The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  “You’re the boss. Should I encrypt this one?”

  “Might as well. It will make things look more normal.”

  3

  A couple of minutes after an encrypted “All normal” message was sent to Beijing, a curt reply came back. This one was sent in the clear. “Make up your mind. Bomb or no?”

  The duty officer brought it in to me. “You want me to tell them again it was a false alarm?”

  “Sure, put it in extra-big type this time,” I said. “They must have decided against sending someone to snoop around. Hard to find people to come up here to waste time with us dull-witted peasants, I guess.”

  “Yeah, you said it.” The duty officer hesitated. “Strange, the explosion didn’t ruffle the papers on my desk. Even the area map on the wall didn’t go cockeyed.” He seemed sunk in thought for a moment, then emerged again. “You want me to call someone to repair the upstairs window?”

  “Maybe later. You sure your commo equipment is all right? Nothing jarred out of place?”

  “Sending and receiving both worked fine.”

  “No wires worked loose? The roof antenna didn’t get pushed over? It must have been closer to the blast than the map on the duty room wall.”

  “There aren’t any wires, and we don’t use an antenna anymore.” He was smart enough not to ask why I didn’t know about the equipment upgrades. “Those were replaced, ah, I don’t remember when. Everything is underground cables these days. They head out from here onto a trunk line somewhere. It would take a much bigger explosion than the one we had…”

  I frowned.

  “… than the one we didn’t have to damage those cables. Maybe a direct hit from a nuclear weapon.”

  “Fine. You wait for that. Meantime, I’ll go upstairs and look around. We’ll worry about the window once I see what happened.”

  We never used the upstairs. No one needed so much space, Beijing thought, and years ago it had sent out a facilities team that made sure the grand stairway leading to the second-floor bedrooms was closed off. I’d gone up to the second floor only once or twice when I first arrived just to be sure I knew what the whole building contained. The locals were sure it was where we tortured people, and I knew the North Koreans thought it was overflowing with intercept equipment aimed at them. They sent people to Yanji regularly to loiter in the neighborhood to try to detect what we were doing. No one believed that over the years the second floor had really been left to spiders and mice. The Japanese had departed in a hurry in 1945, and some of the rooms still had old clothing strewn across the beds. Anything of real value had vanished long ago.

  Poking around, I could see right away there hadn’t been much damage. The blast had been smaller than it appeared, or sounded, from street level. It blew out one window in what I always assumed had been the commanding general’s salon, next to one of the larger bedrooms. The other windows, on the opposite side of the big room, were intact. The blast hadn’t even disturbed the cobwebs on that wall. There had been a desk of some sort near the broken window. It lay on its side, with what looked like a few scorch marks on the top. Other than that, it didn’t look damaged. I backed carefully out of the room, trying to step into the same footprints I’d left in the dust when I entered. I poked my head into a second adjoining room, smaller than the first. An old operations map sat against the far wall. Going down the stairs back to the first floor, I noticed places on the banister where the dust had been disturbed. Some of the stairs, as well, had an odd trail on them. It hadn’t been noticeable on the way up, and I’d been careful not to touch the banister.

  Downstairs again, I walked over to the building’s old entrance, the one that led into the bank. The door was locked, but not the right way. From the outside, with a key, it automatically fully engaged. But from the inside, the latch had to be turned twice—once to throw the bolt partway into the frame, and then again to throw it in all the way. It had only been turned once.

  When I got back to the duty officer’s desk, he was studying a manual. He looked up when he heard me. “Do we need window repair? They’re calling for rain tomorrow.”

  “Who’s been upstairs?” I sat down on the edge of his desk.

  “Upstairs? No one goes upstairs, you don’t allow it.” He was unsure what was going on. I never sat on the edge of his desk, and I could tell he sensed it wasn’t a gesture of camaraderie.

  “Someone delivered a package to my office. Someone went upstairs. Since when do people roam around this office like it was a fun fair?”

  “You said yourself, maybe someone came in through the bank entrance.”

  “Who has the keys to that entrance?”

  He gulped. “You do.”

  “And who else?”

  “No one.” He said it quickly, without having to think.

  I let him hang for a moment before breaking the tension. “That’s right, no one.”

  The duty officer closed the manual and held it up for me to see, his effort at changing the subject. “It’s for my communications test next week.”

  “What test? I thought you already knew that stuff. That’s why you’re my communicator, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but they are always coming up with new technology. New equipment arriving next month, more secure they say. I need to know how to use it.”

  “You mentioned cables. You know where they are routed?”

  “I don’t have the clearances for that.”

  “Who does?”

  “I don’t have the clearances for that either.”

  “Not very convenient, is it? You don’t know what I need you to know.”

  “It’s probably in your operational safe.”

  This time I let the silence drag on so long that he shifted in his chair.

  “You know I have an operational safe?” I went over to the duty map on the wall and moved it a little to one side.

  “There’s an operational safe in the file room, the file clerk says so.”

  “What else does she say?” I stepped back to look at the map. “Is this straight?”

  The duty officer knew enough to keep quiet.

  “The file clerk.” I turned and walked back to the desk. “What else does she say?”

  “That no one is supposed to know about it, no one ever opens it, and she needed it moved to make room for more files.”

  “When did she say that?”

  “Yesterday, to the new deputy, the tall guy with the scuffed shoes.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He moved the safe. Or said he would, anyway. They were standing right here, so I heard what they said.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where he put it?”

  The duty officer had just started to say something when the duty phone rang.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Answer the phone. And leave that window like it is.”

  Chapter Four

  Dead diners aren’t my responsibility and wouldn’t normally even interest me. On the other hand, an explosion of any size or description in a Ministry of State Security office deserves my attention, the more so if it happens in my building, particularly in an area of the building that is supposed to be off-limits. As of now, there were too many troubling coincidences of time and place mounting up: Mike shows up on Tuesday, he disappears again on Wednesday, a lot of bodies turn up on Thursday, and on Friday there is a pinpoint explosion in the never-used upstairs of my office building. I was not looking forward to what the weekend might hold.

  I knew it would be a mistake to conclude that Mike was the thread that tied all of the events together. But something told me it would also be a mistake to discard that possibility too quickly. If I had a deputy I could trust, I’d be able to lay out the trail of events with him, and together we could figure out a plan to look more closely into where the lines intersected, or didn’t. I would have done that with my previous deputy without giving it a second thought, but he was dead. Now the deputy I had was too sullen and, I had the strong impression, not espe
cially trustworthy. I didn’t have anything specific against him, not yet, but I was rarely wrong in my first impressions. For starters, what the hell was he doing moving office safes without asking me?

  My uncle might have good ideas if I wanted to take the time to pull out the barbed hooks that would accompany his observations. It was even possible he would have a few more scraps of real information. If he knew that Mike had been in town, maybe he was holding back on an additional detail or two. He had promised me more than once that he had cut all ties with his old colleagues in North Korea, and maybe he had. Or maybe he hadn’t. He wouldn’t have to try very hard to stumble over a couple of them during one of his early morning walks. And for sure, by now they had tracked him down and pretty well knew his daily schedule.

  I couldn’t ask the police chief for his views. Po had his own problems, and anyway he was too much under the thumb of the mayor. True, he didn’t like the mayor, the mayor didn’t like him, but I could only trust the chief so far. Besides, even if he had manpower to spare, none of his detectives were too sharp.

  It was clear I was on my own. For now, the dead diners were a problem for the police. I didn’t think they’d solve anything, but they still might turn up something in their investigation that I could use. My focus had to be on Mike, the Uighur with a limp, and the prostitutes that hung around Dooran Street. These were smart girls, and they kept their eyes and ears open. I made a list and realized there was one thing missing—the manager of the fish restaurant. It was too soon to tell, but I had a feeling she’d made a big mistake showing up outside our building right after the explosion.

  2

  Number one on my list was finding out more of what Mike had been doing during the time he was laying low. Who was he in contact with? What sorts of deals was he exploring, and had he put out bids for new operations? We had a few pieces of paper on him in the files, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t more in the margins of other reports—unseen hands, low voices in dark corners, that sort of thing. It would entail going through a lot of agent reports, something I loathed doing because most of them were nothing but low-level information lifted from newspapers or, even worse these days, the Internet. This was then sold to us as precious insights from people with supposedly excellent access. We weeded out what we could, but even when we caught someone peddling crap, we rarely took them off the payroll. Beijing didn’t want a lot of former agents running around loose, so we were supposed to keep them on a long leash, like old dogs that mostly slept and dreamed of better days.

  Besides a few special cases, I’d made it policy that in our office, managing agents was the deputy’s responsibility. Not all of the Ministry’s local offices were run that way. In some places the chiefs handled many, sometimes most, of the agents personally. I knew that a lot of people in Beijing complained about my approach of leaving agent operations to the deputy, but sitting in Yanji, I was too far away to care what Beijing thought. Besides, I’d been in the same post for seven years, and if they were disgruntled enough at Headquarters they could order a transfer. That would suit me just fine. The files on active agents were kept in a special file cabinet. Only three people were supposed to know about the operations file cabinet: me, my deputy, and the file clerk who sat in the vault. The clerk didn’t have access to it, but she knew what it was for, and if anyone fiddled with it or showed too much interest, she was supposed to let me know.

  The file room—years before I arrived it had been made into a secure vault with a very heavy door and a sticky lock—was formerly the billiard parlor when the Japanese army occupied the building. Through the years, no one had bothered to remove the racks for the cue sticks attached to the walls. The file clerk used them to hang the checkout logs, her hat, and her purse. She was at her tiny, cluttered desk sipping tea when I walked into the vault.

  “Good morning,” I said, and got right to the point. “I thought we had agreed that you would never discuss the fact that there was an operations cabinet in this vault. You, the deputy, and I were the only ones who were to know it exists.”

  The woman brushed some lint from her blouse.

  “I understand,” I continued, “that you asked the new deputy to move the cabinet. Where is it?”

  The file clerk finally looked up and grunted. “Deputy?” She took a noisy sip of tea and then smacked her lips. “You mean the tall man? No one introduces anyone to me. What do I do? I sit in here all day with this. This!” She waved her hand as if she were the dowager empress dismissing a eunuch.

  “Where is that file cabinet?” I stared at her. She stared back. I thought it was a good time to add fuel to the fire. “And are you aware that we are missing a file?”

  “I am not a magician, Major. Nor am I a shepherd of paper sheep. I do what I can to keep this file room in order. Why don’t you speak to your staff?” This was her subtle way of saying that she wasn’t part of my staff, and that she answered to another authority. It wasn’t true, but it might as well be, considering how she treated the file room like her private preserve. She wasn’t through complaining. “Your staff doesn’t pay much attention to the rules. They take the installation files without signing them out, or when they do, they ignore the return date. Rules are rules, except your staff doesn’t think so.”

  “This file disappeared, so it seems, three years ago.”

  “Ha! All the more reason for you to speak to the staff. Who was it?”

  I wasn’t going to win this tactical skirmish, not without more effort than I could afford at the moment. I let it drop in favor of the main battle. “I need to know where the operations file cabinet is. I don’t suppose you could help me on that?”

  “No one knows what it is for, exactly as you insist.”

  “Insist? It’s not an idle demand on my part. Should we take a vote on it? How many in favor of tight security? How many opposed?”

  This was ignored with a wave of the hand. “They all complain that it gets in the way, I hear that constantly.” She looked at me evenly, daring me to contradict her. “Actually, they are right, and I’ve mentioned it to you before, in writing. The cabinet is rarely used, and yet it takes up space. And space is at a premium in this cave.” She took another sip of tea, making more noise than would seem possible given how small the cup was. “He moved it out there.” The empress waved vaguely in the direction of the vault door. “He’s a nice man. Very tall. We had a lovely conversation.”

  3

  Walking down the hall, I spotted the new deputy ducking out of my office and heading in the other direction.

  “Tang! Hold it right there.”

  The tall man turned, looked at his watch, and frowned. “I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes on the outside. Can this wait?”

  In some MSS offices, an “appointment on the outside” is used to indicate a meeting with a source. But Tang didn’t have any sources in Yanji yet. He couldn’t. He had just arrived. He hadn’t even had time to look through his desk drawers.

  “Can it wait? I don’t know, can it? You were in my office, so I assume you wanted to see me. About what?”

  He looked at his watch again. “I just stopped in to say good morning. Let’s have lunch. We can talk then.”

  “No, I think we can talk now. Your appointment can wait.”

  “In Tianjin, appointments on the outside were considered high priority.”

  I tamped down what first came to my mind to say about how they did things in Tianjin. That was for another day. I pointed the conversation where it needed to be. “Where did you put the file cabinet you took from the file room?”

  “I brought it upstairs.”

  “You what?”

  “Look, Major, this is an important appointment. It’s left over from Tianjin. We didn’t have time to make the formal handoff, so I need one final meeting with this source. It’s vital.”

  What a source from Tianjin was doing in Yanji was an interesting question, but I wasn’t interested in the answer at the moment. “The file cabinet,” I s
aid. “Where is it?”

  “I told you, I brought it upstairs. I couldn’t see any room down here; I didn’t suppose you’d want it left in a hallway. So I carried it upstairs until I could find a better place for it. I’m the deputy; I’m supposed to handle these housekeeping chores without bothering you. Do you have any idea how dusty it is up there?”

  My answer was cut short by the duty officer, who was racing down the hall.

  “Major! Special message, A-class. There were bells when it came in.”

  I glared at Tang. “Go back to your office and stay there. If you even stick one of your scuffed brown shoes into the hall before I tell you to come out, you’ll be on your way to an assignment in Xinjiang by tonight. You won’t like it there.”

  4

  The message was from the MSS office in Harbin. Mike had been overheard a couple of weeks ago discussing a “major shift from noodles to dumplings” with a known Russian criminal boss who visited the city once in a while. Harbin wanted to know if we had anything on either dumplings or noodles that might explain this. The real question, as far as I was concerned, was why weeks-old information on Mike was just getting to me.

  Three of the dead diners had been eating noodles; the two prostitutes had been behind a dumpling shop. I ought to send this query to the chief of police, but the Harbin report indicated it was from a very sensitive technical system, meaning the chief couldn’t get it. At least it added weight to my conviction that this wasn’t terrorism. It was old-fashioned criminals committing old-fashioned crimes, nothing that fell into my area of responsibility.

  Unless a case combining noodles, dumplings, and fish added up to more than the sum of its parts. If Mike was suddenly switching from noodles to dumplings, it might explain the dead diners at the noodle shop. You want to scare people away from noodles and get them eating dumplings? You might leave some corpses over a few bowls of pho. Nice theory, but the dead hookers behind the dim sum place didn’t fit. And the explosion upstairs in my office was still a problem. That wasn’t normal behavior for Mike, and Beijing wouldn’t like it when it did an audit and discovered why I had ordered a new window for the building. At least the report from Harbin gave me one new thread to follow. Mike had been there before he came here. The fish lady was from Harbin. OK, I thought to myself, it was a slender thread, a gossamer thread, but as my uncle would point out, it was better than none. Maybe it wasn’t noodles. Maybe it was Harbin. That my uncle went often to Harbin skipped through my mind, but I discarded the thought. There was no way he was connected to all of this. No way at all.