Barry Eisler - Fault line

It wasn't just that Ben, underneath all his war medals, was a chicken-shit that bothered Alex. It wasn't even his hypocrisy in suggesting that Alex had cared for their mother just because he could, while he himself had done nothing. It was his refusal to acknowledge, in his acts if not in one repentant word, that he was the cause of so much of what had happened. If Ben could just admit that, maybe Alex could let it go. But the way Ben acted as if he hadn't done anything wrong… that made it even more wrong.

Their parents had been wrecked by Katie's death. It was as though her presence, her life, had been keeping them both intact, while without her, fault lines in their personalities had started to widen, hairline fractures, previously invisible and irrelevant, now developing into deepening cracks and fissures until the whole structure had become unsound.

Initially, the change had been more obvious in his mother. She had thrown herself into community work: school fund-raisers, get-out-the-vote projects, church activities even though until that point she'd barely attended a Sunday service. She'd started talking a lot, too, and always needed a television or radio playing on top of it. She seemed always to be in motion. It was as though she couldn't stand stillness anymore, couldn't stand what might well up without a cacophany of manufactured distractions to obscure it and beat it down.

His father had the opposite reaction: never a talkative man to begin with, he'd grown increasingly taciturn. Bags had grown under his eyes, and he seemed to be physically shrinking, too, his shoulders slumping, his posture sagging, his gait tired and shuffling where before it had always been confident and brisk. He spent a lot of time at the office, and when he was home he was always working on some solitary project: waxing the car; repairing something in the garage; a ham radio hobby, conducted from his office behind a closed door. He communicated mostly in yesses and noes, in “sure”s and “okay”s. Ben was home a lot those days, and the only thing that really animated their father was arguing with Ben about staying at Stanford, waiting to graduate before joining the army. Other than that, he was so listless, so out of balance- just one wrong push, and whatever dark place his mind half dwelled in, he could fall into it entirely. What scared Alex most was his sense that his father wouldn't even mind if it happened.

And then stupid, selfish Ben, not even a year after Katie had died, announced he was dropping out of Stanford and joining the army. A month later, his father had taken a bunch of pills at the office. Alex had never gotten all the details, but he gathered his father had planned the whole thing carefully so as to be found by a colleague and spare his family that trauma. As though a little trauma more would have made any difference.

He'd left a handwritten note. His mother had let Ben and Alex see it, and then she burned it. Alex thought that was strange at the time, but who could really say? What do you do with a suicide note?

He was so sorry, the note had said. So sorry, but he believed this was best for all of them. He couldn't bear the pain anymore. He couldn't bear thinking that maybe Katie needed him, and he wasn't there for her. The rest of them still had one another. He couldn't leave Katie alone.

Alex had only been a sophomore in high school, but living through losing Katie the year before had made him wiser than he would have liked about what people said and what they really meant. So he read between the lines of his father's little note. Why would his father think his dead daughter needed him more than his living wife and sons did? Could it have been that something had happened, someone had done something to make him feel useless? Maybe kicked out the one leg of support that was still keeping him standing-his desire to make sure his oldest son finished his college education before going off on his grand G.I. Joe adventure? That would have been too much to ask, wouldn't it? Just defer your big plans for a little while longer, Ben. Your father's fragile; your narcissistic, self-indulgent bullshit is about to shatter what's left of him.

Ben had stuck around for a few months afterward, but Alex knew it was for appearance's sake. One night, as the three of them shared a “family” dinner so funereal that even their mother's nonstop line of manic prattle couldn't dispel it, Ben broke the news that he couldn't defer his enlistment any longer. Something about training schedules, Airborne slots, whatever. Alex knew it was all bullshit.

After that, his only contact with Ben consisted of awkward moments on the phone when Alex made the mistake of picking up. Or his mother would pass on some bit of news with false good cheer after she had spoken with her eldest son, and Alex would pretend to be glad to hear. Ben had visited them, what, maybe a half dozen times after enlisting? Alex had dutifully shown up for those uncomfortable get-togethers because it would have killed their mother if he hadn't, his smiles so forced that sometimes the next day the muscles in his face would hurt. And then she had died anyway, and Ben had made the supreme sacrifice of actually showing up for the funeral, and then he was gone for good.

And now, after all the years of silence, after all the reasons Alex had to feel resentful, Alex gives the shitheel a chance to show just some remorse, some respect for the dead, and what does he do? Throws it back in Alex's face.

He stopped at the window and looked out at the lights of the city and the bay beyond, then went back to pacing. Well, what had he been expecting? His brother was a plague, a damn virus, and the illness he transmitted was other people's misery. Pretending he was some kind of missionary with Osborne, even though he knew Osborne was Alex's boss. Insulting Alex every chance he got. Insulting Sarah, too, suggesting she was part of whatever all this was about. All he ever did was cause other people pain.

He'd been glad when Ben went out to the jazz club that evening. It made him feel foolish to admit it, even to himself, but… he had been excited to spend some time alone with Sarah. Why, he couldn't say, exactly. It wasn't like anything was going to happen. Wasn't like anything could happen. Still…

She was smart, too. She'd come up with a lot of possible uses for Obsidian that day, and even though none of them had turned into the breakthrough they were looking for, each one showed a lot of creativity. She'd seen some possibilities in Hilzoy's notes, some notions for using Obsidian not just to encrypt a network but to encrypt messages sent between networks, and had figured out how to do it, too. But there were plenty of commercially available programs, like PGP, that already performed the same essential function just fine. They couldn't find an advantage Obsidian offered that was worth getting excited about, let alone killing over.

He wished, not for the first time that day, that he had access to the source code. It would have been hugely helpful. Of course, if they still had the source code, they could have just published it as Sarah had suggested and solved their problems right there.

He went back to his laptop. If some secret conspiracy had understood a valuable, or dangerous, hidden potential in Obsidian, how could Hilzoy, the guy who invented it, have missed it? There had to be something in his notes. There had to be.

Ben parked on California and walked back to the Ritz-Carlton. It was nearly three in the morning now, and the area was deserted. He wasn't expecting a problem outside the hotel. At this point, anyone waiting for him would likely be inside.

Russians that morning, an American that night. He wasn't sure what it meant. Different groups with an interest in Obsidian? Could be that. Could be whoever was behind this had run out of Russian contractors and had turned to someone else.