Night Moves

Theo came up to a marked utility pole and knew he had the right place. The streak of white chalk was the load signal, directing his eyes to the payphone right next to it.

He put on a show of digging for loose change in his pockets, when he was really peering up and down the moderately crowded street for any tails. None that he could see. 

Without missing a beat, he stopped at the chunky green machine and fed the slot coins. One, two, three ten-yen. Enough for three minutes, but that didn’t really matter. 

He mimed dialing a number in, bringing the handset to his ear and pretending to talk to an empty line. With his free-hand, he felt around the underside of the phone shelf. There it was on the right-hand side. He slipped the small box into a pocket and ended his sham call. 

After putting some distance between him and the phone, Theo selected a convenience store at random and made a beeline for the bathroom.

To a muffled jingle that touted the benefits of eating fish, Theo finally inspected the dead drop. It was inside a magnetic key box, the kind you could get at any hardware store. Cracking it open, he found a slip of paper with a message.

IRONSIDE 426

That would be one of their meet-up sites, and the time. He burned the dead drop and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Later, when he was sure nobody was looking, he threw the little box into a creek. That was another thing about Japan; there wasn’t a single trash can out in public. But he had enough close calls with the locals already, and it’d be bad form to miss the link-up because of some cop slapping him with a fine.

Night had well and truly overtaken the city, the majority of businesses closing their doors and hanging up their hats. For a not-insubstantial number of establishments, it was time to light up their garish signs and post their staff for primetime. 

For all its small-town charm, Downtown Hokishi was still possessed of something that passed for a night life, servicing the small army of office workers seeking respite from their days of plugging away. Compared to some of the holes he’d been dragged to, it didn’t add up to much of a red-light district at all, though it wasn’t exactly a fair comparison to make. 

Not that he was here for pleasure. Theo instead was waiting in a café, deliberately selected for hitting that sweet spot between traffic and seclusion. There wasn’t any shortage of empty buildings for clandestine meetings in suburban Japan, but if your choice of location was somewhere no law-abiding citizen had any business being, then you might as well put up an ad in the papers for “shady shit at night: open seating”. The more ordinary the place, the better. 

They would’ve chosen somewhere more crowded if they really wanted to frustrate counter-surveillance efforts, but there was the worry about being seen together by other students and staff. 

He’d already changed out of his uniform beforehand, as his counterpart surely would, and getting spotted here wasn’t something that would burn their cover by itself. But inconvenient questions on what the school nurse and a student were getting up to after-hours was best avoided altogether. 

That is, if there was anybody watching them at all. 

Theo was beginning to think that none of this diligence was really necessary. 

Even with the complications to his week-one efforts, all the digging he’d been doing should have come up with something by now. The most obvious leads were busts, and his subsequent investigations to any of the so-called “Mysteries of Hokishi High” came up dry. To begin with, not a single student he’d talked to had anything of note to say about the last nurse. As it was, the evidence that anything was afoot in Hokishi High was nil.

They must have nabbed all the hard-core members on that raid, then. Or if there were any more, they had gone so underground that they were a non-factor. It was the only explanation that jibed with the balance of his intel. That he was basically repeating his counterpart’s original objections to this whole plan did not escape him.

That was why he was here in this café. Theo only had the student-side view of the whole picture; there was an other half to this operation. A breakthrough wasn’t out of the realm of possibility when they put their intel together, one-on-one. Failing that, this meeting would be about the conduct of the op going forward. 

This would be the first time he was getting face-time with her since going undercover– not counting when they ran into each other at the high school, where they obviously couldn’t be anything but strangers.

Right then, the woman he was waiting on walked in.

She was back to her usual get-up with the ponytail. At school, she wore glasses, parted her bangs and let her hair fall down. The net effect was to make the new nurse look older than she actually was. Unlike him, she used a different name for that cover: Katsuko Maeda.

Theo knew her as Maho Kirishima, and no name-changing would make him mistake the stern cast of the woman’s face for anybody else. 

Maho could not have been too pleased when the orders came down about the adjustments to their little operation, which made obvious that Theo had bypassed their informal chain of command. He had to hand it to her; as a true professional, she kept such grievances to herself and performed just as efficiently. 

Still, she found ways to express her displeasure. When she realized that she wouldn’t be rid of him for some time longer, she’d been intractable on their usage of Japanese at all times, even when it wasn’t strictly necessary. The imprecision of the language, besides the inherent limitations of talking over intermediary means, then made eye-to-eyes like this all the more necessary.

Maho seated herself opposite and ordered herself some kind of German item on the menu. Theo greeted her like they were run-of-the-mill colleagues, and wasted no time striking up a conversation about their office jobs. The corporate verbiage was of course a front– always assume someone was listening in.

“So, how’s the project at work coming along?” Theo asked casually, enjoying the little roleplay.

“I’ve been running all over to meet with our people, but I couldn’t land the account. You?” 

“Nada. I’ve been all over spreadsheets all week and couldn’t get anything out of it. And I don’t have to tell you about the trouble a certain department has been giving me the last week.” 

“From where I was looking, you were getting exactly what you wanted. Not to mention, I seem to recall somebody making all that bluster about clearing out the backlog. All that, and we don’t have the material for so much as a presentation.” Maho retorted, clearly taking pleasure from seeing him run around like a headless chicken.

Theo was needled by her gloating, but it’s not like he had ammo to fire back with. This was his idea, after all; thus it was his turn to take his inter-agency lumps. 

“Yeah, yeah. Look here– I’ll own up to my projections being wrong any time, but we’ve still got two weeks until that becomes a sure thing.” he said back, waspish. After that, Maho seemed satisfied with the potshots and went back to her usual manner.

“Enough about that. I want to know just exactly what it is you’re doing with that girl.” she demanded.

“Girl?” Theo feigned ignorance, but was secretly pleased that word had already gotten around. 

“You know who.”

There she was, staring daggers at him again. She kept going. 

“I have to admit, you never fail to surprise. I didn’t think I needed to tell you off about this kind of thing, but you’re not getting paid to make up for the high school romance you never had, you know.”

“Alright, you got me.“ Theo admitted, bringing his hands up in fake surrender.

At the same time, Maho’s order set was served: a donut-shaped cake and coffee. Theo waited for the waitress to make off before affecting a furtive note. 

“But it’s not what you think. I’m doing it for work, I assure you.”

“Just how is that, pray tell?” she asked.

“I didn’t tell you how I plan to deal with the meddlers in the department yet, did I?” he answered, before leaning in for a sip of tea. 

Whether Maho got his whole meaning or not, it was clear to her that this was another one of his “improvisations”.

“Wait a minute, modifications like that should be cleared–“ she said before exhaling sharply. “Don’t you ever stick to the plan– your own plan?” 

“I think a plan is just a list of things that don’t happen.” he said, before taking another sip. 

“No wonder they don’t, if this is how yo–“ Maho cut herself off again, and he looked up in time to see her pinching the bridge of her nose. “Do what you have to untangle yourself. We have to get things moving again, in any case.” 

“That’s why we’re having this conference. How about those other stakeholders?” he added as he finished his tea. He was referring to the out-of-towners they were yet to identify, last he heard.

“It just came in. They all had small-time backgrounds, but there’s nothing to connect them to our work. At this junction, I think that leaves us with one real option.” she replied. 

“I’m all ears for your input, ma’am.” he said wryly. Maho ignored it and elaborated. 

“I think it’s time we bring someone else in. He’s someone we worked with before, the one who was in-charge at the warehouse audit, remember?” 

“The guy with the five o’clock shadow? If you think we can use that burnout, then by all means. You’re gonna fill him in on the whole thing, then?” he asked.

“No, not unless I absolutely have to.” 

Theo nodded approvingly; the decision to induct someone, even in the lesser secrets, wasn’t one to be made lightly. Maho continued. 

“It’ll be the same arrangement as last, with some tweaks. If all else fails, then at least we’ll have a hand on the pulse of this town, if the company ever has to come back to these parts.” she explained, in corporate speak that made it sound like they talked of harmless metrics like KPIs and mergers. That it would be very bad news for this town if they ever did have to come back was left unspoken.

“Okay, then. What do you want me to do?” he asked. 

“Aside from not coming up with any more of your schemes? Stand by for if I need you to follow up on something, keep your phone with you. Any more questions? Then that’ll be all.”

“That’d be all. By your leave, then.” Theo repeated. “Early morning tomorrow, so I’ll be going first. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can’t rustle up some last-minute leads of my own." he added. He rose to make good his exit, but not without a parting shot and a grin.

"One more thing though. If you’ve got a problem with how I do things, then take it up with HR.”

Kids these days. She was barely out of her twenties, and already she was being faced with the realization that the generational gap was no trifling thing.

A waitress offered her a sympathetic smile as she passed by. “Co-workers like him are the worst, aren’t they?” the other woman said. Maho could only smile back.

They hadn’t a single piece of evidence to support the assumption this operation was based upon. It was doubtful that would change in two measly weeks. Certainly, it was better for this town if they never found anything; for the madness at that warehouse to have been nothing but a passing fever, and not a symptom of a deeper cancer.