“Why the city?” Sarah asked. “Why not an airport hotel? That would be anonymous, right? And there are dozens up and down 101.”
“You just said why,” Ben told her.
“Because it's the first thing I thought of?”
“That's right. It's the first thing someone will key on if they start widening their search.”
There was a second, more important reason, but Ben didn't mention it. San Francisco would give him better opportunities to test the girl and surprise anyone who acted on the information he was going to feed her.
“I don't know about anyone else,” Alex said, “but I haven't had breakfast. Can we stop somewhere for a cup of coffee, maybe a muffin?”
“Whatever you want,” Ben said.
“I know a place,” Sarah said. “Ritual Coffee Roasters, on Valencia, in the Mission. Take the San Jose Avenue exit, then bear left on-”
“I know how to get to the Mission,” Alex said. “Just tell me the cross street.”
“Between Twenty-first and Twenty-second.”
Ben didn't like that Sarah had just selected the place they were going, but he couldn't find a tactical reason to object. She didn't have a cell phone. She couldn't warn anyone of anything. So unless Ritual Coffee Roasters was in fact a front for some diabolical organization of which Sarah was a secret member, they would probably be okay there.
Briefly.
Ben noticed the place first from the crowd in front of it-a line stretching twenty feet out of the store, mostly twentysomething hipsters with facial hair or piercings or both. Overhead was a red sign punctuated by the white outline of a coffee cup with a star above it that reminded Ben vaguely of the flag of communist China. It took them ten minutes to find a place to park because the street was jam-packed and Ben refused to let Alex park the car illegally, even if they were just running inside. He would rather eat a bullet than have the time and place of his vehicle logged by a bored city cop issuing a parking ticket.
Ben looked around while they stood in line. The neighborhood was funky: two- and three-story buildings in green and yellow and pink façades; stores with names like Lost Weekend Video and Aquarius Records and Beadissimo; ethnic restaurants and bodegas cheek by jowl with a foreign-car repair shop, a coin-operated laundry, an “environmentally friendly” dry cleaner, whatever that meant.
“They better serve some damn good coffee,” Ben said.
“It's worth it,” Sarah said. “You'll see.”
The line moved faster than he had expected. It was loud inside- music with a heavy beat throbbing through ceiling speakers; the hum of fifty conversations from scattered tables and couches and stools along the bar; the thump and steam of espresso being pulled by hand. Every third person was using a laptop, all of them Macs, and there were a lot of different hair colors, including fuchsia and magenta. Overall the place was a little hip for Ben's tastes, but he had to admit there was nothing self-conscious about it all and the smell of roasting coffee made up for any shortcomings he found in the ambience.
One of the baristas, a twentysomething white guy with a full beard and a Panama hat, smiled in their direction. “Hey, Sarah,” he said, and Ben thought, Goddamn it, she's known here?
“Hey, Gabe,” Sarah said. “The usual.”
“Two of these in one day? Someone's gonna have to talk you down.” Gabe glanced at Ben and Alex. “Your friends…?”
Alex ordered a latte and a muffin; Ben, suppressing his anger, got something called the Guatemalan Cup of Excellence. Alex pulled out his wallet and Ben made sure he paid cash.
They waited at the end of the bar. “What did I just tell you about going to places where you're known?” Ben said. “The manager of the Four Seasons, now this… you guys are unbelievable.”
Sarah raised a hand to her ear and then pointed to the ceiling, indicating the music. “Sorry?”
He put his mouth close to her ear and repeated himself.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Sorry, you're right.”
Christ, he thought. How could people be so stupid?
They waited. The barista put the coffees on the counter. Ben went to reach past Sarah for his and she flinched. And then he realized.
She was afraid of him. She could pin him to what police would prosecute as a double homicide, and she was afraid of what he might do now. She took them here so she would have witnesses.
He was simultaneously impressed by her thinking and appalled at what lay behind it. When had he reached the point where a girl, someone who in all likelihood had done nothing wrong, looked at him and feared for her life?
A Delta guy he had known in Mogadishu once told him that you can tell the kind of warrior you are by the way the people you're sworn to protect react to you. Are they reassured by your presence, or are they afraid?
Jesus.
He took a sip of coffee and nodded appreciatively. “It's good.”
“Yeah.”
He waved a hand in no particular direction. “You, uh, you live around here?”
“This is my neighborhood place,” she said, stirring sugar into her coffee.
Right, got that the first time.
“You don't mind the commute?”
She looked at him, and he could feel her trying to make up her mind. “It's not so bad,” she said, after a moment. “A straight shot down 280. It's worth it, to live in San Francisco. Didn't you grow up here?”
“Not in the city,” he said, looking around. Very unlikely anyone would know about, or key on, the place she bought her coffee. But he wasn't going to rule it out, either. “The Peninsula. Portola Valley.”
“Yeah, but this is still your city, right?”
“I haven't been here in a long time,” he said, and looked away. The truth was, being in the city was making him uncomfortable, though he couldn't articulate exactly why. Not an operational thing… something else. He pushed the feeling away, thinking he would examine it later.
They sat in back, where the music was quieter, on a couple of black leather sofas next to a mound of 150-pound burlap coffee bags and a giant roasting machine. There was a back door, open, and Ben looked through it before sitting. It led to a courtyard filled with bicycles, presumably the employees’, some potted plants, and assorted bric-a-brac, all surrounded by a fence. You could get over the fence fast enough, coming in or getting out. He would keep an eye on it.
“Where are we going to stay?” Alex asked.
Ben had been trying to work that out. He wanted something big enough to be anonymous, but not so big that it would have a lobby bustling with conventioneers, where someone could easily set up for an ambush. Not that it would come to that, most likely, but he'd learned the easy way in training and the hard way in combat that a good defense is always layered.
The other requirement was, he wanted to be in a part of the city he knew. Which narrowed things down more or less to North Beach, a neighborhood of mostly low buildings painted in light colors that dated back to 1906, when much of the city had been rebuilt after the devastating earthquake and ensuing fire of that year. The area had once actually been a beach, but landfill had long since extended the city northeast into the bay and now only the name served as a reminder of the area's past. It was where he and his friends had gone on weekends when they were in high school, sneaking into Little Italy bars that were lax about checking ID, chowing down on late-night dim sum in adjacent Chinatown, reveling in the neon tackiness of the girlie bars and adult bookshops. The neighborhood had probably changed a lot since then, but at least he would know its broad contours. That would give him an advantage.
“What about that place in North Beach?” he said. “Corner of Broadway and Columbus. Something Motor Inn, if it's still there. Blue building, lot of glass?”