Jeff Abbott - Collision

“Ben, I understand he’s your friend, but his name is cropping up here way too much for me. I don’t know anything about him-”

“He urged me to come see him. Said he’d get me a good lawyer. The best money could buy. But he absolutely refused to tell me who was behind the Office of Strategic Initiatives.”

“So do you trust him?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. A real friend would have told me everything I needed to know. Maybe we never know people as well as we think we do.”

Pilgrim finished his pizza, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “And here you are with me. Instead of your old friend.”

“Because you need help. You can’t stop these people alone. I’m just doing what’s right and necessary. Same as you.”

“It might be necessary, but it’s not right.”

“Are the people you killed bad or not?”

Pilgrim shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you campfire stories.”

“Spare me the gory details.”

Pilgrim sat at the table, drank from his water bottle. “I killed three terrorism financiers in Pakistan. One was a Pakistani government official. So no way our government could own that one. A couple of times I killed people selling secrets to the Chinese.” He took another sip from the bottle. “I killed a British gun runner in Colombia who was trying to cut a deal between UK extremist groups and the Cali narcotics rings for financing, to kill British judges. The guy was supposed to be alone; his girlfriend was with him. I had to kill her, too. A single shot to the heart. She started to scream and never finished it.” His mouth narrowed into a thin line.

“Did she know he was with the extremists?”

“I assume. Her brother was the head of the ring.”

“Then she made her choice in her associates.”

“But I assume. Maybe she was clean, just getting a nice vacation in South America. Maybe she didn’t know her brother and her boyfriend were major assholes.”

“Odds are she did know. People have to bear responsibility for their choices and their actions, Pilgrim.”

“Then I’m doomed.” He looked at Ben. “Ben, you don’t ever get used to it. Ever.”

“But you’re fighting the good fight.”

“So you approve of what I do.”

“I understand the need for it,” Ben said.

“But do you understand the price?” Pilgrim was silent for several seconds. “Once, I made my biggest mistake. I tried to destroy a terror cell in Indonesia. Years ago. I failed miserably. I lost… everything.”

For the first time Ben saw a tremble touch Pilgrim’s hands.

“I guess you don’t want to talk about it,” Ben said.

Pilgrim didn’t answer; Ben heard only the passing of traffic on the nearby road, the soft hiss of the tires on pavement.

“I don’t need a friend, Ben. I just need your help to stop these people.”

“All right.”

“I’m thinking… we’re missing the obvious. Adam is hunting terrorists and the sniper who takes him down has terrorist ties. What if the reason Adam died is because the terrorists found out about what he was doing? Maybe they were watching him and they saw me and they learned what Teach and I are. Maybe this mess is way more about Adam than you and me.”

Ben was silent.

“Terrorists operating on American soil, with serious resources, targeting the people who could expose them or bring them down. This fight could be much more important than getting Teach back, or saving the Cellar, or clearing your name,” Pilgrim said. “Do you understand that?”

Ben nodded. “Maybe he really found terrorists here, and the Arabs in Austin were part of it…”

Pilgrim stood. “We have to find who’s behind this McKeen company.”

“Wait. You said you lost everything. Did you lose the kid in your drawings?”

Pilgrim shuffled feet on the grimy carpet. “Don’t, Ben.”

“Is she your daughter?”

“Please. Do I look like a family man?”

“Not now. Maybe before you were a guy like you.”

“Leave it alone, Ben. You don’t hear me asking you about your wife.” He took a deep breath. “All right, business consultant, what do you need to find out about McKeen as a company?”

“A laptop and an Internet connection.”

Pilgrim pulled a red matchbook from his pocket and tossed it on the table. Ben picked it up. Blarney’s Steakhouse.

“Very popular with the imported gunman crowd,” Pilgrim said. “And look there.” He pointed at a line below the phone number: “FREE WI-FI 24/7.”

“A crowded restaurant? Absolutely not. My face is all over television,” Ben said.

“Not the face I’m going to give you.”

Ben barely recognized himself. He wore a fake dental front to make his teeth seem bigger; and slightly tinted glasses from Pilgrim’s cache of goodies that made his blue eyes appear brown. His blond hair went under a baseball cap.

Blarney’s Steakhouse-the original of the regional chain-sat in the prime corner of a major thoroughfare in Frisco. Behind its giant shamrock sign was a glass building, where the shamrock was reproduced again, albeit smaller. The restaurant, when it had gone chain and started a slow expansion across the South, had needed an actual headquarters and had moved to the building behind it.

Blarney’s had taken everything good about Ireland and made it cheap. Badly produced Irish folk tunes warbled from speakers, the singing muffled so that patrons wouldn’t be distracted by the poetry of the lyrics. The en-trees were given names such as Dubliner Chicken and Leprechaun Lamb Chops and Erin Go Blossom, a huge fried onion appetizer. Walls were covered with obscure faux Irish sporting memorabilia, framed pages from Joyce and Yeats, reproduction street signs from towns all around Ireland.

The large bar (made to resemble an American’s ideal of the interior of an Irish castle) attached to the main restaurant was full of people watching basketball, the Dallas Mavericks rallying from behind, a win nearly in their grasp.

Ben took Pilgrim’s laptop and sat at a corner booth. He felt incredibly nervous about being out in public again-but Pilgrim said, “Hide in plain sight, you’d be surprised how few people notice anything going on around them.” Most of the bar’s patrons seemed entirely focused on their own conversations or on the close game being waged on the hardwood. “Who’s gonna look at you? They got American Idol to watch, and basketball brackets to bet on, and cell phones pressed to their ears.”

Pilgrim ordered martinis made with expensive vodka and two hefty appetizers, to keep the waitress happy, so she wouldn’t care about them staying awhile.

Ben started digging. McKeen’s Web site simply showed a banner apologizing for technical difficulties; the Web site was down. Odd. But perhaps McKeen might be suffering from media shyness after the Austin gun battle on its property. He jumped to a series of business intelligence sites where he maintained subscriptions. It was a risk to enter his password, in case people who knew his habits were hunting for him, but he had to take the chance.

McKeen was privately held, so there was scant financial data to be found other than analyst projections.

The martinis and the badly named Casey quesadillas and the Armagh artichoke dip arrived. Ben drank a hard sip of his martini. Pilgrim ate, watched the data spill across Ben’s screen in silence.

Ben read and clicked through a long march of analyst reports, news releases, and forum discussions on McKeen. Not a lot. McKeen started off as a construction company, divested into retail and office properties about ten years ago, mostly in the South. They started doing specialized construction for the government, restoring facilities in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.