Barry Eisler - Fault line

“Yes,” Sarah said, not taking her eyes off Ben.

“When did you learn Farsi?” Alex asked, looking at Ben.

“Correspondence course,” Ben said, still looking at Sarah.

“Your brother speaks like a native,” Sarah said. “I don't think he learned through a correspondence course. He's trying to be cute, although I don't know why. It's actually kind of rude on such short acquaintance.”

Goddamn him, the way he was looking at her. She was not going to blink.

“Yeah, he does that sometimes,” Alex said. “I wouldn't have subjected you to it if it weren't really important.”

Ben smiled at that and walked past her to one of the chairs. The smile said, Sure, you can win our little staring contest. Congratulations. It was infuriating.

Okay, she told herself. Drop it. She sat down next to Ben.

“On the phone,” Alex said, “did you start to say something was missing?”

“Yes, my file on Hilzoy. It was weird because you had just told me you couldn't find yours. What's going on?”

Alex looked at Ben and said, “Oh, man.”

“Do I need to be worried about something?” she said.

She felt Ben looking at her. “Depends on how smart you are,” he said.

She looked at him. “Assume I'm smarter than you.”

He shrugged. “Then you should be very worried.”

“Sarah,” Alex said, “I think you and I might both be in danger.”

Alex talked and Sarah listened, resisting the urge to interrupt him with questions. It was hard to know what to think. She didn't doubt the things he claimed had happened were true. She knew about Hilzoy, of course, and she could easily confirm the rest. Nor did she doubt Alex really believed there was some kind of conspiracy at work. But there had to be a rational explanation, right? People didn't kill over inventions in sunny, civilized Silicon Valley. They bought and sold, sometimes they sued, but killing?

When Alex was done, Sarah looked at Ben. “What do you have to do with all this?”

Ben shook his head. “Nothing, really.”

“Ben's in the army,” Alex said. “He knows this kind of stuff.”

“The army?” Sarah asked, still looking at Ben. “You must know a lot.”

The corner's of Ben's mouth moved just slightly, as though he found her terribly amusing and wasn't quite able to conceal it. “I know a few things,” he said.

“Oh, I'm fascinated. Tell me.”

This time, he cocked his head and smiled. She had never seen a more patronizing look.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Won't you at least try to bring me up to speed on how driving a tank, or shooting a rifle, or requisitioning supplies, or whatever it is you do, qualifies you to ‘know this kind of stuff?”

Ben's eyes narrowed slightly. He watched her, his gaze as forceful as it was quiet, and Sarah had the sense of tremendous pressure and tremendous control in uneasy equipoise. There was something dangerous about this man and she realized she was foolish to push him. But at the same time, that facade of tight control, and the condescension that so far was all he had permitted her to see… she couldn't just let it go.

“I don't drive tanks,” he said, after a moment. “It's been a while since I shouldered a rifle. And I don't requisition many supplies.”

“You must be very special, then.” God, what was she doing? Why did she want so badly to… what? Provoke him? Rattle him? Trip him up somehow? Force a crack in that carefully constructed facade of condescension?

“Oh, I'm really nothing special. Not compared to, say, a lawyer. I mean, you guys, you're the special ones. Top of the food chain. People like me, we're just humble servants.”

“Guys,” Alex started to say, but Sarah cut him off.

“Tell me then,” she said. “What kind of service do you perform?”

“I just keep people like you safe, that's all. It's nothing important, really.”

She caught that. Keeping her safe wasn't important. “How, then? All you've told me is what you don't do.”

He paused as though considering. “I neutralize threats so lawyers can go on earning big bucks and swilling overpriced lattes. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.”

He wasn't just showing her condescension, she realized. Condescension was what was he was intentionally showing her. Beneath that, implicit, was an entire worldview in which people like Ben were martyrs and people like Sarah were yuppie sheep, ingrates, whatever. Play to that, she thought, knowing she was being immature and possibly even dangerously foolish, but too fascinated to see what would happen to stop herself.

“How noble of you. What sorts of threats, though? And how do you neutralize them? It all must be very dangerous.” She didn't hold back on a single iota of the contempt she felt.

“Various,” Ben said. His expression was still neutral, even bored, but there was something in his eyes-engagement? resentment? anger?that made her feel she was getting to him. “Mostly Axis of Evil types. Iraqis, once upon a time. North Koreans.” There was a pause, then, “Iranians.”

“Iranians,” she said, feeling her face go hot. “They must be the most evil of all.”

“Hard to trust,” he said, chewing his gum. “You never know what they're up to.”

“Well, I'm glad you two are getting along so well,” Alex said. “That ought to make our job of staying alive for another day much easier.”

Damn it, he was right. She was playing an idiot's game, and what did that make her?

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Do we have any remaining records of the Obsidian source code?”

Alex shook his head. “I don't think so. They got everything, even the application in PAIR.”

“Shit,” she said.

Ben looked at her. “What?”

“If we had the source code,” she said, “we could have published it.”

“Of course,” Alex said. “SourceForge, or Slashdot-”

“Not just the tech sites,” Sarah said. “We could have written to every political blog out there-Talking Points Memo, Unclaimed Territory, No Comment, Balloon Juice, Hullabaloo, the Daily Dish, Firedoglake. We could have documented the people who were killed, the break-in at your house-”

“That's why they moved so fast after they blew their shot at Alex,” Ben said. “They had to eliminate any chance you might have gone public. This whole thing is about keeping the invention secret.”

“That's what the government does,” Sarah said. “Bottle things up. Information wants to be free. The government wants to control it.”

Alex sighed. “Yeah, well, without the source code, we can't free anything. We'd sound like a couple of crackpots peddling a conspiracy theory.”

“Sure,” Ben said. “And then eventually, when you turned up dead anyway, assuming anyone even noticed when it happened, there would be no proof. No proof, no story. The main thing is, the invention would still be secret.”

They were quiet for a moment. Ben looked at Alex. “You must know something,” he said. “Otherwise they would have just killed you and vacuumed up the documents right after. But they didn't. They wanted information from you first. What was it?”

“How should I know?”

“What do you know? What could they have suspected you know?”

“I don't know.”

“Think. They knew all about your firm's filing system, electronic and hard copy. They knew which lawyers were working on the case. They knew about PAIR, and how to access it. These are all quantifiable, procedural things. Formal things. Systems. What would have unnerved them is the possibility of something idiosyncratic, something outside the system, something hard to predict. What would that be? What would they be afraid they were missing? A personal laptop? An unofficial backup file? Do you have anything like that?”