Savant

4: How Do You Say "This Is A Bad Idea" in Japanese?

One fifteen-hour flight and several fake passports later, there we were: standing on the sidewalk in Japan's neon capital, facing a steel-and-glass skyscraper across a busy street. An image-could it be a memory?-bubbled up through my thoughts, of Times Square on New Year's Eve, a street crammed with bodies, the air humming with voices, the buzz of energy pulsing through me as if I'd tuned in to the heartbeat of the city. A million pulses throbbing against one another, equal parts unity and chaos. Dizzied for a moment by the rush of déjà vu that might or might not be a vestigial memory of Life Before, I had to hold tight to Diego's arm to steady myself. We were buffeted from all sides by businessmen, texting teenagers, moms pushing strollers with parasols propped on their shoulders to shield them from the sun. One of these parasols nearly impaled me in the eye, but Diego pulled me aside just in time.

We'd landed at the Tokyo Narita Airport three hours earlier. Equipped with a laptop he'd rebuilt himself, Colin had spent our first hour in the Land of the Rising Sun in a café near baggage claim. While Nina doodled in one of her notebooks (I always packed her an activity bag before we traveled; I'd rather fly with a rabid opossum than Nina without her crayons), Diego and I studied a map of the city. Between us, we'd been able to memorize a good portion of it, but it would do us no good if Strauss had moved on. We were counting on Colin yet again to track her down.

He compiled a list of the most expensive chauffeur services in the city, then we found a row of pay phones by the food court and split the list between the three of us. Nina sat with me and read off the names and numbers on my list, and Diego was there if any of us needed him to translate if the person on the other end didn't speak English.

The first six calls went the same for me. "Moshi moshi, ogenki desu ka?" I'd say, and then in English, "This is Victoria Strauss's personal assistant. You've gotta help me! I left Miss Strauss's phone in the car three days ago and I absolutely must find it." If they had no record of a Victoria Strauss, then I moved down the list.

The seventh call went like this:

I gave my rehearsed spiel and was met with a moment of silence. Then the girl on the other end said, "Please hold."

At first I thought this would go like all the others: she'd check her computer, then come back and say she had no record of the service, could I provide the driver's name or our confirmation number?

But this time, when the phone was picked up, it wasn't the same voice. This one was male-and British.

"Who is this?" said the man. "Identify yourself at once."

I slammed the phone back on the receiver, my heart pounding. Diego and Colin were still in the middle of calls, and I made a hasty throat-cutting gesture at them. They hung up at once.

"This one," I said, pointing at the name that had already left my mind and was thus indecipherable to me.

Diego read it off. "Sorako Alliance. What'd they say?"

"It's what they didn't say. Some guy took over the phone and started demanding to know who I was."

Colin was already looking up the headquarters for the limo company. "Not far from here. The bus route runs right past it. Wait a sec! If I can just access their servers from here..." Ten minutes and he'd cracked it.

"The driver is a guy named Ichigo Iyomi, and it looks like he's still assigned to Strauss. I can track the GPS in his car... Yep, there he is! Outside the Midori Building, downtown Tokyo."

"Let's do it," I said, beginning to pack up Nina's crayons.