her off. But sanctimonious and naive was a combination guaranteed to piss him off.
And he didn't like that comment about the Istanbul hit at all. Yeah, it had been all over the news. She was Iranian, she was political, she would have seen it. But still.
Anyway, he was going to get Alex out of his latest mess. Not that Alex deserved it, but Ben was going to do it anyway because that's the kind of guy he was, even if Alex couldn't recognize it. And now his little brother had made it clear that it was a package deal: he had to help the girl, too. Christ, he should have seen it coming. It was just like Alex: suck him in, get him committed, and then tell him, Oh, just one other little thing…
Overall, he gave the situation a suck factor of about 9.8, but there was a tiny silver lining. If the girl really was working for the other side, he could use her as a conduit for false information-essentially as an unwitting double agent. He'd have to take extreme care because she'd also have plenty of accurate information she could pass along-their current location, for example-but if he could control for that downside, he might be able to use her to draw her people into an ambush. He started thinking about how.
He had Alex take them to the Wal-Mart on Showers Drive in Mountain View. Ben picked out wool hats for them. Sarah wanted to know why.
“I want to make us a little harder to recognize, and a little harder to remember. Just in case. Is there a downside?”
“I'm just asking,” she said, “or do I have to obey without question?”
Ben tossed her a hat. “You just have to obey.”
He paid for the hats and a prepaid phone. On the way out, he entered the number in his speed dial. He handed the unit to Alex. “This is if you need to call me, and for me to call you. No other uses, no other calls. Understood?”
They understood.
As they pulled off 101 onto the University Avenue exit that would take them to the hotel, Ben said, “Don't pull into the hotel parking lot. Take the next right, Manhattan Avenue, and park it there.”
“Why?” Alex asked.
“Your car and her car are compromised. I don't want-”
“My name is Sarah,” Sarah said, turning to look at him. “Use it. Stop talking about me as though I'm not here. It's rude.”
Christ. “Well, I wouldn't want to be rude.”
“No, you obviously do want to be rude, otherwise you wouldn't be. Which is why I'm telling you to cut it out.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
She shook her head slightly as though in disgust, then turned away again. All right, maybe he'd been too hard on her. He wasn't even sure why, exactly. It wasn't going to help him use her to set up the opposition, assuming she really was playing for the other team. She just pushed his buttons. He was already carrying Alex, he didn't need to shoulder her weight on top of it.
“Your car and Sarah's car are compromised,” Ben said. “I want to make sure this one stays clean.”
Sarah looked back at him again. “You think someone's at the hotel?”
“I doubt it. But like Alex said, I found him here. Someone else could have done the same. If there's a problem, it'll likely be waiting at Alex's car. You can't just sit around a hotel lobby forever without attracting suspicion. So for now, we'll stay clear of Alex's car and go in carefully, just in case. Got it?”
She nodded and turned away. Alex said, “What do you mean, ‘for now’?”
Ben opened the Wal-Mart bag. “One thing at a time. Put your hats on.”
They all pulled on the hats. Ben also slipped on his gloves. Dressing for an op was always easier in the cold.
They got out and walked, squinting against shards of morning sun slicing through the spaces between the buildings they passed. Manhattan Avenue was inaptly named: in fact, it was a quiet tree-lined street fronted by a few small lower-rent apartment complexes and a coin-operated laundry-artifacts of what the neighborhood had been before the sparkling hotel and office complex had been erected next door. Ben led the way back to the main entrance and into the hotel, scanning as they moved. He detected no problems.
A silver-haired guy in a charcoal suit by reception waved to Alex. “Hey, Alex. Nice to see you here. Breakfast today?”
“Hey, Tracy, no, I'm staying with you this time. Some work being done on my house.”
The guy smiled. “Nice to have you with us.”
They kept moving.
Ben was incredulous. “Who the hell was that?” he said.
“Tracy Mercer. The manager.”
“You know the manager?”
“I do a lot of business meals here.”
Ben wondered how someone so smart could at the same time be so galactically stupid. “Didn't I tell you to stay someplace where no one would know you?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
Ben shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. Was Alex a moron? Did he have a death wish?
They went to Alex's room, and while Alex collected his gear, Ben looked out the window at the highway below and the massive sprawl of an Ikea shopping complex on the other side of it. None of this had been here when Ben was a kid. East Palo Alto had been a no-go zone then, unless you wanted to buy pot, and even then you wouldn't go at night. Times had changed. He was amazed that Alex could casually take advantage of something like this. This hotel had to be at least four hundred dollars a night, and Alex was using it as a safe house without giving a second thought to the bill. It was almost funny, the different economic strata they found themselves in. Of course, Ben's half of their parents’ estate wasn't insubstantial, but he never touched that money. In his mind, it didn't even exist except as a last-ditch insurance policy should the shit he dealt with every day ever manage to squarely connect with the fan.
They headed back down to the lobby. Sarah said, “I need to use the bathroom.”
An alarm went off in Ben's head. “No.”
She looked at him. “No?”
“Not now. We're not secure here. We need to keep moving. You'll have to hold it in.”
She cocked her head and her eyes bored into him. “For how long?”
He wanted to say, Until I fucking tell you you can let it out. Instead, he said, “Ten minutes. Can you manage that?”
She didn't answer, and he took that for a yes. Christ, he could almost see smoke coming out of her ears.
Well, tough shit. He was about to do another pass near Alex's car, and the last thing he needed was for her to duck into the restroom, borrow a cell phone, and warn someone what was up.
Alex checked out-no sign of the manager this time-and they went back to Ben's car, Ben scanning for danger along the way. “Drive again,” Ben told Alex. “There's a Starbucks just on the other side of 101. Sarah can use the bathroom there. Then come back and swing around the hotel parking lot past your car. I want to have one more look at it.” By the time they got to the Starbucks, if the girl made a phone call it wouldn't make a difference.
“You sure that's a good idea?” Alex asked.
“I doubt anyone's there,” Ben said. But sooner or later, he knew, someone would be. Either at Alex's car, or at the office, or back at his house. Or at the girl's car. Or at her house. And every one of these ambush points was therefore also a place for a counterambush.
Alex and Sarah drove off. Ben pulled the hat low and walked back into the hotel parking lot. He walked past the hotel entrance, his head swiveling, checking all the places he would have used himself.
He cut through the parking garage so he could come out closer to Alex's car. If anyone was there, the shortcut would give them less time to react. He turned the corner and bingo, there was a burly white guy with a shaved head leaning against the parking garage just ten feet past Alex's car. The guy was wearing shades and smoking a cigarette, and wore a black, waist-length leather jacket.
Although his mind grasped it all in a kind of instant shorthand rather than in conscious thoughts, Ben understood all the things that were wrong with this picture. This was the western side of the garage, and this
