“Unknown.”
“For instance: Were we aware that Shirley was heavily invested on the margin in the Tokyo Stock Market?”
“We’ve been over this a dozen times, Bill. This has taken me completely by surprise.
All of it.”
“I’m getting the impression that he was making ready to jump ship. Quit the Company and settle in here for the duration.”
“It certainly looks like it,” Mowry said glumly. “His wife Doris apparently has no plans to return to the States.”
They were alone in the conference room. Neustadt leaned forward. “So tell me, Ed, do you think he was doing a little freelance work on the side? Something that may have backfired on him?”
Mowry had asked himself that same question a dozen times over the past seventy-two hours. “If you had suggested such a thing to me last week, I would have punched you in the nose.”
Neustadt sat back and shook his head. “Beats me what I’m going to write in my report.”
The telephone rang and Mowry picked it up. It was his secretary just down the hall.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Mowry, but when you get a chance there’s someone in your office who wishes to speak with you. She says it’s urgent.”
“Who is it?”
“Yaeko Hataya. She’s a USIA translator from downstairs.”
“I’m going to be tied up all day. Have Tom or one of the others talk to her.”
“Sir, she says it’s about Mr. Shirley.”
Mowry glanced at Neustadt, who was reading one of the files. “Be right there,” he said, and he hung up. There’d been rumors that Shirley had had a mistress. So far she’d not come forward, and no one knew who she was.
Neustadt looked up. “Something?”
“One of my translators is getting excited. I’ve got to go hold her hand for a minute or two.”
“Why don’t you go over to the safehouse and get some rest. You look like I feel…
like shit. Nothing’s going to happen until Langley wakes up anyway.”
“I guess I will,” Mowry said, getting up.
“The apartment is clean,” Neustadt said. “But use your own driver. I’ll have my people right behind you.”
“Will they stick around?”
“Probably. We’ll see.”
“I’ll be glad when this is over,” Mowry said, and he left the conference room.
“I put her inside,” his secretary, Amanda Richardson, said. “Poor kid is terrified.”
“I’ll talk to her. In the meantime get my car and driver around front. I’m getting out of here for a few hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
The young woman was seated in front of his desk when he came in. Her hands were folded primly in her lap. She looked vaguely familiar to Mowry, who thought he might have seen her around the embassy. If she’d been Shirley’s mistress, he’d had good taste.
“My secretary tells me that you know something about Jim Shirley.”
“I was there when he was killed,” Kelley Fuller said in a small voice.
Mowry had gone around behind his desk, and was about to sit down. He stopped. “You were there, at the Roppongi?” he asked, incredulously.
“In front, on the path behind the trees. I saw everything. It was horrible.”
“Why did you wait to come forward?” Mowry demanded. He reached for the phone, but she half rose out of her chair.
“No,” she cried. “You mustn’t tell anyone. Not now! Not yet!”
“The investigators are here from Washington. They have to be told.”
“Especially not them,” Kelley said. “Jim was just as afraid of Washington as he was of the people here in Tokyo.”
“What people? What are you talking about?”
“Jim called it the chip wars. There was money, so much it was hard to imagine. Billions.”
“Of yen?”
She shook her head. “Dollars. In gold and diamonds. Jim said that so much wealth had corrupted everyone who’d come near it.”
“Was Jim investigating this group?”
“Yes,” Kelley said. “He was going to accept some of their money. But he had to prove that he believed in them. It had something to do with the Tokyo exchange. He would get information, and then he would buy some stock. I don’t understand it all.”
“Then why was he killed?” Mowry asked, barely able to believe what he was hearing, and yet instinctively feeling it was true.
“I don’t know. But he was worried that someone in Washington had found out about what he was doing. Don’t you see, Mr. Mowry, that nobody’s to be trusted? Nobody?”
Their investigation into Shirley’s assassination was getting nowhere. The Station had all but closed shop. Nothing of value was coming in or going out, and there was no telling how long the situation would last. The Japanese authorities were enraged, and Langley was hamstrung.
“Where are you staying?” Mowry asked, making his decision.
Kelley looked up and shook her head. Tears were sliding down her cheeks. “I ran away to the country Friday night, and I just got back now.” She sat forward. “I can’t go back to my apartment. Not now. Someone… might be watching.”
“Were you working with Jim?” Mowry asked.
“Yes. He and I were… friends.”
“Will you work for me? Will you help me find out who killed him? Together we can stop them.”
She shook her head again. “I’m frightened. I don’t know what to do.”
She looked very fragile. Totally at wit’s end. “I’m sorry, Miss Hataya, but we’ll have to go through normal channels with our investigation in that case.”
“No, please!”
“What is it?”
Kelley was wringing her hands. “I need a place to stay that’s safe. That no one knows about.”
“If I provided you an apartment like that, would you help me?”
“Yes.”
Tokyo Station maintained two safehouses within the city. One, near the Ginza shopping district, was an open secret, but expenses for the other were buried in one of the embassy’s housekeeping accounts. Only a few key station personnel even knew the place existed. Ironically it was located less than a hundred yards from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters on Sakurada-dori Avenue and within sight of the Imperial Palace.
“We’ll go there now,” Mowry said, rising. “And you’ll tell me everything you know.
Everything.”
Shizuko Igarshi was parked across the street from the U.S. embassy when Edward Mowry came out with a young Japanese woman, and they both got into the back of a waiting Lincoln Town Car.
The woman was somewhat unexpected, but then it was very common for Occidental men away from home to have young mistresses.
Igarshi kick-started his Honda 250 as the gunmetal gray Lincoln pulled smoothly away from the curb. He waited, and moments later a blue Toyota with two Americans inside pulled out of its parking spot, shot across the road, and fell in behind the Lincoln.
It was as he had been told to expect. Mowry would be protected.
But who was the girl?
Igarshi waited for a break in the traffic and headed after them, keeping a couple of cars behind the
