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!”