At the Sharpe End

by Ashton, Hugh

  “And so he’s doing Ishihara’s dirty work in exchange for immunity from extradition and prosecution by the Japanese authorities?”

  Jon looked at him. “Very good, Kenneth,” he said softly. “Go to the top of the class.”

  Sharpe walked on in silence a little further, Jon slightly behind him. “All right then, Kurokawa’s your man inside who’s giving you all of this? You’re not plucking this out of thin air, are you?”

  Jon gave Sharpe another look. “Ooh, you are good,” he said, affecting a camp voice. “Not quite right, though,” he added. “Nine out of ten.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s Yatabe. Ishihara himself?”

  “I never said a word,” confirmed Jon. “Want to join our lot? Mostly indoor work, no heavy lifting, guaranteed pension. You really could become quite good at this game, you know.”

  “What have you got on Ishihara, then?”

  “Would I tell you? And with you not even signing the Official Secrets Act?” asked Jon rhetorically. “As it happens, nothing. He came to us of his own free will many moons ago. Fed up with what he saw as the graft and corruption in the Liberal Democratic Party. Plus he’d had a couple of years at Cambridge as an exchange student, and really admired what he’d seen of England.” He paused and regarded the river for a while. “Should have brought those bloody doughnuts for those ducks. Silly bugger,” he added inconsequentially. It wasn’t entirely clear whether the “silly bugger” referred to Ishihara’s admiration of the British, or his own forgetting to bring suitable nourishment for the ducks.

  “Do the rest of his team know?”

  “Hell, no, but we do cooperate with them from time to time. Ishihara sent Kurokawa over to the States to learn a few things from the FBI. Since then, we’ve learned quite a lot about the way the Yanks’ counter-intelligence operations work overseas. Damn, now you really are going to have to sign the bloody thing.”

  “It’s all right,” countered Sharpe stiffly. “I know how to keep my mouth shut.” They walked on in silence.

  Sharpe stopped short. “Bloody hell! You bastards!” Once again, he realised that someone had been taking an interest in him without his having been aware of it. His own ignorance angered him as much as the sudden realisation of the fact.

  “Keep your voice down. What is it now?” in the voice of someone humouring a fractious child.

  “My flat. Who the hell burgled it?”

  “Al S. Kowalski. And a hired hand. Don’t know who that was. Plus the kid you met this morning as a lookout.”

  “With your blessing? Or Ishihara’s?”

  “With Ishihara’s reluctant blessing. Cover, you see. If Ishihara left the British alone while turning over the houses of all the Japanese involved in this thing, it would look a bit fishy, wouldn’t it?”

  “So what’s “this thing”, anyway, when it’s at home? All this crazy shit is about what Katsuyama has developed?”

  “Yes, it is. How much do you know about it?”

  “What Katsuyama told me about it. That it’s a cheap way of identifying faces in silicon.”

  “Have you any idea what that’s worth?”

  “Not a hell of a lot, surely? I mean maybe to a digital camera maker who wants to be able to automatically tag the kids’ photos as you take them, it’s a useful gimmick, but not much more than that.”

  “No more than that? Think bigger than your poxy little digital camera makers.” Jon seemed to be considering inner options. “What arrangements have you got for this afternoon? I want you to cancel the lot of them. Now. Use your mobile. We’re off to the embassy after lunch, and then I want you to meet a friend of mine. Go on, I’m going to stand over you while you cancel those arrangements. Tell them you have a fatal case of diarrhoea or something. Tell your woman you’re busy, as well.”

  Sharpe felt he was in no position to argue. He made the calls, leaving a message for Mieko, who appeared to be out of the house, and wasn’t answering her mobile. Jon made one short call on his own phone, but he turned away from Sharpe while he was making it, so it was impossible to hear or guess what he was saying.

  After lunch in a hideously pretentious Italian restaurant in Azabu, for which Jon (or rather, the British taxpayer, Sharpe thought cynically) paid, they set off for Hanzomon, where the Tokyo British Embassy is located in a spacious garden compound facing the Imperial Palace. Sharpe knew the embassy only from passport renewals, international economic or technical forums to which he got occasional invitations, and following Princess Diana’s death, when he had joined the long line of emotional Tokyo-ites to sign the book of condolence (kept in the Ambassador’s residence, not the embassy itself, given Diana’s ambiguous status at the time). Usually the hired Japanese security guards at the entrance searched bags, and demanded ID, but Jon’s magic plastic card let them straight through the gate. Sharpe fought the urge to salute the civilian rent-a-cop back.

  “This way,” said Jon, leading Sharpe past the Consular section, where he usually renewed his passport, round to the back of the compound. A brass plate on the door said “Jonathan Campbell, Special Liaison”. Special Liaison to what? Sharpe wondered to himself.

  Jon unlocked the door and they entered a small room, furnished sparsely with standard office furniture. The room had absolutely no trace of personality, other than a smart pinstripe suit and shirt and tie, on a hanger on a peg behind the door. The desk was bare, except for two telephones. Jon picked up the red one.

  “Internal line,” he said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. To the telephone, “Major Barclay’s annexe if you would please, Jill.” He covered the mouthpiece again. “He works outside the embassy walls for some reason I’ve never been told, and visits are by appointment only. Like royalty.” He spoke into the phone again. “Tim? Jon here. There’s someone you ought to be speaking to. Yes, the man himself. No, we’ve eaten, but thanks for the offer. Yes, within fifteen minutes.” He put the phone down.

  “We’re off to see the wizard,” he announced. “One stop down the line to Kudanshita, or do you feel like walking? We can do it in fifteen minutes if you’d prefer.”

  “Walking’s fine.”

  “Let’s go.” Jon locked the door carefully behind him and they set off.

  As they walked out of the embassy compound, Sharpe gave in to temptation, and returned the quasi-military salute thrown at him by the uniformed private security guard at the gate, which caused momentary confusion in the guard box, and a smirk to appear on Jon’s face. They made their way through small side-streets to a building which appeared to be an empty shop with shuttered windows. Jon pulled the key to the locked front door from his pocket, and led the way through the room, filled with empty showcases, to the back of the building, where a solid-looking door barred their way. It looked much newer than the rest of the building, with heavy-duty hinges and a fearsomely complex-looking lock and some electronic gadgetry that looked like a fingerprint reader.

  Jon pressed the buzzer beside the door and identified himself over the intercom. The lock clicked, presumably having been opened by a remote control. “This is as far as I go,” explained Jon. “I could tell you it was lines of demarcation and bailiwicks and all that but actually, I can’t stand being in the same room as the bastard for more than two minutes at a time. I’ll be seeing you in the near future, I’m sure. Good luck.” Sharpe wasn’t convinced that was what he wanted, but it didn’t seem to be his choice to make.

  -o-

  The first thing he noticed about the room when he entered was the acoustics. All the sound seemed to be soaked up by the walls and floor, and replaced by a soft hissing sound. In contrast to the technical soundscape, the windowless room was comfortably, if somewhat garishly, furnished, with a loud floral wallpaper and a brightly-coloured Turkish carpet, in an attempt to turn the space into a study in a private house. A private house owned by someone with questionable aesthetic sensibilities, thought Sharpe, but still an improvement on standard government issue.

  The nex
t thing that he noticed was the heat. It was uncomfortably warm in the room, to the point of stuffiness, even compared to the humid weather outside. The air-conditioning was obviously not turned on.

  The diminutive Major Barclay made up for his lack of height with an overly fussy manner which seemed intended to put visitors at ease, but didn’t succeed in its task. Sharpe had the absurd impression that he moved on wheels as he came from behind the desk and motioned to a pair of matched armchairs.

  Sharpe sat down, but the other hovered. “Coffee, tea, or something a touch stronger? The coffee’s fabulous, though I say it myself. Comes straight from Indonesia. Special beans reserved for the Indonesian President and the Cabinet. Suharto adored it – drank gallons of the stuff. Do say yes.” Sharpe obliged, recognising the source of Jon’s earlier imitation.

  The Major (“Do call me Tim, or if you like, you can think of me as Major Tim, a bit like the song, not that I really take any notice at all of ground control”) fussed with coffee beans and a shiny glass and metal contraption in an alcove in one corner of the office, throwing out small talk about the weather (“I adore the cold dry mornings in Tokyo winters – so bracing, don’t you find?”), the England cricket team’s chances in the New Zealand Test match (Sharpe, who had hated cricket since he broke his finger catching a ball at the age of seven, switched off at this point), and the recent Japanese cabinet reshuffle (“such bullies”). Eventually the coffee got made, and after more fuss with the milk and sugar (“I detest that Japanese white paint-type muck they give you, don’t you?”), Tiny Tim, as Sharpe now mentally referred to him, settled himself in the armchair and inhaled the steam of his coffee.

  “Fabulous,” he breathed. Sharpe politely sipped his coffee, and agreed. It was good, he had to admit.

  “So Jon picked you up,” Barclay remarked, reaching behind him to pick up a beige folder lying on his desk.

  “If you like to put it that way,” responded Sharpe.

  “No, no, the question is how you like to put it.” Sharpe looked at him over the top of his coffee cup, but there appeared to be no deliberate double entendre involved.

  “Excuse me,” he said, after a pause. “But just who the hell are you?”

  “It says on the door. Or it would do if I’d ever bothered to put up a nameplate. Barclay. Timothy Augustus Neville. Major. Late of Her Majesty’s 33rd Corps of Mounted Sanitary Engineers.”

  “And now?”

  “Oh, you are nosy, aren’t you? I suppose we’d better get this thing out of the way, then, hadn’t we?” He removed a set of folded printed sheets out of the folder. Sharpe noticed the words “Official Secrets Act” in large type underneath the Royal coat of arms. “Here, here and here,” he said, turning to the last page, and proffering a silver fountain pen to Sharpe.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Well, much as I’m enjoying our little tête-à-tête, I suppose we’d have to say that rain stopped play, wouldn’t we?”

  “And if I signed it, and then went back on what I’d signed?”

  “Ooh, you just want to be awkward, don’t you?” Tiny Tim patted his immaculately coiffed silver hair as if making sure it was still there. Sharpe had a feeling that if he pulled hard enough, it might come away in his hand, and expose some bald spots. But then again, hair transplants were big in Japan. “Well, we can’t extradite you for that, of course. But there might be some very butch heavies from the Special Branch waiting for you if you ever decided to go back to dear old Blighty. Much better to sign, really, and do it as though you meant it. Just close your eyes and think of England,” moving the pen towards Sharpe again.

  Sharpe skimmed through the paragraphs of legalese. “Oh, for God’s sake, man,” cried Barclay. “No-one actually reads the bloody thing.” Sharpe ignored him, and ploughed through the jungle of “hereinafters” and “notwithstandings”. Years of reading confidentiality agreements had taught him to skim legal documents fairly fast and reliably. He rapidly came to the conclusion that he’d met commercial non-disclosure agreements which were better worded and armed with more teeth than this. He signed.

  “Oh, well done,” exclaimed Barclay, as if applauding an infant who’d just been coaxed into swallowing an unwanted spoonful of food, and retrieving the papers from Sharpe. “Now we can chat properly,” tucking the signed document into the buff folder. “More coffee, by the way? I will,” moving towards the coffee machine. Sharpe declined. “So where shall we start? How much did Jon tell you?”

  Sharpe repeated the gist of what he had been told earlier that day.

  “Silly boy sometimes, our Jon,” commented Barclay. “Says just a little too much for his own good sometimes. You really didn’t need to know all of that. Words will be had, I can assure you.” He made a motion as if smacking a child’s wrist.

  “Who the hell are you to decide what I do and don’t need to know?” snapped back Sharpe. “It seems you and your crew have had a pretty good go at taking over my life for the past few days. Isn’t it only fair that I’m allowed to know what’s going on around me?”

  Barclay was instantly conciliatory. “Dear me, there’s no need to take it all so personally,” he purred. “I’m not sure you realise exactly what kind of high stakes are on the table right now. Any other pearls of wisdom I can throw in your general direction? Not that I would regard it as casting pearls before swine in your case,” he giggled.

  “Why is Katsuyama’s gizmo so important?” asked Sharpe.

  “Oh, right in the bull’s eye or his arsehole or something,” exclaimed Barclay. “I must say, that is a remarkably good one to start with. Why is this little box of tricks so important, he asks?” He sat back in his chair. Sharpe noticed his legs didn’t reach the floor, but stuck out slightly in front of him. “Well, where Katsuyama was such a clever boy was that he found a way of doing things cheap and fast. And small. Just think, you could put the thing on one of those absolutely super spy satellites that no-one is meant to have, get it to count the spots on a gnat’s dick, and get it to send back the information to us. ‘Spotted dick gnat located at x degrees, y minutes and z seconds north, and a-b-c west, proceeding in a southerly direction along the M1 up to London’. ”

  “Yes?” Sharpe didn’t see where this was leading.

  “As opposed to sending thousands of photos of gnats with no spots on their dicks to the boys in the back room, who’d then have to spend their days counting spots on gnats’ dicks until they find the picture of the one they want. By which time, the bloody thing has flown up the M1, bitten the Prime Minister on the bum, and returned home to Mummy and is safely tucked up in bed with a hot water bottle. Now replace a gnat with spots on his dick on the M1 with a suspected terrorist in Afghanistan. See the use now?”

  Sharpe saw. “OK, if the thing’s that smart, what do the Japanese want with it? They don’t have satellites that good, do they?” Tiny Tim just smiled faintly. “Well, they don’t have the bloody launchers. That H2A booster is flakier than …”

  “A Kellogg’s factory?” Barclay suggested helpfully. “Yes, Kenny – I may call you Kenny?”

  “I prefer Kenneth, or Ken, if you really must abbreviate it.”

  “Ken, then. New planet swims into his,” he mused to himself. “Yes, you’re right, Ken. The Japanese space capability is sadly limited by their inability to actually do anything. Shame, really. They have such bloody wonderful ideas. Robots running around on Mars building cities, and all that crap.”

  “But Katsuyama’s idea is a useful bargaining chip when it comes to defence negotiations with the US?” Sharpe suggested. “No pun intended.”

  “Very, very good, Ken,” applauded Barclay, patting his tiny hands together. “Of course, the Yanks claim it’s really theirs, having been made in Stanford, but between you and me, I think our late lamented friend Katsuyama deserves some credit here, don’t you? And in this case, finders are keepers, don’t you think?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “Of course, that always presupposes that we know jus
t who the finder is. If it happened to be one of Her Majesty’s subjects, that would be a fine thing for the UK, don’t you think? Hurrah for bloody old England and all that?”

  “Indeed it would,” said Sharpe, as offhandedly as he could manage.

  “So where the bloody hell is it?” Barclay asked, more sharply. “Katsuyama gave it to you, and it wasn’t in your flat, was it?”

  “It wasn’t found in my flat.” Let the petty-minded bastard chew on that, he thought to himself.

  “All right, we’ll let you keep your little secrets for now,” somewhat testily. “We’ll find out sooner or later.”

  “Is this thing really so important if you already know everything that Katsuyama was up to?”

  “Strange as it may seem to you, yes. From what we know, Katsuyama is – or rather was,” he corrected himself, “one of those mad geniuses who come along once in a blue moon, and no-one can follow their reasoning. Let me make a wild guess. When you met Katsuyama, was he asking you to write up his work based on what he’d published at Stanford, in order to put the Americans off the scent? Something like that?”

  Sharpe sulkily admitted that this was indeed the case, but something told him that this wasn’t exactly a wild guess on Barclay’s part.

  “Let me tell you, Ken, that you wouldn’t have stood a virgin snowball’s chance in hell of managing it. No offence to your education and intelligence, which I’m sure are vastly superior to those of the average member of God’s creation. It’s just that Katsuyama was progressing by leaps and bounds. And when you leap and bound, you leave precious few footprints behind you for anyone to follow. See where I’m driving?”

  “How do you know so much about him?”

  “My dear Ken, please give us some credit for recognising genius, even in little out-of-the-way backwaters of academia like Stanford University. Anyway, the upshot is that without the combination of the hardware and the software he wrote to make it sit up and beg, we’re stuffed, to coin a phrase.”