Rainfall

has always been to me.”

    “Holtzer knows that he’s being played?”

    He shrugged. “At first, he thought he was developing Yamaoto. Once he realized that the opposite was true, what were his options? Tell the CIA that the assets he had developed were plants, the reports all fabricated? That would have meant the end of his career. The alternative was much more pleasant: work for Yamaoto, who continues to feed him the ‘intelligence’ that makes Holtzer a star. And Yamaoto has his mole inside the CIA.”

    Holtzer, a mole,
I thought, disgusted.
I should have known.

    “Holtzer told me that the CIA had been developing Kawamura, that Kawamura was on his way to deliver the disk to the Agency when he died.”

    He shrugged. “Kawamura screwed me. He might have screwed the Agency, as well. Impossible to say, and irrelevant.”

    “What about Bulfinch,” I asked. “How did Holtzer get to him?”

    “By having him followed until you handed over the disk, of course. Bulfinch was a soft target, Rain-san.” I heard the soft note of criticism in his voice — telling me it was stupid to give the disk to a civilian.

    We walked silently again for a few minutes. Then he said, “Rain-san. What have you been doing in Japan all this time? Since the last time we met.”

    With Tatsu, it was a mistake to assume that anything was small talk. A small warning bell went off somewhere in my consciousness.

    “Nothing terribly new,” I said. “The same consulting work as before.”

    “What was that, again?”

    “You know. Helping a few U.S. companies find ways to import their products into Japan. Get around the red tape, find the right partners, that sort of thing.”

    “It sounds interesting. What sort of products?”

    Tatsu ought to have known better than to think a few simple questions would crack my cover story. The consulting business, the clients, they’re all real, albeit not exactly Fortune 500 stuff.

    “Why don’t you check out my Web site?” I asked him. “There’s a section full of client references on it.”

    He waved his hand in a “don’t-be-silly” gesture. “What I mean is, What are you still doing in Japan? Why are you still here?”

    “What difference does it make, Tatsu?”

    “I don’t understand. I would like to.”

    What could I tell him?
I needed to stay at war. A shark can’t stop swimming, or it dies
.

    But it was more than that, I had to admit to myself. Sometimes I hate living here. Even after twenty-five years, I’m still an outsider, and I resent it. And it’s not just my profession that militates a life in shadows. It’s also that, despite my native features, my native linguistic level, what matters in the end is that inside I am half
gaijin
. A cruel teacher once said to me when I was a kid, “What do you get when you mix clean water with dirty water? Dirty water.” It took several additional years of slights and rejection before I figured out what she meant: that I’m marked by an indelible stain that the shadows can conceal but never wash away.

    “You’ve been here for over two decades,” Tatsu said, gently. “Maybe it’s time for you to go home.”

    He knows,
I thought.
Or he’s on the verge.
“I wonder where that is,” I said.

    He spoke slowly. “There is a risk that, if you stay, we could learn we have opposing interests.”

    “Let’s not learn that, then.”

    I saw the sad smile. “We can try.”

    We walked again, the sky brooding above us.

    Something occurred to me. I stopped walking and looked at him. “It might not be over,” I said.

    “What do you mean?”

    “The disk. Maybe we can still get it back.”

    “How?”

    “It can’t be copied or transmitted electronically. And it’s encrypted. Holtzer is going to need expertise to decrypt it. Either he has to take the disk to the experts, or the experts will have to come to him.”

    He paused for only a second before taking out his cell phone. He input a number, raised the unit to his ear, and waited.

    “I need a schedule for visiting American government personnel,” he said in curt Japanese into the phone. “Particularly anyone declared from the NSA or CIA. For the next week, particularly the next few days. Right away. Yes, I’ll wait.”

    The U.S. and Japanese governments declare their high-level spooks to each other as part of their security treaty and general intelligence cooperation. It was a long shot, but it was something.

    And I knew Holtzer. He was a