A Clean Kill in Tokyo

train, and as we reached the platform the doors were already closing on handbags and the odd protruding elbow. By the time we had passed the kiosk midway down the platform, the last car had passed us and a moment later it was gone. The next train would arrive in two minutes.
    Kawamura shuffled down to the middle of the platform. I stayed behind him but hung back from the tracks, avoiding his wake. He was looking up and down the platform, but even if he had spotted Harry or me earlier, seeing us waiting for the train wasn’t going to unnerve him. Half the people waiting had just walked down Dogenzaka.
    I felt the rumble of the next train as Harry walked past me. He offered just the slightest nod of his head to indicate he understood the rest was with me. I had told him I only needed his help until Kawamura was on the train, which is where he had always gone during our previous surveillance. Harry had done his usual good work in helping me get close to the target, and, per our script, he was now exiting the scene. I would contact him later, when I was done with the solo aspects of the job.
    Harry thinks I’m a private investigator and that all I do is follow these people around collecting information. To avoid the suspicious appearance of a too-high mortality rate for the subjects we track, I often have him follow people in whom I have no interest, who of course then provide some measure of cover by continuing to live their happy and oblivious lives. Also, where possible, I avoid sharing the subject’s name with Harry to minimize the chances that he’ll come across too many coincidental obituaries. Still, some of our subjects do have a habit of dying at the end of surveillance, and I know Harry has a curious mind. So far, he hadn’t asked, which was good. I liked Harry as an asset and didn’t want him to become a liability.
    I moved up close behind Kawamura, just another commuter trying to secure a good position for boarding the train. This was the most delicate part of the operation. If I flubbed it, he would make me and it would be difficult to get sufficiently close for a second try.
    I dipped my right hand into my pants pocket and touched a microprocessor-controlled magnet, about the size and weight of a quarter. On one side, the magnet was covered with blue worsted cloth, like that of the suit Kawamura was wearing. Had it been necessary, I could have stripped away the blue to expose a layer of gray, which was the other color Kawamura favored. On the opposite side of the magnet was an adhesive backing.
    I withdrew the magnet from my pocket and pocketed it in my hand. I would have to wait for the right moment, when Kawamura’s attention was distracted. Mildly distracted would be enough. Maybe as we were boarding the train. I peeled off the wax paper covering the adhesive and crumbled it into my left pants pocket.
    The train emerged at the end of the platform and hurtled toward us. Kawamura pulled a mobile phone out of his breast pocket. Started to input a number.
    Do it now.
I brushed past him, sticking the magnet to his suit jacket just below the left shoulder blade, and moved several paces down the platform.
    Kawamura spoke into the phone for a few seconds, not loudly enough for me to hear over the screeching brakes of the train slowing to a halt in front of us, and then slipped the phone back in his left breast pocket. I wondered whom he had called. It didn’t matter. Two stations ahead, three at the most, and it would be done.
    The train stopped and the doors opened, releasing a gush of human effluent. When the outflow slowed to a trickle, the lines on the platform collapsed inward and poured inside, as though someone had hit the reverse switch on a giant vacuum. People kept jamming themselves in despite warnings that
The doors are closing!
and the mass of commuters swelled until we were all held firmly in place, with no need to grip the overhead handles because there was nowhere to fall. The doors shut, the car lurched forward, and we moved off.
    I exhaled slowly and rotated my head from side to side, hearing the joints crack in my neck, feeling the last remnants of nervousness drain away as we reached the final moments. It had always been this way for me. When I was a teenager, I had lived for a while near a town with a network of gorges cutting through it, and at some of them you could jump from the cliffs into deep swimming holes. You could see the older kids doing it all the time—it didn’t look