Barry Eisler - Hard Rain

“Yeah, and he had a lot to drink and was telling everyone that I’m a computer genius. One of the hostesses asked me some questions about how to configure a firewall because she just bought a new computer.”

“Pretty?”

The blush reappeared. “I guess. Her computer was a Macintosh, so I liked her right off the bat.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I didn’t know that kind of thing could form the basis for love at first sight.”

“So I answered a few of her questions,” he said, ignoring me. “At the end of the night, she asked if I would give her my phone number, in case she had any more questions.”

I laughed. “Thank God she didn’t just give you her number. She would have died of old age waiting for you to call.”

He smiled, knowing that this was probably true.

“So she called you…,” I said.

“And I wound up going over to her apartment and configuring her whole system.”

“Harry, you ‘configured her whole system’?” I asked, my eyes mock-wide.

He looked down, but I saw the smile. “You know what I mean.”

“You’re not going to… penetrate her security, are you?” I asked, unable to resist.

“No, I wouldn’t do that to her. She’s nice.”

Christ, he was so smitten that he couldn’t even spot the sophomoric double entendre. “I’ll be damned,” I said again. “I’m happy for you, Harry.”

He looked at me, saw that my expression was genuine. “Thanks,” he said.

I raised my glass to my nose, took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it go. “So she’s got you keeping odd hours?” I asked.

“Well, the club is open until three A.M. and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home…”

“I get the picture,” I said. Although in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attachment that didn’t have an Ethernet cable and a mouse. He was an introverted, socially stunted guy, with no contacts that I knew of outside of his day job, which he kept at arm’s length in any event, and me. Conditions that had always made him useful.

I tried to picture him with a high-end hostess, and couldn’t see it. It didn’t feel right.

Don’t be a prick , I thought. Just because you can’t have someone in your life, don’t begrudge Harry .

“What’s her name?” I asked.

He smiled. “Yukiko.”

“Yukiko” means “snow child.” “Pretty name,” I said.

He nodded, his expression slightly dopey. “I like it.”

“How much does she know about you?” I asked, taking a sip of the Lagavulin. My tone was innocent, but I was concerned that, in the delirium of what I assumed was first love, Harry would be unnecessarily open with this girl.

“Well, she knows about the consultant work, of course. But not about the… hobbies.”

About his extreme proclivity for hacking, he meant. A hobby that could land him in jail if the authorities caught wind of it. In the ground, if someone else did.

“Hard to keep that sort of thing secret,” I opined, testing.

“I don’t see why it would have to come up,” he said, looking at me.

A waitress appeared from behind a curtain and set Harry’s order on the bar in front of him. He thanked her, showing a deep appreciation for this newly wonderful class of being, women who work in restaurants and bars , and I smiled.

I realized at some level that if Harry was going to start living more like a civilian, he would be less useful, and possibly even dangerous, to me. His increasing transparency to the wider world might offer an enemy a window into my otherwise hidden existence. Of course, if someone connected Harry to me, they might come after him, too. And despite what I’d tried to teach him over the years, I knew that, out in the open, Harry wouldn’t have the means to protect himself.

“Is she your first girlfriend?” I asked, my tone gentle.

“I told you, she’s not really my girlfriend,” he answered, ducking the question.

“If she’s occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until the sun sets, I feel safe using the word as shorthand.”

He looked at me, cornered.

“Is she?” I asked again.

He looked away. “I guess so.”

I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. “Harry, I only ask because, when you’re young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you’re just having fun, you don’t need to tell her anything. You shouldn’t tell her anything. But if the attachment gets deeper, you’ll need to do some hard thinking. About how close you want to get with her, about how important your hobbies are. Because you can’t live with one foot in daylight and the other in shadows. Believe me on this. It can’t be done. Not long-term.”

“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

“Everybody in love is stupid,” I told him. “It’s part of the condition.”

I saw him blush again, at my use of the word and the assumption behind it. But I didn’t care how he referred to these new feelings in his own mind. I know what it’s like to live walled off, isolated, and then suddenly, unbelievably, to have that pretty girl you’d longed for returning the feeling. It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.

I smiled bitterly, thinking of Midori.

Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. But I wanted to do it in person.”

“Sounds serious.”

“A few months ago I got a letter. From Midori.”

I finished off the Lagavulin before answering. If the letter had arrived that long ago, a few moments more for me to figure out how I wanted to respond weren’t going to make a difference.

“She knew where to reach you…,” I started, although I had already figured it out.

He shrugged. “She knew because we brought her over to my apartment to handle the musical aspects of that lattice encryption.”

I noticed that, even now, Harry felt compelled to carve out Midori’s precise role in that operation to clarify that he had been fully capable of handling the encryption itself. He was sensitive about these things. “Right,” I said.

“She didn’t know my last name. The envelope was only addressed to Haruyoshi. Thank God, otherwise I would have had to move, and what a pain in the ass that would have been.”

Harry, like anyone else who values privacy, takes extreme pains to ensure that there is no connection anywhere-not on utility bills, not on cable TV subscriptions, not even on lease documents-between his name and the place where he lives. This kind of disassociation requires some labor, involving the establishment of revocable trusts, LLCs, and other blind legal entities, and it can all be blown in a heartbeat if your Aunt Keiko visits you at your home, notes your address, and decides to send you, say, flowers to thank you. The flower shop puts your name and address into its database, which it then sells to marketing outfits, which in turn sell the information to everyone else, and your true residence is now available to anyone with even rudimentary hacking or social engineering skills. The only way to regain your privacy is to move again and repeat the exercise.

If what was sent to you was just an ordinary letter, of course, the only person who might make the connection is the postman. It’s up to the individual to decide whether that would be an acceptable risk. For me, it wouldn’t be. Probably not for Harry, either. But if only his first name had appeared on the envelope, he would be all right.

“Where was the letter from?” I asked him.

“New York. She’s living there, I guess.”

New York. Where Tatsu had sent her, after telling her I was dead, to protect her from suspicion that she might still have the computer disk her father had stolen from Yamaoto, a disk containing enough evidence of Japan’s vast network of corruption to bring down the government. The move made sense for her, I supposed. Her career in America was taking off. I knew because I was watching.