Rain Fall

by Barry Eisler

  “Maybe it wasn’t up to you,” he said. “Maybe whoever hired you on this one told you to retrieve it. I know you’re not in the habit of asking a lot of questions about these assignments.”

  “And have I ever been in the habit of being an errand boy on these jobs? ‘Retrieving’ requested items?”

  He crossed his arms and looked at me. “Not that I know of.”

  “Then it sounds like you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “You did him, Rain. You were the last one with him. You have to understand, it doesn’t look good.”

  “My reputation will have to suffer.”

  He massaged his chin for a moment while he looked at me. “You know that the Agency is the least of your worries among the people who are trying to get the disk back.”

  “What people?”

  “Who do you think? The people who it implicates. The politicians, the yakuza, the muscle behind the whole Japanese power structure.”

  I considered for a moment, then said, “How did you find out about me? About me in Japan?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, that would fall under sources and methods again, nothing I can discuss here. But I’ll tell you what.” He leaned forward again. “Come on in, and we can talk about anything you want.”

  It was such a non sequitur that I thought I heard wrong. “Did you say, ‘Come on in’?”

  “Yes, I did. If you look at your situation, you’ll see that you need our help.”

  “I didn’t know you were such a humanitarian, Holtzer.”

  “Cut the shit, Rain. We’re not doing this for humanity. We want your cooperation. Either you’ve got that disk, or because you were hunting Kawamura you’ve probably got information that might help us find it. We’ll help you in exchange. It’s as simple as that.”

  But I knew these people, and I knew Holtzer. Nothing was ever simple with them — and the simpler it looked, the harder they were about to nail you.

  “I’m in an uncomfortable spot,” I said. “No sense denying it. Maybe I’ve got to trust someone. But it’s not going to be you.”

  “Look, if this is about the war, you’re being ridiculous. It was a long time ago. This is another time, another place.”

  “But the people are the same.”

  He waved his hand as though trying to dispel an offensive odor. “It doesn’t matter what you think of me, Rain. Because this isn’t about us. The situation is what matters, and the situation is this: The police want you. The LDP wants you. The yakuza wants you. And they’re going to find you because your cover is fucking blown. Now let us help you.”

  What to do. Take him out right here? They knew where I lived, which made me newly vulnerable, and taking out the station chief could lead to retribution.

  The car behind us made a right. I glanced back and saw the car that was following it, a black sedan with three or four Japanese in it, slow down instead of taking up the space that had developed. Not an effective strategy for driving in Tokyo traffic.

  I waited until we were almost at the next light, then told the driver to make a left. He just had time to brake and make the turn. The sedan changed lanes with us.

  I told the driver I was mistaken, that he should get back on Meiji-dori. He looked back at me, clearly annoyed, wondering what the hell this was all about.

  The sedan stayed with us as we made the turns.

  Oh, shit.

  “You bring some people with you, Holtzer? I thought I told you to come alone.”

  “They’re here to bring you inside. For your protection.”

  “Fine, they can follow us back to the embassy,” I said, suddenly scared and trying to think of a way out.

  “I’m not going to have a cab drive the two of us into the embassy compound together. It’s enough of a breach of security that I’ve met with you at all. They’ll bring you in. It’s safer.”

  How could they have followed him? Even if he were wearing a transmitter in a body cavity, they couldn’t have pinpointed the location in this traffic.

  Then I realized. They had played me beautifully. They knew when “Lincoln” called that I was going to demand an immediate meeting. They didn’t know where, but they had people mobile and ready to move the second they found out the place. They had twenty minutes to get to Shinjuku, and they could stay close enough to react to what they heard through the wire without my seeing them. Holtzer must have given them the name of the cab company, the car’s description, the license-plate number, and updated them about its progress until I got in. By then they were already in position. All while I was congratulating myself for thinking so well on my feet and taking control of the situation, while I was relaxing after getting rid of the wire.

  I hoped I would live to enjoy the lesson. “Who are they?” I asked.

  “People we can trust. Working with the embassy.”

  The light at the Kanda River overpass turned red. The cab started to slow down.

  I snapped my head right, then left, searching for an avenue of escape.

  The sedan crept closer, stopping a car length away.

  Holtzer looked at me, trying to gauge what I was going to do. For a split instant our eyes locked. Then he lunged at me.

  “It’s for your own good!” he yelled, trying to get his arms around my waist. I saw the back doors of the sedan open, a pair of burly Japanese in sunglasses stepping out on either side.

  I tried to push Holtzer away, but his hands were locked behind my back. The driver turned around and started yelling something. I didn’t really hear what.

  The two Japanese had closed their doors and were carefully approaching the taxi. Shit.

  I wrapped my right arm around Holtzer’s neck, holding his head in place against my chest, and slipped my left between my body and his neck, the ridge of my hand searching for his carotid. “Aum da! Aum Shinrikyo da!” I yelled at the driver. “Sarin!” Aum was the cult that gassed the Tokyo subway in 1995, and memories of the sarin attack can still cause panic.

  Holtzer yelled something against my chest. I leaned forward, using my torso and legs like a walnut cracker. I felt him go limp.

  “Ei? Nan da tte?” the driver asked, his eyes wide. What do you mean?

  One of the Japanese tapped on the passenger-side window. “Aitsu! Aum da! Sarin da! Boku no tomodachi — ishiki ga nai! Ike! Kuruma o dase!” Those men! They’re Aum — they have sarin! My friend is unconscious! Drive! Drive! Getting the right note of terror in my voice wasn’t a reach.

  He might have thought it was bullshit or that I was crazy, but sarin wasn’t worth the chance. He snapped the car into gear and hauled the steering wheel to the right, doing a burning-rubber U-turn on Meiji-dori and cutting off oncoming traffic in the process. I saw the Japanese hurrying back to their car.

  “Isoide! Isoide! Byoin ni tanomu!” Hurry! We need a hospital!

  At the intersection of Meiji-dori and Waseda-dori, the driver ripped through a light that had just turned red, braking into a sliding lefthand turn in the direction of the National Medical Center. The G-force ripped Holtzer away from me. The flow of traffic on Waseda-dori closed in behind us a second later, and I knew the sedan would be stuck for a minute, maybe more.

  Tozai Waseda Station was just ahead. Time for me to bail. I told the driver to pull over. Holtzer was slumped against the driver-side door, unconscious but breathing. I wanted to put the strangle back in — one less adversary to worry about. But there was no time.

  The driver started to protest, saying that we had to get my friend to a hospital, that we needed to call the police, but I insisted again that he pull over. He stopped and I took out the half of the ten-thousand-yen note I owed him, then threw in one more.

  I grabbed the package I had bought for Midori, jumped out of the cab, and bolted down the steps to the subway. If I had to wait for a train I was going to use an alternate exit and stay on foot, but my timing was good — the Tozai was just pulling in. I took it to Nihonbashi Station, switched to the Ginza line, and then cha
nged at Shinbashi to the Yamanote. I did a careful SDR on the way, and by the time I surged through the station turnstiles at Shibuya, I knew I was safe for the moment. But they’d flushed me into the open, and the moment wouldn’t last.

  16

  AN HOUR LATER I got Harry’s page, and we met at the Doutor coffee shop per our previous arrangement. He was waiting for me when I got there.

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” I said.

  “Well, it’s strange.”

  “Explain ‘strange.’ ”

  “Well, the first thing is, this disk has some pretty advanced copy management protection built into it.”

  “Can you break it?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. Copy management is different than encryption. The disk can’t be copied, can’t be distributed electronically, can’t be sent over the Internet.”

  “You mean you can make only one copy from the source?”

  “One copy or many copies, I’m not sure, but the point is you can’t make copies of copies. No grandchildren in this family.”

  “And there’s no way to send the contents of the disk over the Internet, upload to a bulletin board, anything like that?”

  “No. If you try, the data will get corrupted. You won’t be able to read it.”

  “Well, that explains a few things,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like why they were messing with disks in the first place. Like why they’re so eager to get this one back. They know it hasn’t been copied or uploaded, so they know their potential damage is still limited to this one disk.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now tell me this. Why would whoever controls the data that got copied onto that disk permit even a single copy to be made? Why not no copies? Wouldn’t that be more secure?”

  “Probably more secure, but risky, too. If something happened to the master, all your records would be gone. You’d want some kind of backup.”

  I considered. “What else is there?”

  “Well, as you know, it’s encrypted.”

  “Yes.”

  “The encryption is strange.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Ever hear of a lattice reduction?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s a kind of code. The cryptographer encodes a message in a pattern, a pattern like the flowers in a symmetrical wallpaper design. But wallpaper patterns are simple — only one image in two dimensions. A more complex code uses a pattern that repeats itself at various levels of detail, in multiple mathematical dimensions. To break the code, you have to find the most basic way the lattice repeats itself — the origin of the pattern, in a way.”

  “I get the picture. Can you break it?”

  “I’m not sure. I did some work with lattice reductions at Fort Meade, but this one is strange.”

  “Harry, if you say that one more time . . .”

  “Sorry, sorry. It’s strange because the lattice seems to be a musical pattern, not a physical one.”

  “Now I’m not following you.”

  “There’s an overlay of what look like musical notes — in fact, my optical drive recognized it as a music disk, not a data disk. The pattern is bizarre, but highly symmetrical.”

  “Can you crack it?”

  “I’ve been trying to, so far without luck. I’ve got to tell you, John, I’m a little out of my element on this one.”

  “Out of your element? All those years with the NSA, what could be out of your element?”

  He blushed. “It’s not the encryption. It’s the music. I need a musician to walk me through it.”

  “A musician,” I said.

  “Yeah, a musician. You know, someone who reads music, preferably someone who writes it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I could really use her help on this,” he said.

  “Let me think about it,” I told him, uncomfortable.

  “Okay.”

  “What about the cell phones? Anything there?”

  He smiled. “I was hoping you would ask. Ever hear of the Shinnento?”

  “Not sure,” I said, trying to place the name. “New Year something?”

  “Shinnen, like faith or conviction, not New Year,” he said, drawing the appropriate kanji in the air with a finger to distinguish one of the homonyms that pervade the language. “It’s a political party. The last call the kendoka made was to their headquarters in Shibakoen, and the number was speed-coded into both of the phones’ memories.” He smiled, obviously relishing what he was about to say next. “And just in case that’s not enough to establish the connection, Conviction was paying the phone bill for the kendoka.”

  “Harry, you will never cease to amaze. Tell me more.”

  “Okay. Conviction was established in 1978 by a fellow named Yamaoto Toshi, who is still the head of the party. Yamaoto was born in 1949. He’s the only son of a prominent family that traces its lines back to the samurai clans. His father was an officer in the Imperial Army, military occupational specialty communications, who after the war started a company that made portable communications devices. The father got started in business by trading on his family’s connections with the remnants of the zaibatsu, and then got rich during the Korean War, when the American army bought his company’s equipment.”

  Zaibatsu were the prewar industrial conglomerates, run by Japan’s most powerful families. After the war MacArthur cut down the tree, but he couldn’t dig out the roots.

  “Yamaoto started out in the arts — he spent some years as a teenager in Europe for classical piano training, I think at his mother’s insistence. Apparently he was a bit of a child prodigy. But his father yanked him out of all that when Yamaoto turned twenty, and sent him to the States to complete his education as a prelude to taking over the family business. Yamaoto got a master’s in business from Harvard, and was running the company’s U.S. operations when his old man died. At which point Yamaoto returned to Japan, sold the business, and used the money to establish Conviction and run for parliament.”

  “The piano training. Is there a connection with the way the disk is encrypted?”

  “Don’t know for sure. There could be.”

  “Sorry. Keep going.”

  “Apparently the father’s former position in the Imperial Army and the long samurai lineage made an impression on the son’s politics. Conviction was a platform for Yamaoto’s right-wing ideas. He was elected in 1985 to a seat in Nagano-ken, which he promptly lost in the next election.”

  “Yeah, you don’t get elected in Japan because of your ideas,” I said. “It’s pork that pays.”

  “That’s exactly the lesson Yamaoto learned from his defeat. After he was elected, he spent all his time and political capital arguing for abolishing Article Nine of the Constitution so that Japan could build up its military, kicking the U.S. out of Japan, teaching Shinto in the schools — the usual positions. But after his defeat, he ran again — this time focusing on the roads and bridges he would build for his constituents, the rice subsidies and tariffs he would impose. Very different politician. The nationalistic stuff was back-burnered. He got his seat back in eighty-seven, and has held on to it ever since.”

  “But Conviction is a marginal player. I’ve never even read about the LDP using them to form a coalition. Outside Nagano-ken, I doubt anyone has heard of them.”

  “But Yamaoto has a few things going for him. One, Conviction is very well funded. That’s his father’s legacy. Two, he knows how to dole out the pork. Nagano has a number of farming districts, and Yamaoto keeps the subsidies rolling in and is a vocal opponent of any relaxation of Japan’s refusal to allow foreign rice into the country. And three, he has a lot of support in the Shinto community.”

  “Shinto,” I said, musing. Shinto is a nature-worshiping religion that Japan’s nationalists turned into an ideology of Japaneseness before the war. Unlike Christianity and Buddhism, Shinto is native to Japan and isn’t practiced anywhere else. T
here was something about the connection that was bothering me, something I should have known. Then I realized.

  “That’s how they found out where I live,” I said. “No wonder I’ve been seeing priests begging for alms outside of stations on the Mita-sen. They blanketed me with static surveillance, traced me back to my neighborhood one step at a time. Goddamnit, how could I have missed it? I almost gave one of them a hundred yen the other day.”

  His eyes were worried. “How would they know to focus on the Mita line?”

  “They probably didn’t, for sure. But with a little luck, a little coincidence, a little Holtzer feeding them a dossier, maybe even military-era photographs, it could be done. If they placed me at the Kodokan, they would have assumed that I wouldn’t live too far from it. And there are only three train lines with stops within a reasonable distance from the building, so all they had to do was commit enough manpower at enough places for enough time. Shit, they really nailed me.”

  I had to give them credit; it was nicely done. Static surveillance is almost impossible to spot. Unlike the moving variety, you can’t get the person behind you to do something unnatural to give himself away. It’s more like a zone defense in basketball: no matter where the guy with the ball goes, there’s always someone new in the next zone to pick him up. If you can put enough people in place to make it work, it’s deadly.

  “What’s the basis for the Shinto connection?” I asked.

  “Shinto is a huge organization, with priests running shrines at the national, local, even neighborhood levels. As a result, the shrines take in a lot of donations and are well funded — so they’re in a position to dispense patronage to the politicians they favor. And Yamaoto wants a much bigger role for Shinto in Japan, which means more power for the priests.”

  “So the shrines are part of his funding?”

  “Yes, but it’s more than that. Shinto is part of Conviction’s program. The party wants it taught in schools; it wants to form an anticrime alliance between the police and the local shrines. Don’t forget, Shinto was at the center of prewar Japanese nationalism. It’s unique to Japan, and can easily be bent — has been bent — to foster the xenophobic cult of the Yamato Gokoro, the Japanese soul. And it’s on the rise in Japan today, although not many people realize it outside the country.”