Hard Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

my current name and address with my old friends at
    Christians In Action. Which he could very easily do.
    "I thought you wanted me to retire," I said again, knowing I'd already
    lost.
    He reached into his breast pocket and took out a manila envelope.
    Placed it on the table between us.
    "This is a very important job, Rain-san," he said. "I wouldn't ask for
    this favor if it weren't."
    I knew what I would find in the envelope. A name. A photograph.
    Locations of work and residence. Known vulnerabilities. The
    insistence on the appearance of 'natural causes' would be implicit, or
    delivered orally.
    I made no move to touch the envelope. "There's one thing I need from
    you before I can agree to any of this," I told him.
    He nodded. "You want to know how I found you."
    "Correct."
    He sighed. "If I share that information with you, what would stop you
    from disappearing again, even more effectively this time?"
    "Probably nothing. On the other hand, if you don't tell me, there's no
    possibility that I would be willing to work with you on whatever you've
    got in that envelope. It's up to you."
    He took his time, as though pondering the pros and cons, but Tatsu
    always thinks several moves ahead and I knew he would have anticipated
    this. The hesitation was theater, designed to convince me afterward
    that I had won something valuable.
    "Customs Authority records," he said finally.
    I wasn't particularly surprised. I had known there was some risk that
    Tatsu would learn of Holtzer's death and assume I had been behind it,
    that if he did so he would be able to fix my movements between the time
    he last saw me in Tokyo and the day Holtzer died outside of D.C." less
    than a week apart. But killing Holtzer had been important to me, and I
    had been prepared to pay a price for the indulgence. Tatsu was simply
    presenting me with the bill.
    I was silent, and after a moment he continued. "An individual
    traveling under the name and passport of Fujiwara Junichi left Tokyo
    for San Francisco last October thirtieth.
    There is no record of his having returned to Japan. The logical
    assumption is that he stayed in the United States."
    In a sense, he did. Fujiwara Junichi is my Japanese birth name. When
    I learned that Holtzer and the CIA had discovered where I was living in
    Tokyo, I knew the name was blown and no longer usable. I had traveled
    to the States to kill Holtzer under the Fujiwara passport and then
    retired it, returning to Japan under a different identity that I had
    previously established for such a contingency. I had hoped that anyone
    looking for me might be diverted by this false clue and conclude that I
    had relocated to the States. Most people would have. But not Tatsu.
    "Somehow, I could not see you living in the States," he went on. "You
    seemed ... comfortable in Japan. I did not believe you were ready to
    leave."
    "I suppose you might have been on to something there."
    He shrugged. I asked myself, if my old friend hadn't really left
    Japan, but only wanted me to believe that he had, what would he have
    done? He would have reentered the country under a new name. He would
    have then relocated to a new city, because he had become too well known
    in Tokyo."
    He paused, and I recognized the employment of a fortune-teller's trick,
    in which the party ostensibly charged with supplying information
    instead cleverly elicits it, probing under the guise of informing. So
    far, Tatsu had offered only suggestions and generalities, and I wasn't
    going to fill in the blanks for him by confirming or denying any of
    it.
    "Perhaps he would have used the same new name to reenter the country,
    and then to relocate within it," he said, after a moment.
    But I hadn't used the same new name when I had relocated. Doing so
    would have presented too obvious a nexus for a determined tracker to
    follow. Tatsu must not have been sure of that, and, as I suspected,
    was hoping to learn more by getting me to react. If I were to slip and
    confirm that I had