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I wanted to give Kawamura about three minutes to get his fruit before
I came out, so I examined a selection of bandages that gave me a view
of the street. The way he had ducked into the store looked like a move
calculated to flush surveillance, and I didn't like it. If we hadn't been
hooked up the way we were, Harry would have had to stop abruptly to maintain
his position behind the target. He might have had to do something ridiculous,
like tie his shoe or stop to read a street sign, and Kawamura, probably
peering out of the entranceway of the store, could have made him. Instead,
I knew Harry would continue past the fruit store; he would stop about
twenty meters ahead, give me his location, and fall in behind when I told
him the parade was moving again.
The fruit store was a good spot to turn off, all right-too good for someone
who knew the route to have chosen it by accident. But Harry and I weren't
going to be flushed out by amateur moves out of some government antiterrorist
primer. I've had that training, so I know how useful it is.
I left the drugstore and continued down Dogenzaka, more slowly than before
because I had to give Kawamura time to come out of the store. Shorthand
thoughts shot through my mind: Are there enough people between us to obscure
his vision if he turns when he comes out? What shops am I passing if I
need to duck off suddenly? Is anyone looking up the street at the people
heading toward the station, maybe helping Kawamura spot surveillance?
If I had already drawn any countersurveillance attention, they might notice
me now, because before I was hurrying to keep up with the target and now
I was taking my time, and people on their way to work don't change their
pace that way. But Harry had been the one walking point, the more conspicuous
position, and I hadn't done anything to arouse attention before stopping
in the drugstore.
I heard Harry again: "I'm at one-oh-nine." Meaning he had turned into
the landmark 109 Department Store, famous for its collection of 109 restaurants
and trendy boutiques.
"No good," I told him. "The first floor is lingerie. You going to blend
in with fifty teenage girls in blue sailor school uniforms picking out
padded bras?"
"I was planning to wait outside," he replied, and I could imagine him
blushing.
The front of 109 is a popular meeting place, typically crowded with a
polyglot collection of pedestrians. "Sorry, I thought you were going for
the lingerie," I said, suppressing the urge to smile. "Just hang back
and wait for my signal as we go past."
"Right."
The fruit store was only ten meters ahead, and still no sign of Kawamura.
I was going to have to slow down. I was on the opposite side of the street,
outside Kawamura's probable range of concern, so I could take a chance
on just stopping, maybe to fiddle with a cell phone. Still, if he looked,
he would spot me standing there, even though, with my father's Japanese
features, I don't have a problem blending into the crowds. Harry, a pet
name for Haruyoshi, being born of two Japanese parents, has never had
to worry about sticking out.
When I returned to Tokyo in the early eighties, my brown hair, a legacy
from my mother, worked for me the way a fluorescent vest does for a hunter,
and I had to dye it black to develop the anonymity that protects me now.
But in the last few years the country has gone mad for chappatsu, or tea-color
dyed hair, and I don't have to be so vigilant about the dye anymore. I
like to tell Harry he's going to have to go chappatsu if he wants to fit
in, but Harry's too much of an otaku, a geek, to give much thought to
issues like personal appearance. I guess he doesn't have that much to
work with, anyway: an awkward smile that always looks like it's offered
in anticipation of a blow, a tendency to blink rapidly when he's excited,
a face that's never lost its baby fat, its pudginess accentuated by a
shock of thick black hair that on bad days seems almost to float above
it. But the same qualities that keep him off magazine covers confer the
unobtrusiveness that makes for effective surveillance.
I had reached the point where I was sure I was going to have to stop when
Kawamura popped out of the fruit store and reentered the flow. I hung
back as much as possible to increase the space between us, watching his
head bobbing as he moved down the street. He was tall for a Japanese and
that helped, but he was wearing a dark suit like ninety percent of the
other people in this crowd-including Harry and me, naturally, so I couldn't
drop back too far.
Just as I'd redeveloped the right distance, he stopped and turned to light
a cigarette. I continued moving slowly behind and to the right of the
group of people that separated us, knowing he wouldn't be able to make
me moving with the crowd. I kept my attention focused on the backs of
the suits in front of me, just a bored morning commuter. After a moment
he turned and started moving again.
I allowed myself the trace of a satisfied smile. Japanese don't stop to
light cigarettes; if they did, they'd lose weeks over the course of their
adult lives. Nor was there any reason, such as a strong headwind threatening
to blow out a match, for him to turn and face the crowd behind him. Kawamura's
obvious attempt at countersurveillance simply confirmed his guilt.
Guilt of what I don't know, and in fact I never ask. I insist on only
a few questions. Is the target a man? I don't work against women or children.
Have you retained anyone else to solve this problem? I don't want my operation
getting tripped up by someone's idea of a B-team, and if you retain me,
it's an exclusive. Is the target a principal? I solve problems directly,
like the soldier I once was, not by sending messages through uninvolved
third parties like a terrorist. The concerns behind the last question
are why I like to see independent evidence of guilt: It confirms that
the target is indeed the principal and not a clueless innocent.
Twice in eighteen years the absence of that evidence has stayed my hand.
Once I was sent against the brother of a newspaper editor who was publishing
stories on corruption in a certain politician's home district. The other
time it was against the father of a bank reformer who showed excessive
zeal in investigating the size and nature of his institution's bad debts.
I would have been willing to act directly against the editor and the reformer,
had I been retained to do so, but apparently the clients in question had
reason to pursue a more circuitous route that involved misleading me.
They are no longer clients, of course. Not at all.
I'm not a mercenary, although I was nothing more than that once upon a
time. And although I do in a sense live a life of service, I am no longer
samurai, either. The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty
to his master, to a cause greater than himself. There was a time when
I burned with loyalty, a time when, suffused with the samurai ethic I
had absorbed from escapist novels and comics as a boy in Japan, I was
prepared to die in the service of my adopted liege lord, the United States.
But loves as uncritical and unrequited as that one can never last, and
usually come to a dramatic end, as mine did. I am a realist now.
As I came to the 109 building I said, "Passing." Not into my lapel or
anything stupid like that; the transmitters are sensitive enough so that
you don't need to make any subtle movements that are like billboards for
a trained countersurveillance team. Not that one was out there, but you
always assume the worst. Harry would know I was passing his position and
would fall in after a moment.
Actually, the popularity of cell phones with earpieces makes this kind
of work easier than it once was. It used to be that someone walking alone
and talking under his breath was either demented or an intelligence or
security agent. Today you see this sort of behavior all the time among
Japan's keitai, or cell phone, generation.
The light at the bottom of Dogenzaka was red, and the crowd congealed
as we approached the five-street intersection in front of the train station.
Garish neon signs and massive video monitors flashed frantically on the
buildings around us. A diesel-powered truck ground its gears as it slogged
through the intersection, laborious as a barge in a muddy river, its bullhorns
blaring distorted right-wing patriotic songs that momentarily drowned
out the bells commuters on bicycles were ringing to warn pedestrians out
of the way. A street hawker angled a pushcart through the crowds, sweat
running down the sides of his face, the smell of steamed fish and rice
following in his zigzagging wake. An ageless homeless man, probably a
former sarariman who had lost his job and his moorings when the bubble
burst in the late eighties, slept propped against the base of a streetlight,
inured by alcohol or despair to the tempest around him.
The Dogenzaka intersection is like this night and day, and at rush hour,
when the light turns green, over three hundred people step off the curb
at the same instant, with another twenty-five thousand waiting in the
crush. From here on, it was going to be shoulder to shoulder, chest to
back. I would keep close to Kawamura now, no more than five meters, which
would put about two hundred people between us. I knew he had a commuter
pass and wouldn't need to go to the ticket machine. Harry and I had purchased
our tickets in advance so we would be able to follow him right through
the wickets. Not that the attendant would notice one way or the other.
At rush hour, they're practically numbed by the hordes; you could flash
anything, a baseball card, probably, and in you'd go.
The light changed, and the crowds swept into one another like a battle
scene from some medieval epic. An invisible radar I'm convinced is possessed
only by Tokyoites prevented a mass of collisions in the middle of the
street. I watched Kawamura as he cut diagonally across to the station,
and maneuvered in behind him as he passed. There were five people between
us as we surged past the attendant's booth. I had to stay close now. It
would be chaos when the train pulled in: five thousand people pouring
out, five thousand people stacked fifteen deep waiting to get on, everyone
jockeying for position. Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society
have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour.
The river of people flowed up the stairs and onto the platform, and the
sounds and smells of the station seemed to arouse an extra sense of urgency
in the crowd. We were swimming upstream against the people who had just
gotten off the train, and as we reached the platform the doors were already
closing on handbags and the odd protruding elbow. By the time we had passed
the kiosk midway down the platform, the last car had passed us and a moment
later it was gone. The next train would arrive in two minutes.
Kawamura shuffled down the middle of the platform. I stayed behind him
but hung back from the tracks, avoiding his wake. He was looking up and
down the platform, but even if he had spotted Harry or me earlier, seeing
us waiting for the train wasn't going to unnerve him. Half the people
waiting had just walked down Dogenzaka.
I felt the rumble of the next train as Harry walked past me like a fighter
jet buzzing a carrier control tower, the slightest nod of his head indicating
that the rest was with me. I had told him I only needed his help until
Kawamura was on the train, which is where he had always gone during our
previous surveillance. Harry had done his usual good work in helping me
get close to the target, and, per our script, he was now exiting the scene.
I would contact him later, when I was done with the solo aspects of the
job.
Harry thinks I'm a private investigator and that all I do is follow these
people around collecting information. To avoid the suspicious appearance
of a too-high mortality rate for the subjects we track, I often have him
follow people in whom I have no interest, who of course then provide some
measure of cover by continuing to live their happy and oblivious lives.
Also, where possible, I avoid sharing the subject's name with Harry to
minimize the chances that he'll come across too many coincidental obituaries.
Still, some of our subjects do have a habit of dying at the end of surveillance,
and I know Harry has a curious mind. So far he hasn't asked, which is
good. I like Harry as an asset and wouldn't want him to become a liability.
I moved up close behind Kawamura, just another commuter trying to get
a good position for boarding the train. This was the most delicate part
of the operation. If I flubbed it, he would make me and it would be difficult
to get sufficiently close to him for a second try.
My right hand dipped into my pants pocket and touched a microprocessor-controlled
magnet, about the size and weight of a quarter. On one side the magnet
was covered with blue worsted cloth, like that of the suit Kawamura was
wearing. Had it been necessary, I could have stripped away the blue to
expose a layer of gray, which was the other color Kawamura favored. On
the opposite side of the magnet was an adhesive backing.
I withdrew the magnet from my pocket and protected it from view by cupping
it in my hands. I would have to wait for the right moment, when Kawamura's
attention was distracted. Mildly distracted would be enough. Maybe as
we were boarding the train. I peeled off the wax paper covering the adhesive
and crumbled it into my left pants pocket.
The train emerged at the end of the platform and hurtled toward us. Kawamura
pulled a cell phone out of his breast pocket. Started to input a number.
Okay, do it now. I brushed past him, placing the magnet on his suit jacket
just below the left shoulder blade, and moved several paces down the platform.
Kawamura spoke into the phone for only a few seconds, too softly for me
to hear over the screeching brakes of the train slowing to a halt in front
of us, and then slipped the phone back in his left breast pocket. I wondered
whom he had called. It didn't matter. Two stations ahead, three at the
most, and it would be done.
The train stopped and its doors opened, releasing a gush of human effluent.
When the outflow slowed to a trickle, the lines waiting on either side
of the doors collapsed inward and poured inside, as though someone had
hit the reverse switch on a giant vacuum. People kept jamming themselves
in despite the warnings that "The doors are closing," and the mass of
commuters grew more swollen until we were all held firmly in place, with
no need to grip the overhead handles because there was nowhere to fall.
The doors shut, the car lurched forward, and we moved off.
I exhaled slowly and rotated my head from side to side, hearing the bones
crack in my neck, feeling the last remnants of nervousness drain away
as we reached the final moments. It has always been this way for me. When
I was a teenager, I lived for a while near a town that had a network of
gorges cutting through it, and at some of them you could jump from the
cliffs into deep swimming holes. You could see the older kids doing it
all the time---it didn't look so far up. The first time I climbed to the
top and looked down, though, I couldn't believe how high I was, and I
froze. But the other kids were watching. And right then, I knew that no
matter how afraid I was, no matter what might happen, I was going to jump,
and some instinctive part of me shut down my awareness of everything except
the simple, muscular action of running forward. I had no other perceptions,
no awareness of any future beyond the taking of those brisk steps. I remember
thinking that it didn't even matter if I died.
Kawamura was standing in front of the door at one end of the car, about
a meter from where I was positioned, his right hand holding one of the
overhead bars. I needed to stay close now.
The word I had gotten was that this had to look natural: my specialty,
and the reason my services are always in demand. Harry had obtained Kawamura's
medical records from Jikei University Hospital, which showed that he had
a condition called complete heart block and owed his continuing existence
to a pacemaker installed five years earlier.
I twisted so that my back was to the doors---a slight breach of Tokyo's
minimal train etiquette, but I didn't want anyone who might speak English
to see the kinds of prompts that were going to appear on the screen of
the PDA computer I was carrying. I had downloaded a cardiac interrogation
program into it, the kind a doctor uses to adjust a patient's pacemaker.
And I had rigged it so that the PDA fed infrared commands to the control
magnet. The only difference between my setup and a cardiologist's was
that mine was miniaturized and wireless. That, and I hadn't taken the
Hippocratic oath.
The PDA was already turned on and in sleep mode, so it powered up instantly.
I glanced down at the screen. It was flashing "pacing parameters." I hit
the Enter key and the screen changed, giving me an option of "threshold
testing" and "sensing testing." I selected the former and was offered
a range of parameters: rate, pulse width, amplitude. I chose rate and
quickly set the pacemaker at its lowest rate limit of forty beats per
minute, then returned to the previous screen and selected pulse width.
The screen indicated that the pacemaker was set to deliver current at
durations of .48 milliseconds. I decreased the pulse width as far as it
would go, then changed to amplitude. The unit was preset at 8.5 volts,
and I started dropping it a half volt at a time. When I had taken it down
two full volts, the screen flashed, "You have now decreased unit amplitude
by two volts. Are you sure you want to continue to decrease unit amplitude?"
I entered, "Yes" and went on, repeating the sequence every time I took
it down two volts.
When the train pulled into Yoyogi Station, Kawamura stepped off. Was he
getting off here? That would be a problem: the unit's infrared had limited
range, and it would be a challenge to operate it and follow him closely
at the same time. Damn, just a few more seconds, I thought, bracing to
follow him out. But he was only allowing the people behind him to leave
the train, and stopped outside the doors. When the Yoyogi passengers had
exited he got back on, followed closely by several people who had been
waiting on the platform. The doors closed, and we moved off again.
At two volts, the screen warned me that I was nearing minimum output values
and it would be dangerous to further decrease output. I overrode the warning
and took the unit down another half volt, glancing up at Kawamura as I
did so. He hadn't changed his position.
When I reached a single volt and tried to go farther, 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 in-flow 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.
--from
Rain Fall by Barry Eisler, Copyright � July 2002, Putnam Pub Group,
a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.
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