Jeff Abbott - Collision

“More contractors,” Pilgrim said.

The expansion continued: McKeen landed a large reconstruction contract in Tikrit, but had to pull out due to the insurgency; bought out a few regional construction companies in Texas and New England; bought Blarney’s Steakhouse.

“Wow. McKeen owns Blarney’s,” Ben said.

“I’m going to go scout out the corporate headquarters behind the restaurant,” Pilgrim said.

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Just sit here and keep getting smart,” Pilgrim said. He got up and left.

Ben read further: McKeen was bought by a private equity group, MLS Limited, two years ago June 15. Two months after Emily died.

My God, how different would life be if she had not died? They might be planning to have a child. They might be sitting on the couch at home, watching this same basketball game. She would be full of the energy and love and life that had so defined her personality, and he wouldn’t be wearing a disguise in a bar, trying to find out who was trying to kill him.

He started tapping again, buying and reading and mining through analyst reports, now hunting for information on MLS Limited. It was in turn owned by another three-initial firm, headquartered in Bermuda. That company, in turn, was a subsidiary of another practically invisible company, one Ben couldn’t find a detail on. He’d hit a roadblock. Ben’s head began to spin. Someone was hiding behind an entire, meaningless maze of names.

He wasn’t going to be able to find the name behind McKeen, not with what was available on the Web. Frustration made him feel sick. He drank the martini, ate the olive. He ate half of the too-chewy quesadilla and nibbled at the clover-green artichoke dip.

He had another idea. There was a discussion board devoted to security contractors. He surfed to it, wanted to see if he could find anyone who had done contracts for the Office of Strategic Initiatives. He started paging through the “threads,” the discussions of topics. There was one called MissingContractor. He clicked on it.

It was about him. A few executives at his smaller clients had ventured to his defense, but a number of others were gutting him. Ben Forsberg was no longer considered a kidnapping victim: According to news reports, he had been identified by the housekeeper and the manager of the motel near the LBJ Freeway, he’d been identified by a sales associate at a department store. He scanned the words:

Two contractors died and this son of a bitch ran-he better hope the cops find him before one of us does… It had to be a crooked deal he was settingup… He probably screwed the dead guy on a contract and had him killed… The venom and the conjecture went on. Each poster used a fake name on the board, so he could not know who was savaging his reputation, but the momentum was on their side. His few defenders were shouted down by the righteous. He had an account on the board and wanted to post, You idiots don’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about. It was a business that based much of its appeal on loyalty, but little loyalty was being shown to him. He went to the site’s search bar and entered Office of Strategic Initiatives.

No results. If someone had done a contract with Kidwell’s group, it was not being broadcast or discussed.

The basketball game went into its final minutes and still Pilgrim did not return. He watched the Mavericks win, then the screen switched to a West Coast game. He drank Pilgrim’s martini. His bullet wound began to throb, his head felt fuzzy. Bad idea. They were making scant progress and getting drunk was not an option.

Pilgrim walked into the bar and Ben could see his face was ashen. He sat across from Ben, noticed the two empty martini glasses at Ben’s elbow, gestured to the waitress for another round. He gritted his jaw in cold fury.

“What?” Ben said. “What’s wrong?”

Pilgrim said nothing until the waitress brought two more martinis. He watched her leave, then drank one down and chewed the olives. “I broke into the offices.”

“How?”

“Jesus, Ben, it doesn’t matter. I have my ways. I wanted to access the CEO’s computer, see if there was any data relating to McKeen. But much more interesting was this picture, hanging on the CEO’s wall.” Pilgrim pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. It looked like it had been cut from a picture frame, a newspaper article celebrating the original launch of Blarney’s. The caption under the picture listed the people at the ribbon-cutting: the owner, a couple of his investors, the mayor of Frisco.

“Is this Sam Hector? Is this your wonderful friend?” Pilgrim tapped the man at the far side of the photo, smiling thinly, with his intense eyes. Pilgrim’s finger trembled as he pointed at the man’s face.

“Yeah, that’s Sam. I didn’t know he was an original investor in Blarney’s.”

“There’s a hell of a lot you don’t know about your friend. His name’s not Sam Hector, at least to me.”

“What?”

“That man destroyed my life ten years ago,” Pilgrim said.

Indonesia, Ten Years Ago

The hunt for the Dragon’s killers took Choate into the rain-slick streets, into trash-reeking alleys, smoke-clouded restaurants, a gritty airport hangar. Information flowed at the point of a gun or with the folding of bills into a grimy palm. The info he’d found in the bank was next to useless; those aliases and accounts vanished. But he found people who were family and friends of the Dragon’s murdered informants; they gave him slim threads of hope and rumor to follow. He stayed out of sight; the CIA and the BIN knew he hadn’t bothered to set foot on the plane back to Virginia. His colleagues were searching for him.

Three days of careful and constant tracking brought him to the end; he stood in a darkened upstairs hallway, gun in hand. Waiting to kill. Gumalar would be arriving at this house within a few minutes. Then the score would be settled, his family’s safety assured.

The house was a grand mansion in Jakarta’s wealthy Pondok Indah neighborhood. Outside, distant traffic hummed like a swarm of insects. The breeze smelled of the soft jasmine blossoms of melati. On the floor below him, Choate heard the terrorist leader complain to the drug lord: “Inconsiderate bastard, always running late.”

Yes, Mr. Gumalar, please hurry up and get here, Choate thought. Tonight Gumalar was coming to deliver a laundered two million dollars to the Blood of Fire cell that wished to undermine the Indonesian government. The house belonged to a drug lord who had a vested interest in a weakened government and was providing a neutral, secure location for his two friends to conduct their business.

The men chatted like a pair of old widows, gossiping about television and mutual friends, as though their business was not the devastation of human lives.

Choate checked his watch. Gumalar was late; there had been a change of plans, one of Choate’s new contacts told him in a whispered phone call, moving the meeting to here from the city of Bandung, a hundred miles away. Choate had raced back to Jakarta, driving like a madman, frantic he’d gotten bad information-but here the terrorist leader and the drug lord waited. Choate wondered if the men were simply being cautious in altering their plans, or if they suspected they were being hunted since his escape from his prison.

Because someone-perhaps even someone in the CIA-had betrayed him and the Dragon to Gumalar. Someone might have also told his prey that he hadn’t left the country.

Choate glanced at his watch and prayed for Gumalar to keep the meeting. Tamara was having her birthday party in three days, and if he did the kill tonight and walked back into the Agency, he’d be back home in Virginia in plenty of time to help decorate the house, help Tamara bake her own cake. He knew if he got this impossible job done so that neither he nor the CIA could be blamed, he’d be forgiven for leaving the hospital and continuing the operation.