Collision

4

Teach put a motherly hand on the big man’s shoulder, ran her other one across his burr of hair. “You literally dodged a bullet.” The relief in her face was vivid. “Pilgrim.” Teach leaned close to him. It wasn’t his real name but it was the name she had used for the long, dark ten years of working together, so it was as real as anything else in his jigsaw life.

Pilgrim nodded. “I must have moved just enough as he fired and it saved me. I felt the shot pass by my head. I hit the floor and the sniper thought he’d taken me.” Pilgrim stepped past Teach into the den in the rental house, which stood on a quiet bend of Lake Travis, near Austin. Teach and her assistant Barker had already started tearing down the scant equipment in the safe house: erasing the laptop’s drive, looping cables. They always packed lightly so they could vanish quickly. She told Barker to finish loading up the cars.

Pilgrim sat at the table, rubbed the back of his head as though the bullet had left a trail in his hair. “I should have just kidnapped Adam, forced him to tell us how he found us, who he worked for.” He shook his head. “I don’t like losing, Teach.”

“We couldn’t tip our hand early that we were watching him. You made the only approach possible.”

“Whoever he works for didn’t want him talking.”

“You should have brought him back here.” This from Barker, stepping back inside the house to pick up a box containing eavesdropping equipment. Pilgrim wondered if the kid had wiped the milk off his lip. He couldn’t be more than twenty-three or so, bespectacled and thin. He had more opinions than experience.

Pilgrim ignored him. “Adam thought I was a terrorist. God only knows what he told Homeland.”

“I’ll derail that with a few phone calls.” Teach’s face was normally florid, a little plump, but now her skin was pale and her mouth a thin slash of worry. She was in her fifties, slightly built, bookish, with a polished Southern accent. “This sniper-”

Pilgrim said, “I recognized his face. Nicky Lynch. Rumor was he killed two CIA officers three years ago in Istanbul.”

“I remember,” Teach said. She stood next to him, inspected his head as a mother might a scrape. He shrugged her off. “Hon, give me info on his car.”

Pilgrim described the car, gave her the license number. “I’m sure it was a rental, paid for under a false name. Or stolen for the job.”

“Barker, track the plate when we get out of here.” She nodded at Barker, still standing in the corner. “Let’s get the bags in the car, hon. We’re heading back to New York.”

Barker nodded. He paused at the door. “I’m glad you’re okay, Pilgrim.”

“Thanks.”

Teach waited for Barker to step outside and closed the door behind him. “You nearly get shot and you don’t call me immediately?”

“I’m having a really unpleasant idea. Only you and me and Barker knew about the operation. And foreign gunmen don’t just show up in a place like Austin. Someone had advance word of our operation.”

“Barker’s clean.” Teach went to the window as if to regard Barker afresh as he loaded the car. “Did Reynolds give you any information before he died as to how he found us?”

“No.” He went into the bedroom he’d used, started packing a few essentials into his bag.

Teach rubbed her temples. “Whoever Adam Reynolds was working for has obliterated his tracks. Barker’s found nothing unusual in Reynolds’s life: no unexplained money, no accounts, no suspicious e-mails or phone calls, nothing. Which scares me. We’re talking very smart, very dangerous people.”

“Clearly. They killed their own boy genius for talking to me.”

“It narrows the suspects.” She shrugged. “Terrorist organizations. Organized crime. Drug cartels. Foreign intelligence services.” She offered a wan smile. “No shortage of people who hate us, hon.”

Pilgrim went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face. A ghostly heat tingled in his hair, left over from the bullet, as though its close path had singed his scalp. Just imagination, he told himself, and he stuck his fingers under the cool jet of water. He didn’t want Teach to see his hands shake. It was strange to think how close he had come to his brains painting the walls and the desk and the surprised face of Adam Reynolds. The poor dumb brainiac.

Pilgrim dried his face. “Reynolds. All he wanted to do was good.”

“Exposing us is not in the national interest,” she said. “It’s necessary for our work that we remain unknown.”

Pilgrim shook his head. “I’m tired of what’s necessary. Necessary sucks. I want to do what’s decent.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. “Pilgrim, you do. Every day. You’re tired and rattled. You’ll feel better when we’re back home. We’ll regroup, plan our next move.”

“Screw the next move. Suppose there’s evidence in his office about the Cellar. Something I didn’t find. What do we do? Hide? Take up new names and new lives, again?”

“You knew what our work was when you signed up. You knew it entailed sacrifice…”

“Don’t lecture me about sacrifice. Sacrifice implies a choice.”

“You had a choice today.” Teach crossed her arms. “You should have let Nicky Lynch believe he succeeded. Track him and see who the hell hired him. Instead you pull brainless macho crap. You probably liked him realizing he’d missed.”

“Yes. I’ll long treasure the surprise on his face before I blew him away.”

“Lose the sarcasm. You didn’t analyze the situation and I want to know why.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “I didn’t think because-I don’t want to do this work anymore.” The realization was clear in his head, unexpected but sharp.

She came to him and touched his arm, and it made Pilgrim remember the old days, when she first found him, offered him a choice better than a lifetime in a dank hellhole of a prison that smelled of ancient stone, tears, and blood. “You’re just shaken-”

Pilgrim shrugged off her hand. “I’m done. Adam Reynolds found me, when no one else ever has. He knew the aliases I used on the jobs in India and Canada and Syria. He could have plastered the news channels about us. We can’t hide anymore.”

“Wrong. We simply find out how he found us.”

“I don’t want to work for the Cellar anymore. I want a normal life.”

Her frown deepened. “Stop this nonsense. You’re not resigning, Pilgrim.” Teach was like a mother who didn’t hear what she didn’t want to hear, he thought. “We’re dead if our aliases can be exposed. I know you well enough that you won’t walk away from us while we’re under attack.” She picked up her phone, started punching in a number.

He heard his own words again: I want a normal life. He touched his pocket; the notebook was there, where he always kept it. He wanted to go to the lake’s shore, sharpen a pencil, draw the face as he remembered it, as he dreamed about it. But not now.

Pilgrim clicked on the television, surfed to a news channel. CNN showed an aerial shot of a downtown Austin building, police securing the scene. The reporter said one man was confirmed dead in a sniper shooting and another death in a nearby parking garage might be related. No mention yet that the dead guy in the garage was a known assassin. No release of Reynolds’s name yet, it was too early. The talking heads droned on, the reporter on the scene parceling atoms of worthless data and trying to make her words meaty and relevant.

Teach got off the phone. “We’ve got seats on the evening flight to LaGuardia.”

Pilgrim made a walking-away gesture with his fingers. “Have a good trip.”

“You can’t resign…”

Barker stepped into the bedroom doorway. He straightened his glasses. “Good Lord. Are you quitting?”

“False alarm. It’s the shock of nearly getting shot,” Teach said.

“Your timing sucks.” A strange smile touched Barker’s face.

“That’s what I said, he can’t leave us now…” Teach started. She turned to Barker and she stopped. Her body blocked Pilgrim’s view of the young man and he stood.

Barker held a Glock 9-millimeter. Aimed at them.

Pilgrim felt disjointed, still blinking from the surprise of surviving a sniping, and the slight, bespectacled Barker reminded him of poor, foolish Adam Reynolds and he thought: nerds with guns. Then his survival instinct kicked in, an engine in his chest, and he calculated-eight feet to reach Barker, with Teach between them. He couldn’t get to Barker before Barker shot Teach.

“This is disappointing,” Teach said.

“I apologize,” Barker said. “Nothing personal.”

Pilgrim was silent. Barker was stupid, tipping his hand early. Therefore he would do something else stupid. Pilgrim put the worn, tired look back on his face, one that would make Barker smug.

Teach kept her voice calm, but Pilgrim, behind her, could see a shift in her stance, a balancing to shift her weight forward.

Pilgrim said, “You work for the same boss as Adam Reynolds.”

“Wow. Give me a moment to deal with the staggering awe I feel at your mental prowess.” The gun gave Barker a sense of power, shining in his cocky smile. “Retirement is definitely in your future.” Barker kept the gun locked on Pilgrim.

“Put the gun down. I’ll pay you better than whoever you’re working for,” Teach said.

“Shut your mouth,” he said with an eye roll.

Pilgrim said, “Why are you waiting?” because there was no good reason for the kid not to shoot them both. He risked a step to the left. Teach stayed still. “I’m unarmed and I still make you nervous.”

“Consider it your last compliment,” Barker said.

Footsteps approached, boots crunching into pebbles. Teach had chosen a rental house with a gravel driveway-the stones announced feet or tires with a growl.

“They want Teach alive,” Barker said. “So cooperate and she doesn’t get hurt.”

Too much information, Pilgrim thought. “What about me?” he asked.

“You’re dead,” Barker said and Teach rushed him, drawing the gun’s aim. Barker hesitated for a fraction of a second, not wanting to shoot her, obeying his orders. Teach rammed into Barker, catching him in the door frame. Pilgrim seized the gun from Barker’s hand in a swift downward wrench that broke Barker’s wrist with a sickening crack.

Barker screamed and dropped to his knees.

Teach took the gun from Pilgrim and moved into the den. Their guns were gone, hidden by Barker. She locked the back door. “Three more guns, upstairs closet,” Teach said.

Pilgrim ran up the stairs. In a closet, he found two semiautomatic pistols and a rifle. A crash boomed downstairs, glass breaking, a door being knocked loose from its frame. He grabbed the rifle and barreled a third of the way down the stairs. He saw chaos.

Barker still lay splayed on the floor, face contorted in pain.

Teach squeezed off a shot at the first man through the door but missed by a fraction of an inch. Before she could fire again, a dark-haired bruiser of a thug struck her in the arm with the butt of his rifle. She lost the gun and he grabbed Teach as she staggered backward, then shoved her out the door, following her.

Two other men covered the room with semis. Pilgrim raised the rifle, tried to angle the awkward shot past the railing.

Barker screamed, “On the stairs!”

The men spun the guns toward him and opened fire.

The railing splintered around Pilgrim as he retreated upstairs. Blood wet his temple, cut by the flying debris. He reached the second floor, covered the stairs with the rifle, and backed up next to the window. He peered through the glass.

As he dragged her across the yard, Teach struggled against her captor, hitting a well-placed blow to his throat. But he had a hundred pounds and twenty fewer years on her, and with a jackhammer backhand he knocked her into the scrub. She fell like a stringless puppet to the rain-wet lawn.

Silence below. Not a cry from Barker, no feet slamming on the stairs. The men in the house were waiting him out.

Pilgrim watched the bruiser throw an unconscious Teach over his shoulder and start a hard run toward the oak thickets behind the house.

Pilgrim shattered the window with the rifle butt, took careful aim, and fired. The bruiser jerked and fell, he and Teach crashing to the grass. Pilgrim knew he should turn his eyes back to the staircase, to the immediate threat in the house, but he kept his gaze locked on Teach.

He heard an angry bellow from downstairs.

Get up. Run, he willed her.

She didn’t move. Jesus, maybe he’d hit her. The idea iced his heart. He didn’t see blood on her, but the way she lay slumped, blocked by the bruiser, he couldn’t see her clearly.

He heard a barked, angry half curse, half command. “You can hold a gun in one hand, can’t you, idiot?”-in rapid, heavily accented English, the leader must be talking to Barker-then “Position yourselves, wait for the dog to panic.” Spoken in Arabic. First an ex-IRA sniper and now these assholes. It was an international gathering to kill him. He swallowed past the thick dryness in his mouth and a peculiar serenity filled him and he thought: You guys made a really long trip to die.

He glanced around the room. The only furnishings were a table and an office chair, not much for cover.

He calculated how long it would take him to get down the stairs if both men turned away from the stairwell, toward the window. Not long enough, not running. He moved to the lip of the floor, checked the stairs. Empty. That meant Barker and the two gunmen were taking cover, waiting for him to expose himself on the trapped boundary of the stairs, where his options were limited. They, on the other hand, had an entire room in which to move and catch him in their cross fire.

He returned to the window and saw Teach’s chest rise in a hitch of breathing. She was okay, just out. But two men emerged from the dense grove of oaks and ran toward her. If he fired at them, the three men waiting below would know he was aiming out the window, busy with multiple targets, not at the stairs. In moments the trio would rush upstairs and obliterate him with the semis.

Stalemate.

One of the men, with hair dyed blond and waxed into spikes, threw Teach, still unconscious, over his shoulder. He raised high a pistol, nestled the barrel against her head, where twigs tangled in her graying hair. Pilgrim understood. Fire at us, she dies. The man turned and ran awkwardly, Teach bouncing on his shoulder. The second man, wearing gaudy wraparound sunglasses, covered their retreat into the woods. They left the dead bruiser in the grass.

He needed a distraction. Nothing at hand but the table, the chair

… He noticed the chair had wheels on its bottom. He readied his pistols, left the rifle on the floor.

The hardwood floor was a minefield, and one wrong creak would tip the gunmen to his position. He slowly opened the window over the porch roof, directly above where the gunmen had entered. He fed the chair through the window, carefully, and propped it on the windowsill, half-in and half-out, the wheels positioned against the lip of the frame. He picked up the Glocks and slid quiet as a cat across the hardwood to the head of the stairs.

The gunmen and Barker still weren’t standing on the stairs waiting for him. Cowards, he thought.

Pilgrim held the two Glocks, lifted one, aimed, and fired.

The bullet smacked into the chair’s back. The force propelled the barely balanced wheeled chair out the window. It made a rattling descent down the shingled, sloping porch roof. The noise was huge. He heard a downstairs yell, imagined the gunmen turning toward the window, believing he scrabbled across the shingles in a desperate escape attempt.

Pilgrim threw himself down the stairs, his hair brushing the ceiling, ignoring the coming agony of impact. In the flash of the fall he saw a skinny gunman at the window, whirling back toward him with surprise as the chair bounced on the lawn. Barker huddled at the window, cupping his damaged wrist. A second gunman crouched with his semi at the ready, but aimed at the stairs themselves, a foot or two lower than Pilgrim’s falling path. The second gunman fired and the edge of the stairs erupted into splinters.

Pilgrim fired three times with the two guns in the scant seconds before he crashed into the floor. The first bullet caught the skinny gunman in the face, the second pierced Barker’s forehead, the last winged the second gunman in the leg. Pilgrim hit the floor, his left shoulder taking the brunt, debris flying around him.

The second gunman, pain twisting his face, stumbled and tried to aim again.

Pilgrim ignored the agony and fired, catching the gunman in the throat. He jerked backward, and his last spray of bullets dotted the wall above Pilgrim. The gunman collapsed.

Pilgrim’s whole body hurt. Get up, they’re kidnapping her, get up. He had just taken a full-story jump to a tile floor. His left arm raged in pain, but a good shake told him it wasn’t broken. He staggered to his feet, testing the weight. The skinny gunman and Barker were dead; the other gunman still breathed, gurgled, stared up at him with confused eyes.

Pilgrim reeled out of the house. He loped along the path the kidnappers had taken into the dense growth of oaks and cedar. How much time since they took her? A minute? Two? He heard a car start, tires tickle gravel, an engine accelerate. He couldn’t see the car. He lurched onto a back road and saw a silver van blast from the roadside.

He ran back to the house.

He aimed his gun at the dying gunman. “Where do they take her?” he asked in Arabic.

The dying man spat saliva and blood at him.

“I’ll get you to a doctor-you can live. See your family again. Where do they take her?”

The man’s eyes went sightless.

Pilgrim frantically searched the body. Just a matchbook and a crushed pack of American cigarettes. The matchbook was silver and red, with the words Blarney’s Steakhouse in silver print, with an address in Frisco, Texas, and a phone number. Frisco, he remembered, was north of Dallas, a fast-growing suburb.

He hurried over to Barker’s body. Stupid, stupid kid; but he wished he hadn’t killed him in the flurry of shots. Barker could have answered all his questions. But you couldn’t always shoot to wound. He found a cell phone and wallet with driver’s license in Barker’s pocket and he took both-maybe he could crack open a trail to whoever had induced Barker to turn traitor. He found nothing on the skinny gunman except a wallet containing a well-handled picture of an equally skinny woman and two small skinny children, shy smiles on their faces. He dropped the picture on the floor, nausea braiding his stomach.

You really shouldn’t have a family in this business.

Pilgrim ran. He would clean up the mess later, if he lived, but if Teach was gone the Cellar was gone as well, so what did it matter what the police found? Dead men in an empty, rented-for-cash dump of a lakeside house, a laptop wiped clean, guns, no explanations, no clues.

He dragged himself to his car and roared down the driveway.

Only one road threaded through the lakeside neighborhood. Lake Travis was a sprawling stretch of water a stone’s throw from Austin, its edges lined with homes, condos, and marinas. This neighborhood was fairly quiet; several of the homes were rentals that weren’t always occupied during the week. The car had four minutes on him, maybe. He nearly careened through a stop sign that fed onto Highway 620, a major, curving road that connected the northwest and the southwest edges of the city.

Which way had the kidnappers gone?

To his right, toward the bottom of a curve, a red light caught several cars. One was a silver van.

A horrible, treacherous thought occurred to him. He wanted to resign. He could just turn left, drive the opposite direction. Fewer retirement opportunities were more decisive and clear. Have a normal life, a life outside the shadow, a life in sunlight. With no one shooting at his head.

He could almost taste the beer. He had not been drunk in ten years, not out of a dedication to sobriety but because drunk meant slow and he could never afford to be slow, to be anything but constantly aware of every movement around him. No more. He would go to the airport, toss his guns in the trash, buy a ticket, pick the furthest destination from the Austin airport, get drunk on the miniature vodkas they served on the plane.

Maybe he could even try to have his old life back. No. He dismissed the thought as soon it came to him. That was an impossibility.

So just turn left. Drive away. This whole job was a trap, a trap to draw you and Teach out of the shadows. It freaking worked. They got her. So get out. Now. He had made enough sacrifices.

The light flashed green. The silver van rumbled into motion.

He remembered the first time he saw Teach. He lay on a cold stone floor in Indonesia, cursing at the stupidity of his mistake, his ineptness at getting caught. He’d been beaten with rubber batons, off and on, for a week. He’d glanced up and she stood at the bars. He first thought: Why has a librarian come to see me? The guard opened the cell door for her and then, greased with money, he walked away. She stepped inside the cell and inspected it with a frown. She knelt by him and said: “Listen. You say yes or no, nothing more, when I’m done. To the CIA, you’re nothing; they aren’t ever going to acknowledge you exist. I was in the same mess myself once that you are. I was in a prison in Moldova. The food appears to be halfway edible here. Lucky you.”

He tried to speak but his mouth wouldn’t work. She said, “You can either stay in prison or you can work for me. Hardest work you’ll ever do. Probably will get you killed. But it’s all for good. The most difficult good we can do. But everything about you must change. Nothing of the man you were will remain.”

He held his breath. It was a hallucination, an offer out of here. It couldn’t be. She reached and touched his face so he would know she was real.

She waited to see if he understood what her offer meant, the price he’d pay.

“Or you can stay who you are and enjoy this lovely cell for the rest of your life. Yes or no.”

He watched her for ten silent seconds. Decision of a lifetime. He decided to believe her and whispered, “Yes.”

“Then I’ll have to get you out of here,” she said. “Be patient. I’ll come see you tomorrow. I’ll have to negotiate a number of bribes. And we’ll have to fake your death.” She made this outrageous statement as though it were simply the final humdrum errand on a long list. To his surprise, she brushed the matted, dirty hair from his eyes, a caress that was kind and gentle. She got up and left the cell and vanished down the dank stone corridor and he blinked, as though she had been a dream.

But everything she promised, she did.

Shame at his doubt turned his stomach. Necessary, she’d said. You always did what was necessary.

Another decision of a lifetime to make, he thought, right now.

Ten seconds later Pilgrim turned right, easing eight cars behind the kidnappers’ van as it rumbled toward Austin.