At the Sharpe End

by Ashton, Hugh

  “Did he also say that he was in deep debt to these relations?”

  “No, he said that they’d helped him through Stanford and re-financed his company through a loan. He didn’t mention that it was a major outstanding debt.”

  “Thank you, Mr Sharpe. Since, according to the reports,” he shuffled through some papers, “you seem to have been nowhere near Dr Katsuyama when he died, I have no further questions. Ben?”

  “Just one. Mr Sharpe, what sort of fee was Dr Katsuyama offering you for writing his report?”

  Sharpe thought back and once more decided to oblige with a half-truth. “The exact amount wasn’t discussed. He gave me to believe it would be very generous.”

  Ben gave a hollow laugh. “I wonder what he’d have used for money?”

  Which gave Sharpe pause for thought, given what had been said earlier about debt. He also wondered about the accuracy of the annual accounts on the company Web site, given the usual lax standards of corporate accounting and auditing in Japan.

  “That’s it, then. For now, anyway.” Ben turned to Inspector Sugita.

  Sugita in turn swivelled to face Sharpe. “Are you intending to leave Japan soon, Mr Sharpe?”

  “No, not unless a client asks me to do some research overseas, and then I might have to go away for a week or two. But there’s nothing definite in that line in the immediate future.”

  “If you are going to leave Japan, Mr Sharpe, please make sure you let me know in advance.” He pushed a card across the table with simply the two characters for “Sugita”, and a mobile telephone number printed on it. Sharpe wondered for a moment if Ben was going to give him a card, but only for a moment. He scooped up Sugita’s card and tucked it carefully into his wallet.

  “Thank you for visiting us today,” said Sugita.

  “Yeah, thanks for nothing,” added Ben, lighting yet another cigar.

  Sharpe stood up and turned to leave.

  “Oh, one more thing,” called Ben to his back. “What was Katsuyama wearing when you met him? Was he carrying anything?”

  Sharpe turned round, half-closing his eyes in a conscious attempt to appear as a co-operative witness. “Dark blue suit. Pale blue shirt. Dark red tie with patterns on it. Yellow patterns. And he was carrying a black attaché case and had a shoulder bag over one shoulder. Dark grey. The bag, not the shoulder.” The others ignored this last.

  “OK, you actually did see him,” replied Ben. “I was beginning to wonder.”

  Sharpe ignored this, and left, closing the door behind him. He walked along the corridor to the entrance lobby, enjoying the sunlight as he opened the door. His mobile phone started to ring as he started down the steps. The display told him it was Mieko.

  “Hello, dear,” he said.

  “Are you coming home for lunch?” she asked.

  “Yes, and I think fish would be a good idea for today’s lunch.”

  “You can eat fish?” she confirmed.

  “Yes. Maybe only small fish, though. But I can certainly eat fish.”

  “Good,” she said, and rung off.

  -o-

  As he started to walk home, Sharpe had time to think. Who was “Ben”, for example? NSA? Katsuyama had claimed they were the ones chasing him? FBI? CIA? Or any one of a number of shadowy three-letter agencies infesting the area around Washington who seemed to treat Tokyo as a second home, if Roppongi barroom gossip was to be believed? And who was Sugita? Not a policeman, despite the uniform, Sharpe was willing to bet money on that.

  Had he lied to them? Sharpe replayed the conversation, if that’s what you wanted to call it, in his head, and considered. He certainly had told them the truth and nothing but the truth. But it wasn’t the whole truth, so help him God. But then they hadn’t asked, and he certainly hadn’t been on oath.

  And how much of the truth had Katsuyama told Sharpe? There was probably more than a grain of truth in his story. What if Ben’s crowd had got their story wrong? Sharpe reflected. It wouldn’t be the first time that the Americans had made mistakes of this kind. Suppose Katsuyama had actually done this research, but it really was his own technology that he’d developed by himself, not stolen from Stanford, as Ben was claiming?

  And more importantly, what was in that Hello Kitty box sitting in Kumi-chan’s toy cupboard? This was something he was going to have to find out soon, if only because the curiosity was burning a hole in his mind. The more he thought about it, the more surprised he was with himself for not having opened it earlier. Another thing struck him as he turned into the bush-flanked entrance of the “mansion” (Japanese English for “block of flats”) where he lived; what was the legal status of whatever was inside it? Did it belong to Katsuyama’s estate or his company? To Sharpe? To Stanford University? To the company that had funded the research?

  Sharpe had hardly ever seen Mieko so pleased to see him. “I was really frightened I was going to have to get you out of there. I’ve never heard of anything quite like this happening to anyone.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t have to,” returning her embrace. “But really, you don’t have to worry.”

  “What was Inspector Sugita like? Scary?”

  “No, actually. I quite liked him, in fact,” Sharpe said, a little to his own surprise. But when he thought about it, it was true. Sugita had behaved politely and reasonably. But he thought it better not to mention the American at this stage. It would only complicate things.

  They ate lunch, deliberately steering round the topic of the morning’s events. Sharpe had assigned the afternoon as a “work at home” time, so he shut himself in his home office after finishing the meal, willed himself not to open the Hello Kitty box, and worked solidly until about five o’clock. A little after five, Mieko popped her head around the door. “I’m going to aerobics tonight, remember? I changed from Tuesday this week.”

  “Oh, that’s right. What and when do you want to eat, then?” It was Sharpe’s evening to cook the evening meal.

  “Shrimp curry? We’ve got some shrimp in the freezer, and I’ll put them out to defrost,” Sharpe nodded. “About 6:30?”

  “OK, just give me a few minutes to finish these paragraphs and I’ll make a start.”

  -o-

  Sharpe had always found he could do a lot of constructive thinking while cooking – mixing things, chopping vegetables and so on. He enjoyed the creative process and the feel of doing something physical after working with words all day. The only real problem was that he liked to do things in the kitchen in his own way, which wasn’t always the approved way or even the most efficient way. It meant no-one else could help, or even be in the kitchen while Sharpe was cooking. It was bad for the nerves of all parties. Mieko had discovered this early on in their relationship, and she now kept out of Sharpe’s way while he prepared any meal. If he wanted to see things in a philosophical light, Sharpe considered that his kitchen technique could be taken as a metaphor for his whole life – a basic incompatibility between his way of doing things and that of the world at large.

  Sharpe was heating the garlic and spices in oil when the great thought struck him – so hard that the mixture turned a very deep shade of brown before he noticed and snatched it off the stove.

  Vishal! Of course. Vishal (his family name was something multi-syllabic and unpronounceable for Westerners) was an Indian friend from Bangalore who lived nearby and worked at the Tokyo branch of one of the international investment banks. Maybe it was the smell of the curry that had reminded him. Sharpe always felt that one of the joys of the international life in Tokyo was the chance to make friends with people from different countries whom you’d have little or no opportunity of meeting in “normal” life.

  His friends ranged from Czechs, Hungarians, Latvians and Russians, through New Zealanders and Australians, and Chinese from Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada, through to a large number of Indians, imported by the large international finance houses to manage their computer systems (for a variety of reasons, it usually proved impossible to hire Japa
nese of a sufficiently high level of competence for these positions).

  Vishal, one of these Indians who had been living in Japan for nearly four years now, had an almost intuitive gift for understanding computers and things related, and as a result his job title at the bank seemed to become more impressive every time Sharpe saw him. They’d first met while Sharpe had been called in on a project at the bank where Vishal worked, and something had clicked on a personal level, especially when they discovered they lived close to each other in the wilds of Chiba (as the Tokyo-dwellers regarded it). He was the perfect person, Sharpe reasoned, to say what the Hello Kitty box contents (if they were anything like what had been promised) actually were.

  He finished preparing the curry base of onions, coconut milk and a little lemongrass, and left it simmering while he went back for the box. Cutting the tape neatly, he looked inside for the first time since he had been given it over 24 hours earlier (had it really been that long? he asked himself).

  Inside was a long circuit card, obviously meant to be fitted into a PC, wrapped in a transparent protective anti-static plastic bag. Looking through the plastic, a mass of extremely large chips, presumably digital signal processors, were visible, arranged in an array on the card. He slid the card out of the bag, holding it carefully by the edges, and looked more closely. It was obviously a multi-layer board, not just a prototyping board, and it was extremely complex in terms of the number of connections between the chips. There were a few “kludges” on the back side – small strands of thin wire making additional connections – added after the card had been assembled.

  Also in the box, under the card, was a CD in a case. It was a recordable CD-R, with about half the space used (Sharpe used the trick of holding the disc at an angle to the light to tell how much had been written) and the words “Rev 0.94/71c” and a date about a month ago hand-written in black felt marker.

  He put everything back in the box and closed the lid. Vishal was going to have fun tonight, he thought, heading back to the kitchen. Between stirs of the saucepan, Sharpe called Vishal on his mobile number and confirmed that he was ready to receive visitors that evening.

  The curry was nearly ready. Sharpe tossed in the shelled shrimps and some quartered hard-boiled eggs and waited a few minutes for them to heat through. Mieko came in from the living-room and the curry was speedily demolished, together with rice and home-made green tomato chutney (a speciality of Sharpe’s).

  “What are you going to do tonight? Rent a video?” asked Mieko as she was going out of the door.

  “No, I thought I’d pop round and see Vishal. Haven’t seen him for a long time.”

  “Say hello to him and Meema for me, then? Do you want to take some sweets? You know how Meema loves those daifuku you can get from the store on the corner? They’re open till eight or so, so you should be able to get a few if you start off fairly soon.”

  “Good idea. Have fun at the aerobics.” She set off, and after washing the dishes, Sharpe picked up the Hello Kitty box, and set off, locking the door behind him.

  -o-

  Sharpe arrived at Vishal’s about twenty minutes later, having stopped, as suggested, to buy the Japanese goodies along the way. He’d never seen the point of owning a car in Tokyo, even though some of his foreign friends felt it necessary to proclaim their status by owning costly lumps of metal, which sat unused in their expensive parking slots except for a week or so each year when the owners went on holiday, often stuck in traffic jams for up to six hours at a stretch. And then they had the nerve to charge you for the use of these so-called “expressways”. Sharpe told himself that the benefits of walking everywhere the trains wouldn’t take him offset most of the damage to his health caused by his largely sedentary life-style.

  Vishal’s absurdly beautiful wife Meema answered the door. Sharpe, although he remembered and usually obeyed the commandment about not coveting your neighbour’s wife, found it difficult to obey all the rules in Meema’s case. Happily for all concerned, the level of covetousness stayed at a very minor flirtation level, at its maximum, which didn’t happen very frequently anyway, due to some self-restraint on Sharpe’s part and (he assumed) a complete lack of interest on Meema’s. It stayed at that level, but certain irrelevant thoughts sometimes intruded while Sharpe was showering. He was pretty sure that Meema didn’t suffer from similar problems.

  Sharpe passed her the daifuku he’d picked up on the way, and she greeted them with the expected rapture before showing him into Vishal’s home office, which looked more like an elephants’ graveyard for elderly computing equipment every time Sharpe visited. Vishal met him excitedly halfway across the room, almost leaping from his chair to perform the greeting.

  Much as Sharpe liked Vishal and respected him as a person, his accent was always an inexhaustible source of amusement. He always sounded to Sharpe like a British comedian’s imitation of an Indian who has only just started to learn English, and Sharpe had found that if he didn’t consciously stop himself, he found himself imitating Vishal’s verbal mannerisms after only a few minutes’ conversation. Highly embarrassing, even if Vishal never seemed to notice, or was too much of a gentleman to comment if he did. His Japanese had the same accent, and Mieko also found herself speaking Japanese with an Indian accent after an evening with him and Meema (Meema’s English and Japanese were both almost fluent and accent-less, by the way).

  “Well, Kenneth-san, and what can I be doing for you this evening?”

  Unfortunately, all too many of Sharpe’s visits to Vishal in the past had been based around requests for technical assistance of one sort or another, ranging from CD-ROMs stuck in drives (Sharpe had inadvertently inserted two at once) to dealing with a particularly evil virus infestation (save the data, reformat the hard disk and re-install everything). This evening, Sharpe explained a little about how a client had presented him with some hardware and a CD-ROM, and no adequate way of explaining them. Not too far off the truth, when you thought about it, really.

  “Well, have you not brought them round? What can you expect me to do for you if you are not going to co-operate fully?”

  Shades of Inspector Sugita, Sharpe thought to himself, handing over the Hello Kitty box.

  “Oho, yes. Most interesting. Most interesting indeed. Well then, we are going to have to find out about you, aren’t we?” he said, looking at the box. “I think we’ll start with you,” picking up the CD-ROM and putting it into the drive on his computer. Listening to Vishal’s infuriating habit of talking to inanimate things as he worked, Sharpe always thought it would drive him mad if he ever had to share an office with him. Since he didn’t, he always said nothing.

  Vishal picked up another disc and put it into another CD drive attached to the same computer. “First, we’ll make a copy of you, won’t we? Just in case you get scratched or something.” Sharpe said nothing, but drew up a chair and peered over Vishal’s shoulder. Watching Vishal at work, he got a feeling like the one when a good doctor starts probing the sore spot that’s been bothering you, and you know you’re in good hands now.

  When the copy was done, Vishal ejected the original, put it back in its case and wordlessly handed it back to Sharpe. Then he turned his attention back to the computer screen. “Aha! So you are being Linux?” he asked the disc. “Very good, but we can still play!”

  He restarted the computer, which had been running Microsoft Windows, and pressed a few keys to start up a different operating system – in this case, the free Linux system, which is used more and more in banks and scientific laboratories. It didn’t surprise Sharpe that Katsuyama had used Linux for his work. In fact, he’d recently written a paper on the prevalence of Linux as the system of choice in Japanese research institutions, and he used it more and more in his own work following the virus outbreaks of the mid-2000s.

  At this moment, Meema came in with a tray loaded with a plate of food and some cans of beer. “Samosas for you boys?” she asked. Knowing what the reply would be from both, she put her burden down
on the table beside Vishal.

  “Thank you,” said Sharpe. Vishal said nothing, so Meema gently cuffed the side of his head. “Thank you,” he grunted.

  “That’s better,” she said. “One of you has some manners, anyway,” looking at Sharpe. “Hmm. Interesting,” bending down over the open Hello Kitty box. “That’s a DSP array?” Sharpe always considered it an unfair distribution of gifts on the part of Providence that a Ph.D. in applied electronics working on trading strategies at a major brokerage should also be a beautiful woman and a superb cook, but Meema was all of those things. “Getting into image processing?” she asked Sharpe.

  “I think so,” Sharpe replied.

  “Well, why were you not telling me that, then, instead of wasting your time talking to her?” Vishal asked Sharpe.

  “Because your samosas stink and hers don’t,” Sharpe replied, biting into one of Meema’s marvellous offerings. Everyone laughed. Vishal’s cooking skills could burn a boiled egg. “How did you know?” to Meema.

  “Because those are 64-bit processors. Too much for audio work. You might be going in for some other kind of signal processing, but video has the most applications these days. Very trendy. Do you really need all that floating-point capability, though?”

  “Why am I wasting my time talking to Vishal?” Sharpe asked rhetorically.

  “Because I get my hands dirty. She’s just into theory. And she knows nothing about software,” replied Vishal. In this case, reflected Sharpe, “nothing” was a highly relative term. Meema only knew as much about software as the average computer science Ph.D. who happened to design trading systems for exotic financial products at the bank where she worked with Vishal.

  “Well, I’m in the kitchen getting my hands dirty if you want any more help,” said Meema, leaving the room with an air of offended dignity and her pretty chin in the air. Sharpe knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t really that offended. Sparring like this seemed to be a continuous game between her and Vishal.

  A few more minutes typing and clicking with the mouse and, “Oho! So now we see who’s right!” Vishal dramatically pressed the Enter key and a message appeared.