End of Enemies (6 page)

By the time the taxi dropped him off in Tanabe and he found a phone booth, it was almost two P.M.—almost midnight in Washington. He was about to wake somebody from a sound sleep, but it couldn't be helped.

It took only moments for the overseas operator to route the call to the U.S., but once there, he waited through twenty seconds of clicks as the call was sent to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, where it was electronically scrubbed, bounced off a FLTSATCOM (fleet communication satellite), then transmitted to a secure trunk line to the Holystone office.

Finally, the sleepy voice of Walter Oaken answered. “Hello.”

“Morning, Oaks.”

“Briggs … ? What time is it?”

“Depends on where you are.”

“How's the vacation?” Oaken asked.

“Never a dull moment. Can you conference me with Le-land?”

“Sure, hang on.”

More clicks. Leland Dutcher's voice came on the line. “Morning, Briggs.”

“Sorry to wake you both.”

“Don't worry about it. What've you got?”

For the next five minutes, Tanner related what had happened, from the shooting of Umako Ohira to his spotting of the truck.

“And you think this was more than a simple murder?” Dutcher asked.

“Pretty sure.”

“You have the key with you?”

“Yes.”

“Bad impulse, son.”

A forty-year veteran of the intelligence community, Leland Dutcher had plenty of experience with on-the-spot judgment calls. He'd made his own fair share of them—good and bad.

If ever a man embodied the “walk softly but carry a big stick” image, it was Leland Dutcher. He was soft-spoken but direct, a man of quiet authority. His appearance was a spymaster's dream: average, medium, and unremarkable, except for a pair of hard brown eyes. In the tradecraft jargon, Dutcher was a “gray man,” and it was this lack of distinction that made him one of the CIA's best controllers during the Cold War as he slipped in and out of the Soviet bloc under the noses of the KGB and the East German
Stasi.

When it came to his people, however, Leland Dutcher was anything but gray. He was protective to a fault. People were his most valuable resource, especially in this business, and the ends
did not
always justify the means.

It was, in fact, this protective nature that had caused Dutcher's decline at the CIA. While substituting for a hospitalized DDO during a counterinsurgency operation in Peru, Dutcher weighed the risk to the team unwarranted and ordered it out. Lives were saved, but the DDO, a political appointee from a university think tank, lashed out. Outcome notwithstanding, he argued, Dutcher had over-stepped his authority. The rift was widened further as the rescued team was debriefed and it became clear the order had not only saved lives but had also saved the network.

For Dutcher, it didn't require much analysis to know bullets directed at supposedly covert assets indicated a rapidly deteriorating
overt
situation. He said as much to both the DCI and the Senate and House Intelligence Oversight Committees, both of whom secretly agreed. Neither, however, was willing to cross swords with the DDO, who had powerful backing in the private sector.

The subsequent intra-agency feud began to erode Dutcher's ability to protect his people, which in turn began to taint the product. Knowing the DDO's grudge would eventually gut the directorate, Dutcher resigned. Politics had no business in the intelligence trade, he felt. It was too dangerous for the country and too dangerous for the people who were asked to do its secret bidding.

Six months later, newly elected President Reagan invited Dutcher for a weekend at Camp David to “shoot the breeze.” There in a cabin in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, Reagan outlined the idea of a detached intelligence organization, chartered by NSC directive and controlled by the executive branch. By the end of the weekend, Dutcher was sold. In trademark Reagan-esque fashion, the president simply shook Dutcher's hand and said, “I'll give you what you need. You make it work.”

In the years that followed, Dutcher did just that. He and his people had fixed more “unfixable” problems than the American public ever knew, or would know, existed. Now Dutcher was wondering where this latest problem would take them.

“Tell me about the key,” he said to Tanner. “We'll do some digging.”

Tanner described the key in detail.

Dutcher asked, “Walt, what's the embassy's role in something like this?”

In addition to keeping all the gears at Holystone turning, Walter Oaken was their resident encyclopedia. The running joke at the office was that the game show
Jeopardy
!
had settled out of court to keep him off their show lest he break the bank. For all his knowledge, though, Oaken was unpretentious and keenly aware that people, not information, made the world go 'round.

“By now, the Prefectural Police will have already contacted the legal attaché. It's standard procedure.”

“Then what?”

“Not much. At most, a routine message to State.”

“Good,” said Dutcher. “Do we have any in-country assets we can tap?”

“Maybe,” Oaken said. I'll make some calls.

Dutcher said, “Briggs, tell me about this woman you met.”

Tanner told them what he knew about Camille.

“We'd best check her, too. How about these folks following you?”

“Right now it looks like simple curiosity. I'm okay.”

“Stay that way. Whoever they are, don't give them any more reason to be interested in you.”

Washington,
D.C.

The CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) is a nondescript concrete building with tinted windows surrounded by a barbed-wire fence at the intersection of First and M Streets. Inside, two thousand analysts and technicians go about the business of making sense of the thousands of radar, thermal, and visual images produced by satellites with names like
Keyhole,
Lacrosse,
and
Vortex.
Despite such James Bondian technology that includes computers costing more than the average citizen makes in a lifetime, most of the NPIC's analysts are devotees of the plain old eyeball.

This was the case with Rudy Grayson, the chief interpreter on duty when the latest KH-14 images from the Golan Heights came off the printer.

He aligned the strips vertically on his light table, then scanned them with a magnifying glass. He liked to get a feel for what he was seeing before moving on to a complex dissection, using the computer to manipulate the millions of pixels that comprised the image.

Pixels are individual cells of varying grayscale contrast, each carrying dark and light values ranging from 1 to 10,000, each of which a computer can adjust to highlight selected features. While the human eye cannot detect the difference between, say, a value of 12 and 14, a computer can, making millions of such adjustments until an image reaches optimal resolution.

Today, as he had been for the past four months, Grayson's job was to confirm that both Israeli and Syrian troop strengths on the Golan matched the agreed limits.

The nearer the date for the UN-managed buffer expansion on the Golan came, the more skittish the involved parties became. UN troops on the Golan was not a new idea, but this expansion was to begin a disengagement of both Israeli and Syrian forces that would eventually demilitarize this greatly contested chunk of land.

The theory behind the plan was two-pronged: As long as Israel occupied the Golan, Syria would not engage in the peace process, and as long as Syria planned to militarize a repatriated Golan, Israel would not give it back. Israel remembered too well the years of Katyusha bombardment its northern kibbutzes suffered from Syrian positions before the Golan was captured during the 'war.

Grayson was scanning the last strip when something near the border caught his eye. It was not on the Golan, but to its north and east, in the deserts of Syria.

What the hell is that
?

He turned to his computer, double-clicked a file, then ran his finger down the screen. He frowned and picked up the phone. “Hey Linda, is Jerry around? I've got something he should take a look at.”

Japan

At dusk Tanner took a taxi into Tanabe and found a secluded
shokudo,
or neighborhood restaurant. At the front door he was greeted by a smiling hostess who bowed, offered him a pair of cloth slippers, and led him to a table overlooking a small garden. Paper lanterns lined the roof's overhang.

He started with
ocha,
or green tea, then had an appetizer of
chawan-mushi,
a dish of vegetables and steamed shrimp. For the main course he ordered tempura and
mizu-taki,
a dish of chicken, leeks, and vermicelli boiled in a fish stock. It took all his willpower not to order a second course and simply settle for a pot of hot saki.

He was savoring his second cup when the hostess approached and handed him a small white card:

SATO IEYASU

INSPECTOR,
(
RETIRED
)

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE BUREAU

Tanner looked up at the hostess, who merely smiled.

Interesting.
The CEB was the Japanese equivalent of the FBI. He shrugged. “Ask the inspector to join me, please.”

She returned with a Japanese man in his early sixties. “Mr. Tanner?”

“Inspector Ieyasu.”

Ieyasu nodded and bowed. He was a short man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“What can I do for you?” Tanner asked, gesturing for him to sit.

“It is not what you can do for me, but what I can do for you.”

“You've lost me.”

“We have a mutual friend: Walter Oaken. He thought I might be of some help. As I understand it, you found yourself in a bit of trouble last night.”

“I see. At the risk of sounding paranoid—”

Ieyasu raised his hand. “I understand. Call him if you wish. I will wait here.”

Tanner went to the lobby and borrowed the house phone. He waited through two minutes of clicks before Oaken answered.

“Oaks, its me.”

“Funny you should call,” Oaken said.

“I'll bet. Guess who I'm having dinner with?”

“Sato. Sorry I didn't have time to warn you.”

“No harm done. Describe him.”

Oaken did so, and Tanner said, “That's him.”

“If there's anybody who might have some answers, it's him. Talk to him, then call me. One piece of advice, though: Don't get into a saki drinking contest with him. He's dangerous.”

Tanner laughed. “Okay.”

He hung up and returned to the table.

“Well?” Ieyasu asked.

“Oaks told me not to drink with you.”

For the first time, Inspector Ieyasu smiled. “A wise man, Walter.”

After a second pot of tea, Ieyasu came to business. “What did Walter tell you about me?”

“Aside from the fact that I can trust you, nothing.”

“It's important you understand that I do not work for your government”

“I do.”

“Walter and I have a long-standing relationship. In matters of mutual interest we have been known to share information. So. Why don't you start by telling me about the incident”

Tanner did so, giving Ieyasu the same details he gave Dutcher, and finishing with his second sighting of the pickup truck.

“The night of the murder, you saw none of the men's faces?”

“No.”

“The victim, Umako Ohira, had you ever seen him before?”

“Never.”

“I don't suppose Inspector Tanaka told you he was assaulted three days ago?”

“Again, no.”

“I'm unsurprised. You see, I know Tanaka. He lives beyond his means, if you understand me. Ohira was very specific about his description of his attackers; he even picked one out of a photo file.”

“For a retiree you certainly have solid information.”

“I have many friends. The man Ohira identified is named Tange Noboru. Your description of the driver at the beach matches him perfectly. Noboru is a former
yakuza
—what you call the Mafia—enforcer. He now works for one of our largest industrialists—some say for the richest man in Nippon—Hiromasa Takagi.”

“Of Takagi Industries?”

“The same.”

Tanner's interest was piqued. Takagi Industries was a multinational conglomerate with holdings in everything from textiles to nuclear energy. That alone made Hiromasa Takagi influential, but it was his alleged connection with the Black Ocean Society that most concerned Western intelligence agencies. Though never proven, Black Ocean is said to consist of Japan's richest men, a group whose clout not only dictated the direction of Japanese industry but also the policies of the Japanese government.

“This man that was murdered last night,” Ieyasu continued, “was an employee of Takagi's, in his maritime division. He worked as an engineer at the shipyard south of Anan.”

“Let me see if I understand this,” Tanner said. “First Ohira is mugged by Takagi's chief of security, then three days later he's shot dead, and the police have missed the connection?”

“I doubt anyone has missed the connection. Certainly not Inspector Tanaka. As you Americans say, he knows where his bread is buttered.”

“I see.”

“I don't think you do. Over the past year, eight Takagi employees have either gone missing or have died in accidents.”

“Takagi employees probably number in the thousands, many doing hazardous work,” Tanner countered. “Besides, most conglomerates have skeletons in their closets. Takagi is probably no different.”

“That might be true if there weren't more to it. Do you remember the Tokyo subway gas attack a few years ago?”

“Of course.”

“I was still with the CIB then. I was assigned to the task force. Eventually, we found an informant who claimed the cult was simply a front. You see, the components used were more sophisticated than the government allowed. This informant alleged a connection between the cult, the Japanese Red Army, and Takagi Industries.”

“What connection?”

“The JRA supplied the material—most of which was very hard to obtain—to make the gas bombs, who was in turn supplied by contacts at Takagi Chemical. I pursued this but was told to stop. I refused, so I was … invited to retire.”

“And you think Ohira's murder is somehow connected to that?” said Tanner.

“Not necessarily, but his makes nine mysterious deaths of Takagi employees in the last year. Perhaps it is my background, but I have never been a believer in coincidence.”

Tanner smiled; he liked this man. “That makes two of us. You said the previous eight employees either disappeared or had not-so-accidental accidents?”

“That's correct.”

“So by simply murdering Ohira they broke tradition. I wonder why.”

“That, Mr. Tanner, is a very good question.”