The Last Assassin

hardware's for? And who you're working with? Two of this, two of that, it's not like you.'
    I looked at him. Yeah, he was capable. But maybe getting a little full of himself, too.
    'You're charging me a "favor" for this,' I said, my voice cold, 'and now you're asking for freebies?'
    He looked taken aback. 'I only meant…'
    'Look, are we doing this as an exchange of cooperation and goodwill, or as a sales transaction?'
    'I was hoping it could be both.'
    'It can't. Choose one. And live with it.'
    He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, 'Let me think about it.'
    I shrugged. We were quiet again.
    'Have you been in touch with Tatsu?' I asked.
    'For a while, but not just lately. He's busy, I'm busy…'
    'He's in the hospital.'
    He looked at me, and the concern I saw was genuine. 'No. Nothing serious?'
    'Gastric cancer. If you want to see him, he's at Jikei. But you better do it soon.'
    'Oh, shit.'
    'Go see him. He thinks of you as a kind of protégé, someone who can carry on his work. But he's too proud to say it.'
    He nodded. 'Thanks for telling me.'
    I shouldered the duffel. 'I'll be in touch.'
    He held out his hand and, after a moment, I shook it.
    'Be careful,' he said.
    'Yeah,' I told him. 'I wouldn't want you to miss out on that favor.'

17

    T he drive to Wajima the next morning lasted about five hours. Japanese highways, burdened as they are by frequent and excessive tolls, tend also to be mercifully free of traffic. I used cash for the tolls, having declined the rental car company's offer to set me up with the latest in electronic collection technology. Electronic payment is too easy to track.
    Along the way, we stopped at an abandoned building site to check out all the equipment. Dox had never used a C0 2 rifle before, and the reason I had wanted more darts was so he could train with it. With only five darts in our arsenal, though, I felt we could spare only one for practice.
    'Make it count,' I told him, as he took a prone position eighty meters away from an aluminum can I'd propped up at the top of a fence.
    There was the soft crack of suddenly discharging compressed gas, and an instant later an answering ping eighty meters downfield. I looked through the binoculars and the can was gone. I started to tell Dox, but he already knew. He looked up at me and smiled. 'Shit, eighty meters,' he said. 'I could hit 'em with a rock from this close.'
    Before getting back in the van, I used a toothbrush to comb some white liquid shoe polish into my hair. The polish gave a nice salt-and-pepper effect, far more pronounced than what had lately been creeping in naturally at my temples and over my ears, and would add ten years to a witness's description. A pair of hopelessly unstylish thick-framed nonprescription eyeglasses that I had picked up before leaving Tokyo completed the effect.
    We arrived at Wajima at a little after noon, and I called the inn to see if I could check in. As expected, they asked if I could come at two. That was fine. It suggested that Yamaoto's men weren't there yet, either.
    Dox and I spent the next hour and a half driving around, familiarizing ourselves with Wajima. The area was still pretty in places, I thought, but like much of Japan it was under siege from development. The native deciduous trees, orange and red in the chill air, were everywhere being cut down and replaced with monoculture cedar by the region's logging interests. What remained looked like a patchwork of native flesh half covered with green bandages that did nothing to stanch the wounds beneath. Everything was paved — riverbeds, hillsides, even the coast. It seemed that only the sea itself was free from the metastasizing onslaught of development, but as we drove along the coast I saw that some council or interest group or bureaucracy was in the midst of partially enclosing Wajima harbor with a giant wall of concrete. I thought of what Dox had said, about Americans professing to love peace but always waging war. Japanese maintain a traditional reverence for nature, but here they were entombing all traces of it in a concrete sarcophagus. At what point would this culture have to look in the mirror and admit that its traditional love of nature had become a living lie?
    When we had seen as much as was useful from the van, we parked so I could have a look around on foot. Dox wanted to get out, too, but accepted that in sleepy Wajima, his white face and outsized frame would eclipse his ordinarily strong cloaking skills. He lay down in