Jeff Abbott - Collision

Pilgrim reeled out of the house. He loped along the path the kidnappers had taken into the dense growth of oaks and cedar. How much time since they took her? A minute? Two? He heard a car start, tires tickle gravel, an engine accelerate. He couldn’t see the car. He lurched onto a back road and saw a silver van blast from the roadside.

He ran back to the house.

He aimed his gun at the dying gunman. “Where do they take her?” he asked in Arabic.

The dying man spat saliva and blood at him.

“I’ll get you to a doctor-you can live. See your family again. Where do they take her?”

The man’s eyes went sightless.

Pilgrim frantically searched the body. Just a matchbook and a crushed pack of American cigarettes. The matchbook was silver and red, with the words Blarney’s Steakhouse in silver print, with an address in Frisco, Texas, and a phone number. Frisco, he remembered, was north of Dallas, a fast-growing suburb.

He hurried over to Barker’s body. Stupid, stupid kid; but he wished he hadn’t killed him in the flurry of shots. Barker could have answered all his questions. But you couldn’t always shoot to wound. He found a cell phone and wallet with driver’s license in Barker’s pocket and he took both-maybe he could crack open a trail to whoever had induced Barker to turn traitor. He found nothing on the skinny gunman except a wallet containing a well-handled picture of an equally skinny woman and two small skinny children, shy smiles on their faces. He dropped the picture on the floor, nausea braiding his stomach.

You really shouldn’t have a family in this business.

Pilgrim ran. He would clean up the mess later, if he lived, but if Teach was gone the Cellar was gone as well, so what did it matter what the police found? Dead men in an empty, rented-for-cash dump of a lakeside house, a laptop wiped clean, guns, no explanations, no clues.

He dragged himself to his car and roared down the driveway.

Only one road threaded through the lakeside neighborhood. Lake Travis was a sprawling stretch of water a stone’s throw from Austin, its edges lined with homes, condos, and marinas. This neighborhood was fairly quiet; several of the homes were rentals that weren’t always occupied during the week. The car had four minutes on him, maybe. He nearly careened through a stop sign that fed onto Highway 620, a major, curving road that connected the northwest and the southwest edges of the city.

Which way had the kidnappers gone?

To his right, toward the bottom of a curve, a red light caught several cars. One was a silver van.

A horrible, treacherous thought occurred to him. He wanted to resign. He could just turn left, drive the opposite direction. Fewer retirement opportunities were more decisive and clear. Have a normal life, a life outside the shadow, a life in sunlight. With no one shooting at his head.

He could almost taste the beer. He had not been drunk in ten years, not out of a dedication to sobriety but because drunk meant slow and he could never afford to be slow, to be anything but constantly aware of every movement around him. No more. He would go to the airport, toss his guns in the trash, buy a ticket, pick the furthest destination from the Austin airport, get drunk on the miniature vodkas they served on the plane.

Maybe he could even try to have his old life back. No. He dismissed the thought as soon it came to him. That was an impossibility.

So just turn left. Drive away. This whole job was a trap, a trap to draw you and Teach out of the shadows. It freaking worked. They got her. So get out. Now. He had made enough sacrifices.

The light flashed green. The silver van rumbled into motion.

He remembered the first time he saw Teach. He lay on a cold stone floor in Indonesia, cursing at the stupidity of his mistake, his ineptness at getting caught. He’d been beaten with rubber batons, off and on, for a week. He’d glanced up and she stood at the bars. He first thought: Why has a librarian come to see me? The guard opened the cell door for her and then, greased with money, he walked away. She stepped inside the cell and inspected it with a frown. She knelt by him and said: “Listen. You say yes or no, nothing more, when I’m done. To the CIA, you’re nothing; they aren’t ever going to acknowledge you exist. I was in the same mess myself once that you are. I was in a prison in Moldova. The food appears to be halfway edible here. Lucky you.”

He tried to speak but his mouth wouldn’t work. She said, “You can either stay in prison or you can work for me. Hardest work you’ll ever do. Probably will get you killed. But it’s all for good. The most difficult good we can do. But everything about you must change. Nothing of the man you were will remain.”

He held his breath. It was a hallucination, an offer out of here. It couldn’t be. She reached and touched his face so he would know she was real.

She waited to see if he understood what her offer meant, the price he’d pay.

“Or you can stay who you are and enjoy this lovely cell for the rest of your life. Yes or no.”

He watched her for ten silent seconds. Decision of a lifetime. He decided to believe her and whispered, “Yes.”

“Then I’ll have to get you out of here,” she said. “Be patient. I’ll come see you tomorrow. I’ll have to negotiate a number of bribes. And we’ll have to fake your death.” She made this outrageous statement as though it were simply the final humdrum errand on a long list. To his surprise, she brushed the matted, dirty hair from his eyes, a caress that was kind and gentle. She got up and left the cell and vanished down the dank stone corridor and he blinked, as though she had been a dream.

But everything she promised, she did.

Shame at his doubt turned his stomach. Necessary, she’d said. You always did what was necessary.

Another decision of a lifetime to make, he thought, right now.

Ten seconds later Pilgrim turned right, easing eight cars behind the kidnappers’ van as it rumbled toward Austin.

Vochek drove the car with Kidwell, Ben, and the two guards toward downtown. Traffic thickened; a set of streets to the north had been closed by police-Ben remembered hearing the tidbit on the radio about a shooting-and the area between Austin’s high-end Second Street and the restaurant-and-club-heavy Warehouse District thronged with concertgoers for a blues-focused music festival.

Off Second Street Vochek pulled up in a lot next to an abandoned, squat brick hotel called the Waterloo Arms. Every other building on the block had been redone or undone in the latest spasm of urban gentrification. An early evening crowd of well-heeled music lovers and drinkers wandered among the bars, restaurants, and music venues along the streets. A wire fence blocked the lot of the hotel, a sign announcing that the Waterloo Arms was being remodeled into premier office and restaurant space.

A thousand words crowded the back of Ben’s throat, arguments in defense of his good name, but he decided to keep his mouth shut. Say nothing more until he got a lawyer. Silence was the refuge of the calm and the innocent. As they neared the Waterloo, Joanna Vochek’s eyes met his in the rearview and he wasn’t sure what he saw in her brown eyes: pity or confusion or disgust.

The guards tucked their guns into holsters under dark jackets.

Kidwell turned to face Ben. “We’re going to get out of the car now. We’re walking into the building. No one else is inside. If you run, if you scream, I will hit you so hard in the spinal juncture in your neck that I might very well paralyze you for life. Do you understand me?”

Ben saw Vochek’s gaze flash again in the mirror, as though Kidwell were crossing a line, but she said nothing.