Requiem for an Assassin

unexpectedly during your lunchtime assignation at your favorite out-of-the-way restaurant and says, “Jim! What a surprise to see you here. And who’s your lovely companion?” you’d better have a prefabricated explanation, or your only response is likely be the time-honored slow suicide of “Uh, uh, uh…” or perhaps a variation of a “This isn’t what it looks like” or an “I can explain this,” both of which are universally understood to be confessions of full guilt.
    The concept is easy, but effective execution is difficult. It requires imagination, a talent for acting, and experience. At this point, for me, the operation is second nature. I imagined myself as who I was: Taro Yamada, recently divorced, easing the pain of separation with a rambling holiday on America’s West Coast. The camera I had with me would support the story, and I made sure to snap pictures of a few vistas along the way. It was a persona I’d used before, and I knew the details well, even the name of my divorced wife, and our grown daughter, the location of my apartment building in Tokyo, the office where I worked as an executive in one of the big electronics concerns. None of it was well backstopped, but it didn’t need to be. The popular American perception of Japan today is of a peaceful people, craving luxury brands, snapping pictures ceaselessly, polite, prosperous, deferential, supportive of America’s war on terror. Nothing about my face or behavior would arouse any concerns. These days, it was the dark, bearded, Abdullah-looking types who got all the attention, never mind the protests of the antiprofiling crowd. And even if anyone wanted to check up on some of the details of my story, both the country and the language are opaque enough to throw off and eventually frustrate all but the most ardent and expert hunters.
    If there had been time, I would have taken the Pacific Coast Highway, something I’d always wanted to do. But there wasn’t, so I endured a fairly monotonous drive, instead. I passed flat expanses of farmland; scrub grass blackened by wildfires; a mile-long patch of earth trod to mud by the hooves of thousands of cows.
    One place struck me: the San Luis reservoir, just west of I-5 along a winding stretch of Route 152. Amid the undifferentiated, rolling hills and gnarled, brooding trees, the sudden expanse of sparkling cobalt startled me. I drove along it for miles, watching it unfold on my left, fascinated by this improbable inland sea. As I came to its end and 152 began to curve away, I pulled over and got out.
    The air smelled good, moist from the reservoir, cool and rich. I walked the hundred or so yards down to the water, my feet crunching in the gravel. A few cars whooshed by behind and then above me, but otherwise the area was utterly quiet.
    The water sat within a basin of undulating stone walls stretching away for miles. Despite the afternoon sun it was cold down at the edge, and a sharp wind whistled in the crags of rock. The walls were scarred with horizontal grooves, nature’s own graffiti, carved across the millennia by the ceaseless pressure of water and wind. I stood and watched, hidden now from the road, from everything behind me.
    “I don’t know who he is,” I said aloud after a few minutes. “But it’s him or my friend. I don’t have a choice. You don’t like it? Well, what would you do? Let Dox die, instead?”
    I waited. But of course there was nothing. Just the coruscating sunlight and the caustic wind.
    “Why do I even ask?” I said, shaking my head. “You’re not there. You never were.”
    I turned and went back to the road.
    I arrived in Palo Alto at a little before four. The first thing I did was go to a military-surplus store in nearby Mountain View, where I bought a down parka with a hood and a pair of leather gloves. It was fifty-five degrees outside, according to the Mercedes’ digital readout, so the parka would be a little excessive. But its bulk would conceal my body type, and its hood would obscure my face. The gloves I would need later.
    Next, I drove to Jannick’s house. Christopher Lane was a long, narrow hill ending in a cul-de-sac ringed by massive new mansions with equally massive yards and impressive views of the Palo Alto hills. I didn’t see anyone about, but I was glad I was driving the Mercedes. It fit right into the neighborhood.
    The house was close to the bottom of the hill. It was an older, two-story building, white painted clapboard with