by Barry Eisler
“I don’t feel fine,” Alex said.
“Trust me, you’ll feel better when you have something to shoot back with.”
He closed the curtains, then walked over to the desk and ripped a sheet of paper off the notepad by the phone. He folded it in quarters, then used a strip of duct tape from inside his wallet to tape it over the peephole on the door so that it functioned as a flap. “Now if you need to look through the peephole,” he told Alex, “the person on the other side won’t know you’re there. With the curtains closed, you won’t cast a shadow under the door. Just get up close before you move the paper out of the way.”
“You really live this way. I can’t believe it.”
“I’ll be back in about an hour. Call me on my cell phone if anything comes up.” He wrote down the number and left.
20 IN ANOTHER THOUSAND
YEARS
Ben stopped at the front desk and asked if there had been any calls from the room Sarah was in. He was ready with a story in case the receptionist asked, something about his spendthrift cousin Sarah who had a habit of running up phone and room service charges and pissing off their grandfather, who was footing the bill, but the receptionist just told him no, there hadn’t been.
Good. She hadn’t tried to call anyone. At least not yet.
“As it turns out,” he said, “we’re going to need one more room. Hopefully on the same floor?”
“Certainly, sir. Let me see what we have available.”
They were in luck—there was a third room, right across from the ones they were in. He took two key cards for the extra room, keeping them in separate pockets clockwise alphabetically. Alex front left; Ben front right; Sarah back. A little thing, like folding the edge back on a roll of duct tape, but it would save time when it counted.
On the way out, he scoped the lobby. Small, only a couple of sitting areas, all in view of the concierge and the front desk. Not an easy place to set up and wait. There was an adjacent tearoom, up a few marble stairs and visible from where he stood. A woman was playing a harp in the corner and the gentle sound of it couldn’t have been more incongruous.
He walked outside and looked around. There were a few cars parked in front of the hotel, all of them empty, and it looked like getting a spot in the street might take a sniper’s patience. Not a place you could plan to wait in a vehicle. And the surrounding buildings were all residences. Again, not usable for a seat-of-the-pants ambush. Between the lobby and the street, Alex had picked a reasonably hard-target hotel. Albeit for all the wrong reasons.
He circled the block and then headed north, getting his bearings. The white double spires of Saints Peter and Paul Church were aglow in the midday sun, the blue of the bay behind them, Angel Island and the green hills of Tiburon beyond. He went down the dank stairs of the Stockton Street Tunnel. The concrete walls were covered with graffiti and piss stains. A sign warned of video surveillance. Yeah, thanks for the heads-up.
He crossed California, and the vibrating sound of the cables sliding along in their metal tracks made him remember an early trip to the city, with his parents and Alex and Katie. His dad explained to everyone that the reason they were called cable cars was that they were actually pulled along by metal cables. Ben and Katie played dumb and kept asking, What? Why are they called cable cars? Alex was too young to be wise to the joke, and their father, ever the engineer, too earnest. Alex and their dad kept trying different variations of the obvious— They’re called cable cars because they’re cars and they’re pulled by cables— their accompanying gesticulations growing increasingly emphatic, until finally the others dissolved in laughter, crying out, Oh, that’s why they’re called cable cars! Their dad chuckled with them then, realizing they’d been putting him on. Only Alex refused to share in the amusement, probably because in his insecurity he suspected he was the source of it.
He continued up Stockton into Chinatown, joining a thick, slow-moving mass of pedestrians squeezed between produce stands and souvenir shops on one side of the sidewalk, and newspaper vending machines, street signs, and parking meters on the other. A low-level cacophony surrounded him: storekeepers hawking their wares in Chinese, honking horns, traditional stringed music blaring soullessly from speakers strung from the underside of awnings. The air was laced with the smells of herbal elixirs and diesel belching from buses. A cold wind sliced up and down the east-west streets, and the laundry hanging from shadowed tenement windows twisted back and forth in it like tethered ghosts struggling to break free.
He cut right on Clay, then ducked left into a nameless alley strewn with garbage containers and rotting wood pallets, its walls scarred with dark splotches of paint covering the graffiti underneath. A few pigeons marched spastically away from him, searching for scraps. The air was moist and fetid. He leaned against the wall and waited three minutes. The faces that passed the alley were all Asian. No one followed him in, and no one paid him any attention. He moved on.
When he felt he’d gotten comfortable with the layout of the area, he went back to the hotel, watching his back, checking the likely ambush points as he moved. He checked in at the front desk again. No calls made from either room. Okay.
He tried his key card at Alex’s room and it didn’t work. Good— Alex had engaged the secondary lock. “Alex,” Ben said. “It’s me. Open up.”
Alex opened the door and Ben went in. Sarah was standing in front of the television. “You’re on channel four,” Alex said. “KRON, the Bay Area news station.”
Ben watched. A double homicide outside the Palo Alto Four Seasons. Unidentified victims. Police following leads.
“I don’t know why you think that has anything to do with me,” Ben said. Sarah looked at him but said nothing.
Ben picked up the remote and turned off the television. “The two of you are here to do a job,” he said, not bothering to prevent the irritation from creeping into his tone. “Watching the news doesn’t improve your situation. Figuring out Obsidian does.”
Sarah looked at him and he thought she was going to say something smart. But she didn’t. She just walked over to the desk and sat down in front of one of two open laptops. Shit, he’d been so focused on the possibility of Sarah making a phone call, he hadn’t even thought to check her bag for a laptop. He’d locked the front door and left the windows wide open.
“This is your setup?” Ben asked, walking over and looking at her screen. No e-mail or chat application open, but that meant nothing. It would have taken her all of thirty seconds to send a message, and he had no way of knowing.
“We’re just getting started,” Sarah said. “We linked the two laptops together as a local area network. We’ll use the LAN to encrypt files with Obsidian and send them back and forth.”
“What’s the music?” Ben asked. Something was coming from one of the laptops. He hadn’t been aware of it while the television was on.
“‘Dirge,’ by a band called Death in Vegas,” Sarah said. “Hilzoy built an MP3 file into Obsidian and a command to play it when the program opens. We were listening to see if there was more to it than just a song Hilzoy liked.”
“Is there?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
“Well, he picked an appropriate title. Let’s get back to work, okay?”
“Okay,” Sarah said, without any of the feistiness he had learned to expect from her. Her flat tone gave him another unpleasant emotional wince, like the one he’d felt at the coffee place. But you know what? It might not be the worst thing she was a little afraid of him, afraid of what might happen if she did something stupid like try to contact the police with information about what had happened outside the Four Seasons that morning.
“I need to go out again,” Ben said. “Not sure for how long. Call if there’s a problem.”
He headed north from the hotel, then had a cab take him to Baker Beach, the northern extremity of the city, where the Pacific Ocean ended and the San Francisco Bay began. He took off his shoes and walked across the soft sand, w
hich was pleasantly warm from the sun. A cold sea breeze whistled through the air, and from somewhere on the bay a ship’s horn sounded, long and plaintive. A jogger with a golden retriever pounded along at the tide’s edge, but other than that the beach was empty of all but driftwood.
He walked down to the water, the Golden Gate Bridge looming a quarter mile off to his right, steep sea cliffs topped with houses sporting multimillion-dollar views on his left. For a moment, he looked out over the Pacific and gave himself over to the timeless rhythm of waves crashing against rocks and packed wet sand, the roar of impact, the hush as the water receded and gathered, the roar again. He wondered what it must have been like here, this very spot, a thousand years earlier. Take away the houses and the bridge and it was all probably the same as it was now. The sky and the water; the sound of the wind and the waves; an ocean with another name, long since forgotten. He smiled, thinking that in another thousand years it would be like that again.
He’d come here a fair amount in high school. It was a good place to smoke a joint, and a better one for sex. At the foot of the sea cliffs there was a rock formation you could climb. At low tide you could drop down into its center and do whatever you wanted, hidden from the world. Ben climbed the formation now, surprised at the immediate familiarity of the hand- and footholds, and more so by the heavy sadness their presence stirred in his memory. The tide was too far in and he couldn’t climb down to the formation’s center, but that wasn’t his purpose. He stood at the top, reached into his bag, and took out the Glock he’d used at the Four Seasons that morning. He looked at the gun for a moment, then disassembled it and pitched the components far out into the water. A moment later he slung the license plates in, too. Doubtful any of it would ever be found. Even if it was, the gun was untraceable, and the salt water would long since have scoured away any DNA evidence.
He headed out to the road and caught a cab back to North Beach. The broad outlines of the neighborhood were the same, but he’d known the area before only by night and there was something off about it in daylight. It was like seeing the working girl who’d gotten you so hot the night before without her makeup the next morning. Clubs with names like Roaring Twenties and the Garden of Eden and the Condor Topless Bar and the Hungry I clustered together like drunks sleeping off a collective hangover, their neon signs inert, bleached in the sunlight, the innumerable gray wads of gum ground into the sidewalks before them the only evidence of the restless crowds they attracted at night. A homeless man in a raincoat the color of lichens stopped in front of a trash can and began picking through it, oblivious to Ben’s presence. Ben peeled a twenty out of his wallet and, when the man looked up, handed it to him. The man looked at it, then smiled at Ben, revealing dark and ulcerating gums. Ben watched him shuffle off and thought, What difference does it make, anyway?
He found an Internet café and pulled out the dead Russians’ wallets. The driver’s licenses identified them as Grigory Solovyov and Yegor Gorsky He got no hits. Well, maybe one of the alphabet soup agencies had something on them.
He had a thought—a way of testing the girl. What was the name of that club across from Vesuvio … Pearl’s, something like that? He searched for Pearl’s San Francisco and got it on the first try: Jazz at Pearl’s. Someone named Kim Nalley would be singing songs of love there at eight o’clock that night. Okay, Kim, he thought. Sing one for me.
He went out to a pay phone and called Hort, using the scrambler as always. “Anything turn up about that Russian in Istanbul?” he asked.
“Nothing. Nobody’s claimed him. I would have let you know otherwise.”
“Yeah, I know. The main reason I’m calling is, I just saw something on the news and thought, what the hell, maybe it’s connected.”
“What is it?”
“Two Russians got shot to death this morning in Palo Alto. Well, the part about their being Russian isn’t on the news. I found out about that another way.”
There was a pause. Hort said, “I can’t help noticing you’re calling from San Francisco.”
“Just passing through. Couple of personal things to take care of.”
“I’m not going to ask you if you had anything to do with these two dead Russians.”
“Good, then I won’t have to tell you.”
“They came after you?”
“No. Not me.”
“Then why do you think it was connected?”
“I don’t. It’s … just a lot of Russians lately. You want their names? I’m hoping you can tell me a little more about who they are. I think they were Russian mafia, but there’s nothing publicly available and it’s probably going to be a while before the police can identify them.”
“Go ahead.”
Ben gave him the names. Hort said, “All right, as soon as I learn something, I’ll call you. It might take a while. It’s still hell getting the FBI and CIA to share information.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Nice job in Istanbul, by the way. Intercepts indicate the Iranians are apoplectic. They think it was the Israelis.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah. I’ll let you know what turns up on the Russians.”
Ben hung up and walked away. For a moment he felt purposeless, and found himself heading up Kearny, one of the city’s famously steep streets. Something still felt off to him, but he couldn’t quite place it. He paused at Filbert, just below Coit Tower, and looked out at the city to the west. This was another spot they’d liked as kids. Unlike Columbus and Broadway, the heart of North Beach, with its restaurants and clubs and traffic and neon, the neighborhoods above were quiet and almost entirely residential. He remembered standing here at night, the Transamerica Pyramid behind him and Coit Tower just above, listening to the sounds of distant traffic and watching the river of headlights flow across the Golden Gate Bridge, and he would feel like he could have all this, not just this city but a hundred others like it that for now he could barely imagine, cities and places that were only hinted at and yet also somehow promised by the twinkling neighborhoods below him and the endless dark of the Pacific beyond.
And then he realized what was bugging him about being in San Francisco. When he used to come here as a kid, the visits were always fun and exciting, full of enthusiasm and innocence and stupid optimism. He had grown up down the Peninsula, where Alex still lived, and being back there hadn’t strummed any contrasting emotional chords, maybe because he was somehow hardened to it. San Francisco, it seemed, was different. He knew he’d changed since he’d left the Bay Area; that had been almost twenty years earlier, and who doesn’t change in twenty years? And with the shit he’d seen and done, he knew he’d changed more than most. But being back here made him realize the person he used to be hadn’t just changed, he was actually gone, and this was the first time he had paused to consider whether that long-ago person’s disappearance might be grounds for sadness, maybe even for grief.
He cleared his throat and spat. It was stupid to come back here. Well, Alex hadn’t left him much choice, had he?
He headed back down Kearny and then over to Molinari’s, an Italian deli he used to like at the corner of Columbus and Vallejo. He bought sandwiches and headed back to the hotel, checking in at the front desk on the way. Still no calls. But that didn’t prove anything. The girl was smart, he could see that, and she might even have figured he would check at the desk to see if she’d used the room phone. If she wanted to contact someone, she’d use the computer.
Alex let him in. He saw the bag and said, “That smells great. We were just talking about lunch—can’t believe it’s already almost three.”
Ben handed out the sandwiches. Sarah asked, “Molinari’s?” When Ben nodded, she said, “Good place.”
He didn’t like that she knew the city. It gave her an advantage. “Any progress?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Alex said.
They ate sitting on the floor. When they were done, Ben said, “Sarah, do you mind if I lie down in your room? I need to
shut my eyes for a while, and the two of you will be talking in here.”
“It’s fine,” she told him.
He grabbed his bag and walked through the common doorway, closing and locking the door behind him. He’d almost been hoping she would protest, or say she had to go in there first, or do some other thing that would bolster his suspicions. But nothing. Still, he took the opportunity to quickly and quietly search the room. Again, nothing.
He thought he would nap for maybe twenty minutes, but when he woke he realized from the weak light coming through the window that he’d slept much longer than that. He checked his watch. Damn, it was almost six o’clock. He’d slept nearly three hours. Still on Istanbul time, he supposed. But he was glad he’d been out so long. He’d obviously needed it.
He opened the common door and looked in. Alex and Sarah were still in front of their computers. He walked in rubbing his face. “Anything?”
Alex shook his head. “No. Nothing yet.”
Ben nodded and walked into the bathroom. He showered and changed into an oxford-cloth shirt. Before leaving the bathroom, he hid a key card for the extra room under a drawer. He would call Alex and tell him about it later, when the girl couldn’t overhear.
He walked back out into the room. They were still working the computers. Good.
“There’s an eight o’clock show at Jazz at Pearl’s on Columbus,” he told them. “I’m going to catch it and I’ll be back after.”
“Since when do you listen to jazz?” Alex said.
Ben looked at him. “Since when was the last time we talked about music?”
He covered the half mile to the corner of Columbus and Broadway on foot in fifteen minutes. He could have made it in five, but he made a few aggressive moves on the way to ensure he was alone. He didn’t go into the club. The truth was, he didn’t know the first thing about jazz, Kim Nalley, or anything else, and if Sarah, who increasingly struck him as an astute observer, had probed even a little, she might have found some suspicious lack of depth in his musical knowledge. But she didn’t. He was good to go.
