by Barry Eisler
“Don’t try to pick the lock! You’re no good at it! Just put it somewhere else and get out!”
“What do you mean I’m no good at it? I taught you how to do it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, that’s how I know you’re no good.” He stopped. Probably figured it was useless to try to stop me so he might as well let me concentrate.
I felt the fifth tumbler click, then lost it. Damn. I turned the dental mirror another fraction, tightening the cylinder against the pins. “You really don’t think I’m good at this?” Another tumbler slipped.
“Don’t talk to me. Concentrate.”
“I am, but it’s practically personal now.” I felt the fifth pin click and hold. The next three were easy. Just one more.
The last pin was damaged. I couldn’t feel the click. I worked the pick up and down, but couldn’t get anything.
Come on sweetheart, where are you? I held my breath and jiggled the pick.
I never felt the tumbler click into place. But the knob was suddenly free. It twisted to the right and I was in.
The office was the same as when I’d left it. Even the lights were still on. I knelt next to the leather couch and felt its underside. It was covered with some kind of cloth. The edges were stapled to what felt like wood. Good backing to attach the bug.
I pulled the adhesive covering off the transmitter and pressed it into place. Anyone talking in this room was going to come through loud and clear.
Harry’s voice in my ear: “Two of them just got back. They’re coming up the walkway. Get out right now. Use the side exit—the one at the left side of building as you face it.”
“Shit, the transmitter’s already in place. I’m not going to be able to respond to you once I leave this room. Keep talking to me.”
“They just stopped at the end of the walkway to the front entrance. Maybe they’re waiting for the others. Go down to the side entrance and stay there until I tell you you’re clear.”
“Okay. I’m gone.” I relocked the door from the inside, then backed out and closed it behind me. I turned and started to move in the direction of the exterior corridor.
Flatnose was coming down the hallway. His shirt was covered with blood. The table must have caught him in the face and broken his nose again. It hadn’t improved his appearance. Hoarse animal sounds were rumbling up out of his chest.
He was standing between me and the entrance. Nowhere to go but through him.
Harry again, a second late: “There’s one right in front of you! And the others are coming up the walk!”
Flatnose dropped his head, his neck and shoulders bunching, looking like a bull about to charge.
All he wants is to get his hands on you. He’ll come hard, crazed with rage, not thinking.
He launched himself at me, closing the gap fast. As he lunged for my neck, I grabbed his wet shirt and dropped to the floor in modified tomoe nage, my right foot catching him in the balls and hurling him over me. He landed on his back with a thud I could feel through the floor. Using the momentum of the throw I rolled to my feet, took two long steps over to him, and leaped into the air like a pissed-off bronco, coming down with both feet as hard as I could on his prone torso. I felt bones breaking inside him and all the air being driven from his body. He made a sound like a balloon deflating in a puddle of water and I knew he was done.
I lurched toward the corridor, then stopped. If they found him like this in the middle of the hallway, they would know I’d been back here, maybe figure out why. They might look for a bug. I had to get him back to the room at the other end of the hallway, where it would look like he’d died by a freak shot from the table.
His legs were pointing in the right direction. I squatted between them, facing away from him, grabbed him around the knees and stood. He was heavier than he looked. I leaned forward and dragged him, feeling like a horse yoked to a square-wheeled wagon. There were bursts of pain in my back.
Harry’s voice in my ear again: “What are you doing? They’re coming in the front entrance. You’ve got maybe twelve seconds to get clear of the corridor.”
I dumped him in the room at the end of the hallway and raced out into the corridor, sprinting toward the side exit.
I reached the entrance to the side stairwell and heard the door on the opposite side of the corridor opening. I yanked open the door and threw myself through it, pulling it shut behind me but stopping it before it closed completely.
I squatted on the landing, fighting the screaming need to breathe, holding the door open a crack and watching as three of Yamaoto’s men walked into the corridor. One of them was doubled over—the guy I had nailed with the can of coffee. They walked into Conviction’s offices and out of my field of vision.
Immediately I heard Harry. “They’re back in the office. The front of the building is clear. Walk out the side exit now and head east across the park toward Sakurada-dori.”
I went down the stairs quietly but fast. Stuck my head out the exit door at the bottom, looked both ways. All clear. I shuffled down an alley connecting Hibiya-dori and Chuo-dori and cut across the park. The sun felt good on my face.
PART III
Now… they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. But… if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents.
Thus, between two countries, we have none at all…
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
CHAPTER 19
You are a maniac with a death wish, and I’m never working with you again,” Harry told me when I got to his apartment.
“I’m never working with me again, either. Have you been getting anything from the transmitter?”
“Yes, everything that went on while you were there and a short meeting that just ended. It’s stored on the hard drive.”
“They say anything about the guy I ran into on my way out?”
“What do you mean?”
“I had a little encounter with one of Yamaoto’s men just after I put the transmitter in place. They must have figured it had happened earlier, or you would have heard them say something.”
“Oh, that. Yes, they thought it happened when you busted out of interrogation. They didn’t know you’d been back. You know, the guy is dead.”
“Yeah, he didn’t look too good when I left him.”
He was watching me closely, but I couldn’t read his eyes. “That was fast. You can do something like that, that fast, with just your hands?”
“Actually, I needed my feet, too. Where’s Midori?”
“She went out to get an electronic piano keyboard. We’re going to try playing what’s on the disk for the computer—it’s the only way to discern the patterns in the lattice.”
I frowned. “She shouldn’t be going out if we can avoid it.”
“We couldn’t avoid it. Someone had to monitor the laser and infrared and save your ass before, and she isn’t familiar with the equipment. That didn’t leave a lot of alternatives.”
“I see what you mean.”
“She knows to be careful. She’s wearing light disguise. I don’t think there’s going to be a problem.”
“Okay. Let’s listen to what you got from the transmitter.”
“Just a second—tell me you didn’t leave the van.”
“What do you think, I went back for it? I’m crazy, but not that crazy.”
He looked like a kid who’d been told his dog just died. “Do you have any idea how much that equipment cost?”
I suppressed a smile and patted him on the shoulder. “You know I’m good for it,” I said, which was true. I sat in front of a computer monitor and picked up a pair of headphones. “Play it,” I said.
A few mouse clicks later I was listening to Yamaoto excoriating his men in Japanese. They must have called him with the bad news when I got away.
“One man! One unarmed man! And you let him get away! Useless, incompetent idiots!”
I couldn’t tell who or how many he was talking to because they were suffering his tirade in silence. There was a long pause, during which I assumed he was collecting himself, and afterward he said, “It doesn’t matter. He may not know where the disk is, and even if he does I’m not confident you would have been able to extract the information from him. He’s obviously tougher than any of you.”
After another long pause, someone spoke up. “What would you have us do, toushu?”
“What indeed,” Yamaoto said, his voice slightly hoarse from shouting. “Focus on the girl. She’s still our most promising lead.”
“But she’s underground now,” the voice said.
“Yes, but she’s unaccustomed to such a life,” Yamaoto answered. “She went into hiding suddenly, presumably having left much of the ordinary business of her life suspended. We can count on her to return to that business presently. Put men in all the vital spots of her life—where she lives, where she works, her known acquaintances, her family. Work with Holtzer on this as necessary. He has the technical means.”
Holtzer? Work with him?
“And the man?”
There was a long pause, then Yamaoto said, “The man is a different story. He lives in shadows like a fish in water. Unless we are extraordinarily lucky, I expect you have lost him.”
I could imagine heads bowed collectively in shame in the Japanese fashion. After a while one of the men spoke up. “We may spot him with the girl.”
“Yes, that’s possible. He’s obviously protecting her. We know he saved her from Ishikura’s men outside her apartment. And his reaction to my questions about her whereabouts was defensive. He may have feelings for her.” I heard him chuckle. “A strange basis for a romance.”
Ishikura? I thought.
“In any event, Rain’s loss is not fatal,” Yamaoto continued. “The girl poses much more of a danger: she’s the one Ishikura Tatsuhiko will be looking for, and he has as good a chance of finding her as we do—perhaps better, judging from his speed in preempting us at her apartment. And if he finds the disk, Ishikura will know what to do with it.”
Tatsu? Tatsu is looking for the damn disk, too? Those were his men at her apartment?
“No more chances,” Yamaoto went on. “No more loose ends. When the girl resurfaces, eliminate her immediately.”
“Hai,” several voices replied in chorus.
“Unfortunately, in the absence of the disk’s return or certification of its destruction, eliminating the girl will no longer provide us with complete security. It’s time to remove Ishikura from the equation, as well.”
“But toushu,” one of the voices said, “Ishikura is a Keisatsucho department head. Not an easy man to eliminate without causing collateral problems. Moreover…”
“Yes, moreover, Ishikura’s death will make him a martyr in certain circles by providing elegant supporting evidence for all his conspiracy theories. But we have no choice. Better to have evidence of such theories than what’s on the disk, which is proof itself. Do your utmost to make Ishikura’s demise seem natural. Ironic, that at the moment we need him most, the man supremely capable of such art is unavailable to us. Well, take what inspiration you can from him. Dismissed.”
That was it. I removed the headphones and looked at Harry. “It’s still transmitting?”
“Until the battery runs out—about three weeks. I’ll keep monitoring it.”
I nodded, realizing Harry was almost certainly going to hear things from that room that would lead back to me. Hell, Yamaoto’s comments were already damning if you were smart and had context: the reference to the “strange” basis of my attachment to Midori, and to the irony of having lost the services of the man “supremely capable” of effecting death by natural causes.
“I don’t think Midori should hear what’s on that tape,” I said. “She knows enough. I don’t want to… compromise her further.”
Harry bowed his head and said, “I completely understand.”
All at once, I knew that he knew.
“It’s good I can trust you,” I said. “Thank you.”
He shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
The buzzer rang. Harry pressed the intercom button, and Midori said, “It’s me.”
Harry hit the entrance buzzer and we took up our positions, this time with me at the door and Harry at the window. A minute later I saw Midori walking down the hallway with a rectangular cardboard box in her arms. Her face broke into a smile when she saw me, and she covered the distance quickly, stepped inside the genkan, and gave me a quick hug.
“Every time I see you, you look worse,” she told me, stepping back after a moment and setting the box on the floor. It was true: my face was still smudged with dirt from my tumble on the subway tracks and I knew I looked exhausted.
“I feel worse, too,” I said, but smiling to let her know she made me feel good.
“What happened?”
“I’ll give you the details in a little while. First, Harry tells me you’re going to give us a piano recital.”
“That’s right,” she said, reaching down and stripping tape off the box. She popped open the end and slid out an electronic keyboard. “Will this work?” she said, holding it up to Harry.
Harry took it and examined the jack. “I think I have an adapter here somewhere. Hang on.” He walked over to the desk, pulled open a drawer filled with electronic components, and tried several units before finding one that satisfied him. He set the keyboard down on the desk, plugged it into the computer, and brought the scanned image of the notes up on the monitor.
“The problem is, I can’t play music and Midori can’t run the computer. I think the shortcut will be to get the computer to apply the patterns of sounds to the representation of notes on the page. Once it’s got enough data to work with, the computer will interpret the musical notes as coordinates in the lattice, then use fractal analysis until it can discern the most basic way the pattern repeats itself. Then it will apply the pattern to standard Japanese through a code-breaking algorithm I’ve set up, and we’ll be in.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s just what I was thinking.”
Harry gave me his trademark you-are-a-complete-knuckle-dragger look, then said, “Midori, try playing the score on the monitor and let’s see what the computer can do with the data.”
Midori sat at the desk and lifted her fingers over the keyboard. “Wait,” Harry said. “You’ve got to play it perfectly. If you add or delete a note, or play one out of order, you’ll create a new pattern, and the computer will get confused. You have to play exactly what appears on the screen. Can you do that?”
“I could if this were an ordinary song. But this composition is unusual. I’ll need to run through it a few times first. Can you disconnect me from the computer?”
“Sure.” He dragged and clicked the mouse a few times. “Go ahead. Tell me when you’re ready.”
Midori looked at the screen for a few moments, her head straight and motionless, her fingers rippling ever so slightly in the air, reflecting the sounds she could hear in her mind. Then she brought her hands down gently to the keys, and for the first time we heard the eerie melody of the information that had cost Kawamura his life.
I listened uncomfortably while Midori played. After a few minutes, she said to Harry, “Okay, I’m ready. Plug me in.”
Harry worked the mouse. “Done. Let it hear you.”
Again, Midori’s fingers floated over the keys, and the room was filled with the strange requiem. When she reached the end of the score, she stopped and looked at Harry, her eyebrows raised in a question.
“The data’s in,” he said. “Let’s see what the computer can do with it.”
We watched the screen, waiting for the results, none of us speaking.
After a half minute or so, a strange, disembodied series of notes emanated from the computer speakers, shadows of what I had heard Mi
dori play a moment earlier.
“It’s factoring the notes,” Harry said. “It’s trying to find the most basic pattern.”
We waited silently for several minutes. Finally Harry said, “Shit. I don’t see any progress. I might not have the computing power here.”
“Where can you get it?” Midori asked.
Harry shrugged. “I can try hacking into Livermore to gain access to their supercomputer. Their security has been getting better, though—it could take some time.”
“Would a supercomputer do the trick?” I asked.
“It might,” he said. “Actually, any reasonable amount of processing power is enough. It’s a question of time, though—the more processing power, the more possibilities the computer can try in a shorter time.”
“So a supercomputer would speed things up,” Midori said, “but we don’t know by how much.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
There was a moment of frustrated quiet. Then Harry said, “Let’s think for a moment. How much do we even need to decrypt this?”
I knew where he was going: the same tempting thought I had at Conviction headquarters when Yamaoto was asking for the disk.
“What do you mean?” Midori asked.
“Well, what are our objectives here? The disk is like dynamite; we just want to render it safe. The owners know it can’t be copied or electronically transmitted. For starters, we could render it safe by just giving it back to them.”
“No!” Midori said, standing up from in front of the monitor and facing Harry. “My father risked his life for what’s on that disk. It’s going where he wanted it to go!”
Harry held up his hands in an “I surrender” gesture. “Okay, okay, just trying to think outside the box.”
“It’s a logical idea,” I said, “but Midori’s right. Not only because her father risked his life to acquire the disk. We know now there are multiple parties seeking its return—not just Yamaoto, but also the Agency, the Keisatsucho. Maybe more. Even if we were to give it back to one of them, it wouldn’t solve our problems with the others.”