Hard Rain

by Barry Eisler

  I walked back to Ebisu and caught a Yamanote train to Shibuya. I took the Miyamasuzaka exit to Shibuya 1-chome, then walked the short distance to the Hatou coffee shop. Windowless Hatou, with its dark wood floors and tables and long hinoki counter, its hundreds of delicate porcelain cups and saucers, and its exquisitely prepared brews, had been one of my regular haunts while I lived in Tokyo, or at least as regular as I allowed any one place to become. I missed it.

  I walked in the street-level door. The counterman issued a low irasshaimase but didn’t look up. Instead, he continued pouring steaming water from a silver pot into a filter perched over a blue porcelain demitasse. He was leaning to the side so that he was eye level with the pot, his arm describing small circles in the air to ensure that the water dripped uniformly through the grounds in the filter. He looked like he was painting, or conducting a miniature orchestra. It was a pleasure to behold such practiced devotion and I couldn’t help pausing to watch.

  When he was done he bowed and welcomed me again. I returned the gesture and made my way to the back. I turned left at the end of the L-shaped room and saw Harry sitting at one of the three back tables.

  “Hey,” he said, standing up and offering his hand.

  I shook it. “Glad to see you found the place okay.”

  He nodded. “Your directions were good.”

  I looked at the table, empty but for a glass of ice water. “No coffee?”

  “I didn’t know when you were going to get here, so I ordered two old-bean demitasses. Something called the Nire Blend. It takes a half-hour to prepare. I figured you’d like it—the waitress says it’s ‘exceptionally intense.” ’

  I smiled again. “It is. I’m not sure it’ll be to your taste.”

  He shrugged. “I like to try new things.”

  Yukiko, I thought.

  We sat down. “Well? How did it turn out?” he asked.

  I took out Kanezaki’s wallet and slid it across the table to him. “You were being followed,” I said.

  He opened it and looked at the ID inside. “Oh, shit,” he said softly. “CIA?”

  I nodded.

  “But how? Why?”

  I briefed him on my conversation with Kanezaki.

  “So it looks like they were interested in me only because they’re interested in you,” he said when I was done.

  I nodded slowly. “It looks that way.”

  “I wonder if they know who I am, other than that I’m somehow connected to you.”

  “Impossible to say. They might have cross-checked with other agencies, in which case they would know you were once with the NSA. But they’re not always so thorough.”

  “They did a nice job of tracking me from that letter, though. Stupid of me to send it.”

  “There’s more than meets the eye there. The letter alone doesn’t sound like enough. But I didn’t have time to ask.”

  We were quiet for a minute. Then he said, “It might have been enough. I only signed it with my first name, but my parents chose three kanji, not the usual two.” On his hand he traced the characters for “spring,” “giving,” and “ambition,” an unusual spelling for a common name.

  “They must have been watching Midori, too,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yeah. She was a known point of contact. They might have been doing spot surveillance and mail checks, hoping she’d hear from you. Instead they got me.”

  “I’ll buy that,” I said.

  “And I mailed that letter near the main Chuo-ku post office, not so far from where I work. There would have been a postmark. They could have used it to work outward in concentric circles. That was dumb. I should have mailed it from somewhere out of the way.”

  “You can’t be too careful,” I said, looking at him.

  He sighed. “I’m going to have to move again. Can’t have them knowing where I live.”

  “Don’t forget, they also know where you work.”

  “I don’t care about that. A lot of what I do now, I do remotely. On the days where I have to go to and from the office, I’ll run an extra-careful SDR.”

  “You haven’t been doing that already?”

  “Sorry. Not as much as I should be. But believe me, I’m careful when I go to see you.”

  This was an unavoidable problem. Inside computer networks, Harry was pure stealth. But in the real world, he was mostly a civilian. A weak spot in my armor.

  I shrugged. “If you weren’t, those guys would have gotten to me by now. Maybe at Teize, maybe another time. Your moves shook them off.”

  He brightened a little at that, then said, “You don’t think I’m in any danger, do you?”

  I thought about it. I hadn’t mentioned that Kanezaki’s partner hadn’t survived our meeting. I told him now.

  “Shit,” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about. What if they want payback?”

  “I don’t think they’d look to extract it from you. If this were a yakuza thing, it might be a different story, they might come after my friends just to hurt me. But here, if they’ve got a beef, it’s with me. You’re no threat to them. Besides, they don’t have much in-house muscle. Congress wouldn’t like it. That’s why they need people like me.”

  “What about the police? A taxi picked me up at the same spot where someone is going to find a body.”

  “Kanezaki will make a few calls and that body will be gone before anyone stumbles across it. And even if the cops were to get involved, what do they have? Even if they found a way to contact the cabdriver, all he’s got is a fake name and an average-looking guy he barely saw in the dark, right?”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “But you still have to be cautious,” I said. “This girl you’re involved with, Yukiko, you trust her?”

  He looked at me. After a moment, he nodded.

  “Because, if you’re spending the night with this girl, she knows where you live. That’s a weakness in your defenses right there.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not involved with these people . . .”

  “You never know, Harry. You never really know.”

  There was a long pause, then he said, “I can’t live that way. The way you do.”

  A thought flashed in my mind: Maybe you should have figured that out before you got involved in my world.

  But that wasn’t fair. Or particularly useful.

  The waitress brought two demitasses of the Nire Blend and set them down with exquisite care, as though they were priceless artifacts. She bowed and moved away.

  We drank the coffee. Harry said positive things about his, but there was some obvious effort behind this. It used to be that he would delight in mocking my gustatory recommendations. I couldn’t help noticing the contrast, and I didn’t care for it.

  We made small talk. When the coffee was done, we said good night, and I left him to make my circuitous way back to the hotel.

  I wondered if I really believed that the Agency posed little danger to Harry. I supposed that mostly I did. Whether they posed a danger to me was another story. They might have wanted me for help, as Kanezaki had said. Or they might have been looking for payback for Holtzer. I had no way to be sure. Regardless, eliminating Kanezaki’s escort earlier wasn’t exactly going to engender endearment.

  And there was Yukiko. She still didn’t feel right to me, and I had no way of knowing whether she was hooked up with the Agency or with someone else.

  Back at the hotel, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, again unable to sleep.

  So it wasn’t Midori, after all, I thought.

  The Agency instead of Midori. Talk about a fucking consolation prize.

  Enough. Let it go.

  I was suddenly less certain than I had been the night before that this would be my last in Tokyo. I stared at the ceiling for a long time before descending into sleep.

  6

  THE NEXT MORNING I took the bullet train back to Osaka. Arriving early in the afternoon at bustling Shin-Osaka station, I was surprised to find that it felt good
to be back. Maybe I’d gotten tired of living in hotels. Or maybe it was something about knowing that I was going to have to leave again, this time permanently.

  I knew I’d been clean when I left Tokyo, but the two-and-a-half-hour train ride had afforded me no new opportunities to check my back. That’s a long time for me, especially given my recent run-in with Kanezaki and company, and to ease my discomfort I took an appropriately circuitous route before catching a Tanimachi line train to Miyakojima, where I took the stairs of the A4 exit to the street.

  For no particular reason I made a left around the police box at the Miyakojima Hon-dori intersection, maneuvering around the hundreds of commuter bicycles jammed in all directions around the exit. I could as easily have made a right, past the local high school and toward the Okawa River. One of the things that had attracted me to the high-rise in Belfa is that the complex is approachable from all directions.

  I took a left at Miyakojima Kita-dori, then a right against traffic down a one-way street, then another left. The move against traffic would impede anyone’s attempts at vehicular surveillance. And each turn gave me an opportunity to unobtrusively glance behind me while putting me on a narrower, quieter road than the last. Anyone hoping to follow me on foot would have to stay close or lose me. There were dozens of high-rises in the area, too, and the fact that I might have been going to any one of them was another factor that would have rendered ineffective anything other than close-range surveillance.

  In some ways the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.

  On the other hand, the residents didn’t seem to mind the shambles. On the contrary: everywhere were small signs of the pride the locals took in their dwellings. The monotonous macadam and corrugated metal were relieved by small riots of potted bamboo, lavender, and sunflowers. Here was a carefully arranged cairn of volcanic rocks, there, a display of dried coral. One house had concealed what would have been an ugly ferroconcrete wall with a lovingly tended garden of angel’s trumpet, sage, and lavender.

  I lived on the thirty-sixth floor of one of the twin high-rises in the Belfa complex, in a three-bedroom corner apartment. The place was larger than I needed and most of the rooms went unused, but I liked living on the top floor, with a view of the city, above it all. Also, at the time I’d rented it, I thought it would be to my advantage to take a place that didn’t fit the profile of what a lone man, recently disappeared and with minimal needs, would take for an apartment. In the end, of course, it hadn’t mattered.

  I tell myself that I like to live in places like Belfa because parents are inherently watchful of strangers, and once they decide you belong they can form an unconscious but effective obstacle to an ambush. But I know there’s more to it than that. I don’t have a family and never will, and I’m probably drawn to such environments not just for operational security but for some other, more vicarious form of security, as well. There was a time when I didn’t seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life that fate had denied him.

  It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.

  I used a pay phone to access a voice-mail account attached to a special phone in my apartment, a sound-activated unit with a sensitive speakerphone that functions like a transmitter. The unit silently dials a voice-mail account if someone enters the apartment without knowing the code that disengages the phone, letting me know in advance and from a safe distance whether I’ve had any unexpected visitors. An identical setup had saved me in Tokyo from a Holtzer-inspired ambush, and I tend to stick with what works. I’d been checking the account daily from Tokyo without incident, and the mailbox was empty this time as well, so I knew my apartment had gone unmolested during my absence.

  From the pay phone, I walked the short distance to the Belfa complex. A softball game was under way on the field to my right. Some children were playing kickball by a granite sculpture garden in front of the building. An old man swerved past me on a bicycle, a laughing grandchild perched on the handles.

  I used the front entrance, taking care as always to approach in such a way that the security camera facing the building would get a picture only of my back. Such precautions are part of my routine, but, as Tatsu had pointed out, the cameras are everywhere and you can’t hope to spot them all.

  I took the elevator to the thirty-sixth floor and walked down the corridor to my apartment. I checked the small piece of translucent tape I had left at the bottom of the door and found it intact, still attached to the jamb. As I’d told Harry so many times, a good defense has to be layered.

  I unlocked the door and went inside. Everything was as I’d left it. Which wasn’t saying much. Beyond the futon and nightstand in one of the bedrooms, there was an olive leather couch, new but not new-looking, set against the wall facing the west of the city, where I sometimes sat to watch the sun set. A sprawling Gabeh rug covering an expanse of polished wooden floor, its strata of greens and blues interspersed with a dozen whimsical splotches of cream that were probably intended to denote goats in a pastoral setting, its weave dense and soft enough to have once served as a mattress for the nomads who made it. A massive double-bank writing desk that had made its way to Japan from England, its surface dominated by a black leather insert appropriately worn by more than a century of pressure from the pen points that moved over its surface to transact business across the oceans, conveying news that might be weeks old by the time it reached relatives abroad, announcing births and deaths, offering congratulations, felicitations, condolences, and regrets. One of those fantastically complicated but astonishingly comfortable Herman Miller Aeron desk chairs that I’d picked up on a whim from a recently demised technology start-up in Shibuya’s Bit Valley. Atop the desk, a Macintosh G4 computer and a gorgeous, 23-inch flat panel monitor, about which I’d said nothing to Harry because he was under the impression that I was a computer primitive and I saw no advantage in letting him know that I have my own knack for getting behind the odd firewall when the need arises.

  Opposite the couch was a Bang & Olufsen home theater with a six-CD changer. Next to it, a bookshelf containing an extensive collection of CDs, most of them jazz, and my modest library. The library includes a number of books on the bugei, or warrior arts, some of them quite old and obscure, containing information on combat techniques thought to be too dangerous for modern judo—spine locks, neck cranks, and the like—techniques that are, consequently, largely lost to the art. There are also some well-thumbed works of philosophy—Mishima, Musashi, Nietzsche. And there are a number of slim volumes that I order from time to time from some unusual publishers in the States, volumes that are illegal in Japan and in other countries lacking America’s perhaps overly strong devotion to freedom of speech, but which I manage to acquire nonetheless through techniques garnered from some of the volumes themselves. There are works on the latest surveillance methods and technologies; police investigative techniques and forensic science; acquiring forged identity; setting up offshore accounts and mail drops; methods of disguise and evasion; lock-picking and breaking and entry; and related topics. Of course, over the years I have developed my own substantial expertise in all these areas, but I have no plan to write a how-to account of my experiences. Instead, I read these books to learn what the opposition knows, to understand how the people I might be up against think, to predict where they might come after me, to take the appropriate countermeasures.

  The only conspicuous item in the apartment was a wooden wing-chun training dummy, about the dimensions of a large man, whic
h I had placed in the center of the apartment’s lone tatami room. Had the apartment been occupied by a family, this might have been the location of the kotatsu, a low table with a heavy quilted skirt draping to the floor and an electric brazier underneath, around which the family would nestle in the winter, their shoeless feet warmed by the brazier, their legs tucked comfortably under the quilted skirt, as they gossiped about the neighbors, examined the household bills, perhaps planned for the children’s future.

  But the wooden dummy represented a better use for me. I’d been training in judo for almost the quarter century I’d been in Japan, and loved the art’s emphasis on throws and ground fighting. But once Holtzer and the Agency had connected me to the Kodokan judo center in Tokyo, I knew joining the Osaka branch would have been too obvious a move, like a recent entrant to the federal witness protection program resubscribing to the same obscure magazines he’d always enjoyed before moving underground. For now, I felt safer training alone. The dummy kept my reflexes sharp and the striking surfaces of my hands callused and hard, and allowed me to practice some of the strikes and blocks I’d neglected to some degree while training in judo. It would have made an interesting conversation piece, if anyone ever visited my apartment.

  During the days that followed, I busied myself with my preparations for leaving Osaka. Moving hastily would be a mistake: the transitions are where you’re most vulnerable, and someone who couldn’t track me now might very well find himself able to do so if I dove suddenly into a less securely backstopped life. And Tatsu might be expecting me to move quickly; if so, he would be prepared to follow me. Conversely, if I stayed put, he might be lulled, giving me the opportunity to lose him entirely when the timing and preparations were right. He had no reason to come after me for the moment, so the lesser risk was to take the appropriate time to set things up correctly.

  I had decided on Brazil, and it was for this that I’d been studying the Portuguese that had been so useful with Naomi. Hong Kong, Singapore, or some other Asian destination, or perhaps somewhere in the States, might have been a more obvious choice, but that was of course one of the things that Brazil had going for it. And even if someone thought to look for me there, they would have a hell of a time: Brazil’s multitudes of ethnic Japanese have branched out into all areas of the country’s life, and one more transplant wasn’t going to arouse any attention at all.