Barry Eisler - Fault line

He cut right on Clay, then ducked left into a nameless alley strewn with garbage containers and rotting wood pallets, its walls scarred with dark splotches of paint covering the graffiti underneath. A few pigeons marched spastically away from him, searching for scraps. The air was moist and fetid. He leaned against the wall and waited three minutes. The faces that passed the alley were all Asian. No one followed him in, and no one paid him any attention. He moved on.

When he felt he'd gotten comfortable with the layout of the area, he went back to the hotel, watching his back, checking the likely ambush points as he moved. He checked in at the front desk again. No calls made from either room. Okay.

He tried his key card at Alex's room and it didn't work. GoodAlex had engaged the secondary lock. “Alex,” Ben said. “It's me. Open up.”

Alex opened the door and Ben went in. Sarah was standing in front of the television. “You're on channel four,” Alex said. “KRON, the Bay Area news station.”

Ben watched. A double homicide outside the Palo Alto Four Seasons. Unidentified victims. Police following leads.

“I don't know why you think that has anything to do with me,” Ben said. Sarah looked at him but said nothing.

Ben picked up the remote and turned off the television. “The two of you are here to do a job,” he said, not bothering to prevent the irritation from creeping into his tone. “Watching the news doesn't improve your situation. Figuring out Obsidian does.”

Sarah looked at him and he thought she was going to say something smart. But she didn't. She just walked over to the desk and sat down in front of one of two open laptops. Shit, he'd been so focused on the possibility of Sarah making a phone call, he hadn't even thought to check her bag for a laptop. He'd locked the front door and left the windows wide open.

“This is your setup?” Ben asked, walking over and looking at her screen. No e-mail or chat application open, but that meant nothing. It would have taken her all of thirty seconds to send a message, and he had no way of knowing.

“We're just getting started,” Sarah said. “We linked the two laptops together as a local area network. We'll use the LAN to encrypt files with Obsidian and send them back and forth.”

“What's the music?” Ben asked. Something was coming from one of the laptops. He hadn't been aware of it while the television was on.

“ ‘Dirge,’ by a band called Death in Vegas,” Sarah said. “Hilzoy built an MP3 file into Obsidian and a command to play it when the program opens. We were listening to see if there was more to it than just a song Hilzoy liked.”

“Is there?”

“Doesn't seem like it.”

“Well, he picked an appropriate title. Let's get back to work, okay?”

“Okay,” Sarah said, without any of the feistiness he had learned to expect from her. Her flat tone gave him another unpleasant emotional wince, like the one he'd felt at the coffee place. But you know what? It might not be the worst thing she was a little afraid of him, afraid of what might happen if she did something stupid like try to contact the police with information about what had happened outside the Four Seasons that morning.

“I need to go out again,” Ben said. “Not sure for how long. Call if there's a problem.”

He headed north from the hotel, then had a cab take him to Baker Beach, the northern extremity of the city, where the Pacific Ocean ended and the San Francisco Bay began. He took off his shoes and walked across the soft sand, which was pleasantly warm from the sun. A cold sea breeze whistled through the air, and from somewhere on the bay a ship's horn sounded, long and plaintive. A jogger with a golden retriever pounded along at the tide's edge, but other than that the beach was empty of all but driftwood.

He walked down to the water, the Golden Gate Bridge looming a quarter mile off to his right, steep sea cliffs topped with houses sporting multimillion-dollar views on his left. For a moment, he looked out over the Pacific and gave himself over to the timeless rhythm of waves crashing against rocks and packed wet sand, the roar of impact, the hush as the water receded and gathered, the roar again. He wondered what it must have been like here, this very spot, a thousand years earlier. Take away the houses and the bridge and it was all probably the same as it was now. The sky and the water; the sound of the wind and the waves; an ocean with another name, long since forgotten. He smiled, thinking that in another thousand years it would be like that again.

He'd come here a fair amount in high school. It was a good place to smoke a joint, and a better one for sex. At the foot of the sea cliffs there was a rock formation you could climb. At low tide you could drop down into its center and do whatever you wanted, hidden from the world. Ben climbed the formation now, surprised at the immediate familiarity of the hand- and footholds, and more so by the heavy sadness their presence stirred in his memory. The tide was too far in and he couldn't climb down to the formation's center, but that wasn't his purpose. He stood at the top, reached into his bag, and took out the Glock he'd used at the Four Seasons that morning. He looked at the gun for a moment, then disassembled it and pitched the components far out into the water. A moment later he slung the license plates in, too. Doubtful any of it would ever be found. Even if it was, the gun was untraceable, and the salt water would long since have scoured away any DNA evidence.

He headed out to the road and caught a cab back to North Beach. The broad outlines of the neighborhood were the same, but he'd known the area before only by night and there was something off about it in daylight. It was like seeing the working girl who'd gotten you so hot the night before without her makeup the next morning. Clubs with names like Roaring Twenties and the Garden of Eden and the Condor Topless Bar and the Hungry I clustered together like drunks sleeping off a collective hangover, their neon signs inert, bleached in the sunlight, the innumerable gray wads of gum ground into the sidewalks before them the only evidence of the restless crowds they attracted at night. A homeless man in a raincoat the color of lichens stopped in front of a trash can and began picking through it, oblivious to Ben's presence. Ben peeled a twenty out of his wallet and, when the man looked up, handed it to him. The man looked at it, then smiled at Ben, revealing dark and ulcerating gums. Ben watched him shuffle off and thought, What difference does it make, anyway?

He found an Internet cafe and pulled out the dead Russians’ wallets. The driver's licenses identified them as Grigory Solovyov and Yegor Gorsky He got no hits. Well, maybe one of the alphabet soup agencies had something on them.

He had a thought-a way of testing the girl. What was the name of that club across from Vesuvio… Pearl's, something like that? He searched for Pearl's San Francisco and got it on the first try: Jazz at Pearl's. Someone named Kim Nalley would be singing songs of love there at eight o'clock that night. Okay, Kim, he thought. Sing one for me.

He went out to a pay phone and called Hort, using the scrambler as always. “Anything turn up about that Russian in Istanbul?” he asked.

“Nothing. Nobody's claimed him. I would have let you know otherwise.”

“Yeah, I know. The main reason I'm calling is, I just saw something on the news and thought, what the hell, maybe it's connected.”

“What is it?”

“Two Russians got shot to death this morning in Palo Alto. Well, the part about their being Russian isn't on the news. I found out about that another way.”

There was a pause. Hort said, “I can't help noticing you're calling from San Francisco.”