Barry Eisler - Fault line

If anyone was waiting for him inside, he had a good chance of surprising them. The guy he'd killed at Alex's wasn't carrying a cell phone or a radio. That meant he wasn't expected to check in, at least not right away.

He'd been lulled after Vesuvio, thinking the girl was okay, being insufficiently tactical as a result. He'd been lucky. He wasn't going to rely on luck again.

The interior of the hotel was so still you could hear the silence. A lone woman greeted him at the reception counter, but other than that, the lobby, the bar… it was all deserted.

He took the elevator to the sixth floor, then the stairs down to four. He had his gun out the moment he was in the stairwell. Anyone he encountered on the stairs at this hour who wasn't dragging a mop and bucket wasn't likely to be friendly.

He hugged the wall on the approach to Sarah's room, then ducked low as he went past it on the remote chance someone was in there and looking out through the peephole. He pulled the goggles onto his head but not yet over his eyes. He had to account for every possibility now. Everything. Not just a human ambush, but something remote, too.

Getting his own door open was nerve-racking. Countering a threat from an emplaced IED required a totally different set of tactics than countering a threat from a human ambush, and pausing in front of his door to examine it for signs of the former left his ass badly exposed to the latter. Well, the doors were thick; unlikely someone would risk a shot through one of them. But still.

He found no wires or other signs of anything that would have closed a circuit when the door was open. The magnetic lock showed no signs of tampering. He slid his key card in with his left hand, the Glock held at chest level with his right. He eased the door open an inch and held it there, sighting down the Glock. Nothing on the other side. No wires or anything else out of place around the doorjamb. He reached inside and flicked the master switch. The room went dark.

He let the door close and moved back down the hallway, away from the room. Could be someone was watching from outside. He'd circled the hotel on the way over, of course, but he could have missed someone. He didn't want that someone to see the lights go out at the edges of the curtains of room 767, wait one minute, and then remotely trigger an IED. Or at least he didn't want to be in the room when it happened.

He waited two minutes. Okay, if it was going to happen that way, it would have happened already. He went back to the door, pulled the goggles down, and went in, engaging the privacy lock behind him.

It took him three minutes to confirm that he was alone. Confirming no one had left him an IED love letter took another twenty.

He sat down on the floor, his back against the bed, and pulled the goggles off. He blew out a long breath. Christ, what a day. He ought to be exhausted, but he was still too wired to feel it.

Okay. One more thing, and then he could relax.

The girl.

There were three ways he could go in. First, through the common door, if she hadn't locked it from her side. Second, he could use his key card on the regular door, if she hadn't engaged the privacy lock. He wasn't optimistic that either of these would pan out. So the third option was the most promising: just kick open the common door. It was heavy wood, but it opened into her room, and the metal jamb around it would deform enough, and pull free of the surrounding frame enough, for his purposes.

He opened the door on his side, slowly, carefully, wanting to make sure there was nothing emplaced between the door on his side and the one on hers that could close a circuit. He was surprised to find that the door on her side wasn't just unlocked but was wide open. He was glad he'd left the room lights off and the goggles on. If he hadn't, he would have been instantly silhouetted.

He moved in carefully, not liking that the door was open, sensing a trap. In the green night-vision glow, he saw her on the bed. She was on her back, covered to the neck by the quilt, her long black hair spilling across the white linen pillows. Her right arm was back, resting just above her head. Her left was under the covers. He'd seen during the day she was right-handed, so having her strong hand in view, and seeing it was empty, was marginally comforting. She seemed to be sleeping, but she had played clueless in Vesuvio convincingly, too. He kept an eye on her while he silently cleared the room. It was empty.

He walked over to the bed and watched her for a moment. Her breathing was slow and even. She didn't stir.

He'd noted the privacy lock on her door was engaged. Which turned the open common door into a kind of funnel. He didn't like that at all. It didn't matter where he was going, he didn't like coming in the way he was supposed to.

Keeping the Glock on her, he eased aside the quilt and exposed her left hand. It was empty.

He pulled off the goggles, set them down, and flicked on the nightstand light. Her eyes popped open and she sat up violently in the bed, blinking and squinting and holding the quilt to her body. “What the hell?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“You sound unhappy to see me,” he said, relishing the moment despite himself.

“You're fucking right I'm unhappy. You can't just come in here like this. What are you doing? What do you want?”

“Don't play dumb, sweetheart. I know you're good at it, but the act is getting old.”

She looked at the Glock as though noticing it for the first time, as indeed probably she was. “Why the fuck are you pointing a gun at me? Are you crazy?”

He kept the pistol pointed at her. And because it was his own habit never to sleep farther than arm's reach from a weapon, he said, “Get out of bed.”

“The hell with that. Get out of my room.”

He took hold of the quilt and yanked it entirely off her. It flew to the opposite wall and slipped to the ground.

She leaped to the opposite side of the bed. “Get out of here!” she yelled.

She was wearing nothing but white panties and a white camisole, and for a moment he doubted himself. But how many soldiers had made the same fatal mistake about a sweet-seeming woman the instant before she detonated a suicide bomb?

He circled the bed, keeping the gun on her. “Shut up,” he said. “And keep your hands where I can see them if you don't want to get shot.”

She stared at him, breathing hard. “You're crazy. You're really crazy.”

“You're right,” he said, on her side of the bed now and moving toward her. “I'm mad enough to do something crazy, that's for sure. Three people trying to kill me in one day? That'd make anyone crazy.”

She didn't answer. No, of course she didn't. He came closer. She backed into a corner, a wall to one side, the nightstand to the left.

“You really had me fooled for a while,” he said. “I'll give you credit for that. But it's done now. The guy waiting for me at Alex's house? He told me everything before he died. I had to work on him first, but in the end, he talked.”

“I don't want to know this,” she said.

He stepped in closer. “Then you shouldn't have gotten involved. But here's the good news for you. I have one question. Answer it to my satisfaction and you'll be okay.”

“What question?”

“Who do you work for?”

“You're not making any sense!”

“See, that's not satisfying me.”

And suddenly, she was advancing on him. “Will you stop looking at me as the enemy?” she yelled, jabbing him in the chest with a finger. “I'm Iranian, so that's all you can see! Everything that happens, you distort it in your mind to prove what you already want to believe! Why? Why do you need to believe I'm the enemy? What are you getting out of it?”

He was so surprised he almost took a step back, but then stopped. He was so sure of himself when he'd come in that he'd been expecting her to fold right away. Or to deny it unconvincingly, and then fold. What he hadn't anticipated was a counterattack. Especially one this loud, which could attract attention. He needed to regain control.