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good, really. We’re old friends, after all. Friends should help each other from time to time, don’t you agree?”
    He knew I owed him. I owed him just for letting me go after I’d ambushed Holtzer outside the naval base at Yokosuka, despite all the years he’d spent trying to ferret me out previously. Now he was putting the Agency off my scent, and I owed him for that, too.
    The debts were only part of it, of course. There was also an implicit threat. But Tatsu had a soft spot for me that kept him from being too direct. Otherwise, he would have dispensed with all the win-win, we’re old pals bullshit and would have just told me that if I didn’t cooperate he’d share my current name and address with my old friends at Christians In Action. Which he could very easily do.
    “I thought you wanted me to retire,” I said again, knowing I’d already lost.
    He reached into his breast pocket and took out a manila envelope. Placed it on the table between us.
    “This is a very important job, Rain-san,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask for this favor if it weren’t.”
    I knew what I would find in the envelope. A name. A photograph. Locations of work and residence. Known vulnerabilities. The insistence on the appearance of “natural causes” would be implicit, or delivered orally.
    I made no move to touch the envelope. “There’s one thing I need from you before I can agree to any of this,” I told him.
    He nodded. “You want to know how I found you.”
    “Correct.”
    He sighed. “If I share that information with you, what would stop you from disappearing again, even more effectively this time?”
    “Probably nothing. On the other hand, if you don’t tell me, there’s no possibility that I would be willing to work with you on whatever you’ve got in that envelope. It’s up to you.”
    He took his time, as though pondering the pros and cons, but Tatsu always thinks several moves ahead and I knew he would have anticipated this. The hesitation was theater, designed to convince me afterward that I had won something valuable.
    “Customs Authority records,” he said finally.
    I wasn’t particularly surprised. I had known there was some risk that Tatsu would learn of Holtzer’s death and assume I had been behind it, that if he did so he would be able to fix my movements between the time he last saw me in Tokyo and the day Holtzer died outside of D.C., less than a week apart. But killing Holtzer had been important to me, and I had been prepared to pay a price for the indulgence. Tatsu was simply presenting me with the bill.
    I was silent, and after a moment he continued. “An individual traveling under the name and passport of Fujiwara Junichi left Tokyo for San Francisco last October thirtieth. There is no record of his having returned to Japan. The logical assumption is that he stayed in the United States.”
    In a sense, he did. Fujiwara Junichi is my Japanese birth name. When I learned Holtzer and the CIA had discovered where I was living in Tokyo, I knew the name was blown and no longer usable. I had traveled to the States to kill Holtzer under the Fujiwara passport and then retired it, returning to Japan under a different identity I had previously established for such a contingency. I had hoped anyone looking for me might be diverted by this false clue and conclude I had relocated to the States. Most people would have. But not Tatsu.
    “Somehow, I could not see you living in the States,” he went on. “You seemed. . . comfortable in Japan. I did not believe you were ready to leave.”
    “I suppose you might have been onto something there.”
    He shrugged. “I asked myself, if my old friend hadn’t really left Japan, but only wanted me to believe he had, what would he have done? He would have reentered the country under a new name. He would have then relocated to a new city, because he had become too well known in Tokyo.”
    He paused, and I recognized the employment of a fortuneteller’s trick, in