Ben yanked the guy's right arm away from his body just in case and took a cautious step back. The guy went straight down like one of those imploding Las Vegas hotels. Everything was still utterly quiet-an effect, Ben knew, called auditory exclusion, caused by adrenaline. Adrenaline caused another kind of exclusion, too, this one visual, brought on in part by a hyperfocus on the threat at hand. The trained reflex was to scan, and Ben did so now. Which is when he saw another guy in a dark jacket getting out of a brown sedan two up from Alex's car. This guy was in sunglasses, too, and at least as big as the first. The guy's arm was already inside his jacket, already coming out, and Ben thought, Shit, shit, shit…
The second guy's gun came out. Ben lunged left and dropped to a crouch, accessing the Glock as he went down. The guy's shot went high. Ben put three rounds into his chest before the guy could get off another shot. The guy went down. Ben detected movement to his right- the first guy. He spun and put two rounds into the guy's head. He snapped left again and saw the second guy on his back, still moving, the gun on the ground inches from his hand. Ben put the Glock's sights on him and walked over. So much for not making noise. He figured he had a half minute before he had to beat feet.
“Kto vy?” he asked, in Russian. Who are you?
The guy didn't answer. His sunglasses had gotten knocked off and he was watching Ben with an expression of pained surprise, as though he couldn't quite figure out how all this had happened.
Ben kicked the gun away. “Kto vy?” he said again.
Still no answer. Blood was spreading on the concrete sidewalk underneath the guy's torso. Ben heard an odd slurping sound and realized the guy had a sucking chest wound.
“Tell me who you are and I'll call you an ambulance,” Ben said.
The guy gave a weak chuckle that dissolved into a gurgling cough.
Yeah, well. He had never been a good liar in these situations. He glanced around. No one was coming.
“Do svidaniya,” Ben whispered, and put a last round into the guy's forehead. The guy's body shuddered once as though he'd been shocked, and then the rigidity, the human cohesion and coherence, was just gone, leaving an inert mound where a moment ago had been a man.
Ben squatted and checked the guy's pockets. Son of a bitch, a wallet. He grabbed it, thinking, Hallelujah. He checked the other guy and he had one, too. Come on, man, gotta boogie…
He stuck his head inside their car. No key in the ignition, and he saw why: the ignition lock was broken off. They'd stolen the car and hotwired it. Smart. A description of the car or a license plate would be useless.
Nothing else. No syringes, no restraints, nothing. They hadn't been here to grab Alex, then. They were going to drill him and go. Anyone who saw it would have described two guys in shades, if that, and an irrelevant car. An unsolved murder, which police would probably figure had to do with drugs because look what had happened to the guy's client just a couple of days earlier. Ben looked at the two corpses and thought, Better luck next time, assholes.
He holstered the Glock and walked toward the gated service entrance that accessed Manhattan Avenue. He climbed over the gate and pulled out his cell phone while he walked. Alex picked up immediately.
“It's me. Don't go back to the hotel. I'm walking north right now on West Bayshore, parallel to the freeway. You know where it is?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Take Woodland back to Euclid, Euclid to West Bayshore. Drive normally.”
“Why wouldn't I drive normally? What's going on?”
“Everything's fine, just do what I told you.”
He clicked off. Two minutes later, he heard a car approaching from behind. He glanced back, ready to go for the Glock, but it was Alex. Alex pulled up alongside him and Ben got in, saying “Go” before he even had the door closed behind him.
“What happened?” Alex asked.
“Just drive. Nice and slowly. Through Menlo, then over to 280. I'll tell you more as we go.”
Sarah turned and looked at him. “There's blood on your face,” she said.
Shit, must have been from when he head-butted Ivan. Ben looked in the rearview and used some spit to wipe it away.
“Not your blood,” Sarah said.
Ben smiled, feeling giddiness starting to kick in, knowing he had about ten seconds before he got the shakes.
“That's the best kind,” he said.
“What the hell happened?” Alex asked again.
They were coming up on a do-it-yourself car wash on Oak Grove. “Pull into the car wash,” Ben said, “and pop the trunk. I need to get out for a minute.”
Alex pulled into one of the bays. Ben jumped out and took the car's real plates out of the trunk. He used them to replace the set he had stolen and put on the car before first going to see Alex at the Four Seasons. He put the stolen set in his bag and took out an unused gun, another Glock 17. He would ditch the tainted gun and the plates later, when the girl wasn't around to know where.
He got back in and Alex drove off. “You changed the license plates?” Sarah asked.
“Had to. People in that neighborhood would have heard gunshots. I'm sure plenty of them were looking out their windows. A few of them might have noticed you picking me up, even though that was a few blocks from where the shots were fired. A very few might even have written down some of the license plate number. No reason for us to take a chance like that.”
“Shots fired?” Alex said. “Jesus, Ben!”
Sarah said, “Where did you get the plates?”
“I borrowed them.”
Alex turned to look at him. His eyes were wide. “Did you… I mean, you shot someone?”
“Eyes on the road, Alex. Do your job. Let me do mine.”
Alex faced front and said, “I don't believe this. I don't believe this is happening.”
“There were two of them, amigo,” Ben said. “Waiting in a stolen car parked right next to yours. You think they were there to wish you Happy Birthday?”
“But you just saw them, how could you possibly know-”
“Alex. Stop talking and drive the fucking car.”
That shut him up. The prick. Not even an inkling that maybe he could say something like, Wow, Ben, thank you for taking care of the two guys who if you had'n ‘t been here would already have killed me. I appreciate it.
“Where are we going?” Sarah asked.
“The city,” Ben said. “We ‘re going to stay at a hotel for a little while. You two are going to do your thing with the technology. And I'm going to follow up on what I just learned.”
“What did you just learn?” Sarah asked.
Ben hesitated. He still didn't trust her. The Russian guys didn't feel like government to him. Government guys wouldn't have had wallets on them, they would have been operating sterile. And they would have been sharper about their positioning near Alex's car. They wouldn't have let Ben get as close as he had.
His guess was they were Russian mafia. Which meant either that the Russian mob was after Alex's technology or, more likely, that the mob was being used by someone else as a cutout. It wouldn't be the first time. Look at the way the CIA had used the mob to go after Castro in the sixties. It certainly wasn't unthinkable that the Iranian government would contract out a job to Russian gangsters. The two countries did enough sub-rosa work together. He'd just seen it firsthand in Istanbul.
And he had another problem now, too, which he should have considered more carefully earlier. The girl, whom he didn't even know, whom Alex had forced him to bring along, was now a material witness to a double homicide. True, she didn't actually see him pull the trigger, and he'd been careful not to confirm any of Alex's hysterical allegations, but the information she did have could be plenty damaging.