Orleans?

“Tell me where she’s being held.”

“First, unhook me from him, man,” De La Pena said.

“Tell me.”

“No,” De La Pena said. “Uncuff me. You’re going to have to trust me, I can help you rescue Teach. But I could tell you and you’ll kill me like Green.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“Orders. But I was told you’d gone bad, and you’ve talked to me—I see you haven’t. I believe you, not the guy who’s got Teach. I can help you. He’s planning a big job he needs Teach for. I heard them talking. The job is on Sunday.”

“What’s happening Sunday?”

“I don’t know.”

Pilgrim watched him. He went to the bedside table, rummaged in its depths, found the keys. He readied his gun. He wished he’d brought Ben with him, useless as he might be, because this was the moment of greatest risk. He kept the gun on De La Pena, unlocked the first cuff, then the second.

De La Pena slowly stood, hands apart. Fighting in the restraints had scored his wrists raw and bloody. He spat blood again.

“Where’s the guy’s house?”

“Jesus, I’m bleeding inside . . .” De La Pena stumbled, his hand going to the collar of his shirt. Pilgrim hesitated, but then he saw the flash of silver coming from under the collar, De La Pena’s arm slashing toward him, felt the bite of the blade into his gun hand as he raised it, and he fired.

The bullet caught De La Pena in the throat. He collapsed, dropping the thin little knife he’d hidden in his collar. His gaze found the ceiling and stayed there.

“You stupid,” Pilgrim muttered, both to himself and to De La Pena. The cut wasn’t bad but close to his wrist and he mopped up the blood with a towel. He splashed water on his face, spat into the sink. Everything ached; his wounds were seeping, nausea rocked his stomach.

He finished the search of the house. Nothing. He had a thread—narrow and possibly meaningless—leading to New Orleans and a dirty job in less than forty-eight hours. But Teach was still here in the Dallas area, and he couldn’t leave without trying to find her.

He went to the car parked in front of the house, used keys from Green’s pocket to open it. A rental; he found the receipt in the glove compartment. The reservation was in the name of Sparta Consulting, the regular Cellar financial front. Nothing to trace back to the new boss. Other than a vague description, and he had no idea if De La Pena had even been honest about that.

He returned to the stolen Volvo and headed down the street. The pregnant lady, still kneeling in her garden with a smile, waved at him again as he drove past, and he waved right back.

21

On Friday morning after the mayhem in Austin, Sam Hector stood, tall and resolute, in front of press microphones at the briefing room at Hector Global’s complex northeast of Dallas.

“Nothing can replace the two brave men lost yesterday in Austin. They were working for Homeland Security, as contract guards for an important new office in Austin, in an effort to make all Americans safer.” He briefly eulogized the two men and lauded their families. He honored Norman Kidwell, the dedicated Homeland Security officer who had died with his men. “Let me assure you that the three thousand employees and all the worldwide resources of Hector Global will be available to the authorities to bring those responsible to justice.” He cleared his throat, and gave the viewing public the benefit of his stern, determined gaze. “All early indicators here point to this heinous attack being the work of a terrorist cell, operating here on American soil. Clearly this is a new danger, a more serious threat to us all that our nation—both government and private business—must work together to respond to with strength and resolve.”

He paused to let the drama build; the scratching of pens against paper stopped; the gathered reporters waited. “Hector Global is and will continue to be an integral part of the War on Terror, especially when terror comes again to our shores. We will give our full cooperation and support to Homeland Security, the FBI, and other governmental agencies.”

He took no questions from the press, although they yelled several at him as he left the podium. He heard one inquiring about his business relationship with the missing Ben Forsberg and one asking how much his contracts with Homeland were worth and would he be losing the department’s business. Another reporter yelled a question about how much business he’d already lost in the past six months, and it was an effort for Hector not to flinch as he walked away.

He retreated from the conference room to the sanctuary of his own office. Alone. He sat at his desk and pulled from a locked drawer a photo, yellowed with age. The man in the photo was big-built, plain-faced, with brown hair. His name had been Randall Choate. He was supposed to be dead, but he was not.

Sam Hector wanted Choate dead. Soon. The stakes were far too high to let a man like Pilgrim—Choate—interfere with the operation.

Contractors are sometimes each other’s most important client—much of the large contracts handed to companies are then subcontracted out to other, more specialized concerns. The resulting network of suppliers and firms made for a considerable intelligence advantage.

Hector started leaning on his network to find Pilgrim. Quietly.

Lockhart Technologies, a fast-growing company based in Alexandria, Virginia, handled communications and IT support for Hector Global. Sam Hector owned a software engineer inside Lockhart named Gary, whose online gambling addiction required money. Lockhart also provided customized software design and support to the National Security Agency’s mainframes for tracking, analyzing, and cataloging millions of phone calls to and from, and now within, the United States. The software was a critical component of the NSA’s parabolic satellite listening stations in Yakima, Washington, and Sugar Grove, West Virginia. Gary kept an admin account alive on a mainframe used to analyze the torrents of data—and this morning, at Hector’s request, he was secretly loading programs to listen for and identify any phone conversations, happening anywhere in the country, using the word “Choate.” He wanted to know if the CIA knew one of their lost heroes was alive and well.

A financial services contractor—who handled credit card charges for the military and for Hector employees in Baghdad’s Green Zone—was told by Sam Hector to alert him to any new credit card accounts opened in the name of Benjamin Forsberg or Randall Choate, or of any new credit card accounts opened with any of the aliases he had identified as used by the Cellar. He also asked for alerts on the use of cards which had been dormant for a month, specifically on charges for hotels, travel, or gasoline, in a fivestate area.

The contractor got a number of immediate hits. Hector noticed three from last night in towns between Austin and Dallas, including a charge for James Woodward. That was one of Pilgrim’s aliases found by Adam Reynolds. So were they headed for Dallas—or just headed away from Austin? He called the contractor back, told him to call immediately if there were any further charges on the James Woodward card.

Pilgrim must eventually show his head, and Hector wanted to be ready to lop it off.

He slid the old photo of Randall Choate back into his desk.
Soon enough,
he thought,
you bastard, you’ll be in the coffin you belong in.
He expected that Ben Forsberg—if Choate had not killed him—would be calling for help soon. Both men should be dead within twelve hours, hopefully, if Pilgrim did the expected thing and went to Barker’s house. Nice to have people to do the dirtiest work for you; Hector preferred having clean hands.

His phone rang, the cell phone he kept in his pocket, the number that fewer than ten people in the world had. He glanced at the cell’s readout. He didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Uh, yeah. Hi. Mr. Hector? My name is Delia Moon.”

He said, “You’re Adam’s friend.” He knew this not because of Adam confiding in him but because he knew all pertinent details about Adam Reynolds’s life.

“Oh, yeah. Did he mention me to you?”

“With the warmest regard, Delia. He was so fond of you.”

“Oh, God, um . . .” A choked sob, controlled with effort.

He waited for her to compose herself.

“I need help, Mr. Hector.”

“Of course.”

“Adam mentioned that you were going to help him with his project. His software to track illicit banking activities to find terrorists.”

Hector squeezed the bridge of his nose and thought:
Idiot couldn’t keep a secret.
That was unfortunate. “Well, yes, he talked to me about such a project . . . but I didn’t know he was far off the ground with it.”

“Well, he is very far along in developing the program. I think that’s why he died. And Homeland Security, they’ve confiscated his computers, and they’re going to sit on his software or take it for their own use, and well, it doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to . . . him, to his estate now, I guess.”

“And you would be his estate?”

“No,” she said, sounding horrified. “His mom. She’s sick, she needs money. But it’s not the government’s. I’m scared they’re going to take it and keep it . . . it’s not right. I need your help, Mr. Hector. They won’t listen to me but they’ll listen to you. Or your lawyers.”

“Yes,” he said. “We should talk. But privately.”

“All right.”

He considered. “May I come to your house? I’m afraid the press are all over my place, and I’m constantly interrupted with calls from Homeland Security.”

“Yes, that’s fine.” She gave him directions and he said, “I’ll see you shortly then,” and he hung up.

He called in his assistant.

“I’m going to work from home today.”

The assistant—a former army clerk who was not easily rattled—went pale. “Sir. You’ve gotten another twenty interview requests including CNN and Fox and
The New York Times,
you’ve got that noon meeting with the lawyers if the guards’ families sue, the PR firm wants to give you a strategy update . . .”

“Cancel it all. I’m not giving further interviews; I’ve said the words that matter most to me, they can rerun the press conference. I’m simply not available.” He knew he didn’t have to explain, but he believed so fervently in the power of his own company to do good, he added: “I have to assist the government in its investigation. Are there still a lot of press camped out in front of the gates?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the driver to get a car with tinted windows. I don’t really want the world knowing where I am right now.”

The two men from the Cellar had not returned or reported their progress. Teach sat at the conference table. A laptop, not connected to the Internet, sat before her. She had been typing into a document a detailed history of the Cellar, its agents, and its operations, as ordered that morning by Hector.

He slid into a seat across from her. “Your boys aren’t back. Do you think Green and De La Pena abandoned you?”

“No.”

“You think Pilgrim intercepted them.”

“Maybe.” Hate filled her eyes. “Making us your puppets won’t work.”

“It won’t work today,” he said, “but it will tomorrow. If I get any inkling that those two took off, I start killing people on the Cellar roll calls.”

“You may end up killing us all.”

“I may.”

“Don’t believe for a second that it will be easy.”

He leaned over, printed her draft report on the Cellar’s activities. As the paper spooled from the printer, he scanned each sheet. At one page his gaze widened slightly; but he felt her gaze on him and he put his poker face back in place.

“What?” she said.

“I’m both impressed and disturbed by the scope of your activities. Would it sound contrary to say I admire you?”

“Yes.”

“As you say, this won’t be easy, but I know you’ll smooth my path. Keep writing.” He set the draft on the table and left the room, locking her inside. He leaned for a moment against the door; it was reassuring to know he’d made the right business decision. He felt an inappropriate, insidious urge to laugh, but he choked it down.

Hector found Jackie sitting in a guest room. He’d sent an aide to buy him clothes: black pants and black shirts, as Jackie requested. Jackie kept wearing his pair of black cowboy boots. He looked like a poor man’s Johnny Cash. He balanced a wicked knife’s handle on the flat of his palm.

The knife glinted in the light as Jackie steadied his hand.

“I need you to put that knife to work on a loose end. Her name is Delia Moon.”

Jackie tossed the knife up, caught the handle. “I didn’t think Dallas had hippies.”

“They can have one less. Be quick and don’t get caught.”

Jackie put the knife back in its sheath and stood. “I’d like to know why you hate these two guys so much.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Pilgrim and Forsberg. What’s your motive?”

“It’s not your concern.”

“My brother died trying to put Pilgrim down. I’d like to know why he died.”

Hector crossed his arms. “Jackie, I wonder if you’ve thought about your future.”

“Yes. Quite a lot. Are you going to answer my question?”

“No. It’s irrelevant to your work.” He cleared his throat. “Running a business like yours is dangerous—not just on account of the violence. Trying to bring in the contracts, find clients who will pay, it’s almost as dangerous as killing the targets. Every potential client’s a cop or a rival who wants you to let your guard down.”

“It’s not like you can go cold-calling to drum up business.”

“So you complete this job, and if you want, you’ll work for me. For as long as you like.”

“Work for you. Doing what?”

“I’m going to give you Pilgrim’s job,” Hector said. “His exact same job.”

Jackie laughed. “His job’s too bloody dangerous.”

“But you won’t be alone, Jackie.” And Hector could tell he’d read the boy right, he’d appealed to his insecurity, because Jackie studied the floor, as though he needed to slip on a mask before he met Hector’s stare. He said, “Sure, I’ll give it a solid think, Mr. Hector. Point me toward your hippie chick.”