"Hard Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eisler Barry)

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I SLIPPED AWAY from the area on foot along a series of secondary streets in Roppongi and Akasaka, cutting across narrow alleyways in a manner which, to the uninitiated, would have looked like a series of simple shortcuts to wherever I was going, but which were in fact designed to force a follower or team of followers to reveal themselves in an effort to keep up. With a few deliberate exceptions, all my surveillance detection moves are accomplished under the guise of seemingly normal pedestrian behavior. If I’m being followed because some organization has taken an interest but hasn’t yet managed to confirm who I am, I’m not going to give the game away by acting like anything other than John Q. Citizen.

After about a half-hour I was confident that I wasn’t being tailed, and my pace began to slow in accompaniment to my mood. I found myself moving in a long, counterclockwise semicircle that I only half acknowledged was taking me in the direction of Aoyama Bochi, the enormous cemetery laid out like a triangular green bandage at the center of the city’s fashionable western districts.

On the north side of Roppongi-dori, I passed a small colony of cardboard shelters, the way stations of wandering homeless men whose lives were, in a sense, as detached and anonymous as my own. I set down the gym bag I was carrying, knowing that the bag and its contents of workout clothes and weightlifting gloves would quickly be distributed and assimilated among the gaunt and trackless wraiths nearby. Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls, the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to time into Tokyo’s collective blind spot and from there into oblivion.

Freed of the burden I had been carrying, I moved on, this time circling east. Under an overpass at Nogizaka, north of Roppongi-dori, I saw a half-dozen chinpira, gaudy in sleek racing leathers, squatting in a tight semicircle, their low-slung metal motorcycles parked on the footpath alongside them. Fragments of their conversation skipped off the side of the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes of their machines. They were probably jacked on kakuseizai, the methamphetamine that has been the Japanese drug of choice since the government distributed it to soldiers and workers during World War II, and of which these chinpira were doubtless both purveyors and consumers. They were waiting for the drug-induced hum in their muscles and brains to hit the right pitch, for the hour to grow suitably late and the night more seductively dark, before emerging from their concrete lair and answering the neon call of Roppongi.

I saw them take notice of me, a solitary figure approaching from the southern end of what was in effect a narrow tunnel. I considered crossing the street, but a metal divider made that maneuver unfeasible. I might simply have backed up and taken a different route. My failure to do so made it more difficult for me to deny that I was indeed heading toward the cemetery.

When I was three or four meters away one of them stood up. The others continued to squat, watching, alert for whatever distraction was promised.

I had already noted the absence of any of the security cameras that were growing more pervasive in the streets and subways with every passing year. Sometimes I have to fight the feeling that those cameras are looking specifically for me.

“Oi,” the one who had stood called out. Hey.

I stole a quick glance behind me to ensure that we were alone. It wouldn’t pay to have anyone see what I would do if these idiots got in my way.

Without altering my pace or direction, I looked into the chinpira’s eyes, my expression obsidian flat. I let him know with this look that I was neither afraid nor looking for trouble, that I’d done this kind of thing many times before, that if he was in search of some excitement tonight the smart thing would be to find it elsewhere.

Most people, especially those even loosely acquainted with violence, understand these signals, and can be relied on to respond in ways that increase their survival prospects. But apparently this guy was too stupid, or too jacked on kakuseizai. Or he might have misinterpreted my initial backward glance as a sign of fear. Regardless, he ignored the warning I had given him and started edging into my path.

I recognized the procedure: I was being interviewed for my suitability as a victim. Would I allow myself to be forced out into the street and the oncoming traffic? Would I cringe and flinch in the process? If so, he would know I was a safe target, and he would then escalate, probably to real violence.

But I prefer my violence sudden. Keeping him to my right, I stepped past him with my left leg, shooting my right leg through on the same side immediately afterward and then sweeping it backward to reap his legs out from under him in osoto-gari, one of the most basic and powerful judo throws. Simultaneously I twisted counterclockwise and blasted my right arm into his neck, taking his upper body in the opposite direction of his legs. For a split instant he was suspended horizontally over the spot where he had been standing. Then I drilled him into the sidewalk, jerking upward on his collar at the last instant so the back of his head wouldn’t take excessive impact. I didn’t want a fatality. Too much attention.

The sequence had taken less than two seconds. I straightened and continued on my way as before, my eyes forward but my ears trained behind me for sounds of pursuit.

There were none, and as the distance widened I indulged a small smile. I don’t like bullies-they formed too large a portion of my childhood on both sides of the Pacific-and I had a feeling it would be a long time before these chinpira worked up a fresh appetite to dispute someone’s passage along that sidewalk.

I continued along, cutting left east of the cemetery, then right on Gaiennishi-dori, taking advantage of the turn as I always automatically do to monitor the area to my rear while ostensible checking for traffic. The cemetery was now to my right, but there was no sidewalk on that side of the street, so I stayed on the left until I was opposite a long riser of stone steps, a byway between the green piazza of the dead and the living city without. I stood looking at those steps for a long time. Finally I decided that the urge to which I had almost succumbed was ridiculous, as I had decided so many times in the past. I turned and moved slowly down the street, back the way I had come.

As always after finishing a job, I was aware of the need to be among other people, to find some comfort in the illusion that I am part of the society through which I move. A few meters down the street I ducked into the Monsoon Restaurant, where I could enjoy the Southeast Asian-derived cuisine and the anodyne sounds of other people’s conversation.

I chose a seat set slightly back from the restaurant’s open-air façade, facing the street and the entrance, and ordered a simple meal of rice noodles with vegetables. Although it was late for dinner, the tables were mostly occupied. To my left were the remnants of a small office party: a few young men with loosened ties and identical navy suits, two women with them, pretty and more stylishly dressed than their companions, at ease with the traditional Japanese female role of serving food, pouring drinks, and fostering conversation. Behind them, a solitary couple, high school or college kids, leaning toward each other and holding hands across the table, the boy talking with his eyebrows raised as though suggesting something, the girl laughing and shaking her head no. To the other side, a group of older American men, dressed more casually than the other patrons, their voices appropriately low, their skin shining slightly in the light of the table lamps.

It was almost surreal, finding myself back in a restaurant or bar after finishing a job, my mind starting to drift, relief settling in after the adrenaline rush had ended. The sensations weren’t new, but the context rendered them strange, like the feel of a familiar business suit donned to attend a funeral.

I had thought I was out of all this after finishing things with Holtzer, the late chief of the CIA’s Tokyo Station. My cover had been blown, and it was time to reinvent myself, not for the first time. I had thought about the States, maybe the west coast, San Francisco, someplace with a large Asian population. But establishing a new identity in America, without the sort of groundwork that I had long since prepared in Japan, would have been difficult. Besides, if the CIA had been looking for payback for Holtzer, they might have had an easier time coming after me on their home turf. Staying in Japan left Tatsu to contend with, of course, but Tatsu’s interest in me had nothing to do with revenge, so I had judged him the lesser of the risks.

I had to smile at that. I had learned that the danger Tatsu posed to me, while certainly less acute than the straightforward possibility of getting put to sleep by some lucky CIA contractor, was far more insidious.

He had tracked me down in Osaka, Japan’s second largest metropolis, where I had gone after disappearing from Tokyo. I had moved into a highrise community called Belfa in Miyakojima, the northwest of the city. Belfa was inhabited by sufficient numbers of corporate transferees so that a recent arrival wouldn’t provoke undue attention. It was also home primarily to families with small children, the kind of people who stay aware of the composition of their neighborhood, whose presence makes it difficult to mount effective surveillance or a successful ambush.

At first I had missed Tokyo, where I had lived for two decades, and was disappointed to find myself in a city that the average Tokyoite would reflexively dismiss as a backwater in every category save brute geographical sprawl. But Osaka had grown on me. Its atmosphere, though arguably less sophisticated and cosmopolitan than Tokyo’s, is also lacking in pretense. Unlike Tokyo, whose financial, cultural, and political center of gravity is so strong that at times the city can feel self-satisfied, even solipsistic, Osaka compares itself ceaselessly to other places, its cousin to the northeast chief among them, emerging victorious, of course, in matters of cuisine, financial acumen, and general human goodness. I found something endearing in this scrappy, self-declared contest for supremacy. Maybe we don’t have the refined-read effete-manners, or the most powerful-read corrupt-political establishment, Osaka seems to declare to a Tokyo that isn’t even listening, but we’ve got a bigger heart. Over time, I began to wonder if the city didn’t have a point.

I had spotted Tatsu behind me one night as I was making my way to Overseas, a jazz club in Honmachi that I had come to like. Although I gave no sign, I had recognized him immediately. Tatsu has a squat build and a way of rolling his shoulders from side to side when he walks that makes him hard to miss. If the tail had been someone else, I would have doubled back and questioned him, if possible. Eliminated him, if not.

But since Tatsu himself was the one behind me, I knew I was in no immediate danger. As a department head with the Keisatsucho, Japan’s FBI, he could easily have had me picked up already, if that’s what he had wanted. The hell with it, I had decided. Akiko Grace, a young pianist who had electrified Japan’s jazz world with her debut CD From New York, was appearing that night, and I wanted to see her play. If Tatsu was inclined to join me, he could.

He had arrived midway through the second set. Grace was doing “That Morning,” a melancholy piece from Manhattan Story, her second CD. I watched him pause just inside the entrance, his eyes scanning the tables in back. I would have signaled him, but he knew where to look.

He made his way to my table and squeezed in next to me as though it was the most natural thing in the world that he should be meeting me here. As usual, he was wearing a dark suit that fit him like an afterthought. He nodded a greeting. I returned the gesture, then went back to watching Grace play.

She was facing away from us, wearing a shoulderless gold-sequined gown that shimmered under the cool blue spotlights like heat lightning in the night. Watching her made me think of Midori, although as much by contrast as by association. Grace’s attitude was funkier, with more swaying, more sideways approaches to the piano, and her style was generally softer, more contemplative. But when she got going, on numbers like “Pulse Fiction” and “Delancey Street Blues,” she had that same air of having been possessed by the instrument, as though the piano was a demon and she its exhilarated amanuensis.

I remembered watching Midori play, standing in the shadows of New York’s Village Vanguard, knowing it would be the last time. I’d seen other pianists perform since then. It was always a sad pleasure, like making love to a beautiful woman, but not to the woman you love.

The set ended and Grace and her trio left the stage. But the audience wouldn’t stop applauding until they had returned, with an encore of Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing.” Tatsu was probably frustrated. He wasn’t there to enjoy the jazz.

After the encore, Grace moved to the bar. People began to get up to thank her, perhaps to have her sign the CDs they had brought, then to move on to whatever else the night had in store for them.

When the people next to us had departed, Tatsu turned to me. “Retirement doesn’t suit you, Rain-san,” he said in his dry way. “It’s making you soft. When you were active, I couldn’t have tracked you down like this.”

Tatsu rarely wastes time on formalities. He knows better, but can’t help himself. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about him.

“I thought you wanted me to retire,” I said.

“From your relationship with Yamaoto and his organization, yes. But I thought we might then have the opportunity to work together. You understand my work.”

He was talking about his never-ending battle with Japanese corruption, behind much of which was his nemesis Yamaoto Toshi, politician and puppet master, the man who had suborned Holtzer, who for a time had been my unseen employer as well.

“I’m sorry, Tatsu. With Yamaoto and maybe the CIA after me, things were too hot. I wouldn’t have been much good to you even if I’d wanted to be.”

“You told me you would contact me.”

“I thought better of it.”

He nodded, then said, “Did you know that, just a few days after the last time we saw each other, William Holtzer died of a heart attack in the parking garage of a hotel in suburban Virginia?”

I remembered how Holtzer had mouthed the words I was the mole… I was the mole… when he thought I was going to die. How he had set me against my blood brother, Crazy Jake, in Vietnam, and gloated about it afterward.

“Why do you ask?” I said, my tone casual.

“Apparently, his death came as a surprise to people who knew him in the intelligence community,” he went on, ignoring my question, “because Holtzer was only in his early fifties and also kept physically fit.”

Not physically fit enough for three hundred and sixty joules from a modified defibrillator, I thought.

“It just goes to show you, you can’t be too careful,” I said, taking a sip of the twelve-year-old Dalmore I was drinking. “I take a baby aspirin myself, once a day. There was an article about it in the Asahi Shimbun a few years ago. Supposed to dramatically reduce the chances of heart problems.”

He was silent for a moment, then shrugged and said, “He was not a good man.”

Was this his way of telling me he knew I did Holtzer but didn’t care? If so, what was he going to ask in return?

“How did you hear about all this?” I asked.

He looked down at the table, then back at me. “Some of Mr. Holtzer’s associates from the CIA’s station in Tokyo contacted the Metropolitan Police Force. They were less concerned about the fact of his death than they were about the manner of it. They seem to believe you killed him.”

I said nothing.

“They wanted the assistance of the Metropolitan Police Force in locating you,” he went on. “My superiors informed me that I was to offer full cooperation.”

“Why are they coming to you for help?”

“I suspect that the Agency has been tasked with trying to eliminate some of the corruption that is paralyzing Japan’s economy. The United States is concerned that if the situation worsens, Japan’s finances could collapse. A ripple effect, and certainly a global recession, would follow.”

I understood Uncle Sam’s interest. Everyone knew the politicians were focused more on ensuring that they got their share of graft from rigged public works and yakuza payoffs than they were on resuscitating a dying economy. You could smell the rot from afar.

I took another sip of the Dalmore. “Why do you suppose they’d be interested in me?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps revenge. Perhaps as part of some anticorruption effort. After all, we know Holtzer was issuing intelligence reports identifying you as the ‘natural causes’ assassin behind the deaths of so many Japanese whistle-blowers and reformers. Perhaps both.”

Just like Holtzer, I thought. Getting credit for the intelligence reports while using the subject for his own ends. I remembered how he had looked when I left him slumped and lifeless in his rent-a-car in that suburban Virginia parking garage, and I smiled.

“You don’t seem terribly concerned,” Tatsu said.

I shrugged. “Of course I’m concerned. What did you tell them?”

“That, so far as I knew, you were dead.”

Here it comes, then. “That was good of you.”

He smiled slightly, and I saw a bit of the wily, subversive bastard I had liked so much in Vietnam, where we had met when he was seconded there by one of the precursors of the Keisatsucho.

“Not so good, really. We’re old friends, after all. Friends should help each other from time to time, don’t you agree?”

He knew I owed him. I owed him just for letting me go after I’d ambushed Holtzer outside the naval base at Yokosuka, despite all the years he’d spent trying to ferret me out previously. Now he was putting the Agency off my scent, and I owed him for that, too.

The debts were only part of it, of course. There was also an implicit threat. But Tatsu had a soft spot for me that kept him from being too direct. Otherwise, he would have dispensed with all the win-win, we’re old pals bullshit and would have just told me that if I didn’t cooperate he’d share my current name and address with my old friends at Christians In Action. Which he could very easily do.

“I thought you wanted me to retire,” I said again, knowing I’d already lost.

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a manila envelope. Placed it on the table between us.

“This is a very important job, Rain-san,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask for this favor if it weren’t.”

I knew what I would find in the envelope. A name. A photograph. Locations of work and residence. Known vulnerabilities. The insistence on the appearance of “natural causes” would be implicit, or delivered orally.

I made no move to touch the envelope. “There’s one thing I need from you before I can agree to any of this,” I told him.

He nodded. “You want to know how I found you.”

“Correct.”

He sighed. “If I share that information with you, what would stop you from disappearing again, even more effectively this time?”

“Probably nothing. On the other hand, if you don’t tell me, there’s no possibility that I would be willing to work with you on whatever you’ve got in that envelope. It’s up to you.”

He took his time, as though pondering the pros and cons, but Tatsu always thinks several moves ahead and I knew he would have anticipated this. The hesitation was theater, designed to convince me afterward that I had won something valuable.

“Customs Authority records,” he said finally.

I wasn’t particularly surprised. I had known there was some risk that Tatsu would learn of Holtzer’s death and assume I had been behind it, that if he did so he would be able to fix my movements between the time he last saw me in Tokyo and the day Holtzer died outside of D.C., less than a week apart. But killing Holtzer had been important to me, and I had been prepared to pay a price for the indulgence. Tatsu was simply presenting me with the bill.

I was silent, and after a moment he continued. “An individual traveling under the name and passport of Fujiwara Junichi left Tokyo for San Francisco last October thirtieth. There is no record of his having returned to Japan. The logical assumption is that he stayed in the United States.”

In a sense, he did. Fujiwara Junichi is my Japanese birth name. When I learned that Holtzer and the CIA had discovered where I was living in Tokyo, I knew the name was blown and no longer usable. I had traveled to the States to kill Holtzer under the Fujiwara passport and then retired it, returning to Japan under a different identity that I had previously established for such a contingency. I had hoped that anyone looking for me might be diverted by this false clue and conclude that I had relocated to the States. Most people would have. But not Tatsu.

“Somehow, I could not see you living in the States,” he went on. “You seemed… comfortable in Japan. I did not believe you were ready to leave.”

“I suppose you might have been on to something there.”

He shrugged. “I asked myself, if my old friend hadn’t really left Japan, but only wanted me to believe that he had, what would he have done? He would have reentered the country under a new name. He would have then relocated to a new city, because he had become too well known in Tokyo.”

He paused, and I recognized the employment of a fortune-teller’s trick, in which the party ostensibly charged with supplying information instead cleverly elicits it, probing under the guise of informing. So far, Tatsu had offered only suggestions and generalities, and I wasn’t going to fill in the blanks for him by confirming or denying any of it.

“Perhaps he would have used the same new name to reenter the country, and then to relocate within it,” he said, after a moment.

But I hadn’t used the same new name when I had relocated. Doing so would have presented too obvious a nexus for a determined tracker to follow. Tatsu must not have been sure of that, and, as I suspected, was hoping to learn more by getting me to react. If I were to slip and confirm that I had used the same name, he would tell me that it was by this that he had managed to find me, thereby avoiding the need to reveal how he had really done it, and leaving the vulnerability intact, perhaps to be exploited again later.

So I said nothing, affecting a slightly bored expression instead.

He looked at me, the corners of his mouth creeping upward into the barest hint of a smile. It was his way of acknowledging that I knew what he was up to, meaning it was useless for him to keep at it, and that he would now get to the point.

“Fukuoka was too small,” he said. “Sapporo, too remote. Nagoya was too close to Tokyo. Hiroshima was possible because the atmosphere is good, but I thought the Kansai region more likely because it’s less distant from Tokyo, to which I guessed you might want to maintain some proximity. That meant Kyoto, possibly Kobe. But more likely Osaka.”

“Because…”

He shrugged. “Because Osaka is bigger, more bustling, so there is more room to hide. And it has a larger transient population, so a new arrival draws less attention. Also I know how you love jazz, and Osaka is known for its clubs.”

I might have known that Tatsu would key on the clubs. During the Taisho Period, from 1912 to 1926, jazz migrated from Shanghai to Kansai, the western region of Honshu, Japan’s main island, where Osaka is located. A host of dance halls and live houses were built in the Soemoncho and Dotonbori entertainment districts, and jazz took off in cafés everywhere. The legacy lives on today in establishments like Mr. Kelly’s, Overseas, Royal Horse, and, of course, the Osaka Blue Note, and I couldn’t deny that the presence of these places had been a factor in my thinking.

I had even recognized, for the very reasons Tatsu had just articulated, that Osaka might be a somewhat predictable choice. But I had also found that I was reluctant to forgo the lifestyle advantages that the city would afford me. When I was younger, I would have reflexively forgone any such comforts in favor of the imperative of personal security. But I found my priorities were changing with age, and this, as much as anything else, was a clear sign that it was time for me to get out of the game.

So sure, knowing me as he did, it wouldn’t be too difficult for Tatsu to assume Osaka. But that wouldn’t have been enough for him to pinpoint me the way he ultimately had.

“Impressive,” I told him. “But you haven’t explained how you were then able to pick me up in a city of almost nine million.”

He raised his head slightly and looked at me directly. “Rain-san,” he said, “I understand your desire to know. And I will tell you. But it is important that the information goes no further, or the crime-fighting effectiveness of the Metropolitan Police Force will be curtailed. Can I trust you with this information?”

The question, and the revelations that might follow it, were intended to show that I could trust him, as well. “You know you can,” I told him.

He nodded. “Over the last decade or so, the major prefectural and ward governments have been independently installing security cameras in various public places, such as subway stations and major pedestrian thoroughfares. There is substantial evidence, much of it gathered from the experience of the United Kingdom, that such cameras deter crime.”

“I’ve seen the cameras.”

“You can see some of them. Not all. In any event, the cameras themselves are not really the issue. What is behind them is what matters. After the events of September eleventh in the United States, the Metropolitan Police Force undertook a major initiative to link up these informal networks of cameras with a central database that runs advanced facial recognition software. The software reads characteristics that are difficult or impossible to obscure-the distance between the eyes, for example, or the precise angles of the triangle formed by the corners of the eyes and the center of the mouth. Now, when a camera gets a match for a photograph from the database, an alert is automatically sent to the appropriate authorities. What had been primarily a psychological deterrent is now a potent anticrime and investigative tool.”

I knew of the existence of the software Tatsu was describing, of course. It was being tested in certain airports and stadiums, particularly in the United States, as a way of spotting and preempting known terrorists. But from what I’d read, the early tests had been disappointing. Or perhaps that was just disinformation. In any event, I hadn’t known Japan was so far ahead in deployment.

“The cameras are tied to Juki Net?” I asked.

“Possibly,” he answered in his dry way.

Juki Net, a vast data snooping and centralization program, went live in August 2002, perhaps inspired by the U.S. Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness Initiative. Juki Net assigns every Japanese citizen an eleven-digit identification number, and links that number to the person’s name, sex, address, and date of birth. The government maintains that no other information will be compiled. Few people believe that, and there have already been abuses.

I considered. As Tatsu noted, if word got out, the efficacy of the camera network would be compromised. But there was more.

“Weren’t there protests about Juki Net’s introduction?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. As you may know, the government introduced Juki Net without passing an accompanying privacy bill. Attempts to do so belatedly have been less than convincing. In Suginami-ku there is a boycott. Nonresidents are now seeking to establish an address in that ward to escape the system’s dominion.”

Now I understood why the government would take such care to maintain the secrecy of Juki Net’s connection to the network of security cameras. After all, even if you know it’s there, avoiding video surveillance is hell, so the danger of inadvertently tipping off criminals would be a marginal problem. The real issue, no doubt, was the government’s fear of the protests that would surely result if the public were to learn that the announced scope of the system was really only the tip of the iceberg. If the security cameras were tied together with Juki Net, people would rightly think they had a serious Big Brother situation on their hands.

“You can’t blame people for not trusting the government on this,” I said. “I read somewhere that, last spring, the defense ministry got caught creating a database on people who had requested materials under the new Freedom of Information law, including information on their political views.”

He smiled his sad smile. “When the news broke, someone tried to delete the evidence.”

“I read about that. Didn’t the LDP try to suppress a forty-page report on what had happened?”

This time his smile was wry. “The Liberal Democratic Party officials involved in the attempted cover-up were punished, of course. They had their pay docked.”

“Now there’s a deterrent to future abuses,” I said, laughing. “Especially when you know they were greased with twice what got docked.”

He shrugged. “As a cop, I welcome Juki Net and the camera networks as a crime-fighting tool. As a citizen, I find it all appalling.”

“So why swear me to secrecy on this? Sounds like a few leaks would be just the thing.”

He cocked his head to the side, as though marveling at how my thinking could be so crude. “If such leaks were timed incorrectly,” he said, “they would be as useless as a powerful but misplaced explosive charge.”

He was telling me he was up to something. He was also telling me not to ask.

“So you used this network to find me,” I said.

“Yes. I kept the mug shots that were taken of you at Metropolitan Police Headquarters when you were detained after the incident outside of Yokosuka naval base. I had these photographs fed into the computer so that the network could look for you. I instructed the technicians to focus their initial efforts on Osaka. Still, because the system turns up so many false positives, the problem took a long time and significant human resources to solve. I have been looking for you for almost a year, Rain-san.”

I realized from what he was telling me that the relentless advance of technology was going to force me to return to the nomadic existence I had adopted between Vietnam and my return to Japan, when I had wandered the earth without an identity, drifting from one mercenary conflict to another. There was no pleasure in the thought. I had done my penance for Crazy Jake and didn’t wish to repeat the experience.

“The system is not perfect,” he went on. “There are numerous gaps in coverage, for example, and, as I mentioned, too many false positives. Still, over time, we were able to identify certain commonalities in your movements. A high incidence of sightings in Miyakojima, for example. From there, it was simple enough to check the records of the local ward office for new resident registrations, weed out false leads, and uncover your address. Eventually, we were able to track you sufficiently closely so that I could travel to Osaka and follow you here tonight.”

“Why didn’t you just come to my apartment?”

He smiled. “Where you live is always where you are most vulnerable because it represents a possible choke point for an ambush. And I would not wish to surprise a man like you where he felt most vulnerable. Safer, I judged, to approach you on neutral ground, where you might even see me coming, ne?”

I nodded, acknowledging his point. If you’re a likely target for a kidnapping or assassination attempt, or for any other kind of ambush, the bad guys can only get to you where they know you’re going to be. Meaning outside your home, most likely, or the place where you work. Or at some point in between where they can rely on you to show up-maybe the only bridge crossing between your home and office, something like that. These choke points are where you need to be the most sensitive to signs of danger.

“Well?” he asked, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Did you see me?”

I shrugged. “Yes.”

He smiled again. “I knew you would.”

“Or you could have called.”

“In which case, you might have disappeared again after hearing my voice.”

“That’s true.”

“All in all, I think this was the best approach.”

“The way you went about this,” I said, “a lot of people were involved. People in your organization, maybe people with the CIA.”

He might have said something to intimate that any such lack of security was my fault, for having failed to contact him as I had suggested I would. But that wouldn’t have been Tatsu’s style. He had his interests in this matter, as I had mine, and he wouldn’t have blamed me for disappearing any more than he expected me to blame him for tracking me down.

“There has been no mention of your name in any of this,” he told me. “Only a photograph. And the technicians tasked with checking for the matches the system spits out have no knowledge regarding the basis of my interest. To them, you are simply one of many criminals that the Metropolitan Police Force is tracking. And I have taken other steps to ensure security, such as coming alone tonight and informing no one of my movements.”

This was a dangerous thing for Tatsu to admit. If it were true, I could solve pretty much all my problems just by taking out this one man. Again, he was showing me that he trusted me, that I could trust him in return.

“You’re taking a lot of chances,” I said, looking at him.

“Always,” he said, returning my gaze.

There was a long silence. Then I said, “No women. No children. It has to be a man.”

“It is.”

“You can’t have involved anyone else in this. You work with me, it’s an exclusive.”

“Yes.”

“And the target has to be a principal. Taking him out can’t just be to send a message to someone. It has to accomplish something concrete.”

“It will.”

Having established my three rules, it was now time to apprise him of the consequences for breaking them.

“You know, Tatsu, outside of professional reasons-meaning combat or a contract-there’s only one thing that has ever moved me to kill.”

“Betrayal,” he said, to show me that he clearly understood.

“Yes.”

“Betrayal is not in my nature.”

I laughed, because this was the first time I had ever heard Tatsu say something naïve. “It’s in everyone’s nature,” I told him.

We had worked out a system by which we could communicate securely, including simple codes and access to a secure electronic bulletin board that I continued to maintain for sensitive communications. I had told him I would contact him afterward, but now I wondered whether that would really be necessary. Tatsu would learn of the yakuza’s accident from independent sources and know that I had held up my end. Besides, the less contact with Tatsu, the better. Sure, we had a history. Respect. Even affection. But it was hard to believe that the alignment of our interests would last, and, in the end, that alignment, or its lack, would be all that mattered. A sad thought, in certain respects. There aren’t many people in my life, and, now that things had turned out all right, I realized I had on some level enjoyed this latest encounter with my old friend and nemesis.

Sad also because it forced me to admit something I had been avoiding. I was going to have to leave Japan. I’d been preparing for such a contingency, but it was sobering to acknowledge that the time might be at hand. If Tatsu knew where to find me, and came to believe that I’d gotten back in the game in a way that was inhibiting his life’s work of fighting corruption in Japan, it would be too easy for him to have me picked up. Conversely, if I agreed to play by his rules, it would be too easy for him to drop in periodically and ask for a “favor.” Either way, he’d be running me, and I’ve lived that life already. I didn’t want to do it again.

My pager buzzed. I checked it, saw a five-digit sequence that told me it was Harry, that he wanted me to call him.

I finished eating and motioned to the waiter that I was ready for the check. I looked around the restaurant one last time. The office party had broken up. The Americans remained, the white noise of their conversation warm and enthusiastic. The couple was still there, the young man’s posture steadfastly earnest, the girl continuing to parry with quiet laughter.

It felt good to be back in Tokyo. I didn’t want to leave.

I walked out of the restaurant, pausing to enjoy the feel of Nishi-Azabu’s cool evening air, my eyes reflexively sweeping the street. A few cars passed, but otherwise it was as quiet as the Aoyama cemetery, brooding and dark, silently beckoning, across from where I stood.

I looked again at the stone steps and imagined myself traversing them. Then I turned left and continued the counterclockwise semicircle I had started earlier that evening.