zealots. He performed superbly there, too, so when the U.s. ambassador to Japan dropped dead of a heart attack, the secretary of state was relieved that he could send Stanley P. Hanratty to the American embassy in Tokyo.
Hanratty had been in Tokyo for thirteen months when the emperor was assassinated. During his habitual sixteen-hour workdays, he had become expert in the myriad aspects of U.s.-Japanese relations and made many friends in key places. This evening, just hours after the emperor’s murder, with the world still in shock, he was sitting in his office with the television on, putting the finishing touches on a private letter to the secretary of state, when he heard the knocking on the door. “Come in,” he called loudly, because the doors were thick and heavy. “Mr. Ambassador, I wonder if I might have a few moments of your time?”
“Colonel Cassidy, please come in.”
Stanley P. liked the Air Force attache, who occasionally dropped by to inform him firsthand of developments in the Japanese military that he would eventually read about weeks later in secret CIA summaries. The senior CIA officer, on the other hand, never told him anything. It was almost as if that gentleman thought the ambassador couldn’t be trusted with sensitive information, which frosted Stanley P. a little. “It’s been a long day, Colonel. How about a drink?”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Stanley P. removed a bottle of bourbon and two glasses from his lower desk drawer. He poured a shot in each glass and passed one to Cassidy. “I’ve been speculating, Colonel. Speculating with no information. Speculate with me a little.”
Cassidy sipped the whiskey. “Do you think it’s possible that a faction, shall we say, in the Japanese government might have had a hand in the emperor’s assassination?”
“I had dinner this evening with an officer in the Japanese Self-Defense Force, the air arm, and he said the officers are with Abe almost to a man. They think he’s going to save the nation.”
“The killers were soldiers, I believe.”
“That’s what the government is telling the press. I suppose some high official might have enlisted some zealots to undertake a suicide mission. There is historical precedence, as I recall.”
“There is precedent by the page,” the ambassador admitted. He concentrated on savoring the golden liquid. “The assassination is going down pretty hard with the guy on the street,” the colonel said. “I rode the train back to Tokyo. The people in the subways and trains seem pretty upset.”
“Murder is a filthy business,” the ambassador muttered. “This officer I had dinner with tonight…, he told me some things that he shouldn’t have. Perhaps the news of the assassination made him feel that … Oh, I don’t know!”
Cassidy brushed the thought away, unwilling to try to analyze his friend or make polite excuses for him. Jiro did what Jiro felt he had to do. “The Japanese have developed, manufactured, and put in service about one hundred new, highly capable fighter planes.” The colonel weighed his words. “They are more capable than anything in our inventory, according to my source.”
“How good is your source?”
“Beyond reproach. One hundred percent credible.”
The ambassador poured himself another drink, offered more to the colonel, who refused. Cassidy could see his and the ambassador’s reflections in the window glass. Beyond the reflections were the lights of Tokyo. “The thing my source confided in me that I believe you should know, sir, is this: His squadron is packing for deployment in the near future.”
“Deployment where?”
“Russia, he thought.”
“The appeal for Japanese help by the native minorities — there was a television broadcast about them last night. According to the government, they are the racial cousins of the Japanese.” The ambassador channel-surfed with his television remote. He had picked up more than a smattering of the language. “Perhaps they will just move your source’s squadron to another base here in Japan,” Stanley P. suggested to Cassidy. “That is possible, sir. My source didn’t think so, though. He thinks the squadron is going a lot farther than that.”
3
When Masataka Okada returned to his office after lunch everyone in the department was watching television — a day after Emperor Naruhito’s assassination, the television types were still microan-alyzing the implications. Okada’s office was fairly large by Japanese standards, about ten feet by ten feet, but all the walls above waist level were glass. Apparently the architect believed that the best way to keep spies in line was to let them watch one another. Okada had spent the morning decoding the message from an agent with the code name of Ten, or Ju in Japanese. Alas, it was forbidden to input messages this highly classified into the computer, so the work had to be done by hand. He had completed the decoding, a tedious task, then did the translation and typed the result before lunch. Now he removed the file from his personal safe and read the translation again. The message was important, no question. Very important. In fact, Masataka Okada suspected that the future of both Japan and Russia hinged on the contents of this two-page message from Agent Ju. Of course, Okada had no idea who Ju actually was, but he obviously had access to the very top leadership in the Russian army. He also had access to the contents of the safes of the top leadership, because some of this information could have come only from official documents. Boiled down, the message was that the last of the guidance systems had been removed from the Russians” submarine- based ballistic missiles. The Russians had finished removing the guidance systems from their land-based ICBMS last year; their tactical nuclear warheads had been removed from service and destroyed five years ago. Russia was no longer a nuclear power. Okada knew that the United States had secretly insisted upon nuclear disarmament as the price of the massive foreign aid needed by the current, elected regime to solidify its hold on power. That fact came from intercepted American diplomatic traffic. The United States hadn’t even briefed its allies. Well, the secret had certainly been well kept, even in Russia. Not a whisper of this earth-shattering development had appeared anywhere in the public press in Russia or Western Europe: Okada would have seen it mentioned in the agency’s press summaries if it had been. Part of the reason was that only the top echelon of military commanders in Russia knew that all the guidance systems had been removed in a series of maintenance programs nominally designed to test and return to service every system in the inventory. Disarmament was such a political hot potato that the Russian government had kept it a secret from its own people. By some tangled loop of Kremlin logic, this course of action made perfect sense. As long as no one outside the upper echelons of government knew that the nuclear weapons delivery systems were no longer operational, no one lost face, and no one lost votes. The domestic political crises never materialized. And as long as no one outside Russia knew, the missiles continued to deter potential aggressors, just as they always had. Deterrence was the function of ICBMS, wasn’t it?
Now the Japanese knew. And the Russian government didn’t know they knew. That is, the Japanese would know as soon as Masataka Okada signed the routing slip and sent the message to his superior officer, the head of Asian intelligence for the Japanese Intelligence Agency. From Okada’s boss, the news would go to the head of the agency, who would take it to the prime minister, Atsuko Abe. What Atsuko Abe would make of this choice tidbit was a matter to speculate darkly about. Masataka Okada did just that now as he chewed on a fingernail. Abe’s national-destiny speeches leapt to mind, as did the secret military buildup that had been going on in Japan for the last five years. And now there was the assassin’s letter, written in blood, which had been leaked to the newspapers by someone in the prosecutor’s office investigating the assassination. The letter demanded that the military take over the government and lead Japan to glory. Okada’s friends and acquaintances — indeed, the whole nation — could talk of little else. Amazingly, the ritual suicides of the emperor’s killers had given the ultranationalistic, militaristic views of the Mishima sect a mainstream legitimacy that they had never before enjoyed. Watching this orgy of twisted patriotism gave Okada chills.
What would be the consequences to Japan if military force was used against Russia?
Okada well knew that there would be consequences, mostly unpredictable and, he feared, mostly negative. He certainly didn’t share Abe’s faith in Japan’s destiny. Okada’s father’s first wife died at Hiroshima under the mushroom cloud. He was a son of the second wife, who had been severely burned at Hiroshima but had survived. As a boy, he had examined his mother’s scars as she bathed. When he was ten she died of leukemia— another victim of the bomb. Forty years had passed since then, but he could still close his eyes and see how the flesh on her
