Hard Rain

him
    entirely when the timing and preparations were right. He had no reason
    to come after me for the moment, so the lesser risk was to take the
    appropriate time to set things up correctly.
    I had decided on Brazil, and it was for this that I'd been studying the
    Portuguese that had been so useful with Naomi. Hong Kong, Singapore,
    or some other Asian destination, or perhaps somewhere in the States,
    might have been a more obvious choice, but that was of course one of
    the things that Brazil had going for it. And even if someone thought
    to look for me there, they would have a hell of a time: Brazil's
    multitudes of ethnic Japanese have branched out into all areas of the
    country's life, and one more transplant wasn't going to arouse any
    attention at all.
    Rio de Janeiro, which offered culture, climate, and a significant
    transient population consisting largely of tourists, would be ideal.
    The city is far from the world's intelligence, terrorism, and Interpol
    focal points, so I would have relatively few worries about accidental
    sightings, security camera networks, and the other natural enemies of
    the fugitive. I would even be able to return to judo, or at least one
    of its cousins: the Brazilian Gracie family had taken one of judo's
    forebears, jujitsu, carried into the country by arriving Japanese, and
    developed it into arguably the most sophisticated ground fighting
    system the world has ever seen. It's practiced fanatically in Brazil,
    and has become popular all over the world, including Japan.
    Along with the right location, I had an ice-cold alternate identity,
    something I'd been nurturing for a long time in preparation for a day
    when I might have to drop off the map more completely than I ever had
    before. About a decade earlier, as I was surveilling and preparing to
    eliminate a certain bureaucrat, I was struck by the degree to which the
    man superficially resembled me the age, height, build, even the face
    wasn't too far off. The subject also had a wonderful name: Taro
    Yamada, the Japanese equivalent of John Smith. I had done some
    digging, and learned that Yamada-san lacked a close family. There
    seemed to be no one who would miss him enough to go looking for him if
    he happened to disappear.
    Now, a lot of books will tell you that you can build a new identity
    using the name of someone deceased, but that's only true if no one
    filed a death certificate. If the authorities were involved in any way
    say, the person died in a hospice or hospital, or gets buried or
    cremated, which, if you think about it, applies to pretty much
    everyone, or if someone files a missing person report a certificate
    will be filed. Or if a relative wants to get his or her hands on any
    aspect of the decedent's estate in which case you're talking about the
    transfer of tide to real and personal property and probably probate
    again, a certificate will be filed. And if you decide to proceed
    anyway, then even if you do manage to get some additional new
    identification based on the dead person's particulars, the new ID will
    always be fatally flawed, and, eventually, when you apply for a
    driver's license, or for credit, or when you try to get pretty much any
    job, or file a tax return, or when you try to cross a border in short,
    when you try to do any one of the innumerable things for which you
    needed your new identity in the first place a 'what's wrong with this
    picture' alert will pop up on someone's screen, and you will be
    promptly and thoroughly screwed.
    So what about the identity of someone who's still living? This works
    fine for short-term scams, known colloquially as 'identity theft,"
    although perhaps better understood as 'identity borrowing," but is
    infeasible for anything long-term.
    After all, who's going to be responsible for those new credit cards?
    And where do the bills get sent? Okay, then what about using someone
    who's, say, disappeared for some reason, assuming you even know of such
    a person? Well, what about it? Did the person have debts? Was he a
    drug dealer? Because if he had anyone looking for him before, now
    they'll be looking for you. And anyway, what do you do if Mr. Missing
    Person suddenly resurfaces?
    Of course, if you know of someone who's dead because you happen to have
    killed him, that's a little different. True, you'd have to dispose of
    the body in a manner that ensures it will never be found a risky and
    often grisly chore that isn't for everyone. But if you've come this
    far,