Enzan: The Far Mountain (12 page)

“With any kind of digital item, you have to make sure it’s really what it says it is. It’s too easy to fake this stuff, so I did some analysis to see if any of it had been Photoshopped.”

“And?” I had a brief moment of hope.

“There’s been no doctoring of the images. They’re authentic.”

I settled back in my chair, deflated. I didn’t even know Chie Miyazaki. Her private life was theoretically none of my business. But now, in a curious way, it was my business. It wasn’t so much the Miyazaki who were pulling me in; it was Mori. I thought about his journal and what it contained. Last night seemed so long ago. Images and memories settled on me like a fog: water splashing, the desperate burn of breath. I shook my head, trying to force out the memories like a swimmer clearing his ears of water.
Get a grip, Burke
.

Owen was looking at me, clearly concerned. I cleared my throat and sat forward, pretending I could understand the spreadsheet he had created. I thought about the pictures. She was basically a pretty young woman, but as far as I could tell, porn essentially drains its subjects of their humanity. Is that what she wanted? Was she making some sort of statement? I thought about what the roshi had told me about hypersexuality: a compulsive attempt at creating some kind of connection. What was it about her life that was so terrible that she made herself an object and yet also desperately sought to create a connection? It was beyond me.

“What a freak show,” I sighed.

“I know,” Owen answered. “I mean, I like pictures of naked chicks as much as the next guy, but this …” He seemed at a loss.

I didn’t see that there was much more to add on that subject. “What else have you got?”

Owen brightened up. “I ran the logs and auditing function on the data from the laptop.” It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about. The fight in Lim’s apartment and the laptop I took seemed like another series of distant and indistinct events to me. Owen saw my blank look. “Remember you asked me if I would be able to trace where the images from the laptop’s surveillance program were being sent? Connor, you OK?”

I nodded, trying to stay focused.

“There were a few locations. Three cell phones. Two are unlisted numbers, but the other one is Lim’s. I pulled it off the reverse directory the cops use.” He clicked open another file and pointed out various entries. “Fairly consistent pattern—the surveillance program was sending notifications to the three cell phones. Then a few weeks ago, we get a new entry, an IP address.”

I at least knew what an Internet Protocol address is. It is a unique identifier provided to each computer accessing the Internet.

I leaned in toward the screen. “Can you get a real address from this?”

Owen made a face. “Not usually. Typically you can get a general location. I ran this through a geolocation database provider …”

“And?”

Owen clicked his mouse and called up Google Maps. He entered a string of coordinates into the search box. “Presto!” he said, beaming with pride. “They’re somewhere in this vicinity.”

The satellite image showed woods, lots of it, with some residential roads and NY Route 97 snaking along the right side of the map.

I was deflated. “This helps me how?”

Owen clicked some more, enlarging the map. “Take a look. It’s a private community in northeast Pennsylvania called Mattson’s Peak. Much less densely populated than a city block or even a residential street in a suburban location. I count seven houses that could be contained within the GPS coordinates associated with the IP address.”

“Seven,” I said.

“Sure. But this time of the year, I’d bet not many are occupied. Summer’s over and there’s no snow for skiing yet.”

“It’s a long shot,” I told him, but then I remembered the magazines in Lim’s apartment. “Skiing?”

“It’s a recreational-living resort. Hiking, boating, horseback riding. They’ve got their own slopes for skiing when the weather’s right. And with just this to go on, I agree, you might think it’s a long shot. Except …”

“Except what?”

“I got to thinking once I ran the logs and audits study. I took a look at the tags associated with the photos that the Miyazaki received.”

I was lost again. “Tags?”

“Sure. Most digital cameras store data about pictures in the file’s EXIF tag.”

I held up a hand. “Owen. English, please.”

He grinned sheepishly. “Just details about the image. Ya know: focal length or flash use.” He saw my impatience and rushed on. “And, if the device is GPS enabled, there’s also a geotag, the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken.”

“And?”

“Some of the pictures were taken with cell phones.” I started drumming my fingers on Owen’s desk, so he sped up. The computer screen flashed once more. A file shrank down, and another expanded. “Some pictures were taken in Manhattan. Locations consistent with her place near NYU.”

“She hasn’t been to her apartment in weeks,” I reminded him.

Owen could sense my growing impatience. “OK, OK, but the pictures are date stamped as well. The most recent shots were a mixed bag, but there were a few that had geotags on them. Here’s a sample …” The screen filled with a new picture of Chie Miyazaki, kneeling on a rumpled bed, a short robe hanging open, her legs spread wide in invitation.

“Owen …” I didn’t want to see any more of this.

He clicked and it disappeared. “A few were sent from the same IP address we already had. Indoor shots. But at least one was taken outdoors and was sent from a phone. And the GPS code?” He highlighted a string of numbers and copied them to a blank page: 41.53592,-75.030184.

He switched back to another screen. “And the GPS for the IP address?” He copied another string and pasted it below the first series of numbers: 41.52654,-75.048766.

“What’s it mean?” I said.

He smiled in triumph. “The two locations? Less than a quarter mile away.”

I thought about it for minute. “You’re telling me they somehow overlooked this stuff, the …” I made a face and held out a hand, asking for him to help.

“The EXIF tags,” Owen said.

“Whatever. They somehow didn’t think about this? The setup at Lim’s apartment seemed pretty tech savvy.”

Owen shrugged, massive shoulders surging up like a wave. “You see it all the time. There’s lots of different ways smartphones and other devices store information. You could snap a picture and later, when you send it, turn the GPS off so you think you can’t be traced. But the data’s already been recorded. Ya gotta remember these things are designed to record data, Burke. They do it in multiple ways and it’s hard to circumvent them all.”

“I thought they were phones.”

“They’re smartphones. They do way more than that. And mostly they record information about consumer behavior. It’s a marketing gold mine.”

“It’s Big Brother,” I replied.

“It’s big business,” he countered.

“OK, it’s Big Brother and the Holding Company.” But it was a reference from another time and it flew right over his head.

We thought for a while.

“Best lead we’ve got,” he finally said.

I stood up. “You’re right.” I rubbed my face, trying to line up my next moves. “I’ll need a map,” I told him.

Owen smiled. “I thought you might,” he said, and slid a paper my way.

I checked the time, aware that my window of opportunity was rapidly closing. It would take me a few hours to get to Mattson’s Peak.

“OK. I need to rent a car.”

“Where we going?”

“
We
are not going anywhere,” I said, and Owen’s face fell. “I need you to anchor things here,” I explained. “I need someone who knows where I’m going and what I’m doing. Someone who can relay information.” It was true, but I also thought Owen had a promising career ahead of him and he didn’t need to get too tied up in what I was doing.

He nodded reluctantly. Deep down, I think he was relieved, but I appreciated that he wanted to help out.

“I’ll need you to cut class,” I told him.

He sniffed. “No problem there. I’m a doctoral student. I don’t go to class. I just think deep thoughts.” I had a hard time picturing that. I looked at Owen. His head was big and square. His hands looked big enough to palm a cinderblock.

“How’s that going for you?” I asked with more than a little skepticism.

Owen shrugged. “Some days better than others.”

“A lot of that going around,” I agreed.

Chapter 12

The sky was a smooth, milky grey and I could sense bad weather coming. The clerk in the Pennsylvania sporting goods store tallied up my purchases without commenting on them: boots, socks, a coat, canvas field pants, and a flannel shirt. If she wondered what kind of idiot would come up into the hills at the end of November in running shoes, she didn’t let on. She sat on a stool behind the counter, silently staring out the front window while I shopped. But she shared my feeling about the weather.

“Snow comin’,” she said when I dumped my stuff on the counter. “Ya can smell it.”

I was the only other person in the store. I nodded in agreement as she continued checking out my order: hat, gloves, a water bottle, and some energy bars, a daypack. “I’m up for a short vacation with friends, but I didn’t think I’d need this stuff,” I explained. In reality, I wanted to distract her from the rest of the items I was buying: duct tape, a folding hunting knife, binoculars, a GPS unit, and batteries. But she seemed oblivious to what she was ringing up. Her dark hair was parted into thick braids and grey strands wound through it like new wire. She was wearing one of those knit Peruvian hats with earflaps. It had the figure of a llama woven into it. Then again, maybe it was an alpaca.

“This time of year, ya can never tell what the weather’ll be like,” she advised me. She barely even looked at the merchandise. Never wondered at the dude from the city and his odd collection of gear.
Duct tape?
I imagined once the winter set in, business was slow. She seemed more than happy to bag my stuff without comment and take the money. We made small talk and I paid her. I changed into the new clothes in the dressing room. She gave me a thumbs up when I emerged. “Now you’re talkin’,” she told me, but by the time I reached the door, she was staring out the window again, watching the sky, alone in the silent store, waiting. I drove away and, as the cold hand of the storm cell began to push down from the sky, the hills seemed to hunker down around me.

In the woods, the world was leached of color; everything was grey. The cloud cover had darkened. The trees stood naked and silent amid a jumbled field of rocks, as hard and cold as iron. My breath steamed. I could hear the wind clattering the high branches all around me. Somewhere a blue jay rasped a complaint.

Mattson’s Peak sprawled across the high, uneven ground that generations of Pike County farmers had tried to farm and then given up on. It was covered in hardwood and evergreens and studded with rock. It billed itself as a vacation community, and the houses and chalets were strung seemingly at random in an appropriately leisure-community-like formation along the private roads that looped through the woods. There was lots of green space, lots of privacy. Hiking and bridle trails wound through the acreage. The main hilltop, Mattson’s Peak itself, had been cleared for the welcome and activity centers as well as the ski operation. I drifted into the welcome center and grabbed a few brochures and a map. The teenage receptionist appeared relieved that I didn’t want to talk with her. She was busy texting but occasionally threw a glance out the window, watching the weather. In a few years she’d be wearing a knit hat with a llama on it.

I took a drive around the area to orient myself. At this time of year the place was quiet. There were few full-time residents, there had been no snow to attract skiers, and hunting was prohibited in the community’s forests. The only person crazy enough to be out in the woods that day was me.

I had parked my rental car in one of the convenient parking slips that marked all the trailheads in the community. The visitor’s map made it easy enough to figure out a route that would lead me to the location Owen had pinpointed. I decided to scout on foot. There wasn’t much traffic and the road I was targeting was a cul-de-sac. Driving up would be too conspicuous. The crunch of tires carried a long way up here and there was no sense alerting anyone.

But the map, as the saying goes, is not the terrain. The trail I chose wound aimlessly through the forest, the path gnarled by tree roots. It crossed and recrossed a dry streambed that was choked with leaves. Eventually, I left the path and followed the slope downhill, checking the GPS as I went. My boots thudded against the rocks, a strangely resonant sound that hinted of the dense root networks underground and a carpet of pine needles above it. I shuffled through leaves and snapped twigs, lurching through the brush.
Not exactly the stealthy woodsman
. But I wasn’t too worried about the noise I was making. It was swallowed up in the general sound of the forest. Birds called. The wind pulsed and leaves rustled. The bare tree limbs groaned above me. But if noise wasn’t a problem, light was.

The day was fading. This was taking longer than I had anticipated and the storm was slowly smothering the afternoon light. I moved as quickly as I could, but the footing was treacherous and the slope increasingly steep. It was slow going.
Too long, Burke, it’s taking too long
. The knowledge nagged at me. Finally I picked my way down a fissured rock outcropping and the ground started to level off. Ahead, through the vertical bars of grey tree trunks, I could glimpse color and horizontal lines, the angles of a roof, the shape of a house.

I ghosted along the tree line, close enough to get a look, but deep enough in the woods so no one would notice me. Or so I hoped.

There were seven houses along the cul-de-sac, four fairly close to the main road along either side of the upper part of the lane. All four seemed empty: no sign of cars, dried leaves collecting on doorsills, the windows dark. I could smell wood smoke, though. Someone was around. Farther down, the cul-de-sac widened and there were three houses clustered there, all alike: steep pitched roofs, high decks, and sliding glass doors. Your basic chalet getaway.

It was easy to spot the house that was occupied. It was the only one with smoke wafting out its chimney, and it was coming from the house across the road, farthest from my position. The place had two vehicles in the driveway, both with New York license plates.

I looped around the rear of the three houses, double-checking one after the other for signs of life. The first two: no cars visible, nothing coming out of the chimneys, no lights on. The final house seemed like the only place currently occupied. I slowed my pace and moved farther back into the woods. Wind gusted and leaves swirled. The cold worked on my injuries, old and new. I moved stiffly and my fingers tingled despite my gloves. I felt the urge to hunker down, to fold in on myself in the effort to keep warm.
Ignore
. I let the cold roll over and through me. No sense in fighting against it. Accept it and focus instead on the things that were important.
Look
.
Listen
.
Plan
.
I squatted down and watched the last house. The only one with signs of life.

It had a high cement foundation. A flight of wooden steps led to the deck and the main entrance. The deck wrapped around three sides of the building and the front door was sliding glass and faced the road. There were windows all around. No sense being in a vacation wonderland without a view. From where I crouched, I was below a direct line of sight into the first-floor windows. But lights were on. I could see that. I scanned ahead of me. The ground swelled up behind the house; they had scooped out a place for the foundation in the side of the hill. As a result, when I finally got directly behind the building, I would be able to look into the rear windows from the cover of the woods. That was my plan. Sneak up and around the back and see what I could see.
Burke. Swordsman. Scholar. Peeping Tom
.

I moved deeper into the woods, away from the house. Into the gloom. I picked my way slowly up the slope. I saw another sliding glass door on the side of the house that was nearest to me. There was a gas grill there, shrouded for the winter, and an iron circular rack for cut firewood. It was half filled. I peered through the binoculars, working the focus to see inside the glass doors. Wall cabinets. A table. The stainless steel sentinel of a refrigerator. There was a dim light on over the stovetop, but no sign of anyone in the kitchen. I slung the binoculars around my neck and kept moving.

The rear of the house had smaller windows spaced out on the first floor and a large picture window centered on the second, with smaller windows on either side. The first row of windows was blank and dark. The big window on the second floor had light coming through it.

The slope of the woods took me up higher than I needed to be. I needed to get closer to the house, following the hill down to get an angle where I’d be able to see inside. I moved slowly and took my time. In low light, movement gives you away more than color or shape. I peered through the trees, checking my perimeter, listening for any noises that might have been out of place. But there was just the wind.

I felt the snow begin to fall before I actually saw it. Flecks of cold wetness touching my face. The snowflakes were tiny, and in the fading light they didn’t stand out as much as they just added to the granularity of the visual field. It gave me more confidence as I approached the house. Nobody was going to be able to spot me now. I was another shadow, a blur deep in the tree line.

I made my way down and squatted behind a tree. The snowfall seemed to be accelerating. I focused the binoculars on the window. And got an eyeful.

I had been moving around in the gloom long enough for my eyes to accommodate to the relative darkness. There wasn’t that much light in the upper room, but it seemed bright to me. I could make out everything: the sprawl of the wide bed, the rumpled sheets, the pale shapes of limbs, and torsos.

Chie Miyazaki was on all fours, a short, silky robe pushed up above her hips. Lim was taking her from behind, the two of them rocking. His mouth was open and the dark eyes were vacant, turned in on the moment. A pale blur passed across the line of vision. A second man moved toward Chie. He reached a hand up and stroked her jaw. She smiled and opened her mouth for him.

I pulled the binoculars down, glad to be in the dark woods with the cold and wind and the simple sting of a snowstorm gathering in strength. I felt guilty for looking at them and angry. Angry with them all: with Chie for debasing herself, with the men who let her do it, with whoever had made her this way. I wanted to rush down there and stop it.

But I didn’t. It’s one of the ways I’ve changed. Years ago, I would have let my anger carry me down the hill and into the house. I might have blundered through the situation and come out the other end intact, but then again, I might not. And the warrior’s trade is not simply about the rush to battle, but also about walking away at the end of it. Or so I thought then.

It was the “guard against impetuous courage” angle again. I’ve seen the effects of haste too often in the dojo. Nerves or overconfidence or sheer inexperience sometimes impels your opponent to act too quickly. What happens next unfolds with a curious, clear inevitability. You almost feel sorry for the opponent. Yamashita sums it up with a shrug: “He walked right onto your sword.”

I wasn’t going to do that here. I was going to bide my time and look for an opportunity. I was going to move slowly and cautiously. I was going to be a shadow drifting through the woods. At some point, I’d see a chance. Then I was going to knock some heads together.

I scurried down the slope to the house, slowly circling the property. I probably could have levered open a window lock somewhere, but there were stickers on the glass from a security response company. I couldn’t chance setting off an alarm. I squatted under the deck, invisible, as the snow swirled and started to cover the ground. I waited. I sniffed the air and smelled wood smoke. I remembered the woodpile by the kitchen door. I felt the evening coming closer and the temperature dropping.

When the kitchen door slid open, I took my time. I let the man fill his arms with wood, and then clubbed him with
mawashi empi uchi
, a roundhouse elbow strike. I like the technique because it uses the density of your elbow and forearm to deliver the strike. And you don’t have to worry about breaking your fingers. I slammed my elbow into the point where jawbone and neck meet, a good, solid hit. The wood thumped onto the deck and I followed through on my momentum, sliding close to him and easing him down. I didn’t know whether he was unconscious or just stunned. I dragged him out of sight of the door, pulled off my gloves, and used duct tape to tie him up. He never opened his eyes. He did moan at one point, so I plastered some tape across his mouth as well.

The kitchen sliding door was open. He hadn’t planned on being outside too long and also expected to have an armful of firewood. I slipped inside and rolled the door closed. I stood still in the dim kitchen, my back to the glass door. The refrigerator hummed. I could hear footsteps upstairs. Voices. A woman’s low, knowing laughter.
Laughter?

The first floor had bedrooms in a line across the back wall to my left. A hallway stretched from the kitchen to the other side of the house. It was dark. To my right there was an expanse of living area with the wide glass doors of the main entrance. The room was studded with furniture: a low couch and easy chairs facing a fireplace. I could hear the wood snapping and crackling, and shadows danced from the flames. Another man was squatting in front of the hearth, poking at the logs and embers. He was barefoot, wearing grey sweatpants and no shirt.
Probably on a break from the party upstairs
. He was young and Asian and hunched with muscle. He glanced casually at me as I came toward him, saying something in what was probably Korean. I didn’t understand it, but it had a “What took you so long?” tone. Then he did a double take, as he realized what he was seeing didn’t match his expectations. It slowed his reaction time, which was a good thing. Even so, he managed to straighten up and was just swinging the wrought iron fireplace poker around in my direction when I got to him.

He didn’t call out in alarm. Maybe it was because his brain was still sex-fogged or because he was too surprised. Maybe it was because he was young and strong and probably the toughest guy he knew; he had that look about him. Besides, he was swinging a heavy iron poker at me. His eyes zeroed in on me and his mouth twisted into a type of smile I’ve seen before. He thought he was going to enjoy this.