Collision

34

The safe house featured a porch camera, and after the doorbell rang, Vochek frowned at the face on the screen. She held a gun in her hand as she opened the door.

Ben raised his hands and said, “I’m unarmed.”

Vochek gestured him inside and said, “Where’s Randall Choate?”

Ben shrugged and stepped inside. They heard a stifled cry and the sound of weight hitting the floor. “We mean you no harm but he wants to talk to you alone.”

She hurried to the kitchen. The Homeland pilot who had been assigned to the safe house lay unconscious on the floor. Pilgrim craned his neck into the refrigerator. He found a Coke and popped the tab. On the stove tomato soup bubbled; ham sandwiches lay half-assembled on a cutting block. Pilgrim killed the heat under the soup.

“Messy boil-over,” he said.

She aimed her gun. “On the floor. You just assaulted a federal officer.” “You all think a great deal of yourselves,” Pilgrim said. “If he’s such a federal bad-ass I shouldn’t be able to take him down with two love taps. Kindly point your firepower elsewhere. You wanted to talk, well, here I am. We’re even on your turf.”

“Get your ass on the ground!” she yelled.

“By the end of tonight either your career will be in the toilet or you’ll be running Strategic Initiatives. Your call.”

She kept the gun aimed on him.

“Please listen to him,” Ben said. “We’re on your side. We have the information you need to do your job and we’re willing to share it. But you have to help us in return. You already know Pilgrim is good at vanishing. Don’t test him.”

“He told me you were innocent.” She didn’t move her focus from Pilgrim. “But I’m not sure I should believe someone who’s been lying about being dead for ten years.”

“Sam Hector is the reason Pilgrim had to vanish. Interested yet?” Ben said.

After several more seconds, she lowered the gun. She knelt by the unconscious pilot, checked his pulse, ran a hand over his head.

“He’ll have a headache, nothing more, he’s out for another hour or so,” Pilgrim said. “Here, we’ll put him on the couch.” He and Ben carried the pilot into the den, set him on the cushions, propped a pillow under his head. Ben waited for Vochek to go back to the kitchen; he dug in the pilot’s pocket, removed the man’s cell phone, stuck it in his own pocket as he returned to the kitchen.

“Talk.” She stood again.

Pilgrim poked a spoon in the tomato soup, made a face. “I’ll tell you every dirty job I’ve done in the past ten years. Every job I know the Cellar’s done.”

“The Cellar.”

“That’s the code name of the group of CIA misfits and outcasts you’ve been chasing.”

“The Cellar.” She sounded slightly dazed, as though she’d just woken from a dream. Ben guessed she hadn’t even known the name of the group she’d been hunting. “Okay. I spoke with my boss and I’m authorized to deal with you if you’re willing to surrender.”

Pilgrim frowned at the word surrender, as though it carried an unpleasant odor. “Fine. First, Ben gets granted total immunity. He’s innocent.”

“Okay, I’ll do my best.”

“Your best will be outstanding, Agent Vochek, or I will shut up tighter than a miser’s fist.” Pilgrim gave her a condensed version of the past days, with special details about their escape from the Homeland office in Austin. Ben noticed Pilgrim left out one critical bit of information-the name of the hotel in New Orleans that Barker had phoned. He figured that Pilgrim thought it best to have a card to play in future negotiations, so he said nothing.

Vochek did not interrupt or ask questions-she frowned, shook her head a few times.

Finally she said: “You can confirm Sam Hector was a CIA assassin known as the Dragon?”

“It will be my word against his, unless the CIA opens up about him.”

“The CIA will face enormous political pressure to keep their mouths shut about Hector. He’s made a lot of powerful friends,” Ben said. “But that’s not our first worry. Our first worry is New Orleans.”

“I still don’t understand what the threat is.”

Pilgrim leaned against the counter, took a long drink of soda. “He’s hijacked the Cellar to do a dirty job. Work he couldn’t use his regular security contractors to do, either because they lack the training or because they’re decent guys and they would balk or ask too many questions. The Cellar agents believe that they’re taking orders from Teach. But we don’t know what the job is. I’m just going to bet it’s huge, because he’s taken huge risks to make it happen.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll help you stop the Cellar from executing the job.”

“That means you stay free for now,” she said slowly.

Ben said, “But we stick with you. And we need your plane.”

“Plane.” She blinked once, as though she’d seen his lips move but no word reached her ear.

“This house sits on a runway,” Ben said.

“Useless now,” she said. “You knocked out the pilot.”

“I can pilot,” Pilgrim said. “We leave immediately. Before this guy wakes up.”

“Just go to New Orleans?” She shook her head. “No. We need to call the CIA, call Homeland…”

Ben shook his head. “Hector’s a contractor. He does this for money. Your secret office at Homeland paid him to find the Cellar. He did that but he didn’t share the information with you, did he?”

“No. If he has… my boss hasn’t told me.”

“But now he’s gone beyond that job, he’s taking the Cellar over, taking control of its missions. He has control of a team of highly trained agents who think they’re doing good by doing what they’re told. And if he’s seized control of the Cellar, it’s possible”-and he paused to let the words penetrate-“another client has paid him to. Not your boss. Someone else has bought their own private CIA.”

The words hung between them like a curse.

“And he has bought it by killing my friend and mentor,” Pilgrim said. “He killed Ben’s wife. He’s going to die. Not pay. Die.”

Vochek’s face paled in the flicker of the kitchen fluorescents. Ben reached out and gently touched her arm. “Hector just decided to use me and Pilgrim because he needed to eliminate Pilgrim-who knew him from his assassin days-and me because I would be an easy frame to be tied to a hired killer because of how my wife died. He kills Adam and Pilgrim, and because Pilgrim’s been working with Adam using my name, I then look like I’m connected to them both. It would come out after he was dead that Pilgrim was an ex-CIA assassin; Hector would have made sure that information leaked. Then I take the fall for my wife’s death-and maybe for Adam and Pilgrim’s deaths. His plan got an unexpected boost when Pilgrim left my business card on the sniper’s body.”

“I still don’t understand why he targeted you, Ben, if you were his friend.”

“Two birds, one stone. The frame gives a solution to my wife’s murder,” Ben said, “and he must have wanted me out of the way as he was taking over the Cellar, because I know his business so well.”

“And we’ve given him business.” Vochek closed her eyes for a moment. “My boss is Hector’s client. Margaret Pritchard. She’s been running interference for Hector all week.”

“Then we can’t trust her,” Pilgrim said. “You can’t trust her, either.”

“I can’t just let you take a Homeland plane and go to New Orleans.”

“Agent Vochek,” Pilgrim said. “You want our cooperation, that’s what we’ve got to do. Decide. Or we’ll decide for you, with all due respect.”