Rain Fall (32 page)

He started walking again. “You were saying. ‘Circumstances have changed.’ ”

“There’s a disk. My understanding is that it contains information implicating various politicians in massive corruption. Yamaoto is trying to get it.”

He knew something about the disk—I’d heard Yamaoto saying on the transmitter that Tatsu had sent men to Midori’s apartment, after all—yet he said nothing.

“You know anything about this, Tatsu?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m a cop. I know a little about everything.”

“Yamaoto thinks you know a lot. He knows you’re after that disk. He’s having trouble getting it back, so he’s trying to eliminate loose ends.”

“Why is he having trouble getting the disk back?”

“He doesn’t know where it is.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t have it.”

“That is not what I asked you.”

“Tatsu, this isn’t about the disk. I came here because I learned that you’re in danger. I wanted to warn you.”

“But the missing disk is the reason I’m in danger, is it not?” he said, affecting a puzzled, innocent look that would have fooled someone who didn’t know him. “Find the disk; remove the danger.”

“Ease up on the
inakamono
routine,” I said, telling him I knew he wasn’t a country bumpkin. “I’ll tell you this much. The person who has the disk is in a position to publish what’s on it. That should remove the danger, as you put it.”

He stopped and grabbed my arm. “
Masaka,
tell me you didn’t give that fucking disk to Bulfinch.”

Alarm bells started going off in my head.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because Franklin Bulfinch was murdered yesterday in Akasaka Mitsuke, outside the Akasaka Tokyu Hotel.”

“Fuck!” I said, momentarily forgetting myself.

“Komatta,”
he swore again. “You gave it to him, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Damn it! Did he have it with him when he was killed?”

Outside the Akasaka Tokyu—a hundred meters from where I gave it to him. “What time did it happen?” I asked.

“Early afternoon. Maybe two o’clock. Did he have it with him?”

“Almost certainly,” I told him.

His shoulders slumped, and I knew he wasn’t playacting.

“Damn it, Tatsu. How do you know about the disk?”

There was a long pause before he answered. “Because Kawamura was supposed to give the disk to me.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

“Yes,” he went on, “I had been developing Kawamura for quite some time. I had strongly encouraged him to provide me with the information that is now on that disk. It seems that, in the end, everyone trusts a reporter more than a cop. Kawamura decided to give the disk to Bulfinch instead.”

“How do you know?”

“Kawamura called me the morning he died.”

“What did he say?”

He looked at me, deadpan. “ ‘Fuck off. I’m giving the disk to the Western media.’ It’s my fault, really. In my eagerness, I’d been putting too much pressure on him. I’m sure he found it unpleasant.”

“How did you know it was Bulfinch?”

“If you wanted to give this kind of information to someone in the ‘Western media,’ who would you go to? Bulfinch is well known for his reporting on corruption. But I couldn’t be sure until this morning,
when I learned of his murder. And I wasn’t completely certain until just now.”

“So this is why you’ve been following Midori.”

“Of course.” Tatsu has a dry way of saying “of course” that always seems to emphasize some lack of mental acuity on the part of the listener. “Kawamura died almost immediately after he called me, meaning it was likely that he was unable to deliver the disk to the ‘Western media’ as planned. His daughter had his things. She was a logical target.”

“That’s why you were investigating the break-in at her father’s apartment.”

He looked at me disapprovingly. “My men performed that break-in. We were looking for the disk.”

“Two chances to look for it—the break-in, and then the investigation,” I said, admiring his efficiency. “Convenient.”

“Not convenient enough. We couldn’t find it. This is why we turned our attention to the daughter.”

“You and everyone else.”

“You know, Rain-san,” he said, “I had a man following her in Omotesando. He had a most unlikely accident in the bathroom of a local bar. His neck was broken.”

Christ, that was Tatsu’s man. So maybe Benny had been serious about giving me forty-eight hours to accept the Midori assignment. Not that it mattered anymore. “Really,” I said.

“On the same night I had men waiting at the daughter’s apartment. Despite being armed, they were ambushed and overcome by a single man.”

“Embarrassing,” I said, waiting for more.

He took out a cigarette, studied it for a moment,
then placed it in his mouth and lit it. “Academic,” he said, exhaling a cloud of gray smoke. “It’s over. The CIA has the disk now.”

“Why do you say that? What about Yamaoto?”

“I have means of knowing that Yamaoto is still searching for the disk. There is only one other player in this drama, besides me. That player must have taken the disk from Bulfinch.”

“If you’re talking about Holtzer, he’s working with Yamaoto.”

He smiled the sad smile. “Holtzer isn’t working with Yamaoto, he’s Yamaoto’s slave. And, like most slaves, he’s looking for a way to escape.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Yamaoto controls Holtzer through blackmail, as he controls all his puppets. But Holtzer is playing a double game. He plans to use that disk to bring Yamaoto down, to cut the puppet master’s strings.”

“So Holtzer hasn’t told Yamaoto that the Agency has the disk.”

He shrugged. “As I said, Yamaoto is still looking for it.”

“Tatsu,” I said quietly, “what’s on that disk?”

He took a tired pull on his cigarette, then blew the smoke skyward. “Videos of extramarital sexual acts, audio of bribes and payoffs, numbers of secret accounts, records of illegal real estate transactions and money laundering.”

“Implicating Yamaoto?”

He looked at me as though wondering how I could be so slow. “Rain-san, you were a great soldier, but you would make a very shitty cop. Implicating everyone
but
Yamaoto.”

I was silent for a moment while I tried to connect the dots. “Yamaoto uses this information as blackmail?”

“Of course,” he replied in his dry way. “Why do you think we have had nothing but failed administration after failed administration? Eleven prime ministers in as many years? Every one of them has either been an LDP flunky or a reformer who is immediately co-opted and defused. This is Yamaoto, governing from the shadows.”

“But he’s not even part of the LDP.”

“He doesn’t want to be. He is much more effective governing as he does. When a politician displeases him, incriminating information is released, the media is instructed to magnify it, and the offending politician is disgraced. The scandal reflects only on the LDP, not on Conviction.”

“How does he get his information?”

“An extensive system of wiretaps, video surveillance, and accomplices. Every time he traps someone new, the victim becomes complicit and assists him in furthering his network of blackmail.”

“Why would they help him?”

“Carrot and stick. Yamaoto of course has on his payroll a number of young women sufficiently beautiful to make even the most faithfully married politician temporarily forget himself. Say he has one of his people videotape a member of Parliament engaging in an embarrassing sexual act with one of these women. The politician is then shown the videotape and told that it will be kept in confidence in exchange for his vote on certain measures, typically affecting public-works spending, and for his cooperation in entrapping his
colleagues. If the politician has a conscience, he won’t want to vote in favor of these ridiculous public projects, but his fear of exposure is now a much more significant motivator than his conscience would ever have been. As for entrapping his colleagues, there is some psychology at work: by making others dirty, he feels less dirty by comparison. And because elections are decided in Japan not by a politician’s voting record but by his access to money, Yamaoto offers an enormous slush fund that the politician can use to fund his next election campaign. Yamaoto gives generously: once a politician is part of his network, it is in his interest to see that person reelected, to advance the politician’s career. Yamaoto’s influence runs so deep that, if you’re not part of his network, you can’t get anything done and anyway you’ll be defeated in the next election by being outspent by one of his puppets.”

“With all that power, why have I never heard of him?”

“Yamaoto does not reveal the source of the pressure being applied. His victims know only that they are being blackmailed, not by whom. Most of them believe it is the work of one or another LDP faction. And why not? Every time Yamaoto determines that a scandal is in his interest, the LDP becomes the focus of the country’s attention. Ironic, isn’t it? Yamaoto manages things so that even the LDP believes the LDP is the power. But there is a power behind the power.”

I thought of the reports I’d been tracking, of Tatsu’s conspiracy theories. “But you’ve been focusing on corruption in the LDP yourself, Tatsu.”

His eyes narrowed. “How would you know that?”

I smiled. “Just because we’ve fallen out of touch doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest.”

He took another drag on the cigarette. “Yes, I focus on corruption in the LDP,” he said, the smoke jetting down from his nostrils. “Yamaoto is amused by this. He believes it serves his ends. And it would, if any of my reports were taken seriously. But only Yamaoto decides when corruption is to be prosecuted.” There was a bitter set to his mouth as he said it.

I couldn’t help but smile at him—the same wily bastard I knew in Vietnam. “But you’ve been playing possum. Your real goal is Yamaoto.”

He shrugged.

“Now I understand why you wanted that disk,” I said.

“You knew of my involvement, Rain-san. Why didn’t you contact me?”

“I had reason not to.”

“Yes?”

“Midori,” I said. “If I’d given it to you, Yamaoto would still think it was missing, and he would keep coming after Midori. Publication was the only way to make her safe.”

“Is this the only reason you were reluctant to contact me?”

I looked at him, wary. “I can’t think of anything else. Can you?”

His only response was the sad smile.

We walked for a moment in silence, then I asked, “How did Yamaoto get to Holtzer?”

“By offering him what every man wants.”

“Which is?”

“Power, of course. How do you think that Holtzer
rose so quickly through the ranks to become chief of Tokyo Station?”

“Yamaoto’s been feeding him information?”

“Of course. It is my understanding that Mr. Holtzer has been notably successful at developing assets in Japan. And as chief of station in Tokyo, he has been responsible for producing certain critical intelligence reports—particularly regarding corruption in the Japanese government, on which Yamaoto is of course an expert.”

“Christ, Tatsu, the quality of your information is almost scary.”

“What is scary is how useless the information has always been to me.”

“Holtzer knows that he’s being played?”

He shrugged. “At first, he thought he was developing Yamaoto. Once he realized that the opposite was true, what were his options? Tell the CIA that the assets he had developed were plants, the reports all fabricated? That would have meant the end of his career. The alternative was much more pleasant: work for Yamaoto, who continues to feed him the ‘intelligence’ that makes Holtzer a star. And Yamaoto has his mole inside the CIA.”

Holtzer, a mole,
I thought, disgusted.
I should have known.

“Holtzer told me that the CIA had been developing Kawamura, that Kawamura was on his way to deliver the disk to the Agency when he died.”

He shrugged. “Kawamura screwed me. He might have screwed the Agency, as well. Impossible to say, and irrelevant.”

“What about Bulfinch,” I asked. “How did Holtzer get to him?”

“By having him followed until you handed over the disk, of course. Bulfinch was a soft target, Rain-san.” I heard the soft note of criticism in his voice—telling me it was stupid to give the disk to a civilian.

We walked silently again for a few minutes. Then he said, “Rain-san. What have you been doing in Japan all this time? Since the last time we met.”

With Tatsu, it was a mistake to assume that anything was small talk. A small warning bell went off somewhere in my consciousness.

“Nothing terribly new,” I said. “The same consulting work as before.”

“What was that, again?”

“You know. Helping a few U.S. companies find ways to import their products into Japan. Get around the red tape, find the right partners, that sort of thing.”