by Barry Eisler
“How did you know it was me?” he said. “You knew he was my brother, but how did you put it together?”
There was a long pause, long enough so that Ben thought Hort wasn’t going to answer. But then Hort turned and said, “I wanted to keep you out of it, for everyone’s sake, including yours. But then you put in that weapons request for San Francisco, after I’d told you to stay put in Ankara. It was a concern. Just being cautious, we got into some of Alex’s communications. He’d called Military OneSource, and the army personnel center, and then we checked his e-mail, and we knew he’d been in touch with you. And why else would you be coming out here, if not to help him?”
“It’s not as though I had a choice.”
“That’s exactly the point. There was nothing else you could have done. Blood is blood. But I didn’t have a choice, either. I was responsible for a mission. And as understandable and inadvertent as your actions were, you made yourself a threat to that mission. For what it’s worth, it was the hardest call I’ve ever had to make.”
“So you gave me up to the Russians?”
“What difference does it make how I decided to get it done? Yeah, I was taking heat from the usual suspects for your killing that damn Russian in Istanbul. Some people wanted to hang you out to dry.”
“So you did it for them.”
“Like I said, what difference does it make?”
Ben imagined Hort contacting some Russian counterpart, telling him, Hey, we found the rogue who killed your guy in Istanbul. It wasn’t sanctioned. He’s yours, if you want him. And here’s where you can find him.
It made a kind of twisted sense. You placate the Russians, appease the bean counters, eliminate Alex’s protection, and create a cutout and a diversion from what’s really going on with an op that’s spiraling out of control.
“I guess you’re right,” Ben said, fighting back a bitterness that felt like the leading edge of despair. “But I should have seen it coming. You know why I didn’t? I thought you were as loyal to me as I am to you.”
Hort looked down for a moment, then met Ben’s eyes again. “I am loyal to you, son. I’m loyal to all my men. But my first loyalty is always to the mission. You know that.”
“Well, I know it now.”
“I wish it hadn’t had to happen this way, Ben. I really do wish that.”
They came to San Antonio Road in Los Altos. One of the guys in back said, “Turn here.”
They made a left. What were they doing in Los Altos? And then he realized.
They were tracking Alex’s cell phone signal. They must have had the equipment in back. Alex, goddamn it, I told you they could track you this way.
“This is it,” the guy behind him said. “Last place before the signal cut out.”
“Drive around,” Hort said. “We might spot his car.”
Ben let out a long breath. Thank God, Alex had thought to turn the damn thing off when he realized what was happening.
But all it meant was that Hort wouldn’t be able to take him unawares here. Presumably, Alex was still going to show up at the parking garage.
They drove along Los Altos’s grid of streets, swinging in and out of parking lots. Every time they slowed in front of a dark M3, Ben felt his insides tighten with fear, but each time it wasn’t Alex’s.
After twenty minutes, the guy behind him said, “Wait, he’s back online. In … Mountain View. Go down San Antonio and get on El Camino.”
What the hell was he doing? He’d turned the phone off; why would he turn it back on?
“Wait, he’s moving,” the guy in back said. “Stay on San Antonio. Go to 101.”
“Where’s he heading?” Hort said.
“Palo Alto is my guess,” the guy in back said. “The garage. Looks like he’s heading toward 101.”
Ben’s phone rang. Hort picked up and said, “Hello.” There was a pause. “Good, we’re on our way, too. Thanks for checking in. A half hour from now, we’ll have this whole thing sorted out and you’ll all be good to go.”
He clicked off. Alex must have gotten spooked that they’d been out of touch, and turned on the phone again to make sure everything was still copacetic.
“No, wait, he’s taking Alma,” the guy in back said. “Still heading toward Palo Alto.” They swung off San Antonio onto the entrance ramp.
What the hell? Why wasn’t Alex turning off the phone again?
Because he’s driving. Jesus Christ, he thought they couldn’t track him if he was moving? Ben tried to tamp down his anger. He couldn’t expect Alex to know something like that. It wasn’t his world. But goddamn it, they were going to take him by surprise, force him over to the side of the road, pull him into the van … If he’d been planning anything, anything at all tactical for the garage, they weren’t going to give him the chance.
They headed west on Alma, two lanes of traffic in each direction. The midday traffic was light, but there were enough cars to provide plenty of concealment for vehicular surveillance even against someone who was tail-conscious, which Alex most definitely was not.
“That him?” the driver said.
Ben leaned left and looked through the windshield, his heart thudding. It looked like Alex’s car, but he wasn’t sure.
“Get a little closer,” Hort said. “Just a little now.”
The license plate came into view. Ben recognized it just as Hort said, “It’s him. Back off now. Keep a few cars in between.”
The thudding in Ben’s chest got stronger. Adrenaline surged through his system. He flexed his thighs, his calves, his toes. He glanced left, right, ahead, measuring distance, calculating odds. He wanted to rotate his neck but didn’t. He didn’t want any sign that he was anything but resigned.
The only hope he saw was to disrupt them when they tried to take Alex. If Alex could see they weren’t interested in bargaining, maybe he would understand his only hope was to disseminate Obsidian. If he could get away, if he figured things out, if he disseminated it … Jesus Christ, he thought. He had never tried to execute a plan so entirely composed of ifs and mights and maybes.
They followed Alex right onto Addison, a bucolic street of perfectly kept bungalows. Alex slowed for the traffic circle at Bryant. Hort said, “Take him.”
The driver cut clockwise into the circle and accelerated into the street on the other side alongside Alex. He cut the wheel right and slammed into Alex’s car. Metal whined and Alex went up on the sidewalk and straight into a tree. The driver hit the brakes and they screeched to a halt just ahead of where Alex’s car had stopped.
The driver hit a switch and the passenger-side door slid open. The guy behind Ben moved up alongside him and braced to leap out. In one smooth movement, Ben spun in the seat, planted the back of his head and neck against the side of the passenger-side seat, brought his knees to his face, and blasted both heels into the guy’s lower spine. The guy cried out and went flying through the door, smacking his face into the overhead jamb on the way.
Ben let the momentum of the kick bring him to his feet. He dove through the open door, hit the ground on his shoulder, and rolled to his side. He brought his knees up and shoved his arms down, getting the cuffs over his ass. He straightened his legs and pushed lower, getting the chain past the backs of his knees, his calves …
Shouts came from the van. He heard a door open. Come on, come on …
The chain snagged on his heels. He wriggled his feet frantically and shoved his wrists forward with all his strength. The cuffs bit savagely into his wrists and he thought he wasn’t going to clear it and then the chain was over his boots.
He started to come to his feet and someone grabbed him by the hair. He felt the knee coming in time to turn his head and get his hands in the way. The blow landed but he’d avoided the worst of it. He tried to straighten, but the guy had a fistful of hair and was twisting now, pushing his head down. All he could see was ground and a pair of legs. One of the legs retracted, setting up another knee shot. Fuck that. Ben shoveled his arms up and s
napped both fists into the guy’s balls, the knuckle of each thumb leading the way.
The guy grunted and the grip on Ben’s hair loosened. He cork screwed his head and tore loose. It was the other guy from the backseat. He tried to close and Ben threw his arms forward like a double jab, trying to plant the chain in the guy’s neck but catching him in the teeth instead.
Sarah was out of the van, her hands still cuffed behind her. She looked at Ben. “Run!” he shouted.
The guy shoved Ben’s arms to the side and slipped past him. He grabbed Ben by the hair again and whipped an arm around his neck. Ben jammed his fists up just in time to stop another sleeper hold. “Run!” he shouted again.
Sarah took off like a deer. A second later, the guy behind him yelled and his grip loosened. Ben spun and saw why: Sarah had run up behind him and bitten him on the arm. She was hanging on like a terrier. The guy drew back an arm to cuff her. Ben crossed his arms and brought his hands down behind the guy’s head, catching his neck in the triangle formed by his wrists and the chain. He leveraged his wrists back and his elbows forward. The guy’s eyes bulged and his tongue popped out. Ben felt cartilage grinding and squeezed harder, the chains cutting into his wrists.
There was an explosion of white light, and suddenly he was looking up at the sky, unable to account for what had happened. He was choking the guy, killing him, and then …
His head throbbed. Someone … someone must have pistol-whipped him from behind. He looked over at the van. The Asian guy was shoving Sarah back inside. And Hort … Hort was holding Alex by the hair, a gun at his temple.
No, he thought, but the words didn’t come. No.
Alex was holding a laptop. Jesus Christ, he’d brought Obsidian with him? It was over.
“Get in the van, Ben,” Hort said. “Or I’ll decorate you with your brother’s brains.”
Ben got to his feet and took an unsteady step toward the van. It felt like someone had planted a vibrating chisel in the back of his skull.
“It’s all right,” Alex said. “I brought them what they wanted.”
“Alex,” Ben said, and stopped. He didn’t know what to say. They were all dead.
This time they cuffed Ben to Sarah. His wrists were bleeding. “That was a hell of an effort,” he said to her, because he wanted her to have something to feel good about in whatever time they had left. “For a lawyer.” But she might as well have not even heard. He wanted to say something to Alex, too, but what could he? Alex had delivered Obsidian on a platter. It was game over.
They drove off. The guy Ben had kicked in the back was groaning as if someone had put thumbscrews on him, and the guy Ben had tried to strangle was coughing so much it sounded like he was going to bring up lung tissue. Whatever damage he’d done them, he hoped it was permanent.
Hort turned in the seat and pointed a pistol at Ben. “All right, son,” he said to Alex. “Nice and simple. I want you to turn off that dead man’s switch you set up.”
Dead man’s switch. What had Alex done, set up some kind of dissemination program that only he could stop? Christ, all he’d done was guarantee he’d be tortured before he was killed.
“I need an Internet connection,” Alex said.
“Alex, don’t,” Ben said. “They’ll kill us all the second you—”
“I’ll kill you all if he doesn’t,” Hort said evenly. “Like I said, Ben, I didn’t want it to be this way. But the mission comes first.”
“Drive into Mountain View,” Alex said. “Google has the whole town covered in Wi-Fi.”
Ben grimaced. “Goddamn it, Alex—”
“Ben, I know what I’m doing.”
“No more talk,” Hort said.
Ben closed his eyes. His head was throbbing, his wrists ached, and they were one hundred percent out of options.
They drove in silence. Ben tried to focus on the pain, because what he felt in his body was infinitely easier than what was going on in his mind. He’d been a fool. Everything he’d believed about there not being rules … but that was to prevail against the other side. Well, this was the way it worked. Hort was just more ruthless. Which was why he was holding the gun while Ben was wearing the handcuffs. Why Hort was going to walk away, while the three of them would be dumped in some shallow grave. He’d always thought of himself as a realist, prided himself on it. And now, in his last minutes on earth, he’d been exposed, forced to confront the truth. Which was that he was nothing but a stupid, naïve dipshit, and the real realists had run rings around him and were now about to take away everything.
When they reached Shoreline Road in Mountain View, Alex opened the laptop. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got a connection.”
They pulled onto a side street and stopped.
“Do it,” Hort said. “And show me that it’s done.”
“It’s already done,” Alex said.
Hort frowned. “What do you mean it’s already done? You told me you had to decrypt it, put in a passcode to stop a dissemination sequence.”
“I only said that because I was afraid you’d hurt Ben or Sarah before I could show you what I’d really done.”
Hort’s expression was so steady it might have been frozen. “You did something else, didn’t you?”
Alex nodded. For one crazy second, he looked like the little know-it-all he’d been as a kid. Ben felt a ridiculous surge of hope.
Hort swung the gun so that the muzzle was pointed at Alex’s face. Ben’s breath caught.
“What?” Hort said. “What did you do?”
Alex extended the laptop. “Here. You can see for yourself.”
Hort ignored it. The gun didn’t waver. He looked at Alex with machine eyes and Ben was so sure he was going to fire he couldn’t breathe.
Then Hort lowered the gun. He took the laptop and watched the screen wordlessly for a moment.
“What is this?” he said. “StatCounter? I don’t understand.”
“Oh, that’s just a Web site that tracks downloads and site traffic,” Alex said. He leaned forward and pointed to the screen. “Look, you can see here how many people have downloaded the program from Source-Forge. And here, that’s Slashdot—wow, a hundred downloads in a half hour, that’s pretty exciting. I also sent it to McAfee and Norton.”
The pounding in Ben’s head was so bad he could feel it in his stomach, too. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or puke. Maybe all three.
Hort was clenching his jaw so tightly the muscles in his cheeks stood out like marbles. “Oh, you poor dumb son of a bitch,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes glued to the screen. “You have no idea what you just did.”
“I know what I did.”
“You just unleashed anarchy, son. Anarchy. America is the most networked country on earth. This thing is going to go around like a virus, and no one is more vulnerable to it than we are.”
“No, you don’t get it. I didn’t just post the executable. I posted the source code, too.”
“We had all the—”
“No, you didn’t. Hilzoy hid another copy. Hid it in plain sight, in a copy of a song he liked on a public file-sharing site. It took me a little while to find the right file—it was only a little bigger than the rest of them. But it was there. I decrypted it with Obsidian and now everyone has their own copy.”
“Then we’re fucked. You fucked our whole country.”
“I’m not saying there won’t be a few disruptions. But you know what? Right now, in a thousand basements and garages, more pimply-faced hackers and hobbyists than you can count are ripping this thing apart. Some will be trying to find out how to exploit it, yeah. Others will come up with ways to defend against it. The network is like an organism. The people are its T cells. You can’t stop something like this, no matter how many people you kill. It’s bits. It’s information. And—”
“And information wants to be free,” Sarah said.
“Anyway,” Alex said, “the anarchy thing is only part of it. Or maybe it isn’t part of it at all.”
&n
bsp; Hort watched him. “What do you mean?”
“According to your inside man, Osborne, the NSC wasn’t interested in Obsidian because it could disrupt networks. They wanted it for a domestic spying program.”
“Osborne told you this?”
“Ask him yourself.”
There was a long pause. Hort’s expression was grim. He said, “I believe I will.”
Ben said, “They used you, Hort. They duped you. How do you like the taste?” It wasn’t rational, but it made him feel a tiny bit better to know someone had fucked Hort the way Hort had fucked him.
Hort looked at the screen again. He shook his head slowly.
“Look at that,” Alex said. “Another twenty downloads just since we’ve been talking. This is getting some buzz now. It’s picking up speed.”
“Genie’s out of the bottle,” Ben said. “Go back to Washington and tell them they can’t get it back in. Tell them you did all this for nothing, you piece of shit.”
Hort blew out a long breath. He closed the laptop and looked at Alex, then at Ben, then at Sarah.
“This op is over,” he said. “The mission failed. I failed.”
He glanced at one of the men in back. “Uncuff them. Let them go.”
The man said, “But—”
“Do it.”
The man hesitated, then leaned over and unlocked the cuffs. He inclined his head to Ben’s ear. “This isn’t over, asshole,” he rasped.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Hort said, and the interior of the van reverberated with his baritone. “This. Mission. Is. Over!”
Ben flexed his hands. They were numb. His wrists were slick with blood and flayed skin.
The three of them got out of the van. Hort rolled down his window and looked at them.
“Maybe Genie is out of the bottle,” he said. “But some folks might still think that after what happened, certain people are a security risk. I’m going to tell them you’re not. I think I owe you that. Don’t do something to try to make me look stupid. You’d regret it if you did.”
He looked at Ben. “It was the mission, Ben. And that’s all it should ever be. Now you have to see if that’s a standard you can aspire to. I won’t try to make that decision for you.”
