Japantown (17 page)

“We don’t solve it, that’ll make headlines too,” Noda shot back.

In this land of oversize rose-colored glasses, the scowling detective was an advocate of the no-nonsense school of thought. The Japanese staff saw him as a crude but necessary evil. Americans found him refreshingly straightforward.

Narazaki, as the silver-haired patriarch, coddled his employees, pincushion personalities included. “Kei-kun, you old grouch,” he said, referring to Noda in the affectionate form of a superior addressing an underling, “what would it take to make you happy?”

“To be happy is not in his nature,” George said. “
I’d
take a hot springs trip to Tochigi and twenty-one-year-old twins.”

Born into an aristocratic family with mounds of money and a lineage dating back to a powerful samurai clan, George sported an arrogance that stopped just short of intolerable. Echoing his status, today’s wardrobe consisted of a light blue Givenchy sports coat, a starched white shirt with a faint marine stripe, and a mint-green Gucci necktie. For a Suzuki, he harbored something of a wild streak, which meant he occasionally went without a tie.

Ever tolerant, Narazaki chuckled. “Who wouldn’t? Brodie, you want to bring us up-to-date?”

I sketched the murder scene in Japantown, then supplied a brief recap of the major events, including my suspicions about Homeboy, the break-in at my shop, and the connection between Mieko and the kanji. Last, I added my impressions on the seriousness of the threat.

Narazaki shifted in his seat. “Hold on. You sure it was the same kanji?”

“Positive.”

He looked doubtful. “What are the chances?”

“It’s the same,” I insisted a little too loudly.

The room grew quiet and Narazaki became pensive. “I’m sorry, Brodie-kun. Let’s hear the rest.”

In closing, I mentioned the delicate balance we had to maintain with the SFPD, as well as my last-minute decision to spirit Jenny away. Expecting fireworks, I wound up the recital with the tail’s vanishing act down the no-exit alley and nodded at Noda. When all eyes swiveled in the chief detective’s direction, he merely grumbled incoherently about friends having run into some pros down in Soga-jujo a long time ago.

I grew still. What happened to
Get yourself to Tokyo, Brodie
?

Before I could decipher what lay beneath Noda’s reticence, there was a soft tap on the door and Mari Kawasaki, our in-house computer expert, shuffled in. Fresh-faced and apple-cheeked, she wore pink farmer’s overalls cascading over a blue denim shirt, and sported hair teased with orange highlights, this month’s color. In the inexplicable way that many Japanese women have, her twenty-three years looked like sixteen and belied, in her case, an innate talent for all things software, Internet, and IT.

“What is it, Mari-chan?” Narazaki asked.

“I’m sorry to interrupt but I think you should, like, see this.”

Confused, Narazaki asked, “Do we have a walk-in client?”

“No, it’s the computer. And it looks like trouble.”

Amid scraping chairs being pushed aside as we stood, Narazaki and I traded looks. Then Noda grumbled vague words under his breath that sounded suspiciously like “It’s started.”

CHAPTER 25

T
HE
staff had gathered around a large computer console. As we approached, I saw commands scrolling up the screen unbidden. The seat before the monitor was unoccupied, the keyboard unmanned.

>Open system op.

>Manager password?

>TokyoBase.

>Access denied. Manager password?

>BrodieSecurityCentral.

>Access denied. Manager password?

>Open file: Correspondence—Tokyo

George squinted at the screen. “Isn’t that the Brazilian affiliate’s account?”

Eyes glued to the rising text, Mari gave a curt nod. “Yes. He’s in their system and found some old passwords. He knows a third failure will lock him out, so he’s shifted to joint correspondence.”

Brodie Security shared a secured network with affiliate agencies in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. All accounts required passwords that were changed twice a week, and all messages between offices were encrypted. As we watched, the entrant called up a past-due notice, read and discarded it, then rummaged through a file of internal memos. The manner was probing, of someone unfamiliar with the system.

One of the detectives said, “Not good.”

“Yeah,” a long-haired Japanese man I’d never met chimed in.
“Techno scum. Don’t recognize his op style, but he’s absorbing your system at warp speed. Way uncool.”

The speaker looked to be about Mari’s age, maybe a year or two older.

“By that you mean a hacker?” I asked.

“What else? I give him eight to ten hours online before he cracks your network unless we act.”

Narazaki said, “Brodie, let me introduce Toru Namikoshi. He’s the outside contractor who set up our computer system.”

We shook hands. Toru wore jeans and a black Bathing Ape T-shirt with a self-mocking retro design. A red bandanna above a thin, pale face kept his long wavy locks in check.

One of the women in the crowd said, “He’s one of the top computer hands in Japan
and
Mari’s boyfriend. Heavy input.”

Rolling chuckles echoed through the office.

Toru looked sideways at me through a hank of hair that had slipped forward. “You know much about computers?”

“A little more than the next guy.”

“I’m the next guy.”

“A little less, then.”

He gave me a wry smile and cocked an eye at the monitor. The hacker ran a search function, then opened and scanned several more files. Seeing an unguided cursor move across the screen made my skin crawl, and a sense of violation and outrage welled up inside me.

Noda asked, “Does he know we’re watching?”

“No, this is a default monitor. It’s inactive by system standards.”

“How’d he get in?” I asked. “Don’t you have firewalls?”

“The best, man. Dynamite watchdog software, too. But he signed on with a low-level password that gets him into the server space we share with our Brazilian counterpart. He only has a foot in the door, but he’s trying to access our main server by inserting a Trojan horse program that’ll capture other passwords as people log on. Once he has enough he’ll gain access to our secure files.”

From an overhead flat screen hanging on the far wall, a CNNJ announcer was reporting on the impressive exodus of Japanese banking executives heading to Zurich to attend the funeral of sixth-generation
financier Christoph Spengler, who had tragically perished in a fire caused by a faulty electric socket in his wine cellar. “Spengler worked with all the megabanks in Japan, making frequent trips to Tokyo and Osaka. The bank’s connection to Japan goes back to the late eighteen hundreds, when a Spengler representative based in Hong Kong paid a . . .”

“Mute that damn thing,” Noda snapped, and one of the staff rushed over to the remote and turned off the sound.

In front of me, the computer screen went blank. Mari said, “He’s gone.”

“Good,” Toru said. “I’ll set up a node for his return.”

Narazaki said, “Do you think he’ll be back?”

“Yeah, man. Once they’re in, they keep coming at you like a boomerang from hell. Usually it’s just for the high of cruising a new data stream, but not this black hatter.”

Toru flopped into the seat in front of the console, cracked his knuckles, and hit the up arrow on the keyboard, scrolling back through the hacker’s commands. He stared at the initial string of commands for a long moment, then winced, touched a finger to his lips to silence us, and rose. Stepping behind the computer, he toyed with the wires, then curled his fingers around the main cable and traced it all the way to our central server in a back room. Without a word, we all followed him. Frowning, Toru pulled the blinking box away from the wall, crouched down, and ran his fingers over the length of cable behind the server, and finally allowed himself a private smile. He waved us closer.

We all shuffled forward and peered over Toru’s shoulder. Along a vertical cable climbing from the junction box at the base of the wall to the innards of the server was a hairline slit about a quarter inch long.

Toru scribbled on a piece of paper: “Do you scan for listening devices?”

Narazaki read it and wrote, “Every morning.”

More hurried scribbles followed:

“Anything today?”

“No.”

“Recently?”

“Not since last February.”

“Good,” said Toru, breaking the silence. “No audio, then. See that?”
he asked, pointing to a slight swelling in the cord above the slit. “Someone’s spliced a capacitor into the line. Never seen these babies before but I’ve heard about ’em. Watch.”

With a screwdriver he parted the plastic coating to reveal a small wafer less than an eighth of an inch in diameter.

“Cool, isn’t she? State-of-the-art Dutch tech. Nobody gets them without big connections and bigger money. It copies and stores signals, then transmits them through your target’s own computer system on command. It was the first sequence the hacker ran. You’ve been
trashed
.”

Narazaki scratched his head. “You can’t bug our system. We have safeguards.”

Toru chuckled. “Most people can’t. I can. These dudes did.”

“How?”

“Righteous techno gear. No bullets, no spies, but they cop your moves, man.”

“How come the sweep missed it?”

Toru’s tone turned reverential. “It squirrels away information. Sucks it in and hoards it. Your run-of-the-mill bugs are miniature transmitters that send a continuous signal anti-bugging scanners home in on. This new tech sleeps during the day like a cockroach, soaking up the data. It only transmits when activated from an outside signal. That’s why it crawled under your daily sweeps.”

After the break-in at my shop, I’d finally called the security company to scan for wiretaps and bugs. They’d found nothing, but even they probably weren’t equipped to search for devices of this sophistication.

Narazaki said, “So what’s the damage?”

“Minimum, they’ve captured your email transmissions and any attached files. Keep vital info offline until Mari and I set up a mirror system to contain the hacker.”

“Damage is already done,” I said, recalling Noda’s email to me about finding the kanji.

Toru’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. “You want, we can scare him away.”

“No, don’t,” Noda said.

Toru looked to Narazaki, who concurred. “Kei-kun is right. We’ll have to play catch-up. Can you trace him to his base?”

Toru and Mari traded looks. “Sure. Give us a couple of days, maybe a week. But we’ll need to go sumo. Charge ahead. Pound the mats.”

Noda grunted. “Do whatever it takes.”

Narazaki gave the go-ahead nod. Toru returned to his workstation and unzipped a leather-encased laptop. He connected some cords and fired up the machine. Then the wizardry began. Fingers flashed across the board, his concentration complete and unwavering. He typed and read and typed some more. We watched, fascinated, as his fingers punched keys and produced a fast-scrolling string of commands.

Three minutes later, he flicked a stray lock behind his ear. “Okay. I updated your ware so it’ll retard his Trojan horse without his knowing it. Next, I’ll shadow his op footprints and flame this byte skipper. Just need to snatch some cals and a z-pad.”

Narazaki scowled. “Can you give that to me in plain language, son?”

Toru laughed. “First, we hamstring his password-trapping software. Then we follow his electronic footprints and fry his circuits. We need nourishment and a bed to crash on so we’re set to handle him twenty-four/seven. What you real-time dudes call a stakeout. A stakeout in cyberspace.”

Narazaki squinted at Toru. “Mari, get the kid whatever he wants. He finally said something this old man understands.”

Another wave of chuckles rolled across the room.

Narazaki said, “One more thing. Can you track him so he can’t see you? Electronically?”

“What I can do is provide a tetrapile of camouflage. We better think worst-case scenario because their gear is high-powered.”

Noda growled under his breath. “How high?”

“High as it goes. These guys dangerous?”

“Very.”

“How dangerous?”

Noda said, “Brodie?”

“Let’s put it this way,” I said. “Aside from slinging the high-tech bug and the hacker at us, they’ve killed nine people that we know of.”

“Maybe ten,” Noda said, thinking of the missing linguist.

The color drained from the keyboard jockey’s face, and I turned back to the screen, pondering what I’d just witnessed. Not only had the
people we were hunting slipped in and out of my apartment building and shop without tripping either of the commercial alarm systems, they’d also effortlessly compromised Brodie Security’s state-of-the-art safeguards—which only underscored the conclusion I’d reached on my midnight revisit to Japantown.

These people were leagues beyond good. They were treacherous and thorough, guaranteeing, among other things, that they would come at us again soon enough. But from what angle?

CHAPTER 26

W
HEN
Noda, Narazaki, and I regrouped in my office, we found George frowning at a freshly minted notice of some kind.

“More bad news,” he said. “Not five minutes ago I received an email from Tokyo VIP Security. And get this, gentlemen—Yoshida, the second adult male body in Japantown, was not Hara’s cousin. He was a bodyguard.”

Before boarding my flight to Tokyo, I’d also dashed off an email requesting confirmation of Yoshida’s identity. I finally remembered what I’d neglected to ask Lizza about—the cousin. Not only had Lizza not mentioned him, but well into the second day of the case, his vitals remained elusive, even in the Japanese press. Now we knew why.

Noda said, “Jiro Jo’s place.”

Narazaki nodded. “One of the best in the business. I’ve tried to lure him away for years. Good call, Brodie.”