Collision

26

Pilgrim pulled the stolen Volvo, now on its third set of license plates, into the parking lot of the apartment complex in east Dallas. In the backseat were two sacks of groceries. Food and sleep sounded like heaven.

He got out of the car. He had been careful in approaching the lot, trying to make sure he wasn’t being followed, making sure no hunter lurked in a car. No one in the Cellar knew about the apartment, the same as no one knew about the storage unit he’d loaded with guns and cash. It was his escape hatch, his hideaway. He spent most of his time in the wonderful constant anonymity of New York City, but this dump was his secret base for any job that brought him to the Southwest or Mexico or beyond. He paid for the apartment once a year, sent cash for the utilities. The complex was seedy and the landlord was only too happy to have a unit that he didn’t need to worry about dunning for rent.

He had not been here in months. Another large apartment complex next door had been razed, a bigger shopping center rising in its wake, just the shell of the building-steel beams and concrete floors-in place so far.

Pilgrim headed up the stairs. Sitting in front of his door was Ben. He held a gun between his raised knees, loosely, not aimed at Pilgrim. On his wrist Pilgrim could see the remnant of the plastic cuff. He was pale, shivering in pain, and Pilgrim saw dried blood on his hand. He could probably take him in three steps, knock the gun from his hand. But he wanted to hear what Ben had to say.

“Hello,” Pilgrim said. “I’m really surprised.”

“I’ll take that as an insult.”

Pilgrim shifted the bags in his grip.

“I do what I put my mind to,” Ben said.

“You didn’t bring the police with you.”

“Are you scared that I’m here?” A challenge rose in his voice.

“Scared. Of you.” Pilgrim set down the grocery bags. “How did you find me, Ben?”

“I got shot in the arm. You patch me up and I’ll tell you how I found you. And I’ll tell you exactly how Adam found you.”

“I’m suspicious you would trust me again.”

“I don’t trust you for a second. You screw me over, you screw yourself over.” A hard edge touched Ben’s gaze. “When Emily died, I was so frozen… it took me two minutes to call the police. Because her being dead couldn’t be true. I refused to see what was right before my eyes.”

“It’s called shock.”

“It’s called how I live. I saw a woman-completely innocent-die today. I can’t see that again, not after my wife. I can’t keep running. I want to take the fight back to these people. Whatever it takes.”

Pilgrim picked up the bags. “Come in and let’s get you cleaned up.”

Pilgrim disinfected and bandaged Ben’s arm as Ben gritted his teeth. “An expert shot Jackie made, to wound you.”

“Don’t compliment him.” Ben dry-swallowed four ibuprofen tablets. He sat still and then started to shake, the adrenaline easing out of him.

“So, Sherlock. How did you find me?”

“Bugs you, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t like security holes.”

“Your storage unit-slash-army depot. I figured if you had a storage unit near a major airport hub, you might also have an apartment close by. In case you needed to hide before you got on a plane, or you wanted to vanish for a few days without having to travel. It made sense to be close to your resources, as you call them. You didn’t want me to know about any residence you had since you were planning to dump me as soon as you were recovered enough from your injuries. So I went back to the storage facility office and they remembered I’d been there this morning, moving out boxes with you. I was asking about renting a unit myself, prices and such, and the very nice clerk was looking up units on their system to see what was available. She got a phone call, and when she turned to take it, I snuck a peek at their computer screen and typed in your unit number. It gave this address.”

“You’re lucky they didn’t recognize you from TV.”

“I wore a cap and I talked in a thick fake Boston accent. I didn’t even use the Sneeze and Hide.”

Pilgrim went into the narrow, compact kitchen. “Tell me how Adam found the Cellar.”

“No,” Ben said. “First you tell me what you found at Barker’s.”

“Ben, in your case, ignorance truly is bliss.”

“Wrong. Because if I know too much, you can’t abandon me again. Which means you’d have to kill me, and you won’t.”

“I killed seven people yesterday. I killed two more today. You’d make it an even number.” But he gave a crooked smile.

Ben pulled the small black sketchbook from his pocket. He tossed it to Pilgrim, who caught it one-handed and tucked it close to his chest. He then slid the sketchbook into his pocket.

“Thanks.” He turned back to the counter, started emptying the grocery sacks, heating the oven for frozen pizzas.

“You didn’t realize you’d lost your sketches.”

“I hope you like pepperoni.” Pilgrim checked the oven setting he’d fiddled with twenty seconds earlier.

“You dropped it when we fought in the bathroom.”

“I said thank you.”

“Who’s the kid in the drawings?” Ben asked.

Pilgrim slid two frozen pizzas into the oven.

“I know what it is to lose someone, Pilgrim. My wife was funny, and sharp-tongued, and brilliant, and loving, and hardworking. She drove me crazy, both good and bad. I’ve never been the same since she died. Not for a second.”

“Don’t give me that ‘she completed you’ shit.” Pilgrim slammed the oven door shut.

“Completed me? No. She would have laughed at sentimentality. But she made me a better man, in every way. And when she died… I can’t be better again. I don’t even know how to start. No one can fix it; I have to figure it out on my own.”

Pilgrim stood away from the oven; for a moment he thought of a little girl’s voice on a tinny cell phone call in a Jakarta bank, urging him home for her birthday. “You said you knew how Adam found the Cellar.”

“I said you first.”

Pilgrim told him about the attack at Barker’s house; that his own colleagues were now hunting him. He described Teach’s kidnapper, using the vague terms that De La Pena had provided. That Teach was being held in a house but that he did not know where the house was. That Barker had last called a hotel in New Orleans. “I spent this afternoon trying to track De La Pena and Green back to where they came from. There wasn’t a GPS in their rental car I could use to see where they’d come from. The rental car was in Green’s name, paid for by Sparta-”

“Your front company.”

“Yes. So it was paid for with Cellar funds. I made no headway. Does his description of the guy who’s giving Teach orders sound familiar?”

“He sounds like any number of guys who might be in this line of work,” Ben said slowly. The man did sound vaguely like Sam Hector-but fit older men would be a description for practically every suspect with a military background.

Pilgrim shrugged. “De La Pena was desperate not to betray the guy, which tells me he had major motive to behave, either through reward or threat. I’m not sure I can trust anything De La Pena told me. Tell me what you learned.”

Ben told him how he escaped from the hotel, stole the Explorer, made it to Delia’s house, and about his desperate flight through and from the mall in Frisco. Pilgrim listened, chin on steepled fingertips.

“You’re lucky to be alive.” Pilgrim got up, pulled the cooked pepperoni pizzas from the oven, put them on plates and sliced them. “Considering you made about a dozen stupid mistakes.”

“I missed a chance to kill him.”

“You didn’t give him an equal chance to kill you. Sometimes the smartest move in a fight is to retreat.” A look crossed his face, regret of the bone-deep sort, and he turned away from Ben. “You’re alive to fight tomorrow, and it sounds like he came out of it far worse than you did.”

“Now what?”

“There is no what. Ben, do yourself a favor. Turn yourself in to the police. I know you think I’m a bastard, but leaving you in the hotel was a way to keep you safe.”

“No.” He stood and got their drinks, took his plate of pizza. His arm ached but the nausea had passed and now his stomach rumbled and clenched, a raw pang of hunger. “Discussion over.”

Pilgrim started wolfing his food down. “Fine. We stick together, then.” It was such a simple assertion that Ben knew Pilgrim would not go back on his word this time.

“Barker called New Orleans,” Ben said. “Delia Moon mentioned New Orleans, said Adam wouldn’t go anywhere near New Orleans right now. And he told Kidwell when he called him that there was a major threat brewing. Those two statements have to be connected.”

“There are lots of government contractors in New Orleans. Lots of fat deals.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “FEMA contractors, hundreds of them. Companies with contracts to rebuild and for relief efforts. For a while there were a large number of private security contractors to maintain order in the city right after the hurricane, but not so many now, and they are mostly tied to private businesses.”

“We have three contractors connected to this case-Adam and Hector. And you. It’s not coincidence. You said Delia calls Sam Hector. And a killer then shows up at her door.”

“We still have no connection between Sam and Jackie. He was putting his business before our friendship today, but I can’t believe he’d be involved in murder.”

“You can’t or you won’t. Sam Hector is your blind spot, Ben.”

“Let’s consider this from another angle. This software Adam was building. To unearth and connect illicit activities across databases. He needed funding presumably to have time to write a massive amount of code or to hire out parts of the work. It’s stuff the government would love to have.”

“True.”

“And let’s say Adam was originally not working for the government, but was working for Bad Guys who want to find and destroy the Cellar. But if you want to kill a group of people-especially a group of skilled operatives like the Cellar-you don’t let them wander freely. You kill them dead before they can kill you.” He paused, let the words sink in. “So if said Bad Guys found Green and De La Pena, why not simply kill them? What’s the purpose of finding the Cellar if you don’t destroy it?”

Pilgrim said, “Exposure.”

“Think corporate. Takeover. You force them to do your bidding.”

Pilgrim stood, fists clenched. “I am so going to end these people.”

“What do you know about this Office of Strategic Initiatives that Vochek and Kidwell work for?”

“Zero.”

“Could Strategic Initiatives simply be trying to take over the Cellar?” Ben crossed his arms. “Remember, a few years back, when the Department of Defense didn’t like the intel it was getting from the CIA, they started forming their own intelligence agency. The Cellar would be a pre-made CIA.”

“And they’re willing to kill their own people like Kidwell and Hector’s guards?”

“They’re willing to hire the Lynch brothers.”

“It’s very dangerous to come after us.”

“Maybe you have an enemy in a high place,” Ben said.

Pilgrim stood. “Let’s see what we can find in Jackie’s Mercedes.”

The Mercedes sat parked a block away, in another apartment lot. The dented door and scraped sides gave it an air of belonging in the neighborhood that otherwise it would have lacked.

They drove the Mercedes back to Pilgrim’s apartment, parked it in a pool of light. Ben opened the glove compartment, began to search the papers stuffed into it. A map of Texas, a map of Dallas, a registration receipt and proof of insurance. “Car owned by McKeen Property Company,” Ben said.

“McKeen. That’s the same company that owned Homeland’s office in Austin.”

They searched the rest of the car but found nothing else, so they went back to the apartment. “We need to find who owns McKeen,” Ben said. “And if we don’t or can’t, then we go to Sam Hector. He provided staff to Kidwell. And he balked at giving me any information on this Office of Strategic Initiatives.”

“Ben, I understand he’s your friend, but his name is cropping up here way too much for me. I don’t know anything about him-”

“He urged me to come see him. Said he’d get me a good lawyer. The best money could buy. But he absolutely refused to tell me who was behind the Office of Strategic Initiatives.”

“So do you trust him?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. A real friend would have told me everything I needed to know. Maybe we never know people as well as we think we do.”

Pilgrim finished his pizza, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “And here you are with me. Instead of your old friend.”

“Because you need help. You can’t stop these people alone. I’m just doing what’s right and necessary. Same as you.”

“It might be necessary, but it’s not right.”

“Are the people you killed bad or not?”

Pilgrim shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you campfire stories.”

“Spare me the gory details.”

Pilgrim sat at the table, drank from his water bottle. “I killed three terrorism financiers in Pakistan. One was a Pakistani government official. So no way our government could own that one. A couple of times I killed people selling secrets to the Chinese.” He took another sip from the bottle. “I killed a British gun runner in Colombia who was trying to cut a deal between UK extremist groups and the Cali narcotics rings for financing, to kill British judges. The guy was supposed to be alone; his girlfriend was with him. I had to kill her, too. A single shot to the heart. She started to scream and never finished it.” His mouth narrowed into a thin line.

“Did she know he was with the extremists?”

“I assume. Her brother was the head of the ring.”

“Then she made her choice in her associates.”

“But I assume. Maybe she was clean, just getting a nice vacation in South America. Maybe she didn’t know her brother and her boyfriend were major assholes.”

“Odds are she did know. People have to bear responsibility for their choices and their actions, Pilgrim.”

“Then I’m doomed.” He looked at Ben. “Ben, you don’t ever get used to it. Ever.”

“But you’re fighting the good fight.”

“So you approve of what I do.”

“I understand the need for it,” Ben said.

“But do you understand the price?” Pilgrim was silent for several seconds. “Once, I made my biggest mistake. I tried to destroy a terror cell in Indonesia. Years ago. I failed miserably. I lost… everything.”

For the first time Ben saw a tremble touch Pilgrim’s hands.

“I guess you don’t want to talk about it,” Ben said.

Pilgrim didn’t answer; Ben heard only the passing of traffic on the nearby road, the soft hiss of the tires on pavement.

“I don’t need a friend, Ben. I just need your help to stop these people.”

“All right.”

“I’m thinking… we’re missing the obvious. Adam is hunting terrorists and the sniper who takes him down has terrorist ties. What if the reason Adam died is because the terrorists found out about what he was doing? Maybe they were watching him and they saw me and they learned what Teach and I are. Maybe this mess is way more about Adam than you and me.”

Ben was silent.

“Terrorists operating on American soil, with serious resources, targeting the people who could expose them or bring them down. This fight could be much more important than getting Teach back, or saving the Cellar, or clearing your name,” Pilgrim said. “Do you understand that?”

Ben nodded. “Maybe he really found terrorists here, and the Arabs in Austin were part of it…”

Pilgrim stood. “We have to find who’s behind this McKeen company.”

“Wait. You said you lost everything. Did you lose the kid in your drawings?”

Pilgrim shuffled feet on the grimy carpet. “Don’t, Ben.”

“Is she your daughter?”

“Please. Do I look like a family man?”

“Not now. Maybe before you were a guy like you.”

“Leave it alone, Ben. You don’t hear me asking you about your wife.” He took a deep breath. “All right, business consultant, what do you need to find out about McKeen as a company?”

“A laptop and an Internet connection.”

Pilgrim pulled a red matchbook from his pocket and tossed it on the table. Ben picked it up. Blarney’s Steakhouse.

“Very popular with the imported gunman crowd,” Pilgrim said. “And look there.” He pointed at a line below the phone number: “FREE WI-FI 24/7.”

“A crowded restaurant? Absolutely not. My face is all over television,” Ben said.

“Not the face I’m going to give you.”

Ben barely recognized himself. He wore a fake dental front to make his teeth seem bigger; and slightly tinted glasses from Pilgrim’s cache of goodies that made his blue eyes appear brown. His blond hair went under a baseball cap.

Blarney’s Steakhouse-the original of the regional chain-sat in the prime corner of a major thoroughfare in Frisco. Behind its giant shamrock sign was a glass building, where the shamrock was reproduced again, albeit smaller. The restaurant, when it had gone chain and started a slow expansion across the South, had needed an actual headquarters and had moved to the building behind it.

Blarney’s had taken everything good about Ireland and made it cheap. Badly produced Irish folk tunes warbled from speakers, the singing muffled so that patrons wouldn’t be distracted by the poetry of the lyrics. The en-trees were given names such as Dubliner Chicken and Leprechaun Lamb Chops and Erin Go Blossom, a huge fried onion appetizer. Walls were covered with obscure faux Irish sporting memorabilia, framed pages from Joyce and Yeats, reproduction street signs from towns all around Ireland.

The large bar (made to resemble an American’s ideal of the interior of an Irish castle) attached to the main restaurant was full of people watching basketball, the Dallas Mavericks rallying from behind, a win nearly in their grasp.

Ben took Pilgrim’s laptop and sat at a corner booth. He felt incredibly nervous about being out in public again-but Pilgrim said, “Hide in plain sight, you’d be surprised how few people notice anything going on around them.” Most of the bar’s patrons seemed entirely focused on their own conversations or on the close game being waged on the hardwood. “Who’s gonna look at you? They got American Idol to watch, and basketball brackets to bet on, and cell phones pressed to their ears.”

Pilgrim ordered martinis made with expensive vodka and two hefty appetizers, to keep the waitress happy, so she wouldn’t care about them staying awhile.

Ben started digging. McKeen’s Web site simply showed a banner apologizing for technical difficulties; the Web site was down. Odd. But perhaps McKeen might be suffering from media shyness after the Austin gun battle on its property. He jumped to a series of business intelligence sites where he maintained subscriptions. It was a risk to enter his password, in case people who knew his habits were hunting for him, but he had to take the chance.

McKeen was privately held, so there was scant financial data to be found other than analyst projections.

The martinis and the badly named Casey quesadillas and the Armagh artichoke dip arrived. Ben drank a hard sip of his martini. Pilgrim ate, watched the data spill across Ben’s screen in silence.

Ben read and clicked through a long march of analyst reports, news releases, and forum discussions on McKeen. Not a lot. McKeen started off as a construction company, divested into retail and office properties about ten years ago, mostly in the South. They started doing specialized construction for the government, restoring facilities in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

“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.