A Clean Kill in Tokyo

ancestry next to a blonde straight out of the fjords; a mélange of languages and accents. Somehow Las Chicas manages to be eternally hip and entirely comfortable with itself, both at the same time.
    I arrived two hours early and waited, sipping one of the Chai Lattes for which the restaurant is justifiably celebrated. You never want to be the last one to arrive at a meeting. It’s impolite. And it decreases your chances of being the one to leave.
    At a little before three, I spotted Harry coming up the street. He didn’t see me until he was inside.
    “Always sitting with your back to the wall,” he said, walking over.
    “I like the view,” I answered, deadpan. Most people pay zero attention to these things, but I’d taught him it’s something to be aware of when you walk into a place. The people with their backs to the door are the civilians; the ones in the strategic seats could be people with some street sense or some training, people who might deserve a little more attention.
    I had met Harry about five years earlier in Roppongi, where he’d found himself in a jam with a few drunken off-duty American Marines in a bar where I happened to be killing time before an appointment. Harry can come off as a bit of an oddball: sometimes his clothes are so ill-fitting you might wonder if he stole them from a random clothesline, and he has a habit of staring unselfconsciously at anything that interests him. It was the staring that drew the attention of the jarheads, one of whom loudly threatened to stick those thick glasses up Harry’s Jap ass if he didn’t find somewhere else to gawk. Harry had immediately complied, but this apparent sign of weakness served only to encourage the Marines. When they followed Harry out, and I realized he had no idea what was going to happen, I left too. I have a problem with bullies—a legacy of my childhood.
    Anyway, the jarheads got to play with me, not with Harry, and it didn’t go the way they had planned. Harry was grateful.
    It turned out he had some useful skills. He was born in the United States of Japanese parents and grew up bilingual, spending summers with his grandparents outside of Tokyo. He went to college and graduate school in the States, earning a degree in applied mathematics and cryptography. In graduate school, he got in trouble for hacking into school files one of his cryptography professors had bragged were hack-proof. There was also some unpleasantness with the FBI, which had managed to trace probes of the nation’s Savings & Loan Administration and other financial institutions back to Harry. Some of the honorable men from deep within America’s National Security Agency learned of these hijinks and arranged for Harry to work at Fort Meade in exchange for purging his growing record of computer offenses.
    Harry stayed with the NSA for a few years, getting his new employer into secure government and corporate computer systems all over the world and learning the blackest of the NSA’s computer black arts along the way. He came back to Japan in the mid-nineties, where he took a job as a computer security consultant with one of the big global consulting outfits. Of course they did a thorough background check, but his clean record and the magic of an NSA top-secret security clearance blinded Harry’s new corporate sponsors to what was most fundamental about the shy, boyish-looking thirty-something they had just hired.
    Which was that Harry was an inveterate hacker. He had grown bored at the NSA because, despite its technical challenges, his work was all sanctioned by the government. And the rules, and standards of ethics, he was supposed to follow in his new corporate position were no more than a joke. Harry never did security work on a system without leaving a back door he could use whenever the mood arose. He hacked his own firm’s files to uncover the vulnerabilities of its clients, which he then exploited. Harry had the skills of a locksmith and the heart of a burglar.
    Since we met I’d been teaching him the relatively aboveboard aspects of my craft. He was enough of a misfit to be in awe of the fact that I’d befriended him, and consequently had a bit of a crush on me. The resulting loyalty was useful.
    He sat and I asked him what was going on.
    “Two things. One I think you’ll know about, the other, I’m not sure.”
    “Okay.”
    “First, it seems Kawamura had a fatal heart attack the same morning we were tailing him.”
    I took a sip of my Chai