A Lonely Resurrection by Barry Eisler Read Free Book Online

secrecy on this? Sounds like a few leaks would be just the thing.”
    He cocked his head to the side, as though marveling at how my thinking could be so crude. “If such leaks were timed incorrectly,” he said, “they would be as useless as a powerful but misplaced explosive charge.”
    He was telling me he was up to something. He was also telling me not to ask.
    “So you used this network to find me,” I said.
    “Yes. I kept the mug shots that were taken of you at Metropolitan Police Headquarters when you were detained after the incident outside of Yokosuka naval base. I had these photographs fed into the computer so the network could look for you. I instructed the technicians to focus their initial efforts on Osaka. Still, because the system turns up so many false positives, the problem took a long time and significant human resources to solve. I have been looking for you for almost a year, Rain-san.”
    I realized from what he was telling me that the relentless advance of technology was going to force me to return to the nomadic existence I had adopted before my return to Japan, when I had wandered the earth without an identity, drifting from one mercenary conflict to another. There was no pleasure in the thought. I had done my penance for Crazy Jake and didn’t wish to repeat the experience.
    “The system is not perfect,” he went on. “There are numerous gaps in coverage, for example, and, as I mentioned, too many false positives. Still, over time, we were able to identify certain commonalities in your movements. A high incidence of sightings in Miyakojima, for example. From there, it was simple enough to check the records of the local ward office for new resident registrations, weed out false leads, and uncover your address. Eventually, we were able to track you sufficiently closely so that I could travel to Osaka and follow you here tonight.”
    “Why didn’t you just come to my apartment?”
    He smiled. “Where you live is always where you are most vulnerable because it represents a possible choke point for an ambush. And I would not wish to surprise a man like you where he felt most vulnerable. Safer, I judged, to approach you on neutral ground, where you might even see me coming,
ne?”
    I nodded, acknowledging his point. If you’re a likely target for a kidnapping or assassination attempt, or for any other kind of ambush, the bad guys can only get to you where they know you’re going to be. Meaning outside your home, most likely, or the place where you work. Or at some point in between where they can rely on you to show up—maybe the only bridge crossing between your home and office, something like that. These choke points are where you need to be the most sensitive to signs of danger.
    “Well?” he asked, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Did you see me?”
    I shrugged. “Yes.”
    He smiled again. “I knew you would.”
    “Or you could have called.”
    “In which case, you might have disappeared again after hearing my voice.”
    “That’s true.”
    “All in all, I think this was the best approach.”
    “The way you went about this,” I said, “a lot of people were involved. People in your organization, maybe people with the CIA.”
    He might have said something to intimate that any such lack of security was my fault, for having failed to contact him as I had suggested I would. But that wouldn’t have been Tatsu’s style. He had his interests in this matter, as I had mine, and he wouldn’t have blamed me for disappearing any more than he expected me to blame him for tracking me down.
    “There has been no mention of your name in any of this,” he told me. “Only a photograph. And the technicians tasked with checking for the matches the system spits out have no knowledge regarding the basis of my interest. To them, you are simply one of many criminals the Metropolitan Police Force is tracking. And I have taken other steps to ensure security, such as coming alone tonight and informing