John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories (27 page)

I blew out a long breath and kept pacing. I hadn’t wanted to face it; that’s why I hadn’t thought it through. But my unconscious had been trying to tell me anyway. I’d been an idiot to try to ignore that feeling in my gut. Another thing I knew not to do in the jungle, and had to relearn in the city.

All right. Assume it was staged. How?

Well, let’s say…someone cued the mistress that I was coming and it was time for her to pull out. Maybe someone parked on the street, communicating with a radio. I couldn’t really know—there had been a number of parked cars, and I hadn’t checked them at all closely. Another lesson, I realized: I’d approached Fukumoto’s house oblivious to how I would defend the terrain if
I
were the one waiting for me. I’d done it differently to some degree at the New Otani just a little while earlier, and I wondered now whether that hadn’t been my unconscious, trying to signal me that I needed to sharpen up. Regardless, I hadn’t adequately placed myself in the enemy’s shoes in Fukumoto’s neighborhood, hadn’t examined myself through the eyes of potential opposition. I’d been lucky to live to enjoy that lesson, and I would make damn sure to apply it going forward.

All right,
how
wouldn’t be all that hard. But then
who
?

McGraw was the obvious answer. Who else could it be? He was the one who’d given me the file. I’d shown him I was impatient, hadn’t I? I’d wanted those yakuza files first. And he’d noticed the bag I was carrying, too, first at the Chinese restaurant where we’d met, and then at other places as well. He was sharp—he’d know the bag meant I was on the run, and therefore feeling pressed, and therefore eager to resolve this as quickly as I could. He’d know I would head to Fukumoto’s house as soon as I had the file with the location.

But…
why
?

Had he wanted me to walk into Fukumoto’s house to be ambushed? But that didn’t make sense. If they’d had a spotter outside alerting the mistress, they could as easily have alerted the yakuza security inside. They could have been waiting on the far side of the garage and gunned me down the instant the door closed. They wouldn’t even have gotten my blood on Fukumoto’s nice carpeting. Instead, I was the one who had surprised them.

It felt like someone had greased the skids for me. Whoever it was had wanted Fukumoto dead. But that didn’t make sense.
I
was the one who wanted Fukumoto dead. I’d proposed the hit to McGraw as a solution to my problem with the yakuza. It was my idea, not his. There had been the thing in Ueno with the
chinpira
, which had been a total coincidence, and then…

I shook my head. It was crazy. Once I started questioning one thing, it called into question everything.

Then maybe you’re just being paranoid. A few coincidences, that’s all it was. It happens.

No. That felt like denial to me, like a narcotic. Of course I didn’t want to question everything—it was too much effort, too disorienting, too frightening. But dying would be worse, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t a question of how it all made me feel. I had to set that aside. What mattered was the truth.

All right. What do you know? Not what you think you know, but what you know for sure. Start with that.

Really just one thing: that McGraw had wanted Ozawa dead. That file had been pretty complete, and it had gotten me to the house and then to the
sentō
. And McGraw had proposed the whole thing as a quid pro quo for helping me out with Fukumoto. I looked at it from every angle I could imagine, and I couldn’t find a way around it: the one fact I had so far was that McGraw wanted Ozawa dead.

But someone had wanted Fukumoto dead, too. Someone who’d made sure I was able to get inside his house. Who else could it have been but McGraw? But if he
had
wanted Fukumoto dead, what was it, just a crazy coincidence that I had proposed it to him?

No. Coincidences like that don’t happen.

I paced among the markers, frustrated, sweat trickling down my back. I could sense the shape, the contours, but I couldn’t see the details.

Okay, how about this. McGraw knew where you’d be meeting Miyamoto to hand off the cash that morning in Ueno. He sent those
chinpira
to provoke you. How many times has he told you he knows about your temper? He knew you’d do what you did, that you’d have a problem with the yakuza as a result, that you’d propose killing them as a solution. He’d let you think it was your idea, but that would be just a manipulation.

It didn’t feel quite right. Almost, but not quite. Knowing I would kill one of the
chinpira
…it was just too uncertain. McGraw was good, I’d seen that, but he wasn’t psychic. It had to be something else.

All right, what if they had just robbed you? What if the plan had been to get to you before the exchange, beat you up, take the bag, and run? You’d be fifty grand in hock to the CIA. You’d be desperate, trying to get McGraw to believe you hadn’t just stolen the money yourself. At which point, he would have proposed a way for you to pay off your debt: kill these people for me.

Jesus. What happened instead…he’d just been improvising. Things hadn’t turned out the way he’d been expecting, so he adapted, created a plan B, achieved the same result.

But what about Pig Eyes, at the Kodokan? He was trying to kill you, no question. If he’d succeeded, how would you have carried out McGraw’s hits?

I kept pacing, examining the pieces from different angles, weighing them, rearranging them, seeing which I could get to cohere.

Pig Eyes…that would have been part of the original fuck-up. I wasn’t supposed to kill anyone in Ueno; it was supposed to be an easy ambush and robbery. But I
did
kill someone. And then Mad Dog, who doesn’t know McGraw’s full plans or whose pride is so wounded he doesn’t care, gets his crew and tracks me down on his own. McGraw doesn’t know about it…doesn’t even want it, because it would mess up his plans. Yes, that’s why he had looked surprised when I’d first told him about what happened at the Kodokan. The thing about the yakuza putting a contract out on me had been bullshit, intended to manipulate me, and then I responded, “Yeah, I know, they just tried to kill me.” It had thrown him, albeit only for a moment. And then he was back on his game. Christ, he was good.

All right, but what about the Fukumoto file? It wasn’t very complete. If McGraw had really wanted Fukumoto dead, why didn’t he give me an actionable file, like the one he gave me for Ozawa?

Because from McGraw’s perspective, Fukumoto was supposed to be random. Not something he’d been preparing for. If he’d handed you a detailed, actionable file, you might have been suspicious. All he needed was to get you to the house, and the girl would get you inside. You followed those cues like a pigeon pecking a lever.

Why, though? What was McGraw up to? What was the game? I didn’t know. But whatever it was, it involved taking out Ozawa, the head of the LDP Executive Council; Fukumoto, the head of the Gokumatsu-gumi, Tokyo’s biggest yakuza family; and Fukumoto’s son Mad Dog, presumably the father’s heir.

I paused. Why was I assuming McGraw wanted Mad Dog dead? If Mad Dog were in fact the heir, might it not be the case that killing the father was intended to pave the way for the son?

But then why manipulate me into proposing to kill Mad Dog, too?

Remember, he was improvising. Maybe that wasn’t part of the original plan. McGraw was controlling the order of the files he gave you, remember? First Ozawa. Then Fukumoto Senior. Then Fukumoto Junior. He was saving Junior for last because unlike the first two, he doesn’t want Mad Dog killed at all. Remember, at Inokashira he tried to talk you out of going after the son.

I still didn’t quite see it. Because, in the end, McGraw did get me the file. I’d just retrieved and memorized it the day before. Was it filled with bullshit? A wild goose chase, intended just to placate and distract me?

Or maybe it’s intended to fix you in time and place. Then they can easily clip the guy who did Ozawa and Fukumoto. No loose ends
.

But the problem with Mad Dog’s file was that it wasn’t specific enough. The same generality, the same surfeit of nexuses that would prevent me from fixing Mad Dog would prevent anyone from properly fixing me. Plus, if the idea was to get me to go after Mad Dog so I would fix myself in time and place for an ambush, why had McGraw tried to talk me out of going after Mad Dog entirely?

I chewed that one over. I decided it was just as McGraw said: he’d been looking at me as nothing more than a bagman, a useful idiot, someone expendable. That is: manipulate me into taking out Ozawa and Fukumoto Senior. If there’s a problem, I take a fall; if it goes smoothly, McGraw takes me out. In the first instance, he denies the connection; in the second, he severs it. And then he had second thoughts. Why? Because I’d done better than he’d been expecting. Much better. He’d realized maybe I could be more useful to him and his program, whatever it was, alive than dead. And when I’d resisted, he’d decided,
Okay, so be it, we’ll stick with plan A
.

Which was?

Manipulate you into clipping Ozawa and Fukumoto Senior. After which, the one who gets clipped is you.

But if that was the case, why not do me himself? We’d met just the day before, at Inokashira. He knew I was coming. For that matter, he knew I was going to be at the New Otani just an hour ago. Neither would have been that hard.

Maybe he was going to at Inokashira, and then he’d changed his mind because he thought you’d be more useful alive, like you said. Or, more likely, he just doesn’t want to do it himself. That’s not his style. He manipulates other people into getting their hands dirty on his behalf. He doesn’t take those kinds of risks himself.

Not unless he absolutely has to, anyway.

One thing was clear. I had to up my game. I’d been looking at the world as though down deep it was no more than what its surface indicated. But there were levels I hadn’t sensed, connections I hadn’t considered. There was a world beneath the world—the real world. And I needed to start living in it, or I was going to die there.

All right. What’s your next move?

My next move was that every time McGraw wanted to meet me, or otherwise did something that could fix me in time and place, I had to assume it was an ambush, and adopt appropriate countermeasures. I’d been hellishly lucky he hadn’t dropped me already. What was that Churchill saying? “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” That’s what this felt like. Now the trick was to stop making myself an easy target.

I asked myself if I wasn’t being paranoid. In the last several days, I’d killed six people. What I was feeling now…could it be just the product of a stunted conscience, disturbed in its slumber?

All right, look at it this way: any downside to approaching McGraw as if your concerns are legitimate?

I couldn’t think of any.

And any downside to approaching McGraw as though he’s been telling you nothing but the truth?

Hmm. Just an ambush and my own violent death, I supposed.

Good. Not such a hard decision, then.

If I was right, McGraw was going to make some kind of move soon. I’d done what he wanted. From here on out, all I would represent to him was a liability. How had he put it at Taihō, the night I’d first proposed—or he’d manipulated me into proposing—that I kill Fukumoto Senior and his Mad Dog son?
This is a business relationship. You provide some benefit, and you represent a cost
. Well, the benefit was done; now would be the time for cost-cutting. I’d have to be careful as hell, but I realized that for the moment I had an advantage: he thought I was dumb. And maybe I had been, but I was getting smarter now. I’d seen something and he didn’t know I’d seen it.

You know, the thing about ambushes is, they can work both ways
.

That was true. McGraw could propose a meeting, think he was laying a trap…and I could walk up behind him and blow his face off through the back of his head. I didn’t need a rock for this one. I had that yakuza’s Hi Power.

The problem was, I wasn’t
sure
. Was I sure enough to completely revise my view of what was going on, and take appropriate security measures? Hell yes. But was I sure enough to drop my CIA case officer without even knowing what he’d been up to or what he’d mixed me up in?

No. I wasn’t. That one sounded like out of the frying pan, into the fire. If the frying pan got unbearable, I’d jump wherever I had to. But I wasn’t there yet. I needed to keep cool. Be smart. And remain patient. McGraw was going to make a move. I could feel it. I just didn’t know what it was going to be. But I would soon enough.

chapter
twenty-seven

A
s it happened, I didn’t have to wait long for my break.

I’d pulled back from scouting the locations where I was supposed to have a shot at nailing Mad Dog. Too much risk the person getting nailed would be me. I checked in with my answering service regularly, but no word from McGraw. I had time on my hands and would start to get antsy, then remind myself the smart play was just to wait.

I was spending every morning and day with Sayaka. The only times we were apart were when she had to go to class or work. In bed, it seemed like every time was better than the one before it. I didn’t know why, exactly. Probably because we were getting more comfortable with each other. But also, I thought, because we were getting more comfortable with ourselves. I loved how unselfconscious she was. She still didn’t like my seeing her legs, but even that, I felt, was going to fade over time, and on everything else she was amazingly unaffected. She wanted to try everything—sex was like a giant experiment for her, a limitless, undiscovered country, and her lack of inhibition in bed was a giant turn-on for me. A few times she would do something and then catch herself, as though realizing maybe she was going too far, and then she would see how much I loved it and she would just plunge ahead. I realized I’d gone into this thing unconsciously assuming I’d be teaching and guiding her. Well, whatever I had to teach, she’d learned it in about a day. Since then, she’d been teaching me. Occasionally, I’d catch a flash of the toughness, the guardedness she’d displayed when I’d first met her and on the subsequent nights I’d come to see her at the hotel, but those moments only served to remind me of how much she was trusting me, how far she was letting me in, and moved me tremendously. Sometimes I’d worry I sounded sappy, and think maybe I should be a little more self-censored, but whatever I said or did, she always seemed to respond in kind. It was overwhelming, certainly more than I’d been expecting and more than I could really grasp. Underneath it all, I still felt guilty for what I knew in my heart was a horrible deceit. But I couldn’t tell her, and I also couldn’t stop what was happening between us. Once I had sorted out McGraw and everything else, maybe Sayaka and I would talk about where all this was going and what it meant. But there was no rush on that. As long as we kept getting those precious morning hours in her bed, I didn’t want to think about the future, and I don’t think Sayaka cared.