Collision

“This is Seven,” Pilgrim whispered. “I see them, they are heading back to the van. Four is tapping at ear. I’ll check their pieces.”

A pause, as though his whisper was being judged. “Tell them to get the hell back here.”

“Copy.” Pilgrim ran low and hard, moving toward a small stone outbuilding where a driveway dead-ended. He had to neutralize the team: three more agents, two of them working on the alarm.

And where was Hector?

“We’re found,” he heard a woman say, both in his earpiece and in his ear, and a kick hammered into his chest. She’d been behind the outbuilding and he’d been careless. Her blow staggered him. A flash of silver danced in the spare moonlight; she had a knife, trying to avoid the noise of a gun that would rouse the house. She slashed at him with the blade, slicing through the borrowed black turtleneck and scoring across his chest. But she overshot on the blow, tried to recover by launching another powerhouse kick at his face. He caught her leg high and shoved her hard into the brick building she’d hidden behind. Hushed and sudden chatter from the others filled his ear.

They knew he was there.

“Alarm down,” a man announced.

“Hit now,” Hector ordered.

Pilgrim fractured his attacker’s arm with the next blow, but better than killing her, he thought. She dropped the knife and contained her scream- brave and well trained, trying not to alarm the target. He hit her twice, hard, with respect and regret, and she went down, maybe not knocked out but hurt enough to be out of the fight.

Two more Cellar agents and Hector remained. Pilgrim was at the house’s side porch and he figured the assault would open at the back, away from the street.

He heard the muted sound of a shot hitting steel, a reinforced door. The opportunity for stealth had passed; he was too late. He spoke into the earpiece. “Hector killed Teach. Not me. Shoot him. Shoot him.”

No answer. No acknowledgment. Two more shots.

“You’re not killing terrorists. You’re attacking a CIA safe house. He’s a traitor,” Pilgrim said. He broke into a hard run. “Four are down, none are dead. I’m not the liar. Stand down.”

Nothing. They were ignoring him, or Hector had silenced the communications network. He could see movement inside the windows.

Hector and the Cellar were already inside.

They knew he was here; one would be watching the door for him while the others began the kills. The door was a trap. So he fired rounds at a back window, bullets slamming into the reinforced glass. He vaulted up the porch steps. Those inside would think he was stupid and heading for the nearly unbreakable glass he was trying to shatter with his gunfire. He kept firing at the pane but at the last moment he leapt through the doorway.

The feint worked. He hit the floor, rolled out of the back hallway into the dining room, his gun spitting, and he caught one Cellar agent waiting for him close to the window, in the knees, the agent

firing back, a bullet needling into the meat of Pilgrim’s shoulder. He rolled hard, under a table, fired again, screaming without thinking, “CIA! CIA!”

He was once, and always would be, and now he was again.

A bullet smacked into the table he was under, fired from his left. He could see one body, in T-shirt and pajama pants, on the kitchen floor. They’d already killed one. He shot the agent closest to the window again in the leg, and the wounded agent staggered into the kitchen.

A hallway phone began to ring. Thanks, Vochek, you got their attention. Too late.

A second Cellar agent had also made a retreat into the kitchen, firing at Pilgrim from an awkward angle, pinning him down. Bullets cracked into the back of the pine chairs at the dinner table.

“Abort!” Pilgrim yelled in the pause between the shots. “Hector killed Teach!”

Silence. The pause lengthened and he risked bolting from the table down the hallway.

As he ran toward the end of the hall, the lights came on.

Pilgrim could see on the stairwell a young man no more than twenty-three: black-haired, wearing eyeglasses, mouth twisted in fright, holding a Glock with trembling hands. Hector crouched at the bottom of the stairs, aiming at the kid.

Pilgrim fired and the bullet sizzled hard into Hector’s gun, the impact powering the weapon from his hand. Hector staggered into a room beyond the stairs, Pilgrim firing, the back of Hector’s jacket tearing as a bullet hit him between neck and arm. But Hector kept going, out the front.

The young Arab swiveled his gun toward Pilgrim, firing blindly in panic.

Pilgrim retreated back down the hallway and out the back door. The remaining two Cellar agents had fled the kitchen and were running across the yard, the uninjured one carrying the man Pilgrim had shot.

Pilgrim hit the grass, ran around the house toward the stone wall.

A blast of gunfire erupted from the house’s upper windows. The CIA trainees were awake and pissed. Bullets churned the lawn by his feet. They were shooting at him in the darkness, thinking he was the enemy.