It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.
I used a pay phone to access a voice-mail account attached to a special phone in my apartment, a sound-activated unit with a sensitive speakerphone that functions like a transmitter. The unit silently dials a voice-mail account if someone enters the apartment without knowing the code that disengages the phone, letting me know in advance and from a safe distance whether I’ve had any unexpected visitors. An identical setup had saved me in Tokyo from a Holtzer-inspired ambush, and I tend to stick with what works. I’d been checking the account daily from Tokyo without incident, and the mailbox was empty this time as well, so I knew my apartment had gone unmolested during my absence.
From the pay phone, I walked the short distance to the Belfa complex. A softball game was under way on the field to my right. Some children were playing kickball by a granite sculpture garden in front of the building. An old man swerved past me on a bicycle, a laughing grandchild perched on the handles.
I used the front entrance, taking care as always to approach in such a way that the security camera facing the building would get a picture only of my back. Such precautions are part of my routine, but, as Tatsu had pointed out, the cameras are everywhere and you can’t hope to spot them all.
I took the elevator to the thirty-sixth floor and walked down the corridor to my apartment. I checked the small piece of translucent tape I had left at the bottom of the door and found it intact, still attached to the jamb. As I’d told Harry so many times, a good defense has to be layered.
I unlocked the door and went inside. Everything was as I’d left it. Which wasn’t saying much. Beyond the futon and nightstand in one of the bedrooms, there was an olive leather couch, new but not new-looking, set against the wall facing the west of the city, where I sometimes sat to watch the sun set. A sprawling Gabeh rug covering an expanse of polished wooden floor, its strata of greens and blues interspersed with a dozen whimsical splotches of cream that were probably intended to denote goats in a pastoral setting, its weave dense and soft enough to have once served as a mattress for the nomads who made it. A massive double-bank writing desk that had made its way to Japan from England, its surface dominated by a black leather insert appropriately worn by more than a century of pressure from the pen points that moved over its surface to transact business across the oceans, conveying news that might be weeks old by the time it reached relatives abroad, announcing births and deaths, offering congratulations, felicitations, condolences, and regrets. One of those fantastically complicated but astonishingly comfortable Herman Miller Aeron desk chairs that I’d picked up on a whim from a recently demised technology start-up in Shibuya’s Bit Valley. Atop the desk, a Macintosh G4 computer and a gorgeous, 23-inch flat panel monitor, about which I’d said nothing to Harry because he was under the impression that I was a computer primitive and I saw no advantage in letting him know that I have my own knack for getting behind the odd firewall when the need arises.
Opposite the couch was a Bang & Olufsen home theater with a six-CD changer. Next to it, a bookshelf containing an extensive collection of CDs, most of them jazz, and my modest library. The library includes a number of books on the bugei, or warrior arts, some of them quite old and obscure, containing information on combat techniques thought to be too dangerous for modern judo-spine locks, neck cranks, and the like-techniques that are, consequently, largely lost to the art. There are also some well-thumbed works of philosophy-Mishima, Musashi, Nietzsche. And there are a number of slim volumes that I order from time to time from some unusual publishers in the States, volumes that are illegal in Japan and in other countries lacking America’s perhaps overly strong devotion to freedom of speech, but which I manage to acquire nonetheless through techniques garnered from some of the volumes themselves. There are works on the latest surveillance methods and technologies; police investigative techniques and forensic science; acquiring forged identity; setting up offshore accounts and mail drops; methods of disguise and evasion; lock-picking and breaking and entry; and related topics. Of course, over the years I have developed my own substantial expertise in all these areas, but I have no plan to write a how-to account of my experiences. Instead, I read these books to learn what the opposition knows, to understand how the people I might be up against think, to predict where they might come after me, to take the appropriate countermeasures.
The only conspicuous item in the apartment was a wooden wing-chun training dummy, about the dimensions of a large man, which I had placed in the center of the apartment’s lone tatami room. Had the apartment been occupied by a family, this might have been the location of the kotatsu, a low table with a heavy quilted skirt draping to the floor and an electric brazier underneath, around which the family would nestle in the winter, their shoeless feet warmed by the brazier, their legs tucked comfortably under the quilted skirt, as they gossiped about the neighbors, examined the household bills, perhaps planned for the children’s future.
But the wooden dummy represented a better use for me. I’d been training in judo for almost the quarter century I’d been in Japan, and loved the art’s emphasis on throws and ground fighting. But once Holtzer and the Agency had connected me to the Kodokan judo center in Tokyo, I knew joining the Osaka branch would have been too obvious a move, like a recent entrant to the federal witness protection program resubscribing to the same obscure magazines he’d always enjoyed before moving underground. For now, I felt safer training alone. The dummy kept my reflexes sharp and the striking surfaces of my hands callused and hard, and allowed me to practice some of the strikes and blocks I’d neglected to some degree while training in judo. It would have made an interesting conversation piece, if anyone ever visited my apartment.
During the days that followed, I busied myself with my preparations for leaving Osaka. Moving hastily would be a mistake: the transitions are where you’re most vulnerable, and someone who couldn’t track me now might very well find himself able to do so if I dove suddenly into a less securely backstopped life. And Tatsu might be expecting me to move quickly; if so, he would be prepared to follow me. Conversely, if I stayed put, he might be lulled, giving me the opportunity to lose him entirely when the timing and preparations were right. He had no reason to come after me for the moment, so the lesser risk was to take the appropriate time to set things up correctly.
I had decided on Brazil, and it was for this that I’d been studying the Portuguese that had been so useful with Naomi. Hong Kong, Singapore, or some other Asian destination, or perhaps somewhere in the States, might have been a more obvious choice, but that was of course one of the things that Brazil had going for it. And even if someone thought to look for me there, they would have a hell of a time: Brazil’s multitudes of ethnic Japanese have branched out into all areas of the country’s life, and one more transplant wasn’t going to arouse any attention at all.
Rio de Janeiro, which offered culture, climate, and a significant transient population consisting largely of tourists, would be ideal. The city is far from the world’s intelligence, terrorism, and Interpol focal points, so I would have relatively few worries about accidental sightings, security camera networks, and the other natural enemies of the fugitive. I would even be able to return to judo, or at least one of its cousins: the Brazilian Gracie family had taken one of judo’s forebears, jujitsu, carried into the country by arriving Japanese, and developed it into arguably the most sophisticated ground fighting system the world has ever seen. It’s practiced fanatically in Brazil, and has become popular all over the world, including Japan.