He searched the house. In the den were a portable TV, a scattering of travel magazines, pages turned down on articles about the Bahamas and Aruba, notes about availability the following week jotted in the margins. Barker was planning a vacation with his traitor’s coins. The built-in bookshelves were bare. It felt like home to Pilgrim; his own lodgings, usually changing every few months, were similarly plain.
At the back of the house, he found the master bedroom. Clothes, awaiting laundry, piled at the foot of the unmade bed. A worktable, wide and deep, occupied one corner. No computer, no papers. No trail. A cordless phone with an answering machine. He played the tape; it had been erased.
He began his search. In the back of a drawer he found three pairs of handcuffs, lengths of silk, sexual gels. A few magazines that showed couples lashed and bound to each other in more than love and mutual respect. Whatever, Pilgrim thought. Those in the Cellar led highly stressful lives.
Hidden at the back of the desk drawer he found two fake passports for Barker, under different names, which looked to be Cellar-issue. Teach used superb forgers. But Barker didn’t need to be going overseas with his work. Teach used domestic support in operations; she had Europeans to handle European ops, Americans to handle American ops. Barker and a couple of others were based near American airport hubs, to go quickly where they were needed.
So why had he been overseas?
He found one passport stamped for the United Kingdom, then Switzerland, all of two weeks ago. The other passport journeyed to Greece and then Lebanon.
The United Kingdom. Maybe to Belfast to hire the Lynch boys. Lebanon. Three weeks ago, for three days. Perhaps to hire the group who took Teach.
But then who’d hired Barker?
Pilgrim tucked Barker’s passports into his pocket.
He heard the front door open, the distinctive sound of the lock being eased, probably by the same kind of lockpick he had used. The alarm began its chime. He went to the corner of the room. He heard the door shut. Fingertips tapping in a code. Then silence.
Whoever was here knew the entry code. Pilgrim liked this visitor immediately. This visitor could tell him things.
The soft creepy-crawl of footsteps, two hushed voices, both male. The conversation—he couldn’t hear what they said—murmured on for thirty seconds.
Which meant they didn’t know he was here.
He waited. It didn’t take long. But only one came into the bedroom, and Pilgrim put the gun on the back of his head as soon as he stepped into the room. The man was wiry and compact, in his forties, head shaved bald, and he went still with professional surrender. Pilgrim moved back from him and around him, raised a finger to his lips and kept the gun firmly locked on the man’s head.
“Call your partner back here,” he whispered. “Politely and quietly.”
“I found something,” the bald guy said in a normal tone. Pilgrim pulled him back out of the line of sight of the hallway, put the bald guy between him and the door as a shield. He heard footsteps approaching, then another man, a young, heavy-built Latino, came into the room. He sported evidence of a rough day: two black eyes, a bruised mouth. He wore a suit slightly too small for him: black jacket and pants, a white dress shirt, its creases indicating that it had been recently removed from its store packaging, no tie. He stopped when he saw Pilgrim, tensed for his gun.
Pilgrim said, “Don’t.”
“You’re Pilgrim. We’re from the Cellar,” the man with the bruised face said. “Teach sent us here. I’m De La Pena. It’s my real name. This is Green.”
“Really. Where’s Teach?”
“She’s safe.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know where she’s at,” he said. “Just that she’s safe.”
Pilgrim tossed one of Barker’s handcuffs to each of them. “Face each other. Hands in front. Put a cuff on your hand and his hand opposite.” He kept his surprise that De La Pena offered a real name to him; you never shared your true identity in the Cellar.
So the guy might not be from the Cellar after all. That, or he was desperate to create trust.
The two men faced each other as though they were about to ballroom dance, slid the cuffs onto their wrists. Green’s right hand was cuffed to De La Pena’s left, Green’s left hand was chained to De La Pena’s right.
“Lock them,” Pilgrim ordered, and they shut the cuffs. Green looked pissed; he had a small mouth that went to a rosebud. De La Pena was calm. He, Pilgrim suspected, was the more dangerous one.
“These are for girls,” Green said, peevishly. “They’re a little tight.”
“Sit down,” Pilgrim said. He took their guns from them, one in each pocket. Searched their backs and legs for more weapons, found nothing. He put the guns on the desk, well out of reach.