Rainfall

lips lurid. “Well, we kept at him, getting in deeper an inch at a time. Finally, six months ago, the nature of his refusals started to change. Instead of ‘No, I won’t do that,’ we started hearing, ‘No, that’s too dangerous, I’d be at risk.’ You know, practical objections.”

    I did know. Good salesmen, good negotiators, and good intelligence officers all relish practical objections. They signal a shift from whether to how, from principle to price.

    “It took us five more months to close him. We were going to give him a one-time cash payment big enough so he’d never have to worry again, plus an annual stipend. False papers, settlement in a tropical locale where he’d blend in — the Agency equivalent of the witness-protection program, but deluxe.

    “In exchange, he was going to give us the goods on the Liberal Democratic Party — the payoffs, the bribery, the
yakuza
ties, the killings of whistle-blowers. And this is hard evidence we’re talking about: phone taps, photographs, tape-recorded conversations, the kind of stuff that would stand up in court.”

    “What were you going to do with all that?”

    “The fuck you think we were going to do with it? With that kind of information, the U.S. government would own the LDP. We’d have every Japanese pol in our pocket. Think we’d ever get any grief again about military bases on Okinawa or at Atsugi? Think we’d have any trouble exporting as much rice or as many semiconductors or cars as we wanted? The LDP is the power here, and we would have been the power behind the power. Japan would have been Uncle Sam’s favorite prison fuckboy for the rest of the century.”

    “I gather from your tone that Uncle Sam has been disappointed in love,” I said.

    His smile was more like a sneer. “Not disappointed. Just postponed. We’ll still get what we want.”

    “What was your connection with Benny?”

    “Poor Benny. He was a great source on LDP slime. He knew the players, but he didn’t have the access, you know? The asset had the access.”

    “But you sent him to my apartment.”

    “Yeah, we sent him. Alone, to question you.”

    “How did you find out what happened to him?”

    “C’mon Rain, the guy’s neck was snapped clean in half right outside your apartment. Who else would have done it, one of your neighbors on a pension? Besides, we had him wired for sound. SOP for this kind of thing. So we heard everything, heard him blaming me, the little prick.”

    “And the other guy?”

    “We don’t know anything about him, other than that he turned up dead a hundred meters from where the Tokyo police found Benny’s body.”

    “Benny told me he was
Boeicho Boeikyoku
. That you handled the liaison.”

    “He was right that I handled the
Boeikyoku
liaison, but he was full of shit that I knew his friend. Anyway, you can bet we did some checking, and Benny’s pal wasn’t with Japanese Intelligence. When Benny took him to your apartment, he was on a private mission, getting paid by someone else. You know you can’t trust these moles, Rain. You remember the problems we had with our ARVN counterparts in Vietnam?”

    I looked up at the rearview and saw the driver looking at us, his face suspicious. The chances that he could follow our conversation in English were nil, but I could see that he sensed something was amiss, that it was unnerving him.

    “They take money from you, they’ll take it from anyone,” he went on. “I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to miss Benny. You get paid by both sides, someone finds out, hey, you get what you had coming anyway.”

    Or at least you should. “Right,” I said.

    “But let me finish the part about the asset. Three weeks ago he’s on his way to deliver the information, downloaded to a disk, he’s actually carrying the fucking crown jewels, and — can you believe this? He has a heart attack on the Yamanote and dies. We send people to the hospital, but the disk is gone.”

    “How can you be so sure he was carrying the disk when he died?”

    “Oh we’re sure, Rain, we’ve got our ways, you know that. Sources and methods, though, nothing I can talk about. But the missing disk, that’s not even the best part. You want to hear the best part?”

    “I can’t wait.”

    “Okay, then,” he said, leaning closer to me and smiling his grotesque smile again. “The best part is that it wasn’t really a heart attack . . .someone iced this fucker, someone who knew how to make it