A Lonely Resurrection

hotels. Beyond the locals who live and work there, it seems to cater primarily to older men in search of downmarket sexual commerce. Caucasians are rare. If there were a surveillance team and they were white CIA-issue, Otsuka would make for a difficult approach.
    We took the stairs to the second-story Royal Host restaurant across from the station. We went in and I looked around. Mostly families enjoying a night out. A couple of tired-looking salarymen avoiding an evening at home. We sat in a corner that offered me a nice view of the street scene below.
    I looked at him. “Go on,” I said.
    He rubbed his hands together and looked around. “Oh man, if I get caught doing this. . .”
    “Cut the dramatics,” I told him. “Just tell me what you want.”
    “I don’t want you to think I had anything to do with your friend,” he said. “And I want us to put our heads together.”
    I said nothing.
    “Okay. To start with, I think. . . I think I’m being set up.”
    “What does this have to do with my friend?”
    “Just let me start at the beginning, and you’ll see, okay?”
    I nodded. “Go ahead.”
    He licked his lips. “You remember the program I told you about? Crepuscular?”
    A waitress came over and I realized I was starving. Without checking the menu I ordered a roast beef
sandoichi
and their soup of the day. Kanezaki asked for a coffee.
    “I remember it,” I told him.
    “Well, Crepuscular was formally terminated six months ago.”
    “So?”
    “So it’s still going on anyway, and I’m still running it, even though the funding has been cut off. Why hasn’t anyone said anything to me? And where is the money coming from?”
    “Slow down,” I said. “How did you find out about this?”
    “A few days ago my boss, the Chief of Station, told me he wanted to see all the receipts I’ve collected from the program’s assets.”
    “Biddle?”
    He looked at me. “Yes. You know him?”
    “I know of him. Tell me about the receipts.”
    “Agency policy. When we disburse funds, the asset has to sign a receipt. Without the receipt, it would be too easy for case officers to skim cash off the disbursements.”
    “You’ve been having these people. . . sign for their payouts?” I asked, incredulous.
    “It’s policy,” he said again.
    “They’re willing to do that?”
    He shrugged. “Not always, not at first. We’re trained in how to get an asset comfortable with the notion. You don’t even bring it up the first time. The second time, you tell him it’s a new USG policy, designed to ensure all the recipients of our funding are getting their full allotments. If he still balks, you tell him all right, you’re going out on a limb but you’ll see what you can do on his behalf. By the fifth time he’s addicted to the money and you tell him your superiors have reprimanded you for not getting the receipts, they’ve told you they’re going to cut you off if you don’t get the paperwork signed. You hand the guy the receipt and ask him to just scrawl something. The first one is illegible. Later, they get more readable.”
    Amazing,
I thought. “All right. Biddle asks for the receipts.”
    “Right. So I gave them to him, but it felt weird to me.”
    “Why?”
    He rubbed the back of his neck. “When the program got started, I was told that I would be responsible for maintaining all the receipts in my own safe. I was worried about why the Chief suddenly wanted them, even though he told me it was just routine. So I checked with some people I know at Langley—obliquely, of course. And I learned that, for a program with this level of classification, no one would ask to see documentation unless someone had first filed a formal complaint with the Agency’s Inspector General with specific allegations of case officer dishonesty.”
    “How do you know that hasn’t happened?”
    He flushed. “First, because there’s no reason for it. I haven’t done anything wrong. Second, if there had been a formal complaint, protocol would have been for the Chief to sit me down with the lawyers present. Embezzling funds is a serious accusation.”
    “All right. So you give Biddle the receipts, but you feel weird about it.”
    “Yes. So I started going through the Crepuscular cable traffic. The traffic is numbered sequentially, and I noticed a missing cable. I wouldn’t have spotted it except that it occurred to me to check the numerical sequence. Ordinarily you wouldn’t notice something like that because