A Lonely Resurrection

Big Brother situation on their hands.
    “You can’t blame people for not trusting the government on this,” I said. “I read somewhere that, last spring, the defense ministry got caught creating a database on people who had requested materials under the new Freedom of Information Act, including information on their political views.”
    He smiled his sad smile. “When the news broke, someone tried to delete the evidence.”
    “I read about that. Didn’t the LDP try to suppress a forty-page report on what had happened?”
    This time his smile was wry. “The Liberal Democratic Party officials involved in the attempted cover-up were punished, of course. They had their pay docked.”
    “Now there’s a deterrent to future abuses,” I said, laughing. “Especially when you know they were greased with twice what got docked.”
    He shrugged. “As a cop, I welcome Juki Net and the camera networks as a crime-fighting tool. As a citizen, I find it all appalling.”
    “So why swear me to secrecy on this? Sounds like a few leaks would be just the thing.”
    He cocked his head to the side, as though marveling at how my thinking could be so crude. “If such leaks were timed incorrectly,” he said, “they would be as useless as a powerful but misplaced explosive charge.”
    He was telling me he was up to something. He was also telling me not to ask.
    “So you used this network to find me,” I said.
    “Yes. I kept the mug shots that were taken of you at Metropolitan Police Headquarters when you were detained after the incident outside of Yokosuka naval base. I had these photographs fed into the computer so the network could look for you. I instructed the technicians to focus their initial efforts on Osaka. Still, because the system turns up so many false positives, the problem took a long time and significant human resources to solve. I have been looking for you for almost a year, Rain-san.”
    I realized from what he was telling me that the relentless advance of technology was going to force me to return to the nomadic existence I had adopted before my return to Japan, when I had wandered the earth without an identity, drifting from one mercenary conflict to another. There was no pleasure in the thought. I had done my penance for Crazy Jake and didn’t wish to repeat the experience.
    “The system is not perfect,” he went on. “There are numerous gaps in coverage, for example, and, as I mentioned, too many false positives. Still, over time, we were able to identify certain commonalities in your movements. A high incidence of sightings in Miyakojima, for example. From there, it was simple enough to check the records of the local ward office for new resident registrations, weed out false leads, and uncover your address. Eventually, we were able to track you sufficiently closely so that I could travel to Osaka and follow you here tonight.”
    “Why didn’t you just come to my apartment?”
    He smiled. “Where you live is always where you are most vulnerable because it represents a possible choke point for an ambush. And I would not wish to surprise a man like you where he felt most vulnerable. Safer, I judged, to approach you on neutral ground, where you might even see me coming,
ne?”
    I nodded, acknowledging his point. If you’re a likely target for a kidnapping or assassination attempt, or for any other kind of ambush, the bad guys can only get to you where they know you’re going to be. Meaning outside your home, most likely, or the place where you work. Or at some point in between where they can rely on you to show up—maybe the only bridge crossing between your home and office, something like that. These choke points are where you need to be the most sensitive to signs of danger.
    “Well?” he asked, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Did you see me?”
    I shrugged. “Yes.”
    He smiled again. “I knew you would.”
    “Or you could have called.”
    “In which case, you might have disappeared again after hearing my voice.”
    “That’s true.”
    “All in all, I think this was the best approach.”
    “The way you went about this,” I said, “a lot of people were involved. People in your organization, maybe people with the CIA.”
    He might have said something to intimate that any such lack of security was my fault, for having failed to contact him as I had suggested I would. But that wouldn’t have been Tatsu’s style. He had his interests in this matter, as I had mine, and he wouldn’t