by Barry Eisler
“Usually, yeah, I guess.”
“Well, there it is. Wait for you in the deserted office parking lot, one shot to the head, drive away.”
“Jesus.”
“A soft target like you … if whoever it was wanted you dead, you’d be dead now a dozen different ways. Breaking into your house would be unnecessarily risky and complicated.”
“Then why?”
Ben shrugged. “Privacy. To interrogate you.”
“Torture me, you mean?”
“Call it whatever you want. You said your car was in the driveway, so he knew you were home. He wanted you in a controlled, private environment where he could take his time. When he was done, he probably would have killed you.”
“Just like that?”
Alex meant the question to be sarcastic, a nonchalant response to hide his discomfort. But Ben’s eyes drifted up and to the left, as though he was seriously considering. “Not just like that. He probably would have made you drive someplace where he could do it and get rid of the body.”
“What? Why?”
“No body would tie together all the story elements. Afterward, I’d drive the car to a bus or train station. Maybe plant some signs of heroin. Plant a few more clues. The story then becomes, ‘Lawyer mixed up in drugs gets spooked when police question him about the drug-related death of his client-slash-drug-dealing partner. He disappears himself because he feared exposure, or that he was the next target, or whatever.’ Yeah, it would all make sense. Police are busy, no one’s going to dig deeper than that, not without a body.”
“How would you get rid of the body?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Alex imagined himself dead, with some faceless guy leaning over him holding a saw; or wrapped in a plastic bag and thrown down a well; or weighted with chains and plummeting down through cold, murky water, the pressure incredible, the light of the world racing away above him …
“How do you know these things?” he said. “I mean, you really know, don’t you?”
Ben got up and walked over to the window. He stood there, looking down at the silent traffic. After a moment, he said, “Let’s start with who knew about the invention. Was it public knowledge?”
Alex felt a chill run down his back. “No,” he said, after a moment. “The patent application stays secret for eighteen months, and then, absent an exception, it’s published.”
“And you were still inside eighteen months, so the application was secret.”
“Right. We filed a year ago.”
“But some people knew about it. Who?”
“A lot of people. The PTO, for starters.”
“Who?”
“Patent and Trademark Office. Also a bunch of people at the firm. And the angel investors and venture capitalists I contacted for funding. Plus … anyone Hilzoy might have told, I guess.”
Ben walked over to the other side of the window. “Three targets: you, the inventor, the examiner. Lots of people could have known about any one of you and your connection to the technology. But someone knew about all three. There’s a choke point in there. Who would know about the patent guy?”
“No one, really. His group wasn’t even officially assigned to the patent yet, I just knew him from school. He was helping me unofficially, just status reports, that kind of thing.”
“So his name isn’t on any paperwork?”
“No, nothing like that. Just some off-the-record phone calls and e-mails.”
“Well, somebody knew he was involved.”
“How?”
“Don’t know. Could be something as simple as a tap on your phone or a bug in your office. Or in his.”
They were quiet for a moment. Ben yawned and said, “I need some sleep. We’ll figure out more in the morning.”
Alex felt awkward. He didn’t want Ben to have to pay for a room. He’d already paid for a plane ticket. “Did you take a room here? Or—”
“I’ll just crash on the couch, okay?”
One of Ben’s little games. Acting like he was putting himself out, careful not to accept anything that could get in the way of the routine.
“Suit yourself,” Alex said. “You flew a long way, right? All the way from wherever.”
16 KARMIC KILTER
Alex woke up the next morning and noticed the sound of the shower running. He sat up and glanced at the bedside clock. Six-thirty. Looked like they were going to get an early start. He was surprised he hadn’t heard Ben get up. Ordinarily, Alex was a light sleeper.
He walked over to the bathroom in his underwear and tried the door. It was locked. Damn, he had to take a leak. He knocked and said, “Ben, hurry up,” and was immediately struck by how strange it was. They’d always shared, and often fought over, a bathroom when they were kids, and here they were doing it again.
He opened the blinds and looked out. The sun was just coming up and the sky was scudded with long pink clouds. He stood and watched for a moment, rubbing his bare shoulders. He felt disoriented. He should be in his house, getting ready to go to work. The need to get to the office, to be back in his life, was strong.
The shower stopped. Alex turned and walked past the couch. Ben’s bag was open on it. Alex saw clothes, a paperback book …
Was that a gun?
He looked closer. It was a gun, small and black. Jesus Christ, Ben had a gun? With him?
The bathroom door opened and Ben walked out, a towel around his waist, a bundle of clothes in his arm. “All yours,” he said.
“You have a gun?”
Ben walked right past, barely looking at him. “Of course.”
“With you?”
“Where else would I want it?”
Jesus, it was like the guy who answered Why do you rob banks? by saying, That’s where the money is.
“What I mean,” Alex began, then thought better of it. But wait. “If you’re supposed to have it with you, why didn’t you take it into the bathroom?”
Ben dropped the clothes he had in his arm onto the couch and like a magic trick was left holding another gun, larger than the one Alex had seen a moment earlier. “The other is backup,” he said. “I wear it on the small of my back. I don’t usually bring two into the bathroom.”
“You can travel with them? On airplanes?”
“Sometimes. When I can’t, I can have them waiting for me.”
Alex wanted to ask more—Waiting for you how? By whom?—but decided not to. He couldn’t get over the idea of his brother carrying a gun. Make that two guns. Of course, intellectually it made sense. Ben was some kind of undercover soldier. But still.
He used the toilet, brushed his teeth, showered, and dressed. Ben paused just before opening the door and said, “Here’s what I want to do first. Give the valet this ticket and have him bring around my rental car. I’m going to stroll by your car and have a look around the places I would wait if I were hoping to ambush you. If someone’s waiting and he or they don’t look right, maybe I persuade one of them to take a ride with us.”
“Persuade them?”
“Do I need to paint you a picture, Alex? Just drive the rental around. If I’m alone, pick me up. If I’m not, pop the trunk. Ask the right person the right questions in the right way and we can find out where your problems are coming from, and why. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?”
“Look, I don’t want to get mixed up in—”
“You’re already mixed up in it. What you want to do is get out.”
“What are you saying? You want me to help you … kidnap someone? In the parking lot of the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto?”
“No, what are you saying? You expect me to do the dirty work for you? Is that it?”
“I don’t …” He stopped, unsure what to say next. This was happening too fast. Ben wasn’t really proposing to kidnap someone, was he?
Ben laughed. “You’re just like the politicians, Alex. You want something done but you won’t
let people do it right. You think you can pick up a turd from the clean end? It doesn’t work that way.”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“Yes, it is. I’m sick of liberals who’ve never even seen a gun, let alone handled one under adrenal stress, trying to crucify cops for not shooting the knife out of the bad guy’s hand. Trying to prosecute soldiers who put an extra bullet into Achmed after he goes down, never even thinking to ask whether it was that extra bullet that stopped the fucker from detonating an explosive vest. You can live in that fantasy world if you want, but how about just a little bit of gratitude for the people who make it possible for you? Who do all that dirty work so you can go on pretending you’re clean?”
“What do you want, a shiny gold star?” Alex said, louder than he’d been intending. “You volunteered for what you do, right? You get a salary, don’t you? Sure, I’m glad people join the army so I don’t have to, but I could say the same for people who mine coal. Why do you deserve special dispensation?”
Ben shook his head. “But you don’t tell miners how to mine, do you? You don’t tell them to try doing it without getting coal dust under their nails. So where do you get your amazing expertise about my business? I have to put up with that shit on CNN all the time and I’m not going to put up with it from you.”
They stood looking at each other for a moment. Alex thought of a few rejoinders. But they all felt childish, and what was the point, anyway?
Ben glanced at his watch as though longing for some other place to be. “I’m going to walk past your car now,” he said, “just to see if anyone is waiting there to kill you. I’ll check the lobby, too. Give me a one-minute head start so we don’t get seen together.” He handed the valet ticket to Alex, checked through the peephole, and left.
Alex waited a moment, fighting the urge to pick something up and throw it, then went out. He took the elevator down to the lobby, looking around cautiously as he emerged. It was empty. Christ, was this what it was going to be like from now on? Constantly wondering whether some guy reading a newspaper in a lobby was there to kill him? He didn’t think he could live that way.
He gave the valet the ticket. The guy left and was back in two minutes with a gray Taurus. Anonymous looking, Alex thought. This is how Ben lives.
He got in and drove around the corner. Ben was standing near the M3, alone. Alex pulled over and Ben got in. He said, “Drive me to your office. Go south on Page Mill, not the direction you would take from the house.”
Alex almost asked how Ben knew where the office was, but then remembered: he’d checked the Web site. And of course he knew the terrain. He’d grown up here, too.
They drove in silence. When they got to the Sullivan, Greenwald parking lot, Ben said, “Drive past wherever you usually park but don’t stop. Let’s see what we see.”
Alex did as he asked. It was just after seven, and there weren’t many cars in the lot.
“See that one there?” Ben asked. “The Jaguar. See how the hood and the windows are covered with dew? That’s been there all night. No one could see out of it. For us that means it’s safe.”
“That makes sense.”
“What we’re looking for is a car that was driven this morning. Most obviously, one that has the engine running to keep the occupant warm and the windows from fogging up. But I don’t see anything that applies.”
“But most of these cars don’t have dew on them.”
“Right. They were driven to work this morning, by early risers like you. The point is, they’re empty. So far, so good. Now drive around the block a few more times so I can see the perimeter, then park somewhere you don’t usually park and use an entrance you don’t usually use.”
They parked and went inside. Ben moved cautiously, the way he had in the hotel. He kept pausing and looking around as though gauging something.
“Key card access,” he said, and Alex wasn’t sure if he was talking to Alex or himself. “That’s an obstacle. Plus, if you don’t belong here, where do you set up inside? People coming and going, risk of discovery even early and late, so you can’t control the environment. So the parking lot is your best staging area. Multiple entries and exits. But likely the target solves that problem by always using the same one. Yeah, no doubt, I’d go with the parking lot.”
They walked up a set of stairs in the Death Star. Ben said, “Don’t say anything inside your office until I tell you it’s safe.”
“Safe to—”
“Just don’t say anything.”
They walked down the long, green-carpeted corridor. The light was on inside Osborne’s office, and as they passed, Alex glanced inside. Damn, Osborne was in there. He looked up at the sound of footsteps.
“Alex!” Osborne called out. “I didn’t expect to see you. How are you feeling?”
“Uh, better,” Alex said. “What are you doing here so early? You’re back from Thailand?”
“I’m always here early,” Osborne said. He gestured toward Ben. “And this is …”
“My brother, Ben.”
Osborne stood up and strolled over, cowboy-boot slow. “I didn’t know Alex had a brother.” He held out his hand. Ben waited a long second, then shook it.
“I don’t get out to California much these days,” Ben said.
“No? Where do you live?”
“I do volunteer work with the Missionaries of Africa.”
Osborne looked taken aback. Alex thought, What the hell?
“Africa,” Osborne said. “Hmm.”
“Yes, we provide food, clothing, shelter, new sources of clean water, medicine, pastoral care, education …”
Osborne looked more nonplussed than Alex had ever seen him. “Really,” he said.
Ben smiled. “‘suffer the little children … for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Matthew 19:14. Don’t you agree?”
“Nothing more important than children,” Osborne said. “Well, don’t let me keep you.” He offered a sickly smile and went back to his desk.
Alex and Ben went down the hallway. Alex was steaming. What the hell was that about? Osborne was going to think he had some kind of religious zealot for a brother. He wanted to say something, but they were almost at his office and Ben had told him not to.
They went in. Ben held a finger to his lips, then pointed at the door and rotated his hand as though turning a key. Right. Alex closed the door and locked it. Ben set his bag down on Alex’s desk and took out something that looked like a radio. He attached a corded wand to it and started walking around the office, pointing the wand here and there. Alex realized: Damn, he’s checking for bugs.
After a few minutes, Ben turned his attention to Alex’s phone. He checked the receiver, the line, and the unit itself.
Ben set the detector down on Alex’s desk. He looked out the window for a moment, then closed the blinds. “Your office is clean,” he said.
Alex noticed the unit’s red indicator light was still on. “You’re leaving it on?” Alex asked.
“In case there’s a bug that was turned off while I was looking for it, and that gets turned on later.”
“You really think someone could have bugged my office?”
Ben shrugged. “We’re doing things for the sake of argument, remember?”
“You carry that equipment with you all the time?”
“What are you getting at?”
Alex shook his head. “I don’t … I don’t know how you can live like this.”
“I’d be dead if I didn’t.”
“I mean, it must be exhausting.”
“It just seems that way to you because you don’t know what to look for. You don’t have any filters.”
“What were you looking for out the window?”
“A place someone could set up a laser to read conversations off the window glass.”
“You can’t be serious. You can really do that?”
“It’s not easy, but it can be done. No sense taking chances.”
Alex sat down in his chair,
glad Ben hadn’t taken it already. If he hadn’t been playing with his equipment, he probably would have. “Why did you say all that stuff to Osborne about being a missionary?”
Ben laughed without mirth and took one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. “I didn’t like the smell of that guy. I didn’t want to talk to him. He’s your boss, right?”
“How could you tell?”
“I just could.”
“Yeah, well, all the more reason not to make him think my brother’s a fanatic.”
“It was the right thing to tell him to cut short the conversation. Fat cats who spend their days collecting five hundred dollars an hour to move paper around don’t like to engage people who do charity work. It makes them feel their lives are shallow.”
“You think my life is shallow?”
Ben looked around the office. “You’ve been gone a couple of days, right? Anything seem out of place here to you?”
Alex wasn’t going to let him just pretend he didn’t hear. “I said, you think my life is shallow?”
There was a pause. Ben said, “It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“No, I want to know.”
“I don’t know, Alex. You live in the same house, you work in an office five miles away from it, you went to college and graduate school and law school all at the same place, all right here … I mean, have you ever done anything different? Ever taken a risk?”
Alex could feel his ears burning. “So what? Stanford was the best school. And you know what kind of tax hit you take in California when you sell a house?”
Even as he said it, it sounded lame. But fuck Ben, not everything was about taking risks.
“You think you’re a big risk taker,” he said. “But you want to know what I think?”
Ben glanced away as though bored. “Not really.”
“You sucked in school, you quit college, and you couldn’t have cut it in the Valley. You stumbled into the only thing you seem to be any good at, and ever since, you’ve been making a virtue of necessity. You don’t do what you do because it’s worthy and important. You do it because you don’t know how to do anything else.”
Ben unwrapped a piece of chewing gum and put it in his mouth. He extended the pack to Alex. Alex wanted to slap it out of his hand.