Jeff Abbott - Collision

“No,” Ben said. “First you tell me what you found at Barker’s.”

“Ben, in your case, ignorance truly is bliss.”

“Wrong. Because if I know too much, you can’t abandon me again. Which means you’d have to kill me, and you won’t.”

“I killed seven people yesterday. I killed two more today. You’d make it an even number.” But he gave a crooked smile.

Ben pulled the small black sketchbook from his pocket. He tossed it to Pilgrim, who caught it one-handed and tucked it close to his chest. He then slid the sketchbook into his pocket.

“Thanks.” He turned back to the counter, started emptying the grocery sacks, heating the oven for frozen pizzas.

“You didn’t realize you’d lost your sketches.”

“I hope you like pepperoni.” Pilgrim checked the oven setting he’d fiddled with twenty seconds earlier.

“You dropped it when we fought in the bathroom.”

“I said thank you.”

“Who’s the kid in the drawings?” Ben asked.

Pilgrim slid two frozen pizzas into the oven.

“I know what it is to lose someone, Pilgrim. My wife was funny, and sharp-tongued, and brilliant, and loving, and hardworking. She drove me crazy, both good and bad. I’ve never been the same since she died. Not for a second.”

“Don’t give me that ‘she completed you’ shit.” Pilgrim slammed the oven door shut.

“Completed me? No. She would have laughed at sentimentality. But she made me a better man, in every way. And when she died… I can’t be better again. I don’t even know how to start. No one can fix it; I have to figure it out on my own.”

Pilgrim stood away from the oven; for a moment he thought of a little girl’s voice on a tinny cell phone call in a Jakarta bank, urging him home for her birthday. “You said you knew how Adam found the Cellar.”

“I said you first.”

Pilgrim told him about the attack at Barker’s house; that his own colleagues were now hunting him. He described Teach’s kidnapper, using the vague terms that De La Pena had provided. That Teach was being held in a house but that he did not know where the house was. That Barker had last called a hotel in New Orleans. “I spent this afternoon trying to track De La Pena and Green back to where they came from. There wasn’t a GPS in their rental car I could use to see where they’d come from. The rental car was in Green’s name, paid for by Sparta-”

“Your front company.”

“Yes. So it was paid for with Cellar funds. I made no headway. Does his description of the guy who’s giving Teach orders sound familiar?”

“He sounds like any number of guys who might be in this line of work,” Ben said slowly. The man did sound vaguely like Sam Hector-but fit older men would be a description for practically every suspect with a military background.

Pilgrim shrugged. “De La Pena was desperate not to betray the guy, which tells me he had major motive to behave, either through reward or threat. I’m not sure I can trust anything De La Pena told me. Tell me what you learned.”

Ben told him how he escaped from the hotel, stole the Explorer, made it to Delia’s house, and about his desperate flight through and from the mall in Frisco. Pilgrim listened, chin on steepled fingertips.

“You’re lucky to be alive.” Pilgrim got up, pulled the cooked pepperoni pizzas from the oven, put them on plates and sliced them. “Considering you made about a dozen stupid mistakes.”

“I missed a chance to kill him.”

“You didn’t give him an equal chance to kill you. Sometimes the smartest move in a fight is to retreat.” A look crossed his face, regret of the bone-deep sort, and he turned away from Ben. “You’re alive to fight tomorrow, and it sounds like he came out of it far worse than you did.”

“Now what?”

“There is no what. Ben, do yourself a favor. Turn yourself in to the police. I know you think I’m a bastard, but leaving you in the hotel was a way to keep you safe.”

“No.” He stood and got their drinks, took his plate of pizza. His arm ached but the nausea had passed and now his stomach rumbled and clenched, a raw pang of hunger. “Discussion over.”

Pilgrim started wolfing his food down. “Fine. We stick together, then.” It was such a simple assertion that Ben knew Pilgrim would not go back on his word this time.

“Barker called New Orleans,” Ben said. “Delia Moon mentioned New Orleans, said Adam wouldn’t go anywhere near New Orleans right now. And he told Kidwell when he called him that there was a major threat brewing. Those two statements have to be connected.”

“There are lots of government contractors in New Orleans. Lots of fat deals.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “FEMA contractors, hundreds of them. Companies with contracts to rebuild and for relief efforts. For a while there were a large number of private security contractors to maintain order in the city right after the hurricane, but not so many now, and they are mostly tied to private businesses.”

“We have three contractors connected to this case-Adam and Hector. And you. It’s not coincidence. You said Delia calls Sam Hector. And a killer then shows up at her door.”

“We still have no connection between Sam and Jackie. He was putting his business before our friendship today, but I can’t believe he’d be involved in murder.”

“You can’t or you won’t. Sam Hector is your blind spot, Ben.”

“Let’s consider this from another angle. This software Adam was building. To unearth and connect illicit activities across databases. He needed funding presumably to have time to write a massive amount of code or to hire out parts of the work. It’s stuff the government would love to have.”

“True.”

“And let’s say Adam was originally not working for the government, but was working for Bad Guys who want to find and destroy the Cellar. But if you want to kill a group of people-especially a group of skilled operatives like the Cellar-you don’t let them wander freely. You kill them dead before they can kill you.” He paused, let the words sink in. “So if said Bad Guys found Green and De La Pena, why not simply kill them? What’s the purpose of finding the Cellar if you don’t destroy it?”

Pilgrim said, “Exposure.”

“Think corporate. Takeover. You force them to do your bidding.”

Pilgrim stood, fists clenched. “I am so going to end these people.”

“What do you know about this Office of Strategic Initiatives that Vochek and Kidwell work for?”

“Zero.”

“Could Strategic Initiatives simply be trying to take over the Cellar?” Ben crossed his arms. “Remember, a few years back, when the Department of Defense didn’t like the intel it was getting from the CIA, they started forming their own intelligence agency. The Cellar would be a pre-made CIA.”

“And they’re willing to kill their own people like Kidwell and Hector’s guards?”

“They’re willing to hire the Lynch brothers.”

“It’s very dangerous to come after us.”

“Maybe you have an enemy in a high place,” Ben said.

Pilgrim stood. “Let’s see what we can find in Jackie’s Mercedes.”

The Mercedes sat parked a block away, in another apartment lot. The dented door and scraped sides gave it an air of belonging in the neighborhood that otherwise it would have lacked.

They drove the Mercedes back to Pilgrim’s apartment, parked it in a pool of light. Ben opened the glove compartment, began to search the papers stuffed into it. A map of Texas, a map of Dallas, a registration receipt and proof of insurance. “Car owned by McKeen Property Company,” Ben said.

“McKeen. That’s the same company that owned Homeland’s office in Austin.”

They searched the rest of the car but found nothing else, so they went back to the apartment. “We need to find who owns McKeen,” Ben said. “And if we don’t or can’t, then we go to Sam Hector. He provided staff to Kidwell. And he balked at giving me any information on this Office of Strategic Initiatives.”