Collision

15

The motel was old and clean, owned by a smiling Pakistani couple. Ben signed Pilgrim’s counterfeit charge card (in the name of James Woodward) with lip-biting care, trying to make it identical to the tight scrawling signature on the card. Ben asked for a room on the side of the motel away from the highway. He drove the car around to the back and half-carried, half-walked Pilgrim into the room and onto one of the twin beds.

He’d found a Target store near Georgetown, a small city north of Austin, and purchased clean clothes, towels, a duffel bag, snack food, a large bottle of antiseptic, bottled water, boxes of bandages and Coban medical wrap, saline solution, peroxide, and the most elaborate first aid kit offered. He also bought a pair of forceps in the pharmacy section, thinking, As if I’m really going to dig metal out of him. Down the street was a grocery store and he bought two bottles of cheap Chianti.

He peeled the blue shirt and khaki pants off the groggy Pilgrim and dumped the bloodied clothes on the floor. Hard strength wired Pilgrim’s body; not gym or tennis muscles like Ben’s. A scar wandered like a river on a map across Pilgrim’s stomach; another seam of healed tissue bisected his shoulder. It was as if the story of a life lived in shadows was burnt into his skin. Now a neat puckering wound marred the other shoulder. An awful purpling continent of a bruise extended from hip to knee on the leg. A tear across the forearm revealed where a bullet had pierced and exited. Ben gently inspected Pilgrim’s legs and arms, testing for broken bones. All seemed whole.

“Bullet’s still in my shoulder,” Pilgrim said. “Gonna tell you what to do. Trusting you, Ben.”

“If I screw up, I’m sorry.”

“You’ll do great.”

Ben followed Pilgrim’s directions: He eased Pilgrim to the tub, irrigated the wound with water, disinfected both wound and forceps. Then, back on the bed, towels beneath the shoulder, Ben probed gently with the forceps into the wound.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, so it’s going to hurt like a bitch,” he said.

Pilgrim never screamed. In the meat of his flesh the forceps touched, then closed on a slug of metal. Ben inched the bullet free, holding his own breath along with Pilgrim. Ben dropped the bullet on the side table with a plunk, swallowing a trickle of bile that rose into his throat.

“Okay,” Pilgrim mumbled. “Irrigate it. With force. Hard.”

Ben helped him back to the tub and chugged water over the wound, emptying several bottles, then pouring saline, then rinsing with peroxide. Pilgrim gritted his teeth. Ben smeared a generous spread of antibiotic ointment on gauze for the bandage. He applied pressure with the bandage, and then secured the pad with stretchy self-adhesive medical wrap, colored bright blue.

He opened one of the screw-cap bottles of cheap-jug Chianti he’d bought for Pilgrim to kill the pain and Pilgrim took a giant swig of the red wine. Then Ben cleaned, disinfected, and wrapped the forearm wound.

Pilgrim let out a long sigh. “Okay, doctor, you’re done. Thank you.”

Ben went to the sink. Blood speckled his hands, the new beach towels he had bought, his pants he’d slipped on when he got home, back when his life was normal. His hands stayed steady, though, and he stuck them under the jetting water.

“I’m gonna down more of this premium vintage.” He inspected the label. “Did you get you some wine, Ben?”

“I never drink before surgery.” Ben noticed Pilgrim had gulped down a third of the bottle. Pilgrim closed his eyes, breathing through the pain.

Ben collected Pilgrim’s torn and bloody clothes. He felt a weight in the pockets, both front and back. The front pocket held a small black notebook, which tumbled to the floor as Ben laid the pants on the chair.

He picked it up and opened it. The notebook’s pages were unlined, and half of them were filled with delicate ink and pencil drawings.

A range of images were carefully inscribed on the ivory pages: a baby swaddled in a father’s strong arms; a toddler, dancing in a garden of roses, her pudgy hands reaching toward a fleeing butterfly; a teenage girl, bent reading a book on a park bench, shaded by a wall of pine trees, pushing a hank of dark hair from her face. A gentleness pervaded the drawings-the way that light captured the expressions of serenity and joy and concentration on the girl’s face.

“That’s mine,” Pilgrim said, opening his eyes.

Ben handed the notebook to Pilgrim, embarrassed, as though he’d stepped into another person’s dream. He could feel another weight in the back pocket-where Pilgrim had drawn the credit card from-but Pilgrim’s stare scored his back and he dropped the pants back on the floor. “You didn’t strike me as the artistic type. Those are really well done.”

“I’m not artistic.” Pilgrim closed the notebook, kept it in his grip, close to his chest. “It’s just good to have an eye for detail. See things as they really are.”

“So. Really. How are things right now?” Ben went to the medical kit, poured six ibuprofen into Pilgrim’s hand, watched him swallow them with sips of the Chianti.

“You got questions. I hate questions.”

“I got questions.”

“Get a glass. I don’t want to drink alone,” Pilgrim said.

Ben didn’t want a drink but he got a glass. If Pilgrim drank to kill the pain, it might loosen his tongue. Better to be sociable, to get him talking. Ben found a clean plastic cup in the bathroom, dumped an inch of wine in it.

“Life changes fast, doesn’t it?” Pilgrim said.

“Yes.” He thought of the moment when his life divided, married one second, widowed the next, the echo of the shattering window.

“I killed seven people in the past four hours. I’m like a goddamn serial killer, all in one day.” Pilgrim downed more of the Chianti. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and Ben saw his hand tremble.

“You need some food.” Ben heated water with the room’s tiny coffeemaker, poured the hot liquid into a ramen noodle cup, watched while Pilgrim ate the spongy mass of noodles, studded with chunky dried vegetables.

“So your questions.”

“Your boss, you, this secret group. Who are you?”

A long pause. “Teach is the general,” Pilgrim said, “and she’s the only one who knows the troop strength, the battle plans.”

Ben decided to let Pilgrim tell this his own way, to let the answers unfurl, because he could guess from Pilgrim’s grimace that he was unused to discussing his life. “And the bad guys want to know what you and Teach and this group do. Or keep you from doing your work.”

Pilgrim emptied the cup in an unsteady slop and reached again for the wine jug. Ben didn’t stop him. Pilgrim gulped more Chianti, didn’t look at Ben. For the first time the intense gaze in his eyes dimmed, as though he were tired of glaring at the world.

Ben decided to prod him. “The credit card was for James Woodward. Is that your real name?”

“Promise me you won’t freak out.”

“I don’t have a lot of freak-out left in me.”

“I could tell you were thinking of going through my wallet. I know you’ll do it as soon as I’m asleep. Go ahead.”

Ben went to the pocket, dug out the wallet. Opened it.

A Texas driver’s license lay under a plastic window. Pilgrim’s face on it. The name read “FORSBERG, BENJAMIN LARS.”

Ben thumbed through the rest of the wallet. Visa, American Express, health club membership: each one in Ben’s name. A business card that was a match of his own. Tucked into the wallet was an American passport: Pilgrim’s face, Ben’s name.

His breathing grew ragged and a slow rage rose in his chest. He threw the wallet at Pilgrim, who caught it one-handed.

“I’m you, Ben,” Pilgrim said. “I’ve been you for the past three days.”

“You’re the reason… Homeland thinks I’m guilty,” Ben said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me, or my life…”

“It has everything to do with your life,” Pilgrim said. “You were framed as much as I was.”

“You stole my identity.”

“No. Your identity was given to me by a traitor. He set me up to be you because someone wants us both destroyed.”

“You could have told me this immediately… back in the car.. ”

“I couldn’t have. I needed your help. And earlier I was too busy saving your life. Sit down. Drink your wine.”

“Don’t expect me to thank you.” Ben went and picked up Pilgrim’s gun off the table.

“I don’t think you’re a fool. You and I both got played, both got nailed with a single shot. We’ve got a common enemy.” He paused. “I’m not your enemy. If I were, you’d be dead. I would have grabbed you when you were checking the last of the bandages and broken your neck. I didn’t.”

“Wow. Thank you.” Ben put the gun back on the table. “Tell me why you’re pretending to be me.”

The silence stretched between them like a wire drawn tight. The only noise was the distant ripple of highway traffic and the drone of cicadas in the trees. “You told me you trusted me before I dug that bullet out. Prove it.”

Pilgrim cleared his throat. “The group I’m with does the dirty work that is necessary at times to identify and neutralize threats and protect the country.”

“Dirty work.”

“The activities the other agencies are legally blocked from doing.”

“You do the jobs no one can take credit for or be blamed for.”

Pilgrim blinked. “Excellent description.”

“Where’s your budget hidden-FBI? CIA?”

Pilgrim looked at him with a bit more respect. “Only Teach knows for sure, but I think the budget’s hidden inside the CIA, cobbled together from miscellaneous funding. We’re a back corner. A forgotten room.” He paused. “It’s called the Cellar.”

“And you routinely hijack other people’s identities.”

“No. At least never before. A little shit named Barker created my legends-my identities-when I’m on a job. Normally he spun them out of thin air, invented a name, a history, a financial background. He gave me your identity; I had no idea you really existed. He also betrayed me and Teach; he worked with her kidnappers. Which means his boss-whoever that is-gave him your name to use.” He paused. “I didn’t know you were real.”

“But why me?”

“I’d say whoever Barker worked for hates your guts.”

“No one hates me.”

“Or you’re a huge threat to someone. You just don’t know it.”

Ben rubbed his forehead. “What was your job where you needed my name?”

“To investigate Adam Reynolds.” He took another long sip of the Chianti. “Over the past few weeks, every alias or false identity used by myself or one of my Cellar colleagues was being tracked. Credit checks were run against the fake names, inquiries were being made, our aliases brought to the attention of police in New York, London, Atlanta, other cities. When we’re done with a job we walk away from the aliases-but we keep an eye on them for a while after the job is done, in case someone tries to track us through the false identities.”

“Adam Reynolds tracked you.”

“He was a software designer, so he had to be using technology to find and discover our activities. But we have no idea how he did it.”

“And you dragged my name in.”

“We needed to find out why he was after us and who funded him. Teach got an old CIA contact to tell Adam Reynolds a contractor consultant named Ben Forsberg might be able to help him land funding for a start-up software company, to build products based on his ideas. But I thought Ben Forsberg was just an identity Barker made up along with a history.”

“Barker bought the cell phones in my name. Opened the credit accounts. Rented the office space.” Ben shook his head. “Sparta Consulting, that’s what he used as a cover.”

“Sparta’s a front company for the Cellar, a way to camouflage our financial dealings.” Pilgrim coughed, winced at the pain. “I got three meetings with Adam and I told him I represented a bunch of government contractors interested in backing his software ideas. I could help him set up his own company, fund the work, share the profits. Of course all I wanted to do was find out how he’d found us and who’d paid him to hunt us down.”

“You wrote the business proposal, with my name on it, that Kidwell and Vochek found in his office,” Ben said. Nausea clawed into his guts.

“I wanted to learn how he found our aliases, see who his business contacts were, find who funded his search for the Cellar.”

“So why did he get killed?”

“He knew this afternoon that I wasn’t Ben Forsberg. I tried to make him understand I could protect him, but he told me he’d called Homeland. But I don’t think he worked for Homeland in trying to find the Cellar.”

“Why?”

“Homeland Security doesn’t hire Arab gunmen to kidnap people. They’re not into assassination. And they have no reason to frame you.”

“So his boss is who?”

“No idea. And if his boss knew Adam was bolting… clearly he didn’t want Adam talking about his search for us.”

“And the Cellar is the threat to national security he described to Kidwell?”

“Clearly he viewed us as a threat.”

Ben got up from the bed, walked to the window. “So Nicky Lynch killed him and you killed Lynch. You put my business card in Lynch’s pocket.” The rage swelled in his chest, held its breath, and then was gone; replaced by a exhausting realization of how bad his situation was. He couldn’t afford the distraction of anger. He shivered as he stood by the window, even though the room was warm.

“Ben, listen, I didn’t know you were a real person… my cover had been blown. I thought I was leaving a nonexistent man as the fall guy, an empty trail for the police to follow.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know I would be pointing a finger at you.”

Ben sat down on his bed. “If Nicky Lynch killed you and Adam, it would come out quick enough that you weren’t me. So I’m not convinced that, whoever your enemy is, he’s also mine. Your guy Barker could have just decided to use my name since I’m in the line of work you needed for your cover story.”

Pilgrim refilled his cup with wine. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I’m in Austin, pretending to be you, you’re out of town. Who knew you were gone?”

Ben hesitated. “My clients. I told them so they would know I wouldn’t be answering phone calls or e-mails.”

“And Sam Hector-whose people were guarding you for Homeland-is one of your clients.”

“Yes. My most valued client. My friend.”

Pilgrim studied the empty plastic cup, frowned.

“The government contracting world is a small one,” Ben said. “Hector probably has dozens of people working on Homeland projects. Just because he has a security detail working with Homeland…”

“Then imagine this. Nicky Lynch shoots straight, I’m lying dead, with a wallet with your name inside. The authorities would want to know if you were connected to me.”

“They’d just assume you stole my identity. It seems… incomplete as a frame-up.”

“But let’s say the government thought we were working together. You, a contractor, and me, a guy who’s not supposed to exist who works for an off-the-books group. Your reputation in the government might die the death of a thousand small cuts. You very well could lose your business.”

Ben shifted on the bed. “Kidwell’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. Did you ever hear of it inside Homeland?”

Pilgrim eased himself into a new position on the bed, trying to get comfortable. “No. But I don’t much pay attention to bureaucracies. They’re poison.”

He put the wine cup down; exhaustion filled his face.

“Kidwell’s team could be as dirty as yours,” Ben said. “He sure wasn’t about to give me due process.”

“The only way we get free and clear of this mess,” he said, “is to expose whoever took Teach. They framed us. We get caught, we have no means of nailing whoever hired Adam.”

Ben got up, began to pace, to think.

“I need to sleep now.” Pilgrim closed his eyes, exhaustion gripping him. “We’ll get to Dallas in the morning.”

“One minute. Who would attack the Cellar?”

“Any number of enemies. Terrorists, for sure. I’m sure that certain foreign governments would be glad for the Cellar to shut up shop. They might suspect we exist but they can’t prove it. Fewer than five people outside of the Cellar even know we exist.”

“And now me.”

Pilgrim nodded, his eyes closed. “And now you. Lucky you.”

Ben watched him fall asleep over the next several minutes. If he ran now-abandoned Pilgrim-he might very well be walking straight into a bullet’s path. Whoever had attacked the Cellar had used his name. Pilgrim was right; it couldn’t be coincidence. It was safer, for now, to stay close to Pilgrim. See what he could find out, because he could find out nothing from a jail cell or a Homeland Security interrogation room.

He wondered if Vochek was still locked in the closet.

Ben lay down, pressed his face into his pillow. He felt like he’d fallen into an alternate world, a Wonderland gone dark, where a crazy guy used his name and police hunted for him and vicious men held guns to his head. This morning he had woken up on a low-key vacation; now his life was in tatters.

Don’t kid yourself. Your life has been in tatters since Emily died.

He couldn’t sleep and he sat up and turned on CNN. And saw his name, his face on the television. His driver’s license picture. The anchor described Ben as a person of interest-public-relations-speak for suspect. Homeland Security wanted to know his connection to a purported contract killer with ties to terrorist cells who had been found dead in Austin after shooting a victim who also had connections to Forsberg. The anchor announced Ben had escaped from Homeland custody in a shoot-out in which a respected, decorated Homeland agent died. Anyone with information on Forsberg or his whereabouts was asked to call a special number at Homeland Security.

He had barely managed to rebuild after Emily died; he had survived the stares, the whispers, but never the guilt: the pointless guilt of taking her to Maui for the honeymoon, the endless guilt of being alive when she was dead. Now something far more poisonous than guilt-suspicion. His wife had been murdered and his name was tied to a contract killer. He wasn’t going to get a second chance, in the judicial system or the court of public opinion, unless his name was absolutely cleared.

Escaped from custody. He heard the anchor’s words echo in his head. Ben touched his own face on the television screen. He was now a hunted man.