RainStorm

with that."
    He smiled almost demurely. "We're friends, are we not?"
    I thought for a minute. Maybe Belghazi, through his Saudi intelligence
    contact Mahfouz, sends the six Arabs after me in Macau
    and Hong Kong, as Kanezaki claimed to suspect. The team gets
    wiped out. Belghazi realizes the men were handicapped because of
    the way they stuck out there. Something big is happening on
    Macau or nearby, and Belghazi can't leave just yet. Now he feels
    vulnerable. Vulnerable to me. He decides he needs someone with
    greater local expertise, someone who can blend and get the job
    done right. He reaches out to the yakuza.
    Yeah, I could see that sequence. See it clearly.
    Damn, this guy "was real trouble. I was beginning to wake up to
    the magnitude of the problem I faced.
    "Belghazi's connection to the yakuza," I said. "Is it close enough
    for them to help him with a problem elsewhere in Asia, if he asks?"
    Tatsu nodded. "I would say so."
    Shit.
    I realized I was going to have to take Belghazi out. Not just for
    the money, but simply to survive. And then I realized, He knows
    that. He's putting himself in your shoes, too. Which sharpens his imperative:
    to eliminate you.
    A vicious cycle, then. And winner take all.
    All right. I needed to end this, and end it fast. I wanted this guy
    planted in the ground and no longer giving orders. "Natural causes,"
    if possible; unnatural, if not.
    "How can I help?" Tatsu asked.
    I thought for a moment, then said, "You can get me all the particulars
    for my new friend."
    "Your new friend?"
    I nodded. "Charles Crawley."
    NINE
    elilah had said Belghazi was off Macau for a day or
    two, and there wasn't much I could do for the moment
    with her in the way, anyway. I decided that my own brief departure
    would be a small enough risk to justify certain possible out-of-town
    gains.
    I took the bullet train from Tokyo Station to Osaka, a less likely
    international departure point than Tokyo's Narita. I checked the
    bulletin board from an Internet kiosk. The information I had asked
    Tatsu for was waiting for me: Charles Crawley III. Home, work,
    and cell phone numbers; work address, supposedly the State Department
    but in fact CIA headquarters in Langley and therefore
    unlikely to be operationally useful; and home address: 2251 Pirn-
    mit Drive, West Falls Church. Unit #811. Suburban Virginia. Most
    likely an apartment complex, one with at least eight floors.
    I booked a nonstop ANA flight to Washington Dulles for the
    next morning. Then I checked into a cheap hotel in Umeda for the
    night. I lay in bed, but sleep wouldn't come. Too much coffee. Too
    much to think about.
    I got up, slipped into the yukata robe that even the lowest
    budget Japanese hotels can be counted on to provide, and sat in the
    cramped room's single chair. I left the lights off and waited to get
    tired enough to fall asleep. I could tell it would be a while.
    The cheap rooms are always the hardest. A little luxury can
    numb like anesthetic. Take the anesthetic away, and pain rushes into
    its absence like frigid water through a punctured hull. I felt memories
    beginning to crowd forward, agitated, insistent, like ghosts
    newly emboldened by the dark around me.
    I was eight the first time I saw my mother cry. She was a strong
    woman--she had to be, to give up her life and career in America
    to become my father's wife--and, until the moment I learned otherwise,
    I had assumed that she was incapable of tears.
    One day, Mrs. Suzuki, our neighbor, came and picked me up in
    the middle of the afternoon at school, telling me only that I was
    needed at home. It was June and the air on the train ride back was
    close and hot and sticky. I looked out the window during the trip,
    wondering vaguely what was going on but confident that all was
    well and everything would be explained to me shortly.
    My mother was waiting at the door of our tiny Tokyo apartment.
    She thanked Mrs. Suzuki, who held an extra low bow for a
    long moment before silently departing. Then my mother closed
    the door and 'walked me to the upholstered couch in the living
    room. Her manner was possessed of a ceremony, a gravity that I
    found odd and somehow ominous. She took my small hands in her
    larger ones and looked into my eyes. Hers seemed strange--weak
    and somehow frightened--and I glanced around, uncomfortable,
    afraid to look back.
    "Jun," she said, her voice unnaturally low, "I have bad news and
    I need you to be very brave, as brave as you can." I nodded