Jeff Abbott - Collision

The leader here is Mr. Night. Is he reading my words? If you are, Mr. Night, you must admit, your name is the definition of pretentious. But it suits him: dark, unknowable, yet somehow comforting. If we listen to him, we’ll stay alive as we go to battle.

I am honing my skills. I am learning how to travel and lose someone if followed, how to follow someone without him knowing, how to encode information so I can pass it undetected, how to communicate back to my network without being discovered or found, how to identify people who need to die, how to get close to them.

And they will teach me how to kill. Not simply the techniques of murder. But they will teach me not to hesitate. J said this is the secret to killing. You cannot hesitate.

In three days, on Sunday, the holy day here, we will head out into the world, us six, to do our duty without a moment’s hesitation.

The motel was old and clean, owned by a smiling Pakistani couple. Ben signed Pilgrim’s counterfeit charge card (in the name of James Woodward) with lip-biting care, trying to make it identical to the tight scrawling signature on the card. Ben asked for a room on the side of the motel away from the highway. He drove the car around to the back and half-carried, half-walked Pilgrim into the room and onto one of the twin beds.

He’d found a Target store near Georgetown, a small city north of Austin, and purchased clean clothes, towels, a duffel bag, snack food, a large bottle of antiseptic, bottled water, boxes of bandages and Coban medical wrap, saline solution, peroxide, and the most elaborate first aid kit offered. He also bought a pair of forceps in the pharmacy section, thinking, As if I’m really going to dig metal out of him. Down the street was a grocery store and he bought two bottles of cheap Chianti.

He peeled the blue shirt and khaki pants off the groggy Pilgrim and dumped the bloodied clothes on the floor. Hard strength wired Pilgrim’s body; not gym or tennis muscles like Ben’s. A scar wandered like a river on a map across Pilgrim’s stomach; another seam of healed tissue bisected his shoulder. It was as if the story of a life lived in shadows was burnt into his skin. Now a neat puckering wound marred the other shoulder. An awful purpling continent of a bruise extended from hip to knee on the leg. A tear across the forearm revealed where a bullet had pierced and exited. Ben gently inspected Pilgrim’s legs and arms, testing for broken bones. All seemed whole.

“Bullet’s still in my shoulder,” Pilgrim said. “Gonna tell you what to do. Trusting you, Ben.”

“If I screw up, I’m sorry.”

“You’ll do great.”

Ben followed Pilgrim’s directions: He eased Pilgrim to the tub, irrigated the wound with water, disinfected both wound and forceps. Then, back on the bed, towels beneath the shoulder, Ben probed gently with the forceps into the wound.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, so it’s going to hurt like a bitch,” he said.

Pilgrim never screamed. In the meat of his flesh the forceps touched, then closed on a slug of metal. Ben inched the bullet free, holding his own breath along with Pilgrim. Ben dropped the bullet on the side table with a plunk, swallowing a trickle of bile that rose into his throat.

“Okay,” Pilgrim mumbled. “Irrigate it. With force. Hard.”

Ben helped him back to the tub and chugged water over the wound, emptying several bottles, then pouring saline, then rinsing with peroxide. Pilgrim gritted his teeth. Ben smeared a generous spread of antibiotic ointment on gauze for the bandage. He applied pressure with the bandage, and then secured the pad with stretchy self-adhesive medical wrap, colored bright blue.

He opened one of the screw-cap bottles of cheap-jug Chianti he’d bought for Pilgrim to kill the pain and Pilgrim took a giant swig of the red wine. Then Ben cleaned, disinfected, and wrapped the forearm wound.

Pilgrim let out a long sigh. “Okay, doctor, you’re done. Thank you.”

Ben went to the sink. Blood speckled his hands, the new beach towels he had bought, his pants he’d slipped on when he got home, back when his life was normal. His hands stayed steady, though, and he stuck them under the jetting water.

“I’m gonna down more of this premium vintage.” He inspected the label. “Did you get you some wine, Ben?”

“I never drink before surgery.” Ben noticed Pilgrim had gulped down a third of the bottle. Pilgrim closed his eyes, breathing through the pain.

Ben collected Pilgrim’s torn and bloody clothes. He felt a weight in the pockets, both front and back. The front pocket held a small black notebook, which tumbled to the floor as Ben laid the pants on the chair.

He picked it up and opened it. The notebook’s pages were unlined, and half of them were filled with delicate ink and pencil drawings.

A range of images were carefully inscribed on the ivory pages: a baby swaddled in a father’s strong arms; a toddler, dancing in a garden of roses, her pudgy hands reaching toward a fleeing butterfly; a teenage girl, bent reading a book on a park bench, shaded by a wall of pine trees, pushing a hank of dark hair from her face. A gentleness pervaded the drawings-the way that light captured the expressions of serenity and joy and concentration on the girl’s face.

“That’s mine,” Pilgrim said, opening his eyes.

Ben handed the notebook to Pilgrim, embarrassed, as though he’d stepped into another person’s dream. He could feel another weight in the back pocket-where Pilgrim had drawn the credit card from-but Pilgrim’s stare scored his back and he dropped the pants back on the floor. “You didn’t strike me as the artistic type. Those are really well done.”

“I’m not artistic.” Pilgrim closed the notebook, kept it in his grip, close to his chest. “It’s just good to have an eye for detail. See things as they really are.”

“So. Really. How are things right now?” Ben went to the medical kit, poured six ibuprofen into Pilgrim’s hand, watched him swallow them with sips of the Chianti.

“You got questions. I hate questions.”

“I got questions.”

“Get a glass. I don’t want to drink alone,” Pilgrim said.

Ben didn’t want a drink but he got a glass. If Pilgrim drank to kill the pain, it might loosen his tongue. Better to be sociable, to get him talking. Ben found a clean plastic cup in the bathroom, dumped an inch of wine in it.

“Life changes fast, doesn’t it?” Pilgrim said.

“Yes.” He thought of the moment when his life divided, married one second, widowed the next, the echo of the shattering window.

“I killed seven people in the past four hours. I’m like a goddamn serial killer, all in one day.” Pilgrim downed more of the Chianti. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and Ben saw his hand tremble.

“You need some food.” Ben heated water with the room’s tiny coffeemaker, poured the hot liquid into a ramen noodle cup, watched while Pilgrim ate the spongy mass of noodles, studded with chunky dried vegetables.

“So your questions.”

“Your boss, you, this secret group. Who are you?”

A long pause. “Teach is the general,” Pilgrim said, “and she’s the only one who knows the troop strength, the battle plans.”

Ben decided to let Pilgrim tell this his own way, to let the answers unfurl, because he could guess from Pilgrim’s grimace that he was unused to discussing his life. “And the bad guys want to know what you and Teach and this group do. Or keep you from doing your work.”

Pilgrim emptied the cup in an unsteady slop and reached again for the wine jug. Ben didn’t stop him. Pilgrim gulped more Chianti, didn’t look at Ben. For the first time the intense gaze in his eyes dimmed, as though he were tired of glaring at the world.