Fault Line

by Barry Eisler

7 SO LONG AS THEY FEAR US

  Ben spent three days in Ankara. He wasn’t in a hurry, and didn’t want to cross a national border until some of the potential heat from Istanbul had evaporated. The hit was all over the television news and in the English-language dailies. The Iranians had been identified as such, but there were no reports of their affiliations beyond nationality. The fifth guy was a total unknown. Ben assumed he’d been operating sterile, carrying no passport or other identifying documents, and if no one claimed him, he would remain, at least to the public, the Turkish equivalent of a John Doe.

  He’d checked in immediately with his commander at JSOC, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, an African-American named Scott “Hort” Horton. Horton was a legend in the black ops community, a veteran of countless campaigns both public and secret, a swashbuckler who had ridden on horseback with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, fought with the Contras in Nicaragua, and personally led clandestine small-unit hunts for bin Laden in Pakistan’s northwest tribal regions, a man of impeccable patriotic credentials who could trace his military ancestry all the way back to the Fourth United States Colored Infantry, which fought with Major General Edward Ord’s Union Army of the James at the decisive Battle of Appomattox Court House. Horton was a colonel and Ben only an E-8 master sergeant, but despite the difference in their age, rank, and service, and despite the near reverence Ben felt for the man, Ben addressed him as Hort. Members of the unit called one another by their first names or call signs regardless of rank. There was no saluting, either, or much other regular military behavior. They didn’t need it. They were too small, too irregular, and too specialized for the spit-and-polish discipline and hooah spirit that kept the regular army cohesive. And although they wouldn’t have said it in so many words, they were also too elite.

  Every one of the unit’s members had been through the same brutal feeder system: Airborne, Ranger, Special Forces, and Delta, or the marine or navy equivalent. A candidate needed a personal recommendation from someone already in the unit before being invited to try out, and at least three confirmed combat kills. Most, like Ben, who had been blooded in Mogadishu, had many more than that. Once selected, candidates were put through MOTC—the CIA’s Military Operations Training Course—then subjected to a variety of grueling physical and psychological tests, culminating in something known as “the Final,” which Hort was reputed to have designed himself, in which the candidate was drugged, hooded, flown to a third-world country he had never visited and whose language he didn’t speak, and left with no money, passport, or anything else but the clothes on his back. His objective was to carry out a designated clandestine act that would involve a prison term if it were discovered, then return to the United States undetected. Only men who had passed every test, including the Final, were accepted into the unit. There were three areas of specialization: signals intelligence, human intelligence, and the shooters. Everyone had crossover skills, of course, but Ben was primarily a shooter.

  Over the years the unit had been known by a variety of names: Foreign Operating Group, Intelligence Support Activity, Centra Spike, Gray Fox, and quite a few others. The frequent name changes were part of JSOC’s ongoing efforts to persuade government bean counters that the elite unit was being reformed following inquiries into the latest assassination or other covert op du jour. An ambassador would protest that he hadn’t been briefed, someone from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the Armed Services Committee would ask what the hell was going on, the Pentagon would tell JSOC it had better behave, JSOC would say sorry and give the unit a new name. Egos would be massaged, faces saved, consciences salved. But the program itself never really changed. Because the truth was, the more restrictions Congress and the brass laid down on “white” special ops units like the Green Berets, the greater the need for “black” units like Ben’s. It was a demand-side problem, and thank God there were men who would always find a way to create a supply.

  Ben briefed Hort about the way it went down in Istanbul, using a pay phone and a portable scrambler that fit over the mouthpiece of the receiver. He told him about the Russian.

  “You sure he was Russian?” Hort asked in his gravelly baritone and cultured coastal drawl.

  “Pretty sure,” Ben said. “He had the Slavic cheekbones and pale skin, and that flat expression, if you know what I mean. Plus he was standing there like he was untouchable.”

  “Right up until you touched him.”

  “He was going for a weapon.”

  “Don’t worry, son, I believe you. No chance he was Israeli? They would have loved to take a crack at the two you sent to Valhalla.”

  Ben thought about that. He’d even wondered at one point whether someone had considered handing this op off to the Mossad. Probably someone had, but with their better intel inside Iran, the Israelis might have figured out who the mole was, and no one would have been willing to take that chance, even with one of America’s closest allies in the dreaded global war on terror. Plus there was always someone at JSOC lobbying for use of U.S. resources. They’d invested an enormous amount training—in fact, creating—Ben and a few others like him, and what was the point of having an attack dog if you didn’t sometimes let him off the leash?

  “I’m thinking he was FSB,” Ben said. The FSB was the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB.

  “I hope not,” Hort said. “Those guys are like the mafia. Hell, with all those former KGB siloviki in office, they are the mafia.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’ll see what I can find out. But don’t worry, even if he was FSB, it’s not going to be obvious who did it. The other two had a lot of enemies.”

  The Iranian enemies Hort was referring to were the Israelis. In fact, while he was in Istanbul, Ben had been eating food brought directly from Israel. If the op went sideways and he was killed, or if he was captured and used the cyanide pill he was carrying, there would be an autopsy, his stomach contents analyzed. Best for things to point in the direction of Israel. JSOC had laid down a few other false clues, as well, nothing too heavy-handed. Not a very nice trick to play on a friend, but the Israelis were realists and would understand. Anyway, what could Russia really do to Israel that it wasn’t doing already? Sell arms to Damascus? Deliver nuclear fuel to Tehran? And what could Iran do? Back Hezbollah? Blow up another Argentine synagogue? Yeah, one thing the Israelis had going for them was clarity. Their enemies couldn’t hate them more than they already did. Ben wished the U.S. could be equally clear-eyed. What did Caligula say? Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate us, so long as they fear us.

  He went back to waiting in his room. He didn’t go out much. There were periods in his life where he would go days without even speaking, where his whole world would shrink to no more than the dimensions of the walls around him. Sometimes he withdrew so thoroughly, the only thing that would bring him out of it was the buzz of his pager.

  He thought about hate. America was hated overseas, true, but was pretty well understood, too. In fact, he thought foreigners understood Americans better than Americans understood themselves. Americans thought of themselves as a benevolent, peace-loving people. But benevolent, peace-loving peoples don’t cross oceans to new continents, exterminate the natives, expel the other foreign powers, conquer sovereign territory, win world wars, and less than two centuries from their birth stand astride the planet. The benevolent peace lovers were the ones all that shit happened to.

  It was the combination of the gentle self-image and the brutal truth that made Americans so dangerous. Because if you aggressed against such a people, who could see themselves only as innocent, the embodiment of all that was good in the world, they would react not just with anger but with Old Testament–style moral wrath. Anyone depraved enough to attack such angels forfeited claims to adjudication, proportionality, even elemental mercy itself.

  Yeah, foreigners hated that American hypocrisy. That was okay, as long as they also feared it. Oderint dum
metuant.

  True, there were downsides to the fear. After the U.S. took out Saddam Hussein, every bush-league enemy of America out there realized he needed an insurance policy. Because if Saddam had had a few nukes and had demonstrated the insanity or even just the minimal resolve to use them if attacked—and who would bet against a guy who had gassed his own people?—the U.S. would have stood down for sure. The Iranians understood this. It was part of why they were trying so hard for a nuke of their own.

  He smiled. Well, they’d suffered a bit of a setback recently, hadn’t they?

  But killing the scientists was mostly just buying time. America was the world’s richest, most networked, most technologically advanced nation, with unparalleled military superiority. Nukes might be enough to check a power like that, but that didn’t mean America’s enemies weren’t also looking for a checkmate. The Chinese were experimenting with antisatellite technology, looking for a way to put out America’s eyes in space. For the Russians, it was all about cyberwarfare, with their massive denial-of-service attack on Estonia a trial run. The Iranians and other third-tier powers … who knew? In a thousand garages and bunkers and secret laboratories all around the world, motivated men probed for weakness. When they found it, they would exploit it.

  Luckily, there were hundreds of guys in the bowels of the Pentagon whose job was to ruminate over all the possibilities, imagine, predict, monitor, counter. Of course, there had been people assigned to figure out how to protect America from asymmetrical threats pre-9/11, too. But there were more of them now, and they were better motivated. The Defense Department had even formalized some of it, turning the Eighth Air Force into something called a Cyber Command, tasked with training and equipping forces to conduct network defense, attack, and exploitation. Ben hoped they were doing their job.

  Well, he was doing his. He was proud of that. If his folks were alive, maybe they would have been proud, too.

  Maybe not, though. He’d always been the black sheep. There was a reserve about him, a stillness at his core his parents found vaguely discomfiting and other kids mistook as a kind of cool. The stillness had made him popular, and that unsought, effortless popularity, along with the friends and dates and parties that came with it, had acted to balance the stillness and to some extent conceal it.

  His father had been an engineer with IBM, and the family had moved three times when Ben was a kid—first, Yorktown Heights in New York; then Austin, Texas; and then Portola Valley, in California’s Silicon Valley, a stone’s throw from the San Andreas Fault. Ben had a knack for football and wrestling, and sports were always a good way to quickly get accepted in a new school. His younger sister, Katie, never had a problem, either. She was a beautiful girl with a radiant smile and nothing but goodwill in her heart, who had it in her just to naturally like everyone, and naturally enough, everyone seemed to like her in return.

  Alex, the youngest of the three, was the problem. He was shy and awkward everywhere but in the classroom, where the little teacher’s pet would have an answer to every question and never made a mistake. Alex’s constant need to show everyone how smart he was would invariably attract the attention of a bully, and then it would fall to Ben to straighten the bully out. The bully would typically have an older brother, and the brother would always have friends. Usually it took three or four fistfights before Ben established that even if his younger brother was a dipshit, that didn’t mean people could pick on him. During these periods, when Ben had to make things clear to people, he often found himself suspended from school. His parents were appalled. They demanded explanations, but what could Ben really tell them? Alex, with his instant aptitude for science and school, was his father’s favorite, and the old man wouldn’t have understood that it was precisely Alex’s showing off all the time in class that was causing the problems. A few times, after Ben had violently interceded on his behalf, Alex thanked him, but Ben didn’t want his thanks, he just wanted him to stop provoking people by acting like he was smarter than everyone else. Ben would tell him that, but Alex never listened. And so it went on, Ben angry at Alex, the parents angry at Ben, Ben even more angry at Alex as a result, and Alex, awed by his big brother, confused and resentful at his aloofness and ire. The only emollient was Katie. She would soothe Ben and comfort Alex and try to explain to their parents, and although Martin and Judith Treven could never accept Ben’s ready embrace of violence as a solution, no one could stay angry long when Katie was advocating for peace.

  He hadn’t known it at the time, but family was a fragile thing. Like a house of cards. Some cards, no doubt, could be pulled out without much affecting the overall structure. Others, when they were removed, caused a shudder, and then another card popped out, then two more—and then the whole thing collapsed, just like that. All from a single mistake, from one little lost card.

  But none of that mattered anymore. What happened had happened, and now, looking back, it all seemed unavoidable, not a collection of random events at all but rather the insidious and inevitable workings of destiny itself. He wondered sometimes whether that feeling of destiny was a trick, a narcotic the mind offered up to anesthetize remorse and regret. After all, if it didn’t just happen, but had to happen, it couldn’t have been your fault. Destiny was like a freight train, and who the hell could stop that? Trains just went wherever the tracks led them. So at the time it had looked like a car, sure. But it wasn’t. Really, it was a train.

  8 THE FLAVOR OF THE FOOD

  Sarah had gone back to her office so Alex could call the VCs and cancel the meeting. The poor guy looked crushed. Well, who wouldn’t? He never said anything about it, but she knew if the Obsidian technology turned out to be as good as it looked, Hilzoy would become a very important client of the firm. For a sixth-year like Alex, coming up for partnership, originating a client like that had to be a big deal.

  She spent two hours analyzing some prior art for one of the senior litigation associates. There were no interruptions, and she was glad of it—she still wasn’t used to managing her time in six-minute increments, and long periods devoted exclusively to a single matter made it easier to keep track. She made a note of the time and thought about getting some lunch.

  She got up and adjusted the blinds. At midday the sun moved into position and made the office too warm. Not that an overabundance of sunlight was anything to complain about.

  Outside her window, a soccer game was in progress on a field that had lain barren until recently, when some sort of Superfund cleanup had converted it to its current use. She pulled the blinds open a bit and watched for a moment. Her window was impressively soundproofed and she couldn’t hear the game, but she imagined the players were laughing.

  No, she really had nothing to complain about. An office with a view in a great location, nice furnishings, a secretary. The work was reasonably interesting and she was good at it. The position conferred a certain degree of status, too, although she wouldn’t have wanted to put it that way out loud. And of course she was making an obscene amount of money for a twenty-six-year-old. Still, at times the feeling that somehow she had just stumbled into it all troubled her. Just because you were good at something, and it paid well, was that sufficient reason to do it?

  Her parents would have laughed at the question, and indeed they had before she’d learned to keep her doubts to herself. But of course, they were from a different generation. They had met as college students in America, where they had come to study and to perfect their English as was the custom among the sons and daughters of well-off Iranians of the day. Her father, Emaan, was pre-med and planned to become an ophthalmologist. Her mother, Ashraf, was studying nineteenth-century English literature and wanted one day to become a professor herself. They married while still in school. Their parents were pleased with the match, and their future looked bright.

  Then came the revolution, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy. Amid talk of war, President Carter froze Iranian assets. Their families lost everything. Forget about tuition—it was all they
could do to find a way to eat and pay the rent. Ashraf took a job as a waitress. Emaan sold eyeglasses at an optician’s shop. They worked their butts off and saved money by sharing a two-bedroom apartment with another Iranian couple who had been similarly afflicted. Eventually, they had enough put away to buy out the optician. Now they owned five eyeglass stores in the Bay Area and some real estate, too, and were damn proud of it. Once, when Sarah had told her father she wanted a job that paid psychic income, he had laughed and said, “Silly child, don’t you know that financial income is psychic income?”

  She understood his point. But she had more opportunities than her parents did, opportunities they had given her. Wouldn’t it be wrong not to take advantage? Shouldn’t she build on the foundation they had provided?

  And besides, she thought she had seen sadness behind her father’s laugh.

  She tried to ignore it, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more for her, if only she could figure out what.

  And that was her problem: all her dreams were inchoate. She didn’t know what she wanted. There was a longing inside her, but she couldn’t name it. It could be quietly corrosive, feeling so strongly something was there yet unable to express or even identify it. She wondered which was worse: betraying a dream or being too shallow even to have one?

  And then she would tell herself she was being silly. She was hoping for too much, that was the problem. She should just be satisfied with all the good things she had.

  Sometimes she wished she had a sibling she could confide in. But times had been hard when she was born. Her parents didn’t think they could afford another child, and by the time they could, Sarah was already ten. They didn’t want to start all over again.

  The one thing that really interested her was politics. She read everything, across the political spectrum—newspapers, magazines, books. Blogs especially. There were some great ones out there, and with their diversity and spontaneity she trusted them much more than she did the mainstream media, which was controlled by corporations or driven only by a hunger for access to whoever was in power, or both. The voracious reading was a kind of hobby that had started in high school and intensified as she got older. But what was she supposed to do with it? Look at how Obama’s opponents had tried to smear him by falsely suggesting he was Muslim. Or the way they’d destroyed that Iranian-American businessman, Alex Latifi, with textbook malicious prosecution in Alabama. What would people make of an Iranian-American woman who really was Muslim, who in fact found passages of the Koran breathtakingly beautiful? Her given name was Shaghayegh, for God’s sake, after the Persian flower—Sarah was just a nickname. Shaghayegh Hosseini, vote for me … Really, she had a better chance of being sent to Guantánamo than of being elected to office.