Paris is a Bitch (6 page)

“Look,” Beckley said, his tone indicating the tail-end of patience, “he didn’t see us. Krichmond and I will take the point.” He gestured to one of the buttons on his damp navy shirt. “You’ll see everything we see, through this. If he spots us, and I doubt he will, we’ll switch off like we planned. Okay?”

The button was actually the lens of a high definition pocket video camera that shot color in daylight and infrared-enhanced black and white at night. Each of them was similarly outfitted, and each unit transmitted wirelessly to the others on the network. A separate unit, about the size of a pack of playing cards, could be held in the hand to display what the other units were transmitting. It was nothing fancy, just a stripped-down and slightly modified version of the Eagle Eyes monitoring system that was increasingly popular with various government agencies, but it enabled a small surveillance team to spread out beyond what traditional line of sight would allow, and also enabled each team member to know the position of all the others without excessive reliance on cell phones or other verbal communication.

Larison raised his hands in a
you win
gesture. “All right. You two cover the entrance of the Kodokan. Treven and I will wait here and fan out behind you when you start following him.”

Beckley smiled—a little snidely, Treven thought. And it did seem like Larison, maybe in a weak attempt to save face, was pretending to issue orders that had in fact just been issued to him.

Beckley and Krichmond went out. Larison turned and watched through the window as they walked away.

Treven said, “You think he’s going to come out again at the same time? Hort said he was so surveillance conscious.”

Larison took a sip of coffee. “Why do you think Hort sent those Blackwater bozos along with us?”

It was a little annoying that Larison hadn’t just answered the question. Treven paused, then said, “He doesn’t trust us, obviously.”

“That’s right. They’re working for him, not with us. Remember that.”

Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton was Treven’s commander in the ISA, and had once been Larison’s, too, before Larison had gone rogue and tried to blackmail Uncle Sam for a hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in exchange for videos of American operatives torturing Muslim prisoners. He’d almost gotten away with it, too, but Hort had played him and kept the diamonds for himself. Treven wasn’t entirely sure why. On the one hand, Hort’s patriotism and integrity were unquestionable. A black man who might have been denied advancement in other areas but who was not only promoted, but held in awe by the army meritocracy, he loved the military and he loved the men who served under him. Yet none of that had prevented him from screwing Larison when he’d needed to, as he’d once tried to screw Treven. He’d told Treven why: America was being run by a kind of oligarchy, which didn’t seem to trouble Hort much except that the oligarchy had become greedy and incompetent—grievous sins, apparently, in Hort’s strange moral universe. The country needed better management, he’d said. He was starting something big, and the diamonds were a part of it. So, he hoped, would be Treven and Larison, and this guy Rain they’d been sent to find, too, if he could be persuaded.

So of course Hort didn’t trust them. They weren’t over here under duress, exactly, but it wasn’t all a positive inducement, win-win dynamic, either. Larison had to be looking for payback, as well as a chance to recover the diamonds. And Treven had wised up enough to recognize the strings Hort had been using to manipulate him, and to know he needed to find a way to cut them, too. There was the little matter of some unfortunate security videos, for example, that could implicate Treven in the murder of a prominent former administration official. It didn’t matter that it had been a CIA op and that Treven had nothing to do with the man’s death. What mattered was that Hort and the CIA had the tapes, and might use them if Treven got out of line. So for the moment, the whole arrangement felt like an unstable alliance of convenience, all shifting allegiances and conflicting motives. Hort would never have sent them off without a means of monitoring them, and under the circumstances, Larison’s injunction that he remember who Beckley and Krichmond were really working for felt gratuitous, even a little insulting. Maybe the man was just chafing at the fact that the Blackwater guys didn’t seem to give a shit about what Larison assumed was his own authority. Treven decided to let it go.

But what he wouldn’t let go was that Larison had ignored his question. “Same place, same time, same way out, two nights in a row?” he said. “That sound like our guy?”

Larison glanced at him, and Treven could have sworn the man was almost smiling.

“Depends,” Larison said.

“What do you mean?”

“Rain spotted them last night for sure, when they were there for longer. Very likely, he spotted them again tonight, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I would have spotted them. Because if this guy is who Hort says he is, he would have spotted them. Because if he’s not good enough to have spotted them, Hort wouldn’t even be bothering with him.”

Treven considered. “So what does that mean, if he spotted them but comes out the same way at the same time anyway?”

This time, Larison did smile. “It means I’m glad it’s not us walking point.”

W
hen I left the Kodokan, I knew someone would be waiting for me. Most likely it would be the pair of giants I’d seen twice inside. Possibly they were just recon, and someone else would be set up outside, but if whoever it was had more manpower, the sensible thing would have been to rotate different members of the team to deny me the chance to get multiple IDs. Of course, it wasn’t impossible that I was supposed to see the two I’d already spotted—after all, their bulk was hard to miss—so that I’d keep searching for them when I went outside and consequently overlook the real threat. But if that had been the game, they would have stayed longer earlier that evening, to be sure I had a chance to see them again. My gut told me it was just the two of them, handling both recon and action.

I kept to the left side of the exit corridor as I left the building, using the book and souvenir kiosk as concealment until the last moment to deny them additional seconds to prepare for my appearance. I doubted they had guns—firearms are tightly restricted in Japan, and anyone with the connections to acquire them would likely have fielded a larger and less conspicuous team. A sniper rifle would have been even harder to get than a pistol, and even if they’d managed to procure one, what were they going to do, rent an apartment overlooking the entrance of the Kodokan? Too much trouble, too much paper trail. There were better ways.

As I hit the glass doors, I kept my head steady but let my eyes sweep the sidewalk and street within my field of vision. Nothing yet. The night before, I’d gone left and taken the subway, and though I hadn’t seen them at the time, I now assumed they’d been lurking somewhere and had logged my movements. So if they were hoping to follow me tonight and introduce themselves on terrain they found more favorable, they’d set up to the right. If the plan was for me to walk into them, they’d be to the left. No way to be sure, but other things being equal, I prefer to see what’s coming. And why not let them see me repeating the pattern I’d established the night before? It would give them a little more data to rely on in underestimating me. I turned left onto the sidewalk, my eyes still moving, checking hot spots, my ears trained for footfalls behind me.

I spotted the first instantly, leaning against one of the pillars fronting the building. He was bigger even than I’d estimated from seeing him in the stands. His hands were visible and one of them held a cigarette. Not the best cover for action in Tokyo. The country is a little behind the times on the nonsmoking front, and with the exception of smokers visiting Starbucks and hospital intensive care units, no one goes outside for a tobacco break, especially in the wet summer heat.

I passed him and hit the stairs of Kasuga station, keeping my head down to conceal my face from the security camera staring down from the ceiling, my footsteps echoing along the concrete walls. Ordinarily, I found the cameras a hindrance if not an outright threat, but for the moment, their presence was cause for comfort. No one wants to do a hit in the Tokyo metropolitan subway system, where the number of closed circuit video cameras could make a Las Vegas casino blush. In the past, the cameras had never been a particular concern, but then again my specialty had always been the appearance of natural causes—one of the advantages of which is that no one examines security tapes afterward, trying to find out what happened. The Mossad team that did the Hamas official in Dubai, for example, had likely been planning on the appearance of a heart attack, and so wasn’t worried about the hotel and airport cameras that filmed them. But they’d blown the job, and what was obviously an assassination led to an investigation. I wondered at the time why they hadn’t called me. Maybe Delilah had told them I was out of the life. I smiled bitterly at the notion, and the memory, and kept moving down the stairs.

I turned the corner into the station proper and there was the second guy, standing under the florescent lights in front of the ticket vending machines, looking at the wall map above like an extra-large, extra-confused tourist. Kasuga isn’t a main thoroughfare, and the area was mostly deserted—just a glassy-eyed ticket puncher in a booth, looking about as sentient as a potted plant, and a couple of high school kids who were testing their English trying to help my new friend find whatever he was looking for. I heard him grumble that he was fine as I moved past and could almost have sympathized—having a civilian address you when you’re trying to be invisible is always a bitch. I slid a prepaid pass into the ticket machine and went through to the platform.

I strolled slowly along, the grimy tracks below me and to my right, the white tiled wall gleaming to my left. I passed a few Tokyoites standing here and there—a girl with tea-colored hair and garish makeup texting on a mobile, a
sarariman
absently practicing his golf swing, a couple people I recognized from the Kodokan—but no one who tickled my radar. About two thirds of the way to the end I stopped and stood with my back close to the wall. But for the hum of an air conditioning unit, the platform was silent. From somewhere inside the tunnel to my left, I could just hear dripping water.

I could have glanced back, but doing so would only confirm what I already knew: they had fallen in behind me. They’d keep well down the platform, and when a train arrived they’d get on it, two or three cars away. At each stop, they’d check through the sliding doors to see if I was getting off, and follow me when I did. When they’d tailed me to a venue they found sufficiently dark, or isolated, or otherwise suitable for the business at hand, they’d do what they came for and depart.

But that’s the problem with dark, isolated, and otherwise suitable venues. Like tracer rounds, they work in both directions.

I felt a rumble approaching from far down in the tunnel to my right, and a voice over a public address system announced the arrival of a Meguro-bound train. The rumble grew louder. I glanced to my right and glimpsed the two giants, pressed against the wall about halfway down the platform—the spot I’d most likely overlook if I glanced in the direction of an approaching train. Not too close to alarm me; not so far that they’d get picked up in the natural angle of my vision. I didn’t know who I was dealing with, but the positioning showed some experience.

It wouldn’t have been hard to lose them. I doubted they knew the city well at all and they couldn’t possibly have known it the way I do. But I didn’t see the point. A long time ago, in another context, a man I considered dangerous told me the next time he saw me, he would kill me. I took him at his word, and prevented him from carrying out his promise. It was the same now. If these guys wanted to meet me, we’d get the meeting over with tonight. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder, wondering when they’d show up next. And I wasn’t going to look for an opportunity to politely ask them about the nature of their business, either. When you’ve spent a lifetime in my former line of work, and when two guys this big show up at your only possible known locale and start following you, it’s time to assume the worst, and to act accordingly.

The train hurtled out of the tunnel and began to slow, its brakes hissing, its wheels screeching against the metal tracks. It shuddered to a stop and the doors slid open. A few passengers stepped out. I walked into a mostly empty compartment and stood facing the doors, just in case. No one else got on. After a moment, a loudspeaker voice warned passengers the train was leaving, and then the doors hissed closed and the train jerked into motion.

I thought I’d take them to Jinbocho, two stops away on the Mita line and best known for its numerous antiquarian book shops. I liked the area, too, for a coffee shop, not far from the station, appropriately enough called Saboru, the Japanese word for lounging, loafing, playing hooky, or otherwise taking a timeout from the world. Though I would only take the giants past the coffee shop, not inside. And the timeout I had in mind for them was going to be longer than what
saboru
ordinarily implied.