Jeff Abbott - Collision

“I’m sorry, Pilgrim.” He thought of the drawings of the girl, her imagined transition from toddler to teen, Pilgrim’s only connection to his daughter.

“So he gets you out of the way and uses my name.” Ben was quiet. “That means…” He stopped.

“Finish the sentence, Ben. It means the Lynch brothers worked for him. It means the gunmen were in Hector’s pocket, too, and he sent the gunmen into the Homeland office to kill us all. Including his own people. Just like back in Indonesia.”

Ben’s temples began a slow drumbeat pound. “You understand this goes against everything I’ve ever known about this man. He puts loyalty and country ahead of all. He kept me going when Emily died.. he was there for me…”

“You understand he spent years living a double life. Fooling you, or anyone else, is going to be easy for him. He pulled the double frame on us. It’s no coincidence Barker gave me your identity. Hector knows I’m a threat to his takeover of the Cellar. You’re somehow a threat to him, too.”

“No.”

“Those dates you showed me. You said Emily died two years ago. Same time McKeen gets bought by a mystery company. She was an accountant. Maybe she found money being used she wasn’t supposed to know about.”

“Now you’re reaching too far. Sam adored Emily.” He thought of Emily, laughing on the phone with Sam, in the minutes before the bullet ended her life. No.

“Get it through your head. You don’t truly know this guy. He’s a trained killer, Ben, and the most manipulative bastard I’ve ever known. Jackie is driving a car registered to a company he once had dealings with. He’s connected.”

Ben was silent for a long minute, thinking of Sam’s insistence on not meeting him in a public place, of the soft, bored click of the abacus while Ben had begged Sam for help. “Okay,” he finally said.

“We’re going to his house,” Pilgrim said. “Force him to tell us where Teach is.”

“No, we’re not. That’s suicide right now. His house will be a fortress. It’s also exactly what he would expect,” Ben said. “We’re going to beat him by doing what he doesn’t expect.”

Five past midnight, a quiet Saturday. Jackie sat and drank the shot of vodka neat. The alcohol stung the cuts in his lip but he didn’t care. He closed his eyes and let them water, then blinked.

He’d escaped from the delivery van, easing out at the first stop when the deliveryman busied himself loading an oven onto the dolly. Jackie had crawled out of the truck, unseen. He spotted a busy thoroughfare a block away, which saved the trucker’s life-Jackie didn’t need to kill him to get away, and disposing of a full furniture truck would have been a hassle. Jackie walked a quarter mile, until he reached a gas station and called Hector to come pick him up.

Hector wasn’t happy that Ben was free and Jackie had lost a car. Jackie didn’t care.

He peered out the window, bored, restless, ready to hurt someone. Hector had well over a dozen security personnel-as arrogant as the British Army had been, he thought, in the Belfast of his youth-wandering the property. The men made Jackie feel safer, but their presence was a pain; he and Teach had to be kept out of sight. Hector did not want to explain to his squad of respectable former policemen and ex-military why a woman was being held against her will. No one was allowed in the main house but Hector.

Jackie downed a second shot of vodka. He got up and went downstairs to the conference room. Teach and Hector sat at the table, scribbling on a chart drawn on a plain map of the United States and Europe. It showed names connected by colored lines, notes penciled in, and Hector had taped pictures to some of the names.

“That the whole Cellar, then?” Jackie asked. “All your little spies?”

They both looked up at him.

“I have ears,” Jackie said.

“If only you were as good at the rest of your job,” Hector said. To Teach, he pointed at six names. “These six, they’ll do fine. Call them, tell them to get to New Orleans by this afternoon, come to your safe house there tonight”-he tapped an address written on a notepad-“and await further orders.”

“You said you wanted to kill people in New Orleans,” Jackie said.

“The Cellar’s going to continue its good work, Jackie. I’ve found a cell of young Arabs in New Orleans who have all snuck into the country under false ID. They’re terrorists planning to launch an attack here. You and me and our friends in the Cellar are going to kill them.”

Jackie laughed. “I’m surprised by the altruism. I don’t figure you do nothing without getting paid for it.” He smirked at Teach, who had been mostly silent, speaking only to answer questions.

“Believe me that when I say killing this group of guys is the right thing for our country.” He pushed the phone toward Teach. “Make the calls.”

He listened while she did, following his orders to the letter. She hung up.

“Very good, Teach.”

“If you know of a terrorist cell, why not simply call Homeland and tell them, let them take the risk of taking the cell down? You’d be a hero,” Teach said.

“I don’t need acclaim to be a good citizen.” He stood. “Jackie, put Teach back in her room.” He walked down to his office, closed the door. The day had not gone perfectly-nothing had since Nicky Lynch, damn him to a thousand hells, missed his shot-but the situation was salvageable. He was going to win.

He checked his messages. One from his assistant, saying an Agent Vochek with Homeland was very eager to speak with him. He deleted the message.

An array of photos stood on his walls: Hector shaking the hand of the President of the United States, posing with his contractors in the Green Zone, touring a mountain stronghold in Afghanistan. Now he would truly make his business grow again.

Hector’s cell phone buzzed. “Yes?”

“Mr. Hector? This is Fred Espinoza.” Fred was a Hector Global employee who handled the security account for Blarney’s Steakhouse.

“I’m busy, Fred, this isn’t a good time.”

“I know, sir, what with our men dying in Austin… I’m real sorry about that, sir… but given what happened in Austin I figured you might want to know about any breaches at any client companies. We had a break-in at Blarney’s corporate headquarters tonight.”

“Details. Now.”

“Sir, well, I’m not sure how he did it. At 9:30 this evening we had a guy deactivate the alarms. Caught him on the videotape system. He broke into a keypad and hooked a PDA into the system; it read the codes and gave him access.” Espinoza stopped. “Not a typical burglar.”

“No.” He ran his fingers along the abacus’s beads. “What did he do?”

“I have the video footage, sir, posted on our internal Web site.”

Hector found the page with the video. Randall Choate, now known as Pilgrim, the pain in my ass that must die, he thought. Pilgrim hurried through the darkened halls into the CEO’s office. He flicked on a penlight, scouring the room. The scene was then picked up by a hidden camera in the CEO’s office. Pilgrim tested the file cabinets, found them locked, stopped and stared at the wall. The video showed Pilgrim bending close, shining his pool of light on a framed photo. The ribbon-cutting of the first Blarney’s- Hector remembered it, a happy day.

Pilgrim removed the picture from the frame, tucked it into his pocket. Then put the flashlight’s glowing circle on his hand and raised his middle finger for a good five seconds. The rest of the video showed his exit from the building.

“Have you informed the client yet?” Hector asked.

“Yes, sir. It’s bizarre, the intruder doesn’t take anything of value.”