Authors: Jeff Abbott
40
“You and I are at cross-purposes,” Vochek said. “We can’t be.”
Pritchard crossed her arms, paced the hotel suite, face frowning in thought.
Vochek touched her boss’s shoulder and Pritchard stopped walking. “I’m telling you, we need to find Pilgrim and Ben, get them talking.”
“They’ve already talked plenty to you,” Pritchard said. “You’re calling Choate by that asinine code name.”
“We’ve gotten in too deep with Hector. Take him and his people off this project until we’re sure he’s not hijacking what we’re trying to do. At least until we can find out if he’s really connected to Emily Forsberg’s murder.”
Pritchard pressed a hand to her stomach. “I’m starving. Have you eaten?”
“No.”
Pritchard picked up the phone, called room service, ordered a pot of decaf, two omelets, and potatoes O’Brien. She hung up. “You want me to take the word of a CIA fugitive and a man who is tied to an assassin. Over that of one of the most respected government contractors in the country.”
“How exactly is Hector helping us?”
“I told you, providing infrastructure to help us ID the off-the-books agents.”
“And when you find these agents?”
“Then they’ll be arrested. You act like this is news. Are you doubting my word?”
“No. I’m doubting his. Has he given you a single name other than that of Pilgrim?”
“No.”
“Yet Adam Reynolds is dead. His girlfriend is dead.”
“Because the Cellar’s trying to silence them.” She said this as though stating the obvious.
“Adam Reynolds found them, didn’t he? He gave the names to Hector. But Hector’s not giving them to you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You didn’t even tell me about Reynolds’s software to find aliases through financial trails. At least Pilgrim and Ben told me. Why didn’t you?”
Pritchard waved a dismissive hand. “We didn’t know if the software would even work.”
“That’s not the reason. The reason is that for it to identify likely false identities, it had to work across a huge range of databases that Adam Reynolds had no access to. But you got him the access. Illegally.”
No noise but the hum of the air conditioner. “I told you we have leeway to find these people.” She practically spat the words at Vochek.
The disappointment Vochek felt toward Pritchard welled up in her chest. “If we break every law to find these people, Margaret, we’re no better than they are. We’re turning into them.”
“Spare me the lecture on civil liberties.”
And I wished my mom was more like you? More poised, more perfect?
“We need to see Hector’s service record at the CIA. Pilgrim claimed he’s an assassin.”
“So what if he was?” Pritchard said. “It has nothing to do with his current work.”
“His clients might feel differently,” Vochek said. Her cell phone rang. “Yes?”
“Vochek? It’s Ben Forsberg.”
“Where are you?”
“Nearby. Sorry we ran.”
“I’m not sure I blame you,” she said quietly.
“Are you with your boss?”
“Yes.” She glanced at Margaret, who stood with crossed arms.
“I have evidence tying your boss to Barker, the guy who betrayed the Cellar, and to Adam Reynolds. I believe she might be able to clarify this situation, how the pieces fit together.”
Vochek didn’t look at Pritchard but she could sense Pritchard tensing, standing close to her. Vochek turned and walked to the window. She glanced down to the darkened sidewalks as though she expected to see Ben watching her window. “I think you’re right.”
“Are the two of you alone?”
“Yes.”
“I want to talk to you both. Together. Because if she wants to save her career, she better help bring Hector to justice. I want a deal, hashed out between us.”
Evidence. It would either damn Margaret or it could be explained, but either way, Ben would be in her custody. “Suite 1201,” she said.
He hung up and Vochek folded her phone. She thought, suddenly, of the lost Afghan kids and wondered if she’d gone to work for a woman who was not the cure but part of the problem.
“Who was that?” Pritchard asked.
Vochek spoke to her boss with cool authority: “Sit down, Margaret, we’re going to have a talk.”
Vochek said nothing to Ben when she opened the door and he came into the room. He handed her the list of phone numbers and the gun he’d had on the plane, the one they’d fought for. “Vote of confidence in you standing by me,” he said.
Vochek took the gun and carried it into the bedroom.
Margaret Pritchard watched and then she got up from the couch and moved toward the phone.
Ben stepped between her and the phone and picked it up, pulled the cord from the wall.
“You’ve already been on the phone quite enough,” he said.
“You have some nerve.”
“I’ve gotten a lot more recently. You hired Hector to help you find these clandestine groups. He’s gone off the books himself.”
She looked past his shoulder to Vochek. “If you want to keep your job, Joanna, you’ll arrest this man.”
Vochek didn’t move. “I think we’ve become too much like the people we’re hunting, Margaret. Let’s get all the facts out.”
“The Cellar agent Barker called you in this room. If you didn’t know about the Cellar, how did you know Barker?” Ben asked. “He’s a computer hacker who went underground rather than serve time. You’ve been consorting with a fugitive criminal. Terrible at congressional review time.”
“The phone record is wrong.”
“Fine. One of my clients does a lot of consulting work for the Department of Justice and has great connections there. I’ll be glad to call the attorney general at home tonight and let you explain all this to her.”
Margaret Pritchard went back to the couch, stood, arms crossed. “I hear you want a deal. I’m listening.” She said it like she was the one doing him a favor.
“Hector goes down. Hard. He’s a murderer and he’s hired murderers to kill people for him.”
“If I give up Hector, it’ll be news, and our operation goes public. The whole point of stopping groups like the Cellar this way was to keep it out of the public eye.”
“I don’t care if the government gets embarrassed. It’s not fatal.”
“We hardly want our enemies and our allies to know details of our most illicit operations, and if we go public with him, all his work for me goes public, too.”
“Then give him to us privately.”
“You want me to let you kill him? Forget it.”
“You don’t care about the numerous people he’s killed.”
“I don’t know that he’s killed anyone!” Pritchard yelled.
“He showed me proof that he killed my wife.” Ben put his hands on Pritchard’s shoulders and pushed her into the chair. She didn’t resist. “You protect him, you’re protecting a murderer. How did you know Barker?”
Pritchard’s mouth worked as if she were unsure that she could form the words. Finally she said: “Barker wasn’t ex-CIA. He came to Homeland and got steered to me. He wanted to betray the Cellar, for payment and for a pardon.”
“And you steered him to Hector.”
Pritchard nodded. “Barker was our foot in the door. He only knew of Teach, but not her specific location; he couldn’t hand us any of the rest of the Cellar. But he gave us a couple of identities the Cellar had used—that he had set up for agents—and they let us test Reynolds’s software to find more of the IDs used by the Cellar. Barker called me Monday to let me know the operation was starting to draw out Pilgrim and the rest of the Cellar, that they had gotten wind of Adam Reynolds trying to track down their accounts and their identities. But I had no idea Hector was working any other angle, such as targeting Pilgrim. Or you.”
“Except Barker betrayed you, too, Ms. Pritchard. He fed you limited information while giving everything to Hector. He hired the sniper who killed Reynolds and tried to kill Pilgrim. He hired the gunmen who killed Kidwell and Delia Moon and kidnapped Teach—and Hector never gave Teach to you, which would have handed you the entire Cellar immediately. He killed her right in front of my eyes. Not what you wanted, is it?”
Pritchard put a hand to her mouth.
“Why would he kill Reynolds?” Ben leaned down and yelled in Pritchard’s face. “Tell me!”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I thought . . .” Ben stopped. “Adam Reynolds originally designed this software to find terrorists. Did he call you Monday because he found, not the Cellar, but actual terrorists?”
Pritchard rubbed her temples, as if fending off a migraine.
“Answer him, Margaret,” Vochek said.
“He made a mistake,” she said. “He found suspicious activity centering on a group of men using suspect IDs traveling to New Orleans. But they’re not terrorists.”
“Who are they?”
Pritchard seemed not to hear him. “I came to New Orleans to check it out. That’s why I was here. It’s not a problem.”
“Who is Hector targeting?” Ben asked. “Because whatever’s here, it’s why he’s taken over the Cellar.”
“He couldn’t be after them,” Pritchard said in a whisper. “No reason to go after them.”
Ben grabbed her shoulders. “Tell us.”
“Reynolds’s search queries . . . they found a group of Arabic men traveling under a pattern that suggested assumed names, coming into the country a few weeks ago, all ending up in New Orleans. But these men aren’t terrorists. They’re training at a CIA safe house.” Pritchard swallowed.
“Oh, my God,” Ben said.
“They’re Arabs preparing to infiltrate and spy on terrorist groups overseas. To be the native eyes and ears we haven’t been able to have in places like Beirut and Baghdad and Damascus. We’ve never had true, trained spies working deep cover inside Hezbollah or al-Qaeda or any of the other networks. Our best hope of destroying terrorist networks from inside.”
Ben let her go. “Where is this safe house?”
“I don’t have the location . . . that’s classified . . .”
“But Adam gave Hector the same information he gave you,” Vochek said. “Hector’s going to use the Cellar to kill a CIA team. Why would he—”
“Because Hector needs the war on terror to keep going for a good long time,” Ben said. “It’s fueling his bottom line.” He thought of Pilgrim’s Indonesian story; framing Pilgrim in turn for a security contract for his new company, profiting from fear and chaos.
Hector was repeating his own history, but now on a much wider and more dangerous scale.
The knock on the door came, a man announcing room service.
The waiter, a gentle, hardworking man who had been with the hotel for twenty years and had been one of the first employees to return in the wake of Katrina, knocked on the door, announced, “Room service.” He was tired, his feet ached, and he was ready to go off duty. He nodded at the young man ambling down the hallway, turned back toward the door, and felt the cool metal touch his temple. He froze.
“You’re going to walk in and leave the door propped open. Do it and you won’t get hurt. Argue and you’re dead. I don’t want to hurt you. Nod if you understand.” The voice was a lightly accented whisper.
The waiter, stiff with fear, nodded. The young man stepped back against the wall, where he wouldn’t be seen.
The door opened.
41
Pilgrim watched the cars leave—two of them. One was a van holding the Cellar agents, the other a sedan with just Hector. Jackie had taken off five minutes earlier in a third car, and Pilgrim let him go. He had to stay with Hector.
The two vehicles pulled onto Veterans Boulevard, headed east, then headed north toward Lake Pontchartrain. Traffic was heavier than normal— Saturday night in New Orleans—and he hung back, keeping an eye on Hector’s car. They weren’t wasting any time; whatever this job was, they were moving now.
He did not want to kill anyone in the Cellar. They had made the same choice he had, to take a broken life and rebuild it into meaningful work. Perhaps they hadn’t chosen entirely for virtuous reasons; he himself had no desire to rot in an Indonesian prison. They had all done work that would offer no acclaim and few rewards, other than Teach’s assurance they had done a Good Thing.
What could be in New Orleans that interested Hector so that he needed the Cellar? Hector Global could command a thousand trained men for action anywhere in the world. But those men wouldn’t kill at will, especially outside a war zone.
This had to be a job that his normal security forces would refuse to do. Because there would be questions. Repercussions. Hector needed deniability.
If he could take Hector out with a shot—then the rest of the group would come after him, perhaps abandon the target if they lost the element of surprise.
He stayed close as they began to head into the patchwork of rebuilt and devastated neighborhoods close to the massive lake.
And if he missed Hector, and the Cellar caught him . . . well. His beginning in this life had been messy, at Hector’s hands, and his exit would cost Hector dearly. He would make sure the price was high.
42
The waiter, mouth a thin line, pushed the room service cart into the room. Ben saw the coffee and carafe and the covered dishes. His stomach rumbled. But the waiter said nothing, no hello, how are you, kept his head bowed as if expecting a blow.
Pritchard stepped forward to sign the ticket. Two sharp bleats, the waiter falling over the tray, Pritchard reeling, collapsing onto her back. Jackie Lynch stood in the doorway, silencer-capped gun raised, his eyes seeking his next target, closing the suite’s door behind him.
Vochek stumbled backward toward the coffee table. Jackie raised the gun.
“No!” Ben yelled. “No!”
Jackie saw Ben. A twisted smile touched his battered lips and he shifted the gun’s aim from Vochek toward Ben.
But in the second it took for the gun to point toward Ben, Vochek rushed Jackie and kicked him in the solar plexus. He staggered back and she threw herself against him so that the gun, for barely a moment, pointed only at the floor.
Ben ran and slammed Jackie against the wall, leveraging all his weight into the younger man’s shoulder, pinning the gun between them, closing his hands around the weapon. Fury fueled his muscles. He got hold of Jackie’s pinky and snapped hard.
Jackie screeched and fired, the bullet popping into the carpet.
Vochek tangled fingers in Jackie’s long hair, knocked his head against the wall. Once, twice, and he roared in anger. Ben twisted the gun around, toward Jackie; he tried to fire but Jackie’s broken, bent finger jammed the trigger.
Jackie head-butted Ben’s face, hammering into his cheek, but even with the bolt of pain, Ben did not let go. Jackie wrenched free of Vochek’s grip. With Ben pinning his hands, he landed a kick hard in Vochek’s chest, and she fell to the floor.
“It ends now!” Jackie screamed. He knocked Ben loose; Ben fell against the cart. The heat of the coffee decanter touched his arm. He grabbed the carafe and swung it hard—no time to unscrew the top, Jackie was lifting the gun to put a bullet between Ben’s eyes. Ben caught the gun hard but couldn’t knock it free of Jackie’s grip. Ben swung the carafe back, trying to connect with Jackie’s head, but missed. Jackie leveled the gun to fire again and Ben caught his hand, raised the gun toward the ceiling.
“I’m going to kill you—” Ben shouted.
Vochek got up and ran toward the bedroom.
Jackie grunted in fury, started to wrench his hand from Ben’s grip.
With the other hand, frantic, Ben thumbed the pour control on the hot carafe and dumped coffee on Jackie’s groin. Jackie shrieked and tried to jump back through the wall. Ben slammed the carafe into Jackie’s face. Hot coffee splashed Ben’s hand. He didn’t feel pain.
Jackie’s face contorted in rage. He bent and Ben grabbed the gun, but Jackie kept his grip. Screaming with fury, he slapped the gun into Ben’s face, once, twice, as Ben fought to keep a grip on the pistol.
Don’t let go don’t let go,
he thought.
Ben fell to his knees, his forehead bleeding, his cheek cut. Jackie wrenched the pistol from Ben’s hold and swung it toward him.
The sound of the shot boomed and a hole appeared in Jackie’s hand, a nickel-sized coin of gore, and then Vochek shot him again, in the stomach, and Jackie folded, dropping the gun.
Vochek stood over Pritchard, the gun Ben had surrendered to her in her hands. “Get his gun,” she yelled.
Jackie lunged for the gun as Ben grabbed it and Vochek shot him again, in the chest. He shrieked and curled into a ball. Ben locked the gun on Jackie’s head.
“Where is Hector? Where’s his target?”
“Ah, God,” Jackie moaned. “Hurts, hurts.”
“We’ll get you a doctor but tell us where’s the target,” Ben said.
“Nicky, Nicky,” Jackie sobbed. Spit and snot flew from his face and he gagged, writhing on the carpet. “No, no, no . . .” and then a broken hum. His eyes widened in pain, then he went still.
Ben stood. His mind felt wiped clean, blank, his body shivering with adrenaline. No. This wasn’t over. He reached into Jackie’s pocket. He found car keys, a pass card, and a scrap of paper with the hotel’s address. No cell phone. He took the keys.
Vochek knelt by Pritchard, touched her throat. “Oh, my God. Ben . . . call the front desk.”
Ben checked the poor waiter, slumped by the cart. He was dead as well. “This is Hector cleaning house,” Ben said. “Shutting up Pritchard and you before you became a bigger threat to him, before you started questioning his tactics and results. He doesn’t need you anymore. We have to find him. Now. Call the CIA. Tell them their safe house is in danger. Or the police.”
“We don’t even know where to tell the police to go. And calling the CIA, they’ll have to confirm my identity. That’s a lot of bureaucracy to navigate.”
“Check her cell phone. Check the page of phone records I got on her. Someone at the CIA told her about the operation so she wouldn’t interfere, there has to be a record.”
Vochek nodded.
“I have another idea.” He closed his hand around Jackie’s car keys. He stood and hurried down the hallway, past a couple of frightened guests who’d heard the fight. “I’ll be right back,” he lied.
“Ben!” Vochek yelled at his back. “Stop! Where are you going?”
The breeze outside the hotel was damp and cool. Ben took in a bracing breath as he exited via the hotel’s fire exit into a narrow brick alley. Sirens flashed, the police already pulling into the front of the Hotel Marquis de Lafayette, blue and red light painting the bricks bright as a child’s room.
Ben put Jackie’s gun in his pocket. He went down the bricked alleyway by the hotel, toward the closest parking lot. He thumbed the remote on the keys, kept at it until he hit the third row and a rental Chevrolet winked its lights.
He searched the seat, the glove compartment. Jackie was from Belfast; presumably he didn’t know New Orleans well. There should be a page of directions, maybe, that Ben could backtrack, follow to where Jackie came from. Nothing. The scrap in his pocket carried only the address of the hotel, no directions.
Then he noticed the GPS monitor. He touched the screen and the GPS purred to life. He studied the controls, tapped a button that displayed the last search. Which was for the Hotel Marquis de Lafayette. He went to the previous address. It was in Metairie.
Okay, then off to Metairie.
But caution made him pause.
Think like Jackie.
Where would Jackie have been before coming to execute the hit? Perhaps at wherever the Cellar group convened, with Hector, and they wouldn’t be there now. He checked again. Up another address, to a warehouse near Louis Armstrong International. Then the next address, as he retraced the list, was that of the car rental company.
He had to choose where to go. He tried to think like Hector. If things went bad, or the Cellar people didn’t accept Hector or believe his story, then Hector would need a place to hide. Maybe it was the warehouse.
Or maybe these were directions summoned by the last customer to rent the car. He could waste precious time on a pointless drive.
Warehouse. Hector Global had deployed a security force here in the chaotic, sad aftermath of Katrina. Near the airport. He remembered contracts signed and negotiated, the difficulty of tracking down the owners of the property in the exodus after the storm, when Hector Global wanted to rent the space.
It was all he had to go on.
He clicked back to the warehouse map, studied it, and pulled out of the lot. He switched on the cell phone he’d stolen from the pilot. The battery showed the phone’s charge was nearly at its end. He had no recharger. He called Pilgrim.