Authors: Jeff Abbott
He saw Jackie’s face, etched with fury, hatred, determination.
Ben wrenched a right into the mall’s road system and Jackie overshot the turn, standing on brakes, then powering the car into reverse on the shoulder. The Explorer limped up an incline and Ben zoomed through a stop sign, drove over a curb divider. He jetted up a parking row for the front entrance. Suddenly a front tire gave, the rim started to work toward the pavement, and he urged another thirty feet out of the crippled car.
He’d have to lose Jackie in the mall. He nosed into a vacant slot and got out of the car, scanning the lot for a sign of Jackie’s Mercedes. He saw Jackie, four rows over. Driving toward the mall entrance. Hunting him.
Ben stayed low to the ground, wrapping the jacket around his bullet wound. Blood dotted his shirt, the top of his pants, but he thought he could hide most of the stains and damage by holding the jacket close to him. He spotted the Mercedes hovering near the entrance, then turning, three rows over. Jackie would spot the shot-out windows of the Explorer within seconds.
Ben ran, bent close to the ground, ignoring the curious stares of shoppers. He reached the end of the row and then bolted across the open pavement toward the entrance. Down the row he saw the battered Mercedes cruise to a stop, Jackie abandoning the car in the middle of the right-of-way.
Ben stumbled inside the mall. The new mall was high-end. Ornately tiled floors, leather chairs and couches artfully arranged so people could relax and sip lattes and wait for shopping relatives in comfort. Friday afternoon had brought a good-sized crowd, mostly teenagers and young mothers.
Ben walked fast, trying not to draw attention to himself. He risked a look back to see if he was leaving a trail of blood. He wasn’t, but he saw Jackie, following with purpose, not running.
And Jackie smiled. The cat closing in on the mouse. Hand in his jacket pocket. That would be where the gun was. Jackie’s gaze locked on Ben’s.
Ben reached an intersection in the promenade, a left and right that each led to an anchor store. Across from him was a home electronics store and suddenly a dozen images of his own face looked back at him from the displayed TVs, tuned to CNN.
He stumbled away, wedged his hand into his hair as though lost in thought, shaded his face with his palm. Think. He realized that he needed a big store, a place with short sight lines where he could lose Jackie. He hurried through the thickening crowds—a pair of jugglers performed in one of the intersections, and people stopped to watch—and veered toward one of the less expensive department stores. He had a sudden hope that the store would be more crowded, both with shoppers and merchandise, than the pricier options. More places to hide.
“Mister, you’re bleeding,” an older woman said to Ben. She carried Pottery Barn and Macy’s bags and she gestured at his bloodied shirt. Then at his face. Her mouth pursed. He gave her a half smile and a nod. He hurried past her.
“Mister? Hey, wait,” the woman called.
She might be grabbing a security guard. Ben risked a backward look. Jackie kept pace, not closing in on him in front of witnesses but keeping a constant distance. He couldn’t see where the woman had gone.
Ben went into the department store, past a young woman handing out perfume samples, past silver-draped tables covered with brightly boxed gifts, past red-inked banners announcing 15 percent discounts. He dodged mothers pushing strollers, couples walking hand-in-hand, a trio of women hunting for the bridal department.
Mistake. Too many people, and if Jackie started shooting . . . Ben got on the escalator. He hurried past the standing riders. He turned, saw Jackie in unhurried pursuit, and he had a horrible sense that the boy would simply pull his gun, fire a head shot at Ben, and take his chances with escaping from the crowd. Second mistake, Ben thought. If he made another error an innocent bystander might get killed, and the thought burnt his chest.
Jackie boarded the escalator behind him.
Ben stepped off and around, taking the next escalator to the third floor, where he booked a hard left through housewares and furniture.
Here the merchandise stood closer together, with false walls creating bedrooms, living rooms, and dens, fewer open lines for Jackie to catch sight of him. A labyrinth of staged décor. Fewer customers; he thought more furniture might move at night or on weekends, families and couples browsing together. But not on a Friday afternoon.
One of the alcoves was a den, done in an Asian motif: a low-standing teak coffee table, a minimalist sofa with red silk pillows, Chinese characters sewn on them in black thread, a jade sculpture, a large vase with cranes and flowers painted on its surface. He grabbed the vase with both hands. His arm cramped in agony. The vase was heavy and reached from his waist to his head.
Ben ducked back against the alcove and waited.
Jackie ran past, intent on catching sight of Ben, and Ben rushed him in six steps, swinging the vase hard as Jackie turned and dipped his hand in his jacket pocket. The vase slammed into Jackie’s face like a ceramic baseball bat, shattering.
Jackie reeled back, and Ben swung at him again with the remnant of the vase, the heavy bottom. He socked Jackie in the mouth and the young man went down, face bloodied, lip cut, in a half-conscious sprawl.
Ben leaned down, took Jackie’s gun and keys from his jacket pocket, dropped them down the front of his own shirt. Where was the knife?
Jackie tried to focus on him through a bloodied mask. Ben leaned down and, with his good hand, hit Jackie as hard as he could in the jaw. Twice. Jackie tried to make a fist and Ben pounded Jackie’s head three times against the floor.
Jackie stopped fighting, his eyes unfocused.
“Hey!” a woman started screaming. Ben looked up. The woman was a sales associate, manicured hand at mouth.
“He has a gun. I saw it in his pocket. Call the police,” Ben said. “He followed me from a house on Nottingham Street. He hurt a woman there.”
The woman retreated toward the sales desk’s phone. She pointed a finger at him as though it would freeze him in place. “Don’t move.”
Choose. Stay and explain to the cops that Jackie had killed Delia. But then he was in jail and maybe funneled back to another Kidwell. He stumbled to his feet and ran. He heard the woman yell, “Stop!” He didn’t.
She’d have security on him in a minute. He headed for a door marked “Associates Only.” It wasn’t locked and he went through, hearing the woman yelling behind him. He rushed down a corridor leading off to an empty break room and a much larger back stock area.
And a freight elevator. He hit the button.
Get out to the parking lot. This was an anchor store, it would have a lot of exits. Find Jackie’s car, take it.
He waited for the elevator to arrive; it cranked up sluggishly from the ground floor. It boomed as though it hadn’t been serviced in years, a noisy throat-clearing rise up the elevator shaft.
He pressed himself against the wall. The elevator chimed its arrival, the cargo-wide doors slid open like a slowly drawn curtain. The elevator stood empty. He rushed inside and jabbed the first-floor button and the close-door button.
He heard the door to the employee area open. Feet running, stumbling. “I’m . . . gonna cut you . . . to shreds.”
No. The doors began to close, sliding on their own ancient schedule. Ben yanked out his shirttail, groped for the gun and the car keys.
Jackie raced toward the closing door, his forehead a blood smear, eyes raging, nose bent. The knife low, tight in his hand, ready to strike.
The doors started to close. Ben raised the gun and fired; Jackie saw the gun, his expression of rage shifted into surprise; Jackie dodged to the left; Ben pivoted to follow Jackie’s lunge and fired just before the doors slid shut; the elevator began its arthritic descent.
Did I hit him? Did I kill him?
Ben stood motionless in the elevator, the gun warm in his hand.
What the hell’s wrong with you, you could have stopped the doors, dumb ass, you had the gun,
he thought.
The elevator settled; the doors inched open. He hid the gun awkwardly under his shirttail, listening for pursuing footsteps. Only silence.
He turned and hurried out of the cargo bay exit, jumped down to the parking lot.
Ben ran now. Pain drove him like an engine. He reached the stretch of parking lot where he’d abandoned the Explorer. The black Mercedes still stood where Jackie had left it, an angry man standing by the sedan, blocked in.
Ben hurried to the driver’s door.
“For Christ’s sakes, learn to park,” the man said.
“I will,” Ben said.
The man gawked at him, the blood on him, the sweat. “Hey, do you need help?”
“I’m fine, thanks.” Ben slid into the Mercedes.
“Wait a minute, wait . . .” A note of recognition in his voice. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket.
Of course it was a stick shift, since his arm wasn’t working right. But he was alive. No complaints. He gunned the Mercedes into a lurching motion, found a rhythm. Every time he changed gear the dull agony pulsed.
Ben powered out of the lot.
You had a gun, he only had a knife. You could have hit the button, opened the doors, you could have shot the murdering bastarddead. You cannot run, you have to take the fight back to these people. They will never stop chasing you.
Through the pain he thought of Delia, lying broken on the floor, gone in a second, like his Emily. He’d shot twice at Jackie and missed both times. Pilgrim was right; he was no good at this war. He prayed as he pulled back onto the main road through Frisco that the man in the parking lot didn’t get the license number, wasn’t calling the police, that sirens wouldn’t rise in pursuit of him in the next minute.
A rage filled him, eclipsed the pain in his arm and along his body from Jackie’s toying cuts. It was a hot and fierce anger he’d tamped down hard into his heart, kept at a simmer. Seeing Delia die gave it energy, fueled it like long-dry tinder exploding into flame.
You ran and you should have killed him. You should have killed him for what he did.
Jackie Lynch trembled. More from fury than pain. Ben’s final shot had missed him, because he’d gotten out of the line of fire, stumbling against the wall.
And not had the guts to leap and jab the elevator button, reopen the doors, confront Ben. The thought of being shot with his own gun had slowed him, made him hesitate. Not caution, but cowardice. Stupid, he could have gutted the amateur with one sweep of the blade.
“You worthless shit,” he said to himself, mumbling through his broken nose and cut lips. The heat of shame warmed his bones like a fever. He had hesitated as Ben cut into the mall crowd, when he should have taken the shot, then run. A terrible mistake, a sorry excuse for a Lynch.
He suddenly fought back tears. He was the son of one of the most feared men in the IRA. He remembered the dark basement in Belfast where men who were suspected of whispering into British ears were brought; he could still see the terror in their eyes as they were placed in the chair across from his father. He was brother to a man revered for his ability to kill and not be seen. But he was a sorry legacy of their blood, taken down by an amateur he’d badly underestimated. He didn’t even have his car keys now. His face was a bloody fright; anyone who saw him would remember him. And if the police found him, started questioning him, found his ties to his brother and hence to his brother’s clients in the Mideast—then all was ended. He would never see the outside of a prison again.
He reached the store’s loading docks, hung back in the shadows for a moment. He kept the knife up his shirtsleeve, ready to drop into his hand. A young man wheeled an armoire into a delivery truck, came back out onto the dock and then steered his dolly through another door. Now the back of the truck was empty, the driver conferring off to the side with a co-worker holding a tablet PC, tapping at the screen and shaking his head at his companion, then laughing good-naturedly.
Jackie stepped into the back of the truck, squeezed through the narrow maze toward the cab, hid between a refrigerator and an armoire. He took off his shirt and pressed it against his cut and battered face. Would he have awful scars? Would his face be ugly now?
Thirty seconds later, the truck door slid shut, plunging him into darkness.
He heard footsteps on the loading dock, security men asking questions about two men running through the store, the truck driver saying he’d been standing here the whole time, he’d seen nothing.
Jackie waited, to see if the doors would open or if the truck would take him.
After another minute, the truck’s engine roared to life, moved forward out of the bay.
Escape was escape. But this was humiliation, running, losing to a nobody like Ben Forsberg. As he bounced in the darkness, he imagined Ben’s face gaping in terror, dying slow on his knife’s point, screaming like the cowards in the Belfast basement. The bloodied smile seemed tattooed on Jackie’s face.
25
Bob Taggart’s den appeared to be a bizarre hybrid of a gun show and a used bookstore. Tall bookshelves covered one wall, jammed full with tattered paperbacks and battered hardcovers. Another wall featured a collection of antique firearms mixed in with newer guns. Bright yellow squares of Post-it notes lay beneath several of the mounted guns. Vochek could see notes penciled on the squares of color. The handwriting was as precise as the characters of a typewriter. Stacks of books towered from the floor, volumes on history and weaponry and guns.
“I’m working on a book on firearms,” Bob Taggart said. “I’m on the ninth draft of my outline. I’m being very methodical in how I approach my work.”
“I admire that,” she said. She leaned closer, looked at the guns. A French pistol from 1878. A German revolver from 1915. A police special from Prohibition-era Chicago.
“If they could talk,” he said. “Other than spitting bullets.”
“We’d be out of our jobs.”
He laughed, a rich, warm sound. Taggart was a short man, heavyset, with a silver burr of hair cut into a retro flattop. He had a warm and ingratiating smile. He had his hands behind his back and he rocked on the balls of his feet, beaming at his guns. Vochek gave his fingers a quick inspection as he pointed out the beauty of an antique firearm from Prussia: no wedding ring. She wondered if maybe Mom would like Taggart, wondered if he ever made his way to Houston.
“You truly have quite a collection,” Vochek said.
“I’m mindful about my purchases. I research them. I’m careful and methodical.”
She wondered if he was preemptively defending his work on the Emily Forsberg case before she asked a single question. He offered her iced tea, she accepted, and he got them their drinks. He settled into a recliner; she sat on the couch across from him.
“I’m not sure how I can help you,” he said. “The lead investigators were in Maui. I only did questioning here of people in Dallas in support of the Hawaiian investigation. Everything on the murder was in the file. The case remains open.”
“But cold.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re the closest, so I’m talking to you first, but I’m sure we’ll be talking with the investigators in Maui as well. I read the file. You were, indeed, very methodical and careful.”
Taggart shrugged. “Not that I made much of a difference for Emily Forsberg.”
She heard bitterness under his words. “I’d just like your impressions on the case. You can get so much more from talking to an investigating officer than simply reading the file.”
“You get all my prejudices and theories.” He smiled.
“I’ll take those,” she said.
“And this is because you want to find Ben Forsberg.”
“Yes. We found a link between Forsberg and a known hired killer. I want to find out how strong the link is and how long ago it was forged.”
“You mean, did he use a hired killer to get rid of his wife?”
“Yes.”
Taggart frowned. “I suppose anything is possible.”
“What did you think of Ben?”
“As a suspect or a person?”
“Both.”
“I did not talk with him until he returned to Dallas. So, you understand, I did not see him in the immediate aftermath of his wife’s death, which is when you can learn the most about a suspect’s emotional reaction to the crime. He’d had a few days to compose himself, to deal with the shock of her death. He was . . . There’s a phrase I used in my career. Devastated but dignified.”
“He does have a reserve about him,” she said.
“The more calculating murderers often do. But from what we found, he and Emily were very much in love, very happy. They’d met through their work, dated for two years, gotten engaged. Nothing to indicate trouble. No signs of abuse, or infidelity, no money worries. He carried no life insurance policy on her. They’d only been married a week.” He shrugged. “Plus— killing her on their honeymoon? If he didn’t want to marry her, he could have backed out a few days before. Usually people with doubts immediately after a wedding resign themselves to the marriage or start thinking annulment. But . . .”
“But.”
“They didn’t stay in a hotel. They rented a house in Lahaina. That was a bit unusual, and if he wanted her dead, then it was certainly easier to kill her in a house than in a crowded hotel. But she handled the arrangements; apparently renting the house was her idea—her mother confirmed that with me. Ben and Emily were together most of the time, obviously, it being a honeymoon. Their last morning there, he went to play golf with another honeymooning husband they’d met down on the beach—which gave him a good alibi—but he only played nine holes, not the eighteen he originally told Emily he would. If he planned the shooting and he didn’t want to be there when she was shot, he should have played the whole course.” He cleared his throat. “Of course, he could have taken a gun, gone up the hill, shot her dead. But he has no experience with firearms, and there was zero forensic evidence that he’d handled or fired a gun, or managed to acquire one while on Maui.”
“The police thought it was random.”
“Yes. Windows were shot out in two empty rental houses a half mile away, some empty car windows shot out near the airport. Bullets all matched. The shot into the Forsberg house was the final one. Ben had just left the golf course when the first shots were heard and reported—not enough time to get to the first scene. The timing weighed the inquest in his favor.”
“So several random shots and Emily Forsberg was just unlucky.”
Taggart shrugged. “An idiot kid drinking beer, probably, taking potshots. But damn, the bullet nailed her, square in the forehead.”
“A precise kill.” The kind of shot that a Nicky Lynch could make.
“Or an incredibly unlucky shot.”
“And no trace found of gun or gunman.”
“None.”
“What about Ben’s business? If he was involved in shady dealings, and she found out about it . . .”
Taggart shrugged. “Too much government contracting is shady—just my opinion—but we found no history of questionable business.”
“She worked for Hector Global.”
“Yes, she was a very senior accountant. Being groomed to be Sam Hector’s chief financial officer.” Taggart tented his fingers over his whiskey-barrel stomach. “Sam Hector delivered a eulogy at her service.” He stopped, opened his mouth again as if to speak, closed his jaw as though reconsidering. He tapped fingers on his chair’s arm.
Vochek raised her eyebrows.
He spoke slowly. “Maybe Ben wasn’t the shady dealer; maybe Sam Hector was.”
“You suspected him?”
“Careful and methodical, remember.” He risked a smile. “He was in Los Angeles and two contractors backed him up. But you know, he has his own plane. A Learjet Delta-5.” He paused again, gave her an enigmatic look. “It has the range to fly to Hawaii.”
“You think Hector could have flown to Maui, killed Emily, and come back? But there would be records of the flight.”
“This is a man who moves hired soldiers and equipment all over the world, sometimes in secret. If he wanted to get to Maui without attracting attention, I believe he could.” Taggart shrugged. “But he had no motive we could discern and he had an alibi.”
“Back to a dead end.”
“Tell me about this hired killer you mentioned.”
She took a photo from her purse and slid it to him. Taggart dug bifocals from his pocket, studied Nicky Lynch’s face.
“He looks like a barkeep.”
“He was a trained sniper.”
Taggart raised an eyebrow. He handed her back the photo of Nicky Lynch. “A sniper. I guess that explains it, then.”
“You don’t think Ben Forsberg hiring a killer is the tidy solution.”
“I . . .” He stopped and glanced at his watch. “It’s five o’clock somewhere. I would like a small glass of bourbon. Would you care for a drop?”
The sudden shift in his tone surprised her. His ruddy skin paled. She didn’t want one, but she sensed accepting his offer might loosen his tongue as much as the bourbon. “Yes, please, just a finger’s worth.”
He stood and fetched them each a measure of bourbon, handed her one of the crystal glasses, and sat back down in the recliner. “We’re miles off the record. You tell anyone I said this, and I’ll deny it.”
She allowed herself a tiny sip of bourbon. “Sure.”
He took a long, savoring sip of his drink. “Have you met Sam Hector yet?”
She shook her head.
He stood up and splashed more bourbon in his glass. “This is the part I won’t repeat. When I started digging at Sam Hector, I got leaned on hard. Avalanche hard. By my supervisor and by a suit from Washington. I was told Sam Hector was not a suspect, could not be a suspect, and did not merit further scrutiny. I asked why, because I do not like getting leaned on and I thought, he’s got big government connections, he’s just throwing his dic—pardon, his weight around. I mean, could you do something that looked more guilty?” He touched the fresh bourbon to his lips. “I got into police work for two reasons. My dad was a cop and I admired him more than anyone I ever knew. Second was, I have a basic problem with unfairness. I know that sounds naïve but it’s the way God made me.”
She offered him an awkward smile. “I’m the same way.” She thought of the dead Afghan kids, cut down in their pajamas. She understood Taggart and thought he understood her. He would have made a far better partner in work than Kidwell. “But we live in an inherently unfair world.”
He shrugged. “I felt Sam Hector wasn’t making my corner of the world more fair. So I dug a bit and found that the suit from Washington who warned me off was a senior CIA official.”
She set down her glass. “Why would the CIA care about Sam Hector?”
“At first, I thought, well, maybe the CIA’s a big client of Hector’s, he seems to do work for every government agency. But the CIA protecting him is an inverse in the power relationship. If he’s in trouble because of a crime he committed, and they’ve hired him, they’re going to cut him loose.”
“But instead they back him.”
“So they warned me off, and I let myself be warned off. But I always wondered, why did the CIA not want me to dig at Hector? Why would the CIA be shielding him?”
She drove from Cedar Hill back into the heart of Dallas, headed north on Central Expressway, cut across Plano to the private air park, and let herself into the safe house. The pilot who’d flown her up from Austin had thoughtfully stocked the refrigerator with basics, and she made herself a salad and a sandwich. She hadn’t realized until the bourbon inched into her stomach that she was starving.
The phone rang. “Vochek,” she said.
“Delia Moon is dead,” Pritchard said.
The words hit like a hammer to her chest. “What? How?”
“A man matching Ben Forsberg’s description was seen driving at high speed from her neighborhood. A man in a Mercedes who was either chasing him or fleeing with him shot at a police officer who responded to a report of shots fired. A woman was checking out a house being built down the street and heard the shots and called the police.”
“Ben . . . killed Delia?”
“We don’t know yet. What the hell is going on, Vochek?”
She didn’t like the chiding tone in Pritchard’s voice. “This software that Adam Reynolds was developing, about searching financial databases—what has the team found on it?”
“Why do you ask?”
It was not the response she expected. “Because Delia was dodgy about a project he was working on, said it was a prototype. She didn’t want to describe it to me. She was worried we wouldn’t return his property.”
Silence for a moment. “He was working on a way to identify and track people using false identities via combining information from lots of different databases. At least that’s what an encoded prototype on the system appears to be. But he didn’t save any queries or results from the program—I’m not sure this program would even work. And we can’t test it, we don’t have access to all those different databases.”
Vochek said, “False identity. One you invent, or one you steal.” The competing charges on Ben’s credit card made more sense to her now— especially if someone had stolen Ben’s identity. “I want to know why you told me to stay away from Sam Hector.”
“He’s just a contractor. We’re under the gun to produce results here, Joanna. He has nothing to do with—”
“He knows Ben Forsberg. He might be of help in finding him.”
“He’s not going to give shelter or help to a fugitive. It would be career suicide.”
Vochek couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. “You’re the second government agency to be shielding Hector during a criminal investigation. Why?”
“I am hardly shielding him; I am keeping you focused on what matters, Joanna.”
“I want you to find out for me if Sam Hector is ex-CIA.”
“You want.”
“Please.”
“Well, he’s not. There’s an extensive government file on him. He’s ex-army. Not CIA.”
“Never mind what his file says.” She tempered her tone.
“Joanna. Leave it alone. Just find Randall Choate. That’s all that matters. Don’t get distracted.”
“If Hector is ex-CIA, don’t you think we should know that little fact?”
“Sleeping dogs,” Pritchard said. “But I can tell you won’t give this up, so fine. I’ll see what I can find.”
“Thank you, Margaret.” Vochek hung up. She had a sinking feeling that she’d opened a box best left sealed. Sam Hector was a powerful and respected man, but too many of the threads seemed to loop back toward him.
Vochek clicked on the television, found a twenty-four-hour Texas news channel, waited for an account of Delia’s murder to run.
Dead. Adam Reynolds, who had called Kidwell for help. Kidwell and the guards. Now Delia. The same awful sense of helplessness that she’d felt seeing the dead Afghan boys, cut down by a covert group, clenched her chest. No more, no more, no more.
She dug through the phone book and called Hector Global, argued her way up the chain to Sam Hector’s assistant.
“I’m very sorry, Agent Vochek,” the assistant said, “he’s not in today, and I doubt he’ll be in this weekend. We’ve had a real tragedy here . . .”
“I know. Tell him I was at the hotel when his men were killed. Ask Mr. Hector to call me at this number. I need to talk to him about Ben Forsberg.” She thanked the assistant for his help.