Barry Eisler - Fault line

Randol shrugged. “Most burglars are pretty inept. The ones adept enough to break in quietly and without damaging anything are too smart to carry a gun. It ups the penalties if they're caught.”

“Well, I'm not sure he had a gun. I told you, I didn't see that well. It was dark, there was a flashlight in my face, and I was pretty damn scared.”

“All right. No gun, my guess is, someone broke in here hoping to burglarize the place, and when you surprised him, he got the hell out.”

“And closed the door as he left?” Alex asked.

“Sure,” Tibaldi said. “You'd be amazed at the weird things perps do. He probably thought if he closed the door, no one would notice he'd been inside.”

Alex wasn't persuaded. If the guy had bolted out in such a hurry that he'd missed the wallet he'd gone right past on his exit, what had possessed him to take the time to close the door?

“Why would he break in if he knew someone was home?” Alex asked.

“How would he have known you were home?” Tibaldi asked.

“My car was right in my driveway.”

Tibaldi nodded. “I noticed you've got several newspapers at the end of the walkway. Burglar thinks, ‘This guy's not home-he caught a taxi to the airport.’ Or whatever. Point is, he thinks the newspapers trump the car. You have to put yourself in the perp's shoes. They look for things like that. Newspapers in the driveway, mail in the mailbox, packages in front of the door.”

“Why pick the bathroom lock, then? By then he knew someone was home.”

Tibaldi shrugged. “At that point, he's committed. He's already made his decision, already committed a crime. Some mentalities, they'd rather double down than back off. Look, you have to accept that in all crimes, there's a certain random element. It's why conspiracy theorists love JFK's assassination and nine-eleven so much. You can't ever get all the threads to tie up neatly. There's always something that doesn't make sense.”

Randol asked, “Did you get a good look at him? Could you describe him, pick him out of a lineup?”

Alex tried to picture what he'd seen. “It was dark. I…” What had he seen? Suddenly, he wasn't sure about any of it. He felt drained and useless.

“Black? White?”

Alex shook his head. “I don't know.”

“Well, at least you scared him off,” Tibaldi said. “Nice move, with the bleach. And you didn't lose anything.”

Alex looked at them. “So you think this was just a random break-in?”

Randol didn't answer, and Alex realized he was assessing his own confidence in Alex's responses. After a long moment he nodded and said, “If he didn't have a gun, and you don't have enemies, that's what it looks like. I think you had a bad guy casing the neighborhood, he saw those newspapers, he took a closer look, he saw the door has only one lock, not even a deadbolt, which looks to be what, forty years old, I'm guessing?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Probably that old.”

“Watch this,” Randol said. He stepped out and closed the door behind him. From the other side, Alex heard a rasping sound, then a click, and then the door opened.

“Damn,” Alex said. “How did you do that?”

Randol handed Alex a thin piece of plastic, hard but flexible, about four inches by four. “Slide it between the door and the jamb, push back the mechanism, you're inside in less time than it takes to use a key. Get deadbolt locks. Have the jambs and frames reinforced. Make it harder for the criminal.”

Alex didn't like the rebuke behind the words, but the man had a point.

Alex scrubbed a hand across his face. He was a weird combination of keyed up and exhausted. “Well, thank you very much for coming out in the middle of the night, or, whatever, I guess it's the morning,” he said.

“Not a problem, sir,” Randol said. “We're glad you're okay.”

Alex left every light on after they left. He knew it was ridiculous, but he couldn't help thinking: What if he comes back?

But come on. A burglar coming back to the same house he got surprised at and ran out of earlier the same night? The police might be there, who knows what.

Ridiculous.

The way Randol had opened the front door, though… that was unbelievable. The miracle wasn't that Alex had gotten away tonight; it was that no one had tried to rob him until now.

Not that the guy would come back. But if he did, it wasn't like Alex could stop him. There was effectively no lock on the door, he didn't own a gun.

He remembered the sound the door had made as it slid stealthily open. How terrified and vulnerable he had felt in the bath.

The hell with it. He'd just stay at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto. He did enough business meals in their Quattro restaurant. Might as well sleep there tonight. If he stayed here, he would lie awake the rest of the night, imagining every joint that settled was a footstep, every whoosh of the gas heater the sound of the front door again.

He grabbed a change of clothes and looked through the front window long and hard before venturing out.

Alex slept fitfully for a few hours at the hotel. When he woke up, the brilliant Bay Area sun was shining through the windows onto the white bed linens. He scrubbed his face and thought about the night before. At the time, he'd been panicked and confused. He had thought it was just a burglar. But now, he realized he'd been missing something obvious.

The inventor killed, Alex's contact at the patent office dead, and someone breaking into his house, all in the space of what, thirty-six hours? You didn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe coincidences didn't happen like that.

What were those games he had liked to play in Highlights magazine when he was a kid? What do these things have in common?- that was one of them. There would be a bunch of seemingly disparate pictures, but if you looked closely, if you thought about it, you'd realize they all had right angles, or all began with the letter A, or whatever.

What Alex, Hilzoy, and Hank all had in common was Obsidian. Even if it was a coincidence, the overlap was obvious. The question was, why? What was it about Obsidian that led to someone wanting to kill for it?

No, it didn't make sense. Companies that wanted to acquire a promising technology or neutralize a threatening one did it with cash. It was easy, and it was legal. Hell, Hilzoy could have been had for under seven figures. That wasn't even a rounding error for players in the computer security field.

But whoever was behind all this, how did they even know about the technology? The patent application was secret.

Well, something could have leaked. Who knows who Hilzoy might have told? Who knows who saw what in the patent office? And it wasn't as if Obsidian was for Alex's eyes only at Sullivan, Greenwald. There was Osborne, for one, and of course Sarah.

He told himself he was probably being ridiculous, but better safe than sorry. He called Detective Gamez on the mobile number on the man's card. He told him about the break-in. He told him he knew it sounded crazy, but… What if Hank's death hadn't been a heart attack? How sure were they? Because the inventor and the examiner-it just seemed like quite a coincidence, no? To his surprise, Gamez didn't treat him like he was a nut job. He told him he would look into it and call Alex back.

Alex drove to the office. The first thing he did there was call a locksmith. It was going to be hard enough to sleep in the house after what had happened. Turning the place into a fortress would make it a little easier. Then he called a gun shop. Apparently, he could buy a gun but would have to wait ten days to pass a background check before picking it up. Shit, he'd always thought background checks were a good idea. But he needed something right now.