Collision (25 page)

He heard the Navigator screech to a buckling stop, then boot heels hitting the concrete. He exited the other side of the shell—a clear path all the way to the next chain-link fence on the opposite side of the lot.

More than enough room for Hector or Jackie to shoot him. But there was nowhere else to go.
You can’t outrun him forever and your gun is empty
. He’d counted the bullets, like Pilgrim taught him, and the news wasn’t good.

He ran, and louder than his own panting he heard the pounding of footsteps behind him.

Several yards beyond the chain link, he saw a knot of men and women waiting in the shelter of a Dallas Area Rapid Transit bus station. He launched himself onto the fence, using a pole to haul himself upward. Now he spotted a ditch breaking the land between the site and the bus stop.

He scrabbled over the fence, went head over heels, and the shots boomed, one hitting his shoe—a violent jerk rocked his foot—another shot hitting his chest like a hard kick. A third shot nailed the metal pole that lay against his stomach; it thrummed from the force as though an invisible man kicked it. Ben fell, headfirst, stayed low and rolled, went into the ditch. Water and mud, runoff from the site, smeared the bottom.

Ben sucked breath into his lungs, staggered to his feet, heard a man saying, “What the hell?” A woman screamed, and yelled in Spanish, “Gunshots, I heard gunshots.” Ben ran down the ditch, staying low, bending low to crawl through a drainage section that barreled under the street.

The crowd—someone would be calling the police. Please, God, he hoped. He eased out of the opposite end of the drain and clambered up the side of the gulley. He found himself in a vacant lot, with a large sign announcing more office space soon to come.

No sign of Hector. They might have fled as soon as they saw witnesses. Hector would not want anyone identifying him. Hector would be running.

Ben groped for his cell phone. Gone. He remembered Jackie had taken it.

Blood welled from the laces of his running shoes. The pain in his chest throbbed and he probed his flesh, half-afraid to find a bullet hole. His chest ached to the bone, as though it had taken a hammer’s blow. A tear in his shirt pocket. He found a hard rectangle beneath the hole. Pilgrim’s small sketchbook, with the drawings of the young girl, wore a bullet embedded in the leather cover.

He had to find Pilgrim, but he had to get off the streets. He was bloodied and muddied and memorable.

He ran toward a convenience store and the alley behind it.

It was a surprise to learn that homeless people had cell phones. A group of three men stood behind the store. They stopped talking, giving Ben a suspicious glare as he approached them.

“Excuse me,” Ben said, “is there a pay phone nearby?”

“Naw,” one of the men said. “What happened to you?”

“I fell into a ditch. Hurt my foot.” All three men looked down and inspected his foot; blood oozed from the sock.

“Church down the street, they give you some ice for that,” one man said.

“Ice and a prayer,” a second man laughed. “Who you need to call?”

“Friend. He’ll come get me.” Ben glanced over his shoulder. No sign of pursuit. They’d have risked being seen if they’d lingered, with the crowd at the bus station looking for them. It didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be combing the area looking for him.

“You’re the man on the front page,” the first man said.

Ben froze. The three men studied him.

“Yeah,” the second man said.

“We stay informed. Ain’t got much else to do but look at the paper,” the third man said.

“Is there a reward?” the first man asked. The other two moved in a circle, cutting off Ben’s lines of retreat.

“Please. Please don’t report me.” He was begging for a break from people who’d either never had one or never made the most of one they’d gotten. “I’m innocent. Please. I’m trying to stop the people who killed my wife.”

The three men looked at each other. “Like on
The Fugitive
?” one asked. Ben nodded.

“If there’s a reward, cops’ll figure out a way not to pay us, that’s for damn sure,” the first man said. “I don’t want to be on TV, either. Family’s always looking for me.”

“Here.” The second man dipped in his pocket, pulled out a bulky phone. “You can use mine but no more than one minute. Prepaid. Got mine at Wal-Mart. And nothing personal, but I hold the phone so you don’t run off.”

“His foot’s bleeding, he runs, it’s a short race,” the first man said and laughed at his own wit.

The man held the phone and, stunned, Ben dialed the number. Then the man moved the phone to Ben’s ear. “Speak up clear, Mr. Fugitive. It’s not the best-quality sound.”

33

The threat of rain hadn’t kept the soccer fields empty; dozens of families and kids, in varying shades of uniforms and ranging from ages four to ten, wandered between the rectangles of green. Mothers, fathers, and siblings stood on the sidelines, chatting among themselves or calling out sweetened encouragement to the players. Coaches clapped and frowned; high school kids serving as referees blew whistles and acted supremely bored.

Dads cheered their daughters. Pilgrim knew Tamara played soccer but he’d never worked up the nerve to watch a game from a distance; the risk was too great. Why did he choose this place, filled with fathers and daughters? Salt in the wound, rubbed there himself.

Pilgrim moved through the crowd. He was dressed in a phone repairman’s shirt and baseball cap, a treasure from his cache, and he stayed on the edge of the crowd.

He spotted two people watching him in the first five minutes: a soccer mom who didn’t seem to know the other moms on her side of the field, standing a bit apart, arms crossed, her eyes not fixed on the glorious play of a child but instead scanning the crowd a bit too often. There was another, a compactly built young man in a referee’s shirt, but the shirt was untucked and hanging loose over long pants. Might be a gun there. He was no bigger than the teenaged refs, but his face was that of an older man. He kept glancing around at the other games.

Neither approached him. They wanted him to talk to Vochek. Probably they would try to take him after they talked, when he left.

But she had broken her promise, or a superior had overruled her. Stupid.

A group of six-year-old boys had finished their match and their obligatory juice box and snack, and they and their parents walked as a herd. He stayed close among them, a cell phone at his ear, pretending to be deep in conversation.

He walked into the parking lot with them and glanced back. The watchers were still in place and he didn’t make anyone else following him. He ducked into his car and didn’t bother backing up. He barreled forward, over the curb and into the grass, and shot out onto the road. He had preprogrammed Vochek’s cell number into his phone. He pressed the button.

“I said come alone,” he said.

A sigh. “I wanted to,” she said. “Got vetoed.”

At least she was smart enough not to deny the obvious. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t deal if you break agreements.”

“I can offer you a deal. How about if you come and talk to me and my boss.”

“I must decline your kind invitation. I’m sorry, you’ve bruised my trust.”

She was quiet for a moment and her voice softened. “Randall. I know you have a daughter. Tamara. I could make it so you can see Tamara again.”

A chill slipped into his chest like a knife. “You stay the hell away from my kid. And my ex-wife.”

“I don’t mean them harm, I’m trying to give you what you want.”

“You don’t know what I want, Vochek.”

“Then you tell me what you want.”

“To talk with someone with the actual power to negotiate with me. Good-bye.”

“Wait, please, I need to know what’s going down in New Orleans.”

“I need to know, too. Good-bye, Vochek.” He hung up and did an immediate U-turn, pulled into a Jack in the Box parking lot, and waited.

Five minutes later, he saw her, in a Ford sedan, pull past. Two other cars, both Fords, stayed close to her.

He pulled out after them. Tailing in Plano was both easy and challenging; the roads tended to be straight shots, but traffic was heavy—it was a suburb of a quarter million people—and drivers wove in and out of lanes for every inch of advantage. The trick was to stay close, not too close, and not lose them in the quickly changing lights. Without showing yourself.

The three cars headed back toward a shopping mall, then turned into a neighborhood across the street. Pilgrim was surprised to see a runway bisecting the neighborhood, a series of hangars with an array of private planes sheltering under the tin roofs. He U-turned hard, saw the cars stop in front of one of the houses.

Found you,
he thought. What an interesting place for a safe house, with an airport built right in.

At the shopping center he located a place to perch where he could still see the house. She and her colleagues would go inside, she would call her boss, report failure, perhaps plead for another chance.

Interesting they didn’t go back to an office. Vochek, Ben had said, was based in Houston. He wondered if her colleagues were local. If they were, and they left soon . . .

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.”