by Kotaro Isaka
"He can't talk right now," Aoyagi said. Which was true enough.
"And who are yrju?"
"Me?"
"You're the sus|)ect," said the voice.
"And you are?"
"I'l]) the doctor," said the voice, which was, in tact, cokl and clinical. He was in a hosj)ital, so it occurred to Aoyagi that they might have tracked him down, that this might he one ol the doctors hc*re in the* huilding. But Ihc'ii
REMOTE CONTROL
he realized the call had been for Miura, not him, and that this doctor was the one on "their" side. "The plastic surgeon?" he asked.
"1 called to apologize to Miura, but 1 suppose this concerns you as well, so ril just say that the information I gave him was inaccurate."
"In other words, my double is not at the hospital."
"You know already?"
"Tm just figuring it out."
"Are you there now?" The tone was polite but the voice dry, almost mechanical. "Has something happened to Miura?"
"He can't come to the phone," Aoyagi said as he began moving toward the door. It was time to get going.
"Anyway, I wanted to apologize." The doctor seemed to have understood the situation.
"No need," Aoyagi said quietly. "These things happen. It's not easy confirming a story like that." It occurred to him that he himself should understand better than almost anyone how misinformation can come to be taken for the truth.
"So what will you do now?" the doctor asked.
"1 guess the only thing I can do is run."
"But where will you go? How will you get there?"
He hung up without answering. Why should he answer, when he had no idea? He grasped the doorknob and turned it, expecting again to find a row of men with guns trained on him. But the passage was empty and he retraced his steps to the elevator and pressed the button. His heart was pounding. When the doors opened, a woman in a white coat stood there and he nearly panicked, but he forced himself to get on and move to the back. The woman was next to the doors, in front of the buttons. "What floor?" she asked.
"First," he said, the word barely audible. A bead of sweat ran down his spine. A man in street clothes calling an elevator from a floor that wasn't being used was bound to arouse suspicion.
When the doors opened again he got off, but then hesitated. He didn't know the way back to the parking lot, but he set off to the right anyway, realizing it would seem even more suspicious to stand in the corridor looking lost. Just as he was about to emerge into a larger hall, he had an odd feeling and turned around. He knew it wasn't wise to look back, but he couldn't
THE INCIDENT
help it. And there, still in front of the elevator, was the woman he rode down with, talking into a miniature walkie-talkie.
He didn't really think she had seen through his disguise, but it was likely she was reporting a suspicious person wandering around the hospital. As she talked into the handset, she looked up, noticed Aoyagi staring at her, and looked away. He turned and hurried on, though too much haste would make him even more conspicuous.
Every patient in pajamas he passed gave him a start. Every old man with an intravenous drip scared him. He was as nervous here as he had been out on the streets of the city. The long, window-lined corridor seemed sterile and cold. The floor seemed to suck at his feet.
'There he is," said a voice behind him. He glanced back to find the woman from the elevator pointing him out to a guard. Should he run? He could hear the sound of the guard's footsteps coming closer. He went rigid, as though a flood were about to sweep over him. He felt sick and wanted to fall to his knees. Instead, his eye caught sight of a sign that said "Emergency Exit," and he dodged through it.
Cold, damp air met his face. A spiral staircase led upward. Having made it to the ground floor, it was against his better instincts to head back up, but with no other choice, he bounded up the stairs.
"Hey, kid! Watch where you're going," a voice said from above. When Aoyagi looked up, he saw an old man sitting cross-legged on a landing, pointing at him with a long toothpick. "Hey," the man said again, lowering the toothpick. "Aren't you the kid on T V?" Aoyagi tried to think what he could say to this. "I've been watching you," the man laughed. "You don't give up easy, but for this man's money you're just about out of options."
Haruko liiguchi
the back ol the cotlee shoj). She had gathered her brown hair in an attractive knot on top ot her head, like the tip ol some exotit Iruit.
REMOTE CONTROL
"It's good to meet you at last," said the man next to her. "I'm Masakado Kikuchi." He sat with his back straight, hands on his knees, and he seemed all arms as he looked expectantly at her. His hair was shaggy and he had a short beard—generally, not as much like the jack in a deck of cards as Akira had led her to believe.
"Thanks for coming on such short notice," Haruko said.
"Don't worry about it," Akira laughed. "You just rub the lamp and we appear."
It hadn't been possible in Haruko's day to suddenly announce that you wanted to take time off and walk out of the office—at least not for anyone but Akira. Evening was deepening outside the window.
At first glance, Masakado looked like the sort of person teenage girls would find attractive, but sitting next to Akira sipping an orange juice, he came across as more of a well-trained pet than a pop star.
Haruko told them about Aoyagi—that the man running from the police had been her boyfriend, that she hadn't seen him since they'd broken up, but that the person she knew was incapable of that sort of crime.
"Still, people change," said Akira, a bit skeptically.
"I know."
"But you believe he didn't do it," said Masakado.
"I do. Or, I guess I should say I trust him."
"You still trust a man you broke up with?" Akira smiled. "I have half a mind to tell your husband."
"For all the good it would do you," Haruko laughed. "He couldn't care less."
"So why are we here?" Akira said. "What have you got in mind? And for that matter, where is that little girl of yours?"
"I left her with a neighbor." The woman in the apartment next door was a housewife in her fifties. Her two sons were grown up and off on their own, but she loved children and offered to babysit Nanami from time to time.
"So, you're worked up enough to park your kid while you chase around after the old boyfriend?"
"I wouldn't put it exactly like that. But yes, I'm worked up." Haruko realized her behavior was a bit out of character. And what was she planning to do? She had no idea. "First, I was hoping Masakado could tell me about the Security Pods."
THE INCIDENT
"The pods?" he echoed.
"What kind of problem are they for someone trying to stay hidden in the city?"
"Well, to be honest, Tve never thought of them as a problem—they're supposed to be working for the good guys. What you're saying is kind of scary."
"She always did say scary things," said Akira. "Like suddenly T'm quitting my job' or 'I'm getting married.'"
Haruko didn't have a clear plan, nor did she think there was much she could do, but if there was a chance of helping Aoyagi even without actually finding him, she wanted to try—and the only thing that had come to mind was to disable or fool the Security Pods in some way. They sat there—somewhere—watching everything from behind their little cameras. She wanted to hit them where they lived.
"What do you want to know?" said Masakado.
"I want to know if there's a way to disable them, even for a short time. If we could take them off line for a while, it might give him some breathing room."
"Which ones did vou have in mind?" he asked.
j
"I was thinking all of them."
Masakado shook his head like a dog trying to dry itself. "No way," he said. "Do you have any idea how many of them there are in the city?"
"Don't give up so easily," Akira told him. "Give it some thought."
"Well, since you mention i
t, there might be a way." His immediate about-face was appealing.
"1 was hoping we could somehow cut the power, maybe," said Haruko.
"If the power gets cut off, there's a backuj:) system to automatically notify the police. So that's pretty much (Jut. But there is a way to fool the camera and audio mike."
"l (jol them how?"
"Y()u switch the inj)ut and output terminals. You'd have to have adapters, but it you could manage it, the old data would just be recycled tUid you'd have them out ot operation tor twelve hours or so."
"Sounds like a plan," said Haruko.
"No way, I'm afraid. We'tl never be able to switch till the terminals."
REMOTE CONTROL
"'No way/" Akira parroted. "You say that a lot."
"You could disable a certain number, if you wanted to get into some building unnoticed, for instance. But to knock out every pod in the city . . ."
"What would happen if you made a lot of noise near one of the pods?" Haruko asked. This had been her idea from the start. "Could you use a noise as a diversion or cover, to mask a voice or prevent the pod from processing it?"
"What good would that do?" Akira looked puzzled, but Masakado seemed interested.
"You know how you turn to look when you hear a loud noise?" said Haruko. "Well, Tm wondering whether you could distract the pods with a loud radio or something and make them focus on that instead of anything else that might be happening in the area."
She had expected them to laugh at the proposal, but after a moment's thought Masakado replied. "You might have something there. The pods supposedly keep tabs on everything within fifty meters or so, but in practice it's hard to record sound and images in all directions at once—there's a limit to their capacity. So a sudden noise in the vicinity would attract the pod's attention and tie up its recording mechanism. I've also heard that the picture quality drops off when the pod's busy with other functions."
"Well, that kind of sucks," said Akira. "They use a huge chunk of my taxes to put these things all over the city and boast about how great they are, but then any little noise from a boom box or a jackhammer can put them on the fritz?"
"And how would that be different from all the other things they've spent your tax money on and boasted about?" said Masakado.
"So can we find some way to create a diversion?" Haruko asked. "Right away?"
Masakado thought for a second. "I'm not sure what we could do to generate that much noise," he said.
"Did you have something in mind?" Akira asked.
"Afraid not."
"Well, I've got another idea," said Akira. "Do these things have a blind spot or something?"
"They do," said Masakado. "If you stay on the back side of the pod and up close, there's an area where the camera can't see you. If you're quiet, you'd be almost invisible."
THE INCIDENT
"But you'd stick out a mile away to the rest of the world if you were curled up behind a pod," Haruko said, laughing.
"Not to mention the fact that anything you'd do to these things would be discovered within a day by Masakado and his fellow pod people," said Akira.
"I'm afraid so," he agreed. "My district covers about a third of the pods in the city, so the guys who look after the rest would realize you'd been tampering with their stuff pretty quickly."
"Do you get around to all of them every day?"
"No, we usually try to look in on each pod once every three days or so. Except that the police have been on our backs since the assassination, and they want us to check every one of them twice a day, morning and evening."
"Twice a day," Haruko murmured. She thought for a moment, hand to her mouth, but nothing came to mind.
"1 know you want to try to help him," Akira said, "but there's not much we can do."
"1 don't suppose you'd settle for a nice gesture," said Masakado.
"You have an idea?" Akira turned to peer at him.
"No, it's too crazy. It would never work," he said.
Disappointed, Haruko was looking around for the waitress when she recognized a familiar figure sitting at a table near the entrance. He was reading a newspaper.
"Well, if you think of anything, let me know," she said, turning back to them.
"Tm doing my rounds tonight. Call me if you need me," Masakado said, scribbling his number on a paper napkin and handing it over.
"I'm sorry to pull you out of work," Haruko told Akira.
"Don't be silly. Who wouldn't want to ditch the office to aid and abet an assassin?" She stood uj) and Masakado followed suit, but Haruko made no move to join them. "Are you staying?" Akira asked.
"Just for a minute," she said.
"What a coincidence." A tew minutes later, two men were standing at her tal)ie.
"Somehow, 1 doubt it," said Haruko, looking up at Mamoru Kondo, now wearing a wrinkled suit and even a tie. Without asking, he tiropped into the chair across from her. 'Hie man with him was well built, with a crew cut and chiseled
REMOTE CONTROL
features—the image of a martial arts enthusiast—and for some reason he had earphones on. He sat in the other chair, his face as blank and offputting as Rondo's.
"No, it really is," said Rondo. "But you don't seem too happy to see us."
"I can't say I'm wild about the idea of being followed everywhere." She wondered how they had found her and how much they had guessed. She had kept her call to Akira under thirty seconds. Perhaps they were just listening in on all her calls or had even bugged her apartment at this point.
"No one is following you around. We just noticed you as you came in."
At this, Haruko looked out the window. Across the street, partially hidden in a clump of azaleas, she could see the little dome and flashing eyes of a Security Pod. You bet they had "noticed" her as she entered the place—and sent Rondo on the double to find her.
"Do you get your kicks intimidating innocent people?" she said.
"I'm just doing my job," said Rondo. The other man sat staring at her, as impassive and scary as some temple guardian. "So can you tell me who those people were and what you were talking about?"
"I'm sure you could find out easily enough. She's a colleague from the office 1 used to work in, and her boyfriend. We were just getting together to talk about old times."
"How did you contact her?"
So it had worked. The brief call had gone under their radar, had avoided the pod recording mechanism, so they didn't know how the two of them were connected.
"We ran into each other a week or so ago and made a date for today." As they had only started shadowing her yesterday at the earliest, this seemed safe enough.
"1 see," said Rondo. There was no way of telling whether he believed her.
"Is Aoyagi still leading you on a merry chase?" she asked.
"You think it's funny, do you? You want him to get away?" He stared at her, apparently gauging her reaction. In addition to everything else, it was galling that he seemed determined to force her to tell lies.
"Do you really believe Aoyagi did this?" she asked.
"I don't 'believe' anything. I know he did."
"You really think that one ordinary little guy like him could pull off something like this?"
THE INCIDENT
"Most assassins are ordinary little guys."
"You could say the same about character assassins," she said, wondering whether she was going too far.
"Mrs. Higuchi, are you defending the man who killed our prime minister?" Haruko sucked on her straw to drain the last drops of her iced cocoa. The man next to Kondo watched her as she rattled the cubes in the glass. She was afraid the fingers holding the straw would start shaking. "1 understand your reluctance to accept the fact that your old friend has done something like this. . . ."
Haruko interrupted him before he could finish. "Thank you," she said, smiling at him. "1 appreciate your understanding."
He paused for a moment, and she couldn't tell whether he was annoyed or amused. "Fine,
" he said, getting up. "If you hear anything, please let us know right away."
There was something gruesome about the two of them, Kondo and the other one who had all the animation of a stone carving. She had no doubt whatsoev’er that they would have happily beaten or even killed her right here in the coffee shop if the order had come down to do so.
Masaiiarii Aoyagi
"Tm Hodogaya," said the old man. "Yasushi Hodogaya." They walked up from the landing in the emergency stairwell and came out in a corridor. Hodogaya led Aoyagi to a door at the far end on the west side.
"Is this your room?" he asked, but as they entered he could see that the beds were unmade and the curtains closed.
"It wasn't sate talking on the stairs," 1 lodogaya said, closing the door. "I'm in another ward. Ihis room is empty because the air-conditioning's broken down. 1 use it when 1 want to rest my legs."
"You brrjke them?" Aoyagi asked. With casts on both legs, it should have been difficult for him to walk, but to watch the way he handled his crutches like little sticks he'd found on the roadside, it was hard to see him as a cripple.
REMOTE CONTROL
"Yep, botli of them," he said. "They're just about mended, hut I kind of like it here, so I'm giving myself a little holiday. The casts come right off, anyway." He demonstrated the release catches on them.
Aoyagi looked around the dimly lit room. The way the dust moats danced in the ribbon of light from between the curtains was almost graceful. It occurred to him that it seemed odd to be able to prolong a hospital stay at will, but when he asked Hodogaya how this was possible, he explained that he had "underworld connections" who arranged it for him.
"Underworld connections?" Aoyagi repeated.
"You have a problem with that?" he said.
"No, but it's kind of funny, don't you think? A guy with 'underworld connections' in here enjoying free bed and board, while Tm out there running for my life, even though I've never been anywhere near your underworld. Doesn't seem fair somehow."
"I see what you mean," Hodogaya said. "It has been a bit cushy in here. But to tell the truth, I was just getting bored with the whole thing when your little incident broke on the TV and things got interesting again."