Collision(87)
“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.