Zero Sum (A John Rain Novel)

by Barry Eisler

“What do you propose?”

  “Tell me what you know about him.”

  He sighed. “I can do better than that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The grandson of the minister of agriculture will be married this weekend at the Hotel Okura. Sugihara will be there.”

  I knew the Okura. Opened in 1962, just ahead of the Olympics that marked the end of the postwar era and the beginning of Japan’s economic rise, it was the top hotel in Tokyo, frequented by celebrities, captains of industry, and heads of state. For a government official hoping to demonstrate his power and success while networking with the who’s-who guests, nothing else would do.

  “All right,” I said. “But how do I get in? I’m guessing there’s going to be security. Probably a lot of it. I can’t just hang around in the lobby.”

  “No, I think you’d do better with an invitation.”

  “And how do I get that?”

  “I’m going to give you mine.”

  I shook my head, annoyed that I was missing something. “Don’t you need to be there? I mean, it might look suspicious if—”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be there.”

  “How are you going to get in?”

  “The ceremony itself will be small, held in the hotel chapel, but there will be almost a thousand guests at the reception afterward. I’ll simply tell the security people checking the invitations that I seem to have misplaced mine. I’m sure we’ll be able to find people to vouch for me.”

  “All right. But I’m not going to do it there. You’d be too much the focus—the guy who said he lost his invitation. We don’t want to take that chance.”

  “But how long do you have before Victor concludes you are unreliable?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m not doing this half-assed. The Okura will be just an opportunity to observe. Maybe to follow, see if a secondary opportunity presents itself. Most of all, to buy some time. Victor told me he wants progress reports. No fewer than once a day, until I’ve taken care of business. If I go through the motions on Sugihara, I’ll have reasons to meet with Victor. I’ll be better prepared than I was the first time. I’ll find an opening.”

  I considered for a moment, then added, “I think you should start being a little more careful. Just as a precaution. Do you know how to tell if you’re being followed?”

  “It isn’t something that’s traditionally been a concern, no.”

  “Look, it’s not just for you. It’s for me, too.”

  He shook his head as though perplexed, and I went on. “I’m not easy to get to. No fixed address right now, and I know how to watch my back. If I were Victor trying to get to me, I’d start with the guy who made the recommendation.”

  He nodded slowly. “I see your point.”

  “Don’t worry. None of it is complicated. Mostly just common sense. Along the lines of, ‘If I were trying to follow me, what would make it more difficult?’ That kind of thing. Besides, after all you’ve taught me? It would be nice to be able to teach you something in return.”

  He gave me a wan smile. “I have a feeling what you propose to teach me will have considerably greater value.”

  I returned the smile. “I wouldn’t go that far. Nen hasn’t just changed my life. It’s probably saved it. But yeah, knowing how to spot surveillance, or an ambush, if it comes to that, wouldn’t be the worst thing right now. I’ll teach you the fundamentals, but then you have to practice, too, okay? Think of it as a game. That’s always the best way to learn.”

  “Not a very fun game, I fear.”

  “No,” I said. “But it beats the alternatives.”

  chapter four

  Two days later, I stepped out of a black cab in front of the Hotel Okura, and paused for a moment to review the unfamiliar surroundings. Dozens of other guests were arriving at the same time, some turning over their Mercedes sedans to swarming valets in hotel jackets and caps, others released by uniformed drivers rushing around to open back doors, the men in tuxedos, the women in the latest Paris couture or formal kimonos.

  I strolled toward the entrance, my rented tuxedo as comfortable as a straitjacket, my hair slicked back, my posture military-straight. I reminded myself that I belonged here, I was invited. The secret to making a cover work, McGraw had taught me, was to believe it, to feel it. Here, though, McGraw’s dictum was going to be something of a challenge, because there was only so much I could do to create and inhabit the role. I was too young to pass myself off as one of the government grandees, and, even if age weren’t a problem in that regard, a moment’s conversation with any of my supposed peers would have instantly ended the subterfuge.

  So I had decided instead that I was a childhood friend of the groom. Miyamoto had told me the groom’s father, himself a bureaucrat with the foreign ministry, had been posted overseas while his children were young—London, Riyadh, Accra, and other far-flung locales—taking the family with him as he was transferred from one continent to another. To the extent the groom had stayed in touch with any childhood friends, therefore, it was unlikely any of the friends would have closed the loop with each other. I’d do what I could to avoid conversation, but if avoidance failed, I’d ask a lot, reveal little, and use whatever I learned to tailor a background unlikely to raise red flags. I tried to think of it as a game, as I had advised Miyamoto with regard to countersurveillance. But the tuxedo was stiff, and the hair gel felt fake, and the rented shoes were just tight enough to make me aware of how eager I’d be to get them off by the end of the evening.

  But shit, was my awkwardness really a problem? Everyone around me looked to the manor born, yes, but how many of those tuxedos were rented, how many of the stunning dresses and sumptuous kimonos had been borrowed from a sister or mother or aunt? Many of these people, maybe most, must have been feeling as uncomfortable and pretentious as I was. Which meant feeling that way would only make me blend that much better.

  The thought settled me a little. I flowed with the crowd through the entrance, flanked by doormen in stiff caps and jackets with embroidered epaulettes, kimonoed hostesses bowing and greeting us “Irasshaimase”—Welcome—in unison as we passed.

  Getting past the doormen outside the banquet hall was almost comically easy. Faced with an inflow of hundreds of people, they were barely glancing at invitations, let alone asking for identification. It interested me that they seemed to be reacting more to patterns—the clothes, the posture, the sense of purpose—than to the invitations that should have been their focus. It reminded me of an article I’d once read, about an experiment some social scientist had done. He’d put a person in a room with two strings hanging from the ceiling. The task was to get ahold of both, but the strings were too far apart for the person to reach one while holding the other. There was a hammer in the room, though, which a few clever subjects realized they could tie to one of the strings, push away, and catch on the backswing while holding the other string. The thing was, subjects who first used the hammer for a few simple tasks involving nails suffered a diminished ability to realize that the hammer could be used as something else—as a weight to make a pendulum, for example. Context had reinforced familiarity, and familiarity had blinded them to new possibilities. Watching the reactions of the doormen, I thought this was a principle I might learn to exploit.

  Pondering peripheral matters reaffirmed my conviction that I wasn’t going to kill Sugihara tonight. And not just because I wanted to keep Miyamoto clear of it. The person I really wanted to kill was Victor, and to that end, going slowly on Sugihara seemed tactically sound. Maybe while I dragged things out with the one, I’d get a chance at the other. If I was wrong, I could always kill Sugihara later. But I didn’t really want to. Why would I? I’d promised myself ten years ago I would never be someone’s employee again. And Victor had told me I’d be paid five thousand dollars for the hit—presumably a tenth of his monopolistic finder’s fee. I was doing all the work, and he was going to keep ninety percent of the profits. It was enough to put a young contract killer
off capitalism forever.

  For a while, I drifted along at the edges of the massive banquet hall as it grew increasingly crowded, the sounds of conversation and laughter loud but not unduly so, the twenty-foot ceiling, thick carpet, and silk-screened walls combining to keep the din tolerable. I wasn’t hungry, but made sure to take a few samples of finger food from the servers working the room, barely noticing what I ate. The space was enormous—the size of a football field, at least—and with only the one old newspaper photo to go on, spotting and confirming Sugihara amid the dense, shifting crowds was going to take some luck. At one point, I caught a glimpse of Miyamoto, wearing a black bowtie in lieu of the more febrile designs he ordinarily favored, but per the plan we ignored each other.

  An hour passed. The good news was, I had managed not to talk to anyone, so my story hadn’t been tested. The bad news was, though I saw several men who might have been Sugihara, I couldn’t be sure. The single photograph, the intervening decade, and the uncharacteristic and interchangeable tuxedos . . . it was all making my job harder. That was fine, up to a point. I could explain my difficulties to Victor, and tell him it was worth going slowly because we had to be certain, following Kobayashi’s failure. But it was bothering me that I couldn’t accomplish something as simple as ID’ing a target. It was making me feel like as much of a fuckup as Kobayashi. And Kobayashi’s story hadn’t ended particularly well.

  So I must have been scanning the room pretty hard when I heard a voice coming from right alongside me—a woman’s voice, speaking Italian-accented English. “Who are you looking for?”

  I nearly jumped, managing through some vestigial social instinct not to leap back and get my hands up. An absolutely stunning brunette was looking at me with a friendly smile, her eyebrows raised quizzically. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  I don’t like anyone ghosting up on me, and ordinarily I’m sufficiently aware of my surroundings to prevent it. But in my search for Sugihara, I’d gotten tunnel vision. I was lucky she seemed harmless. Letting someone less well-inclined flank you like that can easily be the last mistake you ever make.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said, trying to shake off my discomfiture. “I was just . . . people watching. Lost in thought.”

  She was wearing a black gown, I noticed, cut maddeningly low in front with thin straps across the shoulders, and though I was concentrating on her face, I was aware of a long neck, delicate clavicles, and the kind of décolletage wars have been fought over.

  “You didn’t look lost,” she said, the friendly smile widening slightly into something better described as dazzling. “You looked . . . mmm, how to say, intent.”

  Damn. She’d ghosted up on me, and before that, she’d been assessing me—and assessing me well, I had to admit. It made me feel foolish, like the amateur McGraw had always accused me of being.

  I laughed uncomfortably, trying to focus on her face, which was distracting enough, and not glance down at her body. She had beautiful cheekbones, a fine, straight nose, a tiny cleft in her chin, and absurdly sensuous lips. Her hair was a luxurious jet black, wound tightly and pinned off her neck in a way that made me wonder instantly what it would look like cascading down her back. She was wearing a multi-tiered pearl choker, long shimmering earrings, and a lot of eyeliner. I’d never seen a woman as beautiful, voluptuous, and glamorous, at least not in person, and in addition to the way she had initially spooked me, just her raw physical presence was throwing me off whatever game I might otherwise have had.

  “I don’t know about that,” I managed to say. “Were you watching me or something?”

  She took a sip of champagne from a glass she was holding. It was the first time I’d noticed her hands. Again, stupid. She wasn’t a threat—at least, not an immediate physical one—but hands are what hold weapons, and only an idiot fails to automatically check them, however discreetly. Well, I’d been distracted, obviously. But that’s never a good excuse for being dead.

  A massive diamond ring encircled her fourth finger. Which made sense. She was so beautiful I couldn’t be sure of her age, but she was older than I was—Forty? Forty-five?—and, a decade or two earlier, she must have been inundated with proposals. But who was her husband? I hadn’t seen many foreign guests, though maybe I hadn’t noticed because I was looking for Sugihara—the same way I had likely managed to overlook her, because she was anything but overlookable. There was another lesson there, I thought distantly, about pattern recognition and distraction.

  She smiled again—not coyly, I noted with a surprising pang of disappointment, but more the way you might smile at something awkwardly cute, like a puppy. “Maybe a little,” she said. “You looked so earnest.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know many people here. Friend of the groom’s, from a long time ago.”

  “From America?”

  I was immediately on guard, and looking for a way to avoid a detailed conversation. “Why?”

  “Your English, of course. You sound American.” She looked at me more closely. “You’re not fully Japanese, are you?”

  I tried not to be irritated, tried not to slot her doubtless innocent and perfectly reasonable question into a lifetime of slights and rejection. “I’m fully Japanese,” I said in Japanese, my annoyance cutting through the spell of her beauty. “And also fully something else. A person doesn’t have to be only part this and part that.”

  She frowned ever so slightly—not in incomprehension, I thought, but as though I had finally said something interesting. As she did so, I noticed a small network of wrinkles around her eyes. Forty-five, I decided. Somehow the wrinkles made her even more beautiful, perhaps because they suggested the beauty’s impermanence. Tsukanoma no koto is how it’s said in Japanese. The fleetingness of things.

  “You’re right,” she said in Japanese. “That’s a nicer way of putting it. After all, when you acquire a new language, you grow a new soul. But the previous soul isn’t, mmm, diminished, yes? If anything, it grows.”

  I liked that I’d said something she agreed with. And those little mmm pauses, while she searched for a word, were charming. “You sound like you would know,” I said, switching back to English. “Where are you from?”

  “Roma, of course, could you not tell?”

  “I thought Italian, but I couldn’t have specified Rome.”

  “You didn’t know from the style? That you can tell instantly. The arrogance and impatience it takes longer to appreciate.”

  I laughed. Hoping to keep the focus on her and not on me, I said, “Who are you here with?”

  “My husband. He gets invited to so many of these functions and it would be rude if his wife didn’t join him.”

  “Does that mean you would prefer not to be here?”

  She gave me the intriguing frown again. “Did I say that?”

  “No. I asked if you meant it.”

  She laughed. “Let’s just say it’s an unexpected pleasure to meet someone who is fully more than one thing.”

  She glanced past me and raised her glass, then finished her champagne. A second later, a waiter appeared with a tray. She placed the empty glass on the tray and took two new ones, handing one to me as the waiter moved off.

  “Salute,” she said, raising her glass.

  We touched glasses. “Alla tua,” I said.

  She cocked her head. “Parli italiano?”

  I took a sip of champagne. “Only English and Japanese. But I can toast someone’s health all over the world. Order a beer, too.”

  She looked me up and down. “You seem young to be so accomplished.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me, or flirting with me. Or maybe it was both.

  “I was thinking the same about you.”

  She laughed. “What do I call you?”

  I wasn’t sure if it was an English-as-a-second-language thing, or if by asking what to call me rather than for my name she was implying I might be working a cover.

  But maybe I was overthinking it
. Maybe I was just buzzed on her beauty. Mabushii is the Japanese word for it—glaring or dazzling like the sun, but used more commonly to describe the effect of a woman like this one.

  I sipped my champagne. “John. And you?”

  “Maria.” She held up her glass and we toasted again.

  “Well, John,” she said, taking a sip, “if you want to blend at mini–affairs of state like this one, you have to know the little things.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but it made me uneasy. “The little things?”

  “Yes, of course. Such as, you hold a champagne flute by the stem, not the bowl. This keeps the champagne cold.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking down at the way I was holding the glass—the flute—as though I needed visual confirmation. “I didn’t know.”

  She shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing you don’t know unless somebody teaches you.”

  I adjusted my grip. “Thanks for telling me, then. Is there anything else?”

  “Well, since you mention, your tie is too wide for your lapels, and in any event a proper tuxedo never has notched lapels, only shawl or peak. And no flaps on the pocket or vent in back. Or cuffs on the pants. But I wouldn’t worry too much about any of that. If you look at the way these other men are dressed, you fit in very nicely.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  She laughed. “You asked.”

  I was more intrigued than irritated. “You remind me of a friend of mine, who also takes note of little things that aren’t really little. He calls it nen—mindfulness. What else should I be aware of?”

  “Ah, well, you seem a little stiff. A little too, mmm, eager. Not so much like a normal bored wedding guest. I’m guessing there’s some regulator here, or banker, or someone you hope to ask about a job, and you’re trying to find him. That maybe this is why you accepted a wedding invitation from a friend from a long time ago.”

  I was relieved she had constructed a plausible reason for my awkwardness. It reminded me of another of McGraw’s lessons: sometimes it pays to confess to the commission of a lesser crime to conceal the commission of a greater one.