When I reached a single volt and tried to go further, the screen flashed, “Your command will set the unit at minimum output values. Are you certain that you wish to enter this command?” I entered “Yes.” It prompted me one more time anyway: “You have programmed the unit to minimum output values. Please confirm.” Again I entered, “Yes.” There was a one-second delay, then the screen started flashing bold-faced letters: Unacceptable output values. Unacceptable output values.
I closed the cover, but left the PDA on. It would reset automatically. There was always the chance that the sequence hadn’t worked the first time around, and I wanted to be able to try again if I had to.
There wasn’t any need. As the train pulled into Shinjuku Station and jerked to a stop, Kawamura stumbled against the woman next to him. The doors opened and the other passengers flowed out, but Kawamura remained, gripping one of the upright bars next to the door with his right hand and clutching his package of fruit with his left, commuters shoving past him. I watched him rotate counterclockwise until his back hit the wall next to the door. His mouth was open; he looked slightly surprised. Then slowly, almost gently, he slid to the floor. I saw one of the passengers who had gotten on at Yoyogi stoop down to assist him. The man, a mid-forties Westerner, tall and thin enough to make me think of a javelin, somehow aristocratic in his wireless glasses, shook Kawamura’s shoulders, but Kawamura was past noticing the stranger’s efforts at succor.
“Daijoubu desu ka?” I asked, my left hand moving to support Kawamura’s back, feeling for the magnet. Is he all right? I used Japanese because it was likely that the Westerner wouldn’t understand it and our interaction would be kept to a minimum.
“Wakaranai,” the stranger muttered. I don’t know. He patted Kawamura’s increasingly bluish cheeks and shook him again — a bit roughly, I thought. So he did speak some Japanese. It didn’t matter. I pinched the edge of the magnet and pulled it free. Kawamura was done.
I stepped past them onto the platform and the inflow immediately began surging onto the train behind me. Glancing through the window nearest the door as I walked past, I was stunned to see the stranger going through Kawamura’s pockets. My first thought was that Kawamura was being robbed. I moved closer to the window for a better look, but the growing crush of passengers obscured my view.
I had an urge to get back on, but that would have been stupid. Anyway, it was too late. The doors were already sliding shut. I saw them close and catch on something, maybe a handbag or a foot. They opened slightly and closed again. It was an apple, falling to the tracks as the train pulled away.
2
FROM SHINJUKU I took the Maranouchi subway line to Ogikubo, the extreme west of the city and outside metropolitan Tokyo. I wanted to do a last SDR — surveillance detection run — before contacting my client to report the results of the Kawamura operation, and heading west took me against the incoming rush-hour train traffic, making the job of watching my back easier.
An SDR is just what it sounds like: a route designed to force anyone who’s following you to show himself. Harry and I had of course taken full precautions en route to Shibuya and Kawamura that morning, but I never assume that because I was clean earlier I must be clean now. In Shinjuku, the crowds are so thick that you could have ten people following you and you’d never make a single one of them. By contrast, following someone unobtrusively across a long, deserted train platform with multiple entrances and exits is nearly impossible, and the trip to Ogikubo offered the kind of peace of mind I’ve come to require.
It used to be that, when an intelligence agent wanted to communicate with an asset so sensitive that a meeting was impossible, they had to use a dead drop. The asset would drop microfiche in the hollow of a tree, or hide it in an obscure book in the public library, and later, the spy would come by and retrieve it. You could never put the two people together in the same place at the same time.
It’s easier with the Internet, and more secure. The client posts an encrypted message on a bulletin board, the electronic equivalent of a tree hollow. I download it from an anonymous pay phone and decrypt it at my leisure. And vice versa.
The message traffic is pretty simple. A name, a photograph, personal and work contact information. A bank account number, transfer instructions. A reminder of my three no’s: no women or children, no acts against nonprincipals, no other parties retained to solve the problem at hand. The phone is used only for the innocuous aftermath, which was the reason for my side trip to Ogikubo.
I used one of the pay phones on the station platform to call my contact within the Liberal Democratic Party — an LDP flunky I know only as Benny, maybe short for Benihana or something. Benny’s English is fluent, so I know he’s spent some time abroad. He prefers to use English with me, I think because it has a harder sound in some contexts and Benny fancies himself a hard guy. Probably he learned the lingo from a too-steady diet of Hollywood gangster movies.
We’d never met, of course, but talking to Benny on the phone had been enough for me to develop an antipathy. I had a vivid image of him as just another government seat-warmer, a guy who would try to manage a weight problem by jogging a few ten-minute miles three times a week on a treadmill in an overpriced chrome-and-mirrors gym, where the air-conditioning and soothing sounds of the television would prevent any unnecessary discomfort. He’d splurge on items like designer hair gel for a comb over because the little things only cost a few bucks anyway, and would save money by wearing no-iron shirts and ties with labels proclaiming “Genuine Italian Silk!” that he’d selected with care on a trip abroad from a sale bin at some discount department store, congratulating himself on the bargains for which he acquired such quality goods. He’d sport a few Western extravagances like a Montblanc fountain pen, talismans to reassure himself that he was certainly more cosmopolitan than the people who gave him orders. Yeah, I knew this guy. He was a little order taker, a go-between, a cutout who’d never gotten his hands dirty in his life, who couldn’t tell the difference between a real smile and the amused rictuses of the hostesses who relieved him of his yen for watered-down Suntory scotch while he bored them with hints about the Big Things he was involved in but of course couldn’t really discuss.
After the usual exchange of innocuous, preestablished codes to establish our bona fides, I told him, “It’s done.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said in his terse, false tough-guy way. “Any problems?”
“Nothing worth mentioning,” I responded after a pause, thinking of the guy on the train.
“Nothing? You sure?”
I knew I wouldn’t get anything this way. Better to say nothing, which I did.
“Okay,” he said, breaking the silence. “You know to reach out to me if you need anything. Anything at all, okay?”
Benny tries to run me like an intelligence asset. Once he even suggested a face-to-face meeting. I told him if we met face-to-face I’d be there to kill him, so maybe we should skip it. He laughed, but we never did have that meeting.
“There’s only one thing I need,” I said, reminding him of the money.
“By tomorrow, like always.”
“Good enough.” I hung up, automatically wiping down the receiver and keys on the remote possibility that they had traced the call and would send someone to try for prints. If they had access to Vietnam-era military records, and I assumed they did, they would get a match for John Rain, and I didn’t want them to know that the same guy they had known over twenty years ago when I first came back to Japan was now their mystery freelancer.
I was working with the CIA at the time, a legacy of my Vietnam contacts, making sure the agency’s “support funds” were reaching the right recipients in the governing party, which even back then was the LDP. The agency was running a secret program to support conservative political elements, part of the U.S. government’s anti-Communist policies and a natural extension of relationships that had developed during the postwar occupation, and the LDP was more than happy to play the role in exchange for the cash.