Fault Line (28 page)

Chapter 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 faASSade 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 sures and okays. 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 showing 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.

He went back to his laptop. If some secret conspiracy had understood a valuable, or dangerous, hidden potential in Obsidian, how could Hilzoy, the guy who invented it, have missed it? There had to be something in his notes. There had to be.

Chapter 25 A KIND OF MADNESS

Ben parked on California and walked back to the Ritz-Carlton. It was nearly three in the morning now, and the area was deserted. He wasn't expecting a problem outside the hotel. At this point, anyone waiting for him would likely be inside.

Russians that morning, an American that night. He wasn't sure what it meant. Different groups with an interest in Obsidian? Could be that. Could be whoever was behind this had run out of Russian contractors and had turned to someone else.

If anyone was waiting for him inside, he had a good chance of surprising them. The guy he'd killed at Alex's wasn't carrying a cell phone or a radio. That meant he wasn't expected to check in, at least not right away.

He'd been lulled after Vesuvio, thinking the girl was okay, being insufficiently tactical as a result. He'd been lucky. He wasn't going to rely on luck again.

The interior of the hotel was so still you could hear the silence. A lone woman greeted him at the reception counter, but other than that, the lobby, the bar it was all deserted.

He took the elevator to the sixth floor, then the stairs down to four. He had his gun out the moment he was in the stairwell. Anyone he encountered on the stairs at this hour who wasn't dragging a mop and bucket wasn't likely to be friendly.

He hugged the wall on the approach to Sarah's room, then ducked low as he went past it on the remote chance someone was in there and looking out through the peephole. He pulled the goggles onto his head but not yet over his eyes. He had to account for every possibility now. Everything. Not just a human ambush, but something remote, too.

Getting his own door open was nerve-racking. Countering a threat from an emplaced IED required a totally different set of tactics than countering a threat from a human ambush, and pausing in front of his door to examine it for signs of the former left his ass badly exposed to the latter. Well, the doors were thick; unlikely someone would risk a shot through one of them. But still.

He found no wires or other signs of anything that would have closed a circuit when the door was open. The magnetic lock showed no signs of tampering. He slid his key card in with his left hand, the Glock held at chest level with his right. He eased the door open an inch and held it there, sighting down the Glock. Nothing on the other side. No wires or anything else out of place around the doorjamb. He reached inside and flicked the master switch. The room went dark.

He let the door close and moved back down the hallway, away from the room. Could be someone was watching from outside. He'd circled the hotel on the way over, of course, but he could have missed someone. He didn't want that someone to see the lights go out at the edges of the curtains of room 767, wait one minute, and then remotely trigger an IED. Or at least he didn't want to be in the room when it happened.

He waited two minutes. Okay, if it was going to happen that way, it would have happened already. He went back to the door, pulled the goggles down, and went in, engaging the privacy lock behind him.

It took him three minutes to confirm that he was alone. Confirming no one had left him an IED love letter took another twenty.

He sat down on the floor, his back against the bed, and pulled the goggles off. He blew out a long breath. Christ, what a day. He ought to be exhausted, but he was still too wired to feel it.