Tokyo Firewall: a novel of international suspense

by Elizabeth Wilkerson

  Talking to an anonymous voice over the phone about her most intimate problems? She didn’t think so. She could work things out herself. Somehow.

  Alison flipped over the paper and saw the news story she’d marked. What did she have to lose? She called the English language operator to get the phone number for the environmental group Green Space and dialed.

  “Moshi moshi. Dare ka — dare ka eigo — does anyone there speak English?” If no one at Green Space spoke English, it would be a short conversation, indeed.

  “Hello. I am Suzuki, and I can speak English. You can hear that, right?” The man on the phone chuckled.

  “My name is Alison Crane, and I’m calling because I’ve been reading about Green Space in the newspaper, and I was wondering if I could come by your office and—”

  “Excuse me, Miss Alison,” Mr. Suzuki began, “but we are not able to meet with reporters right now.”

  “I’m not a reporter, Mr. Suzuki. I’m an—”

  “I am sorry, but it is our policy not to hold interviews.”

  “No, what I’m trying to say is that I’m an attorney, Mr. Suzuki. An environmental lawyer. I used to be chief counsel for the Save-A-Tree Foundation—”

  “Ehh? We know Save-A-Tree Foundation very well. Good work you do.”

  “Thanks. I was hoping to visit and learn more about your organization. I wouldn’t take up much of your time, maybe a half an hour.”

  “Of course. We would be glad to meet you, Miss Alison. Are you available on Tuesday?”

  “Tuesday’s perfect.”

  “Good. Come to our office at twelve noon, neh.”

  Alison smiled as she hung up. If she played her cards right, if she finessed it and was lucky, maybe she could end up with a job, a real job, at an organization right up her alley.

  3

  Outside her window, Alison heard the cry of a street vendor selling roasted sweet potatoes, guaranteed to keep you warm on a crisp autumn evening. At least that’s what Charles had told her the guy was saying. A lively ditty befitting a Good Humor ice cream truck blasted through the public address system and drowned out the potato vendor’s pitch.

  “Damn noise pollution.” She looked at her watch. Five o’clock.

  She hit the power button on the fuzzy logic JVC entertainment center. Referring to the translated labels Charles had taped over the remote control buttons, she turned on the television. A cooking show. Alison zapped to another channel. A rock music video shrieked. Zap. Evening news. Alison pressed a button and the female reporter’s incomprehensible Japanese switched to the British-accented voice of a man delivering a choppy simultaneous English translation of the newscast.

  “The missing foreign woman was last seen in Tokyo, and the police suspect foul play. The woman, a Canadian national, is approximately 155 centimeters tall and teaches English in a high school in Yokohama—” Keys clinked at the front door.

  “Tadaima!” Charles stepped out of his shoes in the marble genkan foyer and slid into one of the pairs of house slippers lined up by the entryway.

  “Hey, Charles! You’re home already?”

  He grinned at Alison. A tall, mocha-licious African-American man with a steel-trap mind and movie-star smile. Charles was model-gorgeous, and Alison loved that he loved her.

  “These are for you.” Charles produced from behind his back a bouquet of rust-colored parrot tulips mixed with yellow freesia.

  Alison inhaled the delicate perfume of the freesia blossoms. “Where’d you find spring blooms this time of year?”

  “My secret sources.” Charles winked. “I’ll never tell.”

  Alison took the flowers into the kitchen and called back to Charles. “I was watching the news. Did you hear about the foreign woman who disappeared?”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yeah. An English teacher.” Alison returned with the flowers in a brass vase and set the arrangement on the console table. “Only twenty-four years old.”

  Charles smirked. “Probably took off with some guy. Foreigners don’t just disappear in Japan. She’ll turn up.”

  “I wonder.” Alison breathed in the fragrance of the freesia again. “Since you’re home early, how about going to a movie?”

  “Sorry, gotta raincheck it. A huge client invited me to his club, and I can’t blow him off. I just stopped by to check something online.”

  Charles moved closer to Alison and planted a kiss on her neck before striding into his home office. He sat down at the keyboard and typed in some commands. Alison followed him inside the room.

  “You need to unplug from the computer, Charles. Online all the time. Bad for your eyes, bad for your spine. Bad for your relationship.”

  Charles swiveled around in his ergonomic desk chair to face Alison head-on. He grabbed hold of her wrists, pulling one finger from her mouth where she was nibbling a cuticle. “I told you that my stint here was going to be intense, that maybe it wasn’t a good time for you to come here.”

  “It’s never a good time, Charles. There always seems to be something.”

  “The bank is expecting me to pull off some minor miracles to boost the Asia business. It’s just for a few more months.”

  “A few more months and then what? We’ll get married? We’d talked about kids, a family…”

  Charles exhaled with impatience and spun around, turning his back on Alison. He tapped some commands at his computer keyboard.

  “We used to have so much fun, Charles. You’d kidnap me and we’d go on those crazy getaways. You took me to that shooting range, once. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember. For a novice, you sure had some kind of eye.”

  “And Tahoe. Remember Tahoe?” Alison sat down on the edge of Charles’ desk.

  He nodded. “Yeah, Tahoe was great.”

  “We could go on a ski trip here. I was reading about the Japan Alps—”

  “Look, Alicats. Things are going to work out. Give it some more time.”

  “It feels like we’re moving in different worlds. You’re so busy with your job, and — and I can’t even find one.”

  “So why don’t you have some fun? Take flower-arranging classes. I make enough money to cover whatever you need, so—”

  “We’re not having that conversation again. We made a deal. Equitable split of all expenses. Pari pasu.”

  “You always sound like a lawyer.”

  “I’m carrying my own weight with my own money. If we were married, well, it’d be different.”

  “We’re not having that conversation again, Alison.” Charles returned his attention to the computer screen.

  Alison stood behind Charles and massaged his shoulders, working her way down his stomach. He turned around in his chair.

  Without standing, he unbuttoned her jeans, unzipped the fly and nuzzled her belly button while exploring with his hands under her sweater. Her hips moved in small circles, and she let her head fall back while Charles squeezed her nipples.

  “Hold that thought until I get back tonight,” Charles said.

  “All we need is ten minutes now.” Alison leaned over Charles and eased his chair away from the desk. Backing up, she tangled her foot in the computer’s cables and pulled a cord out of the wall. The monitor hissed and went blank.

  Charles leaped from his chair. “What are you doing, Alison?” The telltale vein on his forehead bulged out. “You’ll screw up my network connection like that.” Charles pushed Alison away from the computer, crawled under the desk and reconnected the cable. He stood and glared at Alison. “Don’t touch my computer, OK?”

  “It was an accident, Charles.”

  He shook his head. “The computer? It’s off limits.”

  “Boys with their fucking toys.” Alison zipped up her jeans, went to the kitchen, and examined the stock in the wine cabinet. She found a bottle of Charles’ prized pinot noir specially imported from a boutique winery in Sonoma. The last bottle of the pinot noir he had. She opened it. And filled a wine glass up to the rim.


  “Don’t wait up,” Charles shouted from the genkan foyer. The front door slammed closed.

  As if she ever waited up.

  Alison took a big swallow of wine. She might not be the most tech-savvy geek like some of those Silicon Valley nerds Charles went to school with at Stanford, but she wasn’t an idiot. She’d even signed up for a World NetLink internet account before she left the States. Not that she needed to get online, but her brother, Rob, wouldn’t shut up until she’d promised to get an account.

  But the way Charles had said it: “Off limits.” Like she was a clumsy child hell-bent on destruction.

  Alison took her glass of wine into Charles’ office and sat down at the keyboard. She grabbed the mouse, and the computer screen came to life. The Morgan Sachs pyramid logo glowed and pulsed impatiently on the monitor. All the pyramid needed for it to look just like the one on U.S. currency was a wide-open eye on the pinnacle. No one could fault Morgan Sachs for being subtle.

  Alison tapped the computer’s return key and was asked for her user ID. She typed “Charles Gordon,” a safe bet.

  She was prompted to input a password. What the hell would Charles’ password be? She typed in “Alicats.”

  Invalid password. She tried “Baltimore,” Charles’ hometown. Invalid. Next she tried “Money,” his favorite pursuit.

  “Log on attempt timed out. Firewall Access Denied.” The screen went dead.

  Boys with their fucking toys.

  4

  A row of ginkgo trees with golden fan-shaped leaves stood in front of Green Space’s office. Planted alongside the trees were two security guards, dressed in full military gear.

  The raucous crowd congregated outside the entrance to Green Space didn’t look dangerous, exactly. But even from across the street, Alison could tell that folks were plenty upset. Their apparent leader, a middle-aged man with thinning hair, shouted through a bullhorn while his followers, about thirty men and women wearing headbands imprinted with Japanese lettering, chanted and clapped.

  The leader approached the security guards and blasted them full force in the face with an amplified tirade through the bullhorn. The gatherers responded with thunderous cheers and applause.

  One guard’s face reddened, and the other cracked his knuckles. The demonstrators gathered tighter around the guards, but the gatekeepers held fast to their positions. Was she witnessing the beginning of a riot?

  But unless she wanted to miss her scheduled appointment with Suzuki and her chance at landing a good job with a kindred spirit organization, she was going to have to plow right into the heart of the ruckus.

  Or could it be that she was at the wrong building? There was no signage for Green Space on the door. And the Japanese system for assigning addresses was creative at best. Maybe she had made a wrong turn. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d gotten lost in Tokyo.

  Alison looked at the map that Suzuki had faxed to her and double-checked the address. This was the place. Onward and upward.

  Alison feigned a no-nonsense resolve, a tough all-business demeanor, and charged ahead across the street. She could feel her heart pounding as her fight-or-flight sensors assessed the probability of imminent physical violence. She marched on.

  At Green Space’s front door, Alison nodded at the security guards, but the horde, chanting in concert with the bullhorn-bearer, remained in place, standing between her and the door. And her chance at a job.

  Instinctively sympathetic toward the underdog, Alison hated crossing through picket lines. Back in the States, she was usually on the organizing side of unruly demonstrations like this one. But this was Japan, and things were different. There weren’t any cops around, no one had firearms — she hoped — and things hadn’t spun out of control. Yet. This might be her only chance to bust through the line.

  She braced herself for body blows as she dove between two of the demonstrators and strode up to Green Space’s door. The guards didn’t try to stop her, and the crowd didn’t try to push her away. She grabbed the handle on the front door and gave it a tug. The door did not yield.

  The mob’s chanting and the blaring of the bullhorn grew louder. Alison wanted to tell the demonstrators that she was really on their side, that she was a good guy. But she felt them looking at her, their darting glances like so many small slaps of accusation.

  Alison turned to one of the guards. “Can you help me? I have an appointment, and—” The guards didn’t look at Alison, and they didn’t offer any assistance. They remained stock still, as immovable as Buckingham Palace sentries. Not the warm welcome she had hoped for.

  Alison spied a doorbell on the wall next to the entrance, and she pressed the button.

  “Dochira-sama desu ka?” said a voice through an intercom in the building wall.

  Alison couldn’t hear what the voice said over the clamor of the demonstrators, but she broke into her pitch anyway. “Hello. It’s Alison Crane,” she yelled into the speaker. She hoped the demonstration wasn’t drowning her out. “I have an appointment with Mr. Suzuki, and—” In the middle of Alison’s introduction, the door buzzed. She tugged the front door again, and this time it opened. The protesters’ shouts heightened to a roar.

  Alison scurried into Green Space’s genkan foyer. As the door closed behind her, the shrill shouting and chanting deadened to silence. She took a deep breath.

  Why should Green Space, an environmental organization, need security in the middle of Tokyo? Alison hadn’t seen guards like those at other office buildings. And that mob. Where were the cops? Why wasn’t anything being done to restore peaceful Zen harmony?

  Street shoes were lined up in the entrance. Alison stepped out of her pumps and put on one of the pairs of slippers set out for visitors to wear. She climbed the step into the office space and was greeted by a man who was already half-trotting toward the front office door.

  “Miss Alison-san! Hello. My name is Suzuki.” Mr. Suzuki shook Alison’s hand while he bowed. He reached inside his coat jacket pocket and pulled out a meishi business card case crafted out of polished cherrywood. With another small bow, he extended both hands and presented his business card to Alison. Alison couldn’t help but notice that he was missing the tip end of his little finger.

  “Hello, Mr. Suzuki. Suzuki-san.” Alison tried out the polite Japanese form of address. When in Rome … “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Please excuse our entry. From time to time we must deal with, um—” Suzuki closed his eyes and turned his head to the side and rubbed his temple while sucking air through his teeth. “We have to take — what is the word?”

  “Precautions?” offered Alison.

  “Yes! We have to take precautions.”

  “Those people seemed pretty intense,” Alison said. “Who are they?”

  Suzuki blinked hard behind his glasses. “Times have changed in Japan. The police — the police do not help.” Suzuki threw his hands in the air. “But you are not in danger. Please, come this way.” He led Alison into the office.

  Rows of desks topped with computer terminals were squeezed into the Green Space office. The furniture looked ultra-contemporary and ergonomic. It was lunchtime, and a few of the employees were eating at their workstations. Even though the workspace would be considered intolerably congested by American standards, the office had a nice feel to it, Alison decided. Inviting and collegial.

  Suzuki escorted Alison on a brief tour. Green Space’s facilities boasted a library, a digital audio-video center, an amphitheater-style conference area and an exercise room with weight machines. Trees and plants occupied every available space. Alison took a deep breath. The air in the office enjoyed an oxygenated richness, like after a thunderstorm. If only Save-A-Tree had digs like this, she mused.

  Suzuki opened a door to a small conference room. A built-in aquarium stocked full of neon-colored tropical fish comprised one entire wall.

  “Please, sit down.” Suzuki pointed to the seats surrounding a low-slung black glass coffee table. Alison
pulled out a chair — a Wassily, if she wasn’t mistaken — and sat.

  “I’m impressed, Suzuki-san. Such a beautiful office.”

  “We are grateful to have the support of the Taisho Shipbuilding Foundation.”

  “Shipbuilding?” Alison didn’t understand the connection.

  “Yes. Both Taisho and Green Space believe in protecting marine life. In fact, Yamada-san of the Taisho family started Green Space. She will try to meet us for lunch.”

  As if on cue, a woman wearing a steel-gray trench coat and toting a bright green Louis Vuitton attaché case pushed through the door. Suzuki straightened to attention when she entered the room. The woman was accompanied by a young man carrying a stack of red lacquer boxes decorated with gold leaf. The man placed the boxes on the table, bowed and exited.

  The woman tossed her trench coat over the back of a chair, and Alison admired her deep ruby suit. Chanel, of course. Her careful haircut, her French-manicured fingers adorned with a variety of pearl and diamond rings, but most of all her demeanor, screamed “Serious Money.”

  “Hello. I’m Yamada Yuko.” Ms. Yamada bowed and handed Alison a business card she pulled from a Vuitton card case in her attaché. Yuko Yamada looked to be about thirty years old but moved with the surety, the quiet grace, of someone much older, of someone who knew that she owned the joint.

  With no business card to present, Alison felt like an ill-mannered bumpkin. “Alison Crane. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Yamada-san.” Alison took the business card and attempted a bow. The unfamiliar movement felt awkward. She was sure she wasn’t doing it right. How long were you supposed to stay in a courteous bow, staring at your toes? After a few seconds bent at the waist feeling foolish, Alison stood.

  “Tabemasho. Shall we eat?” Yamada gestured for everyone to take a seat. “Ms. Crane, do you speak Japanese?”

  A logical question and not entirely unexpected. But it pained Alison to admit that she was functionally illiterate, with the vocabulary of a newborn. And yet here she was, trying to wrangle a job. Was she deluding herself? “I’m learning,” Alison said and quickly sat down.