Hard Rain

week I came back to Tokyo and went to his office. I told a
    receptionist that if Ishikura-san didn't see me I would contact the
    press, I would do everything I could do to make a public scandal. And
    I would have, you know. I wasn't going to give up."
    She'd been brave, almost a little reckless. Tatsu wouldn't have harmed
    her, even in response to a threat, but she had no way of knowing that.
    Another indication of just how desperately angry she had been.
    "He saw you?" I asked.
    "Not right away. He called me this afternoon."
    This afternoon. Right after I'd refused him, then.
    "And he told you that you could find me here?"
    She nodded.
    How had he managed to track me down again? Probably those damn
    cameras. You can see some of them. Not all, I remembered him saying.
    Sure, use the cameras to get a general fix on my location, then send
    men to the likely hotels in the area, if necessary, with the same photo
    they had fed to the cameras and the facial recognition software, to
    narrow things down.
    I'd been a fool to stay in Tokyo, although with the kind of warning I
    had to give Harry, an overseas phone call would have been less than
    optimal.
    What was that wily bastard up to, though? "Any thoughts on why Tatsu
    would agree to see you after a year of stonewalling?" I asked.
    She shrugged. "Probably my threat."
    I doubted it. Tatsu didn't know her as well as I did. He would have
    mistakenly assumed she was bluffing.
    "You really think that was all there was to it?" I asked.
    "Maybe. Maybe he had some ulterior reason for wanting us to meet. But
    what was I going to do, spite him by refusing to see you?"
    "I suppose not." And Tatsu would have supposed it, too. I felt a
    momentary wave of annoyance, bordering on hostility, toward Tatsu and
    his ongoing machinations.
    She sighed. "He said that telling me you were dead was his doing, not
    yours."
    This was supposed to get back to me. Did he think I was going to take
    out Murakami in gratitude, as a quid pro quo?
    "What else did he tell you?" I asked.
    "That you helped him get the disk expecting him to turn it over to the
    media for publication."
    "Did he tell you why he didn't?"
    She nodded. "Because its information was so explosive that it might
    have brought down the Liberal Democrats and paved the way for Yamaoto's
    ascension."
    "Sounds like you're pretty up-to-date, then."
    "I'm a long way from up-to-date."
    "What about Harry?" I asked after a moment. "Why didn't you go to
    him?"
    She looked away and said, "I did. I wrote him a letter. He said he'd
    heard you were dead, and didn't know any more than that."
    The way she had looked away ... there was something she wasn't telling
    me.
    "You believed him?"
    "Should I not have?"
    Good recovery. But there was something more there, I thought.
    "Remember the last time I saw you?" she asked.
    It had been here, at the Imperial Hotel. We'd spent the night
    together. The next morning I had left to intercept Holtzer's
    limousine. I had spent a few days in police custody after that.
    Meanwhile, Tatsu had told Midori I was dead and had deep-sixed the
    disk. Game over.
    "I remember," I said.
    "You said, "I'll be back sometime in the evening. Will you wait for
    me?" Well, I waited for two days before I heard from your friend
    Ishikura-san. I had no one to contact, no way to know."
    I saw her eyes move to the ceiling for a moment, maybe looking away
    from memories she didn't want to see. Maybe willing back tears.
    "I couldn't believe you were gone," she went on. Then I started to
    wonder if you really were gone. And if you weren't gone, what would
    that mean? And then I doubted myself. I doubted myself. I thought,
    "He can't still be alive, he wouldn't have done this to you." But I
    couldn't get rid of the suspicions. I didn't know whether to grieve
    for you, or to want to kill you."
    She turned and looked at me. "Do you understand what you put me
    through?" she asked, her voice dropping into a whisper. "You ... you
    fucking tortured me!"
    In my peripheral vision I saw her quickly flick her thumb across one
    cheek, then the other. I looked down into my glass. The last thing
    she would want would be for me to witness her tears.
    After a moment I turned to her. "Midori," I said. My voice was low
    and sounded strange to me. "I'm sorrier for all this than I can say.
    If I could change any of it, I would."
    We were silent for a moment. I thought of Rio and said, "For what it's
    worth, I've been trying to get out."
    She looked at me. "How