Collision

The van skittered back into the wrong lane and wove like a drunken dancer to avoid three cars. Pilgrim saw the disbelieving faces of the drivers, all heading back to suburban comfort after an extra-long day of pushing paper or making phone calls or chained to e-mails, death suddenly inches from them, as he tried to give the van room to maneuver.

An empty stretch of road lay ahead; there must be a red light on the other side of the hill, stopping the flow of cars. Pilgrim thumbed down the passenger window, floored the BMW past the van, spun across the empty asphalt so he straddled the lanes. He aimed his gun at the van’s front tires and fired through the open window. Flashes of bullets sparking against the tire cover and bumper told him he’d missed. He was hurting, his arm wasn’t steady.

The van plowed past him, the spiky blond leaning past the driver and leveling fire into the front of the BMW. Pilgrim ducked as the windshield shattered. He sat up as the van passed and floored the car, trying to catch up, but he felt one of the damaged tires part from the rim and he overcorrected as the road curved. The crippled BMW smashed through a railing onto a sharply sloping hill, sliding thirty feet downward in a dust of limestone scrabble and hammering into the cedars lining a landscaped backyard.

He blinked. Broken glass littered his hair and his lap; the passenger door was crumpled by a tree. The engine died. He opened his door, clambered to his feet.

He was unhurt, but the BMW was undriveable.

Pilgrim stumbled, then found his footing on the scrabble. He ran into the backyard’s house, kicking open the back door. A family stood by a dinner table that faced onto the yard: a dad, a mom, two teenage girls. They all stared at him over their pot roast, salad, and potatoes au gratin. Dinner smelled delicious. He raised the gun, aimed it at the dad.

“Pardon the intrusion,” he said. “I need your car.”

The mom retreated back to the kitchen counter, tossed him the keys. Pilgrim caught them with one hand and said, “Thanks.” He hated the next part. He ordered the family into a utility room without an exit. Closed the door, shoved a chair up hard against the knob. “You sit here for the next two hours. I’ve got a cop radio, so you call the cops, I’m back and you do not want me coming back here,” he yelled through the door. He needed them scared to the bone, he needed them to give him enough time to vanish. He could hear the parents comforting the girls with whispers.

The keys were to a maroon-colored Volvo station wagon. He roared out of the driveway, turned back onto FM Road 2222. A police car stood where the BMW had peeled through the railing, and he drove by at the speed limit and didn’t glance over at the officers, who would probably find and free the family in the next ten minutes. He topped the next hill and floored the station wagon. The van was long gone. He drove a couple of miles, hoping he’d winged a tire, given the van a flat. But they were gone. He headed right as FM Road 2222 came to an end and forked into two separate streets, headed down a side road, pulled into a Chinese restaurant’s parking lot, tried to marshal his brain. Where would they take Teach and who could help him?

He had no one to call. That was the beauty of the Cellar-you never knew the other operatives’ real names or how to reach them. Barker had a real name that wasn’t Barker and probably had two or three other names he operated under. Pilgrim was just the name Pilgrim used in the Cellar, as he lived through a series of false names. No one could betray you.

Except Teach, who was the only person who knew every detail of every job.

Her brain was the prize. Her brain could break the Cellar, put every operative in the group in prison or in crosshairs.

It was an unusual opponent, he thought, who could hire an ex-IRA assassin and a group of Arab gunmen to come to Texas to do dirty work. And Barker had claimed to find nothing unusual in Adam Reynolds’s bank accounts or e-mail records-but since Barker had been in the enemy’s pocket, then he would have lied and destroyed any evidence linking Adam Reynolds and himself back to the enemy.

Pilgrim thumbed through the call log on Barker’s cell phone. If Barker’s day was to end with Teach kidnapped and Pilgrim dead, then the traitorous young man didn’t have to be overly careful in erasing his tracks. The call log held what was to be expected as they’d worked their job on Reynolds over the three days: calls to Teach, calls to Pilgrim’s phone. But there was a call to an Austin local number Pilgrim didn’t recognize.