Barry Eisler - Hard Rain

I told the driver to take us in the direction of Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics mecca. I watched behind us but didn’t see any unusual activity. No one was scrambling to keep up with us. It looked like Kanezaki was alone.

I reached over and patted him down. Other than his cell phone, keys, and a new wallet, he wasn’t carrying anything. Harry’s detector stayed quiet.

I had the driver use backstreets to lessen the chance that someone could be tailing us. We got out, near Ochanomizu station, and from there continued a series of swift moves in trains and on foot to ensure that we were alone.

I finished the route in Otsuka, the extreme north of the Yamanote line. Otsuka is a neighborhood kind of place, albeit a somewhat seedy one, with a generous offering of massage parlors and love hotels. Beyond the locals who live and work there, it seems to cater primarily to older men in search of downmarket sexual commerce. Caucasians are rare there. If there were a surveillance team and they were white CIA-issue, Otsuka would make for a difficult approach.

We took the stairs to the second-story Royal Host restaurant across from the station. We went in and I looked around. Mostly families enjoying a night out. A couple of tired-looking salarymen avoiding an evening at home. Nobody out of place.

We sat in a corner that offered me a nice view of the street scene below.

I looked at him. “Go on,” I said.

He rubbed his hands together and looked around. “Oh man, if I get caught doing this…”

“Cut the dramatics,” I told him. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I don’t want you to think I had anything to do with your friend,” he said. “And I want us to put our heads together.”

“I’m listening.”

“Okay. To start with, I think… I think I’m being set up.”

“What does this have to do with my friend?”

“Just let me start at the beginning, and you’ll see, okay?”

I nodded. “Go ahead.”

He licked his lips. “You remember the program I told you about? Crepuscular?”

A waitress came over and I realized I was starving. Without checking the menu I ordered a roast beef sandoichi and their soup of the day. Kanezaki asked for a coffee.

“I remember it,” I told him.

“Well, Crepuscular was formally terminated six months ago.”

“So?”

“So it’s still going on anyway, and I’m still running it, even though the funding has been cut off. Why hasn’t anyone said anything to me? And where is the money coming from?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Slow down. How did you find out about this?”

“A few days ago my boss, the Chief of Station, told me he wanted to see all the receipts I’ve collected from the program’s assets.”

“Biddle?”

He looked at me. “Yes. You know him?”

“I know of him. Tell me about the receipts.”

“Agency policy. When we disburse funds, the asset has to sign a receipt. Without the receipt, it would be too easy for case officers to skim cash off the disbursements.”

“You’ve been having these people… sign for their payouts?” I asked, incredulous.

“It’s policy,” he said again.

“They’re willing to do that?”

He shrugged. “Not always, not at first. We’re trained in how to get an asset comfortable with the notion. You don’t even bring it up the first time. The second time, you tell him it’s a new USG policy, designed to ensure that all the recipients of our funding are getting their full allotments. If he still balks, you tell him all right, you’re going out on a limb but you’ll see what you can do on his behalf. By the fifth time he’s addicted to the money and you tell him your superiors have reprimanded you for not getting the receipts, that they’ve told you they’re going to cut you off if you don’t get the paperwork signed. You hand the guy the receipt and ask him to just scrawl something. The first one is illegible. Later, they get more readable.”

Amazing , I thought. “All right. Biddle asks for the receipts.”

“Right. So I gave them to him, but it felt weird to me.”

“Why?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “When the program got started, I was told that I would be responsible for maintaining all the receipts in my own safe. I was worried about why the Chief suddenly wanted them, even though he told me it was just routine. So I checked with some people I know at Langley-obliquely, of course. And I learned that, for a program with this level of classification, no one would ask to see documentation unless someone had first filed a formal complaint with the Agency’s Inspector General with specific allegations of case officer dishonesty.”

“How do you know that hasn’t happened?”

He flushed. “First, because there’s no reason for it. I haven’t done anything wrong. Second, if there had been a formal complaint, protocol would have been for the Chief to sit me down with the lawyers present. Embezzling funds is a serious accusation.”

“All right. So you give Biddle the receipts, but you feel weird about it.”

“Yes. So I started going through the Crepuscular cable traffic. The traffic is numbered sequentially, and I noticed a missing cable. I wouldn’t have spotted it except that it occurred to me to check the numerical sequence. Ordinarily you wouldn’t notice something like that because no one ever searches the files by cable number, it’s too much trouble, and anyway, ordinarily the number isn’t even relevant. I called someone at East Asia Division at Langley and had her read the cable to me over the phone. The cable said Crepuscular was being terminated and should be discontinued immediately because the funding was being applied elsewhere.”

“You think someone on this end pulled the cable so you wouldn’t know the program had been terminated?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, nodding.

The waitress brought our order. I started wolfing down the sandwich.

He was feeling talkative and I wanted to hear more. We would get to Harry soon enough.

“Tell me more about Crepuscular,” I said, between bites.

“Like what?”

“Like when did it get started. And how you learned of it.”

“I already told you. Eighteen months ago I was told that Tokyo Station had been tasked with an action program of assisting reform and removing impediments. Code name Crepuscular.”

Eighteen months ago , I thought. Hmm . “Who put you in charge of the program originally?” I asked, although given the timeline, I already had a pretty good idea of the answer.

“The previous Station Chief. William Holtzer.”

Holtzer , I thought. His good works live on .

“Tell me how he presented it to you,” I said. “Be specific.”

He glanced to his left, which for most people is a neurolinguistic sign of recall rather than of construction. Had he looked in the opposite direction, I would have read it as a lie. “He told me that Crepuscular was compartmental classified, and that he wanted me to be in charge of it.”

“What was your precise role?”

“Development of target assets, disbursement of funding, overall management of the program.”

“Why you?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

I suppressed a laugh. “Did you assume it was only natural that, despite your youth and inexperience, he recognized your inherent capabilities and wanted to entrust you with something so important?”

He flushed. “Something like that, I suppose.”

I closed my eyes briefly and shook my head. “Kanezaki, are you familiar with the terms ‘front man’ and ‘fall guy’?”

His flush deepened. “I might not be as stupid as you think,” he said.

“What else?”