“Good morning,” Tanner said.
Mitsu looked up and smiled. “Oh, hello.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“He lives under the house.”
“A good place for him. Is your mother home?”
Mitsu nodded, ran into the hut, and returned with his mother.
Tanner laid the bag of rice on the porch. “Mitsu, please tell your mother I enjoyed dinner very much, and I would be honored if she would accept this gift.”
Mitsu translated, and the mother smiled and bowed several times. Tanner asked Mitsu, “How would you like to take a short trip with me?”
“I would like that very much.”
With Mother’s blessing, they climbed into the family skiff and began rowing into the breakers. Mitsu would have made a fine addition to any crewing team; his stroke was steady and strong, and within minutes they were a quarter mile off the beach. “Here,” Mitsu said, handing Tanner a small oilskin bag with a cork stopper.
“What’s this?”
“Air. When you run out on the bottom, you breathe.”
“Good idea. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
Briggs adjusted his mask, slipped on his fins, and rolled over the side.
He hung motionless in the cloud of bubbles for a moment, then turned over, finned to the bottom, and started swimming. He wound his way around and through the coral outcrops and sea grass, watching fish and crabs and even an occasional octopus dart along the bottom. Here and there he stopped to drop a shell into his bag.
After three minutes, his lungs began to burn, so he stopped and took a lungful of air from the bag. He swam for another three minutes, then headed for the surface. He climbed aboard the skiff.
“Did the bag work for you?” Mitsu asked.
“Like a charm. You’re a smart man, Mitsu-san. You know these waters well?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I found a warm spot yesterday, but I couldn’t find it today….”
“The oyster beds. Over that way,” Mitsu said. “Do you want to go?”
“No, I was just curious.”
“We can go if you like.”
“No, that’s okay—”
Something caught Tanner’s eye. On the beach, hidden among the trees, he saw a glimmer, like sun on glass. The breeze shifted the limbs, and he saw it again.
“How about tomorrow?” Tanner said.
“Okay.”
“Mitsu, does anyone in your village have a car?”
“An automobile? Oh, no.”
“Okay, let’s go back.”
As they neared the shore, Tanner was able to make out a front fender, but as if on cue, the vehicle began creeping back into the trees. When only the windshield was again visible, it stopped.
The skiff’s hull scraped the sand, and they climbed out, pulled the skiff ashore, and tied it to a nearby palm. Tanner pulled a shell from his bag and handed it to Mitsu. “For your rowing skills.”
“Thank you! We go again tomorrow?”
“We’ll see. Go on home now.”
Mitsu nodded and ran off.
Tanner loaded his gear into his rucksack, hefted it over his shoulder, and started jogging back toward the hotel. After a hundred yards, he dropped the rucksack, veered into the tree line, and turned again, circling back. After fifty yards he stopped, crouched down.
Thirty feet across a dirt track he could see the vehicle’s rear bumper jutting from the foliage. He crawled ahead until he was within arm’s reach of it, only then realizing it was a dark blue pickup truck, almost identical to the one Ohira’s killers had used the night before. The license plate was missing.
The driver’s side door opened. Tanner froze. Footsteps crunched through the undergrowth, moving toward the front of the truck. Tanner peeked over the tailgate. One man sat in the passenger seat, and through the windshield Briggs could see the driver standing near the tree line, scanning the beach with a pair of binoculars.
Looking for me? Briggs wondered. If so, why? Because of what he’d seen, or because of the key? Or was it something he hadn’t yet considered?
The footsteps were returning.
Tanner risked another glance over the tailgate. The driver was Japanese, a bull of a man with a thick neck, square face, and heavy brows. Tanner committed the face to memory, then ducked down and crawled out of sight.
The truck’s engine growled to life. After a moment it backed out, turned onto the road, and drove off, disappearing into the trees. Tanner watched it go, thinking hard.
By the time the taxi dropped him off in Tanabe and he found a phone booth, it was almost two P.M. — almost midnight in Washington. He was about to wake somebody from a sound sleep, but it couldn’t be helped.
It took only moments for the overseas operator to route the call to the U.S., but once there, he waited through twenty seconds of clicks as the call was sent to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, where it was electronically scrubbed, bounced off a FLTSATCOM (fleet communication satellite), then transmitted to a secure trunk line to the Holystone office.
Finally, the sleepy voice of Walter Oaken answered. “Hello.”
“Morning, Oaks.”
“Briggs…? What time is it?”
“Depends on where you are.”
“How’s the vacation?” Oaken asked.
“Never a dull moment. Can you conference me with Le-land?”
“Sure, hang on.”
More clicks. Leland Dutcher’s voice came on the line. “Morning, Briggs.”
“Sorry to wake you both.”
“Don’t worry about it. What’ve you got?”
For the next five minutes, Tanner related what had happened, from the shooting of Umako Ohira to his spotting of the truck.
“And you think this was more than a simple murder?” Dutcher asked.
“Pretty sure.”
“You have the key with you?”
“Yes.”
“Bad impulse, son.”
A forty-year veteran of the intelligence community, Leland Dutcher had plenty of experience with on-the-spot judgment calls. He’d made his own fair share of them — good and bad.
If ever a man embodied the “walk softly but carry a big stick” image, it was Leland Dutcher. He was soft-spoken but direct, a man of quiet authority. His appearance was a spymaster’s dream: average, medium, and unremarkable, except for a pair of hard brown eyes. In the tradecraft jargon, Dutcher was a “gray man,” and it was this lack of distinction that made him one of the CIA’s best controllers during the Cold War as he slipped in and out of the Soviet bloc under the noses of the KGB and the East German Stasi.
When it came to his people, however, Leland Dutcher was anything but gray. He was protective to a fault. People were his most valuable resource, especially in this business, and the ends did not always justify the means.
It was, in fact, this protective nature that had caused Dutcher’s decline at the CIA. While substituting for a hospitalized DDO during a counterinsurgency operation in Peru, Dutcher weighed the risk to the team unwarranted and ordered it out. Lives were saved, but the DDO, a political appointee from a university think tank, lashed out. Outcome notwithstanding, he argued, Dutcher had over-stepped his authority. The rift was widened further as the rescued team was debriefed and it became clear the order had not only saved lives but had also saved the network.
For Dutcher, it didn’t require much analysis to know bullets directed at supposedly covert assets indicated a rapidly deteriorating overt situation. He said as much to both the DCI and the Senate and House Intelligence Oversight Committees, both of whom secretly agreed. Neither, however, was willing to cross swords with the DDO, who had powerful backing in the private sector.
The subsequent intra-agency feud began to erode Dutcher’s ability to protect his people, which in turn began to taint the product. Knowing the DDO’s grudge would eventually gut the directorate, Dutcher resigned. Politics had no business in the intelligence trade, he felt. It was too dangerous for the country and too dangerous for the people who were asked to do its secret bidding.