A Clean Kill in Tokyo

problem by jogging a few ten-minute miles three times a week on a treadmill in an overpriced chrome-and-mirrors gym, where the air-conditioning and soothing sounds of the television would prevent any unnecessary discomfort. He’d splurge on items like designer hair gel for a combover because the little things only cost a few bucks anyway, and would save money by wearing no-iron shirts and ties with labels proclaiming
Genuine Italian Silk!
that he’d selected with care on a trip abroad from a sale bin at some discount department store, congratulating himself on the bargains for which he acquired such quality goods. He’d sport a few Western extravagances like a Montblanc fountain pen, talismans to reassure himself he was certainly more cosmopolitan than the people who gave him orders. Yeah, I knew this guy. He was a little order taker, a go-between, a cutout who’d never once gotten his hands dirty, who couldn’t tell the difference between a real smile and the amused rictuses of the hostesses who relieved him of his yen for watered-down Suntory scotch while he bored them with hints about the Big Things he was involved in but of course couldn’t really discuss.
    After the usual exchange of innocuous, preestablished codes to establish our bona fides, I told him, “It’s done.”
    “Glad to hear it,” he said in his terse, false tough-guy way. “Any problems?”
    “Nothing worth mentioning,” I responded after a pause, thinking of the guy on the train.
    “Nothing? You sure?”
    I knew I wouldn’t get anything this way. Better to say nothing, which I did.
    “Okay,” he said, breaking the silence. “You know to reach out to me if you need anything. Anything at all, okay?”
    Benny tries to run me like an intelligence asset. Once he even suggested a face-to-face meeting. I told him if we met face-to-face, I’d be there to kill him, so maybe we should skip it. He laughed, but we never did have that meeting.
    “There’s only one thing I need,” I said, reminding him of the money.
    “By tomorrow, like always.”
    I hung up, automatically wiping down the receiver and keys on the remote possibility that they had traced the call and would send someone to try for prints. If they had access to Vietnam-era military records, and I assumed they did, they would get a match for John Rain, and I didn’t want them to realize the same guy they had known over twenty years ago was now their mystery freelancer.
    I was working with the CIA at the time, a legacy of my Vietnam contacts, making sure the Agency’s “support funds” were reaching the right recipients in the governing party, which even back then was the LDP. The Agency was running a secret program to support conservative political elements—part of the U.S. government’s anticommunist policies and a natural extension of relationships that had developed during the postwar occupation—and the LDP was more than happy to play the role in exchange for the cash.
    I was really just a bagman, but I had a nice rapport with one of the recipients of Uncle Sam’s largesse, a fellow named Miyamoto. One of Miyamoto’s associates, miffed at what he felt was an inadequate share of the money, threatened to blow the whistle if he didn’t receive more. Miyamoto was exasperated; the associate had used this tactic before and had gotten a bump-up as a result. Now he was just being greedy. Miyamoto asked me if I could do anything about this guy, for $50,000, “no questions asked.”
    The offer interested me, but I wanted to make sure I was protected. I told Miyamoto I couldn’t do anything myself, but I could put him in touch with someone who might be able to help.
    That someone became my alter ego, and over time I took steps to erase the footprints of the real John Rain. Among other things, I stopped using my American birth name and anything connected with it, and I had a surgeon give my somewhat stunted epicanthic folds a more complete Japanese appearance. I wear my hair longer now, as well, in contrast to the brush cut I favored back then. And wire-rim glasses, a concession to age and its consequences, give me a bookish air entirely unlike the intense soldier’s countenance of my past. Today I look more like a Japanese academic than the half-breed warrior I once was. I haven’t seen any of my contacts from my bagman days in over twenty years, and I steer scrupulously clear of the Agency. After the number they did on me and Crazy Jake in Bu Dop, I was more than