Jeff Abbott - Collision

“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.

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.