Hard Rain

“If you’ll forgive me for avoiding what you’re having and ordering some food instead.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Anyway, Scotch is a grownup’s drink.”

He smiled, knowing I was ribbing him, and ordered an herb salad with tofu and mozzarella and a plain orange juice. Harry’s never been a drinker.

“You do a good SDR?” I asked him while we waited for the food to arrive. An SDR, or surveillance detection run, is a route designed to flush a follower or team of followers out into the open where they can be seen. I’d taught the subject to Harry and he’d proven himself an able student.

“You ask me that every time,” he replied in a slightly exasperated tone, like a teenager remonstrating with a parent. “And every time I give you the same answer.”

“So you did one.”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course.”

“And you were clean?”

He looked at me. “I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t. You know that.”

I patted him on the back. “Can’t help asking. Thanks again for the nice work with that yakuza’s cell phone. Led me straight to him.”

He beamed. “Hey, I’ve got something for you,” he said.

“Yeah?”

He nodded and reached into a jacket pocket. He fished around for a second, then pulled out a metal object about the dimensions of a dozen stacked credit cards. “Check this out,” he said.

I took it. It was heavy for something of its size. There must have been a lot of circuitry packed in it. “Just what I’ve always wanted,” I said. “A faux-silver paperweight.”

He moved as though to take it back. “Well, if you’re not going to appreciate it…”

“No, no, I do appreciate it. I just don’t know what the hell it is.” Actually I had a good idea, but I prefer to be underestimated. Besides, I didn’t want to deny Harry the pleasure of educating me.

“It’s a bug and video detector,” he said, pronouncing the words slowly as though I might otherwise fail to comprehend them. “If you come within shooting distance of radio frequency or infrared, it’ll let you know.”

“In a sexy female voice, I hope?”

He laughed. “If someone’s trying to record you, you might not want them to know that you know. So no sexy voice. Just a vibration mode. Intermittent for video, continuous for audio. Alternating for both. And only in ten-second bursts, to conserve battery power.”

“How does it work?”

He beamed. “Wide-range circuitry that detects transmitters operating on frequencies from fifty megahertz to three gigahertz. Plus it’s got an internal ante

Too bad about the CCTV units. If I had a reliable, portable way to detect those, I’d have a shot at getting my privacy back from Tatsu and whomever else.

“Any chance you can make the reception a little better?” I asked.

He looked a little hurt, and I realized I should have praised him before asking that. “Not for something this small,” he said. “You’d need something with a much bigger ante

Oh well. Even with its limitations, the unit would be useful. I hefted it in my hand. I was familiar with functionally similar commercial models, of course, but I hadn’t seen one this small. It was an impressive piece of work.

“Rechargeable battery?” I asked.

“Of course. Lithium ion. Just like a cell phone.” He reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like an ordinary cell phone charger. “I ran it down testing it, so you’ll need to charge it when you get home. And don’t forget to juice it up every day. There’s no low battery indicator or anything else like that. I built this thing for speed, not looks.”

I took the charger and put it on the table next to me. Then I pulled out my wallet and slid the unit into it. It was a nice, snug fit. I would examine it back at the hotel, of course, to confirm that it was a bug detector and not some sort of bug. Not that I don’t trust Harry. I just like to satisfy myself about these things.

I put my wallet back in my pants and nodded appreciatively. “Nice work,” I said. “Thank you.”

He smiled. “I know you’re a professional paranoid, so I figured it was either this or a lifetime supply of Valium.”

I laughed. “Now, tell me, what’s with the vampire hours?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, looking away, “just lifestyle stuff.”

Lifestyle stuff? As far as I knew, Harry had no lifestyle. In my imagination he was always huddled in his apartment, worming his way into remote networks, creating backdoors to exploit later, mediating the world through the safety of a computer screen.

I noticed he was blushing. Christ, the kid was so transparent. “Harry, are you going to tell me you’ve got a girlfriend?” I asked.

The blush deepened, and I laughed. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Good for you.”

He looked at me, checking to see whether I was going to tease him. “She’s not exactly my girlfriend.”

“Well, never mind the taxonomy. How did you meet her?”

“Work.”

I picked up my glass. “You going to give me details, or do I have to force-feed you two or three of these to loosen your tongue?”

He made a face of exaggerated disgust. “One of the firm’s clients, one of the big trading houses, was happy with some security work I did for them.”

“Guess they didn’t know about the backdoors you left for yourself in the process.”

He smiled. “They never do.”

“So the client is happy…”

“And my boss took me out to celebrate, to a hostess club.”

Most westerners have a hard time grasping the concept of the Japanese “hostess club,” where the women are paid only for conversation. The west accepts the notion that sex can be commodified, but rebels at the idea that other forms of human interaction might be subject to purchase, as well. For hostesses are not prostitutes, although, like the geisha from whom they’re descended, they might strike up an after-hours relationship with the right customer, after a suitable courtship. Rather, patrons at such establishments pay for the simple pleasure of the girls’ company, and for their ability to smooth out the rough edges of business meetings, as well as for the hope that, eventually, something more might develop. If it were simple sex that the hostesses’ clients were after, they could buy it for much less elsewhere.

“What club?” I asked him.

“A place called Damask Rose.”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“They don’t advertise.”

“Sounds upscale.”

“It is. It’s a pretty refined place, in fact. In Nogizaka, on Gaienhigashi-dori. They probably wouldn’t let you in.”

I laughed. I love when Harry shows some spirit. “Okay, so the boss takes you to Damask Rose…”

“Yeah, and he had a lot to drink and was telling everyone that I’m a computer genius. One of the hostesses asked me some questions about how to configure a firewall because she just bought a new computer.”

“Pretty?”

The blush reappeared. “I guess. Her computer was a Macintosh, so I liked her right off the bat.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I didn’t know that kind of thing could form the basis for love at first sight.”

“So I answered a few of her questions,” he said, ignoring me. “At the end of the night, she asked if I would give her my phone number, in case she had any more questions.”

I laughed. “Thank God she didn’t just give you her number. She would have died of old age waiting for you to call.”

He smiled, knowing that this was probably true.

“So she called you…,” I said.

“And I wound up going over to her apartment and configuring her whole system.”