Collision

He moved to a corner table, far from potential listeners, and punched the number he and Nicky were supposed to call to confirm the job was done. The phone had been left for them in their hotel room and they were supposed to call only once. The number had a 972 area code and Jackie knew it was Dallas; he’d looked it up, out of curiosity, in the Yellow Pages at the hotel the night before.

It rang three times, then a man answered. “Yes?”

At first he couldn’t speak. Then he said: “It went bad. Nicky’s dead.” He explained.

He could sense a simmering anger building on the other side of the phone. “If you had called earlier, I would have been able to warn my other team.”

Jackie bit his lip. “Other team?”

“The first man you all were supposed to kill is called Pilgrim. The job had a second component, the kidnapping of a woman who is Pilgrim’s boss. Missing Pilgrim meant he killed four more of my men after he killed your brother.”

You’re going to whine and my brother’s dead, Jackie thought. No, sir, not today. “Not my problem,” he snapped. “You don’t tell me the big picture, then don’t hold me accountable for it. That’s your mistake, not mine.” He tried to put the iron in his voice he’d heard Nicky use with a troublesome client. It was never a good idea to piss off an assassin, no matter who you were.

A painful stretch of silence. Jackie thought, First hand you play alone and you screw up.

“Did you deliver the package to Reynolds’s office?” The client’s voice was ice.

“No, sir.”

“Deliver the package.” Now the rage was clear.

“Absolutely not,” Jackie said. “Cops are crawling over that office like goddamned fleas.” Best to simply assert what was undoubtedly true. “I can see them from here.”

The duo began to play a plaintive Willie Nelson song, and the voice said. “Where are you?”

“Uh, a bar.”

“A bar.” Disbelief and fury, crammed into two words.

“I’m not drinking.”

“The surviving members of the other team will pick you up. You miss the rendezvous and I’ll tell them your mistake is the reason why half their team is dead. I’m not sure what they’ll cut off first-your tongue or your hand.”

Jackie swallowed the rock in his throat. “And then what?”

“You help them finish the job of killing Pilgrim.”

Jackie wasn’t eager to face a man who’d defied Nicky’s bullet and killed five men today. But he had no choice, he told himself. The job wasn’t about the payment, it was about payback. Nicky would have hunted this Pilgrim bastard night and day to avenge Jackie.

Jackie tried to put steel in his voice. “Where do I meet your men?”

7

Sam Hector sat at his desk, five cell phones spread before him, waiting for the call that would change his life.

With one hand he clicked an antique Chinese abacus. He owned a sizeable collection of abaci from around the world: ivory counters from Africa, jade calculators from China, a prized set from India that had once tallied the household accounts of a maharajah. He loved the soft feel of the beads, the click of their collisions on the rods. Ben Forsberg had given him the one he played with now, a souvenir from a trip to Beijing Ben and his poor dead wife, Emily, had taken before their marriage. It was his favorite.

With the other hand Sam Hector paged through his e-mail inbox. The list was long and from every hotspot of the world. Communiques from Iraq, where he had close to a thousand military contractors working security details from Kirkuk to Basra. From Ethiopia, where a select team of his employees offered advice to the regime on dealing with an insurrection in the south. From Afghanistan, where his teams provided protection for both Afghan and coalition dignitaries and had helped stop a suicide bombing at a school-one of the contractors had shot the bomber dead, unfortunately also killing a local guard who’d grappled with the bomber. Regrettable. He forwarded a note to his Afghan operations director, encouraging him to provide a bit of money for the hapless guard’s family. Anonymously of course; Hector Global couldn’t be held liable for doing their job. War was full of tragic accidents, and the work that Hector Global did was all for the common good. Not just America’s, Sam thought, but for the world’s.

The next e-mail made him frown: a manager in Baghdad, saying that many of the security workers were expressing unhappiness with their tours and the level of violence they faced. If they didn’t like working for Hector Global, they could get on a flight home, Sam believed. Aisle or window, chicken or pasta, pick your seat, he thought. But it had been a rough couple of weeks; he’d lost five men in three separate incidents. It was a relief he did not have to pay medical benefits or life insurance; the contractors were responsible for their own.

Worse, he’d lost the past seven contracts he’d bid on for Iraq work, and the contracts for domestic security were starting to dry up. He had three thousand employees on the payroll; he needed every deal he could land.