McGraw didn’t show until nearly three-thirty, and I had to suppress a smile when I saw him — Tatsu must have been grilling him pretty hard. He came in through the southeast exit, just as I had expected. And why not? It wouldn’t be good tradecraft to show up exactly at the designated meeting point without first reconning the area from another direction. He walked right by me, not twenty feet away, carrying one of the bags we had used for our exchanges, and looked right at me — but utterly failed to make the connection. The shaved head, the clothes, the context, his conviction that I was dead — it all served to obscure his ordinarily acute powers of perception. That, and maybe he was feeling stressed about not getting here as early as he would have liked for a meeting with a demonstrably dangerous person he knew almost nothing about, a person who made him nervous.
“McGraw,” I said, as he passed my position.
He stopped and turned. Maybe he thought he’d heard wrong. Maybe he thought, Clever, my new assassin disguised himself as a monk. Whatever it was, it occupied enough of his brain’s processing power to keep him standing there, looking confused, while I walked toward him. When I was ten feet away, he realized. His mouth dropped open and his ruddy face went white. His body tensed as though in preparation for flight. I shook my head, showed him the Hi Power, then slipped it back beneath my robe.
“What is it, McGraw? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” A little corny, but it was so perfect.
“I…How…”
“No. I’ll ask all the questions. You’ll provide all the answers. Tell me now if you have a problem with that. I’ll put a bullet in your head right here and save myself some time.”
He swallowed. “There’s no problem. I just—”
“Open the bag and show me what’s inside. Slowly.”
He did. The bag was stuffed with hundreds, just like it was when I used to pick it up from him for delivery to Miyamoto, a thousand years earlier.
“Now set it down. Slowly. Good. Step away from it. Good. Now lift your shirt. Keep it up. Good. Now turn all the way around. Slowly. Good. Now lift your pants legs. Good.”
When I was satisfied he was unarmed, I picked up the bag. “Now walk. I’ll be right behind you. Be forthcoming in your responses to my questions. I’m not going to make any big speeches. If I get bored, I’ll shoot you and leave you here among all the famous people whose graves you used to photograph. Are we clear?”
He nodded and started walking.
“I have to tell you,” he said over his shoulder. “This was a beautiful play. Christ, but I underestimated you. You realize this makes you even more valuable to me, don’t you? You’re a ghost now, you can go anywhere, do anything. Invisible. Deniable. Name your price, you’re obviously worth it and I’m not going to haggle with you.”
“You set me up, didn’t you? Those chinpira in Ueno. That was you. To dupe me into killing Ozawa and Fukumoto Senior.”
“Yes, that’s true. I won’t deny it. At the time, I didn’t realize how capable you are. How valuable. They were supposed to rob you and put you in the Agency’s debt. They were incompetent, though. I should have expected that, with Mad Dog running the show.”
“Then why did Mad Dog try to have me killed right afterward, at the Kodokan?”
“Because you killed his cousin. I told you, he’s a fuck-up. Like the cousin you killed. A hothead, like you used to be, before you started to wise up.”
“If Mad Dog is so lame, why are you working with him? Why would you want him in charge of the Gokumatsu-gumi?”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to tell you about. If you’d just listened to me earlier when I tried to call you off Mad Dog, we could have done business. I never wanted any of this to happen.”
I didn’t respond, and he went on. “All right, the program. It’s not that complicated, really. It’s just a way of channeling money from American corporations to Japanese decision makers — the people who can ensure the American corporations get the contracts they want, and that the U.S. government gets the policies it needs.”
I smiled, liking the way silence seemed to draw him out. I might have thanked him for teaching me the technique.
“Decision makers…”
“That’s right. You know Japan. The government, the corporations, the yakuza…they’re all just different limbs attached to the same body.”
“And you wanted to cut off some of the limbs?”
“Not cut off. Replace, with something better.”
“You told me Ozawa was charging too much. And Fukumoto, too?”
“No, that was just a convenient story because you insisted on knowing why I wanted Ozawa killed. What you need to understand now is that the opposite is true. They were taking too little. Do you understand?”
I didn’t, so I said nothing. After a moment, he went on. “The problem was, the old guard was too conservative. They felt they were making enough and didn’t want to rock the boat by demanding more. Even though I encouraged them.”
“Why would you encourage them to demand more?”
“Because if there’s more for them, there’s more for the Agency — and we need the goddamn money. Look around you. Communist China’s next door. So is Communist North Korea. That was my war, son, and we lost thirty-four thousand men just for a goddamn stalemate. And Vietnam is going to fall, too, now that Nixon’s pulling out the last combat troops. Fifty-eight thousand American lives, and we’re outright going to lose this time, it won’t even be a draw. Do you understand? Communism is more dangerous than ever, and the politicians who left you high and dry in Vietnam are pretending that just because we got a bloody nose or a couple of barked shins we don’t have to fight it anymore, they can just cut all our funding so they can build rural electrification plants in Appalachia or whatever it is they do to buy votes these days. So yeah, we need this funding, the politicians aren’t giving it to us, and the taxpayer doesn’t want to cough it up either, because they’re misinformed and they don’t trust the clusterfuck politicians who lost in Vietnam. Can’t really blame them for that, but that’s the state of play.”
“So you want to be able to skim off the corporate bribes the CIA is funneling to Japanese politicians. To create…a slush fund.”
“If you want to call it that, yes.”
“With you in charge.”
“That’s right.”
“Just here in Japan?”
He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you were smarter than I thought. Of course not just Japan. This thing can be taken global. Hell, it already is global, but small time. It can be expanded. I want you to help me expand it.”
“By killing people who don’t get what you’re trying to do?”
“What would you prefer? That we invade another country and lose another fifty or sixty thousand men?”
“Are those really our only alternatives?”
“Apparently so. Look, there’s a lot of money out there, if we can work with people with the imagination to ask for it and divide it equitably.”
“You mean kickbacks to you.”
“Not kickbacks, partnerships. I’m offering a way to grow the pie. The recipients keep more, and I keep more.”
“Embezzling from graft, is that it?”
“Jesus, are you just trying to insult me? I’m creating a covert action fund, all right? The fund is necessary, and on balance, my means are pretty benign. I know some operators who are trying to make ends meet by smuggling heroin into the United States. You probably knew some of them, too, in Vietnam. This is better.”