Rainfall

its underside. It was covered with some kind of cloth. The edges were stapled to what felt like wood. Good backing to attach the bug.

    I pulled the adhesive covering off the transmitter and pressed it into place. Anyone talking in this room was going to come through loud and clear.

    Harry’s voice in my ear: “John, two of them just got back. They’re coming up the walkway. Get out right now. Use the side exit — the one at the left side of building as you face it.”

    “Shit, the transmitter’s already in place. I’m not going to be able to respond to you once I leave this room. Keep talking to me.”

    “They just stopped at the end of the walkway to the front entrance. Maybe they’re waiting for the others. Go down to the side entrance and stay there until I tell you you’re clear.”

    “Okay. I’m gone.” I relocked the door from the inside, then backed out and closed it behind me. Turned and started to move in the direction of the exterior corridor.

    Flatnose was coming down the hallway. His shirt was covered with blood. The table must have caught him in the face and broken his nose again. It hadn’t improved his appearance. Hoarse animal sounds were rumbling up out of his chest.

    He was standing between me and the entrance. Nowhere to go but through him.

    Harry again, a second late: “There’s one right in front of you! And the others are coming up the walk!”

    Flatnose dropped his head, his neck and shoulders bunching, looking like a bull about to charge.

    All he wanted was to get his hands on me. He was going to come at me hard, crazed with rage, not thinking.

    He launched himself at me, closing the gap fast. As he lunged for my neck, I grabbed his wet shirt and dropped to the floor in modified
tomo-nage
, my right foot catching him in the balls and hurling him over me. He landed on his back with a thud I could feel through the floor. Using the momentum of the throw I rolled to my feet, took two long steps over to him, and leaped into the air like a pissed-off bronco, coming down with both feet as hard as I could on his prone torso. I felt bones breaking inside him and all the air being driven from his body. He made a sound like a balloon deflating in a puddle of water and I knew he was done.

    I lurched toward the corridor, then stopped. If they found him like this in the middle of the hallway, they would know I’d been back here, maybe figure out why. They might look for a bug. I had to get him back to the room at the other end of the hallway, where it would look like he’d died by a freak shot from the table.

    His legs were pointing in the right direction. I squatted between them, facing away from him, grabbed him around the knees and stood. He was heavier than he looked. I leaned forward and dragged him, feeling like a horse yoked to a wagon with square wheels. There were bursts of pain in my back.

    Harry’s voice in my ear again: “What are you doing? They’re coming in the front entrance. You’ve got maybe twelve seconds to get clear of the corridor.”

    I dumped him in the room at the end of the hallway and raced out into the corridor, sprinting toward the side exit.

    I reached the entrance to the side stairwell and heard the door on the opposite side of the corridor opening. I yanked open the door and threw myself through it, pulling it shut behind me but stopping it before it closed completely.

    I squatted on the landing, fighting the screaming need to breathe, holding the door open a crack and watching as three of Yamaoto’s men walked into the corridor. One of them was doubled over — the guy I had nailed with the can of coffee. They walked into Conviction’s offices and out of my field of vision.

    Immediately, I heard Harry: “They’re back in the office. The front of the building is clear. Walk out the side exit now and head east across the park toward Sakurada-dori.”

    I went down the stairs quietly but fast. Stuck my head out the exit door at the bottom, looked both ways. All clear. I shuffled down an alley connecting Hibiya-dori and Chuo-dori and cut across the park. The sun felt good on my face.

PART THREE

Now . . . they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. But . . . if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary