Zero Sum (A John Rain Novel)

by Barry Eisler

  Not a bridge too far. Just farther. A kind of . . . plan C.

  All right. I’d keep Tatsu in mind, as a kind of backup. But first, I needed to check in with Victor.

  I spent the night in one of the city’s thousand love hotels—short-stay institutions designed for romantic liaisons, but useful, too, for anyone trying to avoid being tracked—and called Victor the following morning. As I dialed the number from a payphone, I realized I wasn’t exactly eager to get together. As the saying goes, if the enemy is in range . . . so are you. But I didn’t see another way to play it.

  Someone picked up and said, “Hello.” Oleg. I recognized the voice, and the accent, from last time.

  “It’s me,” I said. “I made contact last night. If he wants to hear more, I’ll come in. If not, I’ll just get on with it.”

  “No, for sure you should come in. You can be here in half hour, yes?”

  I thought about what that might mean. Most likely they were there now—assuming the number I was calling was to a phone in Victor’s office. In theory, the number might have been for a phone in a different location. But Oleg didn’t strike me as someone Victor had hired for his subtle spy skills. Surprised by my call, communicating over the phone in his weak English, he wouldn’t have been sharp or focused enough to say “here” to mean the office if he was taking the call somewhere else.

  So it seemed they spent a fair amount of time at the Kasumigaseki office. Not actionable intel yet, but another piece I might in time be able to combine with other pieces.

  “I can be there.”

  “Good.” He hung up.

  A half hour later, I was back in Victor’s office, having repeated the drill from last time—the wait, the pat-down, the escort by Oleg and two Japanese gangsters. Victor was a careful man.

  He was sitting when I came in, and he clapped theatrically when he saw me. “Good to see you, my friend, good to see you. Glad you have progress to report. Sit, sit! I want you to be comfortable.”

  No persimmon this time, I noted. And no knife. The polo shirt was now blue. The carpet had been changed—to red. I’d thought he was joking about that, but it seemed his men had decided it was safer to act as though he’d meant it.

  “I’m fine standing,” I said. “I don’t want to take too much of your time.”

  “No problem,” he said. “No problem. I want you to sit.” He gestured to an empty upholstered chair. “Pozhaluista. Please.”

  I would have been more comfortable standing. But I supposed if the plan was to kill me, the four of them, presumably armed, would probably manage it regardless of whether I was in a chair or on my feet. So I sat.

  “Very good. Thank you, my friend.” He leaned forward. “Now. Tell me about Sugihara.”

  “There’s not much to say. I would have told Oleg over the phone, but he said I should come in.”

  “Of course, it’s better you’re here. Face to face, always better. So. Sugihara. He is dead, yes?”

  I looked at him. Was he serious?

  He waited a beat, then laughed uproariously. “All right, all right, still alive, then. No need to worry. Just give details.”

  “There was a wedding last night. The grandson of the minister of agriculture. I managed to get in to the reception. I met Sugihara briefly. No opportunity to do more than that, but I’m more certain of who he is now than I was from that old newspaper clipping. Which ought to reduce the chances of another fuckup like Kobayashi’s.”

  Victor looked at me, his expression unreadable. “You met him.” Not a question, a statement.

  I returned the look. “As I said.”

  “You met man. But you didn’t kill him.”

  “I considered it. But in the end, the thousand or so witnesses stayed my hand. You have a problem with that?”

  He stared at me, his eyes like empty pools. I wondered if I was getting under his skin. He was certainly getting under mine. I needed to shut that shit down. Stay detached. But deep within myself, I felt a realization locking into place.

  One way or another, I was going to kill this asshole.

  “His security wasn’t even with him. Bodyguard stayed outside.”

  I wondered whether he knew that, or whether he was fishing.

  “I didn’t say his bodyguard was the problem. I said it was the witnesses. Look, if you want this done right, it might take a little time. If you want me to be hasty, you’re risking another fuckup, and that would make the job even harder, maybe even impossible. Is that what you want?”

  Again he stared at me for a long moment. If he lunged at me, I would come up under him and go for his eyes while shoving him back into Oleg, then fight to get to the door. Though the odds wouldn’t be great.

  “Hasty,” he said, scratching his neck. “I thought I knew this word. But maybe not. Does it mean spending half of party making sexy eyes with Sugihara’s Italian wife?”

  That confirmed it—he had someone on the inside, someone at the wedding. Probably the same someone who’d been feeding him intel about his opposition in the LDP and on the street, enabling him to quickly acquire the targets who stood to thwart him, and have them beaten them to death.

  But his gambit, and what lay behind it, didn’t throw me off. I might have been awkward at a wedding reception, but Victor was tripping all my combat triggers, and combat for me is like coming home.

  “You knew he had a wife,” I said, my tone dropping a notch, “and you didn’t tell me? That’s a solid operational lead. I could have sought her out as a route to Sugihara instead of having to stumble upon her by accident. I got lucky. You want this job to depend on luck, or do you want to work with me by telling me what you know?”

  But probably he hadn’t known. Not before. Probably his inside man apprised him of what happened at the reception after the fact. In pushing back, I concealed this suspicion. And put Victor on the defensive.

  Though I had to be careful. If I made him too defensive, things could get ugly fast.

  Victor’s eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly. “You are not . . . afraid of me, are you.” Again, not a question. A statement.

  I watched him, wary. “I’m just trying to get the job done. And done right.”

  “This is interesting. I like man who isn’t afraid of me.”

  I thought he was full of shit about that. It seemed to me this guy wanted everyone who ever even heard his name to be afraid of him, and in general he was doing a reasonably good job of pulling it off. Although whether he was lying to me or to himself, I wasn’t sure.

  He leaned back in his chair as though to look at me in deeper focus. “But maybe also true that man who isn’t afraid of me . . . is dangerous.”

  “You scare a man enough,” I said, “and you’d be amazed at how dangerous he can become.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, the pressure of silence in the room building as though something might explode. In my peripheral vision, I saw his men watching. Oleg’s right hand drifted to his waist—in preparation to access a weapon, no doubt. I braced to intercept him.

  Then Victor threw back his head and laughed. It went on for maybe a half minute, peals of hilarity filling the room. When it finally began to ebb, he leaned forward again, still laughing and wiping his eyes. He pointed at me. “Like I said. Funny guy. I really like you, funny guy. Okay, so it’s good thing you’re not afraid of me, yes?”

  “I guess so. Now, do you have any other leads you’re planning to hold back? Or do you want me to get this job done?”

  He laughed again and clapped. “All right, funny tough guy. You don’t worry. I get you good lead. Where can Oleg call you?”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “Where do you stay?”

  “With a friend. But I don’t like to disturb him with calls that aren’t for him.”

  He looked me up and down, his face expressionless. I could feel the tension in the room again.

  “You know, funny tough guy, I like you. But fuck with me is big mistake. You know this,
yes? You want me to show? Show you right fucking now?”

  The tension in the room intensified. I wasn’t afraid, though. More . . . interested. This psychopath seemed to have a certain amount of self-control. And he was exercising it now because he wanted something from me. Something I wouldn’t be able to do for him dead.

  “How about if I call you?” I said. “Just tell me when you want me to.”

  I figured letting him tell me when to call might make him feel like he was in control again, and get him to overlook the fact that I had ignored his demand, and made my own instead.

  It seemed to work, because after a moment, he said, “You call Oleg tonight. Five o’clock. If we don’t have lead then, you call twice a day. Nine o’clock, five o’clock. Don’t miss call. Don’t be unreliable.”

  “You know, this whole thing would be easier if you could get me a gun.”

  Victor smiled as though he recognized exactly what I wanted that gun for. “Guns are . . . difficult to get in Japan. Oleg has one, but I like him to be only guy to have.”

  Was it true that Oleg was carrying? I hadn’t seen any telltale signs—a bulge under the arm, a sagging waistband. When his right hand had drifted to his waist earlier, he might have been going for a pistol, maybe something small enough for good concealment by his jacket and his bulk. But my gut said the weapon he’d been reaching for was a knife. Even if he hadn’t read Sun Tzu, Victor was smart and experienced enough to know that when weak, you feign strength, and when strong, you feign weakness.

  And what about Victor’s other men? I hadn’t seen any other hands drifting in a telltale move for a weapon. And beyond that, if Oleg, who was clearly Victor’s right-hand man, wasn’t carrying, it was hard to imagine the flunkies would be.

  And even if I’d been wrong—even if Oleg were carrying, and even if I could disarm him before the others converged on me—I’d be pinning everything on the weapon itself. A weapon that, for all I knew, might be improperly maintained and could easily jam. Probably it would be operational, but if not, I’d be dead a few seconds later.

  So I waited.

  “Besides,” Victor went on, “you know where Sugihara lives. Where he works. With what I give you, you should be able to club him in head with rock it’s so easy.”

  “Yeah, I made a few runs past his building and where he works. They’re both low-percentage places to try to get to him. That would be the case no matter what, because of the layout, the neighborhood, the access control, and the guards at work. But it’s even more the case because, as you’ve said, he upped his security after Kobayashi, and unless it’s the least competent security in the world, they would have explained to him that he has to be extra careful coming and going from home and work because these are the known, predictable places where someone would try to drop him. Now, he wasn’t being super careful at the wedding, so we know he’s going to be vulnerable somewhere. But I need solid intel to figure out where that somewhere is.”

  “Excuses.”

  “No, obstacles. Does he have a hobby? A mistress? A dog? Something like that. If he has a dog, maybe he walks it at night because his wife doesn’t want to get out of bed. That kind of thing. That might be an opportunity.”

  “I don’t know about dog.”

  “Look, I’m the weapon, but I need your help acquiring the target. And if you can’t help, okay, but then I’m going to have to develop the intel myself. That’s going to take time, or luck, but probably some of both.”

  He looked at me with his blank eyes. “You call Oleg tonight,” he said. “Don’t be late. Don’t be unreliable guy.”

  chapter six

  The National Museum was in Ueno Park. I was staying at another love hotel, this time in Ikebukuro, which was a straight shot to Ueno on the JNR Yamanote line.

  It was odd to be back in the city after a decade away. Of course, it all still felt like the Tokyo I remembered—the sounds of trains and traffic; the smell of rice and ramen; the overall energy of the place. But so much had changed, too. The Ikebukuro skyline was dramatically different, with high-rises going up everywhere—one of which, the giant Sunshine 60 building, was currently the tallest in Japan. So many of the stalwart wooden houses, browned by decades of alternating sun and rain, were being supplanted by concrete. And the war had receded, too. When I was a boy, there had still been signs of it—craters, empty fields, the skeletons of buildings immolated by American incendiary bombs. By the time I was back, in 1972, the physical scars were gone, but somehow their memory lingered, a ghostly presence in the increasingly prosperous, ever more cosmopolitan city. But now, it seemed, even the ghosts had departed, and the war had come to feel less like memory, and more like history.

  The train was fine—clean and fast and efficient. But it made me miss Thanatos, the Suzuki GT380J I’d abandoned when I left Tokyo ten years earlier. Maybe I’d get another, if I took care of Victor and wound up staying. But probably it wouldn’t be the same. There’s no love like your first.

  I got off the train and strolled through the park, avoiding Shinobazu Pond, the place where I had “died” ten years earlier. Remembering the gunshot, and the splash among the lotuses, and the cries of startled birds, I thought the spot would feel haunted now. I wouldn’t mind if I never saw it again.

  It was a warm day, and sunny, and the park was full. I saw groups of schoolchildren in their blue uniforms and yellow safety caps, chattering and holding hands as their teachers ushered them to whatever shrine or museum was next on their itinerary; tourists, cameras hanging from their necks, consulting maps and guidebooks; mothers with strollers, out for walks; salarymen with newspapers out for illicit saboru breaks; pensioners on benches out to kill time. The air was light with laughter and the sounds of relaxed conversation. The leaves of the gingko trees were tinged with yellow, and the kōyō, fall colors, made me think of my mother, and how much she had loved autumn in Japan.

  I walked past the fountain along the esplanade in front of the museum, then stood for a moment, watching as a foreign tour group gradually filed into the massive stone structure. As the last of them disappeared inside, I saw Maria, standing alone under the main entrance portico. She waved when she saw me, and started down the steps.

  “John, hello,” she said as she reached me, kissing my cheeks in the Italian fashion. “I wasn’t sure you would come, you know, but I’m so glad you did.”

  She was wearing an over-the-knee black skirt, a white button-down blouse open at the neck, and black pumps. Small gold earrings, a simple pearl necklace, and a bit less eyeliner than she had at the reception. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she struck me as even more beautiful in the understated business attire than in the black gown.

  “I wasn’t sure, either. It was a little hard to know what this is about.”

  “Well, a job, of course.”

  “A job?”

  “Isn’t that what you were looking for at the reception? Someone to talk to about a job?”

  That had been her interpretation. I hadn’t denied it, but neither did I think I’d confirmed sufficiently for her to try to actually offer me something.

  “I . . . don’t know what to say.”

  “Was I mistaken? You’re not looking for work? The way you answered, I thought you were being, mmm, euphemistic.”

  “Maybe a little. What kind of job are we talking about?”

  “Recently, the gentleman who was leading English-language tours had to return suddenly to Australia. So when I met you, I thought maybe you could be a good fit.”

  I glanced over at the imposing bulk of the museum behind her. “Maria, it’s nice of you to think of me, but pretty much everything I know about art is from a conversation with you at a wedding.”

  “Of course, you would need a teacher. Luckily for you, as you can see, I’m a good one.”

  I laughed. “Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted me to come here?”

  “Honestly, I was afraid if I told you without also showing you and introducing you t
o Director Kurosawa, you might not realize you were interested.”

  “Might not realize? I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

  “Look, you’ve come this far, so you must be at least a little intrigued, yes? Why don’t I introduce you, show you around a little, and then, if you’re still not interested, at least you’ll have made an informed decision, isn’t that right?”

  I tried to think it through. Was she telling the truth? Did she really invite me to the museum about a job? Because it occurred to me that, if there was something more she was interested in, or something else, the job pretext would have made excellent cover for action. Everything aboveboard, including a meeting with the museum director himself. Everything deniable. A much safer way to proceed than, say, a drink in a bar or a rendezvous on a park bench.

  Or maybe the cover for action was more for her than for potential third parties. It wasn’t until years later that I read Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, where Niebuhr talked about how the baser self has to deceive the better self to get the better self’s buy-in for behavior it would never otherwise agree to. But even before I read the book, I grasped the concept, and I wondered if maybe she was interested in me for something other than a job, but had convinced herself it was about a job because she wasn’t ready to accept the true nature of that interest. I certainly knew enough about the kinds of rationalizations involved with killing to understand something similar might come into play in the context of forbidden attractions.

  Or maybe that was all foolish hope on my part. Projection. Maybe I was just overthinking it.

  It didn’t matter. I needed to develop her for information about her husband. And one pretext for that was probably about as good as another.

  A formation of chattering, blue-sailor-uniformed high-school girls flowed out of the museum and past us. I watched them go, then threw up my arms in surrender. “Okay. I guess what’s the harm.”

  We walked inside, and I paused for a moment in the foyer, craning my neck to look around. I tried to recall the last time my mother had taken me here—probably when I was seven or so. I didn’t expect to remember it well, and was surprised to find that I did. The imposingly high ceiling with its elaborate carvings. The tall marble walls. The massive split staircase, twenty feet across, and the metal carvings on the huge bannisters. And of course the solemn echo produced by all that stone and space.