Hard Rain

zoning.
    There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated
    and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside
    recycling plants and foundries. A new multi story school turned its
    proud granite facade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a
    car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing
    parent.
    On the other hand, the residents didn't seem to mind the shambles. On
    the contrary: everywhere were small signs of the pride the locals took
    in their dwellings. The monotonous macadam and corrugated metal were
    relieved by small riots of potted bamboo, lavender, and sunflowers.
    Here was a carefully arranged cairn of volcanic rocks, there, a display
    of dried coral. One house had concealed what would have been an ugly
    ferroconcrete wall with a lovingly tended garden of angel's trumpet,
    sage, and lavender.
    I lived on the thirty-sixth floor of one of the twin high-rises in the
    Belfa complex, in a three-bedroom corner apartment. The place was
    larger than I needed and most of the rooms went unused, but I liked
    living on the top floor, with a view of the city, above it all. Also,
    at the time I'd rented it, I thought it would be to my advantage to
    take a place that didn't fit the profile of what a lone man, recently
    disappeared and with minimal needs, would take for an apartment. In
    the end, of course, it hadn't mattered.
    I tell myself that I like to live in places like Belfa because parents
    are inherently watchful of strangers, and once they decide you belong
    they can form an unconscious but effective obstacle to an ambush. But
    I know there's more to it than that. I don't have a family and never
    will, and I'm probably drawn to such environments not just for
    operational security but for some other, more vicarious form of
    security, as well. There was a time when I didn't seem to need such
    things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely
    disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a
    lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with
    forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life that fate had denied
    him.
    It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.
    I used a pay phone to access a voice-mail account attached to a special
    phone in my apartment, a sound-activated unit with a sensitive
    speakerphone that functions like a transmitter. The unit silently
    dials a voice-mail account if someone enters the apartment without
    knowing the code that disengages the phone, letting me know in advance
    and from a safe distance whether I've had any unexpected visitors. An
    identical setup had saved me in Tokyo from a Holtzer-inspired ambush,
    and I tend to stick with what works. I'd been checking the account
    daily from Tokyo without incident, and the mailbox was empty this time
    as well, so I knew my apartment had gone unmolested during my
    absence.
    From the pay phone, I walked the short distance to the Belfa complex. A
    softball game was under way on the field to my right. Some children
    were playing kick ball by a granite sculpture garden in front of the
    building. An old man swerved past me on a bicycle, a laughing
    grandchild perched on the handles.
    I used the front entrance, taking care as always to approach in such a
    way that the security camera facing the building would get a picture
    only of my back. Such precautions are part of my routine, but, as
    Tatsu had pointed out, the cameras are everywhere and you can't hope to
    spot them all.
    I took the elevator to the thirty-sixth floor and walked down the
    corridor to my apartment. I checked the small piece of translucent
    tape I had left at the bottom of the door and found it intact, still
    attached to the jamb. As I'd told Harry so many times, a good defense
    has to be layered.
    I unlocked the door and went inside. Everything was as I'd left it.
    Which wasn't saying much. Beyond the futon and nightstand in one of
    the bedrooms, there was an olive leather couch, new but not
    new-looking, set against the wall facing the west of the city, where I
    sometimes sat to watch the sun set. A sprawling Gabeh rug covering an
    expanse of polished wooden floor, its strata of greens and blues
    interspersed with a dozen whimsical splotches of cream that were
    probably intended to denote goats in a pastoral setting, its weave
    dense and soft enough to have once served as a mattress for the nomads
    who made it. A massive double-bank writing desk that had