by Barry Eisler
We tumbled onto the bed, stripping off each other’s clothes, tossing them helter-skelter. Her back was arched upward and I was kissing her breasts, her belly, and she said, “No, now, I want you now,” and I moved up, feeling her legs on either side of me, and into her. She made a sound like the wind picking up, and we moved against each other, with each other, slowly at first, then more urgently. We were fused together, breathing the breath from each other’s lungs, the sensation arcing from my head to my groin to my toes and back again until I couldn’t tell where my body ended and hers began. I felt a rumbling between us and in us like storm clouds rolling in and when I came it was like a thunderclap from everywhere, her body and my body and all the places where we were joined.
We lay there afterward, still entwined, exhausted as though we had done battle but had failed to vanquish each other with our last and mightiest blows. “Wow,” she said. “What did they put in the sake?”
I smiled at her. “You want to get another bottle?”
“A lot of bottles,” she said, drowsily. And that was the last thing either of us said before I drifted off into a sleep that was mercifully untroubled by memories and only slightly marred by dread of what was still to come.
CHAPTER 23
I got up just before dawn, and stood looking out the window as the lights came on in Tokyo and the city slowly emerged from its slumber, dreamily stretching its fingers and toes. Midori was still sleeping.
I showered and dressed in one of the suits I keep at the Imperial, an eleven-ounce gray flannel from Paul Stuart. A white Sea Island cotton shirt, conservative blue tie. The shoes were bench made, the well-seasoned attaché from the old British leather-goods manufacturer W & H Gidden. I was dressed better than most people who are supposed to look the part—again, the details are what make the disguise, or give you away. And who knows? I thought. If this doesn’t go well, you could be buried in this outfit. You might as well look good.
Midori had gotten up while I was in the shower. She was wearing a white terry-cloth hotel robe and sat on the bed silently while I dressed. “I like you in a suit,” she told me when I was done.
“Just a sarariiman on his way to work,” I said, trying to keep it light.
I slipped the Glock into a custom holster at the small of my back, where it would be concealed by the nice drape of the flannel. Then I eased the flashbang up under my armpit above the sleeve of the suit, where the natural compression of my arm held it in place. I moved my arm out a few centimeters and jiggled it hard, and the device slid down into my waiting hand. Satisfied, I put it back in position.
I rotated my head and heard the joints in my neck crack. “Okay. I’ve got to go. I’ll be back sometime in the evening. Will you wait for me?”
She nodded, her face set. “I’ll be here. Just come back.”
“I will.” I picked up the attaché and left.
The hotel lobby was relatively empty of the visiting businessmen who would soon arise and meet for overpriced power breakfasts. I walked out through the front doors and shook my head at the bellman’s offer to assist me with a cab, preferring instead an indirect walk to Tokyo Station, which would give me a better chance to ensure I wasn’t being followed. From the station, I would catch the train to Shinbashi, and from Shinbashi to the station at Yokosuka. I could have gone directly from Tokyo Station, but preferred a more circuitous route for my usual reasons.
It was a brisk, clear morning—rare weather for Tokyo, and the kind I’ve always liked best. As I cut across Hibiya Park, I saw a small asagao, a morning glory, blooming improbably in the cold spray of one of the fountains. A summer flower. It looked sad, as though aware it would die soon in the autumn chill.
At Tokyo Station, I bought a ticket to Shinbashi, where I transferred to the Yokosuka line, checking my back on the way. I bought a two-way ticket to Yokosuka, though a one-way would have been marginally more secure. All soldiers are superstitious, as Crazy Jake had liked to say, and old habits die hard.
I got on the train at seven o’clock, and it eased out of the station four minutes later, precisely on time. Seventy-four minutes after that, we pulled into Yokusuka Station, across the harbor from the naval base. I stepped out onto the platform, attaché case in hand, and busied myself making an ostensible phone call from a public booth while the other passengers who had gotten off the train departed.
From the station, I walked along the esplanade that followed the waterline of Yokosuka Harbor. A cold wind sliced across the water into my face, smelling faintly of the sea. The sky was dark, in contrast to the clear weather in Tokyo. Too good to last, I thought.
The harbor surface was as gray and foreboding as the sky. I paused on a wooden walkway overlooking the harbor, watching the brooding U.S. warships at rest, the clumps of hills behind them startlingly green against the gray of everything else. The detritus of the military was rhythmically washing up against the seawall below me: empty bottles, cigarette packs, plastic bags like some bizarre and decaying species of sea creature that had been wounded in the deep and come to the surface to die.
The harbor reminded me of Yokohama, and the long-ago Sunday mornings when my mother would take me there. Yokohama was where she went to church, and she was going to raise me as a Catholic. Back then, we left from Shibuya Station, and the trip took over an hour, not the twenty minutes in which the distance can be covered today.
I remember the long train rides, on which my mother would always take my hand, literally leading me away from my father’s displeasure at the imposition of this primitive Western ritual on his impressionable young son. The church was an insidiously sensory experience: the settled, wooden smells of old paper and seat cushions; the erect pews, rigid as body casts; the glittering light of stained-glass angels; the ominous echoes of the liturgy; the bland taste of the Eucharist. All catalyzed by a dawning sense that the experience took place through a window my father, the other half of my cultural heritage, would have preferred to keep closed.
People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.
But I can tell you as the Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn’t a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn’t care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.
I heard tires crunching gravel, and turned toward the parking lot behind me just in time to see the first of three black sedans brake to a stop a few meters from where I was standing. The rear doors flew open and a man got out on each side. All Caucasians. Holtzer, I thought.
The follow-on cars stopped to the left and right of the lead; with my back to the water, I was encircled. Two more men got out of each of the additional cars. All of them were brandishing compact Berettas.
“Get in,” the one closest to me growled, gesturing to the lead car with his gun.
“I don’t think so,” I said evenly. If they were going to kill me, I’d make them do it here.
Six of them stood around me in a semicircle. If they closed in a little tighter, I could try to blast through one of the guys at the outer edge—his opposite number would be afraid to shoot, lest he hit his comrade.
But they were well disciplined and resisted the urge to close. Probably they’d been briefed on the dangers of getting too near.
Instead, one of them reached under his jacket and pulled out what I instantly recognized as a Taser.
Which meant they wanted to take me, not kill me. I pivoted to launch myself at the nearest man, but too late. I heard the pop of the Taser firing, felt its twin electrical darts sink into my thigh, current surging through my body. I went down, jerking helplessly, willing my hand to pull out the darts but getting no response from my twitching limbs.
Someone knelt on my neck and handcuffed my arms behind my back. A hood was pulled over my head. I felt them pick me up, limp as a burlap sack, and dump me onto the floor in the back of a car. Then knees were pressing down on my back, doors were slamming, and the car jerked into motion.
We drove for less than five minutes. From our speed and the absence of turns, I knew we were still on National Highway 16 and that we had passed the base. During the ride I tested my fingers, wiggled my toes. Control was coming back, but my nervous system was still scrambled from the electric jolt, and I felt sick to my stomach.
I felt the car slow and turn right, heard gravel crunching beneath the tires. We stopped. Doors opened, and a pair of hands took me by each ankle and dragged me out of the car. My head smacked the bottom edge of the door on the way out and I saw stars.
They pulled me to my feet and shoved me forward. I heard footsteps all around me and knew I was surrounded. Then they were pushing me up a short flight of stairs. I heard a door open, then slam shut with a hollow aluminum bang. I was shoved into a chair and the hood was pulled off my head.
I was inside a construction trailer. Dim light came through a single sliding window. A figure sat with his back to it.
“Hi, John. It’s good to see you.”
It was Holtzer, of course.
“Fuck,” I said, deliberately radiating an air of defeat and despondency. Not so hard, under the circumstances. “How did you get to me?”
“I knew you’d hear about Bulfinch, that you’d make another play for the disk. I know you’ve got sources, that you might be able to put together enough of the pieces to track me. As a precaution, we set up checkpoints around the likely staging areas near the base. You walked right into one of them.”
“Fuck,” I said again, meaning it.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You got pretty close. But you should have known you were going to come up short, John. You always do, when you’re up against me.”
“Right,” I said, trying to see how I was going to get out of this. Without the handcuffs, I might be able to get past Holtzer and the two men at the door, though I didn’t know who was still outside. With the handcuffs, I wasn’t going anywhere.
“You don’t even know what I mean by that, do you?” he went on. “Christ, you’ve always been so blind.”
“What are you talking about?”
His fleshy lips twisted into a loathsome smile and he silently mouthed four words. I couldn’t catch them at first, so he kept mouthing them until I did.
I was the mole. I was the mole.
I dropped my head and fought for control. “Fuck you, Holtzer. You never had the access. It was someone on the ARVN side.”
“You think so?” he said, his face close to mine and his voice low and obscenely intimate so his men couldn’t hear. “Remember Cu Lai?”
The Cambodian village. I felt a sick feeling creeping in that had nothing to do with the aftereffects of the electric shock.
“What about it?” I said.
“Remember ‘Waste ’em?’ Remember ‘Son, I assure you if I told you my rank you’d shit your pants for me?’ You were tough, John! I had to use three sets of voices to convince you.”
Keep control John. You will keep control. Focus on the problem. You will get out of this.
“Why?” I asked.
“I had a source, a guy who could do a lot for me. I had to show him what I could do for him. Someone in the village had lent him a lot of money, was causing some problems about it. I wanted to show him how I could make those kinds of problems go away.”
“So you massacred an entire village to get to one guy?”
“Had to. You all look alike, you know.” He laughed at his joke.
“Bullshit. Why not just give the source money to pay back the loan?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Come on, Rain, the bean counters were paying much more attention to the money being expended than they were to the bullets. Some dead villagers? Just a few more VC to add to the body count. Christ, it was easier to do it that way than it would have been to requisition funds, fill out the paperwork, all that shit.”
For the first time since some of the nightmares of the war, I could feel real despair starting to drill its way into my mind. I began to understand bone deep that in a few minutes I would be dead, that Holtzer would have won, as he’d been winning all along. And while the thought of my own death no longer particularly fascinated me, the knowledge that I had failed to stop him, at the same moment that I came to understand what he had caused me to do so long ago, was overwhelming.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, playing for time. “What were they giving you that would have been worth it? I know it wasn’t money—you’re still a government bean counter in a cheap suit, thirty-five years later.”
He made a face of exaggerated sympathy. “You’re such a farmer, Rain. There’s the way of the world, and you just don’t get it. You trade intel for intel, that’s the game. I had a source who was passing me information on NVA movements—information that was critical for the Arc Light raids we used to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail supply chain. And even though SOG’s missions weren’t doing any real operational damage, the North had a bug up its ass about you cowboys because you made them look like they couldn’t control their own backyard. So they wanted intel on SOG, and were willing to pay a lot for it with intel of their own. I was bartering pig shit for gold.”
I knew he was telling the truth. There was nothing I could say.
“Oh, and let me share just one more tidbit before these men take you outside, shoot you in the back of the head, and dump your body in the harbor,” he went on. “I know all about ‘Crazy Jake.’ I volunteered you for the mission to get rid of him.”
My throat constricted. I couldn’t speak. It was like being raped.
“It’s true, it was just good luck that the problem of his little Montagnard army came to my attention. But I knew just the guy to handle it—his old high school pal, John Rain. No one else could get close enough.”
It was over. I was going to die. My mind started to drift, and a strange calmness descended.
“I got the word out afterward. It was supposed to be confidential, but I made sure people knew. ‘Just between you and me,’ don’t you love that phrase? You might as well say, ‘make sure it gets in the papers.’ It’s great.”
I found myself remembering the time I had first climbed Mount Fuji. I was with my father, and neither of us had dressed properly for the cold. We took turns wanting to go back, but somehow the other always insisted on going on, and eventually we made it to the top. We always laughed about it afterward, and he had loved to tell the story.
“I’ll tell you, it made people uncomfortable, John. What kind of man can off his own best friend? Just sneak up on him and cap him? Not someone you could ever trust afterward, I’ll tell you that. Not someone you could promote, whose career you could advance. I guess that bit of just-between-you-and-me info pretty much ruined your career in the military, didn’t it? You’ve been nothing but a murderous little half-breed errand boy for the higher-ups ever since.”
The old man had always liked to tell that story. And how glad he was we had managed to take turns convincing each other to go on until we had made it.
“Cat got your tongue, Rain?”
Yeah, it was a good memory. Not a bad one to have with you on your way out.
He stood and turned to the two men at the do
or. “Don’t kill him here—it’s too close to the naval base. The military still has his dental records, and might ID the body. We don’t want anyone to make any connection between him and the U.S. government—or with me. Take him somewhere else and dump him when you’re done.”
One of the men opened the door for him and he walked out.
I heard car doors opening and closing, then two sets of tires crunching the gravel as they drove off. We had arrived in three cars, so only one was left. I didn’t know if there were other men outside.
The two men remained at the door, their faces impassive.
Some deep part of me welled up, insisting on going out fighting.
“These cuffs are starting to hurt,” I said, slowly coming to my feet. “Can you do anything?”
One of them laughed. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the pain in a few minutes.”
“But my arms hurt,” I said again, making a face of near-tears and lifting my elbows to create space between my upper arms and my torso. I saw one of them sneer with disgust.
“Oh God, I think I’m losing circulation,” I moaned. I worked my shoulders in circles until the flashbang was poised over my sleeve, then raised my elbows and started jiggling my arms violently. I felt the device ease into the upper part of the jacket sleeve.
The flashbang wouldn’t slide as easily because of the pressure of my handcuffed arms against my sides. I realized I should have tried to force it out onto my back, where it would have dropped down more easily into my handcuffed hands. Too late.
I lowered my wrists, straightening my arms, and started bouncing on my toes as though I had to urinate. “I need to take a leak,” I said.
The men at the door looked at each other, their expressions indicating they found me pathetic.
Each bounce brought the device down another crucial centimeter. When it got past my elbow, I felt it slide smoothly down my sleeve and into my waiting hand.