Ben pressed his face to the window. “It’s not a fighter jet,” he said. “It’s a private jet, but bigger than ours.”
Vochek said, “They’re too close.”
“Wait a sec,” Pilgrim said, and he pulled the earphone plug so the radio could be heard in the cabin.
“This is Pritchard. The plane will escort you to New Orleans Lakefront Airport. Upon arrival, you will toss out any weapons, leave the plane, hands on head, and then you will lie flat on the tarmac. Do you understand?”
“Understood,” Pilgrim said. “Thanks for the escort.” He clicked off the line.
“It’s just a precaution,” Vochek said. “You’ve been rogue for ten years. They just want to make sure you behave.”
“Or make sure they control us,” Ben said.
“After they kill me,” Pilgrim said, “they’ll either promote you as a reward, or kill you because you know too much.” Vochek started to shake her head and Pilgrim held up a hand. “Watch your back. At least until the ink’s dry on your promotion.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“Tell me,” Ben said, “what was going to be the end result of finding all the illicit groups like the Cellar?”
“Shut them down. They’re not accountable.”
“Right. And then what? Trials for all the participants and those who gave them their orders, a public spectacle, the dirtiest laundry of our government aired for the world to see? Or was the shutdown going to be discreet? You’d have to find a way to shut everyone up.”
“We certainly weren’t going to eliminate people.”
“But you weren’t going to give them passes or pardons,” Ben said.
“No, I suppose not.”
“Forgive me for not wanting to step in front of a firing squad,” Pilgrim said.
The gleam of New Orleans, dimmed since the storm, began to unfold beneath them. The radio sounded, the Lakefront Airport-where jets such as theirs would normally land-gave Pilgrim approach instructions.
Now they arrowed across the width of Lake Pontchartrain, the huge lake to the north of New Orleans, one source of the deadly tidal surge that flooded the city. Coming up fast on the city proper.
The radio repeated landing instructions.
Pilgrim scanned the controls. He listened to the reported positions of the planes around him, gauging distance and speed, measuring their own distance from Lakefront and Louis Armstrong New Orleans International.
“This’ll work,” he said, half to himself, then he dove the plane toward the waters of the lake in a steep dive.
Ben pressed his face to the window; the Homeland plane veered downward as they shot toward earth, trying to stay close to them.
“He’s crazy, Ben, for God’s sakes!” Vochek grabbed at Pilgrim and one-handed he shoved her back in her seat.
“Ben, give me the gun, now,” she said.
“No.” He didn’t point the gun at her but he kept it close. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“You’re as crazy as he is,” she said.
Air Traffic Control for Lakefront Airport was not happy, calmly warning Pilgrim that he did not have clearance for the approach he was taking. He raced low over the long cup of Lake Pontchartrain, but he had slowed his descent, flying a bare two hundred feet above the surface, and he came in low over the city. In the puddles of lamplight Ben could see people on the street, watching the plane in surprise and fear, perhaps sure the plane was verging on a crash, before it went past in an instant.
The Homeland plane was the only other aircraft close to them. Pilgrim zoomed over the Superdome, rising to skirt its top, took a turn over the French Quarter, going low again, driving hard along the Mississippi River toward the Lower Ninth Ward. Below in the bright glow of the moon lay a ghostly web of roads, highways, and devastation left over from Katrina, now taking on its own sad permanence. Ben peered at wide swatches of land where nothing had been rebuilt; many homes still lay on limp and broken deathbeds. FEMA trailers dotted yards. He watched the altimeter dip: He was at two hundred feet, soaring fast over the broken city. The engines’ roar made a booming echo against the ground.
He took a hard, screaming turn, downward toward the ruins.
The crazy bastard was going to land the plane. In the streets. Vochek could see below that it was madness: power lines, still-tilted poles, front yards jagged with fencing, ruined houses, trying to crawl back from death.
The gun. Ben still held it, not pointed at anyone, and his own mouth was a thin line of worry.
“Ben. Talk him out of this.”
“He knows what he’s doing.”
Doubtful. She grabbed at the gun and slammed her elbow hard into Ben’s chest. She got both hands on the gun and tried to wrench it from his grasp.
Pilgrim turned the plane hard again, banking, slowing, searching for enough street.
The force of the sudden turn threw Vochek off Ben. He put the gun on the side away from her. Then a small but pile-driving fist hit Ben in the back of the head, smacked his face against the window. His lip split, blood smeared his teeth.
He folded himself over the pistol. He could not let her get the gun; she’d force them to land at Lakefront. The plane took another wrench to port, Pilgrim trying to slow before he ran out of road to land. As the windows dipped, Ben saw the headlights of a car on a deserted street, close enough almost to touch.
Vochek landed on his back, one arm closing around his throat, the other hand’s fingers digging for his eyes, saying, “Please, Ben, give it to me before he kills us.”
Pilgrim needed asphalt. In the moon’s gleam and the spill of light from cars and houses, he saw five threads of pavement, one a busier cross street on the edge of the neighborhood, where the roads and the lots had been swept clean. The other two choices were less-crowded roads. One had fewer houses and FEMA trailers and chain-link fences dotting the yards and was a straight shot. It had the fewest cars parked on the curb. No sign of the Homeland plane close by; they were far above, circling, watching, summoning the local police to intercept Pilgrim. Taking bets if he was actually crazy enough to land.
Well, why wouldn’t he be? He had nothing left to lose. Nothing. First time he’d been told to do anything by anyone other than Teach in ten years, and she was dead. He took no more orders. The realization steadied his hands on the controls.
He descended fast, hearing Vochek and Ben struggling behind him. A pickup truck chuffed through an intersection at a crosshatch on the road, going the opposite way, maybe thirty feet below him as they dropped. Doubt-normally a stranger-filled him, and a sour taste broke in his mouth. He could kill someone, and he was supposed to be a Good Guy, eliminating Bad Guys. A minivan, full of kids, or a car, driven by a high school girl, or a motorcycle, with some regular nice guy coming back from a long day’s work of rebuilding the nearly lost city-no, he wouldn’t let that happen.
He dove the plane down toward the empty blacktop. Had to time it just right, pull up with room to spare, bring it down on three points, with room to slow-
Then the gun erupted.
Vochek knew how to hurt. The eyes, the groin, the bending back of the finger that caused surprised agony. She worked all this brutal magic on Ben, saying, “Ben, let go,” again and again. But he wouldn’t. She stepped on his wounded foot and he howled. She got a grip on the pistol. He raised the gun and she twisted it, felt his finger depress the trigger. The gun barked. The window shattered; a flick of light hit the wing.
“Goddamn it!” Pilgrim yelled.
Ben kicked back with all his strength, trapped Vochek between himself and her window. He kept her pinned, tried to pry her hands from the gun.
“Nearly there,” Pilgrim yelled.
Wheels hit the blacktop. The plane bounced hard, Ben nearly thrown to the ceiling. He kept his iron grip on the gun. He landed back on Vochek, knocking the wind from her. Wings screamed as Pilgrim cut the engines and lifted the flaps. A boom thundered and a shiver rocked the plane, sparks dancing past the window, as a wing clipped metal-a mail box, a street sign, a chain-link fence-and the plane rumbled forward. Another shriek of protesting metal, a jarring bump, then the plane skidded to a stop.
Pilgrim turned and pulled the gun from both their hands. He put it to Vochek’s head.
“The deal is off,” Pilgrim said. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Pilgrim…,” Ben started.
“The police will be here in probably ninety seconds and we can’t trust Homeland. Come on.” He opened the door, grabbed Ben, pushed him out onto the pavement.
“Don’t do this,” Vochek gasped.
“Vochek, don’t trust anybody. I don’t want to see your lovely face again.”
Pilgrim jumped to the asphalt. Behind the plane, a pickup truck and a minivan slammed to a stop. Pilgrim ran toward the truck, his gun out and high to see, and gestured the two women out of the cab. The women stared, agog at the crumpled-winged plane on the road and the crazy man waving a gun. They obeyed, hands up, one crying.
“Very sorry, need the truck. You’ll get it back.” Pilgrim shoved Ben across to the passenger seat, climbed into the driver’s seat. He wheeled the truck hard in a circle, tore around the plane by driving on a grassy edge of the road, and roared away. Through the open window the damp breath of the neighborhood smelled of wet and decay. The sirens rose in their approach: fire truck, police, ambulance.
Above them circled the Homeland plane.
“Ben,” Pilgrim said, “I should have given you the choice to stay with her.”
“We said we’d stick together.” He thought he saw for a moment a flicker of relief on Pilgrim’s face. There, then gone. He must have imagined it.
“They’re gonna chase us hard. You ready?”
“Yes.”
Pilgrim tore along a road of houses of patchwork brick and wood, homes trying to arise from the drowned soil, stripped down and rebuilt.
“I can still hear that plane.” Ben leaned out the window. “He’s banking, trying to keep us in his sights.”
Pilgrim swerved the wheel hard, catching sight of a police car flashing sirens in the rearview, and he wrenched the pickup into a two-wheeling turn toward the thoroughfare of St. Claude Avenue and headed west.
A deputy’s car picked them up, followed, lights blazing.
Traffic was light and Pilgrim swerved and accelerated around cars, ducking onto side roads, and then back onto St. Claude. Ben braced himself for the impact that would surely come when Pilgrim miscalculated and rammed into a bumper or a barrier. Pilgrim nearly clipped a construction sign that marked where the street was being repaired, power-turned hard, drove across two yards, and veered down a side street. He was out of sight of the pursuing deputy’s car and he stood on the brakes, revved into a grassy parking lot full of cars and trucks, a banner announcing a Saturday night revival meeting, presumably connected to a church that sat back from the street, in redbrick grandeur. Slammed on brakes, nestled in between two large trucks in a loading area for the event. The jet went overhead.
They ducked down and Ben thought, This is how it ends, me arrested with an ex-spy in a church parking lot. The jet’s whine passed, the deputy’s sirens faded, and they eased out of the truck. Pilgrim started feeling along bumpers for key cases, Ben testing for unlocked doors.
More sirens sounded, patrols responding to calls about the downed plane. The energetic strains of modern worship music rose from the tent that stood pitched near the church. Then the sirens faded again. The buzz of a helicopter replaced the churning whine of the Homeland plane.
“I got a winner,” Pilgrim said, pulling loose a key box from a bumper. “Come on, before the helicopter spots us. They can fly lower and slower, stick to us like glue.”
They pulled away from the revival in a sedate blue Ford sedan.
“I hope this isn’t the preacher’s car,” Ben said. “We’re going to hell.”
“I’m the only one hell-bound. We’ll find you a place to lay low.” They could hear the helicopter widening its circles. Pilgrim wheeled the sedan back into traffic, at normal speed.
“Lay low. Forget it. He killed Emily. I’m not sitting on my ass.”
“Ben. Hector specifically took over the Cellar for this big job. That means I have to fight several people from the Cellar. It’ll be like fighting a whole gang of me. You did your part. You don’t have to take this on…”
“I know I’m not good at shooting and fighting, but I can help you.”
“Not now. I promise you, I will kill him for you. For everyone he’s hurt.” Pilgrim’s mouth became a thin slash. “For Teach, and for your wife. You won’t have a long wait.”
“Good Lord. You know where Hector and the Cellar are at.” Of course he knew, and he wasn’t going to tell Vochek or the authorities until he knew what kind of reception awaited him and Ben in New Orleans.
“I have an idea,” Pilgrim said.
“The Cellar had a safe house here.”
“Good guess.”
“If Hector has them believing you turned against Teach-same as Green and De La Pena did-they’ll kill you,” Ben said.
“Yes, they will. They don’t know me from any other jerk on the streets. Hector has all of Teach’s pass codes, bank information-he’ll seem very legit in their eyes. I will look like the enemy.”
“Then let me fight him from another angle. Barker called someone at the Hotel Marquis de Lafayette. Last person he called before he left that house, to betray you and Teach.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to know who that person is. We know Hector’s working for Vochek’s boss on security. But maybe he’s working for someone else, too.”
“Fine,” Pilgrim said. “You go get phone records, I’ll go shoot people.”
“You better calm down,” Ben said, “or you’re going to make a mistake and get killed.”
Pilgrim pulled the sedan over to the side of the road. “Pardon my anger. I’ve lost my life, same as you. But I’ve done it twice now. First I lost my family, my career; and now I’ve lost Teach and the Cellar. I wanted to retire two days ago. I wanted to leave and be in the real world. He killed my hope.” For a moment he was silent, fingers clenching above the steering wheel. “But there’s no place out here for me now. As long as I could stay in the Cellar, then I could hope it could be different for me… that I could have a real life. But I can’t. Vochek and Homeland, they’d put me in a cell, have me talking for years.”
“You offered to do that for Vochek.”
“I was desperate, Ben. To get here. Because Hector’s not winning. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. I hate the bastard as much as you do. That’s why I want you to let me help you…”
“Call me on my cell if you find anything interesting in the phone records. I’ll call you when I’ve killed Hector.” He pulled the pilot’s stolen cell phone from Ben’s hands, activated the screen, memorized the number.
“Assume we succeed, then what?”
“I walk away. You negotiate an immunity, I’ll feed you plenty to give Homeland that’ll be worth gold to them. It’ll buy you your life back.”
“Buy your own life back. You’ll always be looking over your shoulder.”
“No. I won’t.” Pilgrim drove in silence for several minutes and then turned onto Poydras. On the streets were clumps of tourists, not like in pre-Katrina days, but more than Ben had expected. “Here.” Pilgrim pulled a few hundred dollars, hoarded from his storage unit, slid them to Ben. “You won’t be able to get the records without bribery. Nothing’s cheap. The hotel’s a few blocks down that way. Good luck.”
“You almost hope I get caught.”
“You don’t want to be in the cross fire, Ben.”
Ben offered his hand. Pilgrim shook it. “Sorry. Not good at good-byes.”
“Good-bye, Randall.” Ben stepped out of the car. First and only time to use his real name, the one Vochek mentioned.
“Bye, Ben. I’m sorry. For everything.”
Ben closed the door and the car raced off into the night.