back had been burned, literally cooked, by the thermal pulse of the explosion. He fumbled for his cigarettes, lit one, and tried to forget his mother’s back as he inhaled deeply, savoring the smoke. What if … What if this message merely reported that some of the guidance systems had been removed?
Masataka Okada scrutinized the message carefully. Well, it would be easy enough to write another translation. If he deleted this third sentence, changed this phrase, added a sentence or two at the bottom, he could make it appear that the Russians were still years away from complete disarmament. His superiors would catch him eventually. Or would they?
It wasn’t like the head of the agency was going to Moscow any time soon for a personal chat with Agent Ju. The other people in the office were still intently watching the television set. I must be going mad. Crazy. The pressure is getting to me. The first rule, the very first rule, is never, ever put anything in writing that creates the least suspicion. Leave no tracks. But what I’m contemplating is not espionage; it’s sabotage. He intertwined his fingers and twisted until the pain brought tears to his eyes. At some point, a man must make a stand. This is insane! You are merely buying time. Okada scrolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter, glanced yet again at the backs of his colleagues, and began to type. You are buying time at the cost of your own life, fool. No one will care. Not a single, solitary soul will care one iota.
After two lines, he stopped and stared at the words he had written. This wouldn’t work. Ju was certain to send follow-up reports; indeed, he might have already sent other reports on this subject. It was probable that he had. Both previous and future reports might be given to another cryptographer to decode. It was just a stroke of good fortune that Okada had been handed this particular message. He took the sheet of paper from the typewriter and inserted another. The best way to discount the message wasn’t to change the facts related, but to change the way they were related. Okada knew his boss, Toshihiko Ayukawa. The man had an uncanny ability to separate gold from dross. Intelligence agencies inevitably gathered huge amounts of dross: idle rumors, wild speculations, inaccurate gossip, outright lies, and, worst of all, disinformation passed as truth. Through the years, Okada had become a connoisseur of intelligence reports. As he had first typed it, Agent Ju’s report seemed to be pure gold — it contained eloquent facts, lots of them, crammed into as few words as possible, yet the source for each fact was carefully related. What if the style was changed, not too much, but just enough?
It would be dicey — the message would have to appear to someone who knew Ju’s style to be indubitably his, yet the tone had to be wrong — not clearly wrong, just subtly wrong, enough to create a shadow of doubt about the truth of the facts related in the mind of a knowledgeable reader. The tone would be the lie. God knows, Toshihiko Ayukawa was a knowledgeable reader!
Okada lit another cigarette. He flexed his fingers. His colleagues were still glued to the television in the common area. He took a last drag, put the cigarette in an ashtray to smolder, and began to type quickly. The thought shot through his head that Ayukawa might ask another cryptographer to decode the original of this message again. True, he might, if he thought Okada had done a sloppy job. And if he did that, Okada would be in more trouble than he could handle. He would just have to rely on his reputation, that’s all. He was the best. The boss damn well knew it. Oh well, every man’s fate was in the hands of the gods. They would write a man’s life as they chose. I — lis fingers flew over the keyboard.
When he finished the message, he read it over carefully. He had it the way he wanted it. He put the fake message into the official envelope and signed the routing slip in the box provided for the cryptographer. The people outside were still watching television, milling around, talking. No one seemed to be looking his way. Okada held the copy of the real message under his desk and folded it carefully. He then slipped the small square of paper into a sock. He took the envelope in his hand, weighing it one last time. When he walked out of this office with this envelope in his hand, he was irrevocably committed. He swayed slightly as the enormity of what he had done pressed down upon him. He had to struggle to draw a breath. Ayukawa knew Ju’s work. This fake message might stand out like a police emergency light on a dark night. If so, Masataka Okada was doomed. His eye fell upon the old photo of his family that stood on the back of his desk. It was perched precariously there, almost ready to fall on the floor, shoved out of the way when he made room for the usual books and files and reports that seemed to grow like mushrooms on his desk. That picture must be at least ten years old. His daughter was grown now, with a baby of her own. His son was in graduate school. What would they look like with their skin black and smoking and hanging in putrid ribbons from their backs? From their faces?
Masataka Okada took a firm grip on the envelope and walked out of his office.
At six that evening, Okada’s superior officer, Toshihiko Ayukawa, got around to opening the classified security envelope containing the decoded message from Agent Ju. He’d had a feeling when this message first came in that it might be very important, but he had spent the afternoon in meetings and was just now getting to the red-hot matters awaiting his attention in his office. It was a wonder his desk hadn’t melted, with a belligerent China, civil unrest in Siberia, and riots in the streets of Hong Kong. Yet the assassination of the emperor and the coming state funeral took precedence over everything. “No,” he had told the agency director, “we have no indication whatever that any Asian power had anything to do with the emperor’s murder.”
As Ayukawa read the message, he frowned. It sounded like Ju, cited the proper codes, yet … He read it through again slowly, his mind racing. He looked at the envelope for the signature of the cryptographer. Okada. Then he called his confidential assistant, Sushi Maezumi. He held up the envelope where Sushi could see it. “Why did you give this to Okada?”
The assistant looked at the signature, then his face fell. “I apologize, sir. I forgot.”
“I had another copy of this message for decoding.” Ayukawa consulted his ledger. He believed in keeping his operation strictly compartmentalized. It was unfortunate that the aide had to know that he occasionally handed out duplicates of the messages to be decoded and translated, but unless he had the time to do everything himself and he didn’t — he had to delegate. The use of duplicates allowed him to check on the competency of his staff. And their loyalty. And if the message was important, he would have two versions to compare, for they were never exactly the same. “Number three four oh nine,” Ayukawa said. “Where is it?”
“Here, sir.” Sushi removed the envelope from the bottom of the pile. Ayukawa ripped it open and scanned the message. He didn’t even bother to compare this with Okada’s short story. “You disobeyed my order. I told you not to give any sensitive item to Okada without my express approval.”
“I forgot, sir.”
The avoidance of direct confrontation was one of the pillars on which Japanese society rested. Ayukawa had little use for that social more. “That’s no excuse,” he said bluntly to his aide, who blanched. “My instructions must be obeyed to the letter. Always. I am the officer responsible, not you. And you know that we have a mole in this agency.
… But enough — we’ll discuss it later. Go see if Okada is still in the building. Now, quickly.”
Speechless after this verbal hiding, Sushi Maezumi shot from the office as if he had been scalded.
In the Shinjuku district neon lights tinted the skins of visitors red, green, blue, orange, and yellow, all in succession, as they moved from one garishly lit storefront to the next. Beyond the light was the night, but here there was life. Here there was sex.
This was Tokyo’s French Quarter, only more so, a concentration of adult bookstores, peep shows, porno palaces, and nightclubs, with here and there a whorehouse for the terminally conventional. The whore-houses ranged from bordellos specializing in cheap quickies to geisha houses where the evening’s entertainment might cost thousands of dollars.
The crowds were an inherent part of the district’s attraction. A visitor could blend into the mass of humanity and become an anonymous voyeur, savoring sexual pleasures denied by social convention, which is the very essence of pornography.
Masataka Okada moved easily through the swarms of people. He enjoyed the sexual tension, a release from the extraordinary, heart-attack stress he had experienced that day, as he did every day. The flashing lights and weird colors, highlighted on the men’s white shirts, seemed to draw him and everyone else into the fantasy world of pleasure.
Okada bought two square cakes of fried shark meat from a sidewalk vendor. The heat of the evening and closeness of the crowd made the smell of the cooking fat and fish particularly pungent.
He walked on, adrift in this sea of people. The lights and heat and smells engulfed him.
Somewhere on this planet there might be an occupation more stressful than that of a spy, but it would be difficult to imagine what it would be. A spy played a deadly game, was always onstage, spent every waking moment waiting for the ax to fall. In the beginning it had been easier for Masataka Okada, but now, as the full implications
