by Barry Eisler
It used to be that, when an intelligence agent wanted to communicate with an asset so sensitive that a meeting was impossible, they had to use a dead drop. The asset would drop microfiche in the hollow of a tree, or hide it in an obscure book in the public library, and later, the spy would come by and retrieve it. You could never put the two people together in the same place at the same time.
It’s easier with the Internet, and more secure. The client posts a message on an encrypted site, the electronic equivalent of a tree hollow. I download it and decrypt it at my leisure. And vice versa.
The message traffic is pretty simple. A name, a photograph, personal and work contact information. A bank account number, transfer instructions. A reminder of my three no’s: no women or children; no acts against nonprincipals; no other parties retained to solve the problem at hand. The phone is used only for the innocuous aftermath, which was the reason for my side trip to Ogikubo.
I used one of the payphones on the station platform to call my contact within the Liberal Democratic Party—an LDP flunky I know only as Benny, maybe short for Benihana or something. Benny’s English is fluent, so I know he’s spent some time abroad. He prefers to use English with me, I think because English has a harder sound in some contexts and Benny fancies himself a hard guy. Probably he learned the lingo from a too-steady diet of Hollywood gangster movies.
We’d never met, of course, but talking to Benny on the phone had been enough for me to develop an antipathy. I had a vivid image of him as just another government seat-warmer, a guy who would try to manage a weight problem by jogging a few ten-minute miles three times a week on a treadmill in an overpriced chrome-and-mirrors gym, where the air-conditioning and soothing sounds of the television would prevent any unnecessary discomfort. He’d splurge on items like designer hair gel for a combover because the little things only cost a few bucks anyway, and would save money by wearing no-iron shirts and ties with labels proclaiming Genuine Italian Silk! that he’d selected with care on a trip abroad from a sale bin at some discount department store, congratulating himself on the bargains for which he acquired such quality goods. He’d sport a few Western extravagances like a Montblanc fountain pen, talismans to reassure himself he was certainly more cosmopolitan than the people who gave him orders. Yeah, I knew this guy. He was a little order taker, a go-between, a cutout who’d never once gotten his hands dirty, who couldn’t tell the difference between a real smile and the amused rictuses of the hostesses who relieved him of his yen for watered-down Suntory scotch while he bored them with hints about the Big Things he was involved in but of course couldn’t really discuss.
After the usual exchange of innocuous, preestablished codes to establish our bona fides, I told him, “It’s done.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said in his terse, false tough-guy way. “Any problems?”
“Nothing worth mentioning,” I responded after a pause, thinking of the guy on the train.
“Nothing? You sure?”
I knew I wouldn’t get anything this way. Better to say nothing, which I did.
“Okay,” he said, breaking the silence. “You know to reach out to me if you need anything. Anything at all, okay?”
Benny tries to run me like an intelligence asset. Once he even suggested a face-to-face meeting. I told him if we met face-to-face, I’d be there to kill him, so maybe we should skip it. He laughed, but we never did have that meeting.
“There’s only one thing I need,” I said, reminding him of the money.
“By tomorrow, like always.”
I hung up, automatically wiping down the receiver and keys on the remote possibility that they had traced the call and would send someone to try for prints. If they had access to Vietnam-era military records, and I assumed they did, they would get a match for John Rain, and I didn’t want them to realize the same guy they had known over twenty years ago was now their mystery freelancer.
I was working with the CIA at the time, a legacy of my Vietnam contacts, making sure the Agency’s “support funds” were reaching the right recipients in the governing party, which even back then was the LDP. The Agency was running a secret program to support conservative political elements—part of the U.S. government’s anticommunist policies and a natural extension of relationships that had developed during the postwar occupation—and the LDP was more than happy to play the role in exchange for the cash.
I was really just a bagman, but I had a nice rapport with one of the recipients of Uncle Sam’s largesse, a fellow named Miyamoto. One of Miyamoto’s associates, miffed at what he felt was an inadequate share of the money, threatened to blow the whistle if he didn’t receive more. Miyamoto was exasperated; the associate had used this tactic before and had gotten a bump-up as a result. Now he was just being greedy. Miyamoto asked me if I could do anything about this guy, for $50,000, “no questions asked.”
The offer interested me, but I wanted to make sure I was protected. I told Miyamoto I couldn’t do anything myself, but I could put him in touch with someone who might be able to help.
That someone became my alter ego, and over time I took steps to erase the footprints of the real John Rain. Among other things, I stopped using my American birth name and anything connected with it, and I had a surgeon give my somewhat stunted epicanthic folds a more complete Japanese appearance. I wear my hair longer now, as well, in contrast to the brush cut I favored back then. And wire-rim glasses, a concession to age and its consequences, give me a bookish air entirely unlike the intense soldier’s countenance of my past. Today I look more like a Japanese academic than the half-breed warrior I once was. I haven’t seen any of my contacts from my bagman days in over twenty years, and I steer scrupulously clear of the Agency. After the number they did on me and Crazy Jake in Bu Dop, I was more than happy to shake them out of my life.
Miyamoto had put me in touch with Benny, who was working with people in the LDP who had problems like Miyamoto’s, problems I could solve. For a while I worked for both of them, but Miyamoto retired about ten years ago and died peacefully in his bed not long thereafter. Since then, Benny’s been my best client. I do three or four jobs a year for him and whomever in the LDP he fronts for, charging the yen equivalent of about $100k per. Sounds like a lot, I know, but there’s overhead: equipment; multiple residences; a real but perpetually money-losing consulting operation that provides me with tax records and other means of legitimacy.
Benny. I wondered whether he knew anything about what had happened on the train. The image of the stranger rifling through the slumped Kawamura’s pockets was as distracting as a small seed caught in my teeth, and I returned to it again and again, hoping for some insight. A coincidence? Maybe the guy had been looking for identification. Not the most productive treatment for someone who is going blue from lack of oxygen, but people don’t usually act rationally under stress, and the first time you see someone dying right in front of you it is stressful. Or he could have been Kawamura’s contact, on the train for some kind of exchange. Maybe that was their arrangement—a moving exchange on a crowded train. Kawamura calls the contact from Shibuya just before boarding the train, says, “I’m in the third-to-last car, leaving the station now,” and the contact knows where to board as the train pulls into Yoyogi Station. Sure, maybe.
Actually, the little coincidences happen frequently in my line of work. They start automatically when you become a student of human behavior—when you start following the average person as he goes about his average day, listening to his conversations, learning his habits. The smooth shapes you take for granted from a distance can look unconnected and bizarre under close scrutiny, like cloth fibers observed under a microscope.
Some of the targets I take on are involved in subterranean dealings, and the coincidence factor is especially high. I’ve followed subjects who turned out to be under simultaneous police surveillance—one of the reasons my countersurveillance skills have to be as dead subtle as they are. Mistresses are a frequent theme, and sometimes even se
cond families. One subject I was preparing to take out as I followed him down the subway platform surprised the hell out of me by throwing himself in front of the train, saving me the trouble. The client was delighted, and mystified at how I was able to get it to look like a suicide on a crowded train platform.
It felt like Benny knew something, though, and that feeling made it hard to put this little coincidence aside. If I had some way of confirming he’d broken one of my three rules by putting a B-team on Kawamura, I’d find him and he would pay the price. But there was no obvious way to acquire that confirmation. I’d have to put this one aside, maybe mentally label it “pending” to make myself feel better.
The money appeared the next day, as Benny had promised, and the next nine days were quiet.
On the tenth day I got a call from Harry. He told me it was my friend Koichiro, he was going to be at Galerie Coupe Chou in Shinjuku on Tuesday at eight with some friends, I should come by if I had time. I told him that sounded great and would try to make it. I knew to count back five listings in the restaurants section of the Tokyo City Source yellow pages, making our meeting place Las Chicas, and to subtract five days from the date and five hours from the time.
I like Las Chicas for meetings because almost everyone approaches it from Aoyama-dori, making the people coming from the other direction the ones to watch, and because people have to show themselves coming across a little patio before reaching the entrance. The place is surrounded by twisting alleys snaking off in a dozen different directions, offering no choke points where someone could set up and wait. I know those alleys well, as I make it my business to know the layout of any area where I spend a lot of time. I was confident anyone unwanted would have a hard time getting close to me there.
The food and the ambience are good, too. Both the menu and the people represent a fusion of East and West: Indian jeera rice and Belgian chocolate; a raven-haired beauty of high-cheeked Mongolian ancestry next to a blonde straight out of the fjords; a mélange of languages and accents. Somehow Las Chicas manages to be eternally hip and entirely comfortable with itself, both at the same time.
I arrived two hours early and waited, sipping one of the Chai Lattes for which the restaurant is justifiably celebrated. You never want to be the last one to arrive at a meeting. It’s impolite. And it decreases your chances of being the one to leave.
At a little before three, I spotted Harry coming up the street. He didn’t see me until he was inside.
“Always sitting with your back to the wall,” he said, walking over.
“I like the view,” I answered, deadpan. Most people pay zero attention to these things, but I’d taught him it’s something to be aware of when you walk into a place. The people with their backs to the door are the civilians; the ones in the strategic seats could be people with some street sense or some training, people who might deserve a little more attention.
I had met Harry about five years earlier in Roppongi, where he’d found himself in a jam with a few drunken off-duty American Marines in a bar where I happened to be killing time before an appointment. Harry can come off as a bit of an oddball: sometimes his clothes are so ill-fitting you might wonder if he stole them from a random clothesline, and he has a habit of staring unselfconsciously at anything that interests him. It was the staring that drew the attention of the jarheads, one of whom loudly threatened to stick those thick glasses up Harry’s Jap ass if he didn’t find somewhere else to gawk. Harry had immediately complied, but this apparent sign of weakness served only to encourage the Marines. When they followed Harry out, and I realized he had no idea what was going to happen, I left too. I have a problem with bullies—a legacy of my childhood.
Anyway, the jarheads got to play with me, not with Harry, and it didn’t go the way they had planned. Harry was grateful.
It turned out he had some useful skills. He was born in the United States of Japanese parents and grew up bilingual, spending summers with his grandparents outside of Tokyo. He went to college and graduate school in the States, earning a degree in applied mathematics and cryptography. In graduate school, he got in trouble for hacking into school files one of his cryptography professors had bragged were hack-proof. There was also some unpleasantness with the FBI, which had managed to trace probes of the nation’s Savings & Loan Administration and other financial institutions back to Harry. Some of the honorable men from deep within America’s National Security Agency learned of these hijinks and arranged for Harry to work at Fort Meade in exchange for purging his growing record of computer offenses.
Harry stayed with the NSA for a few years, getting his new employer into secure government and corporate computer systems all over the world and learning the blackest of the NSA’s computer black arts along the way. He came back to Japan in the mid-nineties, where he took a job as a computer security consultant with one of the big global consulting outfits. Of course they did a thorough background check, but his clean record and the magic of an NSA top-secret security clearance blinded Harry’s new corporate sponsors to what was most fundamental about the shy, boyish-looking thirty-something they had just hired.
Which was that Harry was an inveterate hacker. He had grown bored at the NSA because, despite its technical challenges, his work was all sanctioned by the government. And the rules, and standards of ethics, he was supposed to follow in his new corporate position were no more than a joke. Harry never did security work on a system without leaving a back door he could use whenever the mood arose. He hacked his own firm’s files to uncover the vulnerabilities of its clients, which he then exploited. Harry had the skills of a locksmith and the heart of a burglar.
Since we met I’d been teaching him the relatively aboveboard aspects of my craft. He was enough of a misfit to be in awe of the fact that I’d befriended him, and consequently had a bit of a crush on me. The resulting loyalty was useful.
He sat and I asked him what was going on.
“Two things. One I think you’ll know about, the other, I’m not sure.”
“Okay.”
“First, it seems Kawamura had a fatal heart attack the same morning we were tailing him.”
I took a sip of my Chai Latte. “I know. It happened right in front of me on the train. Hell of a thing.”
Was he watching my face more closely than usual? “I saw the obituary in the Daily Yomiuri,” he said. “A surviving daughter placed it. The funeral was yesterday.”
“Aren’t you a little young to be reading the obituaries, Harry?” I asked, eyeing him over the edge of the mug.
He shrugged. “I read everything, you know that. It’s part of what you pay me for.”
That much was true. Harry kept his finger on the pulse, and had a knack for identifying patterns in chaos.
“What’s the second thing?”
“During the funeral, someone broke into his apartment. I figured it might have been you, but wanted to tell you just in case.”
I kept my face expressionless. “How did you find out about that?” I asked.
He took a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket and slid it toward me. “I hacked the Keisatsucho report.” The Keisatsucho is Japan’s National Police Agency, the Japanese FBI.
“Christ, Harry, what can’t you get at?”
He waved his hand as though it was nothing. “This is just the Sosa, the investigative section. Their security is pathetic.”
I felt no particular urge to tell him that I agreed with his assessment of Sosa security—that in fact I had been an avid reader of their files for many years.
I unfolded the piece of paper and started to scan its contents. The first thing I noticed was the name of the person who had prepared the report: Ishikura Tatsuhiko. Tatsu. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
I had known Tatsu in Vietnam, where he was attached to Japan’s Public Safety and Investigative Board, one of the precursors of the Keisatsucho. Hobbled by the restrictions placed on its military by Article Nine of the post war constitution and unable to do more than
send a few people on a “listen and learn only” basis, the government sent Tatsu to Vietnam for six months to make wiring diagrams of KGB assistance to the Vietcong. Because I spoke Japanese I was assigned to help him learn his way around.
Tatsu was a short man with the kind of stout build that rounds out with age, and a gentle face that masked an intensity beneath—an intensity revealed by a habit of jutting his torso and head forward in a way that made it look as though he was being restrained by an invisible leash. He was frustrated in postwar, neutered Japan, and admired the warrior’s path I had taken. For my part, I was intrigued by a secret sorrow I saw in his eyes, a sorrow that, strangely, became more pronounced when he smiled and especially when he laughed. He spoke little of his family, a wife and two young daughters in Japan, but when he did his pride was evident. Years later, I learned from a mutual acquaintance that there had also been a son, the youngest, who had died in circumstances of which Tatsu would never speak, and I understood from whence that sorrowful countenance had come.
When I came back to Japan we spent some time together, but I had distanced myself since getting involved with Miyamoto and then Benny. I hadn’t seen him since moving underground.
Which was good, because I knew from the reports I’d hacked that Tatsu had a pet theory: the LDP had an assassin on the payroll. In the late eighties, Tatsu came to believe that too many key witnesses in corruption cases, too many financial reformers, too many young crusaders against the political status quo were dying of “natural causes.” In his assessment, there was a pattern, and he profiled the shadowy shape at the center of it as possessing skills very much like mine.
Tatsu’s colleagues thought the shape he saw was a ghost in his imagination, and his dogged insistence on investigating a conspiracy others claimed was a mirage had done nothing to advance his career. On the other hand, that doggedness did afford him some protection from the powers he hoped to threaten, because no one wanted to lend credence to his theories by having him die suddenly of natural causes. On the contrary: I imagined many of Tatsu’s enemies hoped he would live a long and uneventful life. I also knew this attitude would change instantly if Tatsu ever got too close to the truth.