A Clean Kill in Tokyo

agent couldn’t possibly have been the only source of damage for all those years. The real mole was never discovered. It was a mystery I had to live with. And I was one of the lucky ones.
    I took Benny’s and the
kendoka’s
mobile phones from my jacket pocket and handed them to Harry. “I need two things from you. Check out the numbers that have been called. They should be stored in the phones.” I showed him which unit had belonged to the
kendoka
, and which to Benny. “See if there are any speed-dial-programmed numbers, too, and try chasing them all down with a reverse directory. I want to know who these guys were talking to, how they were connected to each other and to the Agency.”
    “No problem,” he said. “I’ll get you something by the end of today.”
    “Good. Now the second thing.” I took out the disk and put it on the table. “What everybody is after is on this disk. Bulfinch says it’s an exposé on corruption in the LDP and the Construction Ministry that could bring down the government.”
    He picked it up and held it up to the light.
    “Why a disk?” he said.
    “I was going to ask you the same question.”
    “Don’t know. It would have been easier to move whatever’s on here over the Internet. Maybe a copy management program prevented that. I’ll check it out.” He slipped it inside his jacket.
    “Could that be how they knew we were on to Kawamura?” I asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “How they found out that he’d made the disk.”
    “Could be. There are copy management programs that will tell you if a copy has been made.”
    “It’s encrypted, too. I tried to run it but couldn’t. Why would Kawamura have encrypted it?”
    “I doubt he did. He probably wasn’t supposed to have access. Someone else would have encrypted it, whoever he took it from.”
    That made sense. I still didn’t understand why Benny had put me on Kawamura weeks earlier, though. They must have had some other way of knowing he had been talking to Bulfinch. Maybe telephone taps, something like that.
    “Okay,” I said. “Buzz me when you’re done. We’ll meet back here—just input a time that’s good for you. Use the usual code.”
    He nodded and got up to leave. “Harry,” I said. “Don’t be cocky now. There are people who, if they knew you had that disk, would kill you to get it back.”
    He nodded. “I’ll be careful.”
    “Careful’s not good enough. Be paranoid. You don’t trust anyone.”
    “Almost anyone,” he said with a slightly exasperated pursing of the lips that might have been a grin.
    “No one,” I said, thinking of Crazy Jake.
    After he’d left, I called Midori from a payphone. We had switched to a new hotel that morning. She answered on the first ring.
    “Just wanted to check in,” I told her.
    “Can your friend help us?” she asked. I had told her to watch what she said over the phone, and was pleased she was choosing her words carefully.
    “Too early to tell. He’s going to try.”
    “When are you coming?”
    “I’m on my way now.”
    “Do me a favor, get me something to read. A novel, some magazines. I should have thought of it when I went out for something to eat. There’s nothing to do in this room and I’m going crazy.”
    “I’ll stop someplace on the way. See you in a little bit.”
    Her tone was less strained than it had been when I first told her I had found the disk. She had wanted to know how, and I wouldn’t tell her. Obviously couldn’t.
    “I was retained by a party that wanted it,” I finally said. “I didn’t know what was on it at the time. I didn’t know the lengths they would go to in trying to get it.”
    “Who was the party?” she had insisted.
    “Doesn’t matter,” was my response. “All you need to know is I’m trying to be part of the solution now, okay? Look, if I wanted to give it to the party that paid me to find it, I wouldn’t be here with it right now, discussing it with you. That’s all I’m going to say.”
    Not knowing my world, she had no reason to doubt that Kawamura’s heart attack had been due to something other than natural causes. If it had been anything other than that—a bullet, even a fall from a building—I knew I would be suspect.
    I headed to Suidobashi, where I began a thorough SDR by catching the JR line to Shinjuku. I changed trains at Yoyogi and watched to see who got off with me, then waited on the platform after the train left. I let two trains pass at Yoyogi before I got back