by Ashton, Hugh
“And Vishal’s not going to be able to work in India in the same way as he works here.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure about that. Maybe I could move to Mumbai or Bangalore or something?”
“Well that’s not something I would enjoy,” putting down her fork and crossing her arms. Sharpe knew her well enough that this signified a position from which she would only budge after a good deal of persuasion.
“It was only an idea. Not a good one, I admit.”
“Something tells me you’re going to have to go to Hanoi and talk to Katsuyama, don’t you think?”
“Damn it, yes.” He forked the rest of his spaghetti in silence, brooding. “All right, let’s get back home. I’ll get hold of Katsuyama and arrange to meet him.”
-o-
Sharpe first tried to contact Katsuyama through Skype, the Internet-based telephony system that had taken the place of conventional international telephones for him. However, there was no sign of anyone in the Skype directory called Masashi Katsuyama, either in roman letters, in either of the kana syllabic alphabets, or in kanji Chinese characters.
He guessed it was probably better to put things in writing, rather than try to explain things over the phone, so he started to write a cryptic e-mail message to the address on Katsuyama’s business card before remembering that he had been told that Katsuyama’s secretary filtered all e-mail.
It was doubtful whether he was still staying at the Sofitel in Hanoi – the place had certainly looked expensive when Sharpe had been there earlier, and didn’t seem the sort of place where you’d dig in for the duration. Still, it was worth a try.
He connected his computer headset and “dialled”. Amazingly, it appeared that Katsuyama was still a customer there (Sharpe hated the term “guest” that hotels use to describe their customers – “guests” typically don’t pay to stay with their hosts, he reasoned).
However, Katsuyama was apparently not actually in the hotel at that moment. Sharpe checked his watch. Well, early in the afternoon, he probably wouldn’t be, would he? He left a message with the hotel asking Katsuyama to call him back on his new mobile number.
It was later that evening that the call came from Hanoi. Sharpe and Mieko had just finished their meal, and he was ready to start washing the dishes, when his mobile rang.
Sharpe explained the situation, asking for Katsuyama’s help.
“There’s no way I’m coming back to Japan. I’ll meet you in Seoul,” Sharpe heard, in the familiar husky voice.
“Where? It’s a big city.”
“Send me a message at this address when you know where you’ll be staying and when you want to meet me. Stay in the hotel and wait for me.” Sharpe took down a Google mail address.
“All right. I’ll be there in a day or so to explain more. We can pay you well, you know.” He heard laughter at the other end.
“I’m sure you can, if you worked out how to use my invention before all this crazy Wall Street shit started to hit the fan. Just make sure my wife doesn’t get hold of it.”
Sharpe was a little taken aback by this last. Why would Katsuyama want to keep the money from reaching his wife? Obviously their relationship wasn’t that close, if they had been living in different countries for a few months, but this seemed to be taking things to some sort of extreme.
“Uh … I hear you,” replied Sharpe. “Maybe we can discuss this when we meet. You do know your father-in-law has died, don’t you?” There was a long silence at the other end.
“No, I didn’t know that,” came the answer. “How? When?”
Sharpe filled in the details, wondering exactly what the relationship was between Katsuyama and his wife if she hadn’t even bothered to inform him of the fact that his father-in-law, and principal business backer, had been killed.
“Have they caught the murderer yet?” was Katsuyama’s next question, sounding somewhat irrelevant to Sharpe’s ears. “Don’t bother answering. Silly question. The Japanese police aren’t going to waste time looking for the killer of a small-time gangster. See you in Seoul.” And the line went dead.
“Mieko!” he shouted. “I need a ticket to Seoul tonight or tomorrow morning. Can you do it for me, please?”
“What? Why are you going there?”
“To see Katsuyama and try to get him to work for us to get the thing working again. Just the way we all decided it would be.”
“But why Seoul, for God’s sake? Why not Hanoi again?”
“Not my choice.” Sharpe shrugged. “And I’m not the one calling the shots here.”
“All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be.” Soon, Sharpe could hear her on the phone, talking to a travel agent and making a reservation.
“I booked you business class on ANA,” she said as she walked into the room a few minutes later. “It seems to me that you deserve to travel comfortably this time round, and we can afford it. Leaving at 9:20 tomorrow morning from Haneda. Arriving in Gimpo at 11:45.”
Sharpe breathed a sigh of relief. Although he lived on the same side of Tokyo as the main international airport at Narita, the long train ride to Narita was never one he looked forward to. Haneda was opening up slowly as an alternative international hub, and was much easier for him to reach. “Thanks for that.”
“Anyway, all the economy class seats, and all the flights from Narita were booked solid,” she added, just as Sharpe was thinking how lucky he was to have Mieko to look after him.
“OK. I’ll book myself in at a hotel then, now I know when I’ll be arriving.” He logged onto the Web site of the Grand Hyatt in Seoul where he had stayed in the past and made a reservation for two nights. He could always extend his stay if necessary, he reasoned. It wasn’t that he had any particular liking for the hotel, but it was convenient for the centre of the city, and to his mind was less noisy and more civilised than some of the alternatives which he had used in the past. As soon as the booking was confirmed, he sent off a message to the e-mail address that Katsuyama had given him earlier. He wasn’t really surprised when he received a reply within 10 minutes, confirming that Katsuyama would meet him in the hotel lobby the next day at 4PM, and adding the information that the Google e-mail address from which the reply had been sent would now be disabled.
“Looks as though I’ll only be away for a night or so,” he called to Mieko. I’ll just take a couple of clean shirts and socks and things and not bother with any checked bags.” He moved to the bedroom and started throwing things into an overnight bag. He’d almost finished when Mieko came in and, as always, removed his efforts at packing and put his things back in the bag for him neatly and tidily.
-oOo-
Chapter 15: Seoul
Sharpe arrived at the hotel and checked into his room, where he spent the time waiting for Katsuyama by lying on the large double bed, and making notes on his laptop for his forthcoming meeting about what needed to be done to the system and how much money could be offered.
The room TV was showing CNN in English, but after seeing the same headlines three times in an hour, and listening to the same vacuous comments, Sharpe turned off the set, and found some irrelevantly pleasant background music.
With Kim, Katsuyama’s chief source of funding, now dead, Sharpe’s main questions were whether Katsuyama would be prepared to return to Japan and help to get the brokerage back on track, and how much money would be required to persuade him.
There was also the problem, Sharpe mused as he swung his legs off the bed, splashed cold water over his face, and put on his jacket and tie before going downstairs to the hotel lobby to meet Katsuyama, of what someone who was reportedly dead was doing meeting him in Seoul.
He picked a place in the lobby that he hoped was inconspicuous, but from where he could keep an eye on the main entrance doors and the reception desk so he could meet Katsuyama as soon as he arrived. Although he kept a careful eye on everyone entering and leaving the hotel, he could see no sign of Katsuyama.
He checked his watch. Katsuyama was al
most fifteen minutes late – an unforgivable sin in most Japanese people’s eyes.
Time to get up and check that Katsuyama wasn’t hiding behind a pillar or something. As he reached the reception desk, a hand tapped him on the shoulder, and a familiar voice greeted him.
“Sorry if I made you jump,” Katsuyama said to him as his heart-rate slowly returned to something closer to normal. “I prefer to come in through the side door.”
Sharpe, who had no idea that there was such a thing as a side door to the hotel, let alone any knowledge of where it was, nodded.
“Do you think they’re serving drinks?” Katsuyama asked. “I need one.”
They made their way over to a quiet corner of the lounge bar area. Sharpe was quietly amused to notice that both Katsuyama and he automatically took places with their backs to the wall from where they could keep an eye on the comings and goings around them.
“Gin and tonic,” Katsuyama ordered in English when the waiter arrived to take their orders. Sharpe followed his lead. When the waiter finally arrived with the drinks and had finished fussing with the coasters and a small bowl of cashews, and Sharpe had signed with his room number, Katsuyama took a pull at his gin and tonic, sighed, and leaned back in his chair.
“Tell me all about my father-in-law,” he said.
-o-
Sharpe took a breath. “How much do you know already?”
“Nothing, apart from what you told me on the phone yesterday.” Sharpe’s surprise must have showed on his face, because Katsuyama explained, “I have as little to do with my bitch wife as possible. And the feeling’s mutual. I’ll tell you why in a bit.”
“But even if you don’t get on with her, surely someone must have told you something about what happened to him? After all, he was one of your principal backers, wasn’t he?”
Katsuyama said nothing, but drained his glass, and set it significantly on the table in front of him. Sharpe signalled to a waiter for a refill. He had a feeling that Katsuyama was already several drinks ahead.
“All right,” Sharpe said. “I can tell you what I know about him, which isn’t much.” He recounted a brief history of his dealings with Kim, and events up to the time of the funeral, and Tomiko’s and Jon’s demands for money. When he had finished, there was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the ice cubes rattling in Katsuyama’s new glass, which was now empty.
“Who do you think killed him?” asked Katsuyama.
“I really have no idea. Members of a rival gang, maybe? The Americans? North Koreans? South Koreans? Martians? I really don’t know enough to make any kind of guess worth more than a dart thrown at a dartboard. What’s your guess?”
“Right. Too many possibilities,” replied Katsuyama. “I wouldn’t like to guess, either. I was just wondering if you knew more than I do about all this.”
“I doubt it very much. Would the British have anything to do with it? Or the Americans?”
“Maybe the Americans. Why the British? What makes you mention them as possibilities.”
“Oh, nothing.” Sharpe didn’t want to get too deep into this. “It’s just that I know a couple of guys from the embassy who seem to monitor technical developments.”
“One of them being this Jon Campbell you mentioned just now, and the other being his boss, who I have yet to have the pleasure of knowing the name?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Sharpe, a little surprised. “Do you know Jon?”
“I know Jon Campbell only too well,” said Katsuyama. “The bastard was in America not so long back, snooping round my lab, accidentally bumping into my graduate research assistants in bars and asking them questions about my work, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, he told me he’d been in Silicon Valley. How well did you actually know him there?”
“Not nearly as well as my wife did, I can tell you that. She got to know him real close up and personal.” Katsuyama grimaced. “You may have noticed that she’s somewhat attractive? Have you fucked her yet?” Sharpe shook his head, appalled at the question. “Then you’re probably one of the first men under 70 years old that she hasn’t tried to get into bed with her.” He looked at Sharpe critically. “Not that there’s a lot of temptation for her to resist, I would guess.” This time it was Katsuyama’s turn to signal the waiter. Sharpe ordered a tonic water, without the gin. “Jon Campbell was always hanging round the Stanford campus, dropping heavy hints to anyone who would listen about how he wasn’t James Bond or anything like that. So of course, all the women thought that he was, just because he said he wasn’t. And my dear lovely bitch wife was one of them.”
“So that’s where he found out about the trading function of your technology?”
Katsuyama shrugged. “I would be somewhat surprised if he didn’t get the idea from there. My graduate students only helped with some of the multicore and DSP scheduling algorithms. They thought that they were working on the image pattern recognition. Actually, that side of it works pretty well, but it was only intended as cover. Shame that it never hit the market. Of course, Jon being the kind of person he is, he might have got the skinny from anywhere.”
They sat in silence for a while. “Why aren’t you dead?” asked Sharpe. “No, you know what I mean. That’s how I came into contact with your father-in-law, after all. He thought I was conspiring with the police to hide things. He thought that you’d been kidnapped by the authorities and that I was part of the cover-up. It seemed rather loony thinking to me, but that’s what he told me.”
“Ah yes, my father-in-law.” Katsuyama sat staring in front of him. Sharpe had the feeling he had gone to sleep with his eyes open when he suddenly came out with, “What a fool. What a naïve and stupid fool to believe that he could buy his way into Pyongyang.”
“Why couldn’t he?” asked Sharpe, innocently. “From what I understood, he had quite a reasonable plan worked out.”
Katsuyama laughed bitterly. “And I suppose he told you that he didn’t want to be any part of a new government?” Sharpe nodded agreement. “I don’t suppose he bothered mentioning to you that his family had played an important role in the original Kim Il-sung regime? And they got out while they could before being liquidated as enemies of the people?” This time Sharpe shook his head. “He never wanted justice or anything of the kind for the North Korean people. He wanted to get back into the country to recover the loot his family had stolen years before.”
“What was going to be your share of all of this?” Sharpe couldn’t help asking. This new twist on things was intriguing.
“I’d been promised enough money to keep the company going and to expand it almost as much as I wanted. After all, that’s a lot of money. And I could have done so much with it. Katsuyama Electronic Devices could have become a world leader in pattern recognition, and made the money back tens or hundreds of times over.”
“What’s your problem with that?”
“But that was almost certainly just a promise. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t live to see any of the money. I’d suffer an unfortunate accident just as Kim got the money he was after. I knew him and his daughter all too well. And so I decided it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. We had the factory in Hanoi, and it’s easy enough to get yourself some decent protection there fairly cheaply. You probably didn’t notice when you met me in Hanoi, but there were five armed guards surrounding us. The Vietnamese are good at that sort of thing.” Sharpe looked around a little nervously. “Four today. One behind that pillar, and the other three at that table over there …” Sharpe looked. He’d taken them for Korean businessmen.
“OK,” Sharpe said. “I can see why you would want to skip town, given the circumstances. But why that way, and why the hell did you have to drag me into it?”
Katsuyama called for another drink – his fourth or fifth. Sharpe wasn’t counting. His breathing seemed a little more forced, and his face was slightly flushed, but he didn’t seem too drunk.
“I wanted them to believe I was dead. Didn’t ma
tter too much if it was suicide or what.”
“But they were called in to identify your body. Kim and your wife, I mean. And not your body, of course.”
“That wasn’t meant to happen. The whole point of leaving your card in the jacket was that you’d be the one called to identify the body, and I did take the trouble to find someone who looked something like me. I didn’t think that you’d remember me well enough to be able to say for sure it wasn’t me. I really don’t know how they bypassed you and went straight to Kim.”
“Actually, they didn’t bypass me completely. I was interviewed by some officials. Maybe there was something else in your pockets to identify you and that led them to your wife and her father?”
“I’m pretty sure there wasn’t.”
Sharpe thought for a moment. “Who are we talking about, anyway? The body wearing your clothes?”
“I don’t know his name. He wore my clothes, I wore his.”
“Why? What?” Sharpe shook his head in bewilderment.
“It’s amazing what a hundred thousand yen will do. I told him I was being followed by my wife’s private detective who suspected me of an affair.” Mirthless laughter. “He thought it was funny. So do I, given my wife’s habits. We changed in the toilets at the station.”
“And where was all his ID? I assume you both hung onto your own wallets, and so on.”
“I lifted it from his pocket along with the money I’d given him as we went down the escalator to the platform together. One of my minor talents.”
Sharpe knew the answer already by now, but he had to ask the question.
“He never felt a thing,” replied Katsuyama. “It was a crowded platform. It could easily have been an accident. It just so happened that it wasn’t.” He seemed totally unconcerned by the admission.
This wasn’t a topic Sharpe wanted to pursue at any length. He felt more than slightly uneasy about talking to a self-confessed murderer. He changed the subject.
“When you met me the first time, you told me that you were being chased by the CIA and NSA. Was that a complete load of crap?”
