FUCK, SHIT, COCK...
“Fuck, shit, cock, twat, suck, bitch.” No, bitch was five... He had been absolutely sure. It seemed so right but now the certainty was fading. “Ass1, ass2, ass3...” He stared at the keys, focusing on the left side—q-w-e-r-t-a-s-d-f-z-x-c-v—then he saw it. He knew it was right even before he typed it. He entered it fast with his left hand: a-r-s-e, tik-a-da-tik. The JET logo spun apart and he was at the desktop, a picture of Terry and five smiling JET teachers standing in front of the Hub of Roppongi. He was in.
* * *
The apartment door was unlocked so she walked in. Alex was sitting at the kitchen counter with a man Stephanie had never met. He was attractive in a doughy, bland, older sort of way, friendly face. Alex looked pale and a little tired but he smiled when Stephanie came in.
“Hello, stranger,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I’m sorry. Dr. Stephanie Parrish, this is...” The other man stood up and came around the counter with a warm smile, hand extended.
“Delighted to meet you, Dr. Parrish. Please call me Sam.”
* * *
Buried alive. The dark was total. He reached his hand out and felt the sides of the casket, oddly smooth and hard. He sensed the weight of the earth above and all around the box. How did things like that happen? Weren’t you supposed to make sure the guy was finished, properly DOA, before you planted him? Then he heard them, like dozens of little bellows wheezing and blowing each in their own rhythm. He reached out with his toe and found the soft woven curtain and pushed it open. A dim light illuminated the interior of his capsule. He wriggled around and stuck his head out into the hallway. The sound of the men snoring all around him was louder now.
Pairs of feet stuck out of the occasional curtain and one man was passed out on his knees with only his head in his capsule, looking for all the world as if he had just been guillotined and the executioner was waiting for the torso to fall before presenting the severed head to the howling mob.
Jordan had fallen asleep with the computer on and the battery had died. He’d have to get a charger. Akihabara was the electronics center of Tokyo, so he could grab one as soon as the stores opened. His watch said almost five in the morning. He should try to go back to sleep. His mind wouldn’t stop, though. He’d excised the offending entries from the server log but he couldn’t tell if the information had been backed up anywhere else.
He needed a story. Why had he run? Why had he broken into Terry’s place? Why the fuck did he have the computer? He needed something plausible and soon. The longer he was off the reservation, the more dangerous it got for Stephanie and the kids. Jesus, what had he done?
Before the battery had died he’d gone through Terry’s calendar. Last Friday: “D gone. Out w GP. Book M plus two. 50thou. Lex?” D, Dennis. GP, that was him. M, Miki, the girl. She was a hooker. Of course she was a hooker. It was all part of Terry’s grand unified theory. Jordan was furious with himself. How fucking naive could he be, how racist, really? How else could you explain believing that this beautiful young girl was ready to fuck some middle-aged gaijin she’d just met? On Thursday there had been an entry that read “Pull GP bedroom,” so it looked like Terry had been as good as his word about the camera in the bedroom, anyway. There was a lot of JET stuff—new teachers’ evaluations, report deadlines. All in all, it was a surprisingly dull schedule for a guy working as a facilitator for mass murderers and mobsters trying to flout international law and maybe defraud a few insurance companies in the process.
* * *
Jordan had no memory of falling back to sleep. He was wide-awake now so he decided to check out early. It was probably good to keep moving and keep as low a profile as he could.
They could be out there, looking for him. He needed to know what else was on the laptop. He slipped out of the capsule and walked down the narrow hallway. The televisions had been left on in a few capsules and laugh tracks and muted dialogue mixed with the noises of drunken sleep. The air smelled of stale alcohol and cigarette smoke, mixed with locker room and morning breath, and underneath it all, a sour hint of vomit. Jordan breathed through his mouth until the elevator started down. He was the only one in the bathroom as he showered and changed into fresh clothes. At the front desk he traded the locker key for his shoes and walked out into the gray early morning.
Akihabara was ablaze with garish neon and massive vertical anime posters. Directly across from the hotel a shop was just opening its doors. It was on the ground floor of a building that went up twenty stories, all electronics and home theater shops. There was a massive pink-and-green banner over the entrance with kanji that Jordan didn’t understand but he could see the racks of cheap consumer gear, some unboxed and haphazardly piled up in plastic bins. He went in and quickly found a universal power adapter with tips in every conceivable shape and size. He paid in cash and tucked it into his knapsack before heading west down a narrow street that threaded its way between the fragile towers of steel and glass that leaned out over the street like gangly mantises peering down at their scuttling prey.
Within a few blocks the sky appeared overhead as the towers gave way to modest two-story residential buildings and then a long wall of perfectly stacked brown sheets of slate behind which, Jordan saw through an iron gate that punctuated the stone, slumbered a medieval monastery with great sweeping roofs of black tile and immaculately tended gardens. Ahead an older man in a rumpled black suit, with a sparse black comb-over and a briefcase swinging jerkily at his side, kept his face buried in an illustrated paperback and muttered aloud to himself as he hiked up the gentle grade, completely monopolizing the sidewalk. Jordan was forced to slow down, and after a couple of throat clearings went completely unacknowledged, he stepped over the low iron railing and into the street to make his way around.
The taxi came from nowhere. It rounded the corner fast and swerved just in time. Jordan saw the driver’s face seemingly frozen in a grimace, caught midexpletive, as the cab passed within inches. He only heard the blare of the horn afterward, though he thought it must have come before and just taken longer to penetrate. Then everything went quiet except for the clatter of bamboo from the monastery garden. The man was staring at Jordan with an annoyed expression, still clutching his book. Jordan looked away, throat dry, heart thumping in his chest, and stepped back onto the sidewalk.
He walked faster, head down, his back and shoulders beginning to ache from the constant weight of the knapsack. At the top of the rise he walked under a bridge just as a red commuter train burst from a tunnel below him, headed for the station at Akihabara. The noise startled the pigeons nesting in the girders and they fluttered their wings in protest. There was a large apartment building on the right when he came out from the underpass. People were hurrying down the steps of the boxy, postwar structure. No one looked at the pale American as they hurried to the subway or the underground parking.
Jordan crossed the street. The city was waking up. The sidewalk was wide and bordered a narrow park whose trees overhung the low wall. The buildings ahead got bigger and taller as the road widened into a main boulevard with traffic coming in at each roundabout, flowing west toward Shinjuku. Ahead on the right he saw a stream of schoolkids dressed in gray uniforms heading into a tall marble-and-glass-fronted building. Beyond the school to the left he saw an enormous wheel and the edge of a roller coaster.
Jordan knew where he was now. He picked up his pace and, rounding the corner, saw the huge silver bubble of the Tokyo Dome rise up behind the Ferris wheel. There was a whole shopping complex built around the dome and foreigners flowed in and out all day.
Once inside, Jordan felt safe and unremarkable as he sat in one of the overstuffed white chairs in the Festa Café sipping on a scalding milky latte, waiting for the laptop to charge.