Zero Sum (A John Rain Novel)

by Barry Eisler

  Kobayashi’s eyes bulged and he tried to pivot away. I grabbed him by the shirt with my free hand and, bellowing another war cry, drove the blade into his stomach. He screamed and flailed and I thrust my shoulder into his sternum, swept my free arm up under both of his, jammed him back against the wall, and stabbed him in the stomach again, and again, and a half dozen times more. My vision was tinged red and I didn’t even know where I was. All that mattered, the only thing that was real, was that I was killing a man who was trying to kill me, the primal consciousness the same in that room as in the war. Kobayashi’s shrieks went falsetto and his flailing more spastic but I didn’t relent at all.

  All at once, I realized I had lost track of my perimeter. I was seeing Kobayashi through tunnel vision, but he was no longer any threat. The threat now, if there was one, was around me.

  I released Kobayashi, took a long step forty-five degrees from him, and brought the knife in and my free hand up. I scanned the room for danger, but saw none. Victor was still sitting, slapping his thigh and laughing uproariously. Oleg was cradling his wounded arm. Victor’s other men were frozen in place, wide eyed.

  I looked back at Kobayashi. He had collapsed and fetaled up, his arms crossed uselessly across his belly. He was panting and bleating, and his feet kicked feebly in place, as though some part of his mind believed he was running away. His shirt had gone crimson, and the carpet around him was dark with his blood.

  “Horosho!” Victor cried out, clapping delightedly. “Ochyen horosho!”

  I had gotten some control over myself, but my vision was still tinged red. I looked at Victor and felt rage surging up. Without warning, he had just thrown me into the ring—not a fighting ring, a combat ring. With a little less experience, or a little less luck, it easily could have been me bleeding out on the floor. And now he was laughing about it.

  He stood and walked over to Kobayashi, still laughing. When he reached the downed man, he paused and looked at him for a moment, his laughter slowly subsiding. He blew out several breaths as though trying to compose himself.

  He was only ten feet from me. Oleg was injured. The other men looked half in shock. I watched Victor, trying to rein in my rage. I thought I could take him out, and probably the others, as well. But that was just it: it needed to be the product of thought, not emotion. And in that instant, I wasn’t sure which was driving me.

  “Oh, Kobayashi,” Victor said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “Kobayashi. So, okay. Giving you chance with me was mistake. You are fuckup! Can you even deny this? Nothing but fuckup.”

  In response, Kobayashi only twitched and whimpered.

  Victor remained still for another moment, looking down at Kobayashi as though in anticipation of a response. Then, with no sign of escalation, no apparent switching of gears, no warning at all, he raised a leg and stomped Kobayashi full force in the side of the face. Kobayashi screamed and his arms flew up to protect his head, and Victor, laughing now, stomped his face again, and again and again, adjusting his position from time to time to ensure the stomps were landing where he wanted. Kobayashi’s efforts to protect himself grew more feeble, his twitching diminishing, his screams fading to moans. Finally, his arms flopped open and he stopped moving entirely, but this seemed only to encourage Victor, who stopped laughing and continued the vicious stomping with even greater determination, like someone whose life depended on smashing through a basement storage door.

  I looked at Oleg and the other men. All were wide eyed, and had gone pale. I’d seen enough petrified faces in the war to recognize the look here. These men were terrified of Victor. Obviously with reason.

  I’d never experienced anything quite like this. The rapturous joy this man obviously experienced from killing at such intimate distance. The instantaneous transition from buffoonery to savagery. The incongruity, the sheer abnormality and unexpectedness of his behavior. It didn’t terrify me. But it confused me. It threw off my confidence in my understanding of the enemy, the environment, and my ability to manage both.

  In retrospect, the opportunity had been there. At that moment, I could have—should have—ended him. But also, at that moment, I was gripped with too many doubts to do so.

  Finally, Victor stopped. He stood over Kobayashi for a moment, panting from exertion. Kobayashi’s face was an unrecognizable ruin of blood and bone and brain.

  Victor looked up as though remembering there were other people in the room. “You believe this guy?” he said, glancing down at Kobayashi. “Always he makes a mess. And look at this one! Biggest mess yet! But also last one, yes?” He laughed as though he’d just said the funniest thing of all time.

  He walked back to his chair and collapsed into it, leaving a trail of bloody footprints along the way. “Oleg,” he said. “Call doctor. Get arm taken care of. We don’t want blood all over the place, do we?” He laughed again. “And get couple more guys in here to get rid of mess.”

  Oleg nodded and walked out, his face still ashen. The other men remained rooted in place, plainly unsure of what to do and afraid that, whatever they did, it might be the wrong thing.

  Victor sighed. “Congratulations, Mr. Rain. You’re hired.”

  I said nothing. I was pretty sure the danger had passed—or the immediate danger, at any rate—but I wasn’t ready to put down the knife regardless. There was one less man in the room now, too. I’d missed one moment, but maybe this was another one.

  “What are you going to do?” Victor said. “You want to stab me? Go ahead, try. You wouldn’t be the first. You won’t be the last.”

  He was unarmed. And sitting. I had a knife. I was paralyzed between the urge to do it, and the fear that I was overlooking something.

  “Good. I like this. Not just funny. Not just balls. Also smart. Only stupid man would try to kill me now, without first hearing about job he’s hired to do.”

  Was he reading me right? Was he deliberately reinforcing, or even planting, the notion that no move was now the safe move?

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that all at once, the notion of working for, with, or anywhere near this guy seemed like an extremely bad idea.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything about a job. And even if I had, you haven’t hired me. Because I haven’t accepted.”

  A bit of the good humor disappeared from Victor’s expression. “No, you did accept. I asked who wanted job more, you or Kobayashi. You answered this. Very persuasive answer, too, congratulations to you, my friend. But now Kobayashi is gone. Now you take his place. This is not negotiation. This is reality. Money is good. Fringe benefits also good. You like very much. But don’t say no again to me. Not after you say yes. Otherwise, I think you are unreliable guy. Like Kobayashi. And man who recommends you, too. Miyamoto. He sends you here for work, to me this is guarantee of you. If you turn out to be unreliable guy, then so is Miyamoto.”

  Oleg returned with two more Japanese gangsters, one of whom was carrying a large roll of contractor’s plastic sheeting and a roll of duct tape. When they saw what was left of Kobayashi, one of them turned away. The one with the plastic and tape managed not to, but his face blanched and he had to clench his jaw.

  “What is problem?” Victor said. “Go ahead. Clean up mess. And maybe new carpet, too, yes? What do you think, maybe red this time is better.” He looked at me pointedly. “In case anyone else turns out to be unreliable guy.”

  chapter three

  After leaving Victor’s office, I did a long SDR—a surveillance detection run, tradecraft I’d learned from McGraw. I didn’t know how large Victor’s organization was, the level of resources he could bring to bear, how far he might go if he decided I posed a threat. What I did know was that he had spooked me.

  For the moment, of course, there was no reason for him to come after me—if he’d wanted me dead, he could have done me there in his office, and had his men carry me out in plastic sheeting alongside Kobayashi. But the notion of a good SDR was comforting. Before missions in Vietnam, I h
ad learned to steady my nerves by checking my gear. An SDR, it seemed, was the urban equivalent. It was cheaper than a drink, and more effective, too.

  When I was satisfied I was alone and began to feel a little calmer, I found a bench in Hibiya Park and opened the file Victor had given me before I’d left.

  The target was named Koji Sugihara, an LDP Diet member. There was a work address, a home address, and a newspaper clipping from ten years earlier that included a photo of Sugihara, tall for a Japanese, posing with some students from the University of Tokyo the article described as “the future of Japanese government.”

  A work address, a home address, an old newspaper photo. Not the most complete dossier I’d ever seen, but that was okay. The file was usually only a start, even when the contents were as top grade as McGraw’s. The file I really wanted was one on Victor. I had to learn more about him. At the moment, what I knew was all jumbled and impressionistic. I started trying to sort it out.

  It wasn’t something I was excessively proud of, but I did find a certain amount of grim satisfaction in how well I could handle violence, which for most humans presents the most toxic, traumatizing, paralyzing environment a person can be faced with. I had killed countless Vietcong and NVA regulars who were doing everything in their power to do the same to me. I had outmaneuvered the son of the most powerful yakuza in Tokyo, a guy who had earned the sobriquet “Mad Dog,” picking off his soldiers one by one as they tried to hunt me down. I had spent a lifetime learning and implementing the lessons of guerrilla warfare—first, as a half-breed kid bullied in Japan and in the working-class American town my mother brought me to after my father had died; then in Vietnam; and then again, most recently, in the Philippines. I was good at violence. Exceptionally good. Exceptionally unfazed by it. There’s a cost to that kind of aptitude, and maybe the cost isn’t worth it. But for the moment, the cost wasn’t the point. The point was, I was good.

  And yet, I’d never encountered anything like Victor. The closest analogue was my blood brother, Jimmy “Crazy Jake” Calhoun, who more than anyone I’d ever known was capable of taking a life without compunction or regret. But there was a stillness in Jimmy’s approach, a focus, a professionalism. No matter how much satisfaction he found in war and killing, no matter how addicted he was to the high of combat, he never found outright joy in gratuitous butchery. Even at Cu Lai, where we had lost control and massacred civilians, there had been more a “get it over with” aspect to Jimmy’s actions than what I would classify as joy or delight.

  Jimmy, I knew, was what the army had classified in World War II as an aggressive psychopath—a man who needed no particular conditioning to overcome an innate reluctance to kill, and no particular comforting afterward. He could just do it. Historically, about two percent of military men have fit this category, and the majority of killing in war has been their handiwork. But because they pose no danger to society outside of war, maybe the term psychopath isn’t really suitable. Or maybe I just didn’t like it because I’d been similarly classified myself.

  What I did know was that Victor was different. If the term psychopath had any real application, I thought it was what I had witnessed in his office. I didn’t know what to make of the behavior beyond that. But it had unnerved me.

  I decided that was all right. The real problem would have been if it hadn’t unnerved me. When you recognize something is dangerous, it automatically becomes less dangerous. So recognizing Victor’s nature was something. But it wasn’t much. What I needed, and fast, was intel. And that meant Miyamoto.

  I called him from a payphone and asked if he could come to the same place we had met last time, in one hour. I didn’t want to say too much on the phone. Paranoid, maybe, but with someone like Victor, I decided paranoid was practical.

  An hour later, we were sitting on a bench in one of the shady sections of Hamarikyu, away from the teahouse and other attractions.

  “You might have been right,” I told him. “Victor is dangerous.”

  “You’ve changed your mind, then? About trying to remove him?”

  I smiled. “Would that be a welcome development for you? Or unwelcome?”

  He didn’t return the smile. “My people would of course be delighted to see him go. But that is of little interest to me compared to your well-being.”

  “Thank you for that,” I said, strangely moved by the sentiment. “But I think we’re a little past the point where changing my mind is even an option.” I told him what had happened to Kobayashi, and how Victor had decided on the spot that I had taken Kobayashi’s place.

  By the time I was done, he looked grimmer than I’d ever seen him. “I wish you had listened to me,” he said. “But . . . it doesn’t matter now.”

  “I wish I had listened to you, too.”

  But even as I said the words, I realized they weren’t entirely true. I’d gotten bored in the Philippines. And whatever else Victor might be, he wasn’t boring. A part of me was excited by . . . what, the challenge? The distraction? The danger? Was I actually glad things had turned out this way, so I could involve myself in this thing while telling myself it wasn’t my choice?

  Exactly, I could imagine Crazy Jake saying. And nothing to be ashamed of, either. You like the game, John-John. You’re good at it. One of the best, maybe. But you can’t be the best at a game you won’t play.

  I pushed aside the thoughts because they were subordinate to the matter at hand.

  Or maybe because I didn’t like the implications.

  “What will you do?” he asked.

  “Well, I think I’d better do the job, don’t you?”

  “Not at all. I would instead recommend that you leave Tokyo. Disappear again. You’ve done it before.”

  I had hoped not to burden him with Victor’s threat, but I was beginning to see that was going to be difficult.

  “I’m afraid it’s a little more . . . complicated than that,” I said.

  He paled a little, as though he already understood, or at least sensed it. “What do you mean?”

  I told him what Victor had said about Miyamoto being my guarantor. And how if I didn’t do what Victor wanted, he would conclude Miyamoto was “unreliable guy.”

  When I was done, he had paled a lot more. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just . . . I hadn’t imagined anything like that. I should have. But I didn’t.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. You didn’t know Victor. I do. I should have seen that he would do something like this.”

  “You told me it was a bad idea. And you were right, even if you didn’t foresee all the specifics. I’m the one who insisted. And I’m the one who’s going to fix it.”

  He nodded—in relief, it seemed, as much as agreement. “How?”

  “Well, for starters, by following up on this guy Victor wants dead. That ought to buy us some time, at least.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You don’t know?”

  He frowned. “At the moment, there are no outstanding contracts with Victor. At least none that I know of.”

  I hadn’t seen that coming. The twist worried me, along with the fact that I’d missed it. “Shit, I just assumed . . . but that was dumb of me. You’re not Victor’s only client.”

  “Not if your description of his monopolizing violence in the Tokyo underworld is correct, no.”

  “Well, then I better not tell you more. It could just put you more at risk.”

  He laughed. “Rain-san. Is that really possible at the moment?”

  I didn’t care to admit it, but he had a point. “All right,” I said. “The guy I’m supposed to take out is LDP. Which is part of why I assumed the contract went through you. His name is Sugihara. Koji Sugihara. Do you know him?”

  “Of course I know him. He controls patronage for the Fukuda faction.”

  “Well, who would want him dead?”

  “A man of his power? Many people. A Fukuda faction member who feels Sugihara has overlooked him. A rival, hoping to take ov
er his network. Another faction, hoping to weaken Fukuda. But . . . to go after a man in his position is very bold. Unprecedented. Something like this would never be sanctioned by my superiors.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe whoever wants it knew there would be problems if it were handled through the usual channels. So they went around you. Directly to Victor.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I suppose this is possible.”

  “Victor said Kobayashi killed the wrong man. That mean anything to you?”

  “The wrong man? No.”

  “No other Diet members killed recently? Or even just died?”

  “No. None.”

  “Because Victor said that, as a result of Kobayashi’s screwup, Sugihara had upped his security.”

  “I can look into that. But no matter what, this is bad business. It’s one thing to pound down the nail that sticks out. This has to be done from time to time, and besides, is not the nail’s own behavior to blame? But as far as I know, Sugihara has done nothing wrong. He plays by the rules.”

  “Maybe he’s played too well.”

  “Yes, that is my point. Punishing a cheater preserves the system. Punishing a winner undermines it.”

  “Maybe that’s what someone wants.”

  “Who?”

  “Victor himself, maybe. I don’t know.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t like this.”

  It wouldn’t have been productive to tell him that I didn’t care one way or the other. Instead, I focused on the aspect we could agree on. “Better Sugihara than you, my friend.”

  “Yes, if it comes to that.”

  “Then let’s make sure it doesn’t.”