Hard Rain
By Barry Eisler
Signet Book
Copyright © 2004
Barry Eisler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0451212460
Chapter One
Once you get past the overall irony of the situation, you realize that killing a
guy in the middle of his own health club has a lot to recommend it.
The target was a yakuza, an iron freak named Ishihara who worked out every day
in a gym he owned in Roppongi, one of Tokyo's entertainment districts. Tatsu had
told me the hit had to look like natural causes, like they always do, so I
was glad to be working in a venue where it was far from unthinkable that someone
might keel over from a fatal aneurysm induced by exertion, or suffer an unlucky
fall onto a steel bar, or undergo some other tragic mishap while using one of
the complicated exercise machines.
One of these eventualities might even be immortalized in the warnings corporate
lawyers would insist on placing on the next generation of exercise equipment, to
notify the public of yet another unnatural use for which the machine was not
intended and for which the manufacturer would have to remain blameless. Over the
years, my work has made me the anonymous recipient of at least two such legal
encomia-one on a bridge traversing the polluted waters of the Sumida River, in
which a certain politician drowned in 1982 ("Warning-Do Not Climb On These
Bars"); another, a decade later, following the aquatic electrocution of an
unusually diligent banker, on the packaging of hair dryers ("Warning-Do Not
Use While Bathing").
The health club was also convenient because I wouldn't have to worry about
fingerprints. In Japan, where costumes are a national pastime, a weightlifter
wouldn't pump iron without wearing stylish padded gloves any more than a
politician would take a bribe in his underwear. It was a warm early spring for
Tokyo, portending, they said, a fine cherry blossom season, and where else but
at a gym could a man in gloves have gone unnoticed?
In my business, going unnoticed is half the game. People put out signals-body
language, gait, clothes, facial expression, posture, attitude, speech,
mannerisms-that can tell you where they're from, what they do, who they are.
Most importantly, do they fit in. Because if you don't fit in, the target will
spot you, and after that you won't be able to get close enough to do it right.
Or the rare uncorrupt cop will spot you, and you'll have some explaining to
do. Or a countersurveillance team will spot you, and then-congratulations!-the
target will be you.
But if you're attentive, you begin to understand that the identifying signals
are a science, not an art. You watch, you imitate, you acquire. Eventually, you
can shadow different targets through different societal ecosystems, remaining
anonymous in all of them.
Anonymity wasn't easy for me in Japan when my parentage was a matter of public
record and schoolyard taunts. But today, you wouldn't spot the Caucasian in my
face unless someone tipped you off that it was there to be found. My American
mother wouldn't have minded that. She had always wanted me to fit in in Japan,
and was glad that my father's Japanese features had prevailed in that initial
genetic struggle for dominance. And the plastic surgery I had undergone when I
returned to Japan after my fling with U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam largely
completed the job that chance and nature had begun.
The story my signals would tell the yakuza was simple. He'd only begun seeing me
at his gym recently, but I was already obviously in shape. So I wasn't some
middle-aged guy who'd decided to take up weightlifting to try and regain a lost
college-era physique. The more likely explanation would be that I worked for a
company that had transferred me to Tokyo, and, if they had sprung for digs near
Roppongi, maybe in Minami-Aoyama or Azabu, I must be someone reasonably
important and well compensated. That I was apparently into body building at all
at this stage in my life probably meant affairs with young women, for whom a
youthful physique might ameliorate the unavoidable emotional consequences of
sleeping with an older man in what at root would be little more than an exchange
of sex and the illusion of immortality for Ferragamo handbags and the other
implicit currencies of such arrangements. All of which the yakuza would
understand, and even respect.
In fact, my recent appearance at the yakuza's gym had nothing to do with a
company transfer-it was more like a business trip. After all, I was in Tokyo
just to do a job. When the job was finished, I would leave. I'd done some things
to generate animosity when I'd been living here, and the relevant parties might
still be looking for me, even after I'd been away for a year, so a short stay
was all I could sensibly afford.
Tatsu had given me a dossier on the yakuza a month earlier, when he'd found me
and persuaded me to take the job. From the contents, I would have concluded that
the target was just mob muscle, but I knew he must be more than that if Tatsu
wanted him eliminated. I hadn't asked. I only wanted the particulars that would
help me get close. The rest was irrelevant.
The dossier had included the yakuza's cell phone number. I had fed it to Harry,
who, compulsive hacker that he was, had long since penetrated the cellular
network control centers of Japan's three telco providers. Harry's computers were
monitoring the movements of the yakuza's cell phone within the network. Any time
the phone got picked up by the tower that covered the area around the yakuza's
health club, Harry paged me.
Tonight, the page had come at just after eight o'clock, while I was reading in
my room at the New Otani hotel in Akasaka-Mitsuke. The club closed at eight, I
knew, so if the yakuza was working out there after hours there was a good
possibility he'd be alone. What I'd been waiting for.
My workout gear was already in a bag, and I was out the door within minutes. I
caught a cab a slight distance from the hotel, not wanting a doorman to hear or
remember where I might be going, and five minutes later I exited at the corner
of Roppongi-dori and Gaienhigashi-dori in Roppongi. I hated to use such a direct
route because doing so afforded me limited opportunity to ensure that I wasn't
being followed, but I had only a little time to pull this off the way I'd
planned, and I decided it was worth the risk.
I had been watching the yakuza for over a month now, and knew his routines. I'd
learned that he liked to vary the times of his workouts, sometimes arriving at
the gym early in the morning, sometimes at night. Probably he assumed the
resulting unpredictability would make him hard to get to.
He was half right. Unpredictability is the key to being a hard target, but the
concept applies to both time and place. Half-measures like this guy's will
protect you from some of the people some of the time, but they won't save you
for long from someone like me.
Strange, how people can take adequate, even strong security measures in some
respects, while leaving themselves vulnerable in others. Like double-locking the
front door and leaving the windows wide open.
Sometimes the phenomenon is caused by fear. Fear not so much of the
requirements, but rather of the consequences of life as a hard target. Seriously
protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that
most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance.
You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If
you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you'd wind up buried in an obscure
municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no
mourning. It's natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.
Other times there's a form of denial at work. Circuitous routes, extensive
security checks, an ongoing internal dialogue consisting of If I were trying to
get to me, how would I do it? all require a deep acceptance of the notion
that there are people out there who have both the motive and the means to cut
short your time on Earth. This notion is innately uncomfortable for the human
psyche, so much so that it produces enormous stress even for soldiers in battle.
A lot of guys, the first time they come under close-range fire, they're shocked.
"Why's he trying to kill me?" they're asking themselves. "What did I ever do to
him?"
Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you're alone in the
house, to ensure that an intruder isn't hiding there? Now, if you really
believed that the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would
you behave the same way? Of course not. But it's more comfortable to believe the
danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only half-heartedly. That's
denial.
Finally, and most obviously, there is laziness. Who has the time or energy to
inspect the family car for improvised explosive devices before every drive? Who
can afford a two-hour, roundabout route to get to a place that could have
been reached directly in ten minutes? Who wants to pass up a restaurant or bar
just because the only seats available face the wall, not the entrance?
Rhetorical questions, but I know how Crazy Jake would have answered. The living,
he would have said. And the ones who intend to go on that way.
Which leads to an easy rationalization, one that I'm sure is common to people
who have taken lives the way I have. If he'd really wanted to live, the
rationalization goes, I wouldn't have been able to get to him. He wouldn't have
permitted himself that weakness, the one that did him in.
The yakuza's weakness was his addiction to weights. Who knows what fueled it-a
history of childhood bullying that made him want to appear visibly strong
afterward, an attempt to overcome a feeling of inadequacy born of being
naturally slighter of build than Caucasians, some suppressed homoeroticism like
the one that drove Mishima. Maybe some of the same impulses that had led him to
become a gangster to begin with.
His obsession had nothing to do with health, of course. In fact, the guy was an
obvious steroid abuser. His neck was so thick it looked as though he could slide
a tie up over his head without having to loosen the knot, and he sported acne
so severe that the club's stark incandescent lighting, designed to show off to
maximum effect the rips and cuts its members had developed in their bodies, cast
small shadows over the pocked landscape of his face. His testicles were
probably the size of raisins, his blood pressure likely rampaging through an
overworked heart.
I'd also seen him explode into the kind of abrupt, unprovoked violence that is
another symptom of steroid abuse. One night, someone I hadn't seen before, no
doubt one of the club's civilian members who liked the location and thought
that rubbing elbows with reputed gangsters made them tougher by osmosis, started
removing some of the numerous iron plates that were weighing down the bar the
yakuza had been using to bench-press. The yakuza had walked away from the
station, probably to take a break, and the new guy must have mistakenly assumed
this meant he was through. The guy was pretty sizable himself, his colorful
Spandex sleeveless top showing off a weightlifter's chest and arms.
Someone probably should have warned him. But the club's membership consisted
primarily of chinpira-low-level young yakuza and wanna-be punks-not exactly good
Samaritan types who were interested in helping their fellow man. Anyway, you
have to be at least mildly stupid to start disassembling a bar like the one the
yakuza was using without looking around for permission first. There were
probably a hundred and fifty kilos on it, maybe more.
Someone nudged the yakuza and pointed. The yakuza, who had been squatting,
reared up and bellowed, "Orya!" loud enough to vibrate the plate glass in the
front of the rectangular room. What the fuck!
Everyone looked up, as startled as if there had been an explosion-even the new
guy who had been so clueless just an instant earlier. Still bellowing
expletives, the yakuza strode directly to the bench-press station, doing a good
job of using his voice, either by instinct or design, to disorient his victim.
Everything about the yakuza-his words, his tone, his movement and posture-
screamed Attack! But the man was too frozen, either by fear or denial, to move
off the line of assault. And although he was holding a ten-kilo iron plate with
edges considerably harder than the yakuza's cranium, the man did nothing but
drop his mouth open, perhaps in surprise, perhaps in inchoate and certainly
futile apology.
The yakuza blasted into him like a rhino, his shoulder driving into the man's
stomach. I saw the man try to brace for the impact, but again he failed to move
off the line of attack and his attempt was largely useless. The yakuza drove
him backward into the wall, then unleashed a flurry of crude punches to his head
and neck. The man, in shock now and running on autopilot, dropped the plate and
managed to raise his arms to ward off a few of the blows, but the yakuza,
still bellowing, slapped the attempted blocks out of the way and kept on
punching. I saw one of his shots connect to the left side of the man's neck, to
the real estate over the carotid sinus, and the man began to crumble as his
nervous system overcompensated from the shock of the blow by reducing blood
pressure to the brain. The yakuza, feet planted widely as though he had an axe
and was splitting logs, continued to hammer at the top of his victim's head and
neck. The man fell to the floor, but retained enough consciousness to curl up
and protect himself to some extent from the hail of kicks that followed.
Huffing and swearing, the yakuza bent and caught the prostrate man's right ankle
between an enormous biceps and forearm. For a moment, I thought he was going to
apply a jujitsu leglock and try to break something. Instead, he straightened and
proceeded to drag the man's prone form to the club's entrance and out into the
street.
He returned a moment later, alone, and, after taking a moment to catch his
breath, resumed his rightful place on the bench without looking at anyone else
in the room. Everyone returned to what they were doing: his affiliates, because
they didn't care; the civilians, because they were unnerved. It was as though
nothing had happened, although the silence in the club indicated that indeed
something had.
A part of my mind that's always running in the background logged what I saw as
the yakuza's assets: raw strength, experience with violence, familiarity with
principles of continuous attack. Under weaknesses, I placed lack of
self-control, shortness of breath after a brief and one-sided fight, relatively
minimal damage caused despite ferocity of assault.
Continues...
Excerpted from Hard Rain
by Barry Eisler
Copyright © 2004 by Barry Eisler.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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