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, which 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.