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Jordan sat at a small round table at the Taza Café in the Hamburg airport, absently stirring an espresso. He wore an opaque pair of aviators and had a small bandage taped over the bridge of his nose. The nose appeared slightly swollen still and there was fading yellow bruising. He wore a cheap brown wool suit, identifiably Eastern European in a Soviet Ostalgie sort of way. In his lap he held a ticket stub and a passport in the name of Dieter Boll whose pages he absently riffled. He had flown the Lisbon–Hamburg leg after an overnight Dulles to Lisbon via Heathrow and was pretty glazed.
“Guten tag, Herr Boll. May I?” the stranger said in heavily accented English as he pulled up a chair and sat down at the table. “We will change here, all right?”
As he spoke he slid an envelope into Jordan’s hand and took the passport and ticket, tucking them into his folded copy of Die Zeit. He pushed back his chair and stood with a curt nod, saying, “Have a pleasant flight, Mr. Kramaric.”
Leaving a couple of euros on the table, Jordan walked to the restroom. He locked himself in a stall and opened the envelope. Inside was a round-trip coach ticket to Hong Kong along with a well-worn Croatian passport and a credit card. The credit card and passport were in the name of Antonin Kramaric. He crumpled the envelope and threw it in the trash. He washed his hands and dabbed at his face with a wet paper towel. His nose still hurt like hell and his eyes burned. He gingerly took off the shades and studied his face in the mirror. Where the nose had been broken there was now a pronounced Roman dip. Also his eyes were now a little wider and larger and subtly sloped down at the outside, giving him a vaguely morose Slavic look. The skin was still puffy and red at the corners where the lids had been cut and sutured. Taken with the short, short hair and the scruffy facial growth, the cumulative change was substantial. If a former colleague had passed him in the airport, Jordan doubted he would have looked twice.
* * *
“What’s Parrish’s status?” Sam asked, brushing the rain from his jacket with a glove before folding it neatly over the back of a chair.
“So far so dull,” Dennis said without looking up from the screen. “Manny put him on the Lisbon flight. All the handoffs have been clean.” He selected several files, double-checked against a list, then hit Delete. He exhaled and sat back in his chair. “I still think it’s an excess of caution.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Sam said.
“No one’s looking.”
“No, I suppose not. But even so, well, it would be irresponsible to lead anyone to our doorstep. Better part of valor, right?”
“Sure.” The chair creaked in protest as Dennis pushed back. “Server’s clean. He was never here.”
“Thank you. As you say, excessive. But I appreciate it. Going soft.”
Dennis smiled. “Well, if it all plays out...”
“Big if.”
“Sure. But if... Tuscany, maybe. Little palazzo with a garden to putter around in, maybe a vineyard.”
Sam laughed drily. “Your lips to God’s ear.”
* * *
The woman in 19C had the longest fingernails Jordan had ever seen. She was playing a game on the touchscreen monitor at her seat. It looked like a Japanese mash-up of sudoku and Scrabble. There was a row of kanji characters in a little box at the top of the screen and the woman would select them one at a time with the curved bright purple nail of her left index finger and drag them sharply across to make words on the line below. Each time a word was complete, she’d tap a blue box with her right pinky nail and the letters would fly back to the top with a cheerful puff of animated smoke. She seemed to be doing very well. Jordan was in 20D, one row behind and across the aisle. The man in the seat next to him was sharply thin and smelled terrible. He kept falling asleep, then jerking awake every time his head lolled forward. The elderly woman in the window seat was visibly outraged and had pressed herself against the bulkhead. There was a tourist group filling the front third of the plane and a young boy directly behind Jordan’s seat who took a break from kicking it just often enough to make the resumption doubly irritating.
He’d been traveling nonstop for almost two days now, over thirty hours in the air and another fifteen in airports across Europe and Asia. At every stop he had been met by someone new who had given him new tickets and documentation. A blur. He had sunk into the rhythm of flight. It felt like he was traveling in his own little bubble of space-time like the stick man in a freshman physics lecture, little chalk rocket, alarm clock.
* * *
The immigration hall at Narita was mobbed. Two or three international flights must have landed within minutes of each other. Jordan shuffled through the serpentine queue for foreign nationals. He glanced quickly at his current passport to refresh himself on the particulars. Gordon Patterson, thirty-nine. Seattle. As the line switched back around the stanchions, he filed past the same twenty or thirty faces again and then again. Most looked as tired and rumpled as he felt. He tried to remember if he’d seen any of them before the last flight. He didn’t think so. Would someone be following him? Were they watching now? He had to assume yes.
And then he was next. The immigration officer waved him forward with a desultory flap of his hand. He wore white cotton disposable gloves. He thumbed open Jordan’s passport with a deliberate casualness.
“Business or pleasure, Mr. Patterson?”
Right now. He could do it right now. End it, jump off the carousel. He imagined himself saying the words in hushed urgent tones: “You need to contact the American Embassy right now. I am not Gordon Patterson. My name is Jordan Parrish and I have been kidnapped. People are threatening my family. Pick up the phone, call the embassy, take me into custody.” The nightmare would be over. But then what? Sam would know. He’d kill them all. Jordan believed it absolutely.
“Pleasure,” he said, and the full weight of it fell on his shoulders, the impossibility of escape, the terrible senseless loss. His vision misted over as the officer’s stamp thudded twice.
“Enjoy your stay in Japan.”
He was met in baggage claim by a driver with the lithe build and precisely tousled mop of a young Paul Weller. The traditional black jacket was worn over a casually underbuttoned white shirt and jeans and loafers that would have looked right at home at the Bridgehampton Polo Club. He was holding a sign that said Patterson and he nodded when his eyes caught Jordan’s. “Hey, Mr. Patterson, how was your flight?” When Jordan looked at him blankly he went on. “Any checked bags, sir?”
“Oh. No, I don’t think so,” Jordan mumbled thickly.
“Okay, sir. Follow me. Car’s just outside.” Taking Jordan’s battered carry-on, he waded into the mass of humanity flowing like tar toward the exits.
* * *
Jordan sank into the plush gray wool-upholstered seat in the back of the Toyota Century. The car’s V12 purred with understated power. The driver, who had introduced himself as Kai, drove without speaking, a small creased chauffeur’s cap perched on the back of his head. Tokyo at night was a bewildering maze of narrow wet streets and sweeping thoroughfares all dazzlingly lit by the ubiquitous illuminated billboards and video screens. Times Square would be just another intersection here. That old movie Blade Runner captured the feeling pretty perfectly, Jordan thought, the cacophony of light as whirling, pulsing greens, reds and whites competed with one another for the eye’s attention. The frenetic saturation was so complete that a simple black-and-white billboard of a grizzled Scott Glenn, in a tieless tux, hawking Suntory Whisky, held his eye like the horizon on a heaving sea. The hint of a smile playing at the corner of Glenn’s mouth seemed to confirm the absurdity of Jordan’s situation, just as the rheumy blue eyes acknowledged its tragedy.
The route seemed to wind and double back on itself as the driver whipped down narrow side streets and alleys that suddenly burst out into riotous intersections. Jordan couldn’t tell if Kai was worried about being followed or was just showing off, but he sat back passively as the city unfolded itself through his window. A red-and-white metal tower rose up in the distance, a garishly overdressed twin of Eiffel’s original in Paris. In the foreground a massive shopping complex shone in gleaming curves of steel and glass. They drove on past expensive retail stores and down narrow roads choked with people streaming in and out of bars and clubs.
Kai grinned in the rearview mirror, speaking for the first time since they had gotten in the car. “Roppongi. This is where all the gaijin come. Good time.” The venom in his voice belied the wide smile in the mirror. They continued up a gradual hill and the bright neon gave way to dull cinder-block buildings with only token bits of tile work to differentiate them from all the other grim functional structures that had sprouted like mushrooms from the rubble of the Second World War.
At the end of a little cul-de-sac the car stopped in front of a plain brown structure, one of a set of conjoined triplets, with the number 47-2 painted in white on the door. Kai switched off the car and said, “Here we are, Mr. Patterson. Welcome home.”