Collision(22)
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. Communiqués 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.
He put aside the abacus and typed an e-mail to the Smith woman at the State Department who’d shown the more-than-professional interest in Ben: Sure that Ben will call you tomorrow, he’s back from his getaway I believe today. I’m sure we’ll be able to come to agreement. Best, Sam. He sent it and thought: God, if Ben would have just bedded the idiotic bitch from State when she’d dropped her first hint, that contract would be signed and he’d have several million he desperately needed on the books.
But Ben wasn’t going to be bedding anyone.
The last e-mail in his inbox was from New Orleans and contained a link to a Google Map image. He studied the map for several long, silent moments. The map was the first key to his future. He committed it to memory, felt a little thrill of excitement.
One of the five phones rang; he blinked at the number display. “Hello?”
“Homeland Security has taken Ben Forsberg into custody. Evidence linked him to a dead foreign assassin killed today in Austin.”