Collision (29 page)

43

Much of the Lakeview neighborhood remained a ghost town—a very few homes newly rebuilt, others razed, far more abandoned. The shells had taken on the look of abstract monuments. It had been a myth that only the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans drowned in the bitch Katrina; this was a district of what had been nice middle- and upper-middle-class homes. Pilgrim thought if he blinked in the moonlight—now fading behind heavy clouds—he could see how pretty the yards and the homes had once been. Statues remained in a few backyards of the ruins, arms and legs broken, bodies slanted and bowed as though praying for mercy to their own stone-faced god. Suffocated oaks and Japanese maples stood, dead, ignored, tottering like nature’s own memorial to her fury.

As they approached the lakefront on West End Boulevard, Pilgrim had to back off from the cars, turn into a lot, hold position, then hurry to keep their taillights in sight, then fall back again. Finally they turned onto a street. He drove past, then turned right onto Robert E. Lee and circled back and turned into the neighborhood, a few streets south of the road they had taken.

His cell phone chirped.

“The Cellar is attacking a CIA safe house.” Ben sounded frantic. “It’s a training place for a group of Arab recruits being infiltrated as spies back into terrorist networks.”

That goddamned traitor, Pilgrim thought. He felt hatred lick through his heart.
No, stay cool,
he told himself.

“But I don’t know where the house is . . .”

Pilgrim said, “No worries. I’m there, Ben. Jesus, you did awesome.”

“Listen. I think I know where Hector’s based here. A warehouse, by the airport.” He gave Pilgrim the address. “Vochek’s trying to warn the CIA. I’m going to this warehouse to see if I can find evidence against him. Or do you want me to come help you?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Pilgrim—”

Pilgrim hung up. Nothing more to say and no time to waste.
Damn, Ben, you scored a big one.
He remembered when he had told Ben, with a hard ugliness in his words,
You don’t have what it takes.
He had been wrong.

He thought:
Me saving the CIA, that’s a definition of irony. I get to go fight for the CIA when they wouldn’t lift a finger to spring me out of an Indonesian jail unless I joined their dirty secret group.

Full circle. This was the end result of his life. So different from what he’d thought it would be. He remembered the joy in his stepdad’s face when he’d graduated from school, the pride he felt when he joined the Agency, the mix of shock and awe at his daughter’s birth, the warmth of new life being held in his unworthy arms. Everything then brimmed with promise. If he had just not gone after Gumalar in an attempt to protect his family—if he had not missed with his shot on the Dragon through that window—if he hadn’t gotten caught by the police.

If. If. If.

No more ifs. There was only what was, his beginning fading as though it belonged to a different man, what was his likely end at hand. He was on a collision course with the man who had undone his life. He had no illusions about getting out of this mess alive.

Pilgrim parked in an empty lot and slipped out of the car. He cut through two yards between houses under construction and saw a street of mostly razed lots. The grass grew high on two of the lots and he darted low through the growth.

Half a block ahead, he heard a plink. A streetlight, probably installed after the storm, died. Before the light vanished, he saw a large home, ample grounds surrounding it, a newly built stone wall, set a bit away from the other homes and lots.

The target.

The Cellar team would be fast. The safe house probably had reinforced doors and windows, but they would deactivate the alarm systems and they would be in and murdering and out in sixty seconds. In the house, one dim light gleamed on a second floor, someone unable to sleep or standing guard.

He’d never slept well while on training; too eager to learn, to soak up data and techniques and analysis. He felt an instant kindred spirit with the night owl in the target house.

He hurried back to the van. Shot out the lock, yanked open the door. A man inside, headphones on, turned toward him. He went for his gun and Pilgrim stopped him with a kick in the gut. The guy collapsed, airless. Pilgrim carefully deactivated the headphones and wrapped the cable around the guy’s neck. He tightened it hard into the throat’s flesh, then loosened it a bit for a display of mercy, tightened it again while he asked his question.

“How many of them on the attack?”

The guy struggled and Pilgrim yanked the cable tighter. Turning purple, the guy held up six fingers. Hector and five more Cellar agents, not counting this one.

“Guns? Explosives?”

“Guns, knives. Nothing heavier.” The guy choked.

“What’s your call sign? Don’t lie to me. If I give the wrong sign and I have to run, I’ll kill you on my way out. Right now you’re getting to live.” He eased up enough on the cable and the guy said, “Strict numbers. I’m Seven.”

“By the way, I didn’t kill Teach. You get out of this alive and I don’t, kill Hector for me.” He slammed the guy’s head against the corner of the equipment table, twice, and the guy slumped unconscious.

Pilgrim’s own clothes were not night stalker-ready—he wore khakis and a pale shirt. The unconscious man wore a black turtleneck and black pants. Pilgrim relieved him of his dark clothes; they were tight on Pilgrim’s big frame but they fit well enough.

Pilgrim took the guy’s gun and knife, fished an earpiece from the curl of his ear, and tucked it into his own. He activated it and listened to the Cellar chatter as the team deployed. One and Two had deactivated the perimeter security system and were approaching the house, to deal with its alarm box. Which meant two of them should be close to the low stone wall, holding back to watch the group’s rear, ready to join the others when the alarm system was cut.

For an instant Pilgrim considered revving the van, laying on the horn, creating a disturbance to awaken everyone in the house. But that would trigger a retreat, all of them heading straight for him. He’d be outnumbered and outgunned. And if he went live on the com network and informed them that Hector killed Teach—there was the chance they might not believe him. He had killed two other Cellar agents in self-defense, but when it was dark and tense, one could not always have rational discussions with heavily armed people.

So he’d have to do this the hard way.

He slipped out of the van.

You’re going to die.
He was fairly sure of the outcome. Six now against one, and if anyone inside the CIA safe house was armed—and no doubt they were—they were just as likely to shoot him.

Do what’s necessary.
He had done it for ten years and Ben kept telling him that it was fine, it was understandable. Ben was one of those people who thought dirty jobs had their place in the cogs of society; as long as his own hands didn’t get bloodied, it was okay. Lots of people thought that way. But now Pilgrim faced killing his own colleagues to keep them from doing a serious and harmful wrong to the country, and it wasn’t their fault.

Do what you have to do.

His heart weighed like a stone.

He listened to the silence. No one saying anything, which meant they were waiting for the alarm system to go down. He crept from the van—every streetlight had been doused. The road was dark, the moon hiding its face.

He studied the length of the wall. Five feet high, a foot wide. He got close to the house’s main driveway. A spot along here was a likely station for whoever was ordered to hold back—enough to cover a retreat for those at the alarm box, far back enough to see any encroaching danger.

He stopped ten feet shy of the driveway, listened. After a minute he heard, four feet to his left, the faintest rustle of a heel shifting weight in grass.

He moved back, heard a whispered “Copy” as someone announced they were nearly through the decode sequence for the alarm, and went over the wall.

Pilgrim practically landed on one of them, a woman, his feet knocking into her back, nailing her to the grass. The other was a man, short and powerfully built. Pilgrim grabbed his head, slammed it against the stone with three brutal blows, breaking the man’s nose, savaging his cheek. The man went down; Pilgrim dropped him. He knelt by the woman; she was semiconscious and he struck the flat of his palm against her neck, knocking her out.

He scooped their earpieces from their ears. Three down, four to go.

“Five, Four, report.” Hector’s baritone in his earpiece. The noise of the takedown drew his attention.

“This is Seven,” Pilgrim whispered. “I see them, they are heading back to the van. Four is tapping at ear. I’ll check their pieces.”

A pause, as though his whisper was being judged. “Tell them to get the hell back here.”

“Copy.” Pilgrim ran low and hard, moving toward a small stone outbuilding where a driveway dead-ended. He had to neutralize the team: three more agents, two of them working on the alarm.

And where was Hector?

“We’re found,” he heard a woman say, both in his earpiece and in his ear, and a kick hammered into his chest. She’d been behind the outbuilding and he’d been careless. Her blow staggered him. A flash of silver danced in the spare moonlight; she had a knife, trying to avoid the noise of a gun that would rouse the house. She slashed at him with the blade, slicing through the borrowed black turtleneck and scoring across his chest. But she overshot on the blow, tried to recover by launching another powerhouse kick at his face. He caught her leg high and shoved her hard into the brick building she’d hidden behind. Hushed and sudden chatter from the others filled his ear.

They knew he was there.

“Alarm down,” a man announced.

“Hit now,” Hector ordered.

Pilgrim fractured his attacker’s arm with the next blow, but better than killing her, he thought. She dropped the knife and contained her scream— brave and well trained, trying not to alarm the target. He hit her twice, hard, with respect and regret, and she went down, maybe not knocked out but hurt enough to be out of the fight.

Two more Cellar agents and Hector remained. Pilgrim was at the house’s side porch and he figured the assault would open at the back, away from the street.

He heard the muted sound of a shot hitting steel, a reinforced door. The opportunity for stealth had passed; he was too late. He spoke into the earpiece. “Hector killed Teach. Not me. Shoot him. Shoot
him
.”

No answer. No acknowledgment. Two more shots.

“You’re not killing terrorists. You’re attacking a CIA safe house. He’s a traitor,” Pilgrim said. He broke into a hard run. “Four are down, none are dead. I’m not the liar. Stand down.”

Nothing. They were ignoring him, or Hector had silenced the communications network. He could see movement inside the windows.

Hector and the Cellar were already inside.

They knew he was here; one would be watching the door for him while the others began the kills. The door was a trap. So he fired rounds at a back window, bullets slamming into the reinforced glass. He vaulted up the porch steps. Those inside would think he was stupid and heading for the nearly unbreakable glass he was trying to shatter with his gunfire. He kept firing at the pane but at the last moment he leapt through the doorway.

The feint worked. He hit the floor, rolled out of the back hallway into the dining room, his gun spitting, and he caught one Cellar agent waiting for him close to the window, in the knees, the agent firing back, a bullet needling into the meat of Pilgrim’s shoulder. He rolled hard, under a table, fired again, screaming without thinking, “CIA! CIA!”

He was once, and always would be, and now he was again.

A bullet smacked into the table he was under, fired from his left. He could see one body, in T-shirt and pajama pants, on the kitchen floor. They’d already killed one. He shot the agent closest to the window again in the leg, and the wounded agent staggered into the kitchen.

A hallway phone began to ring.
Thanks, Vochek, you got their attention. Too late.

A second Cellar agent had also made a retreat into the kitchen, firing at Pilgrim from an awkward angle, pinning him down. Bullets cracked into the back of the pine chairs at the dinner table.

“Abort!” Pilgrim yelled in the pause between the shots. “Hector killed Teach!”

Silence. The pause lengthened and he risked bolting from the table down the hallway.

As he ran toward the end of the hall, the lights came on.

Pilgrim could see on the stairwell a young man no more than twenty-three: black-haired, wearing eyeglasses, mouth twisted in fright, holding a Glock with trembling hands. Hector crouched at the bottom of the stairs, aiming at the kid.

Pilgrim fired and the bullet sizzled hard into Hector’s gun, the impact powering the weapon from his hand. Hector staggered into a room beyond the stairs, Pilgrim firing, the back of Hector’s jacket tearing as a bullet hit him between neck and arm. But Hector kept going, out the front.

The young Arab swiveled his gun toward Pilgrim, firing blindly in panic.

Pilgrim retreated back down the hallway and out the back door. The remaining two Cellar agents had fled the kitchen and were running across the yard, the uninjured one carrying the man Pilgrim had shot.

Pilgrim hit the grass, ran around the house toward the stone wall.

A blast of gunfire erupted from the house’s upper windows. The CIA trainees were awake and pissed. Bullets churned the lawn by his feet. They were shooting at him in the darkness, thinking he was the enemy.

In the sudden gleam of the van’s headlights on the street, Pilgrim saw Hector hauling himself over the stone wall.

Lights flickered on at the safe house. Upstairs, downstairs.

Pilgrim hit the stone wall, vaulted over it. Agony flamed his shoulder. The Cellar van kicked to life and in the rising glow of lights from the safe house he saw the van tech, not Hector, at the wheel, slowing long enough for the woman with the broken arm to stagger inside.