Hard Rain

by Barry Eisler

  “It’s a bug and video detector,” he said, pronouncing the words slowly as though I might otherwise fail to comprehend them. “If you come within shooting distance of radio frequency or infrared, it’ll let you know.”

  “In a sexy female voice, I hope?”

  He laughed. “If someone’s trying to record you, you might not want them to know that you know. So no sexy voice. Just a vibration mode. Intermittent for video, continuous for audio. Alternating for both. And only in ten-second bursts, to conserve battery power.”

  “How does it work?”

  He beamed. “Wide-range circuitry that detects transmitters operating on frequencies from fifty megahertz to three gigahertz. Plus it’s got an internal antenna that picks up the horizontal oscillator frequency radiated by video cameras. I’ve optimized it for the PAL standard, which is what you’re most likely to encounter, but I can change it to NTSC or SECAM if you want. Reception isn’t great because it’s so small, so you won’t be able to tell where the bug or camera is, only that one is there. And the big security closed-circuit TV units you sometimes see in train stations and parks will usually be out of the unit’s range.”

  Too bad about the CCTV units. If I had a reliable, portable way to detect those, I’d have a shot at getting my privacy back from Tatsu and whomever else.

  “Any chance you can make the reception a little better?” I asked.

  He looked a little hurt, and I realized I should have praised him before asking that. “Not for something this small,” he said. “You’d need something with a much bigger antenna.”

  Oh well. Even with its limitations, the unit would be useful. I hefted it in my hand. I was familiar with functionally similar commercial models, of course, but I hadn’t seen one this small. It was an impressive piece of work.

  “Rechargeable battery?” I asked.

  “Of course. Lithium ion. Just like a cell phone.” He reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like an ordinary cell phone charger. “I ran it down testing it, so you’ll need to charge it when you get home. And don’t forget to juice it up every day. There’s no low battery indicator or anything else like that. I built this thing for speed, not looks.”

  I took the charger and put it on the table next to me. Then I pulled out my wallet and slid the unit into it. It was a nice, snug fit. I would examine it back at the hotel, of course, to confirm that it was a bug detector and not some sort of bug. Not that I don’t trust Harry. I just like to satisfy myself about these things.

  I put my wallet back in my pants and nodded appreciatively. “Nice work,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He smiled. “I know you’re a professional paranoid, so I figured it was either this or a lifetime supply of Valium.”

  I laughed. “Now, tell me, what’s with the vampire hours?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, looking away, “just lifestyle stuff.”

  Lifestyle stuff? As far as I knew, Harry had no lifestyle. In my imagination he was always huddled in his apartment, worming his way into remote networks, creating backdoors to exploit later, mediating the world through the safety of a computer screen.

  I noticed he was blushing. Christ, the kid was so transparent. “Harry, are you going to tell me you’ve got a girlfriend?” I asked.

  The blush deepened, and I laughed. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Good for you.”

  He looked at me, checking to see whether I was going to tease him. “She’s not exactly my girlfriend.”

  “Well, never mind the taxonomy. How did you meet her?”

  “Work.”

  I picked up my glass. “You going to give me details, or do I have to force-feed you two or three of these to loosen your tongue?”

  He made a face of exaggerated disgust. “One of the firm’s clients, one of the big trading houses, was happy with some security work I did for them.”

  “Guess they didn’t know about the backdoors you left for yourself in the process.”

  He smiled. “They never do.”

  “So the client is happy . . .”

  “And my boss took me out to celebrate, to a hostess club.”

  Most westerners have a hard time grasping the concept of the Japanese “hostess club,” where the women are paid only for conversation. The west accepts the notion that sex can be commodified, but rebels at the idea that other forms of human interaction might be subject to purchase, as well. For hostesses are not prostitutes, although, like the geisha from whom they’re descended, they might strike up an after-hours relationship with the right customer, after a suitable courtship. Rather, patrons at such establishments pay for the simple pleasure of the girls’ company, and for their ability to smooth out the rough edges of business meetings, as well as for the hope that, eventually, something more might develop. If it were simple sex that the hostesses’ clients were after, they could buy it for much less elsewhere.

  “What club?” I asked him.

  “A place called Damask Rose.”

  “Haven’t heard of it.”

  “They don’t advertise.”

  “Sounds upscale.”

  “It is. It’s a pretty refined place, in fact. In Nogizaka, on Gaienhigashi-dori. They probably wouldn’t let you in.”

  I laughed. I love when Harry shows some spirit. “Okay, so the boss takes you to Damask Rose . . .”

  “Yeah, and he had a lot to drink and was telling everyone that I’m a computer genius. One of the hostesses asked me some questions about how to configure a firewall because she just bought a new computer.”

  “Pretty?”

  The blush reappeared. “I guess. Her computer was a Macintosh, so I liked her right off the bat.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I didn’t know that kind of thing could form the basis for love at first sight.”

  “So I answered a few of her questions,” he said, ignoring me. “At the end of the night, she asked if I would give her my phone number, in case she had any more questions.”

  I laughed. “Thank God she didn’t just give you her number. She would have died of old age waiting for you to call.”

  He smiled, knowing that this was probably true.

  “So she called you . . . ,” I said.

  “And I wound up going over to her apartment and configuring her whole system.”

  “Harry, you ‘configured her whole system’?” I asked, my eyes mock-wide.

  He looked down, but I saw the smile. “You know what I mean.”

  “You’re not going to . . . penetrate her security, are you?” I asked, unable to resist.

  “No, I wouldn’t do that to her. She’s nice.”

  Christ, he was so smitten that he couldn’t even spot the sophomoric double entendre. “I’ll be damned,” I said again. “I’m happy for you, Harry.”

  He looked at me, saw that my expression was genuine. “Thanks,” he said.

  I raised my glass to my nose, took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it go. “So she’s got you keeping odd hours?” I asked.

  “Well, the club is open until three A.M. and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home . . .”

  “I get the picture,” I said. Although in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attachment that didn’t have an Ethernet cable and a mouse. He was an introverted, socially stunted guy, with no contacts that I knew of outside of his day job, which he kept at arm’s length in any event, and me. Conditions that had always made him useful.

  I tried to picture him with a high-end hostess, and couldn’t see it. It didn’t feel right.

  Don’t be a prick, I thought. Just because you can’t have someone in your life, don’t begrudge Harry.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Yukiko.”

  “Yukiko” means “snow child.” “Pretty name,” I said.

  He nodded, his expression slightly dopey. “I like it.”

  “How much does she know about you?” I asked, taking a sip of the Lagavulin. My tone
was innocent, but I was concerned that, in the delirium of what I assumed was first love, Harry would be unnecessarily open with this girl.

  “Well, she knows about the consultant work, of course. But not about the . . . hobbies.”

  About his extreme proclivity for hacking, he meant. A hobby that could land him in jail if the authorities caught wind of it. In the ground, if someone else did.

  “Hard to keep that sort of thing secret,” I opined, testing.

  “I don’t see why it would have to come up,” he said, looking at me.

  A waitress appeared from behind a curtain and set Harry’s order on the bar in front of him. He thanked her, showing a deep appreciation for this newly wonderful class of being, women who work in restaurants and bars, and I smiled.

  I realized at some level that if Harry was going to start living more like a civilian, he would be less useful, and possibly even dangerous, to me. His increasing transparency to the wider world might offer an enemy a window into my otherwise hidden existence. Of course, if someone connected Harry to me, they might come after him, too. And despite what I’d tried to teach him over the years, I knew that, out in the open, Harry wouldn’t have the means to protect himself.

  “Is she your first girlfriend?” I asked, my tone gentle.

  “I told you, she’s not really my girlfriend,” he answered, ducking the question.

  “If she’s occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until the sun sets, I feel safe using the word as shorthand.”

  He looked at me, cornered.

  “Is she?” I asked again.

  He looked away. “I guess so.”

  I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. “Harry, I only ask because, when you’re young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you’re just having fun, you don’t need to tell her anything. You shouldn’t tell her anything. But if the attachment gets deeper, you’ll need to do some hard thinking. About how close you want to get with her, about how important your hobbies are. Because you can’t live with one foot in daylight and the other in shadows. Believe me on this. It can’t be done. Not long-term.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “Everybody in love is stupid,” I told him. “It’s part of the condition.”

  I saw him blush again, at my use of the word and the assumption behind it. But I didn’t care how he referred to these new feelings in his own mind. I know what it’s like to live walled off, isolated, and then suddenly, unbelievably, to have that pretty girl you’d longed for returning the feeling. It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.

  I smiled bitterly, thinking of Midori.

  Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. But I wanted to do it in person.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “A few months ago I got a letter. From Midori.”

  I finished off the Lagavulin before answering. If the letter had arrived that long ago, a few moments more for me to figure out how I wanted to respond weren’t going to make a difference.

  “She knew where to reach you . . . ,” I started, although I had already figured it out.

  He shrugged. “She knew because we brought her over to my apartment to handle the musical aspects of that lattice encryption.”

  I noticed that, even now, Harry felt compelled to carve out Midori’s precise role in that operation to clarify that he had been fully capable of handling the encryption itself. He was sensitive about these things. “Right,” I said.

  “She didn’t know my last name. The envelope was only addressed to Haruyoshi. Thank God, otherwise I would have had to move, and what a pain in the ass that would have been.”

  Harry, like anyone else who values privacy, takes extreme pains to ensure that there is no connection anywhere—not on utility bills, not on cable TV subscriptions, not even on lease documents—between his name and the place where he lives. This kind of disassociation requires some labor, involving the establishment of revocable trusts, LLCs, and other blind legal entities, and it can all be blown in a heartbeat if your Aunt Keiko visits you at your home, notes your address, and decides to send you, say, flowers to thank you. The flower shop puts your name and address into its database, which it then sells to marketing outfits, which in turn sell the information to everyone else, and your true residence is now available to anyone with even rudimentary hacking or social engineering skills. The only way to regain your privacy is to move again and repeat the exercise.

  If what was sent to you was just an ordinary letter, of course, the only person who might make the connection is the postman. It’s up to the individual to decide whether that would be an acceptable risk. For me, it wouldn’t be. Probably not for Harry, either. But if only his first name had appeared on the envelope, he would be all right.

  “Where was the letter from?” I asked him.

  “New York. She’s living there, I guess.”

  New York. Where Tatsu had sent her, after telling her I was dead, to protect her from suspicion that she might still have the computer disk her father had stolen from Yamaoto, a disk containing enough evidence of Japan’s vast network of corruption to bring down the government. The move made sense for her, I supposed. Her career in America was taking off. I knew because I was watching.

  He reached into a back pants pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

  I took it and paused for a moment before unfolding it, not caring what he would make of my hesitation. When I looked, I saw that it was written in confident, graceful longhand Japanese, an echo, perhaps, of girlhood calligraphy lessons, and a reflection of the personality behind the pen.

  Haruyoshi-san,

  It is still cold in New York, and I am counting the days to Spring. I imagine that soon enough, the cherry blossoms will be blooming in Tokyo and I am sure they will be beautiful.

  I trust that you, too, have heard the sad news that our mutual friend Fujiwara-san has passed away. I have been given to understand that Fujiwara-san’s body had been returned to the United States for burial. I have hoped to visit the gravesite to present an offering for his spirit, but, regrettably, I have been unable to discover where he has been laid to rest. If you have any information that would be helpful to me in this matter, I would sincerely appreciate your assistance. You can reach me at the above address.

  I humbly pray for your health and well-being. Thank you for your solicitude.

  Yours,

  Kawamura Midori

  I read it again, slowly, then a third time. Then I folded it back up and extended it to Harry.

  “No, no,” he said, his hands raised, palms forward. “You keep it.”

  I didn’t want him to see that I wanted it. But I nodded and slipped it into an inside pocket of the blazer I was wearing.

  I signaled the bartender that it was time for another Lagavulin. “Did you answer this?” I asked.

  “I did. I wrote back, and told her that I had heard exactly what she had, that I didn’t have any other information.”

  “Did you hear from her after that?”

  “Just a thank-you. She asked me to let her know if I heard anything, and told me she would do the same.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yeah.”

  I wondered if she had bought the story. If she hadn’t thanked Harry for his response, I would have known she hadn’t bought it, because she was classy and it wouldn’t have been like her not to respond. But the thank-you might have been automatic, sent even in the presence of continued suspicions. It could even have been duplicitous, intended to lull Harry into thinking she was satisfied when in fact the opposite was true.

  That’s bullshit, some part of me spoke up. She’s not like that.

  Then a bitter smile: Not like you, you mean.

  There was nothing duplicitous about Midori, and knowing it opened up a little ache. The environment I’ve inhabited for
so long has conditioned me to assume the worst. At least I still occasionally remember to resist the urge.

  It didn’t matter. There were too many oddities surrounding the disk’s disposition and my disappearance, and she was too smart to miss them. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it over the last year or so, and I knew the way she would see it.

  After what had happened between us, the doubts would have started small. But there would have been nothing to check their growth. After all, she would think, the contents of the disk were never published. That was Tatsu’s doing, not mine, but she would have no way of knowing that. All she would know was that her father’s last wishes were never carried out, that his death was ultimately futile. She would wonder again how I had known where to find that disk in Shibuya, go over my previous explanations, find them wanting. That would have led her to start thinking about the timing of my appearance, so soon after her father’s death.

  And she knew I was part of something subterranean, although she never knew exactly what. The CIA? One of the Japanese political factions? Regardless, an organization that had the resources to fake a death and backstop it reasonably effectively.

  Yeah, with all these loose threads, and without me there to reassure her that what happened between us had been real, I knew that, eventually, she would conclude that she had been used. That’s how I would see it, in her shoes. Maybe the sex was just opportunistic for him, she would think. Sure, why not, might as well have a little fun while I’m using her to get the disk. And then I’ll just disappear afterward, after I’ve tricked her into cooperating. She wouldn’t want to believe all this, but she wouldn’t be able to shake the feeling. And she wouldn’t want to believe that I might actually have been involved in some way in her father’s death, but she wouldn’t be able to let that suspicion go, either.

  “Did I handle it right?” Harry asked.

  I shrugged. “You couldn’t have handled it any better than you did. But she’s still not buying it.”

  “You think she’ll let it go?”

  That was the question I was always left with. I hadn’t managed to answer it. “I don’t know,” I told him.