Paris is a Bitch

Milan station chief, and Treven figured Larison was applying the lessons of that op to this one. Still, the current precautions struck him as excessive—they weren’t here to kill or kidnap Rain, after all, only to contact him. On the other hand, just as for sending only the two Blackwater guys into the Kodokan for the initial recon, he supposed there was no real downside to the extra care.
    The Blackwater guys came in and stood so they were facing Treven and Larison and had a view of the street. Treven had seen plenty of foreigners in this section of the city, but even so he knew they were all conspicuous. Treven’s blond hair and green eyes had always been somewhat of a surveillance liability, of course, but he figured that to the average Japanese, such features wouldn’t much distinguish him from Larison, with his dark hair and olive skin, or from any other Caucasian foreigner, for that matter. What the natives would notice, and remember, was the collective size of the four of them. Treven, a heavyweight wrestler in high school and linebacker for Stanford before dropping out, was actually the smallest of the group. Larison was obviously into weights, and, if Hort could be believed, maybe steroids, too. And the Blackwater guys could almost have been pro wrestlers. Treven wondered if Hort had selected them in the hope their size might intimidate Rain when they made contact. He doubted it would make a difference. Size only mattered in a fair fight, and from what he’d heard of Rain, the man wasn’t stupid enough ever to allow a fight to be fair.
    “He’s there,” the man called Beckley said. “Training, just like last night.”
    Larison nodded. “Maybe we should switch off now,” he said in his low, raspy voice. “Two nights in a row, he’s probably spotted you. Treven and I can take the point.”
    “He didn’t spot us,” Krichmond said. “We were in the stands, he barely even glanced our way.”
    Beckley grunted in agreement. “Look, if the guy were that surveillance conscious, he wouldn’t be showing up at the same location at the same time every night in the first place. He didn’t see us.”
    Larison took a sip of coffee. “He any good? The judo, I mean.”
    Krichmond shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed like he had his hands full with the kid he was training with.”
    Larison took another sip of coffee and paused as though thinking. “You know, it probably doesn’t really matter that much whether he saw you or not. We know he’s here, we can just brace him on his way out.”
    “Yeah, we could,” Krichmond said, his tone indicating the man found the idea hopelessly unambitious. “But what kind of leverage do we have then? We found him at the Kodokan. Tomorrow he could just go and train somewhere else. Or give up training, period. We want him to feel pressured, isn’t that what Hort said? So let’s show him we know where he lives. Brace him there, make him feel we’re into his life in a big way. That’s how you get people to play ball—by getting them
by
the balls.”
    Treven couldn’t disagree with the man’s assessment overall. He was surprised Larison didn’t see it that way, too. But Larison must have realized his oversight, because he said, “That makes sense. But come on, he must have seen you. Treven and I should take the point.”
    “Look,” Beckley said, his tone indicating the tail-end of patience, “he didn’t see us. Krichmond and I will take the point.” He gestured to one of the buttons on his damp navy shirt. “You’ll see everything we see, through this. If he spots us, and I doubt he will, we’ll switch off like we planned. Okay?”
    The button was actually the lens of a high definition pocket video camera that shot color in daylight and infrared-enhanced black and white at night. Each of them was similarly outfitted, and each unit transmitted wirelessly to the others on the network. A separate unit, about the size of a pack of playing cards, could be held in the hand to display what the other units were transmitting. It was nothing fancy, just a stripped-down and slightly modified version of the Eagle Eyes monitoring system that was increasingly popular with various government agencies, but it enabled a small surveillance team to spread out beyond what traditional line of sight would allow, and also enabled each team member to know the position of all the others without excessive reliance on cell phones or other verbal communication.
    Larison raised his