Rain Fall (25 page)

“Benny wasn’t my people,” he said, shaking his head at my obvious obtuseness. “He was fucking us just like he tried to fuck you.” He slipped off the belt and handed it to me. I held it up. Sure enough, there was a tiny microphone under the buckle.

“Where’s the battery?” I asked.

“The buckle is the battery. Nickel hydride.”

I nodded, impressed. “You guys do nice work.” I rolled down the window and pitched the belt out into the street.

He lunged for it, a second late. “Goddamnit, Rain, you didn’t have to do that. You could have just disabled it.”

“Let me see your shoes.”

“Not if you’re planning on throwing them out the window.”

“I will if they’re wired. Take them off.” He handed them over. They were black loafers—soft leather and rubber soles. No place for a microphone. The insides were warm and damp from perspiration, which indicated that he’d been wearing them for a while, and there were indentations from his toes. Obviously not something that the lab boys put together for a special occasion. I gave them back.

“All right?” he asked.

“Say what you’ve got to say,” I told him. “I don’t have much time.”

He sighed. “The incident outside your apartment was a mistake. It never should have happened, and I want to personally apologize.”

It was disgusting, how sincere he could sound. “I’m listening.”

“I’m going out on a limb here, Rain,” he said in a low voice. “What I’m about to tell you is classified . . .”

“It better be classified. If all you’ve got to tell me is what I can read in the paper, then you’re wasting my time.”

He scowled. “For the last five years, we’ve been
developing an asset in the Japanese government. An insider, someone with access to everything. Someone who knows where all the bodies are buried—and I’m not just being figurative here.”

If he was hoping for a reaction, he didn’t get one, and he went on. “We’ve gotten more and more from this guy over time, but never anything that went beyond deep background. Never anything we could use as leverage. You following me?”

I nodded. Leverage in the business means blackmail.

“It’s like a Catholic schoolgirl, you know? She keeps saying no, you’ve just got to find another way, because hey, in the end, you know she wants it.” He grinned, the fleshy lips lurid. “Well, we kept at him, getting in deeper an inch at a time. Finally, six months ago, the nature of his refusals started to change. Instead of ‘No, I won’t do that,’ we started hearing, ‘No, that’s too dangerous, I’d be at risk.’ You know, practical objections.”

I did know. Good salesmen, good negotiators, and good intelligence officers all relish practical objections. They signal a shift from whether to how, from principle to price.

“It took us five more months to close him. We were going to give him a one-time cash payment big enough so he’d never have to worry again, plus an annual stipend. False papers, settlement in a tropical locale where he’d blend in—the Agency equivalent of the witness-protection program, but deluxe.

“In exchange, he was going to give us the goods on the Liberal Democratic Party—the payoffs, the bribery,
the
yakuza
ties, the killings of whistle-blowers. And this is hard evidence we’re talking about: phone taps, photographs, tape-recorded conversations, the kind of stuff that would stand up in court.”

“What were you going to do with all that?”

“The fuck you think we were going to do with it? With that kind of information, the U.S. government would own the LDP. We’d have every Japanese pol in our pocket. Think we’d ever get any grief again about military bases on Okinawa or at Atsugi? Think we’d have any trouble exporting as much rice or as many semiconductors or cars as we wanted? The LDP is the power here, and we would have been the power behind the power. Japan would have been Uncle Sam’s favorite prison fuckboy for the rest of the century.”

“I gather from your tone that Uncle Sam has been disappointed in love,” I said.

His smile was more like a sneer. “Not disappointed. Just postponed. We’ll still get what we want.”

“What was your connection with Benny?”

“Poor Benny. He was a great source on LDP slime. He knew the players, but he didn’t have the access, you know? The asset had the access.”

“But you sent him to my apartment.”

“Yeah, we sent him. Alone, to question you.”

“How did you find out what happened to him?”

“C’mon Rain, the guy’s neck was snapped clean in half right outside your apartment. Who else would have done it, one of your neighbors on a pension? Besides, we had him wired for sound. SOP for this kind of thing. So we heard everything, heard him blaming me, the little prick.”

“And the other guy?”

“We don’t know anything about him, other than that he turned up dead a hundred meters from where the Tokyo police found Benny’s body.”

“Benny told me he was
Boeicho Boeikyoku.
That you handled the liaison.”

“He was right that I handled the
Boeikyoku
liaison, but he was full of shit that I knew his friend. Anyway, you can bet we did some checking, and Benny’s pal wasn’t with Japanese Intelligence. When Benny took him to your apartment, he was on a private mission, getting paid by someone else. You know you can’t trust these moles, Rain. You remember the problems we had with our ARVN counterparts in Vietnam?”

I looked up at the rearview and saw the driver looking at us, his face suspicious. The chances that he could follow our conversation in English were nil, but I could see that he sensed something was amiss, that it was unnerving him.

“They take money from you, they’ll take it from anyone,” he went on. “I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to miss Benny. You get paid by both sides, someone finds out, hey, you get what you had coming anyway.”

Or at least you should. “Right,” I said.

“But let me finish the part about the asset. Three weeks ago he’s on his way to deliver the information, downloaded to a disk, he’s actually carrying the fucking crown jewels, and—can you believe this? He has a heart attack on the Yamanote and dies. We send people to the hospital, but the disk is gone.”

“How can you be so sure he was carrying the disk when he died?”

“Oh we’re sure, Rain, we’ve got our ways, you know that. Sources and methods, though, nothing I can talk about. But the missing disk, that’s not even the best part. You want to hear the best part?”

“I can’t wait.”

“Okay, then,” he said, leaning closer to me and smiling his grotesque smile again. “The best part is that it wasn’t really a heart attack . . .someone iced this fucker, someone who knew how to make it look like natural causes.”

“I don’t know, Holtzer. It sounds pretty far-fetched.”

“It does, doesn’t it? Especially because there are so few people in the whole world, let alone Japan, who could pull something like that off. Hell, the only one I know of is you.”

“This is what you wanted to meet me for?” I said. “To suggest that I was mixed up in this kind of bullshit?”

“C’mon, Rain. Enough fucking around. I know exactly what you’re mixed up in.”

“I’m not following you.”

“No? I’ve got news for you, then. Half the jobs you’ve done over the last ten years, you’ve done for us.”

What the hell?

He leaned closer and whispered the names of various prominent politicians, bankers, and bureaucrats who had met untimely but natural ends. They were all my work.

“You can read those names in the paper,” I said, but I knew he had more.

He told me the particulars of the bulletin board system I had been using with Benny, the numbers of the relevant Swiss accounts.

Goddamn,
I thought, feeling sick.
You’ve been nothing but a fool for these people. It’s never stopped. Goddamn.

“I know this is a shock for you, Rain,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “All these years you’ve thought you’ve been working freelance and in fact the agency has been paying the bills. But look on the bright side, okay? You’re great at what you do! Christ, you’re a fucking magician, making these people disappear without a trace, without a sign that there was any foul play. I wish I knew how you do it. I really do.”

I looked at him, my eyes expressionless. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to show you sometime.”

“Dream on, pal. Now look, we had access to the autopsy report. Kawamura had a pacemaker that somehow managed to shut itself off. The coroner attributed it to a defect. But you know what? We did a little research and found out that a defect like that is just about impossible. Someone shut that pacemaker off, Rain. Your kind of job exactly. I want to know who hired you.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“What doesn’t?”

“Why go to such lengths just to retrieve the disk?”

His eyes narrowed. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I can’t. I can only tell you that if I had wanted that disk, I could have found a lot of easier ways to take it.”

“Maybe it wasn’t up to you,” he said. “Maybe whoever hired you on this one told you to retrieve it. I know you’re not in the habit of asking a lot of questions about these assignments.”

“And have I ever been in the habit of being an errand boy on these jobs? ‘Retrieving’ requested items?”

He crossed his arms and looked at me. “Not that I know of.”

“Then it sounds like you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“You did him, Rain. You were the last one with him. You have to understand, it doesn’t look good.”

“My reputation will have to suffer.”

He massaged his chin for a moment while he looked at me. “You know that the Agency is the least of your worries among the people who are trying to get the disk back.”

“What people?”

“Who do you think? The people who it implicates. The politicians, the
yakuza,
the muscle behind the whole Japanese power structure.”

I considered for a moment, then said, “How did you find out about me? About me in Japan?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, that would fall under sources and methods again, nothing I can discuss here. But I’ll tell you what.” He leaned forward again. “Come on in, and we can talk about anything you want.”

It was such a non sequitur that I thought I heard wrong. “Did you say, ‘Come on in’?”

“Yes, I did. If you look at your situation, you’ll see that you need our help.”

“I didn’t know you were such a humanitarian, Holtzer.”

“Cut the shit, Rain. We’re not doing this for humanity. We want your cooperation. Either you’ve got that disk, or because you were hunting Kawamura you’ve probably got information that might help us find it. We’ll help you in exchange. It’s as simple as that.”

But I knew these people, and I knew Holtzer. Nothing was ever simple with them—and the simpler it looked, the harder they were about to nail you.

“I’m in an uncomfortable spot,” I said. “No sense denying it. Maybe I’ve got to trust someone. But it’s not going to be you.”

“Look, if this is about the war, you’re being ridiculous. It was a long time ago. This is another time, another place.”

“But the people are the same.”

He waved his hand as though trying to dispel an offensive odor. “It doesn’t matter what you think of me, Rain. Because this isn’t about us. The situation is what matters, and the situation is this: The police want you. The LDP wants you. The
yakuza
wants you. And they’re going to find you because your cover is fucking blown. Now let us help you.”

What to do. Take him out right here? They knew where I lived, which made me newly vulnerable, and taking out the station chief could lead to retribution.

The car behind us made a right. I glanced back and saw the car that was following it, a black sedan with three or four Japanese in it, slow down instead of taking up the space that had developed. Not an effective strategy for driving in Tokyo traffic.

I waited until we were almost at the next light, then told the driver to make a left. He just had time to brake and make the turn. The sedan changed lanes with us.

I told the driver I was mistaken, that he should get back on Meiji-dori. He looked back at me, clearly annoyed, wondering what the hell this was all about.

The sedan stayed with us as we made the turns.

Oh, shit.

“You bring some people with you, Holtzer? I thought I told you to come alone.”

“They’re here to bring you inside. For your protection.”

“Fine, they can follow us back to the embassy,” I said, suddenly scared and trying to think of a way out.

“I’m not going to have a cab drive the two of us into the embassy compound together. It’s enough of a breach of security that I’ve met with you at all. They’ll bring you in. It’s safer.”

How could they have followed him? Even if he were wearing a transmitter in a body cavity, they couldn’t have pinpointed the location in this traffic.

Then I realized. They had played me beautifully. They knew when “Lincoln” called that I was going to demand an immediate meeting. They didn’t know where, but they had people mobile and ready to move the second they found out the place. They had twenty minutes to get to Shinjuku, and they could stay close enough to react to what they heard through the wire without my seeing them. Holtzer must have given them the name of the cab company, the car’s description, the license-plate number, and updated them about its progress until I got in. By then they were already in position. All while I was congratulating myself for thinking so well on my feet and taking control of the situation, while I was relaxing after getting rid of the wire.