A Clean Kill in Tokyo

outside your apartment. Who else would have done it, one of your neighbors on a pension? Besides, we had him wired for sound. SOP for this kind of thing. So we heard everything, heard him blaming me, the little prick.”
    “And the other guy?”
    “We don’t know anything about him, other than he turned up dead a hundred meters from where the Tokyo police found Benny’s body.”
    “Benny told me he was
Boeicho Boeikyoku.
That you handled the liaison.”
    “He was right that I handle the
Boeikyoku
liaison, but he was full of shit that I knew his friend. Anyway, you can bet we did some checking, and Benny’s pal wasn’t with Japanese Intelligence. When Benny took him to your apartment, he was on a private mission, getting paid by someone else. You know you can’t trust these moles, Rain. You remember the problems we had with our ARVN counterparts in Vietnam.”
    I looked up at the rearview and saw the driver looking at us, his face suspicious. The chances he could follow our conversation in English were nil, but I could see he sensed something was amiss, that it was unnerving him.
    “They take money from you, they’ll take it from anyone,” he went on. “I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to miss Benny. You get paid by both sides, someone finds out, hey, you get what you had coming anyway.”
    Or at least you should. “Right,” I said.
    “But let me finish the part about the asset. Three weeks ago he’s on his way to deliver the information, downloaded to a disk. He’s actually carrying the fucking crown jewels, and—can you believe this?—he has a heart attack on the Yamanote and dies. We send people to the hospital, but the disk is gone.”
    “How can you be so sure he was carrying the disk when he died?”
    “Oh we’re sure, Rain. We’ve got our ways, you know that. Sources and methods, though, nothing I can talk about. But the missing disk, that’s not even the best part. You want to hear the best part?”
    “I can’t wait.”
    “Okay, then,” he said, leaning closer to me and smiling his grotesque smile again. “The best part is that it wasn’t really a heart attack. Someone iced this fucker, someone who knew how to make it look like natural causes.”
    “I don’t know, Holtzer. It sounds pretty far-fetched.”
    “It does, doesn’t it? Especially because there are so few people in the whole world, let alone Japan, who could pull something like that off. Hell, the only one I know of is you.”
    “This is what you wanted to meet me for?” I said. “To suggest I was mixed up in this kind of bullshit?”
    “Come on, Rain. Enough fucking around. I know exactly what you’re mixed up in.”
    “I’m not following you.”
    “No? I’ve got news for you, then. Half the jobs you’ve done over the last ten years, you’ve done for us.”
    What the hell?
    He leaned closer and whispered the names of various prominent politicians, bankers, and bureaucrats who had met untimely but natural ends. They were all my work.
    “You can read those names in the paper,” I said, but I knew he had more.
    He told me the particulars of the secure site system I had been using with Benny, the numbers of the relevant Swiss accounts.
    Goddamn,
I thought, feeling sick.
You’ve been nothing but a tool for these people. It’s never stopped. Goddamn.
    “I know this is a shock for you, Rain,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “All these years you’ve thought you’ve been working freelance and in fact the Agency has been paying the bills. But look on the bright side, okay? You’re great at what you do! Christ, you’re a fucking magician, making these people disappear without a trace, without a sign that there was any foul play. I wish I knew how you do it. I really do.”
    I looked at him, my eyes expressionless. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to show you sometime.”
    “Dream on, pal. Now look, we had access to the autopsy report. Kawamura had a pacemaker that somehow managed to shut itself off. The coroner attributed it to a defect. But you know what? We did a little research, and found out that a defect like that is just about impossible. Someone shut that pacemaker off, Rain. Your kind of job exactly. I want to know who hired you.”
    “It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
    “What doesn’t?”
    “Why go to such lengths just to retrieve the disk?”
    His eyes narrowed. “You tell me.”
    “I can’t. I can only tell you if I had wanted that disk, I could have found a lot of easier ways