Zero Sum (A John Rain Novel)

by Barry Eisler

  “Are we really only going to know each other for a short while?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because something like this can never last. You’re young, but not too young to know that.”

  I stroked her belly. “But you have so much to teach me.”

  She laughed. “For that, I think we have time. But not tonight. I have to get home.”

  “I wish you could stay.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  I did know. But I was hoping she would at least say she wanted to.

  She used the bathroom and got dressed again. I did the same. When she saw me pulling on my clothes, she said, “What, are you going out again?”

  “I’ll just walk you.”

  “Maybe it’s better if I go alone.”

  “This part of Shibuya’s a little dodgy at night. Can I walk you to the street and make sure you’re okay? I promise not to make puppy-dog eyes or anything. I’ll just see you to a cab and bow goodnight.”

  “Ah, I told you you’re considerate.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “We shouldn’t. But . . . yes.”

  “How?”

  “You can reach me at the museum.”

  “All right. I’m going to kiss you goodnight here. Outside, we’ll be perfectly proper.”

  It was a tender kiss, but behind it I sensed sadness and some ambivalence. I wanted to say something, but didn’t know what.

  We took the stairs down and headed out. The hotel was at the corner of an L-shaped street. Straight would have meant more alleyways and hotels; left was the way back to the main thoroughfare. From a little ways off, I could hear the sounds of restaurant-goers and revelers. It was cooler now, the moon higher overhead.

  Straight ahead, about fifty feet down in the shadows, was another banker-looking white guy, leaning against a telephone pole, having a smoke.

  I didn’t like it. Foreigners were relatively rare in Hyakkendana, and the street leading away from the hotel was a particularly empty one. I didn’t know what he was doing there. I did know his position offered a great view of the hotel entrance.

  I gave no sign that I’d particularly noticed him. We turned left and headed toward Dogenzaka Street. We passed a few couples, obviously in the area for trysts, and of course the touts in front of the sex shops. The street was quiet, but grew more lively as we walked, the sounds of boisterous restaurant and bar conversation louder, the crowds more substantial. This time, Maria didn’t take my arm. There was some irony to that, because we probably looked less guilty when she was unconsciously taking my arm than we did now, walking conspicuously and silently apart surrounded by a dozen love hotels.

  Assume the guy you saw in the bar was part of a team. Two men, maybe more. A safe bet you’ll head to the main street after leaving the hotel, so the second man would be somewhere ahead. But where exactly?

  I glanced casually left and right as we walked. Not many places to wait while keeping a view of the street. I assumed I was up against only foreigners. If there had been a Japanese guy on the team, he would have been the less conspicuous choice to position by the hotel. That they’d used a white guy showed they didn’t have anything better.

  We passed a convenience store on our left. Bam, there he was, the guy I’d seen in the bar, leafing through a magazine and standing with a perfect view of the street. I let my eyes go right past him, registering nothing. My heart started thudding hard and I felt a warm hit of adrenaline snake out through my torso.

  I pushed aside thoughts regarding why. And self-recrimination for having idiotically failed to spot the ambush sooner. There would be time for all that later. If there wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter. It would mean I was dead.

  Two-man team. Maybe more, but beyond three would be overkill.

  Right. If there had been a third man, they would have rotated the one from the bar to the back, or taken him off me entirely. That they’d risked my spotting him in two places and thereby making him as surveillance meant very likely just the two.

  They didn’t follow you. They followed her to you. That’s why the first one poked his head in at the bar. To confirm she was with you. After that, they hung back, which is why you didn’t spot them outside the bar or at the temple.

  But why? Why hang back? What did that mean for what was happening now?

  They don’t want her involved. They’re waiting for you to be alone.

  Tactically, that felt right. Still, I was acutely aware of Oleg’s advice about hardware stores and rat poison and knives. There were people around, sure, but it wouldn’t be so difficult to hit someone from behind and move off before anyone got a good look or understood what had happened.

  Dogenzaka Street was just ahead, choked with pedestrians. I didn’t know if the crowds would inhibit an attack, or invite one. A lot of potential witnesses, on the one hand. A lot of concealment, confusion, and movement, on the other.

  But the main thing was, the moment Maria was in the cab, the leash would be off whoever was following me. Meaning, in all likelihood, I had maybe a minute left to live.

  Or to kill my pursuers in less than that.

  chapter ten

  The instant we got to the sidewalk, I turned right and raised my hand for a cab. The turn was natural, but also gave me a peripheral view of what was behind us. The bar guy had the point now, but he was hanging back. They didn’t know I’d spotted them. They thought they had time to move in at their leisure. That was good.

  A cab pulled over and the automatic door opened. Maria got in.

  “I’ll see you at work,” I said, with a polite wave.

  She smiled. “Grazie.” The door closed, and the cab pulled away.

  I might have turned left, or right. Or cut across the busy street. I might have run, and hoped to live to fight another day.

  Instead, I turned and walked back the way we had come.

  It was a reflex, honed by hard training and lethal experience. An ambush is planned around anticipation that, once you realize you’re in it, you’ll run away. So if you run, you’re following the ambusher’s script, and in doing so probably heading into something even worse. It follows that if you’re ambushed, running is almost always a mistake. Your best chance of survival is instead to attack the ambush.

  This isn’t to say that attacking an ambush is a good thing. You’ve been ambushed, after all. Meaning you’re already at a huge disadvantage. It’s just that within the universe of crappy possibilities remaining to you following your galactic fuckup of not spotting the ambush before it happened, attacking back tends to be the least crappy alternative. Whether they realized I had spotted them or not, therefore, it was critical now that I not do the expected thing, the thing they would have anticipated and planned for.

  So I nodded to myself and kept a slightly dopey grin on my face, as though still drunk on gin and the afterglow of lovemaking. In fact, whatever trace of either had been lingering in my system was now gone, eclipsed by an icy clarity. But they wouldn’t know that. What they “knew” was that we’d been in a bar, and then a love hotel. They’d see my expression, and it would slot right into what they already believed. Comfort them. Lull them. Just like the doormen checking invitations at the wedding reception, and like the shopkeepers reacting to my fancy new clothes, they would see what they already expected to see. With a little assist from me, of course.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Bar Guy duck back into the convenience store. Farther up the street, I saw Hotel Guy ghost behind a lamppost. Yeah, they hadn’t been expecting me to come back this way. Probably they didn’t realize I was staying at the hotel. They thought Maria and I had gone there only for a “rest.” My sense that they had followed her to me deepened, to be examined later. What mattered now was that I already had them reacting. They wanted to be behind me, not in front. I couldn’t blame them. I wanted to be behind them just as much. And I had an idea about how to make it happen.

&n
bsp; I knew the area reasonably well from having scoped it out when McGraw was using the Lion coffee shop operationally. And from having reacquainted myself earlier that day, when I was looking for a new hotel. Still, I should have known it better. I should have known every inch of the terrain, so that I could make maximum use of it for my own advantage. I’d been lazy. Complacent. Well, one way or the other, I knew I would never make that mistake again.

  There was an alley on the left side of the street, across from the convenience store—probably for trash and storage for the restaurants that fronted on the street running parallel to it. If it was like most alleys in Tokyo, I thought I might be able to use it.

  I cut over and went in. Immediately, the light and sound from the street faded. On my left, visible in the moonlight, was a rusted metal fence, half-covered in weeds, clots of garbage all along its base. To my right were the graffiti-covered backs of buildings, all of them lined with trash containers and broken furniture and abandoned appliances. Power lines ran rampant overhead.

  I wondered if they’d follow me in. The alley was sufficiently dark, dirty, and off the beaten track to make them sense something might be questionable about my detour. On the other hand, someone unfamiliar with Tokyo might have guessed the alley could make sense as some sort of shortcut. Of course, if they were eager enough, they might not care either way.

  Up ahead, I saw a cat dart out from between two buildings and run up the alley away from me. Good. That’s what I was looking for—spaces between the structures.

  I moved at a moderate pace—not so slowly that they could have easily overtaken me, not so fast that they would have thought I was onto them and trying to escape. I glanced around as I moved, and confirmed that there were narrow spaces between a few of the buildings to my right. Some were choked with refuse, and others were deliberately blocked off. But not all.

  In less than a half minute, I reached the end of the alley and made a right onto a walkway that was only slightly less dim and decrepit. To my right was a construction site—nothing huge, but there were tarps, with bricks weighting down the edges. I snatched one up, liking the weight of it in my hand, the solidity, then sprinted ahead and immediately turned right again, moving parallel to the alley.

  I stopped at the first navigable passage I came to, and stuck my head just past the edge to watch. A moment later, I saw Bar Guy pass my position. Having lost sight of me, he was walking faster, doubtless afraid he would lose me. I ducked into the passage, which was so narrow I had to move sideways. The ground was soft—dirt and moss and muck—and noiseless. In a few seconds, I had almost reached the alley again. I squatted, controlling my breathing, silent and still, waiting.

  A few seconds later, Hotel Guy moved past my position. He was fixated on what was in front of him and didn’t even glance in my direction—though it was so dark in the passage I doubted he would have seen me regardless. But I saw him, along with the knife he was holding in his right hand close to his thigh. I’d already assumed that, whoever they were, they hadn’t tracked me just to offer their warm felicitations. Now I knew for sure.

  I eased out silently behind him, walking the way I had learned in the jungles of Vietnam, where stepping on a branch could bring an NVA battalion down on your head, and where failing to spot a tripwire could cost you your legs or balls or both. The trash and dead leaves strewn here and there didn’t even register for me consciously. I took it all in, avoided it, and moved quickly forward on the soles of my fancy new Italian shoes.

  When we were ten feet from the end of the alley, I traded stealth for speed, wanting to close the gap before he turned the corner. But moving more quickly, I stepped on something I’d missed—a wrapper, a leaf, something like that. His arms came up and his head turtled in and he started to turn, some primitive part of his mind registering that the footfall he’d heard behind him was the sound of mortal danger. But it was too late. I raised the brick high, gripping it around the middle, and smashed a corner down into the top of his skull, caving it into his brain and possibly fracturing his neck, as well. His legs buckled and he pitched forward onto his face, his arms splayed at his sides, the knife clattering to the ground.

  I had hoped he would die noiselessly, but absent a perfect headshot or transected throat, there are no guarantees in these matters. So it was just bad luck that, as he hit the ground, some weird final sound emanated from his dying throat, a sort of gurgling bark. It wasn’t loud, but along with the clattering knife, I knew it was loud enough.

  I searched desperately for the blade. He’d been holding it in his right hand, his arms were at his sides when he pitched forward—

  Bar Guy came tearing around the corner, stopping not eight feet away when he saw the tableau in the moonlight. I checked his hands, afraid I’d see a gun, and instead saw another knife. If he’d charged me right then, his chances would have been excellent. A brick against a blade isn’t usually an equal fight.

  But he hesitated, needing an instant to process what he was seeing—along with how did I get behind them, how did I drop his partner, what did all this mean. Psychologists call this mental state “cognitive dissonance,” as the brain, confronted with an uncomfortable or unexplainable fact pattern, struggles to make sense of it. And in that moment of hesitation, I saw and swept up his partner’s knife.

  The smarter thing for me to do, the safer thing, would have been to run. But I was still young, and not quite as governed by cold rationality as I liked to think. Plus, I’d been suppressing a lot of animosity dealing with Oleg and Victor, and my patience had started to wear thin. There was a beast inside me, a beast that had saved me many times in the war, a beast that was always looking for a reason and that I controlled only with difficulty. Being hunted, and having just stalked and killed one of the people hunting me, had unleashed that beast. Freed from my grasp, it wasn’t much in the beast’s nature to run. Its nature was to kill.

  “I don’t know what they’re paying you,” I said in a near growl. “But come at me, and I guarantee you won’t collect. Ask your partner. I’m standing in his brains.”

  I saw it in his eyes then. Fear. The realization that I was telling the truth. That he’d just treed an animal with teeth and tusks. Along with the ability—hell, the longing—to use them.

  I knew he was going to turn and run even before he did. So I was already switching the knife to my left hand and the brick to my right before he’d completed his pivot. And drawing back my arm before he’d planted his foot. And launching the brick like a mortar round before he’d gotten off his first step.

  It caught him in the back of the head with a beautiful, bass-note bumpf. He went sprawling forward, his legs churning spastically, the limbs still receiving a truncated Run! message from his brain but unable to properly carry it out. He landed facedown, but managed to hold on to the knife.

  Receiving a brick to the back of the head is never a welcome development, but I knew the damage was likely to be much less severe than what I’d inflicted on his partner. When your body has room to move with the impact, it makes all the difference—like being punched in the face when you’re freestanding, as opposed to being punched the same way when your head is against a wall. This is just a principle of physics. The fact that he’d held on to the knife was a demonstration.

  It didn’t matter, though. His circuits would still be scrambled for at least a couple seconds, and it took me less than that to reach him, raise my foot, and stomp his knife hand with the pleasingly unforgiving heel of a new Italian split-toe brown suede shoe.

  There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand. I didn’t know how many I shattered with that adrenaline-fueled stomp, but in my strictly nonmedical judgment, the answer was undoubtedly “plenty.” He shrieked and jerked his arm in reaction to the pain, abandoning the knife. I doubted he could have gripped it at that point no matter what, but still I kicked it away. Then I dropped a knee onto his spine, took a fistful of hair, jerked his head back hard, swept the blade under his chin, and pressed t
he edge against his neck just below the jaw.

  “I haven’t cut a man’s throat in over ten years,” I said, breathing like a locomotive. “You want me to keep that streak, or end it?”

  “Keep it,” he rasped.

  I swiveled my head to check my flanks. All clear.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Nobody. I’m nobody.”

  “Answer my questions or you’ll be a dead nobody. Why were you following me?”

  He groaned and tried to move his head away from the knife, but I already had his neck stretched so hard there was nowhere for him to go. His hair was slick, and I realized his scalp was bleeding from where the brick had landed. I tightened my grip.

  “Don’t,” he said, panting. “Don’t. You’re making a huge fucking mistake.”

  “That’s weird, from this angle, it looks like the one who made a huge fucking mistake is you.”

  He groaned again. “You do this, and you will be buried in a shit storm you can’t even imagine.”

  “Yeah? Something worse than a couple of assholes trying to sneak up and knife me in the dark?”

  “You tell me. You think you can take on the whole CIA?”

  Just the mention was enough to make me do another visual sweep. But the alley was still quiet.

  Maybe he was bluffing. A guy with a knife to his neck will say anything he thinks might get you to move it in a safe direction.

  “You have a name?”

  “Mike.”

  “Okay, Mike. What does the CIA want with me?”

  “Look, man, I’m just like you. A contractor. Doing a job. You think they tell me why? Have they ever told you?”

  “But they told you I’m a contractor.”

  “Ex-contractor, they said. Ex-military. Fifth Group. That was my unit, too.”

  Maybe it was. Maybe he was lying. Either way, he was obviously trying to build some rapport, to make it harder for me to kill him. If so, whatever file they gave him must not have described me very well.