Barry Eisler - Fault line

“What about that place in North Beach?” he said. “Corner of Broadway and Columbus. Something Motor Inn, if it's still there. Blue building, lot of glass?”

“You're not serious,” Sarah said.

“What's wrong with it?”

“It's a total pit, that's what's wrong with it. You'd have to be desperate.”

“Have you not gotten the memo? You are desperate.”

“I'm not that desperate.”

Alex said, “What about the Four Seasons?”

Ben didn't even know there was a Four Seasons in the city. It must be new. “Where is it?” he asked.

“South of Market,” Sarah said.

Ben shook his head. It was too far for his purposes. “No good. Alex just stayed at a Four Seasons. I don't want any patterns.”

“All right,” Alex said. “The Ritz-Carlton.”

“Jesus, the two of you have expensive tastes. You ought to write a book. Five-star-hotel safe houses. You don't know the manager there, do you?”

“No, I've never stayed there.”

Actually, the Ritz-Carlton would work. It was on the edge of Chinatown, a half mile from the heart of North Beach.

They drove over. While Alex and Sarah waited in the marble-floored, Oriental-carpeted lobby, Ben used a credit card registered to one of the legends he traveled under to reserve two connected rooms on the fourth floor. He asked for two key cards to each room, and gave Sarah only one.

“I'll pay you back,” Alex told him.

“Yes, you will,” Ben said.

The rooms were deluxe-high ceilings, luxurious drapes, patterned carpets, elegant furniture. Nice views of Coit Tower and the bay, too.

“Here's the deal,” Ben told them. “Alex and I will stay in this room. Sarah, you have the room next door. I'm going out for a few supplies and to run down the names of the Russians. You two get moving on Obsidian.”

Sarah said, “I'm going to have to get some clothes at some point.”

“We'll take care of that later,” Ben said. “Let's see what kind of progress we make today.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Sarah said to Alex, and went through the connecting door to her room.

As soon as the door was closed, Ben said, “I don't trust her.”

“What?”

“Somebody knew where those missing files were kept.”

“Yeah, but you said yourself-”

“It's a question of probabilities. We need to be very careful with her.”

“Ben, you sound… paranoid.”

“Thanks for the compliment. Listen. I'm going to have a look around the area. While I'm out, keep the door locked and the privacy sign on. If someone knocks, do not answer.”

“What if they don't go away?”

Ben reached around and freed his backup from its holster. He stood up and showed Alex the gun. “Have you ever used one of these?”

Alex's eyes went wide. “No.”

“It's very simple. This is a Glock 26. Nine-millimeter, which is a relatively small round but also relatively quiet. Although to you, it would sound like a cannon. There's no safety you need to worry about. There's already a round in the chamber. Point it at the target and squeeze the trigger. Keep it in your pocket and don't play with it. That's it.”

Alex nodded, looking uncomfortable. The sad truth was, by the time Alex got his balls sufficiently in an uproar to use the gun, it would probably be too late. Training was at least as much about mental and emotional readiness as it was about physical skill. But what else could he do? He couldn't leave Alex naked.

“Keep your finger off the trigger and out of the trigger guard until you're ready to shoot,” Ben said. “Don't ever point the gun at something unless you're ready to shoot it. You'll be fine.”

“I don't feel fine,” Alex said.

“Trust me, you'll feel better when you have something to shoot back with.”

He closed the curtains, then walked over to the desk and ripped a sheet of paper off the notepad by the phone. He folded it in quarters, then used a strip of duct tape from inside his wallet to tape it over the peephole on the door so that it functioned as a flap. “Now if you need to look through the peephole,” he told Alex, “the person on the other side won't know you're there. With the curtains closed, you won't cast a shadow under the door. Just get up close before you move the paper out of the way.”

“You really live this way. I can't believe it.”

“I'll be back in about an hour. Call me on my cell phone if anything comes up.” He wrote down the number and left.

Ben stopped at the front desk and asked if there had been any calls from the room Sarah was in. He was ready with a story in case the receptionist asked, something about his spendthrift cousin Sarah who had a habit of running up phone and room service charges and pissing off their grandfather, who was footing the bill, but the receptionist just told him no, there hadn't been.

Good. She hadn't tried to call anyone. At least not yet.

“As it turns out,” he said, “we're going to need one more room. Hopefully on the same floor?”

“Certainly, sir. Let me see what we have available.”

They were in luck-there was a third room, right across from the ones they were in. He took two key cards for the extra room, keeping them in separate pockets clockwise alphabetically. Alex front left; Ben front right; Sarah back. A little thing, like folding the edge back on a roll of duct tape, but it would save time when it counted.

On the way out, he scoped the lobby. Small, only a couple of sitting areas, all in view of the concierge and the front desk. Not an easy place to set up and wait. There was an adjacent tearoom, up a few marble stairs and visible from where he stood. A woman was playing a harp in the corner and the gentle sound of it couldn't have been more incongruous.

He walked outside and looked around. There were a few cars parked in front of the hotel, all of them empty, and it looked like getting a spot in the street might take a sniper's patience. Not a place you could plan to wait in a vehicle. And the surrounding buildings were all residences. Again, not usable for a seat-of-the-pants ambush. Between the lobby and the street, Alex had picked a reasonably hard-target hotel. Albeit for all the wrong reasons.

He circled the block and then headed north, getting his bearings. The white double spires of Saints Peter and Paul Church were aglow in the midday sun, the blue of the bay behind them, Angel Island and the green hills of Tiburon beyond. He went down the dank stairs of the Stockton Street Tunnel. The concrete walls were covered with graffiti and piss stains. A sign warned of video surveillance. Yeah, thanks for the heads-up.

He crossed California, and the vibrating sound of the cables sliding along in their metal tracks made him remember an early trip to the city, with his parents and Alex and Katie. His dad explained to everyone that the reason they were called cable cars was that they were actually pulled along by metal cables. Ben and Katie played dumb and kept asking, What? Why are they called cable cars? Alex was too young to be wise to the joke, and their father, ever the engineer, too earnest. Alex and their dad kept trying different variations of the obvious- They're called cable cars because they're cars and they're pulled by cables – their accompanying gesticulations growing increasingly emphatic, until finally the others dissolved in laughter, crying out, Oh, that's why they're called cable cars! Their dad chuckled with them then, realizing they'd been putting him on. Only Alex refused to share in the amusement, probably because in his insecurity he suspected he was the source of it.

He continued up Stockton into Chinatown, joining a thick, slow-moving mass of pedestrians squeezed between produce stands and souvenir shops on one side of the sidewalk, and newspaper vending machines, street signs, and parking meters on the other. A low-level cacophony surrounded him: storekeepers hawking their wares in Chinese, honking horns, traditional stringed music blaring soullessly from speakers strung from the underside of awnings. The air was laced with the smells of herbal elixirs and diesel belching from buses. A cold wind sliced up and down the east-west streets, and the laundry hanging from shadowed tenement windows twisted back and forth in it like tethered ghosts struggling to break free.