learned that from the gangs that pursued me when I was a kid, and refined the lesson with SOG in Cambodia. You’ve got to ask: If I were trying to get at me, how would I go about it?
Predictability is the key, geographical and chronological. You need to know where a person will be and at what time. You learn this by surveillance, analyzing the routes to work, the times the target comes and goes, until you’ve identified a pattern, and choke points through which the target can almost always be counted on to pass at a certain time. You choose the most vulnerable of these, and that’s where you lay the ambush.
And if that’s what you’re doing, you’d better not forget that all the time someone is running the same kind of operation on you. Thinking like this is what divides the hard targets from the soft ones.
The same principle works for crime prevention. If you wanted to grab some quick cash, where would you wait? Near an ATM, probably, and probably at night. You’d scout around for the right location, too, someplace with enough pedestrian traffic to save you a long wait, but not so much of a crowd that you’d be impeded from acting when you identified a good target. You’d look for a dark spot far enough from the machine so the target wouldn’t notice you, but close enough so that you could move right in once the cash transaction was completed. Police stations close by would make you nervous, and you’d probably hunt for a better place. Etc. If you think this way, you’ll know exactly where to look to spot someone lurking, and you’ll know where you’re vulnerable, where more alertness is required.
With Midori, extensive surveillance wasn’t even necessary. Her schedule was publicly available. Presumably that was how Bulfinch knew to find her at Alfie. And that would be the easiest way for Benny’s people to find her now.
From Otemachi I rode the Chiyoda-sen subway seven stops to Omotesando, where I exited and took the stairs to the street. I walked the short distance to the Yahoo Cafe, a coffee shop with Internet terminals. I went in, paid the fee, and logged on to one of the terminals. With the cafe’s T1 line, it took just a few seconds to access the file Benny had posted. It included a few scanned publicity photos, Midori’s home address, a concert schedule with tonight’s appearance at the Blue Note, and parameters indicating that the job had to look natural. They were offering the yen equivalent of about $150,000 — a substantial premium over our usual arrangement.
The reference to tonight’s appearance at the Blue Note, first set at 7:00, was ominous. Predictability, time and place. If they wanted to take her out soon, tonight would be almost too good to pass up. On the other hand, Benny had told me I had forty-eight hours to get back to him, which would indicate that she would be safe for at least that long.
But even if she had that much time, I didn’t see how I could parlay it into a reasonable life span. Warn her that someone had just put a contract out on her? I could try, but she had no reason to believe me. And even if she did, what then? Teach her how to improve her personal security? Sell her on the benefits of an anonymous life in the shadows?
Ludicrous. There was really only one thing I could do. Use the forty-eight hours to figure out why Benny’s people had decided Midori was a liability and to eliminate the reasons behind that view.
I could have walked the kilometer or so to the Blue Note, but I wanted to do a drive-by first. I caught a cab and told the driver to take me down Koto-dori, then left to the Blue Note. I was counting on traffic to make the ride slow enough so that I could do a quick sneak-and-peek at some of the spots where I would wait if I were setting up surveillance outside.
Traffic was heavy as I had hoped, and I had a good chance to scope the area as we crawled past. In fact, the Blue Note isn’t that easy a place to wait around unobtrusively. It’s surrounded mostly by stores that were now closed. The Caffe Idee restaurant across the street, with its outdoor balcony, would offer a clear-enough view, but the Idee has a long, narrow external staircase that would afford access sufficiently slow as to make the restaurant an unacceptable place to wait.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t have to linger long. You can time the end of a Blue Note set to within about five minutes. The second set hadn’t yet begun, so if anyone was planning on visiting Midori after the show tonight, they probably hadn’t even arrived yet.
Or they could already be inside, just another appreciative audience member.
I had the cab stop before reaching Omotesando-dori, then got out and walked the four blocks back to the Blue Note. I was careful to scope the likely places, but things looked clear.
There was already a long line waiting for the second set. I walked up to the ticket window, where I was told that the second set was sold out unless I had a reservation.
Damn, I hadn’t thought about that. But Midori would have, if she really had wanted me to come. “I’m a friend of Kawamura Midori’s,” I said. “Fujiwara Junichi . . . ?”
“Of course,” the clerk responded immediately. “Kawamura-san told me you might be coming tonight. Please wait here — the second set will start in fifteen minutes, and we want to make certain that you have a good seat.”
I nodded and stepped off to the side. As promised, the crowd from the first set started filing out five minutes later, and as soon as they were clear I was taken inside, down a wide, steep staircase, and shown to a table right in front of the still-empty stage.
No one would ever confuse the Blue Note with Alfie. First, the Blue Note has a high ceiling that conveys a feeling of spaciousness totally unlike Alfie’s almost cave-like intimacy. Also, the whole feel is higher-end: good carpeting, expensive-looking wood paneling, even some flat panel monitors in an antechamber for obsessive- compulsives who need to check their e-mail between sets. And the crowd is different at the Blue Note, too: first, because you can’t even fit a crowd into Alfie, and second, because the people at Alfie are there only for the music, whereas, at the Blue Note, people also come to be seen.
I looked around the room as the second-set crowd flowed in, but nothing set off my radar.
I swiveled and looked behind me as though searching for an acquaintance. There was a Japanese man, mid- forties, sitting all the way in the left rear, near one of the exits. The people sitting next to him were all talking to one another; he was obviously alone. He was wearing a rumpled suit, dark blue or gray, which fit him like an afterthought. His expression was bland, too bland for my taste. This was a crowd composed of enthusiasts, sitting in twos and threes, waiting eagerly for the performance. Mr. Bland felt like he was deliberately trying to be unobtrusive. I filed him as a strong possible.
