by Barry Eisler
“You can’t blame people for not trusting the government on this,” I said. “I read somewhere that, last spring, the defense ministry got caught creating a database on people who had requested materials under the new Freedom of Information law, including information on their political views.”
He smiled his sad smile. “When the news broke, someone tried to delete the evidence.”
“I read about that. Didn’t the LDP try to suppress a forty-page report on what had happened?”
This time his smile was wry. “The Liberal Democratic Party officials involved in the attempted cover-up were punished, of course. They had their pay docked.”
“Now there’s a deterrent to future abuses,” I said, laughing. “Especially when you know they were greased with twice what got docked.”
He shrugged. “As a cop, I welcome Juki Net and the camera networks as a crime-fighting tool. As a citizen, I find it all appalling.”
“So why swear me to secrecy on this? Sounds like a few leaks would be just the thing.”
He cocked his head to the side, as though marveling at how my thinking could be so crude. “If such leaks were timed incorrectly,” he said, “they would be as useless as a powerful but misplaced explosive charge.”
He was telling me he was up to something. He was also telling me not to ask.
“So you used this network to find me,” I said.
“Yes. I kept the mug shots that were taken of you at Metropolitan Police Headquarters when you were detained after the incident outside of Yokosuka naval base. I had these photographs fed into the computer so that the network could look for you. I instructed the technicians to focus their initial efforts on Osaka. Still, because the system turns up so many false positives, the problem took a long time and significant human resources to solve. I have been looking for you for almost a year, Rain-san.”
I realized from what he was telling me that the relentless advance of technology was going to force me to return to the nomadic existence I had adopted between Vietnam and my return to Japan, when I had wandered the earth without an identity, drifting from one mercenary conflict to another. There was no pleasure in the thought. I had done my penance for Crazy Jake and didn’t wish to repeat the experience.
“The system is not perfect,” he went on. “There are numerous gaps in coverage, for example, and, as I mentioned, too many false positives. Still, over time, we were able to identify certain commonalities in your movements. A high incidence of sightings in Miyakojima, for example. From there, it was simple enough to check the records of the local ward office for new resident registrations, weed out false leads, and uncover your address. Eventually, we were able to track you sufficiently closely so that I could travel to Osaka and follow you here tonight.”
“Why didn’t you just come to my apartment?”
He smiled. “Where you live is always where you are most vulnerable because it represents a possible choke point for an ambush. And I would not wish to surprise a man like you where he felt most vulnerable. Safer, I judged, to approach you on neutral ground, where you might even see me coming, ne?”
I nodded, acknowledging his point. If you’re a likely target for a kidnapping or assassination attempt, or for any other kind of ambush, the bad guys can only get to you where they know you’re going to be. Meaning outside your home, most likely, or the place where you work. Or at some point in between where they can rely on you to show up—maybe the only bridge crossing between your home and office, something like that. These choke points are where you need to be the most sensitive to signs of danger.
“Well?” he asked, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Did you see me?”
I shrugged. “Yes.”
He smiled again. “I knew you would.”
“Or you could have called.”
“In which case, you might have disappeared again after hearing my voice.”
“That’s true.”
“All in all, I think this was the best approach.”
“The way you went about this,” I said, “a lot of people were involved. People in your organization, maybe people with the CIA.”
He might have said something to intimate that any such lack of security was my fault, for having failed to contact him as I had suggested I would. But that wouldn’t have been Tatsu’s style. He had his interests in this matter, as I had mine, and he wouldn’t have blamed me for disappearing any more than he expected me to blame him for tracking me down.
“There has been no mention of your name in any of this,” he told me. “Only a photograph. And the technicians tasked with checking for the matches the system spits out have no knowledge regarding the basis of my interest. To them, you are simply one of many criminals that the Metropolitan Police Force is tracking. And I have taken other steps to ensure security, such as coming alone tonight and informing no one of my movements.”
This was a dangerous thing for Tatsu to admit. If it were true, I could solve pretty much all my problems just by taking out this one man. Again, he was showing me that he trusted me, that I could trust him in return.
“You’re taking a lot of chances,” I said, looking at him.
“Always,” he said, returning my gaze.
There was a long silence. Then I said, “No women. No children. It has to be a man.”
“It is.”
“You can’t have involved anyone else in this. You work with me, it’s an exclusive.”
“Yes.”
“And the target has to be a principal. Taking him out can’t just be to send a message to someone. It has to accomplish something concrete.”
“It will.”
Having established my three rules, it was now time to apprise him of the consequences for breaking them.
“You know, Tatsu, outside of professional reasons—meaning combat or a contract—there’s only one thing that has ever moved me to kill.”
“Betrayal,” he said, to show me that he clearly understood.
“Yes.”
“Betrayal is not in my nature.”
I laughed, because this was the first time I had ever heard Tatsu say something naïve. “It’s in everyone’s nature,” I told him.
We had worked out a system by which we could communicate securely, including simple codes and access to a secure electronic bulletin board that I continued to maintain for sensitive communications. I had told him I would contact him afterward, but now I wondered whether that would really be necessary. Tatsu would learn of the yakuza’s accident from independent sources and know that I had held up my end. Besides, the less contact with Tatsu, the better. Sure, we had a history. Respect. Even affection. But it was hard to believe that the alignment of our interests would last, and, in the end, that alignment, or its lack, would be all that mattered. A sad thought, in certain respects. There aren’t many people in my life, and, now that things had turned out all right, I realized I had on some level enjoyed this latest encounter with my old friend and nemesis.
Sad also because it forced me to admit something I had been avoiding. I was going to have to leave Japan. I’d been preparing for such a contingency, but it was sobering to acknowledge that the time might be at hand. If Tatsu knew where to find me, and came to believe that I’d gotten back in the game in a way that was inhibiting his life’s work of fighting corruption in Japan, it would be too easy for him to have me picked up. Conversely, if I agreed to play by his rules, it would be too easy for him to drop in periodically and ask for a “favor.” Either way, he’d be running me, and I’ve lived that life already. I didn’t want to do it again.
My pager buzzed. I checked it, saw a five-digit sequence that told me it was Harry, that he wanted me to call him.
I finished eating and motioned to the waiter that I was ready for the check. I looked around the restaurant one last time. The office party had broken up. The Americans remained, the white noise of their conversation warm and enthusiastic. The couple was still there, the young man’s posture steadfastly earnest, th
e girl continuing to parry with quiet laughter.
It felt good to be back in Tokyo. I didn’t want to leave.
I walked out of the restaurant, pausing to enjoy the feel of Nishi-Azabu’s cool evening air, my eyes reflexively sweeping the street. A few cars passed, but otherwise it was as quiet as the Aoyama cemetery, brooding and dark, silently beckoning, across from where I stood.
I looked again at the stone steps and imagined myself traversing them. Then I turned left and continued the counterclockwise semicircle I had started earlier that evening.
3
I CALLED HARRY from a public phone on Aoyama-dori. “Are you on a secure line?” he asked, recognizing my voice.
“Reasonably secure. Public phone. Out-of-the-way location.” The location mattered, because governments monitor certain public phones—the ones near embassies and police stations, for example, and those in the lobbies of higher-end hotels, to which the nearby lazy can be counted on to repair for their “private” conversations.
“You’re still in Tokyo,” he said. “Calling from a Minami-Aoyama pay phone.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve got things rigged so that I can see the originating number and location of calls that come in to my apartment. It’s what nine-one-one uses in the States. You can’t block it.”
Harry, I thought, smiling. Despite his SuperNerd clothes and constant case of bedhead, despite being at heart an oversized kid for whom hacking was just a video game, only better, Harry could be dangerous. The random favor I’d done him so many years earlier, when I’d saved his ass from a bunch of drunken marines who were looking for a suitable Japanese victim, had paid a hell of a dividend.
And yet, despite my efforts, he could also be astonishingly naïve. I would never tell anyone the kind of thing he had just told me. You don’t give away an advantage like that.
“The NSA should never have let you go, Harry,” I told him. “You’re a privacy nut’s worst nightmare.”
He laughed, but a little uncertainly. Harry has a hard time knowing when I’m teasing him. “Their loss,” he said. “They had too many rules, anyway. It’s much more fun working for a big-five consulting firm. They’ve got so many other problems, they don’t even bother trying to monitor what I’m up to anymore.”
That was smart of them. They couldn’t have kept up with him, anyway. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing really. Just wanted to catch up with you while I could. I had a feeling that, if your business here was done, you might leave soon.”
“I guess you were right.”
“Is it . . . done?”
Harry has long since figured out what I do, although he also understands that it would be taboo to actually ask. And he must have known what it meant when he had contacted me earlier that evening, at my specific request, to tell me precisely where and when I could find the yakuza.
“It’s done,” I told him.
“Does that mean you won’t be around much longer?”
I smiled, absurdly touched by his hangdog tone. “Not much longer, no. I was going to call you before I left.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I looked at my watch. “In fact, what are you doing right now?”
“Just getting up, actually.”
“Christ, Harry, it’s ten at night.”
“I’ve been keeping some strange hours lately.”
“I believe it. Tell you what. Why don’t we meet for a drink. For you, it can be breakfast.”
“What have you got in mind?”
“Hang on a minute.” I grabbed a copy of the Tokyo Yellow Pages from under the phone, and flipped through the restaurant section until I found the place I was looking for. Then I counted ahead five listings, per our usual code, knowing that Harry would count five backward from whatever I told him. Not that anyone was listening—hell, I couldn’t imagine who could listen, if Harry didn’t want them to—but you don’t take chances. I’d taught him to always use a layered defense. To never assume.
“How about Tip-Top, in Takamatsu-cho,” I said.
“Sure,” he said, and I knew he understood. “Great place.”
“I’ll see you when you get there,” I told him.
I hung up, then pulled a handkerchief out of a pants pocket and wiped down the receiver and the buttons. Old habits die hard.
The place I had in mind was called These Library Lounge, pronounced “Teize” by the locals, a small bar with the feel of a speakeasy nestled on the second floor of an unremarkable building in Nishi-Azabu. Although it inhabits the city’s geographical and psychological center, Teize is suffused by a dreamy sense of detachment, as though the bar is an island secretly pleased to find itself lost in the vast ocean of Tokyo around it. Teize has the kind of atmosphere that quickly seduces talk into murmurs and weariness into languor, peeling away the transient concerns of the day until you might find yourself listening to a poignant Johnny Hodges number like “Just a Memory” the way you listened to it the first time, without filters or preconceptions or the notion that it was something you already knew; or taking a saltwater and iodine sip of one of the Islay malts and realizing that this, this exactly, is the taste for which the distiller must have mouthed a silent prayer as he committed the amber liquid to an oak cask thirty years before; or glancing over at a group of elegantly dressed women seated in one of the bar’s quietly lit alcoves, their faces glowing, not yet lined, their faith that havens like this one exist as if by right reflected in the innocent timbre of their laughter and the carefree cadences of their conversation, and remembering without bitterness what it felt like to think that maybe you could be part of such a world.
It took me less than ten minutes to walk the short distance to the bar. I paused outside, before the exterior stairs leading to the second floor, imagining, as I always do before entering a building, where I might wait if I hoped to ambush someone coming out. The exterior of Teize offered two promising positions, one of which, the entryway of an adjacent building, I especially liked because it was set back from the bar’s entrance in such a way that you wouldn’t see someone lurking there until after you’d reached the bottom of the stairs, when it might be too late for you to do anything about it. Unless, of course, before descending, you took the trouble to lean out over the bar’s front balcony in appreciation of the quiet street scene below, as I had now reminded myself to do.
Satisfied with the security layout outside, I took the stairs to the second floor and walked in. I hadn’t been there in a long time, but the proprietors hadn’t seen fit to change anything, thank God. The lighting was still soft, mostly sconces, floor lamps, and candles. A wooden table that had begun its life as a door before being elevated to its current, considerably higher, purpose. Muted Persian rugs and dark, heavy drapes. The white marble bar, confident but not dominating at the center of the main room, shining quietly beneath an overhead set of track lights. Everywhere there were books: mostly works on design, architecture, and art, but also seemingly whimsical selections such as The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and Uncle Santa.
“Nanmeisama?” the bartender asked me. How many? I held up two fingers. He looked around the room, confirming what I had already noticed, that no tables were available.
“That’s fine,” I told him in Japanese. “I think we’ll just sit at the bar.” Which, in addition to its other advantages, offered a tactical view of the entranceway.
Harry arrived an hour later, as I was beginning my second single malt of the evening, a sixteen-year-old Lagavulin. He saw me as he came in, and smiled.
“John-san, hisashiburi desu ne,” he said. It’s been a long time. Then he switched to English, which would afford us marginally better privacy in these surroundings. “It’s good to see you.”
I stood up and we shook hands. Despite the lack of formality of the occasion, I also offered him a slight bow. I’ve always liked the respect of a bow and the warmth of a handshake, and Harry merited both.
“Have a seat
,” I said, motioning to the bar stool to my left. “I hope you’ll forgive me for starting without you.”
“If you’ll forgive me for avoiding what you’re having and ordering some food instead.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Anyway, Scotch is a grownup’s drink.”
He smiled, knowing I was ribbing him, and ordered an herb salad with tofu and mozzarella and a plain orange juice. Harry’s never been a drinker.
“You do a good SDR?” I asked him while we waited for the food to arrive. An SDR, or surveillance detection run, is a route designed to flush a follower or team of followers out into the open where they can be seen. I’d taught the subject to Harry and he’d proven himself an able student.
“You ask me that every time,” he replied in a slightly exasperated tone, like a teenager remonstrating with a parent. “And every time I give you the same answer.”
“So you did one.”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
“And you were clean?”
He looked at me. “I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t. You know that.”
I patted him on the back. “Can’t help asking. Thanks again for the nice work with that yakuza’s cell phone. Led me straight to him.”
He beamed. “Hey, I’ve got something for you,” he said.
“Yeah?”
He nodded and reached into a jacket pocket. He fished around for a second, then pulled out a metal object about the dimensions of a dozen stacked credit cards. “Check this out,” he said.
I took it. It was heavy for something of its size. There must have been a lot of circuitry packed in it. “Just what I’ve always wanted,” I said. “A faux-silver paperweight.”
He moved as though to take it back. “Well, if you’re not going to appreciate it . . .”
“No, no, I do appreciate it. I just don’t know what the hell it is.” Actually I had a good idea, but I prefer to be underestimated. Besides, I didn’t want to deny Harry the pleasure of educating me.