Collision (11 page)

“And Sam Hector—whose people were guarding you for Homeland—is one of your clients.”

“Yes. My most valued client. My friend.”

Pilgrim studied the empty plastic cup, frowned.

“The government contracting world is a small one,” Ben said. “Hector probably has dozens of people working on Homeland projects. Just because he has a security detail working with Homeland . . .”

“Then imagine this. Nicky Lynch shoots straight, I’m lying dead, with a wallet with your name inside. The authorities would want to know if you were connected to me.”

“They’d just assume you stole my identity. It seems . . . incomplete as a frame-up.”

“But let’s say the government thought we were working together. You, a contractor, and me, a guy who’s not supposed to exist who works for an off-the-books group. Your reputation in the government might die the death of a thousand small cuts. You very well could lose your business.”

Ben shifted on the bed. “Kidwell’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. Did you ever hear of it inside Homeland?”

Pilgrim eased himself into a new position on the bed, trying to get comfortable. “No. But I don’t much pay attention to bureaucracies. They’re poison.”

He put the wine cup down; exhaustion filled his face.

“Kidwell’s team could be as dirty as yours,” Ben said. “He sure wasn’t about to give me due process.”

“The only way we get free and clear of this mess,” he said, “is to expose whoever took Teach. They framed us. We get caught, we have no means of nailing whoever hired Adam.”

Ben got up, began to pace, to think.

“I need to sleep now.” Pilgrim closed his eyes, exhaustion gripping him. “We’ll get to Dallas in the morning.”

“One minute. Who would attack the Cellar?”

“Any number of enemies. Terrorists, for sure. I’m sure that certain foreign governments would be glad for the Cellar to shut up shop. They might suspect we exist but they can’t prove it. Fewer than five people outside of the Cellar even know we exist.”

“And now me.”

Pilgrim nodded, his eyes closed. “And now you. Lucky you.”

Ben watched him fall asleep over the next several minutes. If he ran now—abandoned Pilgrim—he might very well be walking straight into a bullet’s path. Whoever had attacked the Cellar had used his name. Pilgrim was right; it couldn’t be coincidence. It was safer, for now, to stay close to Pilgrim. See what he could find out, because he could find out nothing from a jail cell or a Homeland Security interrogation room.

He wondered if Vochek was still locked in the closet.

Ben lay down, pressed his face into his pillow. He felt like he’d fallen into an alternate world, a Wonderland gone dark, where a crazy guy used his name and police hunted for him and vicious men held guns to his head. This morning he had woken up on a low-key vacation; now his life was in tatters.

Don’t kid yourself. Your life has been in tatters since Emily died.

He couldn’t sleep and he sat up and turned on CNN. And saw his name, his face on the television. His driver’s license picture. The anchor described Ben as a person of interest—public-relations-speak for suspect. Homeland Security wanted to know his connection to a purported contract killer with ties to terrorist cells who had been found dead in Austin after shooting a victim who also had connections to Forsberg. The anchor announced Ben had escaped from Homeland custody in a shoot-out in which a respected, decorated Homeland agent died. Anyone with information on Forsberg or his whereabouts was asked to call a special number at Homeland Security.

He had barely managed to rebuild after Emily died; he had survived the stares, the whispers, but never the guilt: the pointless guilt of taking her to Maui for the honeymoon, the endless guilt of being alive when she was dead. Now something far more poisonous than guilt—suspicion. His wife had been murdered and his name was tied to a contract killer. He wasn’t going to get a second chance, in the judicial system or the court of public opinion, unless his name was absolutely cleared.

Escaped from custody.
He heard the anchor’s words echo in his head. Ben touched his own face on the television screen. He was now a hunted man.

16

Vochek didn’t much like kids; but she could never forget the two dead boys.

She had first seen the small, crumpled bodies when she stepped into a bullet-blasted living room, six months ago, in Kabul, Afghanistan.

As she entered the ransacked house that awful gray morning, she had pulled tighter around her face the hijab she wore out of deference to tradition. The scarf masked the burnt smell of gunfire, and hid the trembling of her own mouth as she stood over the pitiful bodies. She reached to touch the children, but her fingers stopped just short of their dark mops of hair. One was nine, the other ten, both boys. If they had been American children their pajamas would have featured Scooby-Doo or Power Rangers or Spider-Man. But these two boys wore PJs with a repeating pattern of soccer balls, with rainbow arcs of speed drawn behind each ball to suggest a powerful and accurate kick.

They lay on their stomachs and she realized that they’d been shot in the back.

There was no sign of the children’s parents, people she knew, freelance translators who worked with the State Department. She knew them because she was here to help the Kabul government shape and refine its own version of Homeland Security. The boys’ father had called her an hour earlier, waking her from a deep sleep.
I wonder, Ms. Vochek, if you could come by and talk to me and my wife. We have information of value. Time is critical.

“It’s two of your people,” the Afghan officer in charge of the scene said.

“My people.” She tore her gaze away from the children. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes. The killers. Two men from the State Department.”

“The people who killed these kids work for State?” Horror filled her voice.

“Yes. In the security division. They grabbed the parents, stuck them in a trunk after they shot the family. Wife is dead, husband is wounded. May not make it through the night.” The Afghan officer shrugged. “What is wrong with you people?”

She was placed in charge of the interrogation of the two State Department employees. The Afghan government fed the media a careful fiction, announcing that two unknown gunmen had attacked the family.

Vochek’s questioning of the two State Department employees showed yes, they worked for State—but they were taking orders from a secret group within State, operating in Kabul, as a private information network. This group was driven by its own agenda to spy on the insurgent Taliban. The group believed the parents knew of the locations of key Taliban figures. One of the two gunmen, trigger-happy, cut down the children as they fled from their parents’ attackers.

“Didn’t mean to,” one of the men told her. “We were just going to take the parents to force them to talk. The kids freaked. Ran. We couldn’t have them waking the neighbors”—as if gunfire wouldn’t shatter the quiet— “and I just shot them.” The man wept. “Because no one could know what we were doing. No one.”

The idea that a small rogue group could be operating independently, secretly, and illegally inside the vast maze of the government made her sick. Washington smothered the story; the two State Department employees, who worked in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, were sent back to the United States, charged with far less serious crimes. Vochek protested. She was told to forget the incident. And she had no idea what had happened to any other members of the rogue cadre inside State—if they had been charged, or dismissed, or told to proceed a bit more cautiously with their under-the-table work.

It was grossly unfair, and she complained about it in memo after memo to her supervisor.

The only response was a maddening silence, until Margaret Pritchard appeared in her office one afternoon.

Pritchard was in her late fifties, a carefully groomed woman with ash blond hair and slightly oversized eyeglasses. She introduced herself as being from a Homeland task force in Washington that Vochek had never heard of. She shut the door of Vochek’s office. “You don’t like the idea of these unapproved covert groups.”

“No, I don’t.”

“They offend you.” It was a dry observation. “I’ve read your memos and your e-mails. You certainly love your outraged adverbs.”

“I don’t love outrage, but it serves a purpose.”

Pritchard leaned forward. “Would you like to help me shut these groups down?”

“No, thank you.”

“Why not?”

“Because the government doesn’t want these dirty dogs shut down. They had their chance. I saw two men who killed a family get slapped on the wrist. I don’t want to participate in another charade.”

“Dirty dogs. I like that term. But this isn’t a charade. The administration wants these groups closed and ended but with no publicity, no acknowledgment that they ever existed. This is a problem that’s been building over time—too many agendas, not enough accountability, too much leeway given to produce intelligence and hard results. I’ve been put in charge of a team to find the illicit groups, gather evidence against them, build a strong case, and then gut them.” She leaned back, crossed her arms. “You and the rest of the team will have enormous latitude.”

“I haven’t said yes yet. How many groups are there?”

Margaret Pritchard shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes groups have formed then dissolved. I suspect there’s a very private CIA hidden inside the CIA. Establishing whether or not they exist will be our first job. We have our suspicions.” She reached into her briefcase, unfurled a long piece of paper. A web of colored lines connected circles; the circles overlapped the names of the agencies and the departments: CIA, FBI, NSA, Defense, State, Homeland.

“We suspect certain activities—assassinations, thefts, sabotage—were ordered by a cadre of people inside the government, contrary to our current foreign policies. They might produce good results but this isn’t how our government operates. We’re unsure where the groups are hiding inside the bureaucratic maze—where they get their money, their people, their resources.”

“You’re forming a secret group to find a secret group.” Vochek gave her a bitter laugh.

“It takes a thief.” Margaret Pritchard leaned back from the chart. “You’ll work out of the Houston office. I don’t want people in DC knowing what we’re doing. We’ll keep our numbers few, very low-profile, make heavy use of outside contractors so word doesn’t spread among the people we’re investigating.”

No good deed could bring back the Afghan boys in pajamas. But if there were no secret groups, then there were no rogue operations, there was accountability. She would have to keep her silence, for the sake of the government, but the rogues using government cover and resources to advance their own agendas would be gone.

She wanted to make the first mark for right in the ledger. She thought she had with Ben Forsberg.

She opened her eyes at the sound of the hospital door opening, and Margaret Pritchard stood at the foot of her bed. Vochek blinked against the early morning light hazing in from the window. “Not a word other than pleasantries. We’ll talk shortly.”

Vochek nodded.

“Your notoriously hard head seems to be undamaged.”

“I’m fine.” The attacker had left her with a bad knot.

“I took the liberty of bringing you some of your clothes from Houston.” Pritchard held up a bag. “Clearly I’m paying you too much.”

“Does my mom know I was hurt?”

“Not from me. That’s for you to tell her, Joanna.”

“Thank you.” Vochek went into the bathroom. She had showered earlier that morning—awake at four, restless. She opened the bag: two of her Chanel suits, summer-weight gray; two Armani suits; and silk blouses, shoes that matched, hosiery, underwear bought from a store. Clothes were her one vanity, but she had found it paid to look like she meant business. Pritchard was a thorough soul and she’d included in the bag basic makeup, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, and floss.

Vochek wished for a moment that her mother had half the initiative and poise of Margaret Pritchard. She would have to call Mom today, but better to wait until she was out of the hospital so she didn’t have to lie by default.

Vochek used the toiletries and dressed in her favorite suit. It felt like putting on armor; she was ready to go face the world again. She felt entirely herself again for the first time since Pilgrim’s gun smacked into her head.

“The hospital’s set you free,” Pritchard said. “Come on.”

They walked down in silence to a back exit of the hospital—away from any curious press—and a waiting Lincoln Town Car. Pritchard had a driver-cum-bodyguard, a powerfully built man who raised the bulletproof privacy partition as soon as the car pulled away from the curb.

The car left the hospital complex, drove past the interstate into east Austin. The morning traffic on the highways was spiraling toward dismal— she had read Austin had the worst congestion of any midsized city in the nation—and the driver stuck to side roads. “I’m sorry about Kidwell,” Pritchard said.

Vochek privately thought that Pritchard was probably closer to Kidwell than she was, but she said, “Thanks.”

“What exactly did you tell the police when they found you?”

“I stuck to the story Kidwell ordered me to tell if we ever ran into trouble.” Vochek looked out the window. They drove past brightly painted taquerias and Mexican bakeries, the lots full of commuters and workers grabbing breakfast and coffee. “That I work for Homeland Security on a classified project and cannot discuss my assignment. Repeat as needed.”

“The local police have come to Jesus,” Pritchard said. “It has been explained to them that the shootings bear on a highly secretive operation relating to national security. They’re keeping their mouths shut and responding to our requests for assistance. FBI has charge of the official investigation. They only know that yours and Kidwell’s work was classified and is not to be publicized. You will have to give them a statement later today, but I’ve already written it for you.” Pritchard handed her the morning edition of the Austin paper and she scanned the story.

A photo of Ben Forsberg stared back at her. The story described a brazen attack on an office rented by Homeland Security in downtown Austin. One agent slain, one survived, two contractor security guards assigned to the building killed. Three suspected attackers were dead. All three men were unidentified but, the paper suggested with a nod toward terror, were described as Arabic. This followed hours after two shootings downtown, one of a software programmer, the other of a man at a parking garage who remained unidentified but had a Canadian passport and fit the description of a known assassin from Northern Ireland. Forsberg, a local businessman, was missing; the paper darkly hinted that he might have information on the attackers—he was described as a person of interest to the police. A state official warned about terrorists bringing their fight to American soil. A spokesman at the Washington headquarters of Homeland Security had no immediate comment. Neither did the FBI.

“There’s no mention of the man who attacked me. Does everyone think the gunmen committed suicide?” Vochek couldn’t keep the acid out of her voice.

“Of course not,” Pritchard said. “This job is aging me faster than my teenagers. Tell me everything.”

Vochek did. Pritchard had the disconcerting habit of listening to detailed accounts with her eyes closed. When Vochek finished, Pritchard opened her eyes.

“This man was looking for a woman named Teach. Do you have any idea who she is?”

Vochek shook her head. “But I’m real interested in her.”

“Why?”

“Because he is.”

Pritchard leaned back against the leather. “A statement from Homeland’s going to be issued shortly. We have identified the three Arabs as being part of a new terrorist cell. They attacked the new Austin facility because of scant security.”

“Is that true?”

“Well, I’m told that there’s been increased cell phone chatter to make Homeland and FBI believe that terror organizations are trying to create more cells here. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, a couple of small but ambitious groups like Sons of the Sword and Blood of Fire. The gunmen might be Lebanese but we don’t have confirmation yet.”

“So why say they’re terrorists until we’re sure?”

“Because we need the cover. Four more people died at a lake house near Austin. Three of them were Arabs as well. If we say it’s a terror cell, then we don’t have to explain in much more detail; the idea of hired guns from Lebanon attacking our office creates more questions, actually, than saying terrorists did it. Because here’s the next problem. This was the fourth corpse.” Pritchard slid a picture toward her. The young guy was bespectacled, skinny, with a bitter expression on his face, unhappy at having his picture taken.

“Who is he?”

“His name was David Shaw. He was a black hat hacker, suspected of breaking into a Department of Defense network. His hacker name was Big Barker. He was awaiting trial when he vanished a year ago.”

“How does he connect with the Arabs?”

“Other than lying dead with them on a floor, I’ve no idea.” Pritchard tented her fingers, put them against her lip.

Vochek tapped Ben’s picture on the paper. “I did not mention him to the police.”

“Ben Forsberg became a falling row of dominoes. The Austin police listened to Kidwell’s recording of Forsberg—the one left in the interrogation room. They know Kidwell suspected him of involvement in the Reynolds murder. Then when Forsberg’s name went out on the wire, the media searched on his name, hit accounts of his wife’s death. The press got ahold of him and he’s the only answer they’ve got.”

“So Ben’s their focal point.”

“Yes, and that’s fine with me.” Pritchard opened a laptop, tapped a few keys. A video began to play—two men running, one clearly injured. “Someone tried to kill your attacker and Ben Forsberg last night in a parking garage off Second Street. Bullet holes all along one wall, blood. We got a solid image of Mr. Nice Guy’s face from the security camera.” Pritchard tapped more keys; the photos blew up, focusing on the men’s faces. One was Ben Forsberg. The other was the big-shouldered man who’d hit her and locked her in the closet and inadvertently saved her life.

“Yes. That’s him.”