Rainfall

the spy would come by and retrieve it. You could never put the two people together in the same place at the same time.

    It’s easier with the Internet, and more secure. The client posts an encrypted message on a bulletin board, the electronic equivalent of a tree hollow. I download it from an anonymous pay phone and decrypt it at my leisure. And vice versa.

    The message traffic is pretty simple. A name, a photograph, personal and work contact information. A bank account number, transfer instructions. A reminder of my three no’s: no women or children, no acts against nonprincipals, no other parties retained to solve the problem at hand. The phone is used only for the innocuous aftermath, which was the reason for my side trip to Ogikubo.

    I used one of the pay phones on the station platform to call my contact within the Liberal Democratic Party — an LDP flunky I know only as Benny, maybe short for Benihana or something. Benny’s English is fluent, so I know he’s spent some time abroad. He prefers to use English with me, I think because it has a harder sound in some contexts and Benny fancies himself a hard guy. Probably he learned the lingo from a too-steady diet of Hollywood gangster movies.

    We’d never met, of course, but talking to Benny on the phone had been enough for me to develop an antipathy. I had a vivid image of him as just another government seat-warmer, a guy who would try to manage a weight problem by jogging a few ten-minute miles three times a week on a treadmill in an overpriced chrome-and-mirrors gym, where the air-conditioning and soothing sounds of the television would prevent any unnecessary discomfort. He’d splurge on items like designer hair gel for a comb over because the little things only cost a few bucks anyway, and would save money by wearing no-iron shirts and ties with labels proclaiming “Genuine Italian Silk!” that he’d selected with care on a trip abroad from a sale bin at some discount department store, congratulating himself on the bargains for which he acquired such quality goods. He’d sport a few Western extravagances like a Montblanc fountain pen, talismans to reassure himself that he was certainly more cosmopolitan than the people who gave him orders. Yeah, I knew this guy. He was a little order taker, a go-between, a cutout who’d never gotten his hands dirty in his life, who couldn’t tell the difference between a real smile and the amused rictuses of the hostesses who relieved him of his yen for watered-down Suntory scotch while he bored them with hints about the Big Things he was involved in but of course couldn’t really discuss.

    After the usual exchange of innocuous, preestablished codes to establish our bona fides, I told him, “It’s done.”

    “Glad to hear it,” he said in his terse, false tough-guy way. “Any problems?”

    “Nothing worth mentioning,” I responded after a pause, thinking of the guy on the train.

    “Nothing? You sure?”

    I knew I wouldn’t get anything this way. Better to say nothing, which I did.

    “Okay,” he said, breaking the silence. “You know to reach out to me if you need anything. Anything at all, okay?”

    Benny tries to run me like an intelligence asset. Once he even suggested a face-to-face meeting. I told him if we met face-to-face I’d be there to kill him, so maybe we should skip it. He laughed, but we never did have that meeting.

    “There’s only one thing I need,” I said, reminding him of the money.

    “By tomorrow, like always.”

    “Good enough.” I hung up, automatically wiping down the receiver and keys on the remote possibility that they had traced the call and would send someone to try for prints. If they had access to Vietnam-era military records, and I assumed they did, they would get a match for John Rain, and I didn’t want them to know that the same guy they had known over twenty years ago when I first came back to Japan was now their mystery freelancer.

    I was working with the CIA at the time, a legacy of my Vietnam contacts, making sure the agency’s “support funds” were reaching the right recipients in the governing party, which even back then was the LDP. The agency was running a secret program to support conservative political elements, part of the U.S. government’s anti-Communist policies and a natural extension of relationships that had developed during the postwar occupation, and the LDP was more than happy to play the role in exchange for the cash.

    I