by Barry Eisler
This time, Ben did laugh. “Yeah. Like a fairy tale.”
He was five feet from the corner of the house, a gap that in his present circumstances looked as wide as the Grand Canyon. There was something just on the other side he could use. Assuming it was still there, of course. If it wasn’t, even if he made it around the corner, he was dead. But Alex hadn’t changed anything else. And regardless, it was his only chance.
“Listen, buddy, you’re in a bad spot, I know. But here’s the way it is. Maybe I’m bullshitting you. Maybe I’m not. But trust me on this, okay? When I ask you again? This one more time I’m going to ask you? If you don’t tell me something I can work with, the thing you’ll see a second later, the last thing you’ll see ever, will be the mist that used to be your insides.”
Without letting any sign of it come to the surface, Ben tensed to move faster than he had ever moved in his life. Then he laughed, long and hard and with a confidence he absolutely didn’t feel. The laughter was inappropriate and incongruous, and no matter how good the guy was, trying to process it was going to momentarily suck up a few precious neurons.
“Something funny?” the voice said.
“For me it is. He’s in the tree right over you.”
The instant the last word was out of his mouth, Ben dove for the corner like he’d been shot out of a cannon. And it worked: the laughter, the momentary shift in the guy’s focus to what was going on above him instead of in front, and good old action beating reaction—it was just enough. He hit the deck on his stomach like he was sliding into third base and heard the boom of the Taurus behind him, felt lead flying through the air just above his head. He rolled in close to the house, got his feet under him, and dove forward again.
The woodpile. There was always a tarp-covered half cord or cord of firewood here, stacked parallel to the side of the house and two feet away from it because his dad didn’t want termites to have an easy jump from the wood to the foundation. And it was still here, thank God, not as much as he remembered but chest high. He scrambled to his feet and turned, his back to the house. He flexed his knees and dropped his hips low, getting his head and body below the top of the pile. He brought his palms up against it, his elbows in, his forehead pressed against the protruding ends of the logs.
And then the guy made a mistake. In his fear that Ben might clear the fence and escape, and in his confidence that Ben was effectively blind now, he followed in too fast. Ben tensed, forcing himself to wait the extra second, to let the guy narrow the gap, and then blasted up and through the wood like an offensive lineman crashing into a blocking sled. Two-foot lengths of hard white oak—splits, rounds, and everything in between—exploded out. Ben charged out behind them. He heard a heavy thud, heard the guy cry out, and then he was on him, wrapping his left hand around the barrel of the gun and twisting hard to the left, driving the other hand into the guy’s throat, shoving him backward, slamming him back into the fence. The gun went off again but the muzzle was pointed away from him and then he felt the guy’s trigger finger break and the gun tore free. He reversed direction instantly, bringing the gun in muzzle-first in a hammer fist grip, driving it into the guy’s temple like he was pounding in a nail. The guy spun away and doubled over, his hands suddenly invisible, clearly reaching for a backup weapon. Ben took the Taurus in his right hand, put the front sight on the guy’s back, and rolled the trigger. There was a flash from the muzzle and the gun kicked in his hand. The guy’s body jerked as though he was trying to shrug something off, then he dropped to his knees. Ben kept the gun on him and moved in, wanting to shoot him again but hating the thought of the noise of a fourth discharge.
There was no need. The .410 ammunition had shredded the guy, and in the pale light of the moon Ben could see blood flowing from all over his back. The guy groped a hand around to the gore, then held it before his face. “Fuck me,” he whispered, his tone faintly wondrous, and pitched face-forward to the ground.
Ben moved in, keeping the gun on the guy. He turned him over with a foot and checked for a pulse in this neck. Nothing. He was done.
He retrieved the goggles he had dropped and got them back on, then picked up the Glock. He went back to the guy and pulled the goggles from his slack-jawed face. Caucasian, close-cropped hair, about thirty, maybe younger. That didn’t tell him anything. His tactics had been good, though, at least until he’d followed Ben around the corner of the house. But that could be excused—he wouldn’t have had a way of knowing how well Ben knew the terrain. And his equipment was good, too. The Taurus, of course; and his goggles were Night Optics, like Ben’s.
He crouched next to the body for a moment, sucking wind, trying to clear his head and figure out what to do. A series of snapshot images clicked open and closed in his mind: Tossing a baseball with his dad. Throwing a Frisbee to Arlo. Katie, laughing, throwing barbecue sauce at him after he’d squirted her with a water gun. He looked down at the body and for a moment was paralyzed by the colliding past and present.
Come on, he thought. Focus. Three shots fired. Pretty damn loud. The lots were big in Ladera, though, typically separated by fences and trees that would suppress some of the sound. Could be people slept through it all, or convinced themselves it was something other than gunshots, or thought it might be gunshots but figured someone else would do something about it. Could be someone picked up the phone and called the police. He couldn’t afford to wait around to find out.
He went through the guy’s pockets quickly, not expecting anything. This one was better than the Russians. He was a pro. It wasn’t like he was going to be carrying a business card.
A bunch of spare Taurus rounds. Useless. A SureFire E1E mini light. Same. And …
A car key. No rental agency fob or other identifying characteristics, but it belonged to a Volvo. He’d seen a few Volvos parked on the streets on his way in. A good bet one of them belonged to his new dead friend here. Or if not, then another one, somewhere within, say, a one-mile radius from the house. After all, the guy didn’t parachute in here.
He dragged the body back behind the hot tub. He took the guy’s goggles and the Taurus—the less physical evidence left at the scene, the better—and headed back over the fence and to his car. He drove away with the headlights off, switching them on again only when he was back on Erica. He parked far back in the Ladera Center parking lot. There were only two streets in and out of Ladera, and from here Ben could see both. If the police came, he would quietly drive away.
He waited, watching and thinking. Leave the guy, or move him? There were risks either way. If he left him, it wouldn’t be long before someone saw the body. And a body in his brother’s backyard was too close a connection to himself. Okay. This guy had to go for one last ride and be found somewhere else, if he was ever found at all.
After a half hour with no sign of police, he drove back to Escanyo and parked as he had before. He crossed the yard, hopped the fence, and walked over to the woodpile. He grabbed the tarp that had been covering it, got the guy onto it, and dragged him back to the fence. The tarp was plastic and sledded easily across the wet grass. At the base of the fence he rolled the guy into the tarp, managed to scoop the package up onto his shoulder, and then, using both hands and his head, shoved it over the side. From there it was an easy drag to the car.
He passed two Volvos parked in the street on the way out. Both times he hit the remote unlock button on the key he had taken from the dead guy, hoping for a bit of luck. No good either time. Okay, take care of business and come back later. Too risky to drive around looking for the guy’s car with his body cooling in the trunk.
Two minutes later he was back on 280, heading north. He made two stops: first, San Andreas Lake, where he punched the necessary holes in the body to prevent it from floating and then dumped it, along with the guy’s pistol and goggles and the knife he used for the aeration; second, a Dumpster in the Mission, where he unloaded the bloody tarp. Then he drove back to the hotel, smiling grimly at the prospect of the girl. Wasn’t
she going to be surprised to see him now.
24 VIRUS
After Ben had left, Alex opened his laptop again and continued to work with Obsidian and Hilzoy’s notes. But his focus was shot.
Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything about the cemetery. But it wasn’t his fault that Ben couldn’t handle it. A simple suggestion, a request, that his brother pay his respects, and Mr. Tough Guy has a purple fit. What was Alex supposed to do, walk on eggshells out of fear that Ben might blow up at the slightest provocation? It was ridiculous.
He felt sick and exhilarated at the same time. Sick because he’d said some harsh things, things he hadn’t thought of in a long time and had never dared articulate before. Exhilarated because it was high time Ben heard them. Most of all he was angry—furious, in fact—that Ben, who’d pulled the world’s greatest disappearing act while their mother was sick and dying, would now accuse Alex of taking care of her only because it had been convenient for him, because it was some kind of excuse not to go anywhere or do anything else.
Convenient? I wish you could have been there to hold her head while she puked her guts from the chemotherapy. To watch her waste away until she looked like a prisoner of war. Trying every stratagem to get her to take just one more bite. Come on, Mom, it’s good, just one more, can’t you? No? You want something else? I’ll make you something, it’s not a problem. Or I could run down to the deli at the shopping center. Just tell me, Mom. Just eat something. Just a bite. Please. Please, Mom.
They’d hired a nurse, but she hadn’t been there all the time, and Alex had cleaned up more than one mess when his mother had lost control of her bowels, and then had to try to comfort her afterward, had to try to find ways to ease her shame and shore up her collapsing dignity.
He remembered her feeble laughter at his feeble jokes. Come on, Mom, what are you talking about? You used to do the same for me, remember? Remembered his despair when he realized she was only pretending he had made her feel better to make him feel better, remembered this as one of the black instants when he understood, really understood, she was going to die.
Mostly she’d been tough, but still, sometimes the façade would suddenly crack and out of nowhere she’d be crying. I’m scared, honey. I’m scared. Look at me, big brave Mommy.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. It was amazing, the clarity of the moments, of the images, that lived in his mind. Months would go by, years, without anything from that horrible time surfacing, and then here it was, in total-recall high definition, all at the flick of a switch.
Yeah, you could have tried looking into her eyes when she cried, while you lied to her about how it was going to be all right. And you could have cried yourself to sleep afterward, because everyone you loved was dying and you couldn’t handle this again. Except you had to. You had to. Because no one else was there. That was convenient, too, asshole.
His screen saver kicked in, an image of a galaxy or something, infinite black studded with distant stars and swirling violet nebulas.
The hell with it. He wasn’t getting anything done on Obsidian. He got up and started pacing.
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 show
ing 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.