The Last Assassin (14 page)

She hunched forward, her eyes squeezed shut, fistfuls of hair balled in her hands. She'd actually been hoping. She had. She realized that now.

Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. Maybe Rain didn't tell the woman. Maybe she found out some other way.

But that didn't matter. It didn't even matter what the woman wanted. What mattered was that she had been telling the truth. Rain was a danger. And he always would be.

She wanted him out of her life. Hers and Koichiro's. Forever.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I used the Watanabe identity to rent a van at a place in Shinjuku. After that, I shopped for some supplemental items: warm, dark clothing; waterproof boots; two-way radios in case cell phone coverage was lacking by the Sea of Japan. I spent the balance of the day sleeping. Not an ideal way to adjust to the local time zone, but I needed the rest and Dox and I were going to be working at night, anyway. I woke up just as the sun was setting, and after the proper procedures to ensure I was alone, I went out to a pay phone to call Kanezaki.

“Hai,”
he said, after the customary single ring.

“You get what I asked for?”

“It's all right here. Oplus-XT Gauged C0
₂
rifle with AN/PVS-17 Mini night-vision scope, two SOCOM HK Mark 23s each with Trijicon night sights, AN/PEQ-6 infrared laser aiming module, Knight's Armament suppressor, spare mag, one hundred rounds of Federal Hydra-Shok, and Wilcox tactical thigh holster, two pairs of AN/PVS-7 night-vision goggles, Agency-designed GPS transmitter with magnetic mounts for surreptitious emplacement and accompanying monitor with mapping software. The only thing I couldn't do was the ten darts. Turns out we only had five on hand.”

“Shit,” I said, and started running through the plan to see how we could adjust.

“You were lucky we even had the rifle and the five darts. This kind of stuff is used mostly for rendering bad guys in Europe and the Middle East. The only reason we had any of it is because someone in the embassy must have realized there was some counterterror money left over in the budget and wanted to use it up.”

“What's in the darts?”

“Some commercial variation of liquid succinylcholine chloride. There's a small explosive charge that injects the drug on impact, so pulling the dart out won't help. Very fast-acting, depending on where you place the shot. The neck is best.”

“Is weight a factor?”

“No. These things are rated for anything up to a rhinoceros.”

“All right, five will have to do it.”

“This is some expensive equipment, you know. I'm going to be in major shit if any of it goes missing.”

“I can tell you you're not getting the darts back.”

“I'm not talking about the darts. Or the ammo.”

“Where do I pick it up?”

“Wherever you want,” he said, knowing I'd be more comfortable choosing the place.

I considered. I knew I was clean at the moment and didn't need time to run a route. And I didn't want to give Kanezaki time to set anything up. Not that he would—especially if he assumed I was on the hook now for a “favor”—but it always pays to be careful.

“JR Harajuku Station platform,” I said. “Thirty minutes from now.”

“Okay.”

Twenty minutes later, I stepped off the Yamanote onto the platform at Harajuku. Nothing pinged my radar. Crowds were moderate, and divided more or less equally between teenagers heading to nearby Takeshitadori, the grunge/retro/hip-hop shopping strip, and smartly dressed adults heading to the bistros and boutiques of adjacent Omotesando-dori. That the two disparate groups and places existed side by side in parallel dimensions would never cease to please me. It was part of what made Tokyo tick.

Kanezaki arrived on time, stepping off a Shinjukubound train with a medium-sized blue duffel slung over his shoulder. He was wearing a dark suit and, but for something detectably western in his posture and gait, could have been just another young Japanese corporate samurai.

He saw me and headed over. I scanned the other people who had gotten off the train. I noted no problems.

He put the duffel down and we shook hands. The bug detector my late friend Harry had made for me slumbered in my pocket. Kanezaki was clean.

“How've you been?” he asked.

“All right,” I said, looking him over. “You?”

“Fine.”

“How's the Global War on Terrorism?”

He smiled. “These days we call it the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism.”

I liked that he didn't get defensive. Not so long before, he would have taken my derisiveness personally. I wondered if his people knew how capable he was becoming. Probably not.

“Yeah, GWOT just wasn't a winning acronym,” I said. “I'm sure it'll go better now that you've renamed it.”

He chuckled. “You want to tell me what all the hardware's for? And who you're working with? Two of this, two of that, it's not like you.”

I looked at him. Yeah, he was capable. But maybe getting a little full of himself, too.

“You're charging me a ‘favor' for this,” I said, my voice cold, “and now you're asking for freebies?”

He looked taken aback. “I only meant…”

“Look, are we doing this as an exchange of cooperation and goodwill, or as a sales transaction?”

“I was hoping it could be both.”

“It can't. Choose one. And live with it.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Let me think about it.”

I shrugged. We were quiet again.

“Have you been in touch with Tatsu?” I asked.

“For a while, but not just lately. He's busy, I'm busy…”

“He's in the hospital.”

He looked at me, and the concern I saw was genuine. “No. Nothing serious?”

“Gastric cancer. If you want to see him, he's at Jikei. But you better do it soon.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Go see him. He thinks of you as a kind of protégé, someone who can carry on his work. But he's too proud to say it.”

He nodded. “Thanks for telling me.”

I shouldered the duffel. “I'll be in touch.”

He held out his hand and, after a moment, I shook it.

“Be careful,” he said.

“Yeah,” I told him. “I wouldn't want you to miss out on that favor.”

T
HE DRIVE TO WAJIMA
the next morning lasted about five hours. Japanese highways, burdened as they are by frequent and excessive tolls, tend also to be mercifully free of traffic. I used cash for the tolls, having declined the rental car company's offer to set me up with the latest in electronic collection technology. Electronic payment is too easy to track.

Along the way, we stopped at an abandoned building site to check out all the equipment. Dox had never used a C0
₂
rifle before, and the reason I had wanted more darts was so he could train with it. With only five darts in our arsenal, though, I felt we could spare only one for practice.

“Make it count,” I told him, as he took a prone position eighty meters away from an aluminum can I'd propped up at the top of a fence.

There was the soft crack of suddenly discharging compressed gas, and an instant later an answering ping eighty meters downfield. I looked through the binoculars and the can was gone. I started to tell Dox, but he already knew. He looked up at me and smiled. “Shit, eighty meters,” he said. “I could hit 'em with a rock from this close.”

Before getting back in the van, I used a toothbrush to comb some white liquid shoe polish into my hair. The polish gave a nice salt-and-pepper effect, far more pronounced than what had lately been creeping in naturally at my temples and over my ears, and would add ten years to a witness's description. A pair of hopelessly unstylish thick-framed nonprescription eyeglasses that I had picked up before leaving Tokyo completed the effect.

We arrived at Wajima at a little after noon, and I called the inn to see if I could check in. As expected, they asked if I could come at two. That was fine. It suggested that Yamaoto's men weren't there yet, either.

Dox and I spent the next hour and a half driving around, familiarizing ourselves with Wajima. The area was still pretty in places, I thought, but like much of Japan it was under siege from development. The native deciduous trees, orange and red in the chill air, were everywhere being cut down and replaced with monoculture cedar by the region's logging interests. What remained looked like a patchwork of native flesh half covered with green bandages that did nothing to stanch the wounds beneath. Everything was paved—riverbeds, hillsides, even the coast. It seemed that only the sea itself was free from the metastasizing onslaught of development, but as we drove along the coast I saw that some council or interest group or bureaucracy was in the midst of partially enclosing Wajima harbor with a giant wall of concrete. I thought of what Dox had said, about Americans professing to love peace but always waging war. Japanese maintain a traditional reverence for nature, but here they were entombing all traces of it in a concrete sarcophagus. At what point would this culture have to look in the mirror and admit that its traditional love of nature had become a living lie?

When we had seen as much as was useful from the van, we parked so I could have a look around on foot. Dox wanted to get out, too, but accepted that in sleepy Wajima, his white face and outsized frame would eclipse his ordinarily strong cloaking skills. He lay down in back while I set out underneath a cold sky darkening with rain clouds.

The town felt tired to me. I saw much gray hair and no children, although I imagined the latter must exist somewhere. The local economy seemed to be on a subsistence diet of foresting, fishing, and farming, supplemented by a trickle of tourists taking the waters and returning home with gifts of locally made lacquerware.

I walked down to the harbor, my shoulders hunched against a bitter sea breeze. The road in was hemmed on both sides with detritus from the fishing industry—torn nets, broken ballast, rusted-out crab traps. Much of it was covered in blue tarpaulins that blanketed the shapes beneath like trembling shrouds. Everywhere there were gulls, cooing and cawing. Beyond the debris, scores of small fishing boats rose and fell, creaking against their moorings, their tangled rigging skeletal against the scudded horizon. A crushed coffee cup skidded past my feet, impelled by the wind, and a cold mist started down from the sky and in from the water.

They might have been planning to meet here, but I doubted it. The layout was too confusing, for one thing; people might be around, for another. I headed east along the coast. Giant concrete tetrapods lay at the water's edge like unexploded ordnance from a long forgotten war. The mist was getting heavier and the clouds darker, and I sensed we were in for a storm.

Past the tetrapods, I came to some sort of park that was being used as a staging ground for further construction. Trucks were parked here and there and I saw piles of cement and girders and similar matériel. A wide grassy field gave way to dirt, and dirt gave way to open water.
Here,
I thought,
they're going to do it right here. It's perfect.
And perfect sniping ground, too. I used the camera we'd bought in New York to take pictures from various angles, then went back to the van so I could walk Dox through the terrain.

We finished going through the pictures just before two o'clock, and I drove us to the inn. It was a small, three-story structure separated from the sea by the narrow coastal road and a short embankment of grass. I parked in the lot behind the building. “You going to be all right?” I asked Dox. “I don't know when Yamaoto's people are going to arrive. It might be a while.”

“Partner, I once waited three days in the mud before my quarry came into view. Nailed him, too, from eight hundred yards out. The inside of a van feels like paradise by comparison. Got my sleeping bag, foam mattress, food, water, a plastic jug for number one and a bucket and plastic bags for number two. Plus reading material, including some high-quality Japanese pornography. Life couldn't be better.”

“Well, I'll be sure to knock before I come inside,” I told him, and he laughed.

I looked through the driver's and passenger's side windows. There were three other cars in the lot, possibly belonging to inn employees, possibly to guests who had checked in yesterday or earlier. They were all small, older model Toyotas and the like, and none had Tokyo plates. I had a feeling Yamaoto's men weren't here yet. Still, I would remember the cars so I could compare later.

“You might see them before I do,” I said. “I expect they'll be parking back here, just like us.”

“Yeah, I'll sneak a look whenever I hear a car pull in. If I see anything promising, I'll call you on the cell phone.”

I got out and walked around to the front entrance. I stepped inside and was immediately transported by the warm smell of incense and tatami mats. A middle-aged woman in a blue kimono welcomed me with a bow. I took off my shoes and followed her in. She had me sit at a low table in the lobby while I—or I should say Mr. Watanabe—filled out some check-in paperwork.

The procedure had an air of ritual about it, and I realized Yamaoto's men would probably have to pause here, too. I looked around for a good vantage point and was pleased to see a second-story sitting area open to the lobby below. It offered stellar views of the sea and, more important from my perspective, of where Yamaoto's men would enter as I had.

The woman returned with a cup of barley tea. “You're traveling alone, Watanabe-san?” she asked, no doubt hoping for an answer to her implicit question of “Why?”

“Yes,” I told her. “My wife passed away recently, and because we honeymooned in this area I wanted to return to it.”

“I'm saddened to hear of your loss,” she said, bowing her head. As I expected in the face of Watanabe's sad story, she asked no further questions, and I needed to tell her no further lies. But I was confident that word would now circulate among the staff, and that consequently no one would find it at all remarkable that sad Watanabe-san might sit brooding for long hours alone on that second-floor balcony.

I dropped off my bag in my room on the third floor, a twelve-mat square with an alcove and a view of the sea that was impressive in spite of the tangle of high-tension wire in front of it. Then I went down to the lobby restaurant, sat so I had a view of the entrance, and ate a long, leisurely lunch of oysters from Anamizu Bay, sweet shrimp from the deep waters of the Sea of Japan, and locally caught winter yellowtail with sliced radish and red pepper. During my repast a few elderly couples checked in, but they obviously weren't the people Dox and I were waiting for.

Afterward, I repaired to the second-story balcony, where I waited as though absorbed in my memories. It was just getting dark outside when my cell phone buzzed. I glanced at the caller ID readout—Dox.

I pressed the receive button. “Yeah.”

“Looks like our company has finally arrived,” Dox said.

“You sure?”

“Let's just say I've got a strong feeling. They're coming in now.”

“What do they look like?”

“Oh, don't worry. You're not going to miss them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just watch, you'll see.”

I looked down into the lobby. I heard the front door open and close. The blue-kimonoed woman who had greeted me called out
“Irasshaimase”—
welcome—and hurried out from behind the check-in counter. A moment later, two gigantic men, obviously sumo wrestlers, appeared below me. I sat well back to conceal myself and from the angle I couldn't be sure, but I estimated each of them at north of a hundred and fifty kilos. It was like looking down on the heads and shoulders of a pair of bison.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“Guess you've seen 'em,” Dox said.

“Christ, we've only got four darts.”

“Yeah, as I think Roy Scheider put it in
Jaws,
‘We're gonna need a bigger boat.'”

They said something to the woman, but I couldn't quite make out what. She escorted them inside.

It wasn't just their bulk that advertised their background. They had that slow sumo swagger, that air of royalty—almost of divinity—born of size and celebrity. They were used to being looked at, to being the objects of attention and awe, and they moved as though bearing the adoration as of right, with no obligation to repay it with anything more than impassive acceptance.

I moved farther back, out of their view. “Did you see what they're driving?” I asked.

“'Course I did. Big burgundy Cadillac, with the steering wheel on the left side.”

Sounded like a yakuza ride. It had to be them.

“You get the license plate?”

“Yeah.” He gave it to me, and I wrote it down.

“Hang on,” I said. “I'll call you back.”

“Roger that.”

I called Tatsu. The phone rang a few times, then his weak voice said,
“Hai.”

“How are you holding up?” I asked.

“I'm still here.”

I had the sudden sick knowledge that one day soon I would call him and he wouldn't answer, he wouldn't still be here at all.

I pushed that aside and said, “I think our guys have arrived, but I need to be sure. Kito and Sanada…are they sumo wrestlers?”

“I don't know. But I can find out.”

“All right. Here's the license number of the car they're driving. Toyko plate.”

I read it out to him. He told me he would call me back.

I stole another peek down at the lobby. The men had finished signing in, and the woman in blue was walking them to the elevator, presumably to show them their rooms.

Fifteen minutes later, Tatsu called back. “It's them,” he said. “Both former sumo wrestlers, their careers cut short by injuries. The car is registered to Kito.”

“Okay. Let me get back to business. I'll call you again soon.”

“Good.”

I hung up and called Dox.

“You were right,” I told him. “They're the ones we've been waiting for. Former sumo wrestlers.”

“‘Former'? They look pretty current to me.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Were they any good?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Just wondering if we could handle 'em if we had to.”

“‘Handle' them? There must be seven or eight hundred pounds between the two of them. We're going to handle them with long-range weapons, that's how we're going to handle them. And only because we can't call in an air strike.”

“All right, just trying a contingency plan, that's all.”

“If we have to tangle with these guys up close, I advise prayer.”

“You stick with the prayer. I prefer to rely on something sharp if it comes to that.”

“I hope it's a harpoon. I doubt anything else could reach a vital organ.”

“Well, how about if…”

“Look, it's not that I don't want to sit around figuring out how to kill a sumo,” I said, “but if it's clear now, maybe you could duck out and put the transmitter in place on their car. I'll stay here and warn you if anyone's coming.”