A Clean Kill in Tokyo

me.”
    He reached into the left side of the blazer and pulled out a phone.
    “That’s fine,” I said. “Go ahead and put it back in your pocket.” As he did so, I took a pen and small sheet of paper from my own jacket pocket and started jotting down instructions. My gut told me he wasn’t wired, but no one’s gut is infallible.
    “Until I say otherwise, under no circumstances do I want to see you reaching for that phone,” my note read. “We’ll walk out of the restaurant together. After we step outside, I’ll pat you down for weapons. After that, go where I motion you to go. At some point, I’ll let you know I want you to start walking ahead, and at some point I’ll tell you where we’re going. If you have questions now, write them down. If you don’t, just hand back this note. Starting now, do not say a word unless I tell you to.”
    I extended the note to him. He took it with one hand while slipping on his glasses with the other. After a moment, he pushed it across the table to me and nodded.
    I folded the note up and put it back in my jacket pocket, followed by the pen. Then I placed a thousand-yen note on the table to cover the coffee I’d been drinking and motioned him to leave.
    Once outside, I patted him down and was unsurprised to find he was clean. As we moved down the street, I was careful to keep him slightly in front of me and to the side, a human shield if it came to that. I knew every good spot in the area for surveillance or an ambush, and my head swept back and forth, looking for someone out of place, someone who might have followed Bulfinch to the restaurant and then set up to wait.
    Periodically, I tapped his shoulder to indicate “left” or “right,” and we made our way to the Spiral Building. As we walked through the glass doors, I told him it was okay to talk. Midori was waiting in the music section.
    “Kawamura-san,” he said, bowing, when he saw her. “Thank you for your call.”
    Midori returned the bow. “Thank you for coming to meet me. I’m afraid I wasn’t completely candid with you when we met for coffee. I’m not as ignorant of my father’s affiliations as I led you to believe. But I don’t know anything about the disk you mentioned. No more than you told me, anyway.”
    “I’m not sure what I can do for you, then,” he said.
    “Tell us what’s on the disk,” I replied.
    “I don’t see how that would help you.”
    “I don’t see how it could hurt us,” I answered. “Right now we’re running blind. If we put our heads together, we’ve got a much better chance of retrieving the disk than we do if we work separately.”
    “Please, Mr. Bulfinch,” Midori said. “I barely escaped being killed a few days ago by whoever is trying to find that disk. I need your help.”
    Bulfinch grimaced and looked at Midori and then at me, his eyes sweeping back and forth several times. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Two months ago your father contacted me. He told me he read my column for
Forbes.
He told me who he was and said he wanted to help. A classic whistle-blower.”
    Midori turned to me. “That was about the time he was diagnosed.”
    “I’m sorry?” Bulfinch asked.
    “Lung cancer,” Midori said. “He had just learned he was going to die.”
    Bulfinch nodded. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”
    Midori bowed her head briefly, accepting his solicitude. “Please, go on.”
    “Over the course of the next month I had several clandestine meetings with your father, during which he briefed me extensively on corruption in the Construction Ministry and its role as broker between the Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza. These briefings provided me with invaluable insight into the nature and extent of corruption in Japanese society. But I needed corroboration.”
    “What corroboration?” I asked. “Can’t you just print it and attribute it to ‘a senior source in the Construction Ministry?’”
    “Ordinarily, yes,” Bulfinch replied. “But there were two problems here. First, Kawamura’s position in the Ministry gave him unique access to the information he was providing me. If we had published the information, we might as well have used his name in the byline.”
    “And the second problem?” Midori asked.
    “Impact,” Bulfinch answered. “We’ve already run a half-dozen exposés on the kind of corruption Kawamura was involved in. The Japanese press resolutely refuses to pick them up. Why? Because the politicians and