Fault Line

16 KARMIC KILTER

Alex woke up the next morning and noticed the sound of the shower running. He sat up and glanced at the bedside clock. Six-thirty. Looked like they were going to get an early start. He was surprised he hadn't heard Ben get up. Ordinarily, Alex was a light sleeper.

He walked over to the bathroom in his underwear and tried the door. It was locked. Damn, he had to take a leak. He knocked and said, “Ben, hurry up,” and was immediately struck by how strange it was. They'd always shared, and often fought over, a bathroom when they were kids, and here they were doing it again.

He opened the blinds and looked out. The sun was just coming up and the sky was scudded with long pink clouds. He stood and watched for a moment, rubbing his bare shoulders. He felt disoriented. He should be in his house, getting ready to go to work. The need to get to the office, to be back in his life, was strong.

The shower stopped. Alex turned and walked past the couch. Ben's bag was open on it. Alex saw clothes, a paperback book…

Was that a gun?

He looked closer. It was a gun, small and black. Jesus Christ, Ben had a gun? With him?

The bathroom door opened and Ben walked out, a towel around his waist, a bundle of clothes in his arm. “All yours,” he said.

“You have a gun?”

Ben walked right past, barely looking at him. “Of course.”

“With you?”

“Where else would I want it?”

Jesus, it was like the guy who answered Why do you rob banks? by saying, That's where the money is.

“What I mean,” Alex began, then thought better of it. But wait. “If you're supposed to have it with you, why didn't you take it into the bathroom?”

Ben dropped the clothes he had in his arm onto the couch and like a magic trick was left holding another gun, larger than the one Alex had seen a moment earlier. “The other is backup,” he said. “I wear it on the small of my back. I don't usually bring two into the bathroom.”

“You can travel with them? On airplanes?”

“Sometimes. When I can't, I can have them waiting for me.”

Alex wanted to ask more-Waiting for you how? By whom?-but decided not to. He couldn't get over the idea of his brother carrying a gun. Make that two guns. Of course, intellectually it made sense. Ben was some kind of undercover soldier. But still.

He used the toilet, brushed his teeth, showered, and dressed. Ben paused just before opening the door and said, “Here's what I want to do first. Give the valet this ticket and have him bring around my rental car. I'm going to stroll by your car and have a look around the places I would wait if I were hoping to ambush you. If someone's waiting and he or they don't look right, maybe I persuade one of them to take a ride with us.”

“Persuade them?”

“Do I need to paint you a picture, Alex? Just drive the rental around. If I'm alone, pick me up. If I'm not, pop the trunk. Ask the right person the right questions in the right way and we can find out where your problems are coming from, and why. Isn't that what you want?”

“Yeah, but-”

“But what?”

“Look, I don't want to get mixed up in-”

“You're already mixed up in it. What you want to do is get out.”

“What are you saying? You want me to help you… kidnap someone? In the parking lot of the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto?”

“No, what are you saying? You expect me to do the dirty work for you? Is that it?”

“I don't…” He stopped, unsure what to say next. This was happening too fast. Ben wasn't really proposing to kidnap someone, was he?

Ben laughed. “You're just like the politicians, Alex. You want something done but you won't let people do it right. You think you can pick up a turd from the clean end? It doesn't work that way.”

“That's not what I'm-”

“Yes, it is. I'm sick of liberals who've never even seen a gun, let alone handled one under adrenal stress, trying to crucify cops for not shooting the knife out of the bad guy's hand. Trying to prosecute soldiers who put an extra bullet into Achmed after he goes down, never even thinking to ask whether it was that extra bullet that stopped the fucker from detonating an explosive vest. You can live in that fantasy world if you want, but how about just a little bit of gratitude for the people who make it possible for you? Who do all that dirty work so you can go on pretending you're clean?”

“What do you want, a shiny gold star?” Alex said, louder than he'd been intending. “You volunteered for what you do, right? You get a salary, don't you? Sure, I'm glad people join the army so I don't have to, but I could say the same for people who mine coal. Why do you deserve special dispensation?”

Ben shook his head. “But you don't tell miners how to mine, do you? You don't tell them to try doing it without getting coal dust under their nails. So where do you get your amazing expertise about my business? I have to put up with that shit on CNN all the time and I'm not going to put up with it from you.”

They stood looking at each other for a moment. Alex thought of a few rejoinders. But they all felt childish, and what was the point, anyway?

Ben glanced at his watch as though longing for some other place to be. “I'm going to walk past your car now,” he said, “just to see if anyone is waiting there to kill you. I'll check the lobby, too. Give me a one-minute head start so we don't get seen together.” He handed the valet ticket to Alex, checked through the peephole, and left.

Alex waited a moment, fighting the urge to pick something up and throw it, then went out. He took the elevator down to the lobby, looking around cautiously as he emerged. It was empty. Christ, was this what it was going to be like from now on? Constantly wondering whether some guy reading a newspaper in a lobby was there to kill him? He didn't think he could live that way.

He gave the valet the ticket. The guy left and was back in two minutes with a gray Taurus. Anonymous looking, Alex thought. This is how Ben lives.

He got in and drove around the corner. Ben was standing near the M3, alone. Alex pulled over and Ben got in. He said, “Drive me to your office. Go south on Page Mill, not the direction you would take from the house.”

Alex almost asked how Ben knew where the office was, but then remembered: he'd checked the Web site. And of course he knew the terrain. He'd grown up here, too.

They drove in silence. When they got to the Sullivan, Greenwald parking lot, Ben said, “Drive past wherever you usually park but don't stop. Let's see what we see.”

Alex did as he asked. It was just after seven, and there weren't many cars in the lot.

“See that one there?” Ben asked. “The Jaguar. See how the hood and the windows are covered with dew? That's been there all night. No one could see out of it. For us that means it's safe.”

“That makes sense.”

“What we're looking for is a car that was driven this morning. Most obviously, one that has the engine running to keep the occupant warm and the windows from fogging up. But I don't see anything that applies.”

“But most of these cars don't have dew on them.”

“Right. They were driven to work this morning, by early risers like you. The point is, they're empty. So far, so good. Now drive around the block a few more times so I can see the perimeter, then park somewhere you don't usually park and use an entrance you don't usually use.”

They parked and went inside. Ben moved cautiously, the way he had in the hotel. He kept pausing and looking around as though gauging something.

“Key card access,” he said, and Alex wasn't sure if he was talking to Alex or himself. “That's an obstacle. Plus, if you don't belong here, where do you set up inside? People coming and going, risk of discovery even early and late, so you can't control the environment. So the parking lot is your best staging area. Multiple entries and exits. But likely the target solves that problem by always using the same one. Yeah, no doubt, I'd go with the parking lot.”

They walked up a set of stairs in the Death Star. Ben said, “Don't say anything inside your office until I tell you it's safe.”

“Safe to-”

“Just don't say anything.”

They walked down the long, green-carpeted corridor. The light was on inside Osborne's office, and as they passed, Alex glanced inside. Damn, Osborne was in there. He looked up at the sound of footsteps.

“Alex!” Osborne called out. “I didn't expect to see you. How are you feeling?”

“Uh, better,” Alex said. “What are you doing here so early? You're back from Thailand?”

“I'm always here early,” Osborne said. He gestured toward Ben. “And this is…”

“My brother, Ben.”

Osborne stood up and strolled over, cowboy-boot slow. “I didn't know Alex had a brother.” He held out his hand. Ben waited a long second, then shook it.

“I don't get out to California much these days,” Ben said.

“No? Where do you live?”

“I do volunteer work with the Missionaries of Africa.”

Osborne looked taken aback. Alex thought, What the hell?

“ Africa,” Osborne said. “Hmm.”

“Yes, we provide food, clothing, shelter, new sources of clean water, medicine, pastoral care, education…”

Osborne looked more nonplussed than Alex had ever seen him. “Really,” he said.

Ben smiled. “ 'suffer the little children… for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Matthew 19:14. Don't you agree?”

“Nothing more important than children,” Osborne said. “Well, don't let me keep you.” He offered a sickly smile and went back to his desk.

Alex and Ben went down the hallway. Alex was steaming. What the hell was that about? Osborne was going to think he had some kind of religious zealot for a brother. He wanted to say something, but they were almost at his office and Ben had told him not to.

They went in. Ben held a finger to his lips, then pointed at the door and rotated his hand as though turning a key. Right. Alex closed the door and locked it. Ben set his bag down on Alex's desk and took out something that looked like a radio. He attached a corded wand to it and started walking around the office, pointing the wand here and there. Alex realized: Damn, he's checking for bugs.

After a few minutes, Ben turned his attention to Alex's phone. He checked the receiver, the line, and the unit itself.

Ben set the detector down on Alex's desk. He looked out the window for a moment, then closed the blinds. “Your office is clean,” he said.

Alex noticed the unit's red indicator light was still on. “You're leaving it on?” Alex asked.

“In case there's a bug that was turned off while I was looking for it, and that gets turned on later.”

“You really think someone could have bugged my office?”

Ben shrugged. “We're doing things for the sake of argument, remember?”

“You carry that equipment with you all the time?”

“What are you getting at?”

Alex shook his head. “I don't… I don't know how you can live like this.”

“I'd be dead if I didn't.”

“I mean, it must be exhausting.”

“It just seems that way to you because you don't know what to look for. You don't have any filters.”

“What were you looking for out the window?”

“A place someone could set up a laser to read conversations off the window glass.”

“You can't be serious. You can really do that?”

“It's not easy, but it can be done. No sense taking chances.”

Alex sat down in his chair, glad Ben hadn't taken it already. If he hadn't been playing with his equipment, he probably would have. “Why did you say all that stuff to Osborne about being a missionary?”

Ben laughed without mirth and took one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. “I didn't like the smell of that guy. I didn't want to talk to him. He's your boss, right?”

“How could you tell?”

“I just could.”

“Yeah, well, all the more reason not to make him think my brother's a fanatic.”

“It was the right thing to tell him to cut short the conversation. Fat cats who spend their days collecting five hundred dollars an hour to move paper around don't like to engage people who do charity work. It makes them feel their lives are shallow.”

“You think my life is shallow?”

Ben looked around the office. “You've been gone a couple of days, right? Anything seem out of place here to you?”

Alex wasn't going to let him just pretend he didn't hear. “I said, you think my life is shallow?”

There was a pause. Ben said, “It doesn't matter what I think.”

“No, I want to know.”

“I don't know, Alex. You live in the same house, you work in an office five miles away from it, you went to college and graduate school and law school all at the same place, all right here… I mean, have you ever done anything different? Ever taken a risk?”

Alex could feel his ears burning. “So what? Stanford was the best school. And you know what kind of tax hit you take in California when you sell a house?”

Even as he said it, it sounded lame. But fuck Ben, not everything was about taking risks.

“You think you're a big risk taker,” he said. “But you want to know what I think?”

Ben glanced away as though bored. “Not really.”

“You sucked in school, you quit college, and you couldn't have cut it in the Valley. You stumbled into the only thing you seem to be any good at, and ever since, you've been making a virtue of necessity. You don't do what you do because it's worthy and important. You do it because you don't know how to do anything else.”

Ben unwrapped a piece of chewing gum and put it in his mouth. He extended the pack to Alex. Alex wanted to slap it out of his hand.

“Anything seem out of place here to you?”

Alex stared at him for a moment, then decided to drop it. “Let me see,” he said.

As soon as he started looking, he noticed it. There had been eight stacks of paper on his worktable. One of them was missing now. The one on Hilzoy.

“What the hell?” he said. He started poking through the piles, confirming what he already knew. It was as though the Hilzoy paperwork had just been… deleted.

“What is it?” Ben asked.

“My file on Hilzoy. Obsidian. It's gone.”

“You sure?”

“It was right here on this table. This is where I keep active matters.”

He looked through his filing cabinet. “Yeah, it's gone.”

He sat down and called Osborne. “David, you didn't borrow any files from my office, did you?”

“Why, is something missing?”

“David, is there a reason you can't just give a straightforward answer to a question?”

The second it came out, he couldn't believe he said it. Even Ben was looking at him with surprise.

There was a pause. Osborne said, “No, I didn't borrow your files.” And hung up.

Ben said, “I wouldn't worry about him thinking I'm a zealot. You can probably piss him off all by yourself.”

Alex didn't answer. It had felt good to snap at Osborne. He'd half expected Ben to be impressed by it, too… except now Ben was criticizing him, or mocking him.

Well, whatever. He had a right to be cranky. And he was getting tired of taking shit.

“Could anyone else have borrowed that file?” Ben said.

“Well, there's Alisa, my secretary, but she never takes anything without putting it back before she goes home.”

“Why don't you take a look around her station to make sure?”

Alex got up and checked. No documents. He came back and sat down, shaking his head.

“Anyone else?” Ben said.

Alex thought for a moment. “Sarah, I guess, the associate who was helping me on it. But she wouldn't take something from my office. Or if she did, she would have left a note or a message, or something.”

“Check with her anyway.”

Alex called Sarah on her mobile. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry to bother you so early.”

“No problem. I'm just pulling into the parking lot. What's up?”

There weren't many people who got to the office earlier than Sarah. Alex was one of them.

“I can't seem to find some of my files on Hilzoy. You didn't borrow anything, did you?”

“Of course not. I would have told you if I had.”

“Yeah, I figured. Just wanted to be sure. Thanks.”

He clicked off and shook his head at Ben. Ben said, “We still doing things for the sake of argument?”

Alex swallowed. First his house, then his office… what the hell was this?

“No,” he said. “Something is going on here.”

“What would they get by taking your paperwork?”

Alex thought for a moment. “Nothing. We still have chron files, there's tape backup… and I could probably duplicate a lot of what's missing from e-mail correspondence, if it came to that.”

“Have you checked your e-mail?”

Alex fired up his terminal and went through the correspondence. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It's all missing. All my files of the Obsidian source code.”

He went out and checked the chron file. He couldn't find it. He double-checked, cross-referenced. Nothing. Obsidian was gone.

He came back to his office. “Someone took it all,” he said. “Everything. It's all missing.”

“What about the tape backup?”

“I don't know how to check that. I'll have to talk to someone in IT, when they get in.”

“Trust me, the tape backup is gone, too,” Ben said.

“How do you know?”

“Someone came in here in the last couple of nights and ran a professional black bag op. They'd done their homework. They knew to scrub your working files, your chron files, and the relevant e-mail correspondence. You think they overlooked something as obvious as tape backup?”

Alex sat silently, dumbfounded. He had no idea what to do.

“Here's the question, then,” Ben said, looking at him. “Why are you getting a pass?”

“What do you mean?”

“They killed two people on two sides of the country. One of them, apparently, in a very sophisticated way, so that it looked like a heart attack. They could have killed you anytime. Why haven't they?”

“Well, I'd sure like to know.”

Ben drummed his fingers along his thigh. “I think they made a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“The perfect is the enemy of the good. And they were trying to be perfect.”

“Hey, Ben? I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Somebody wants this invention. No, that's the wrong way to put it. They don't want anyone else to have it, meaning they don't want anyone else to know about it. Now put yourself in their shoes. Disappearing the invention is your goal. What do you do?”

“Well, you can't, it's too-”

“If you had to. What do you do first?”

Alex thought. “The inventor,” he said after a moment.

“Okay. In the current sequence of events, who died first?”

“The inventor.”

“What next?”

“I'd say it's a toss-up between the patent office and the lawyer prosecuting the patent.”

“They did the patent guy before you. Maybe they got to talk to him before he died. They wanted to talk to you, too.”

“What the hell is this about?” Alex said.

Ben ignored him. “But you got away. They were watching you, and suddenly you're not at work and you're not at home. What do they conclude from that? That you're lying low. And when they realized that, they shifted priorities. What would you have done in their shoes?”

“I don't know… paperwork, I guess. Documentation.”

“There you have it.”

“But what would that get them? Patent applications are electronic now, the entire recipe is in PAIR, the Patent Application Information Retrieval system. To access it, you need a digital certificate and password. I mean, it's-”

“Check it.”

Alex brought up the PAIR Web site, logged in, and entered the patent application number. There was nothing for that number.

“What the hell?” he said.

“Gone?”

Alex tried again, this time by docket number, and then by customer number. Nothing. He looked at Ben and shook his head wordlessly.

“See?” Ben said. “They were going after the people before they went after the documents. You interrupted the sequence of their op, so they shifted priorities. And the fact that they were able to instantly vacuum up the paperwork means they were ready to do it-they just preferred to delete you first if possible. You get it? It's like trying to clean up a mess. If you can't reach one spill, you take care of something else and come back to the part you couldn't reach later.”

He paused, then said, “That girl, Sarah. You said she was helping you with this?”

“Shit, yes. You don't think-”

“Is she mentioned anywhere in the patent application? Are there other ways people could know she was involved?”

“Yes to both.”

“Is there an attorney of record or something like that listed in a patent application?”

“Yeah, that would be me.”

“Well, if they know she's junior, it means for targeting she's tertiary.”

“You mean-”

“Every element of an operation carries potential repercussions, things that could go wrong and abort the op. So you want to start with the most critical targets. Like you said, that means first the inventor, next the examiner, next you. It's only after you've taken out the primaries that you'll risk complications by going after the junior associate who helped apply for the patent. Understand?”

“Yeah. You think she's in danger now.”

“She would be if I were running this thing.”

“Well, we have to warn her.”

“Who ‘we,’ white man?”

“I don't know this stuff. I'll sound like I'm out of my mind. She won't listen to me. She's… stubborn.”

“That's her choice.”

“Damn it, at least help me talk to her. How are you going to feel if something happens to her?”

“I'm not going to feel anything one way or the other. It's not my problem.”

Alex couldn't believe what he was hearing. “Wow, how did you get so cold?”

“You give any money to charity lately, chief?”

“What does that have to do-”

“You know, the Smile Train, for kids with harelips? Malaria No More? Care.org for childhood malnutrition? How about SaveDarfur.org? Just a few dollars a day, Alex, no more than the price of your daily latte habit, and you could be saving hundreds of lives.”

“It's not the same.”

“You're right about that. Because what you're asking me to do involves possible danger to myself. What you refuse to do on your own wouldn't even inconvenience you.”

“How do you know so much about those charities?”

“I study up on them so I can point out hypocrisy when I meet people like you.”

Alex sensed he was onto something and wasn't going to let it go. “You donate to them, don't you?”

“What if I did?”

“Why? To atone for other things you do? Trying to rejigger the cosmic ledger?”

Ben laughed. “You're like a little kid trying to understand adult experience. Just go back to the pencil pushing and leave the burden of the real world to grown-ups.”

“Yeah, I'd really like to do that, Ben, except one of the grown-ups seems to have taken it into his mind to kill me. But right, that's not your problem. Sorry to bother you.”

“That's right, it's not my problem. You're just another of my charities.”

Alex stared at him, amazed. The really amazing thing, though, was that after all this time, his callousness could still be shocking. But why would it be? When had Ben given a shit about anyone but himself?

“So let me make sure I understand. You give money to charity organizations for the benefit of remote people you'll never have to know or touch. But when someone right in front of you needs your help, you can't be bothered. Is that the way it works?”

They stared at each other for a long moment. The hell with it, Alex thought. He picked up the phone and dialed Sarah's extension.

“Sarah? Can you come down to my office right away?”

“This is bizarre. I can't find-”

“Just come now. We'll talk about it here.” He hung up and looked at Ben. “She's on her way. If you can't be bothered to even talk to her, you better leave now-unless you want to use my computer first, to donate money to one of those organizations you like. You know, so you won't be out of karmic kilter.”

Ben said nothing. He watched Alex and chewed his gum, his cheek muscles jumping.