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this isn’t a good evening…” Cassidy began, but Jiro waved him into silence.
    They sat on the mats in front of the television as the last of theafternoon light faded from the sky. It was completely dark when Jiro turned off the set and Shizuko went into the small Pullman-style kitchen to make dinner.
    Cassidy was about six feet tall, a wiry man with a runner’s build. Tonight he wore civilian clothes, dark slacks and a beige short-sleeve shirt. He had blue eyes, thinning sandy-colored hair, and a couple of chipped teeth, which had been that way for years. A cheap watch on his left wrist was his only jewelry.
    â€œBeer?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œGood to see you, Bob.” Kimura spoke like an American, Cassidy thought, with fluent, unaccented English.
    â€œWhen I heard the news on the radio, I almost turned around and went home,” Cassidy told his host. “Thought you and Shizuko might want some privacy. But I figured that these get-together times are so hard to arrange that…”
    â€œYeah. I needed to talk to you. This assassination is not good.” Jiro Kimura thought for several seconds, then shook his head. “Not good. Japan is on a strange, dangerous road.”
    Cassidy looked around the apartment, accepted the offered beer. Kimura turned on a radio, played with the dial until he got music, then resumed his seat just across from his guest.
    â€œThey are preparing to move the planes to forward bases,” Jiro said. “We are packing everything, crating all the support gear, all the special tools, spare engines, parts, tires, everything.”
    â€œYou mean bases outside of Japan?”
    â€œYes.”
    Robert Cassidy sat in silence, digesting Kimura’s comment. Finally, he sipped his beer, then waited expectantly for his host to decide what else he wanted to say. For some reason, at that moment he recalled Jiro as he had first known him, a lost, miserable doolie at the U.S. Air Force Academy. A more forlorn kid, Cassidy had never met.
    Of course, the Japanese had sent their very best to the United States as an exchange student. Jiro finished second in his class, with a 3.98 grade point average—in aeronautical engineering. The first person in the class was a black girl from Georgia with a 180 IQ. After graduation, she didn’t spend a day in uniform; she went on to get a Ph.D. in physics on the Air Force’s dime. The last Cassidy heard, she was doing fusion research at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
    Jiro became a first-rate fighter pilot—for Japan. Now he was flying an airplane that had been developed in the utmost secrecy. Until Kimura mentioned the new Zero to him six months ago, Cassidy had not known of the plane. Judging by the startled reaction his report caused in Washington when he sent it in, no one there knew about it, either. Since then he had received a blizzard of requests from Washington for further information on the new plane, and he had had just two further conversations with Jiro.
    The first occurred when he invited the Kimuras to dinner in Tokyo. Jiro didn’t mention his job during the course of the evening. Cassidy couldn’t bring himself to ask a question.
    It was obvious that Jiro had wrestled with his conscience long and hard before he violated the Japanese security regs the first time.
    Cassidy decided that the next move was up to Jiro. If he wanted to tell the U.S. government Japanese secrets, Cassidy would convey the information. But he would not ask.
    Last month he and Jiro had attended a baseball game together. In the isolation of a nearly empty upper deck of the stadium, Jiro discussed in general terms the dimensions of the Japanese military buildup that had been under way for at least five years. Some of that information Cassidy knew from other sources; some was new. He merely listened, asked questions only to clarify, then wrote a detailed report that evening when he got home. That afternoon Jiro had