Jeff Abbott - Collision

Jackie lunged for the gun as Ben grabbed it and Vochek shot him again, in the chest. He shrieked and curled into a ball. Ben locked the gun on Jackie’s head.

“Where is Hector? Where’s his target?”

“Ah, God,” Jackie moaned. “Hurts, hurts.”

“We’ll get you a doctor but tell us where’s the target,” Ben said.

“Nicky, Nicky,” Jackie sobbed. Spit and snot flew from his face and he gagged, writhing on the carpet. “No, no, no…” and then a broken hum. His eyes widened in pain, then he went still.

Ben stood. His mind felt wiped clean, blank, his body shivering with adrenaline. No. This wasn’t over. He reached into Jackie’s pocket. He found car keys, a pass card, and a scrap of paper with the hotel’s address. No cell phone. He took the keys.

Vochek knelt by Pritchard, touched her throat. “Oh, my God. Ben.. call the front desk.”

Ben checked the poor waiter, slumped by the cart. He was dead as well. “This is Hector cleaning house,” Ben said. “Shutting up Pritchard and you before you became a bigger threat to him, before you started questioning his tactics and results. He doesn’t need you anymore. We have to find him. Now. Call the CIA. Tell them their safe house is in danger. Or the police.”

“We don’t even know where to tell the police to go. And calling the CIA, they’ll have to confirm my identity. That’s a lot of bureaucracy to navigate.”

“Check her cell phone. Check the page of phone records I got on her. Someone at the CIA told her about the operation so she wouldn’t interfere, there has to be a record.”

Vochek nodded.

“I have another idea.” He closed his hand around Jackie’s car keys. He stood and hurried down the hallway, past a couple of frightened guests who’d heard the fight. “I’ll be right back,” he lied.

“Ben!” Vochek yelled at his back. “Stop! Where are you going?”

The breeze outside the hotel was damp and cool. Ben took in a bracing breath as he exited via the hotel’s fire exit into a narrow brick alley. Sirens flashed, the police already pulling into the front of the Hotel Marquis de Lafayette, blue and red light painting the bricks bright as a child’s room.

Ben put Jackie’s gun in his pocket. He went down the bricked alleyway by the hotel, toward the closest parking lot. He thumbed the remote on the keys, kept at it until he hit the third row and a rental Chevrolet winked its lights.

He searched the seat, the glove compartment. Jackie was from Belfast; presumably he didn’t know New Orleans well. There should be a page of directions, maybe, that Ben could backtrack, follow to where Jackie came from. Nothing. The scrap in his pocket carried only the address of the hotel, no directions.

Then he noticed the GPS monitor. He touched the screen and the GPS purred to life. He studied the controls, tapped a button that displayed the last search. Which was for the Hotel Marquis de Lafayette. He went to the previous address. It was in Metairie.

Okay, then off to Metairie.

But caution made him pause. Think like Jackie. Where would Jackie have been before coming to execute the hit? Perhaps at wherever the Cellar group convened, with Hector, and they wouldn’t be there now. He checked again. Up another address, to a warehouse near Louis Armstrong International. Then the next address, as he retraced the list, was that of the car rental company.

He had to choose where to go. He tried to think like Hector. If things went bad, or the Cellar people didn’t accept Hector or believe his story, then Hector would need a place to hide. Maybe it was the warehouse.

Or maybe these were directions summoned by the last customer to rent the car. He could waste precious time on a pointless drive.

Warehouse. Hector Global had deployed a security force here in the chaotic, sad aftermath of Katrina. Near the airport. He remembered contracts signed and negotiated, the difficulty of tracking down the owners of the property in the exodus after the storm, when Hector Global wanted to rent the space.

It was all he had to go on.

He clicked back to the warehouse map, studied it, and pulled out of the lot. He switched on the cell phone he’d stolen from the pilot. The battery showed the phone’s charge was nearly at its end. He had no recharger. He called Pilgrim.

Much of the Lakeview neighborhood remained a ghost town-a very few homes newly rebuilt, others razed, far more abandoned. The shells had taken on the look of abstract monuments. It had been a myth that only the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans drowned in the bitch Katrina; this was a district of what had been nice middle- and upper-middle-class homes. Pilgrim thought if he blinked in the moonlight-now fading behind heavy clouds-he could see how pretty the yards and the homes had once been. Statues remained in a few backyards of the ruins, arms and legs broken, bodies slanted and bowed as though praying for mercy to their own stone-faced god. Suffocated oaks and Japanese maples stood, dead, ignored, tottering like nature’s own memorial to her fury.

As they approached the lakefront on West End Boulevard, Pilgrim had to back off from the cars, turn into a lot, hold position, then hurry to keep their taillights in sight, then fall back again. Finally they turned onto a street. He drove past, then turned right onto Robert E. Lee and circled back and turned into the neighborhood, a few streets south of the road they had taken.

His cell phone chirped.

“The Cellar is attacking a CIA safe house.” Ben sounded frantic. “It’s a training place for a group of Arab recruits being infiltrated as spies back into terrorist networks.”

That goddamned traitor, Pilgrim thought. He felt hatred lick through his heart. No, stay cool, he told himself.

“But I don’t know where the house is…”

Pilgrim said, “No worries. I’m there, Ben. Jesus, you did awesome.”

“Listen. I think I know where Hector’s based here. A warehouse, by the airport.” He gave Pilgrim the address. “Vochek’s trying to warn the CIA. I’m going to this warehouse to see if I can find evidence against him. Or do you want me to come help you?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Pilgrim-”

Pilgrim hung up. Nothing more to say and no time to waste. Damn, Ben, you scored a big one. He remembered when he had told Ben, with a hard ugliness in his words, You don’t have what it takes. He had been wrong.

He thought: Me saving the CIA, that’s a definition of irony. I get to go fight for the CIA when they wouldn’t lift a finger to spring me out of an Indonesian jail unless I joined their dirty secret group.

Full circle. This was the end result of his life. So different from what he’d thought it would be. He remembered the joy in his stepdad’s face when he’d graduated from school, the pride he felt when he joined the Agency, the mix of shock and awe at his daughter’s birth, the warmth of new life being held in his unworthy arms. Everything then brimmed with promise. If he had just not gone after Gumalar in an attempt to protect his family-if he had not missed with his shot on the Dragon through that window-if he hadn’t gotten caught by the police.

If. If. If.

No more ifs. There was only what was, his beginning fading as though it belonged to a different man, what was his likely end at hand. He was on a collision course with the man who had undone his life. He had no illusions about getting out of this mess alive.

Pilgrim parked in an empty lot and slipped out of the car. He cut through two yards between houses under construction and saw a street of mostly razed lots. The grass grew high on two of the lots and he darted low through the growth.

Half a block ahead, he heard a plink. A streetlight, probably installed after the storm, died. Before the light vanished, he saw a large home, ample grounds surrounding it, a newly built stone wall, set a bit away from the other homes and lots.