Requiem for an Assassin (11 page)

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I flew to Los Angeles, arriving on a cool, clear winter morning. San Francisco would have been more convenient, but Hilger knew I was coming and I didn’t want to do anything that would help him anticipate me. It was bad enough he knew I’d be tracking Jannick; I wasn’t going to offer up an additional datapoint unless I had no choice.

Before leaving, I’d gone to an Internet café and uploaded the photos of Mr. Blond to Kanezaki. It wouldn’t be much to go on, but Mr. Blond and Hilger must have both applied for Vietnamese visas in the last seventy-two hours. That might be enough for Kanezaki to cross-reference. If it wasn’t, I’d just have to get him more information. I included Dox’s mobile number in the upload—the one Hilger was using now. Probably Hilger was keeping the phone off out of fear that I might have some means to triangulate on the signal, but it was still worth trying.

I might have given Kanezaki the URL of the compromised bulletin board, too. Maybe he could tell me where it was being accessed. But I decided to hold off on that. Even if Kanezaki had the technical means, and I wasn’t sure he did, I doubted Hilger would be sloppy enough to access the site from anywhere that would reveal his actual position. And if Kanezaki managed to hack the site itself, he’d be able to read my communications with Hilger, including the ones about Jannick. I didn’t want to take that chance for so little probable gain. At least, not yet.

I had also checked the bulletin board I used with Dox, now compromised, of course, by Hilger. Hilger had uploaded a thorough dossier on Jannick: photos, home and work addresses, make and model of car, everything. I looked at the photos for a while. They had all been taken from public sources: his Stanford yearbook photo, company bios, some newspaper clippings. He was blond, with a round face, rectangular rimless glasses, and an uncertain smile balanced by a determination in his eyes. No surveillance photos. Apparently, Hilger had never gotten that close.

The home address was Christopher Lane; work, East Bayshore Road, both in Palo Alto. I’d never been to the town, but of course knew of it: birthplace of Hewlett-Packard and other technology giants; home of Stanford University; once a sleepy community of apricot groves, now the world’s foremost technology center, the heart of Silicon Valley itself.

At LAX, I rented a Mercedes E500 with a navigation system. With the extra miles I was going to be driving, the car would run me about two thousand dollars, but it was worth it. I didn’t know how much skulking around would be required before I figured out how to get close to Jannick, but there was a lot of money in Palo Alto and I expected the Mercedes and BMW quotient to be high. The locals, and local law enforcement, would take a lot less interest in a sixty-thousand-dollar car parked at the curb than they would in a Buick.

I stopped at a sporting goods store, where I equipped myself with a three-inch Benchmade folding knife. Tossing such quality knives every time I got on a plane was definitely an expensive habit, but it beat not having something sharp at hand when you needed it. Next, a Cingular shop, where I picked up an Apple iPhone. The mobile I had been using with Dox was now compromised, of course, and I needed something new and therefore sterile. The iPhone had a huge screen that made it useful for Internet access—not as versatile as a laptop, true, but it was a lot more portable and was always connected, too.

I drove north on Interstate 5 with the cruise control set for seventy-two—close enough to the seventy-mile-an-hour speed limit to ensure I wasn’t risking a ticket; just enough over the limit to look normal. Plenty of cars passed me at eighty or better, and I silently thanked them for drawing off any prowling Highway Patrol cars and making me uninteresting by comparison.

I reminded myself of who I was, what I was doing here—the story I would use if anything went awry and I wound up facing questions from someone, a neighbor, a hotel clerk, a cop. Cover for action, the American spy agencies call it. It’s the ostensible reason you have prepared in case you’re caught doing something you’re not supposed to. A fairly intuitive concept, actually, as anyone who’s ever had an affair can tell you. When one of your colleagues shows up 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 solar panels on the roof. No cars in the driveway. Maybe no one was home; maybe they parked in the garage. No way to know at the moment. It was a weekday and I expected Jannick to be at the office regardless.

I went past slowly, looking for a place I could set up. There was a gravel turnout on the right side of the road, about fifty yards down from his house. I could wait there and pick him up coming and going, but the spot would enable me only to see him, not to act. Worse, if I parked there, Jannick would go right past the driver’s side of my car. Even if he were as oblivious to personal security as Hilger claimed, he might see my face, and he would certainly make the Mercedes.

I drove down to the end of the street. Christopher ended on Old Page Mill Road, a narrow, sleepy affair paralleled by a blacktopped, four-lane artery called Page Mill Road. I gathered the “old” version was what the locals relied on until the town grew and the small road was overtaken by the need for something wider and faster. I made a left on what I decided to think of as OPM and drove slowly north. A hundred yards up the street, just south of another small road called Gerth Lane, there was a dirt turnout. I did a U-turn into it and stopped, facing Christopher. I looked around and decided I liked the spot. I wasn’t in front of a house, so no one was likely to pay me much attention. And I had a good view of Christopher where it let out onto OPM. Jannick couldn’t come and go without my seeing him, and I was far enough away so that he was unlikely to see me, or to care particularly if he did.

A pack of bicyclists shot past me on Page Mill. They were all helmeted, sleek in gaudy racing suits, and I had a feeling their machines cost thousands of dollars apiece. They reminded me of hiking clubs in Japan, whose members wouldn’t consider a stroll even on a gentle grassy hillside without hiking boots, walking sticks, and enough North Face paraphernalia to make a seasoned alpinist blush. Well, I could see why biking would be popular around here. I understood the weather was wonderful most of the year, although just now it was overcast, and the hills were beautiful enough.

I was tired, but there was only about an hour of daylight left and I wanted to reconnoiter more before it got dark. I plugged Jannick’s office address into the nav system and drove there so I could get a feel for his likely route. It was pretty direct: mostly a straight shot north on Page Mill Road, five miles in all. There were no deserted stretches anywhere along the way. On the contrary, the route was heavily trafficked. Page Mill had four lanes for cars, several miles of bike lanes, sidewalks, and a mix of office buildings that gave way to residences farther north. I could follow him easily enough in the traffic, but unless he surprised me by veering off and stopping somewhere deserted, I saw no locations that would serve for action.

East Bayshore turned out to be an access road paralleling Route 101, one of the main arteries between the Bay Area and southern California. I parked on a perpendicular street called Embarcadero, across from a Chinese restaurant named Ming’s. Call me paranoid—I’d just take it as a compliment, anyway—but I didn’t want to run even the smallest risk that the car I was driving, or its license plate, might be seen near Jannick’s office, whether by an employee or a camera or both.

I slipped on the parka, pulled up the hood, and got out. I used the short walk to get into character. Thinking in Japanese, I reminded myself that I was Yamada again, altering certain details of the legend to fit the current circumstances. This time, I was being transferred to Silicon Valley by my employer, Matsushita Electric Industrial in Osaka, and was in town now to find a house and take care of school arrangements and otherwise prepare for the family move. I had a business card I could provide in case anyone asked for it, complete with a number that would be answered by a suitably incomprehensible Japanese message on the voice-mail system I continued to maintain back in Japan. My wife would need office space after our move for her work as a freelance translator.
This look like a good place, and so close to highway, too…what kind companies work here?
It wasn’t very cold, so the parka was a little odd, sure, but Americans are tolerant of foreigners and their idiosyncrasies. Look at how much they put up with in that movie
Borat.

Jannick’s building was three down on East Bayshore, on the right side of the road. I strolled past the driveway, noting that it was shared by several office buildings, each an unremarkable, two-story glass-and-concrete box. From the size of the structures, I gathered Jannick was renting or subletting space. That, or DET was a much bigger company than its website suggested. I didn’t like all the windows. If Hilger wanted me dead, he could have a sniper waiting in one of the buildings, knowing I would show up here while tracking Jannick. Or someone shooting photos instead of bullets, compiling evidence of my guilt, evidence they’d use for blackmail later. But I didn’t have a choice. I kept going, my scalp prickling from the feeling of exposure to all those ominous windows.

I walked through the parking lot looking for Jannick’s car, according to Hilger’s dossier, a black Volvo S80. I didn’t see it. I wondered if he was out at a meeting. Or if he’d left early for the day and I’d missed him on his way home. Or if he was traveling somewhere. In my experience, every predictable pattern you’ve analyzed goes to hell the moment you go operational. Imagination, backup plans, and an ability to improvise are the only countermeasures.

I thought about calling him from a pay phone, but didn’t like the idea. I might come away with a better understanding of where he was, or even if he was in town right now, but I’d have to engage him or someone else with a story, too, leaving another potential piece of evidence for later. I decided to wait until a call would likely be more valuable.