Barry Eisler - Fault line

Alex shook his head. “I don't… I don't know how you can live like this.”

“I'd be dead if I didn't.”

“I mean, it must be exhausting.”

“It just seems that way to you because you don't know what to look for. You don't have any filters.”

“What were you looking for out the window?”

“A place someone could set up a laser to read conversations off the window glass.”

“You can't be serious. You can really do that?”

“It's not easy, but it can be done. No sense taking chances.”

Alex sat down in his chair, glad Ben hadn't taken it already. If he hadn't been playing with his equipment, he probably would have. “Why did you say all that stuff to Osborne about being a missionary?”

Ben laughed without mirth and took one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. “I didn't like the smell of that guy. I didn't want to talk to him. He's your boss, right?”

“How could you tell?”

“I just could.”

“Yeah, well, all the more reason not to make him think my brother's a fanatic.”

“It was the right thing to tell him to cut short the conversation. Fat cats who spend their days collecting five hundred dollars an hour to move paper around don't like to engage people who do charity work. It makes them feel their lives are shallow.”

“You think my life is shallow?”

Ben looked around the office. “You've been gone a couple of days, right? Anything seem out of place here to you?”

Alex wasn't going to let him just pretend he didn't hear. “I said, you think my life is shallow?”

There was a pause. Ben said, “It doesn't matter what I think.”

“No, I want to know.”

“I don't know, Alex. You live in the same house, you work in an office five miles away from it, you went to college and graduate school and law school all at the same place, all right here… I mean, have you ever done anything different? Ever taken a risk?”

Alex could feel his ears burning. “So what? Stanford was the best school. And you know what kind of tax hit you take in California when you sell a house?”

Even as he said it, it sounded lame. But fuck Ben, not everything was about taking risks.

“You think you're a big risk taker,” he said. “But you want to know what I think?”

Ben glanced away as though bored. “Not really.”

“You sucked in school, you quit college, and you couldn't have cut it in the Valley. You stumbled into the only thing you seem to be any good at, and ever since, you've been making a virtue of necessity. You don't do what you do because it's worthy and important. You do it because you don't know how to do anything else.”

Ben unwrapped a piece of chewing gum and put it in his mouth. He extended the pack to Alex. Alex wanted to slap it out of his hand.

“Anything seem out of place here to you?”

Alex stared at him for a moment, then decided to drop it. “Let me see,” he said.

As soon as he started looking, he noticed it. There had been eight stacks of paper on his worktable. One of them was missing now. The one on Hilzoy.

“What the hell?” he said. He started poking through the piles, confirming what he already knew. It was as though the Hilzoy paperwork had just been… deleted.

“What is it?” Ben asked.

“My file on Hilzoy. Obsidian. It's gone.”

“You sure?”

“It was right here on this table. This is where I keep active matters.”

He looked through his filing cabinet. “Yeah, it's gone.”

He sat down and called Osborne. “David, you didn't borrow any files from my office, did you?”

“Why, is something missing?”

“David, is there a reason you can't just give a straightforward answer to a question?”

The second it came out, he couldn't believe he said it. Even Ben was looking at him with surprise.

There was a pause. Osborne said, “No, I didn't borrow your files.” And hung up.

Ben said, “I wouldn't worry about him thinking I'm a zealot. You can probably piss him off all by yourself.”

Alex didn't answer. It had felt good to snap at Osborne. He'd half expected Ben to be impressed by it, too… except now Ben was criticizing him, or mocking him.

Well, whatever. He had a right to be cranky. And he was getting tired of taking shit.

“Could anyone else have borrowed that file?” Ben said.

“Well, there's Alisa, my secretary, but she never takes anything without putting it back before she goes home.”

“Why don't you take a look around her station to make sure?”

Alex got up and checked. No documents. He came back and sat down, shaking his head.

“Anyone else?” Ben said.

Alex thought for a moment. “Sarah, I guess, the associate who was helping me on it. But she wouldn't take something from my office. Or if she did, she would have left a note or a message, or something.”

“Check with her anyway.”

Alex called Sarah on her mobile. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry to bother you so early.”

“No problem. I'm just pulling into the parking lot. What's up?”

There weren't many people who got to the office earlier than Sarah. Alex was one of them.

“I can't seem to find some of my files on Hilzoy. You didn't borrow anything, did you?”

“Of course not. I would have told you if I had.”

“Yeah, I figured. Just wanted to be sure. Thanks.”

He clicked off and shook his head at Ben. Ben said, “We still doing things for the sake of argument?”

Alex swallowed. First his house, then his office… what the hell was this?

“No,” he said. “Something is going on here.”

“What would they get by taking your paperwork?”

Alex thought for a moment. “Nothing. We still have chron files, there's tape backup… and I could probably duplicate a lot of what's missing from e-mail correspondence, if it came to that.”

“Have you checked your e-mail?”

Alex fired up his terminal and went through the correspondence. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It's all missing. All my files of the Obsidian source code.”

He went out and checked the chron file. He couldn't find it. He double-checked, cross-referenced. Nothing. Obsidian was gone.

He came back to his office. “Someone took it all,” he said. “Everything. It's all missing.”

“What about the tape backup?”

“I don't know how to check that. I'll have to talk to someone in IT, when they get in.”

“Trust me, the tape backup is gone, too,” Ben said.

“How do you know?”

“Someone came in here in the last couple of nights and ran a professional black bag op. They'd done their homework. They knew to scrub your working files, your chron files, and the relevant e-mail correspondence. You think they overlooked something as obvious as tape backup?”

Alex sat silently, dumbfounded. He had no idea what to do.

“Here's the question, then,” Ben said, looking at him. “Why are you getting a pass?”

“What do you mean?”

“They killed two people on two sides of the country. One of them, apparently, in a very sophisticated way, so that it looked like a heart attack. They could have killed you anytime. Why haven't they?”

“Well, I'd sure like to know.”

Ben drummed his fingers along his thigh. “I think they made a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“The perfect is the enemy of the good. And they were trying to be perfect.”

“Hey, Ben? I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Somebody wants this invention. No, that's the wrong way to put it. They don't want anyone else to have it, meaning they don't want anyone else to know about it. Now put yourself in their shoes. Disappearing the invention is your goal. What do you do?”

“Well, you can't, it's too-”