A Clean Kill in Tokyo

upright bars next to the door with his right hand, his left clutching his package of fruit, commuters shoving past him. I watched him rotate counterclockwise until his back hit the wall next to the door. His mouth was open; he looked slightly surprised. Then slowly, almost gently, he slid to the floor. A passenger I had seen get on at Yoyogi stooped to assist him. The man, a mid-forties Westerner, tall and thin enough to make me think of a javelin, somehow aristocratic in his wireless glasses, shook Kawamura’s shoulders, but Kawamura was past noticing the stranger’s efforts at succor.
    “Daijoubu desu ka?”
I asked. Is he all right? I used Japanese because it was likely the Westerner wouldn’t understand it and our interaction would be kept to a minimum. My left hand moving to support Kawamura’s back, feeling for the magnet.
    “Wakaranai,”
the stranger muttered. I don’t know. He patted Kawamura’s increasingly bluish cheeks and shook him again—a bit roughly, I thought. So he did speak some Japanese. It didn’t matter. I pinched the edge of the magnet and pulled it free. Kawamura was done.
    I stepped past them onto the platform and instantly the in-flow began surging onto the train behind me. Glancing through the window nearest the door, I was stunned to see the stranger rummaging through Kawamura’s pockets. My first thought was that Kawamura was being robbed. I moved closer to the window for a better look, but the crush of passengers obscured my view.
    I had an urge to get back on, but operationally that would have been stupid, and anyway it was too late. The doors were sliding shut. I watched as they closed. They caught on something, maybe a handbag or a foot, then opened slightly and closed again. It was an apple, falling to the tracks as the train pulled away.

CHAPTER 2
    F rom Shinjuku I took the Maranouchi subway line to Ogikubo, the extreme west of the city and outside metropolitan Tokyo. I wanted to do a last SDR—surveillance detection run—before contacting my client to report the results of the Kawamura operation, and heading west took me against the incoming rush hour train traffic, making the job of watching my back easier.
    An SDR is just what it sounds like: a route designed to force anyone who’s following you to show himself. Harry and I had of course taken full precautions en route to Shibuya and Kawamura that morning, but I never assume that because I was clean earlier I must be clean now. In Shinjuku, the crowds are so thick you could have ten people following you and you’d never make a single one of them. By contrast, following someone unobtrusively across a long, deserted train platform with multiple entrances and exits is nearly impossible, and the trip to Ogikubo offered the kind of peace of mind I’ve come to require.
    It used to be that, when an intelligence agent wanted to communicate with an asset so sensitive that a meeting was impossible, they had to use a dead drop. The asset would drop microfiche in the hollow of a tree, or hide it in an obscure book in the public library, and later, the spy would come by and retrieve it. You could never put the two people together in the same place at the same time.
    It’s easier with the Internet, and more secure. The client posts a message on an encrypted site, the electronic equivalent of a tree hollow. I download it and decrypt it at my leisure. And vice versa.
    The message traffic is pretty simple. A name, a photograph, personal and work contact information. A bank account number, transfer instructions. A reminder of my three no’s: no women or children; no acts against nonprincipals; no other parties retained to solve the problem at hand. The phone is used only for the innocuous aftermath, which was the reason for my side trip to Ogikubo.
    I used one of the payphones on the station platform to call my contact within the Liberal Democratic Party—an LDP flunky I know only as Benny, maybe short for Benihana or something. Benny’s English is fluent, so I know he’s spent some time abroad. He prefers to use English with me, I think because English has a harder sound in some contexts and Benny fancies himself a hard guy. Probably he learned the lingo from a too-steady diet of Hollywood gangster movies.
    We’d never met, of course, but talking to Benny on the phone had been enough for me to develop an antipathy. I had a vivid image of him as just another government seat-warmer, a guy who would try to manage a weight