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.
But he had to tell them something. Otherwise, they'd be groping in the dark when they tried to get inside the technology. And he wanted the girl to understand that the threat she faced wasn't something the police could protect her from. He had to discourage her from the temptation, which he knew would arise repeatedly, to default to good, civilian behavior, implicating him in the process.
“I heard them talking,” Ben said. “They were Russian. Can you think of any reason the Russians would want Obsidian?”
Sarah said, “Russians? Russians are mixed up in this?”
Ben nodded. “Sounds like the two of you treed a bad one.”
Alex said, “What do you mean?”
“I see two possibilities. One, they were FSB. That's the new KGB. Which would mean the people who want you dead are the Russian government.”
Sarah glanced back at him. “What's the other possibility?”
“They were Russian mafia.”
“Great,” Alex said, shaking his head but at least keeping his eyes on the road. “The people who want us dead are either the KGB or the Russian mob.”
“I doubt your problem would be with the Russian mob directly,” Ben said. “My guess is, someone gave them a contract. Could be the FSB. Could be someone else. So again, can you think of any reason the Russian government would want Obsidian?”
They were all quiet for a moment. Alex said, “None particular to Russia.”
“Well, keep the connection in mind as a new data point. I'm going to check with my people and see if I can't learn more about who they were working with. Or working for.”
19 RITUAL
They drove in silence through Menlo Park, onto Sand Hill Road, and then onto 280. Ben watched the rolling green hills pass, the sky above hard blue and studded with bright white clouds. It was surreal.
He rarely had to deal with the aftermath of a job. Ordinarily he just walked away, instantly severing the connection with what was left behind. But now he had… all of this. The crazy thing was, a part of him was enjoying it. Maybe it was the giddy aftereffects of what had just happened, but the whole situation was a hell of a challenge, and he'd managed it pretty well so far.
They passed Crystal Springs Reservoir, a stretch of sparkling blue. Ben had chosen 280 over 101 because its slightly more meandering route would give him more time to think on the way to the city. But he was glad now for the views, as well. He'd forgotten how beautiful a highway this was. Even when he had been a kid here, 101 had been an eyesore- an unending stretch of billboards and sound walls and industrial buildings backed up ass-forward to the very edge of the highway.