Rain Fall

by Barry Eisler

  I headed to Suidobashi, where I began a thorough SDR by catching the JR line to Shinjuku. I changed trains at Yoyogi and watched to see who got off with me, then waited on the platform after the train left. I let two trains pass at Yoyogi before I got back on, and one stop later I exited at the east end of Shinjuku Station, the older, teeming counterpart to sanitized, government-occupied west Shinjuku. I was still wearing sunglasses to hide my swollen eye, and the dark tint gave the frenzied crowds a slightly ghostly look. I let the mob carry me through one of the mazelike underground shopping arcades until I was outside the Virgin Megastore, then fought my way across the arcade to the Isetan Department Store, feeling like a man trying to ford a strong river. I decided to buy Midori an oversized navy cashmere scarf and a pair of sunglasses with wraparound lenses that I thought would change the shape of her face. Paid for them at different registers so no one would think the guy in the sunglasses was buying a neat disguise for the woman in his life.

  Finally, I stopped at Kinokuniya, about fifty meters down from Isetan, where I plunged into crowds so thick they made the arcade seem desolate by comparison. I picked up a couple of magazines and a novel from the Japanese best-seller section and walked over to the register to pay.

  I was waiting in line, watching to see who was emerging from the stairway and escalator, when my pager starting vibrating in my pocket. I reached down and pulled it out, expecting to see a code from Harry. Instead the display showed an eight-digit number with a Tokyo prefix.

  I paid for the magazines and the book and took the stairs back to the first floor, then walked over to a pay phone on a side street near Shinjuku-dori. I inserted a hundred-yen coin and punched in the number, glancing over my shoulder while the connection went through.

  I heard someone pick up on the other end. “John Rain,” a voice said in English. I didn’t respond at first, and the voice repeated my name.

  “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

  There was a pause. “My name is Lincoln.”

  “That’s cute.”

  “The chief wants to meet with you.”

  I understood then that the caller was with the Agency, that the chief was Holtzer. I waited to see if Lincoln was going to add something, but he didn’t. “You must be joking,” I said.

  “I’m not. There’s been a mistake and he wants to explain. You can name the time and the place.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You need to hear what he has to say. Things aren’t what you think they are.”

  I glanced back in the direction of Kinokuniya, weighing the risks and possible advantages.

  “He’ll have to meet me right now,” I said.

  “Impossible. He’s in a meeting. He can’t get free before tonight, at the earliest.”

  “I don’t care if he’s having open-heart surgery. You tell him this, Abe. If he wants to meet me, I’ll be waiting for him in Shinjuku in twenty minutes. If he’s one minute late, I’m gone.”

  There was a long pause. Then he asked, “Where in Shinjuku?”

  “Tell him to walk out the east exit of Shinjuku JR Station directly toward the Studio Alta sign. And tell him that if he’s wearing anything besides pants, shoes, and a short-sleeved T-shirt, he’ll never see me. Okay?” I wanted to make it as hard as possible for Holtzer to conceal a readily accessible weapon, if that’s what he was planning to do.

  “I understand.”

  “Exactly twenty minutes,” I said, and hung up.

  There were two possibilities. One, Holtzer might have something legitimate to say, the chances of which were remote. Two, this was just an attempt to reacquire me to finish the job they had botched outside my apartment. But either way, it was a chance for me to learn more. Not that I would count on Holtzer to be straight with me one way or the other, but I could read between the lines of his lies.

  I had to assume there would be cameras. I’d keep him moving, but the risk would still be there. But what the hell, I thought. They know where you live, bastards have probably got a damn photo album by now. You don’t have a whole lot of anonymity to protect anymore.

  I crossed back to Shinjuku-dori and walked to the front of the Studio Alta building, where several cabs were waiting for fares. I strolled over to one of the drivers, a younger guy who looked like he might be willing to overlook a strange situation if the price were right, and told him I wanted him to pick up a passenger who would be coming out the east exit in about fifteen or twenty minutes, a gaijin wearing a T-shirt.

  “Ask if he’s the chief,” I explained in Japanese, handing him a ten-thousand-yen note. “If he answers yes, I want you to drive him down Shinjuku-dori, then make a left on Meiji-dori, then go left again on Yasukuni-dori. Wait for me on the north side of Yasukuni-dori in front of the Daiwa Bank. I’ll get there right after you do.” I pulled out another ten-thousand-yen note and tore it in two pieces. I gave half to him, told him he would get the other half when he picked me up. He bowed in agreement.

  “Do you have a card?” I asked him.

  “Hai,” he answered, and instantly produced a business card from his shirt pocket.

  I took the card and thanked him, then walked around to the back of the Studio Alta building, where I took the stairs to the fifth floor. From there I had a good view of the east exit. I checked my watch: fourteen minutes to go. I wrote down an address in Ikebukuro on the back of the card and slipped it into my breast pocket.

  Holtzer showed up one minute early. I watched him emerge from the east exit, then walk slowly toward the Studio Alta sign. Even from a distance I could recognize the fleshy lips, the prominent nose. For a brief, satisfying moment, I remembered breaking it. He still had all his hair, although now it was more steely gray than the dirty blond that I had known. I could tell from his carriage and build that he was keeping in shape. He looked cold in the short-sleeved shirt. Too bad.

  I saw the cab driver approach him and say something. Holtzer nodded, then followed him to the cab, glancing left and right as they walked. He looked the cab over suspiciously before getting in, and then they moved off down Shinjuku-dori.

  I hadn’t given Holtzer’s people time to set up a car or other mobile surveillance in the area, so anyone who was trying to keep up with him was going to have to scramble, most likely by hurrying to get a cab. I watched the area for four minutes, but there was no unusual activity. So far, so good.

  I turned and headed back to the stairs, taking them three at a time until I got to the first floor. Then I cut across Yasukuni-dori to the Daiwa Bank, getting there just as the cab pulled up. I walked over to the passenger side, watching Holtzer’s hands as I approached. The automatic door opened, and Holtzer leaned toward me.

  “John . . . ,” he started to say, in his reassuring voice.

  “Hands, Holtzer,” I said, cutting him off. “Let me see your hands. Palms forward, up in the air.” I didn’t really think he was going to try to just shoot me, but I wasn’t going to give him the chance, either.

  “I should ask the same thing of you.”

  “Just do it.” He hesitated, then leaned back and raised his hands. “Now lace your fingers and put your hands on the back of your neck. Then turn around and look out the driver-side window.”

  “Oh, come on, Rain. . . ,” he started to say.

  “Do it. Or I’m gone.” He glared at me for a second and then complied.

  I slid in next to him and gave the driver the business card with the Ikebukuro address, telling him to drive us there. It didn’t matter where he took us. I just didn’t want to say anything out loud. Then I squeezed Holtzer’s laced fingers together with my left hand while I patted him down with my right. After a minute I moved away from him, satisfied that he wasn’t carrying a weapon. But that was only half my worry.

  “I hope you’re happy now,” he said. “Do you mind telling me where we’re going?”

  I thought he might ask. “You wearing a wire, Holtzer?” I said, watching his eyes. He didn’t answer. Where wou
ld it be? I thought. I hadn’t felt anything under his shirt.

  “Take off your belt,” I told him.

  “Like hell, Rain. This is going too far.”

  “Take it off, Holtzer. I’m not playing games with you. I’m about halfway to deciding that the way to solve all my problems is just to break your neck right here.”

  “Go ahead and try.”

  “Sayonara, asshole.” I leaned toward the driver. “Tomatte kudasai.” Stop here.

  “Okay, okay, you win,” he said, raising his hands as if in surrender. “There’s a transmitter in the belt. It’s just a precaution. After Benny’s unfortunate accident.”

  Was he telling me not to worry, that Benny didn’t even matter? “Iya, sumimasen,” I said to the driver. “Itte kudasai.” Sorry. Keep going.

  “Good to see that you’ve still got the same high regard for your people,” I said to Holtzer. “Give me the belt.”

  “Benny wasn’t my people,” he said, shaking his head at my obvious obtuseness. “He was fucking us just like he tried to fuck you.” He slipped off the belt and handed it to me. I held it up. Sure enough, there was a tiny microphone under the buckle.

  “Where’s the battery?” I asked.

  “The buckle is the battery. Nickel hydride.”

  I nodded, impressed. “You guys do nice work.” I rolled down the window and pitched the belt out into the street.

  He lunged for it, a second late. “Goddamnit, Rain, you didn’t have to do that. You could have just disabled it.”

  “Let me see your shoes.”

  “Not if you’re planning on throwing them out the window.”

  “I will if they’re wired. Take them off.” He handed them over. They were black loafers — soft leather and rubber soles. No place for a microphone. The insides were warm and damp from perspiration, which indicated that he’d been wearing them for a while, and there were indentations from his toes. Obviously not something that the lab boys put together for a special occasion. I gave them back.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “Say what you’ve got to say,” I told him. “I don’t have much time.”

  He sighed. “The incident outside your apartment was a mistake. It never should have happened, and I want to personally apologize.”

  It was disgusting, how sincere he could sound. “I’m listening.”

  “I’m going out on a limb here, Rain,” he said in a low voice. “What I’m about to tell you is classified . . .”

  “It better be classified. If all you’ve got to tell me is what I can read in the paper, then you’re wasting my time.”

  He scowled. “For the last five years, we’ve been developing an asset in the Japanese government. An insider, someone with access to everything. Someone who knows where all the bodies are buried — and I’m not just being figurative here.”

  If he was hoping for a reaction, he didn’t get one, and he went on. “We’ve gotten more and more from this guy over time, but never anything that went beyond deep background. Never anything we could use as leverage. You following me?”

  I nodded. Leverage in the business means blackmail.

  “It’s like a Catholic schoolgirl, you know? She keeps saying no, you’ve just got to find another way, because hey, in the end, you know she wants it.” He grinned, the fleshy lips lurid. “Well, we kept at him, getting in deeper an inch at a time. Finally, six months ago, the nature of his refusals started to change. Instead of ‘No, I won’t do that,’ we started hearing, ‘No, that’s too dangerous, I’d be at risk.’ You know, practical objections.”

  I did know. Good salesmen, good negotiators, and good intelligence officers all relish practical objections. They signal a shift from whether to how, from principle to price.

  “It took us five more months to close him. We were going to give him a one-time cash payment big enough so he’d never have to worry again, plus an annual stipend. False papers, settlement in a tropical locale where he’d blend in — the Agency equivalent of the witness-protection program, but deluxe.

  “In exchange, he was going to give us the goods on the Liberal Democratic Party — the payoffs, the bribery, the yakuza ties, the killings of whistle-blowers. And this is hard evidence we’re talking about: phone taps, photographs, tape-recorded conversations, the kind of stuff that would stand up in court.”

  “What were you going to do with all that?”

  “The fuck you think we were going to do with it? With that kind of information, the U.S. government would own the LDP. We’d have every Japanese pol in our pocket. Think we’d ever get any grief again about military bases on Okinawa or at Atsugi? Think we’d have any trouble exporting as much rice or as many semiconductors or cars as we wanted? The LDP is the power here, and we would have been the power behind the power. Japan would have been Uncle Sam’s favorite prison fuckboy for the rest of the century.”

  “I gather from your tone that Uncle Sam has been disappointed in love,” I said.

  His smile was more like a sneer. “Not disappointed. Just postponed. We’ll still get what we want.”

  “What was your connection with Benny?”

  “Poor Benny. He was a great source on LDP slime. He knew the players, but he didn’t have the access, you know? The asset had the access.”

  “But you sent him to my apartment.”

  “Yeah, we sent him. Alone, to question you.”

  “How did you find out what happened to him?”

  “C’mon Rain, the guy’s neck was snapped clean in half right outside your apartment. Who else would have done it, one of your neighbors on a pension? Besides, we had him wired for sound. SOP for this kind of thing. So we heard everything, heard him blaming me, the little prick.”

  “And the other guy?”

  “We don’t know anything about him, other than that he turned up dead a hundred meters from where the Tokyo police found Benny’s body.”

  “Benny told me he was Boeicho Boeikyoku. That you handled the liaison.”

  “He was right that I handled the Boeikyoku liaison, but he was full of shit that I knew his friend. Anyway, you can bet we did some checking, and Benny’s pal wasn’t with Japanese Intelligence. When Benny took him to your apartment, he was on a private mission, getting paid by someone else. You know you can’t trust these moles, Rain. You remember the problems we had with our ARVN counterparts in Vietnam?”

  I looked up at the rearview and saw the driver looking at us, his face suspicious. The chances that he could follow our conversation in English were nil, but I could see that he sensed something was amiss, that it was unnerving him.

  “They take money from you, they’ll take it from anyone,” he went on. “I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to miss Benny. You get paid by both sides, someone finds out, hey, you get what you had coming anyway.”

  Or at least you should. “Right,” I said.

  “But let me finish the part about the asset. Three weeks ago he’s on his way to deliver the information, downloaded to a disk, he’s actually carrying the fucking crown jewels, and — can you believe this? He has a heart attack on the Yamanote and dies. We send people to the hospital, but the disk is gone.”

  “How can you be so sure he was carrying the disk when he died?”

  “Oh we’re sure, Rain, we’ve got our ways, you know that. Sources and methods, though, nothing I can talk about. But the missing disk, that’s not even the best part. You want to hear the best part?”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, leaning closer to me and smiling his grotesque smile again. “The best part is that it wasn’t really a heart attack . . .someone iced this fucker, someone who knew how to make it look like natural causes.”

  “I don’t know, Holtzer. It sounds pretty far-fetched.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? Especially because there are so few people in the whole world, let alone Japan, who could pull something like that off. Hell, the only one I know of is you.”

  “This
is what you wanted to meet me for?” I said. “To suggest that I was mixed up in this kind of bullshit?”

  “C’mon, Rain. Enough fucking around. I know exactly what you’re mixed up in.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “No? I’ve got news for you, then. Half the jobs you’ve done over the last ten years, you’ve done for us.”

  What the hell?

  He leaned closer and whispered the names of various prominent politicians, bankers, and bureaucrats who had met untimely but natural ends. They were all my work.

  “You can read those names in the paper,” I said, but I knew he had more.

  He told me the particulars of the bulletin board system I had been using with Benny, the numbers of the relevant Swiss accounts.

  Goddamn, I thought, feeling sick. You’ve been nothing but a fool for these people. It’s never stopped. Goddamn.

  “I know this is a shock for you, Rain,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “All these years you’ve thought you’ve been working freelance and in fact the agency has been paying the bills. But look on the bright side, okay? You’re great at what you do! Christ, you’re a fucking magician, making these people disappear without a trace, without a sign that there was any foul play. I wish I knew how you do it. I really do.”

  I looked at him, my eyes expressionless. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to show you sometime.”

  “Dream on, pal. Now look, we had access to the autopsy report. Kawamura had a pacemaker that somehow managed to shut itself off. The coroner attributed it to a defect. But you know what? We did a little research and found out that a defect like that is just about impossible. Someone shut that pacemaker off, Rain. Your kind of job exactly. I want to know who hired you.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Why go to such lengths just to retrieve the disk?”

  His eyes narrowed. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I can’t. I can only tell you that if I had wanted that disk, I could have found a lot of easier ways to take it.”