Rainfall

I thought he might ask. “You wearing a wire, Holtzer?” I said, watching his eyes. He didn’t answer. Where would it be? I thought. I hadn’t felt anything under his shirt.

“Take off your belt,” I told him.

“Like hell, Rain. This is going too far.”

“Take it off, Holtzer. I’m not playing games with you. I’m about halfway to deciding that the way to solve all my problems is just to break your neck right here.”

“Go ahead and try.”

“Sayonara, asshole.” I leaned toward the driver. “Tomatte kudasai.” Stop here.

“Okay, okay, you win,” he said, raising his hands as if in surrender. “There’s a transmitter in the belt. It’s just a precaution. After Benny’s unfortunate accident.”

Was he telling me not to worry, that Benny didn’t even matter? “Iya, sumimasen,” I said to the driver. “Itte kudasai.” Sorry. Keep going.

“Good to see that you’ve still got the same high regard for your people,” I said to Holtzer. “Give me the belt.”

“Benny wasn’t my people,” he said, shaking his head at my obvious obtuseness. “He was fucking us just like he tried to fuck you.” He slipped off the belt and handed it to me. I held it up. Sure enough, there was a tiny microphone under the buckle.

“Where’s the battery?” I asked.

“The buckle is the battery. Nickel hydride.”

I nodded, impressed. “You guys do nice work.” I rolled down the window and pitched the belt out into the street.

He lunged for it, a second late. “Goddamnit, Rain, you didn’t have to do that. You could have just disabled it.”

“Let me see your shoes.”

“Not if you’re planning on throwing them out the window.”

“I will if they’re wired. Take them off.” He handed them over. They were black loafers — soft leather and rubber soles. No place for a microphone. The insides were warm and damp from perspiration, which indicated that he’d been wearing them for a while, and there were indentations from his toes. Obviously not something that the lab boys put together for a special occasion. I gave them back.

“All right?” he asked.

“Say what you’ve got to say,” I told him. “I don’t have much time.”

He sighed. “The incident outside your apartment was a mistake. It never should have happened, and I want to personally apologize.”

It was disgusting, how sincere he could sound. “I’m listening.”

“I’m going out on a limb here, Rain,” he said in a low voice. “What I’m about to tell you is classified . . .”

“It better be classified. If all you’ve got to tell me is what I can read in the paper, then you’re wasting my time.”

He scowled. “For the last five years, we’ve been developing an asset in the Japanese government. An insider, someone with access to everything. Someone who knows where all the bodies are buried — and I’m not just being figurative here.”

If he was hoping for a reaction, he didn’t get one, and he went on. “We’ve gotten more and more from this guy over time, but never anything that went beyond deep background. Never anything we could use as leverage. You following me?”

I nodded. Leverage in the business means blackmail.

“It’s like a Catholic schoolgirl, you know? She keeps saying no, you’ve just got to find another way, because hey, in the end, you know she wants it.” He grinned, the fleshy lips lurid. “Well, we kept at him, getting in deeper an inch at a time. Finally, six months ago, the nature of his refusals started to change. Instead of ‘No, I won’t do that,’ we started hearing, ‘No, that’s too dangerous, I’d be at risk.’ You know, practical objections.”

I did know. Good salesmen, good negotiators, and good intelligence officers all relish practical objections. They signal a shift from whether to how, from principle to price.

“It took us five more months to close him. We were going to give him a one-time cash payment big enough so he’d never have to worry again, plus an annual stipend. False papers, settlement in a tropical locale where he’d blend in — the Agency equivalent of the witness-protection program, but deluxe.

“In exchange, he was going to give us the goods on the Liberal Democratic Party — the payoffs, the bribery, the yakuza ties, the killings of whistle-blowers. And this is hard evidence we’re talking about: phone taps, photographs, tape-recorded conversations, the kind of stuff that would stand up in court.”

“What were you going to do with all that?”

“The fuck you think we were going to do with it? With that kind of information, the U.S. government would own the LDP. We’d have every Japanese pol in our pocket. Think we’d ever get any grief again about military bases on Okinawa or at Atsugi? Think we’d have any trouble exporting as much rice or as many semiconductors or cars as we wanted? The LDP is the power here, and we would have been the power behind the power. Japan would have been Uncle Sam’s favorite prison fuckboy for the rest of the century.”

“I gather from your tone that Uncle Sam has been disappointed in love,” I said.

His smile was more like a sneer. “Not disappointed. Just postponed. We’ll still get what we want.”