Zero Sum (A John Rain Novel)

by Barry Eisler

  “How’d you know how to find me?”

  “Look, I’ll talk to you, all right? But will you show me some goodwill? Soldier to soldier?”

  “If you earn it.”

  “All we were told was to take you off the count. Not why, just who. And that the way to find you was to follow the woman.”

  “What about the woman?”

  He groaned again. “Come on, man, I’m being straight with you. She’s Italian. Works at a museum. We were given her particulars and followed her.”

  That tracked with what I’d pieced together myself. “Who told you? Who gave you her particulars? Who wants me dead?”

  “I told you. The Agency.”

  “That’s funny, maybe they mentioned I have a few acquaintances there. Who are we talking about specifically?”

  “The seventh floor. You get it?”

  The seventh floor was where the Langley top echelon had their offices. I tried to come up with a way to test whether he was telling me the truth, or was just bluffing to scare me. It was a delicate dance. Consciously or otherwise, this guy understood he was doing a version of Scheherazade, but with only a minute to hook me with his tale rather than a thousand and one nights.

  “So you know the floor, but not the office?”

  “Come on, you know the way things work. The guy who hires you doesn’t say why or at whose orders, but you connect the dots.”

  “That’s exactly what you need to do, if you want to survive this conversation.”

  “I’ll give you a name, okay? A name. And you let me walk away. Just one soldier to another. I tell you something that’ll save your life, you spare mine. A deal, okay?”

  “It better be a good name.”

  “Wilson. Calloway Wilson. Goes by Cal.”

  I jerked him by the hair. “Never heard of him. Starting to be a really bad day for you, Mike.”

  “Easy. Easy. Listen to me. He’s not with the Agency anymore. Not formally. He hasn’t been for a while.”

  “You just told me the Agency is after me. Seventh floor, you said.”

  “It is. Wilson was thrown out by Turner and his people three years ago.”

  Turner would have been Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s appointee for Director of Central Intelligence. Taking the job shortly after the Church and Pike Committees revealed that the CIA had been running amok—conducting assassinations, domestic spying, and unwitting human experimentation—Turner had purged over eight hundred operators in what became known inside the Agency as the Halloween Massacre.

  “First you said the Agency wants me dead. Now you’re saying it’s a guy who got shit-canned three years ago.”

  “Listen. Wilson goes all the way back to the OSS. And who’s Reagan’s DCI?”

  The OSS was the Office of Strategic Services—the World War II precursor to the CIA.

  “William Casey,” I said.

  “Bingo. And Casey’s former OSS, too. He’s brought guys in from the cold. Buddies of his, from back in the day. Wilson’s one of them.”

  “Why?”

  “To do deniable shit, isn’t that obvious?”

  If it was a fabrication, it was smoothly delivered. It sounded like either the truth, or cover-for-action the guy had rehearsed carefully in advance. But in advance of what? The possibility that he might have someone kneeling on his back and demanding answers with a knife to his throat? And what would the fabrication even get him? If he’d invented something in advance as a bargaining chip, presumably he would have created something with a little more value.

  “What’s your connection to Wilson?” I asked.

  “Same as his connection to Casey. I was out, and Wilson got me work.”

  He was sounding a little calmer now. A little more confident. He thought he’d established some rapport, that he’d improved his odds of talking his way out of this. That was good.

  “How old are you, Mike?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “That’s pretty young to be out.”

  “Let’s just say I was asked to leave.”

  “Dishonorable?”

  “It was bullshit. I did an informant in El Salvador. They said it was murder. You know what I’m talking about. You guys went through the same thing in Vietnam. Project Gamma, right? Terminate with extreme prejudice? What are we supposed to do, let some turncoat fuck compromise our mission? Get our guys killed?”

  He was talking about something that had been reported in the press as “the Green Beret Affair,” where US Special Forces had killed a suspected South Vietnamese double agent and tried to cover it up. The resulting trial introduced into the public lexicon the phrase “termination with extreme prejudice,” but accomplished little else. The CIA, naturally citing national security concerns, refused to make its personnel available for the defense, and the judge dismissed the case.

  “What about your friend? The one whose brains are leaking through the hole in his skull on the ground back there.”

  “He wasn’t my friend. Just another guy Wilson hired. I barely knew him. I got no beef with you.”

  “How do I get to Wilson?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did he hire you?”

  “At a 7-Eleven in Paterson, New Jersey, which is about the only job I could get after the army fucked me over.”

  Something else occurred to me. A lot of ex-military are obviously just that—buzz cuts, tactical watches, loud ties that are an overreaction to years of olive drab. But these two were a lot smoother than that.

  “I saw you,” I said, “but I didn’t spot you. Some of that was my fault. But you knew what you were doing. Tell me how.”

  “Urban-ops course. Taught by the Agency. Wilson made sure I went through it.”

  I was intrigued. “What did they teach you?”

  “It was like acting school. You know, a lot of fieldwork examining what we could tell about people from how they dressed and walked and what they carried. A lot of roleplaying, blending, that kind of thing.”

  It sounded like what I’d been doing on my own. I wouldn’t have minded taking the course, though—it seemed to have benefited these guys.

  “What else?”

  “That’s it, man. Are we cool?”

  I pulled his head back a fraction. “I was really hoping you could do better than this, Mike.”

  “Easy, easy! Look, I’m telling you what I know. Why wouldn’t I? Wilson’s nothing to me. He’s a paycheck. That’s it. I got no loyalty to him.”

  “I doubt he has any for you, either.”

  “Exactly. He’s just an old ex-spook. But this is different. I’m asking you, man. Soldier to soldier. Please. Don’t do me. You don’t have to. Don’t.”

  “I’m not a soldier anymore,” I said, and cut his throat.

  The wound was so massive that the blood didn’t spurt. Instead it flooded out of him, as though his neck was an overturned bucket. I leaped back, managing to avoid getting it on anything more than my hand.

  He didn’t make a sound—he couldn’t. But he did somehow get to his knees, one hand on the tarmac, the other pressed uselessly over the gash in his throat. He planted a wobbling foot as though to rise, but then his brain, oxygenated blood plummeting out of it, went dark, and he collapsed and lay still.

  I stood there for a moment, looking down at him, as detached as someone in the back row of a theater watching the credits roll on a movie. A knife is about the most horribly intimate way there is to kill a man, and if I’d allowed myself to feel anything at all, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

  Of course, later would be a different story. But I’d deal with that when I had to. The way I always had before.

  I kneeled and checked his pockets. Nothing but a map of Tokyo. Then I backed up, just ahead of a growing pool of blood, and did the same for his partner. Again nothing. It was worth checking, but I hadn’t really been expecting they’d be carrying ID while operationa
l.

  I skirted wide of the blood and headed out of the alley. Around the corner, I wiped my hand as best I could on the weeds growing through a chain-link fence. The sleeve of my sweater was moist and stank of blood. I’d have to get rid of it.

  I headed straight to the hotel, scanning my surroundings constantly. I saw no problems. Back at the room, I pulled the plastic liner out of a trashcan, jammed the sweater into it, cleaned the knife, wrapped it in a towel, washed up, changed into my more familiar clothes, threw the wrapped knife, the sweater, and my gear into my bag, and headed out. This time, I used an employee entrance around the side, unlocking the door from the inside and heading down an alley, again scanning as I moved. Nothing. So it seemed it had been just “Mike” and his partner. Whoever was behind them, their team was now down by two.

  Good news, as far as these things go. But I didn’t know how deep their bench was.

  chapter eleven

  I kept to backstreets and headed west. In a neighborhood park, I tied the sweater around a rock and tossed it into a muddy pond. It might be found eventually, but by then there would be no sign of blood, and no way of connecting it to me regardless. The plastic bag went into a dumpster behind a convenience store, the towel into another dumpster. I was reluctant to part with the knife, but decided on balance I’d be better off not carrying around a murder weapon, and got rid of it in a sewer drain. I could pick up a clean one later.

  Just after I finished dumping the incriminating articles, I got the shakes. It was okay. The aftermath of an adrenaline dump and the impact of realizing how close I’d come to dying. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. I kept walking, waiting it out.

  You’re okay. You fucked up and it was a close call. But you handled it. You’re okay now. You’re safe. Now you need to think. Think.

  Yes. In the military, we called it an after-action report. What did we do well, what could we have done better, what can we learn to improve the odds next time.

  So what had I done wrong?

  I breathed deeply in and out for a minute, clearing my mind, calming myself. I reminded myself of one of McGraw’s dictates: First, tell me what you know. Then tell me what you don’t know. Now tell me what you think.

  Okay. I started working it through.

  You assumed that if you were clean, you were safe. You didn’t account for the possibility that someone you were meeting was herself under surveillance.

  Yes. That was stupid. Sugihara was a target. In retrospect, it wasn’t so inconceivable that someone would treat his wife as a nexus. I’d been so infatuated, I hadn’t wanted to see it.

  All true. But you’re being too easy on yourself.

  Yeah, it was worse than not wanting to see it. I’d wanted to not see it. Sure, the suit could have been a banker uniform, and the obvious fitness might have been the product of leisure time for the gym. And some of my mistake could be attributed to the trip to Ginza that very day, and my subsequent focus on what clothes could tell me about civilians. I’d started to develop a framework, but then that framework had limited me. I’d seen one kind of professional when I should have been open to the possibility of another.

  But I hadn’t just been fooled. I had also fooled myself. I’d wanted to believe Maria was separate from Sugihara, from the life I was in. Because I wanted whatever was between us to be separate from all that, too.

  Exactly. You listened to your heart and ignored your brain. You wanted to be a romantic in a business where only cynics survive.

  I could feel myself resisting the idea even as it presented itself to me. Which was part of how I knew it was the truth.

  I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. And even if I couldn’t control my heart, I could damn sure do a better job of watching my back. And of knowing that no matter how well I protected myself, anytime I met someone else, that person would automatically be the weak link in the chain of my own security. An ugly, selfish way to put it, maybe, but this wasn’t about sentiment. It was about survival.

  All right. Maria was a danger. But was she in danger?

  No. If they’d wanted to take her out, they could have hit the two of us anytime. The temple would have been ideal—dark, quiet, and we were distracted and then some. But they didn’t.

  Almost. But then why not do just you at the temple? Her back was to that post, remember? Your back was to the street. They could have approached from behind, hit you a half dozen times in the liver and kidneys, and been gone in five seconds. In the fear and confusion and the dark, she’d never be able to identify who did it. A couple white guys, if that.

  That made sense. So it wasn’t just that they didn’t want to kill her. They didn’t want her involved in my death in any way at all. They didn’t even want her to be around when it happened.

  I thought about Sugihara. Could he have put them on me?

  It made a certain amount of sense. He was a powerful man. If he was jealous, if he was having her watched, if he wanted her lover killed . . . presumably, he wouldn’t want it to be done in her presence. Any detective worth a damn would zero in on the likely motive, and Sugihara would instantly be a suspect.

  Okay, a certain amount of sense. But does it feel right to you?

  No, it didn’t. Not really. If those guys had been under orders from Sugihara, he would have had to be almost unimaginably jealous. Nothing had happened between Maria and me before that night. In fact, I’d seen her only twice. At the wedding, there had been a little flirtation, but overall she’d treated me professionally. Even if he’d known about the job offer or whatever it was at the museum, if he were so jealous of her that he’d use his connections to hire a couple of CIA contractors to take me out on no more than what had happened before tonight, she never would have talked to me the way she did at the wedding. She would have been afraid to. I supposed it was possible he kept his mad jealousy hidden from her or something like that, but the scenario just didn’t feel right to me. And besides, wouldn’t it have been easier for him, and probably more effective, to reach out to the yakuza for a hit than to the CIA?

  But if he had reached out to the yakuza, they’d have to funnel it through Victor. Those are the rules now, remember? Victor has a monopoly on contract killings. And if you violate his monopoly, a contract goes out on you.

  I chewed on that. Not impossible, I supposed, but still far-fetched. It required an insanely jealous Sugihara. Who reaches out to the yakuza. Who funnel the job through Victor. Who outsources it to the CIA. Or at least an insanely jealous Sugihara who reaches out directly to the CIA through some contact there.

  No. It didn’t add up. Parsimony suggested my problem wasn’t with Sugihara.

  Or not directly with him.

  Right. After all, someone knew they could find me through Sugihara’s wife. But why? Who had I offended?

  Victor.

  So back to Victor and the CIA.

  Assume there’s a connection there.

  I tried, but it was hard to imagine what it would be. Why would Victor have decided to have me killed? As far as he knew, I was over at Moonglow in Ginza right this minute, trying to get to Sugihara. Could he have . . . what, changed his mind? Decided I was a liability for some reason? Why? And even if he had, and even if he had some kind of access to the CIA, why would he deploy a couple of white guys in Tokyo to do the hit? He had plenty of locals under him; I’d seen that. Why wouldn’t he have used his own people, who could have gotten closer so much more easily? After all, this was someone who had killed his way to the top of the Japanese-crime food chain.

  How do you know it was his people doing the killing?

  I considered that. And realized I didn’t know. I was assuming—describing not what I knew, but what I thought. McGraw would have chewed me out for it, and rightly so.

  But a Victor-CIA connection?

  That would explain the intel behind his rise, wouldn’t it? You wondered yourself, when you first met Miyamoto for tea at Hamarikyu: How could Victor’s intel about the
LDP be so superb? There’s your explanation.

  Well, one possible explanation, anyway. Though I couldn’t see why. I could see what the CIA could offer Victor—what maybe they had offered him. But what would be in it for them?

  I tried to imagine it. Local muscle? For what? And why a guy like Victor? Information was valuable currency. The CIA could have used it to buy whatever local muscle they needed. And yakuza, who were so insidiously integrated into Japanese politics, would have been far more useful than a half-Russian psychopath from the other side of the world.

  There’s your answer, then.

  The other side of the world? An outsider?

  Sure. Doesn’t it sound familiar?

  I considered again. Okay, the CIA wanted an outsider for . . . what, jobs that couldn’t leave Japanese fingerprints? The concept made sense, but I had no idea what the specifics might be.

  And what about the knives? The Agency could bring a damn arsenal into Japan in the diplomatic pouch if it wanted to. So why did Mike and his partner not have guns?

  If this was an off-the-books operation, they might not have been able to get guns. Or even if they could, a gun homicide in Japan would be like a bombing anywhere else. A ton of publicity. A massive investigation. A suggestion of outside influence. Maybe they didn’t want any of that.

  Intermediaries. Outsiders. And fresh, wholesome, locally sourced weapons. All of it felt like someone’s attempt at keeping a low profile. But who? Why? And how the fuck was I mixed up in it?

  I spent a few frustrating minutes trying to puzzle my way past the impasse, and couldn’t.

  That’s okay. Back up. Start with what you know. Victor.

  It was hard to imagine that, if I hadn’t gotten mixed up with Victor, tonight would have happened. I accept a job from a psychopath, and a few days later a couple CIA contractors try to take me out? That would be one hell of a coincidence.

  Maybe I was looking at it backward, though. Could Mike and his partner have been hired to protect Sugihara?

  It didn’t make sense. If the CIA knew I’d been hired to kill Sugihara, they would have known who’d done the hiring. Why try to block a bullet, when you could just disarm the guy holding the gun?