Collision, page 28
His phone buzzed. He didn’t recognize the number calling. He clicked it on. “Yes.”
“It’s Ben.”
“Yes.”
“I need help.”
“Explain.”
“I’m six blocks from the apartment. Slight accident. Hurt my foot. Hector came over, and he got wild, you know how he is.”
“Are you okay? Does he have you?”
“I’m fine and no he doesn’t.”
He knew Ben wouldn’t betray him, even if Hector was holding a gun to his head right now. He knew it with a clarity that cut through a momentary doubt. “I’m at the Plano Palisades shopping center, across from the Plano Air Ranch Park. Do you have money in your wallet?”
“Yes.”
“Get a cab.”
“In Dallas? They don’t exactly wander the streets looking for fares.”
“Ben. Give me your address, I’ll call a cab for you, I’ll cover the fare. I’m north of the Nordstrom’s, edge of the lot.”
“Okay.” Ben sounded like he might faint.
“You all right?”
“I am beyond sorry.” Dread colored Ben’s voice. “You were entirely right.”
“About what?”
“I have to go, my time’s-”
And the phone went dead.
Well. If he was wrong about Ben, and Hector had just found his location, let Hector come. He’d just wait, shoot Hector and Jackie in the knees, drag them to Vochek’s safe house like a cat bringing torn, dead birds as trophies.
An hour later, the cab pulled up. Pilgrim got out of the Volvo and unfolded bills for the cabbie. Ben got in the passenger side, eased his shoe off. Not looking at Pilgrim.
“Tell me what happened.” Pilgrim leaned down, inspecting the foot.
“I have bad news,” Ben said. Pilgrim leaned back. “Teach is dead.”
Pilgrim said, “Tell me.” His expression stayed like stone as Ben explained.
“She died trying to help me.”
Pilgrim’s mouth contorted. He got out of the car, stood by the door, leaned his head against his arm on the car’s roof. Ben got out on the opposite side of the car, faced him over the car’s roof.
“Pilgrim… man, I’m sorry.”
The traffic hummed by and kept them in companionable silence for a few moments. Pilgrim lifted his head. “He killed her because he doesn’t need her anymore. He has complete control of the Cellar. He’s won.”
“No. We’re still alive, we can fight him. We have to. He killed Emily. He had photos of her. Photos taken of her right before and after she was killed.”
Pilgrim’s face paled; he shook his head. He seemed to wait a few moments for his voice to return. “Ah, God, Ben.”
“I was an idiot-I defended him-I made him a goddamned fortune.. and he killed my wife.”
“Where are the pictures?”
“I don’t know. They were on the floor… I doubt Hector headed back to the apartment to collect them.”
Pilgrim ran a hand along his mouth. “So the photos are still there. With Teach’s body.”
“What the hell does that matter?”
“It may mislead the police.” Pilgrim took a deep breath. “We got to keep moving forward. Let me see your foot.”
“I’m okay.”
“Give me a job to freaking do, all right?”
He used the first aid kit in the car to doctor Ben’s foot-the bullet had slowed considerably in moving through the fake leather and the dense mesh, leaving a wicked track, parting a chunk of flesh from the foot’s top. The bullet was stuck in the bloody sock, between foot and shoe. Pilgrim thumbed the bullet onto the floorboards.
“Here’s another one.” Ben handed him the damaged sketchbook. “I put it in my pocket, I didn’t want you to lose it.”
Pilgrim plucked the bullet from the pages, put the book in his pocket without a word, without inspecting the damage to the pictures. “I don’t have anything for the pain, Ben.”
“I don’t need anything. Now what?”
“We talk with Vochek.” He nodded toward the house. “Only one car there now; her sidekicks are gone. Let’s go.”
34
The safe house featured a porch camera, and after the doorbell rang, Vochek frowned at the face on the screen. She held a gun in her hand as she opened the door.
Ben raised his hands and said, “I’m unarmed.”
Vochek gestured him inside and said, “Where’s Randall Choate?”
Ben shrugged and stepped inside. They heard a stifled cry and the sound of weight hitting the floor. “We mean you no harm but he wants to talk to you alone.”
She hurried to the kitchen. The Homeland pilot who had been assigned to the safe house lay unconscious on the floor. Pilgrim craned his neck into the refrigerator. He found a Coke and popped the tab. On the stove tomato soup bubbled; ham sandwiches lay half-assembled on a cutting block. Pilgrim killed the heat under the soup.
“Messy boil-over,” he said.
She aimed her gun. “On the floor. You just assaulted a federal officer.” “You all think a great deal of yourselves,” Pilgrim said. “If he’s such a federal bad-ass I shouldn’t be able to take him down with two love taps. Kindly point your firepower elsewhere. You wanted to talk, well, here I am. We’re even on your turf.”
“Get your ass on the ground!” she yelled.
“By the end of tonight either your career will be in the toilet or you’ll be running Strategic Initiatives. Your call.”
She kept the gun aimed on him.
“Please listen to him,” Ben said. “We’re on your side. We have the information you need to do your job and we’re willing to share it. But you have to help us in return. You already know Pilgrim is good at vanishing. Don’t test him.”
“He told me you were innocent.” She didn’t move her focus from Pilgrim. “But I’m not sure I should believe someone who’s been lying about being dead for ten years.”
“Sam Hector is the reason Pilgrim had to vanish. Interested yet?” Ben said.
After several more seconds, she lowered the gun. She knelt by the unconscious pilot, checked his pulse, ran a hand over his head.
“He’ll have a headache, nothing more, he’s out for another hour or so,” Pilgrim said. “Here, we’ll put him on the couch.” He and Ben carried the pilot into the den, set him on the cushions, propped a pillow under his head. Ben waited for Vochek to go back to the kitchen; he dug in the pilot’s pocket, removed the man’s cell phone, stuck it in his own pocket as he returned to the kitchen.
“Talk.” She stood again.
Pilgrim poked a spoon in the tomato soup, made a face. “I’ll tell you every dirty job I’ve done in the past ten years. Every job I know the Cellar’s done.”
“The Cellar.”
“That’s the code name of the group of CIA misfits and outcasts you’ve been chasing.”
“The Cellar.” She sounded slightly dazed, as though she’d just woken from a dream. Ben guessed she hadn’t even known the name of the group she’d been hunting. “Okay. I spoke with my boss and I’m authorized to deal with you if you’re willing to surrender.”
Pilgrim frowned at the word surrender, as though it carried an unpleasant odor. “Fine. First, Ben gets granted total immunity. He’s innocent.”
“Okay, I’ll do my best.”
“Your best will be outstanding, Agent Vochek, or I will shut up tighter than a miser’s fist.” Pilgrim gave her a condensed version of the past days, with special details about their escape from the Homeland office in Austin. Ben noticed Pilgrim left out one critical bit of information-the name of the hotel in New Orleans that Barker had phoned. He figured that Pilgrim thought it best to have a card to play in future negotiations, so he said nothing.
Vochek did not interrupt or ask questions-she frowned, shook her head a few times.
Finally she said: “You can confirm Sam Hector was a CIA assassin known as the Dragon?”
“It will be my word against his, unless the CIA opens up about him.”
“The CIA will face enormous political pressure to keep their mouths shut about Hector. He’s made a lot of powerful friends,” Ben said. “But that’s not our first worry. Our first worry is New Orleans.”
“I still don’t understand what the threat is.”
Pilgrim leaned against the counter, took a long drink of soda. “He’s hijacked the Cellar to do a dirty job. Work he couldn’t use his regular security contractors to do, either because they lack the training or because they’re decent guys and they would balk or ask too many questions. The Cellar agents believe that they’re taking orders from Teach. But we don’t know what the job is. I’m just going to bet it’s huge, because he’s taken huge risks to make it happen.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll help you stop the Cellar from executing the job.”
“That means you stay free for now,” she said slowly.
Ben said, “But we stick with you. And we need your plane.”
“Plane.” She blinked once, as though she’d seen his lips move but no word reached her ear.
“This house sits on a runway,” Ben said.
“Useless now,” she said. “You knocked out the pilot.”
“I can pilot,” Pilgrim said. “We leave immediately. Before this guy wakes up.”
“Just go to New Orleans?” She shook her head. “No. We need to call the CIA, call Homeland…”
Ben shook his head. “Hector’s a contractor. He does this for money. Your secret office at Homeland paid him to find the Cellar. He did that but he didn’t share the information with you, did he?”
“No. If he has… my boss hasn’t told me.”
“But now he’s gone beyond that job, he’s taking the Cellar over, taking control of its missions. He has control of a team of highly trained agents who think they’re doing good by doing what they’re told. And if he’s seized control of the Cellar, it’s possible”-and he paused to let the words penetrate-“another client has paid him to. Not your boss. Someone else has bought their own private CIA.”
The words hung between them like a curse.
“And he has bought it by killing my friend and mentor,” Pilgrim said. “He killed Ben’s wife. He’s going to die. Not pay. Die.”
Vochek’s face paled in the flicker of the kitchen fluorescents. Ben reached out and gently touched her arm. “Hector just decided to use me and Pilgrim because he needed to eliminate Pilgrim-who knew him from his assassin days-and me because I would be an easy frame to be tied to a hired killer because of how my wife died. He kills Adam and Pilgrim, and because Pilgrim’s been working with Adam using my name, I then look like I’m connected to them both. It would come out after he was dead that Pilgrim was an ex-CIA assassin; Hector would have made sure that information leaked. Then I take the fall for my wife’s death-and maybe for Adam and Pilgrim’s deaths. His plan got an unexpected boost when Pilgrim left my business card on the sniper’s body.”
“I still don’t understand why he targeted you, Ben, if you were his friend.”
“Two birds, one stone. The frame gives a solution to my wife’s murder,” Ben said, “and he must have wanted me out of the way as he was taking over the Cellar, because I know his business so well.”
“And we’ve given him business.” Vochek closed her eyes for a moment. “My boss is Hector’s client. Margaret Pritchard. She’s been running interference for Hector all week.”
“Then we can’t trust her,” Pilgrim said. “You can’t trust her, either.”
“I can’t just let you take a Homeland plane and go to New Orleans.”
“Agent Vochek,” Pilgrim said. “You want our cooperation, that’s what we’ve got to do. Decide. Or we’ll decide for you, with all due respect.”
35
Sam Hector aimed his Learjet down his private runway. The compound fell away below him. He set the plane’s course, radioed into Dallas airspace. Then he went silent, slipped off the headphones, and called a number on the plane’s phone. He said, “I hope you’re leaving some gumbo for me.”
“Hardly. I expected to hear from you before now…,” Margaret Pritchard said.
“Listen. There’s been a break in the project.”
“I’m listening.”
“Early this afternoon Dallas police found a body in an apartment. I have a source inside the department. The body is that of a woman who, I believe, is connected to Randall Choate.”
“How do you know she is…”
“I don’t. But it might be worth it if your agent flashes Choate’s picture to the landlord, see if anyone recognizes him. See if you can match the woman’s photo to any known ex-CIA, including those missing in action. My source at the force will send you complete info.” He cleared his throat; he didn’t need to go into detail about the additional findings in the police report: the scattered photos of Emily Forsberg in the moments before her death and the description of Ben Forsberg given by the bus station witnesses. Better for her to hear it from an impartial source. The only thing he’d taken from the apartment was the laptop; no reason to let the cops recover Ben’s deleted report from the hard drive.
“Too many deaths,” she said. “We can’t keep this under wraps.”
“Wrong. They’ve been in hiding for years, and thanks to Adam’s work and my digging, I’ve rooted out three of them in the past few days; this woman could be the fourth. This group is imploding under the pressure I’m putting on them,” he lied. “They know they’re close to being discovered. Choate might be trying to eliminate everyone who might talk.”
“I don’t need dead bodies. I need live ones that can tell us where the rest of this group is.”
“I know, Margaret,” he said. “We’re getting very close. There is one problem.”
“What?”
“They know it’s me after them. Ben Forsberg called me. Threatened me. Said they would smear me and my company with all sorts of allegations if I don’t back down. Who knows what he might claim, what he might say? None of it would be true, but I want you to silence the story as much as you can. When you speak to the police chief in Dallas, and I know you will, about this case having implications for Homeland Security, you need to be sure she understands that I’m doing your work and any allegations against me are baseless.”
She hesitated, as though he were asking too much. “Sam…”
“Should I call the Homeland secretary? Would that be easier?”
“Of course not, Sam, we’ll handle it on this end. Are you coming straight here after you land?”
“No. We have further leads to pursue. But I’ll call you when I’m on the ground.”
She thanked him and hung up.
Jackie said, “You might have overplayed your hand there.”
“Ben and Pilgrim can’t hurt us now. Ben fled a murder scene and left behind pictures of his dead wife. No one’s going to believe a word either of them say.”
“They know about New Orleans. He talked to Delia Moon-”
Hector didn’t want to think about how Ben had gotten him to let down his guard. “She knew no specifics. And they can’t get there in time. We move tonight.”
Hector pointed the plane southeast toward New Orleans. The hard work was nearly done. Within a day, he knew, his future would be assured.
36
The pilot stirred awake. Voices jabbered in the kitchen. Two men. Vochek. Talking about… taking the plane. He could smell the tomato soup he’d started to heat and he thought that his nose was the only part of his body working normally. His neck ached, he could barely see, and his hands weighed heavy, as though his flesh had converted to iron. He groped his front pocket for his cell phone-gone. But he remembered the scattering of panic buttons in the safe house. Pressing the button would send a silent alarm to the Homeland office in Dallas and an alert to the Plano Police Department.
He heard whoever was in the kitchen leaving, and he staggered to his feet, fell to his knees, and started to crawl for the alarm button in the bookcase.
The plane was already fueled and loaded, and Pilgrim was going through the flight check when sirens approached.
“Pilgrim.” Ben pointed over Pilgrim’s shoulder. “We got to go. Now.”
At the front entrance of the air park a police car screeched past the gate, sirens flashing.
“Let me explain to them.” Vochek reached for the door.
“Ben, don’t let her.” Pilgrim kicked in the engines, hurried the plane onto the runway. “We can’t risk that you might not be persuasive.”
The police car wheeled onto the grass around the runway as the jet coursed down the concrete.
“He’s going to pull onto the runway,” Vochek yelled.
“He’s not suicidal.” Pilgrim gunned the plane.
The plane hurtled toward the police car. A second patrol car followed the first, both onto the runway.
“Oh, Christ,” Ben said.
The jet powered forward. Straight toward the cars, which both lurched out of the jet’s way as time ran thin. The plane’s wheels rose; the cars fell away beneath them.
“The officers didn’t get out of the cars so I knew they wouldn’t stay parked. Common sense,” Pilgrim said.
“Your common sense gave me a goddamned heart attack,” Ben said.
The plane’s radio began to squawk.
“They’re going to order us to land,” Ben said.
“Explain that we’re on a Homeland Security emergency. Your boss got juice?” Pilgrim asked.
Vochek nodded. “She can clear our path. She can also stop us cold.”
“Then she gets us cleared all the way to New Orleans. Otherwise, consider the possibility we’ll be shot down.”
She reached for the radio and asked air traffic for an emergency patch to Homeland Security. Three minutes later Margaret Pritchard was on the line.
“Agent Vochek.”
“Here. With Mr. Choate and Mr. Forsberg.”
“Please repeat.”
“Mr. Choate and Mr. Forsberg have surrendered and are in my protective custody.”
