by Barry Eisler
She had been a freshman at Caltech when the planes struck the Pentagon and Twin Towers. After, she had been approached by recruiters from all over the federal government: FBI, NSA, CIA, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. They were all desperate for people who could speak the languages of the Muslim world, and Sarah, whose Farsi was fluent, seemed to be popping up on all their computer lists. She was intrigued by the notion of a top-secret security clearance, by the chance to fight the fanaticism that was poisoning the culture she came from. But her parents had been against it. Having endured the revolution and everything that came after, they had been badly afraid of another backlash. The Hosseinis were American now, and didn’t want to do anything to draw attention to their origins. Education was the key to success in America, her parents assured her. They had long since accepted that she had no interest in becoming a doctor, but she had a strong aptitude for science—advanced placement courses in high school, early acceptance to the information security program at Caltech. Why not go on to a law degree? With a combination like that, she could do anything. And so a kind of compromise had been born.
She loved her parents and wanted to make them happy, but there was a part of her too that resented their obsession with education and status, with the way they used her as a vehicle to pursue their own truncated dreams. That kernel of resentment led to her first real act of rebellion— an American-as-apple-pie boyfriend named Josh Marshall, whom she started dating as a sophomore when he was a junior, and to whom she lost her virginity that same year. Josh was a nice guy, from a nice family, and with good prospects, but he wasn’t Iranian, and although there wasn’t much her parents could do to stop her, she knew they were quietly appalled. And that was good. She was finally going after something she wanted.
The romance lasted until Josh graduated, when he left for Tucson and a job designing missile systems with Raytheon. They saw each other a few times that summer, but when the senior-year fall semester began, Sarah told him she was just too busy to keep it up. She pretended to be full of regret, but the truth was, she’d gotten bored. Although he was generally a confident guy, Josh had always been intimidated by her, and uncertain of himself as a result. It was as though he didn’t quite believe he deserved her, that she was doing him some kind of favor by seeing him. She’d always felt the relationship was on her terms, that she was the one ultimately in control, and in the end she’d been proven right.
The pattern had continued at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. She’d been at the law school less than a month when she got involved with a second-year, another Anglo-American, this one named John Cole. And later, when John graduated and left for a job with the Justice Department in D.C., Sarah, who had grown bored with her new relationship in much the same way she had grown bored with the previous, again used the occasion as an excuse to end it. After, she wondered about her motivations. Both had been good boyfriends, at least in an all-appropriate-boxes-checked kind of way. But both had been guaranteed to be unacceptable to her parents, and both had come with a kind of built-in expiration date. Was she stacking the odds against herself? And why would she do that?
Had she loved them? She told them she did, after they breathlessly declared the same to her. But although she felt a deep affection, especially for Josh, who after all had been her first, she didn’t know if she could really call it love. She wondered if it was not only the expiration date that drew her, but also a certain blandness to the flavor of the food. Maybe she was afraid to taste something that might ignite some latent appetite, an appetite she sensed inside herself but for some reason sought to deny.
The sex had been good, though. Or good enough, anyway. True, she couldn’t seem to come with either of them, but it didn’t really matter. Just the contact was nice, and she liked having someone to sleep with. And when she needed to really get off, she could always lock the bathroom door, take a hot bath, close her eyes, and touch herself the way she needed to. In her fantasies, she would be at the back of a lecture hall, or surrounded by a crowd at a bar or a party, or in the library stacks late at night. There was always a man whose face was indistinct, but who she knew was watching her, and there was something simultaneously appreciative and arrogant in his gaze. She would challenge him, demand to know who he was, what he thought he was looking at. He would smile and say, I know what you want. She would laugh at his presumptuousness and say something like, Oh, really? The laugh was supposed to make him wilt, but it didn’t, and his smile would grow broader, and she would feel he was silently mocking her. You don’t know the first thing about me, she would say. He would come closer then, and in a low voice say that of course he knew things about her, and he could prove it if he wanted to. His insolence would enrage her, and she would demand, Prove it how? He would come very close then, and she would try to move back, but there was always something blocking her, and then his body would be against hers and his mouth would be at her ear and he would whisper, I know how you like to be touched … like this, and like this, and like this …
She shook her head and let the blinds fall shut. She needed lunch. Maybe she’d ask Alex. She was curious if he’d heard anything else about Hilzoy. And he looked like he could use a little company.
He was an attractive guy, and she wondered about him sometimes. But he’d probably make partner soon, and if she were involved with him at that point they’d have to break it off. She chuckled. Yeah, he was right up her alley. Another good-looking, all-American guy with the right kind of résumé and an automatic expiration date. Perfect.
Anyway, he didn’t seem interested, although she had to admit that was part of the attraction. She was used to men wanting her. They weren’t very good at concealing it, and most didn’t even try. It was funny, too, because she’d been a strange-looking kid, with widely set eyes and lips way too full for her face, and her features hadn’t come together until late in high school. She was grateful for that. If she’d been born beautiful, it would be like being born rich. Everything would have been too easy. As it was, her looks always felt like an improbable, unexpected gift, something she’d happened across by accident, not something she’d been granted by right.
It was ridiculous, really, that she would be interested in the one guy in the firm who seemed not to be interested in her. But he had qualities she liked. He was good to work with, for one. He always explained things clearly, and he wasn’t intimidated by her technical knowledge, unlike various other associates she’d worked with. And he was certainly serious. Even too serious—she saw him in his office whenever she came in early or left late, and he didn’t seem to have much of a life outside the firm. She thought she detected an odd sort of … sadness behind the seriousness, and it intrigued her. She imagined how she might respond if he made a move, then laughed at the thought. He wasn’t interested, and that was probably for the best.
But no harm in just asking him about lunch. She was going out anyway, she would just check in about Hilzoy and then mention that she was going to grab a bite, maybe at Straits Café, the Singaporean place, and if he was hungry …
She walked down the corridor to his office and poked her head in, but he wasn’t there. His secretary, Alisa, saw her and said, “He had to go to the police station.”
Sarah raised her eyebrows. “The police station? Is it about Hilzoy?”
Alisa shook her head. “He didn’t say.”
Sarah nodded and said, “He never does, does he?”
She walked off, thinking maybe she would just grab something from the firm cafeteria. Yeah, that was probably for the best.
9 SADLY ETERNAL
Alex got to the office at six o’clock the next morning. He hadn’t slept well, but at least he’d come up with a course of action. The first step was to check in with the Patent and Trademark Office. The group director of Technology Center 2130—the PTO examination group responsible for computer cryptography and security—was a Stanford grad named Hank Shiffman, whom Alex had been friendly with when they were students. Having a frie
nd like Hank inside was huge—he was smart enough to really get what Obsidian was about, and he knew all the bizarre inner workings of the patent office, too. Hank and 2130 hadn’t officially received the application yet, but Hank had been keeping Alex unofficially apprised of its progress since it had first arrived at the Office of Initial Patent Examination. The last Alex had heard, the application had been forwarded to the Department of Defense for national security review. A security review was routine for an invention dealing with cryptography, and unless the DoD decided to issue a secrecy order—a huge pain in the neck but, thank God, highly unlikely—the application would soon pass muster and be assigned to a formal examiner in Hank’s group.
It was nine o’clock in Virginia, where the PTO was located. Alex called Hank and got his voice mail.
Damn. Hank was always at his desk early. Well, maybe he was in the bathroom or something.
The message said to press zero to speak to an operator. Alex did. A moment later, a woman asked, “How may I direct your call?”
“I’m trying to reach Hank Shiffman.”
There was a pause. The woman said, “Ah, could you hold on for just a moment?”
Alex waited, wondering why the woman had sounded so uncertain about something so mundane.
A moment later, another woman’s voice came on, throatier than the first, the tone more businesslike. “Hello, this is Director Jane Hamsher, Computer Architecture, Software, and Information Security. May I ask to whom I’m speaking?”
Alex thought for a moment. The information Hank had been feeding him was back-channel. He didn’t want to create a problem for his friend.
“This is Alex Treven,” he said. “I’m a friend of Hank’s from Stanford.”
There was a pause, then the woman said, “I see. Then I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that Hank passed away yesterday.”
Alex had one long moment during which he was certain he had heard wrong. He replayed the woman’s words in his head, trying to arrive at a construction that made sense. Nothing did.
Finally he managed to blurt out, “What … what happened? How?”
“Apparently, it was a heart attack.”
Alex thought of Hank, a vegetarian and a demon on the squash court. “But … Hank was totally healthy. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone that healthy.”
“I know, it’s been quite a shock to all of us. It seems it was something congenital, but they’re still trying to work it out. We’re all going to miss Hank. He was a good man and very capable.”
She was easing away. Alex thought, Well, nothing to protect him from if he’s dead, and said, “The thing is, Hank was … advising me on a cryptography application on behalf of a client. I wonder if there’s someone else there who could give me an update?”
There was a pause. “Hank was the examiner?” the woman asked, her tone doubtful.
“No, it hadn’t been assigned to a group yet. As far as I know, it’s still at OIPE, and subject to Defense Department review—”
“Well, as soon as it’s cleared the review, OIPE will assign it to a technology group, probably 2130 from your description. We’ll be in touch at that point.”
Damn, not quite the sympathetic reaction he’d been hoping a bereaved friend would rate. “Right,” Alex said. “Thank you.”
“Not at all. And again, my condolences.”
He hung up. Time for a Plan B. Trouble was, with Hilzoy dead, he was already at Plan B. And it didn’t seem to be going well.
First Hilzoy, then Hank. Unbelievable. It was like Obsidian was cursed.
He thought about what to do next. He still needed to find out who stood to inherit the rights to the patent if—when—it was issued. Also to roll up his sleeves and thoroughly assess the technology—the benefits, the limitations, all possible applications in various potential markets. Up until now, Hilzoy had been the best pitchman for Obsidian as something you could build a company around. With Hilzoy gone, Alex would need to be able to talk that talk.
He went through Hilzoy’s file and was unsurprised to find no information on family. All right, he’d put Alisa on this. Contact the ex-wife and figure out who were the closest relatives—the likely beneficiaries under a will, or the most likely to inherit if Hilzoy died intestate.
Finally, the technology itself. Hilzoy always left a backup DVD of the latest version with Alisa when he visited the office. Alex went out and retrieved it, then popped it into the bay of his laptop. When the program booted, Alex was surprised to hear music coming from the laptop’s tiny speakers. He didn’t recognize the tune—something instrumental. He listened for a minute, then found a command to turn it off. It was creepy, imagining Hilzoy listening to it while he worked on Obsidian. Maybe it was one of his favorites.
He started performing the various applications, describing them as he worked, pretending he was talking to a VC. “Did you see how fast Obsidian encrypted a five-gigabyte video file? Well, it scales, too. We’ve tested it up to five terabytes, and we think it can go further. And not just video, of course not. Any data. Any platform. And the decrypt process is just as quick. Watch this …”
He kept at it for an hour, immersed, lost to the outside world. He had to be able to do this. He had to.
There was a knock on his door. He called out, “Yeah.”
The door opened and Sarah walked in. “Hey,” she said, her tone and accompanying expression suggesting she was not entirely pleased.
“What is it?” Alex asked, startled to see her, his mind still more than half occupied by Obsidian.
She sat down and looked at him. “Has it not occurred to you that other people might be concerned about what happened to Hilzoy?”
Alex frowned. Why couldn’t she just act like a first-year associate was supposed to? She couldn’t just barge in here, plop down in a seat like his office was her second home, and start interrogating him.
“Look—” he started to say.
She leaned forward, her elbows on his desk. “You blew out of here and went to the police station yesterday. What was that all about?”
Alex forced himself not to glance down at the alluring bit of décolletage he sensed in his peripheral vision. All right, maybe she had a point. “He was murdered,” he said.
Suddenly her expression was soft again. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it.”
He thought he should just tell her he was busy. Convey his displeasure with her failure to show him the appropriate deference. He’d always been deferential when he was a first-year. What was wrong with her?
Instead, he said, “There was a bunch of heroin in the trunk of his car. Some kind of drug deal, they think.”
“Heroin? Hilzoy? Come on, he was a geek. That doesn’t make sense.”
“I guess you can never tell.”
She leaned back as though she intended to stay awhile. “The police called you because … they thought you might know something?”
For a moment Alex hesitated, and then he surrendered. Hilzoy, then Hank … it was so weird, he just needed to talk to someone. He told her about the cell phone connection that led the police to him, about the Q&A at headquarters, even about the DNA test. He hadn’t been planning to say so much; in fact, he hadn’t planned on saying anything. He sensed that in doing so now he was taking a chance, the risks of which he didn’t fully understand and certainly couldn’t control. The feeling made him feel slightly dizzy, almost nauseated.
“Have you told Osborne?” she asked, when he was done.
“No. He’s in Bangkok until tomorrow. I’ll tell him then.”
“Won’t he want to know right away? You could send him an e-mail.”
Alex laughed. “If it’s not his client, Osborne could give a shit, believe me.”
The moment the words were out, he wished he hadn’t said it. He always knew to be tight-lipped about that kind of thing—you never knew how something innocuous could get distorted and amplified in the retelling. He hated that she could have this effect on him.
But Sarah only smiled sympathetically. “So, what’s going to happen to the patent?”
Alex ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “I’m trying to find out.”
She glanced at his laptop. “Is that what you’re doing there?”
“A little, yeah. Taking Obsidian for a test drive. Trying to see how it does without Hilzoy behind the wheel.”
She nodded. “Well, if you want a copilot, just ask me.”
He looked at her, trying to read her expression. What did the offer mean, exactly? Was it just about work, or …
He felt himself blushing. Goddamn it.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”
She smiled and stood. “Sorry I barged in on you. I was just really curious, you know?”
Alex nodded and forced himself to stay in his seat. He wasn’t going to see her off as though she were a damned partner.
She flashed him that beautiful smile again and left, closing the door behind her. Alex expelled a long breath. After a minute, he opened the laptop and returned to experimenting with Obsidian. But he couldn’t get his focus back. This whole situation … it was just stirring up memories.