Guess Who’s Coming to Kill You

Chapter 1

Wilkinson’s most valuable asset was that he looked like a tired businessman pushing fifty. He was in fact tired and pushing fifty, but he was not a tired businessman pushing fifty. He was a tired spy pushing fifty.

He had seen it all before and he had been through it all before. That was the trouble, as he was to find out shortly. There is a deadly hypnosis about repeated experience that lowers the guard; or, if the guard-up is automatic, like a reflex, the muscle response is not. He was to find that out shortly, too.

Wilkinson leaned against the wall in the alley behind The Golden Obi watching tradesmen and porters going and coming through the rear door. He was well in the shadows. He was thinking: what am I doing here?

That was bad; a bad sign. Holloway would have been distressed, if a spider can be credited with emotion. Worse, or perhaps better, he would have seen to it that Wilkinson was cashiered on the spot. But Holloway was in his web in Washington, D.C., an ocean and a continent away, and that was Fred Wilkinson’s misfortune.

The wail of soul music came from somewhere inside the square building. On the street side the building was all neon flash; in the alley it was a dump. Times Square-like nightclubs and soul bands had been enthusiastically ingested by the Japanese along with other condiments of the American cuisine. It produced in Wilkinson the stomach revolt felt by the fastidious everywhere. That was another of Wilkinson’s weaknesses; he was fastidious, or rather he had grown fastidious with the multiplication of his assignments; another bad, very bad, sign.

The dirt offended him, the flash offended him, the smells offended him, and it was all very like home, which he sometimes thought offended him more than anywhere. Home to Wilkinson was Washington, and Washington meant the Holloways, and the Holloways meant FACE and CIA; which brought Wilkinson full circle.

At times on assignments like these he had to remind himself that he was in a foreign country. Tokyo was a let-down. It was not openly dangerous like Saigon; not seething with cockroach spies like Berlin; not a gateway to Mediterranean hocuspocus like Lisbon, or a boiling pot like Buenos Aires. Things had settled down in Tokyo; which was why, Wilkinson suspected, Holloway had put his okay on the CIA mission. Even a Wilkinson, Holloway’s eyes had seemed to say, could pull this one off.

Sometimes he yearned — increasingly these days — for a book-type adventure. He did not know a Château Lafite Rothschild 1918 from a Bordeaux Rouge ’64 — he knew of no one in the trade with James Bond’s oenological and other expertise; but it would be nice, it would be nice. Like inhabiting a fairy tale, where bullets missed or left laughable flesh wounds, and the hero enjoyed professional beatings from which he blithely strolled away. Being young again would be especially nice, with its tireless sexuality. Bond kept tumbling in and out of bed with breasty beauties as if his body had never heard of gonad fatigue. (There was even supposed to be a counterpart in reality, a school near Moscow where the KGB trained selected spies to perform prodigies of intercourse; the British intelligence agents Wilkinson had met insisted on its existence with a fervor, Wilkinson suspected, that had led Ian Fleming astray.) Being young again... being anything but what he was.

Wilkinson took a drag and sighed smoke. Two policemen sauntered past the alley entrance, glancing in. They did not see him. Not that it would have mattered if they had. He had his cover story ready — his “legend,” as the fancy boys called it — in case he was questioned. A hostess in The Golden Obi had promised to meet him in the alley and he, poor sucker, was waiting. The club hostesses in Tokyo often rid themselves of importunate foreigners that way; the story was plausible enough. To lay the groundwork for it Wilkinson had had two drinks in the club with a hostess before slipping into the alley. He was ready for the meet if Krylov was serious.

He glanced at his wristwatch in the glow of his cigarette — a natural action if it should be overseen; male foreigners hot for Japanese girls were notoriously impatient. He felt a stir of pride at the fact that he still made the right moves automatically. He had a lot of good missions left in him, Wilkinson knew — “runs,” as they called them nowadays — even though he couldn’t seem to convince anyone in Washington. For “anyone” read Holloway. They all added up to Holloway. Damn Holloway.

At the home office the Holloway boys had hinted that he was skid-bound. They hadn’t come right out with it, but they might as well have. His crown was balding, his waist was blowing up, he was walking on the flats of his feet. All right for a Class II or a contract agent who had to do only transmission, cutout, or courier work, but not for a Class I man who was expected to be everything from an Olympic athlete to a psych major.

Wilkinson drew deeply on his cigarette and shifted his stance. At that moment he saw curtains part in a second-floor window in the rear wall of the building and froze to attention. He caught one glimpse of the sheared silhouette of a tall, bulky man, but in that glimpse Wilkinson made out the crop of dark hair and the square face with its professional camouflage of boyish charm and recognized Krylov. Krylov was of course allowing himself to be seen from the alley to let Wilkinson know he was still waiting for a chance to come down unseen. He must be desperate, Wilkinson thought; what Wilkinson could see others might see, too.

He kept watching, refusing to reveal himself. After a moment Krylov’s silhouette moved away from the window and the curtains dropped back.

Wilkinson ground his cigarette out. Okay so far. They could yatter all they wanted about his going to seed, but it took a man of long experience to set up a proper meet and carry it through. They had even had the gall to ask for his plan in advance instead of letting him work out the details in his own way — a demand they would never have made in the old days. In revenge Wilkinson had worked out two plans, giving them their choice. The first had set the Seibu department store for the meet, either in the basement, which looked like a hero-sized American supermarket, usually crowded with people shopping for meats and delicatessens and delicacies from all over the world; or on the top floor, with its dozens of restaurants and coffee shops, always jammed, where a shopper could dine on soba and seaweed for eighty yen or a kobe beefsteak dinner for a thousand; the Seibu was a favorite haunt of foreigners. A cultural attaché like Krylov, tired of the relative austerities of GUM, could be expected to browse or dine there, and an American tourist was one of the Seibu’s commonest sights. Wilkinson’s alternative plan had been The Golden Obi alley.

He had passed the plans along through channels — the usual two cutouts and a communicator — and they had made him wait almost two days for the nod for the second plan. It rankled. Not their choice of the second plan, but the wait. It was a good plan, based on the existing situation, as good plans should be. Aleksei Krylov was known to frequent The Golden Obi; he had gone soft on a hostess there named Kimiko. It would be easy for Krylov to excuse himself ostensibly to visit the men’s room and instead slip out the rear door to make the meet. Even if they were observed it would appear a casual encounter. And in the open alley such normal hazards as bugs or eavesdropping would be minimized. The kids they used for Class I agents these days were dead shots and expert karate fighters and they maimed and killed without hesitation, but could they think things out ahead of time? Wilkinson thought not. The organization lost a lot of Class I agents because of it, he was convinced.

An odd sound interrupted his thoughts. It was a spatter of thin musical notes in a minor key; a sort of chance remark in song that managed to make itself heard above the noisy street. Wilkinson smiled, knowing immediately what it was. He glanced toward the mouth of the alley and saw the tall covered handcart with its hanging paper lantern. Its owner was pushing the cart along as he played his musical identification on the tiny double-reed flute, the instrument they called a charumera. In the cart there would be containers of soba, the thick Japanese noodles, and for a few yen the vendor would dish out a bowl and hand you a pair of chopsticks and wait patiently while you ate. In large Japanese cities it was a common practice to top off an evening of carousing with a bowl of steaming soba from a charumera cart on the way home. The tinkle of the charumera was one of the few sounds, in Wilkinson’s view, that made Japanese nights tolerable.

The soba man turned into the alley, straining against his cart, the picture of sore feet. For a moment Wilkinson thought that he had come into the alley to rest; but no, the man headed for the rear door of the club. Sometimes the hostesses, tired of the steak sandwiches and other occidental fare served in these places, succumbed to a yen for a bowl of soba; vendors often visited the tradesmen’s entrances to serve them. Wilkinson felt the juices begin to flow in his mouth; the noodles smelled delicious. Why not? he argued with himself. A foreigner waiting in an alley for an assignation with a nightclub hostess could get hungry for soba like anyone else. But he pushed the thought away. Krylov might show at any moment.

The soba man raised his little flute to his lips and blew his announcement. Having advertised, he waited at the door. He was a stocky Japanese of indeterminate age in shabby clothing, wearing a towel twisted about his head, the badge of the working class. If he had seen Wilkinson standing in the shadows some fifteen feet away he gave no sign; Wilkinson rather thought not. The man was shifting from foot to foot; he must have calves of iron, from all the walking and pushing he had to do, but even iron gets tired. And Wilkinson knew how to blend with a shadow.

The American agent hoped that Krylov would not choose this time to appear in the alley. It would be better if they talked with no one else there. Their conversation ought not to take more than a few minutes. Tonight Krylov was to pass along his decision. If he said he wanted to come over, for which Wilkinson considered the odds good, it would then be a mere matter of developing a workable plan, something quick and simple. Like the theme of a Bach invention. Pure logic.

Wilkinson smiled at his conceit. He was a classical music buff, and Bach was a passion of his.

Wilkinson had no doubt of his ability to bring Krylov safely out once the Russian gave the nod. It would be pick-and-spade work: get him quickly into a plain car and hustle him off to the American embassy; then, before his people could find out what had happened, stow him in a plane from one of the U.S. military bases in Japan and away he’d go, to the States and sanctuary. Routine stuff. What excited Wilkinson’s imagination was not the modus operandi of Krylov’s defection. It was the shot in the arm the coup would give his own career.

For Krylov would be quite a catch for the U.S. He was far more than the cultural attaché at the Soviet Union’s Tokyo embassy that was his cover. He was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, having worked in Soviet intelligence in a dozen important posts from Rangoon to London. What was more, he was something of a white-haired boy; he clicked vodka glasses with the most prestigious comrades in Moscow. So Krylov would have a lot to tell FACE. In fact, his defection would be second in importance only to that of General Levashev, the biggest Soviet fish they had ever netted, who had defected in Vienna a year ago. The organization would have to be grateful — even Holloway, that damned think-tank. They would offer Wilkinson a fat desk job in Washington, as they had once before, when they were trying to kick him upstairs. And, as before, he would turn it down, but this time with bargaining power. He would insist on nothing less than being kept in the field as a Class I agent in spite of his age, and he would make a pitch for one of the juicy posts. Berlin. He had always liked Berlin. (There had been a lonely blonde in her mid-thirties — the best age — who worked in an airline office on the Kurfürstendamn and with whom Wilkinson had come dangerously close to falling in love; she was no doubt married and fat by now, but Berlin offered thousands like her.) It had a surplus of lonely women, and they had bedroom eyes for Americans. Yes, Berlin. Definitely. He’d hold out for Berlin.

The noodle vendor put away his flute and with some difficulty balanced his tall cart on its two wheels again, apparently giving up. The bottom half of the cart was a sort of chest; it was here that he kept his ingredients. There should have been a charcoal fire in the well of this chest to keep the noodle pots warm. There was no fire in this one. That was a detail Wilkinson had not noticed before. He must be about ready to call it a night. On top of the chest four posts supported the overhead canopy from which hung the paper lantern. It was a picturesque piece, this noodle cart, and Wilkinson had often played with the notion of buying one and converting it into a garden bar for his home. If he ever achieved a home.

The vendor was having trouble starting his cart. When it did start it got out of hand. It swerved and began to roll toward the shadows where Wilkinson was waiting. The Japanese was trying manfully to stop it, but from his struggle he was too tired. The cart was bound to crash into the wall and reveal the lurking man. Wilkinson made a decision.

He smiled and stepped forward, as if to lend a hand.

As Wilkinson came out of the shadows, the Japanese saw him, grinned, bowed, and gestured toward the cart.

“Glad to help,” Wilkinson said. The guy probably didn’t understand English, but the tone ought to disarm him.

Wilkinson set himself to stop the cart.

It was done quickly and well. There were three piston jabs of a blade that looked like an overgrown icepick and Wilkinson felt the numbing of his kidneys even before the terrible pain. He made very little noise as he fell, only a grunt and a moan, the grunt at his dying and the moan at the failure of his reflexes.

The noodle man eased Wilkinson down. After that, with no sign of fatigue, he shoved the body through the side doors into the chest of his cart.

He wheeled the cart out of the alley and once more brought the charumera to his lips and sent its tinkle sadly into the Tokyo night. He had no noodles to sell that anyone with developed, taste buds would buy, but that was not why he was tinkling away. Perhaps he was a humorist, tootling a derisive mass for a spy slowed down by age and the Japanese equivalent of Weltschmerz.