by Barry Eisler
When I returned to Tokyo in the early eighties, my brown hair, a legacy from my American mother, had worked for me the way a fluorescent vest does for a hunter, and I dyed it black to develop the anonymity that protects me now. But then the country went mad for chappatsu, or tea-color dyed hair, and I don’t have to be so vigilant about the dye anymore. I like to tell Harry he’s going to have to go chappatsu if he wants to fit in, but Harry’s too much of an otaku, a geek, to give much thought to issues like personal appearance. I guess he doesn’t have that much to work with, anyway: an awkward smile that always looks like it’s offered in anticipation of a blow; a tendency to blink rapidly when he’s excited; a face that’s never lost its baby fat, its pudginess accentuated by a shock of thick black hair that on bad days seems almost to float above it. But the same qualities that keep him off magazine covers confer the unobtrusiveness that makes for effective surveillance.
I had reached the point where I was going to have to stop when Kawamura popped out of the fruit store and reentered the flow. I hung back as much as possible to increase the space between us, watching his head bobbing as he moved down the street. He was tall for a Japanese and that helped, but he was wearing a dark suit like ninety percent of the other people in this crowd—including Harry and me, naturally—so I couldn’t drop back too far.
Just as I’d redeveloped the right distance, he stopped and turned to light a cigarette. I continued walking slowly behind and to the right of the group of people that separated us, knowing he wouldn’t be able to make me moving with the crowd. I focused on the backs of the suits in front of me, just a bored morning commuter. After a moment he turned and started moving again.
I allowed myself the trace of a satisfied smile. Japanese don’t stop to light cigarettes; if they did, they’d lose weeks over the course of their adult lives. Nor was there any reason, such as a strong headwind threatening to blow out a match, for him to turn and face the crowd behind him. Kawamura’s obvious attempt at countersurveillance simply confirmed his guilt.
Guilt of what I didn’t know, and in fact I never ask. I insist on only a few questions. Is the target a man? I don’t work against women or children. Have you retained anyone else to solve this problem? I don’t want my operation getting tripped up by someone’s idea of a B-team, and if you retain me, it’s an exclusive. Is the target a principal? I solve problems directly, like the soldier I once was, not by sending messages through uninvolved third parties like a terrorist. The concerns behind the last question are why I like to see independent evidence of guilt: it confirms that the target is indeed the principal and not a clueless innocent.
Twice in eighteen years the absence of that evidence has stayed my hand. Once I was sent against the brother of a newspaper editor who was publishing stories on corruption in a certain politician’s home district. Another time, it was against the father of a banker, a reformer who showed excessive zeal in investigating the size and nature of his institution’s bad debts. I would have been willing to act directly against the editor and the reformer, had I been retained to do so, but apparently the clients in question had reason to pursue a more circuitous route that involved misleading me. They are no longer clients, of course. Not at all.
I’m not a mercenary, although I was nothing more than that once upon a time. And although I do in a sense live a life of service, I am no longer samurai, either. The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty to his master, to a cause greater than himself. There was a time when I burned with loyalty, a time when, suffused with the samurai ethic I had absorbed from escapist novels and comics as a boy in Japan, I was prepared to die in the service of my adopted liege lord, the United States. But loves as uncritical and unrequited as that one can never last, and usually come to a dramatic end, as mine did. I am a realist now.
As I came to the 109 building I said “Passing.” Not into my lapel or anything stupid like that—the transmitters are sensitive enough so that you don’t need to make any subtle movements that are like billboards for a trained countersurveillance team. Not that one was out there, but you always assume the worst. Harry would now know I was passing his position and would fall in after a moment.
Actually, the popularity of mobile phones with earpieces makes this kind of work easier than it once was. It used to be that someone walking alone and talking under his breath was either demented or an intelligence or security agent. Today you see this sort of behavior all the time.
The light at the bottom of Dogenzaka was red, and the crowd congealed as we approached the five-street intersection in front of the train station. Garish neon signs and massive video monitors flashed frantically on the buildings around us. A diesel-powered truck ground its gears as it slogged through the intersection, laborious as a barge in a muddy river, its bullhorns blaring distorted right-wing patriotic songs that momentarily drowned out the bells commuters on bicycles were ringing to warn pedestrians out of the way. A street hawker angled a pushcart through the crowds, rivulets of sweat running down the sides of his face, the smell of steamed fish and rice following in his zigzagging wake. An ageless homeless man, probably a former sarariiman who had lost his job and his moorings when the bubble burst in the late eighties, slept propped against the base of a streetlight, inured by alcohol or despair to the tempest around him.
The Dogenzaka intersection is like this night and day, and at rush hour, when the light turns green, over three hundred people step off the curb at the same instant, with another twenty-five thousand waiting in the crush. From here on, it was going to be shoulder to shoulder, chest to back. I would keep close to Kawamura now, no more than five meters, which would put about two hundred people between us. I knew he had a commuter pass and wouldn’t need to go to the ticket machine. Harry and I had purchased our tickets in advance so we would be able to follow him right through the wickets. Not that the attendant would notice one way or the other. At rush hour, they’re practically numbed by the hordes; you could flash anything, a baseball card, probably, and in you’d go.
The light changed and the crowds swept into one another like a battle scene from some medieval epic. An invisible radar I’m convinced is possessed only by Tokyoites prevented a mass of collisions in the middle of the street. I watched Kawamura as he cut diagonally across to the station, and maneuvered in behind him as he passed. There were five people between us as we surged past the attendant’s booth. I had to stay close now. It would be chaos when the train pulled in: five-thousand people pouring out; five-thousand more stacked fifteen deep waiting to get on; everyone jockeying for position. Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour.
The river of people flowed up the stairs and gushed onto the platform, and the sounds and smells of the station seemed to arouse an extra sense of urgency in the crowd. We were swimming upstream against the people who had just stepped off the train, and as we reached the platform the doors were already closing on handbags and the odd protruding elbow. By the time we had passed the kiosk midway down the platform, the last car had passed us and a moment later it was gone. The next train would arrive in two minutes.
Kawamura shuffled down to the middle of the platform. I stayed behind him but hung back from the tracks, avoiding his wake. He was looking up and down the platform, but even if he had spotted Harry or me earlier, seeing us waiting for the train wasn’t going to unnerve him. Half the people waiting had just walked down Dogenzaka.
I felt the rumble of the next train as Harry walked past me. He offered just the slightest nod of his head to indicate he understood the rest was with me. I had told him I only needed his help until Kawamura was on the train, which is where he had always gone during our previous surveillance. Harry had done his usual good work in helping me get close to the target, and, per our script, he was now exiting the scene. I would contact him later, when I was done with the solo aspects of the job.
Harry thinks I’m a private investigator and that all I do is follow these peop
le around collecting information. To avoid the suspicious appearance of a too-high mortality rate for the subjects we track, I often have him follow people in whom I have no interest, who of course then provide some measure of cover by continuing to live their happy and oblivious lives. Also, where possible, I avoid sharing the subject’s name with Harry to minimize the chances that he’ll come across too many coincidental obituaries. Still, some of our subjects do have a habit of dying at the end of surveillance, and I know Harry has a curious mind. So far, he hadn’t asked, which was good. I liked Harry as an asset and didn’t want him to become a liability.
I moved up close behind Kawamura, just another commuter trying to secure a good position for boarding the train. This was the most delicate part of the operation. If I flubbed it, he would make me and it would be difficult to get sufficiently close for a second try.
I dipped my right hand into my pants pocket and touched a microprocessor-controlled magnet, about the size and weight of a quarter. On one side, the magnet was covered with blue worsted cloth, like that of the suit Kawamura was wearing. Had it been necessary, I could have stripped away the blue to expose a layer of gray, which was the other color Kawamura favored. On the opposite side of the magnet was an adhesive backing.
I withdrew the magnet from my pocket and pocketed it in my hand. I would have to wait for the right moment, when Kawamura’s attention was distracted. Mildly distracted would be enough. Maybe as we were boarding the train. I peeled off the wax paper covering the adhesive and crumbled it into my left pants pocket.
The train emerged at the end of the platform and hurtled toward us. Kawamura pulled a mobile phone out of his breast pocket. Started to input a number.
Do it now. I brushed past him, sticking the magnet to his suit jacket just below the left shoulder blade, and moved several paces down the platform.
Kawamura spoke into the phone for a few seconds, not loudly enough for me to hear over the screeching brakes of the train slowing to a halt in front of us, and then slipped the phone back in his left breast pocket. I wondered whom he had called. It didn’t matter. Two stations ahead, three at the most, and it would be done.
The train stopped and the doors opened, releasing a gush of human effluent. When the outflow slowed to a trickle, the lines on the platform collapsed inward and poured inside, as though someone had hit the reverse switch on a giant vacuum. People kept jamming themselves in despite warnings that The doors are closing! and the mass of commuters swelled until we were all held firmly in place, with no need to grip the overhead handles because there was nowhere to fall. The doors shut, the car lurched forward, and we moved off.
I exhaled slowly and rotated my head from side to side, hearing the joints crack in my neck, feeling the last remnants of nervousness drain away as we reached the final moments. It had always been this way for me. When I was a teenager, I had lived for a while near a town with a network of gorges cutting through it, and at some of them you could jump from the cliffs into deep swimming holes. You could see the older kids doing it all the time—it didn’t look so far up. The first time I climbed to the top and looked down, though, I couldn’t believe how high I was, and I froze. But the other kids were watching. And right then, I knew no matter how afraid I was, no matter what might happen, I was going to jump, and some instinctive part of me shut down my awareness of everything except the simple, muscular action of running forward. I had no other perceptions, no awareness of any future beyond the taking of those brisk steps. I remember thinking it didn’t even matter if I died.
Kawamura was standing in front of the door at one end of the car, about a meter from where I was positioned, his right hand holding one of the overhead bars. I needed to stay close now.
The word I’d received was that this had to look natural: my specialty, and the reason my services are always in demand. Harry had obtained Kawamura’s medical records from Jikei University Hospital, which revealed he had a condition called complete heart block and owed his continuing existence to a pacemaker installed five years earlier. Turn off the pacemaker, and you turn off Kawamura.
I twisted so my back was to the doors—a slight breach of Tokyo’s minimal train etiquette, but I didn’t want anyone who might speak English to see the kinds of prompts that were about to appear on the screen of the PDA computer I was carrying. I had downloaded a cardiac interrogation program into it, the kind a doctor uses to adjust a patient’s pacemaker. And I’d rigged it so that the PDA fed infrared commands to the control magnet. The only difference between my setup and a cardiologist’s was that mine was miniaturized and wireless. That, and I hadn’t taken the Hippocratic Oath.
The PDA was already turned on and in sleep mode, so it powered up instantly. I glanced at the screen. It was flashing Pacing Parameters. I hit the enter key and the screen changed, giving me an option of Threshold Testing and Sensing Testing. I selected the former and was offered a range of parameters: rate, pulse width, amplitude. I chose rate and quickly set the pacemaker at its lowest rate limit of forty beats per minute, then returned to the previous screen and selected pulse width. The screen indicated the pacemaker was set to deliver current at durations of .48 milliseconds. I decreased the pulse width as far as it would go, then changed to amplitude. The unit was preset at 8.5 volts, and I started dropping it a half-volt at a time. When I had taken it down two full volts, the screen flashed, You have now decreased unit amplitude by two volts. Are you sure you want to continue to decrease unit amplitude? I entered Yes and continued, repeating the sequence every time I took it down two volts.
When the train pulled into Yoyogi Station, Kawamura stepped off. Was he getting off here? That would be a problem: the unit’s infrared had limited range, and it would be a challenge to operate it and follow him closely at the same time. Damn, just a few more seconds, I thought, bracing to follow him out. But stopped outside the doors—he was only allowing the people behind him to leave the train. When the Yoyogi passengers had exited, Kawamura got back on, followed closely by several people who’d been waiting on the platform. The doors closed and we moved off again.
At two volts, the screen warned me that I was nearing minimum output values and it would be dangerous to further decrease output. I overrode the warning and took the unit down another half volt, glancing up at Kawamura as I did so. He hadn’t changed his position.
When I reached a single volt and tried to go further, the screen flashed, Your command will set the unit at minimum output values. Are you certain that you wish to enter this command? I entered Yes. It prompted me one more time anyway: You have programmed the unit to minimum output values. Please confirm. Again I entered Yes. There was a one second delay, then the screen started flashing bold-faced letters: Unacceptable output values. Unacceptable output values.
I closed the cover, but left the PDA on. It would reset automatically. There was always the chance the sequence hadn’t worked the first time around, and I wanted to be able to try again if I had to.
There wasn’t any need. As the train pulled into Shinjuku Station and jerked to a stop, Kawamura stumbled against the woman next to him. The doors opened. The other passengers flowed out, but Kawamura remained, his right hand gripping one of the upright bars next to the door with his right hand, his left clutching his package of fruit, commuters shoving past him. I watched him rotate counterclockwise until his back hit the wall next to the door. His mouth was open; he looked slightly surprised. Then slowly, almost gently, he slid to the floor. A passenger I had seen get on at Yoyogi stooped to assist him. The man, a mid-forties Westerner, tall and thin enough to make me think of a javelin, somehow aristocratic in his wireless glasses, shook Kawamura’s shoulders, but Kawamura was past noticing the stranger’s efforts at succor.
“Daijoubu desu ka?” I asked. Is he all right? I used Japanese because it was likely the Westerner wouldn’t understand it and our interaction would be kept to a minimum. My left hand moving to support Kawamura’s back, feeling for the magnet.
“Wak
aranai,” the stranger muttered. I don’t know. He patted Kawamura’s increasingly bluish cheeks and shook him again—a bit roughly, I thought. So he did speak some Japanese. It didn’t matter. I pinched the edge of the magnet and pulled it free. Kawamura was done.
I stepped past them onto the platform and instantly the in-flow began surging onto the train behind me. Glancing through the window nearest the door, I was stunned to see the stranger rummaging through Kawamura’s pockets. My first thought was that Kawamura was being robbed. I moved closer to the window for a better look, but the crush of passengers obscured my view.
I had an urge to get back on, but operationally that would have been stupid, and anyway it was too late. The doors were sliding shut. I watched as they closed. They caught on something, maybe a handbag or a foot, then opened slightly and closed again. It was an apple, falling to the tracks as the train pulled away.
CHAPTER 2
From Shinjuku I took the Maranouchi subway line to Ogikubo, the extreme west of the city and outside metropolitan Tokyo. I wanted to do a last SDR—surveillance detection run—before contacting my client to report the results of the Kawamura operation, and heading west took me against the incoming rush hour train traffic, making the job of watching my back easier.
An SDR is just what it sounds like: a route designed to force anyone who’s following you to show himself. Harry and I had of course taken full precautions en route to Shibuya and Kawamura that morning, but I never assume that because I was clean earlier I must be clean now. In Shinjuku, the crowds are so thick you could have ten people following you and you’d never make a single one of them. By contrast, following someone unobtrusively across a long, deserted train platform with multiple entrances and exits is nearly impossible, and the trip to Ogikubo offered the kind of peace of mind I’ve come to require.