Jeff Abbott - Collision

“Useless if they want us dead…”

“I don’t believe she wants you dead. Leashed, maybe. What will help us is that you did necessary work, ordered by the government.”

“Correction. Necessary as decided by a small and secret group.”

“And that group might be her target far more than you. Vochek might cut you a really good offer to come in. You know more dirty laundry about the government than I ever will about Hector.”

“I still say we face Hector down.”

“You’ve already hurt him badly, you’ve made him desperate. You wiped out Hector’s teams, you killed his sniper. He’ll have beefed up compound security just because he lost two men to supposed terrorists. He’ll virtually have an army on his property. No way will you get to his house. We don’t even know that’s where he has Teach.”

“Fine. I see your point.” Pilgrim said this as though it caused physical pain. “So what do we say to Vochek?”

“Don’t freak at my idea.” Ben took a deep breath. “The Cellar’s done. Adam Reynolds already found you; it’s just a matter of time before Homeland finds the other Cellar agents. You just have to decide whether you surrender peacefully and cooperate, or not. Give them details about your jobs. Your results. They’ll go easier on you.”

“I joined the Cellar to avoid jail. I can’t go back into a prison.” He parted the curtain slightly, surveyed the lot. “You understand that Strategic Initiatives’ cure for us might be a bullet in the head.”

“I don’t believe Vochek would be party to murder.”

“You’ve been fooled by Sam Hector for years, so pardon me if I question your judgment of character.”

“She wasn’t comfortable with Kidwell leaning so hard on me. Says something about her as a person.”

“She was playing the good cop role.”

“Fine. We play good cop by giving them something. We can’t fight Hector, not on his own turf. We can’t go to the police. Whatever is going down tomorrow in New Orleans, if it’s bad, if we step forward now with the information, get it to Homeland, we can cut a deal.”

“But we have no idea what’s happening.”

“Help Vochek put all the pieces together and then you’re a good guy.”

“She’ll just arrest us.”

“I know this is a different approach for you. But please, let’s try it. We give Vochek ammunition. Everything you know about the Cellar. Everything we both know about Hector, both in his business and in his days in the CIA. There’s a relationship there and if…”

Pilgrim shook his head. “Vochek’s group hired Hector… Someone in that group could smother the information.”

“Yes. It’s a risk. But we’re going to have to meet with her face-to-face, see if we can convince her. You did save her life.”

“Not on purpose.”

“Take the credit, we need it.”

“Ben. This course of action sounds sane to you. It sounds crazy to me. I just want to get a gun and kill Hector. Problem solved.”

“Doing it my way makes it a lot more likely that we survive.” Ben stepped forward, leaned on the cracked Formica bar that divided the kitchen from the tiny dining space. “Jackie Lynch was in league with the people that killed Kidwell. Homeland’s going to want Jackie’s head on a plate, and he’s driving a car that ties him to Hector. They therefore will want Hector’s head on a plate. If there’s an alliance between them, we destroy it. Isolate him.”

“You should call Vochek.”

“No.” Ben shook his head. “You will.”

“I have poor phone manners.”

“You’re the one with the information she wants. But you’re going to meet her by yourself. Because she may set a trap and she can’t catch us both. One of us has to stay free if the meeting goes bad.”

Pilgrim nodded. “She’s not catching me, don’t worry.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’ll call her.” He shook his head at Ben. “No offense, but I really am not getting used to having a partner.”

“Hopefully it’s not for much longer,” Ben said.

Vochek glanced at the clock-just past nine on Saturday morning-and studied the photos of the dead men. The investigators on Kidwell’s murder, operating out of the Homeland Security office in Houston, sent her the latest on the dead Arab gunmen.

The men had been identified; they were all from the southern suburbs of Beirut. Two of the men were brothers, two more were their cousins, and all were tied to a gang that ran drugs into Beirut and did muscle work when hired.

She remembered a truism she’d read about the Middle East in a book by former CIA agent Robert Baer: You don’t recruit individuals; you recruit families, tribes, clans. Here was a perfect example. But the one with dyed blond hair, the other with two piercings in his ear-these men did not strike her as typical fundamentalists.

She called one of the Homeland investigators in Houston, let him complain about working with the FBI for three minutes, then she said: “But these guys don’t seem like religious extremist types.”

“Oh, I don’t think the Murads are prayerful boys. They’ve always been hired help.” She heard a shuffle of paper on the investigator’s desk. “The Murads all flew in via Paris then Miami, staggered over five days. Tickets paid for in cash in Beirut. But they all stayed together at a hotel in Miami before they flew into Austin, the morning of the attack.” He coughed a smoker’s hack. “Here’s the sticky part. Back in the 1980s, Papa Murad, the head of the clan, was eyes and ears for the CIA.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah. When we were hunting the embassy bombers, he was an informant. Not a great one but he was willing to point a few fingers for a price. He dropped off the Agency payroll about a decade ago. One of his sons got tangled up with a Blood of Fire cell in Lebanon, did some for-hire bombing work for them, got murdered a few months back.”

“So the Murads have played both sides.”

“Yes, but you wouldn’t know it to hear the CIA. They say they don’t have a file on the Murads, which beggars belief; they’ve been part of the Beirut underworld for two generations. My sources are two retired CIA field officers. And Mrs. Murad.”

“You talked with her.”

“She’s not speaking publicly, of course. And she could be trying to defend her family’s honor, say they’re not terrorists. But frankly, it’s more dangerous for her to link her family to the CIA than to Hezbollah. She said her husband mentioned he’d gotten a call from an old friend, big money for a favor.”

“Who’s the old friend?”

“She says he was an Englishman her husband knew years ago called the Dragon. Of course the CIA denies that they know, or have known, anyone by that code name. In fact, the CIA is no longer talking to me.”

The Dragon. She said, “Of course they’re putting distance and denying they know anything. Former hirelings of theirs attacking a Homeland office on American soil? It’s a PR nightmare. They won’t touch it.”

Former CIA informants, and now a mysterious Englishman from the Murads’ CIA days. “Why does someone hire a gang from Lebanon? You could just as easily find gunmen closer to home.”

“Quit asking hard-to-answer questions.”

She tapped her finger on the table. “They attacked an office that wasn’t even open yet. Very low payback for the effort put forth. Let’s say they get caught or killed. Arab gunmen attacking a Homeland office, it creates a different image in the media. That sounds like a terrorism attack. But this wasn’t.”

“Probably not.” She heard the investigator shuffling another file.

“So what were they after? They could have taken Kidwell if they wanted a Homeland officer. And if they wanted Ben Forsberg… why? What does he know, why is he valuable to them?”