Headhunters

Chapter Ten

Ziggy Penn looked through the windshield at the slow-moving traffic and the pedestrians that thronged the sidewalks. It was a stifling night, and Tokyo was busy. The heat was uncomfortable and the air-conditioning unit in his car was sporadic at best. His sweat had soaked through the fabric of his shirt and now it was stuck to his back. Ziggy was nervous. He had allowed himself plenty of time for the journey across the city, so punctuality was not the cause of his concern. It was what he was planning to do once he got where he was going.

A distant light turned green, the queue was released, and Ziggy got moving again. He took a quieter road through Minato until he reached Azabu, Tokyo’s most upscale residential district. It was home to embassies and high-end businesses, and counted plenty of notable residents within its population. There were well-heeled ex-pats, diplomats and business people, the whole district awash with their money.

Ziggy found the address he wanted and turned off the road. He was at the top of a ramp facing the entrance to an underground garage. He took out his wallet and removed his faked credentials. The gate to the garage was operated by way of a security card. Ziggy had hacked the system, obtained the code and pasted it onto a magstripe that he had pasted onto a blank card. He lowered his window, reached out and slid the card through the machine. It worked, as he had known it would. The door retracted and Ziggy drove into the garage.

He drove slowly into the dimly lit space, found an empty bay and reversed his car into it. The garage was full of expensive cars: in the row opposite him he saw a Lexus, a Bentley and a Jaguar, each ensconced within a generously proportioned bay. He waited a moment, satisfying himself that the garage was empty. He was three cars along from the Ferrari. He had been given its registration and told where it would be parked. It sat there, in the corner of the garage, its red bodywork gleaming like a jewel in the dim light cast by a sconced light above it. It was a 458 GTB. Ziggy didn’t care much for cars, but he knew that this one was expensive. There would have been very little change from $250,000.

He checked left and right again and, satisfied, reached across to the passenger seat and collected his MacBook. He opened it, waking the computer, and activated his homebrew software application. Ziggy was wearing forensic gloves, but the latex was thin and it didn’t impede his fingers as they danced across the keyboard. It was custom software created for this specific purpose, and although he was confident in his coding chops, he was still a little anxious to put it to the test. He reached into the bag on the seat and took out the software-defined radio that he had built from off-the-shelf components for less than a hundred thousand yen. It was, effectively, a radio that could digitally emit or pick up a wide band of frequencies, including FM, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

He typed commands into the laptop, firing up the software. With the transmitter attached to the MacBook, along with an antenna and amplifier he had picked up in RadioShack, he was able to transmit on the same frequency as the key fob that the owner of the Ferrari used to unlock the doors and start the engine. He used that frequency to perform a brute-force attack. The software cycled through thousands of code variations at a rate of ten every second.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes.

The car’s lights flashed and he heard the bleep that signified the doors unlocking.

He paused again and checked that the garage was still empty. He put the laptop and radio gear into his bag, opened the door and stepped outside. He would leave the Nissan here. He had stolen it earlier that evening from a lot in Roppongi. It would be discovered, eventually, but it would be too late by then. He would be long gone.

He reached the Ferrari, opened the door and slid inside. He took a moment to familiarise himself with the layout of the instruments and controls and, satisfied, he took out his laptop and activated the software again. The keyless ignition activated and the engine turned over. Ziggy put the car into reverse and pushed down on the gas. He lurched backward, almost rear-ending the car in the bay behind him. He stamped on the brakes and then, applying pressure more carefully, pulled away. He negotiated the garage, ascended the ramp and pulled up at the gate. He pressed his fake credentials against the reader, waited for the barrier to be raised, and then pulled away. He turned onto the road that ran alongside the apartment block and pressed down on the gas a little more firmly. The car, agile as a cat and powered by a monstrously large engine, leapt forward.

Ziggy allowed himself a smile. He was not prone to doubting his abilities, but he wouldn’t deny the quick flash of relief that he had successfully made away with his target.

Now to deliver it.

The identity of the recipient was more thrilling to him than the heist itself.

He headed to another underground garage, this one beneath an apartment block in Ojima. He backed it into the space that had been specified, collected his things and stepped outside. That was that. The job was done. He walked back up the ramp, limping a little from the old injury to his leg, and exited onto street level. There was a taxi idling at a rank two hundred metres away from him and he put his fingers to his lips and whistled, loud and shrill. The driver flashed his lights to signal that he had seen him and started forward.

“Where to?” the man said in broken English. He had clocked Ziggy’s ethnicity and assumed that he couldn’t speak Japanese.

That annoyed him.

“The Park Hyatt,” he said, reeling off the address in adequate Japanese.

“Very good,” the man said, sticking to English, not even trying to hide the sarcastic little upturn at the side of his mouth.

Whatever. Life was too short to worry about the opinion of a patronising taxi driver, and Ziggy didn’t push it. In any event, he was buoyed by the sense of anticipation that he felt. He rested his bag on the seat next to him and thought about the situation that he had found himself in. The arrangement was far from satisfactory, but it still gave him shivers of excitement whenever he thought about it.

He thought of Shoko.

Ziggy had been single for years, long since before he had made his way to Tokyo. It was one of those things that he had come to accept. Some people were in relationships; others were not. He was one of the people who were not. He had tried to persuade himself that it didn’t matter and had immersed himself in his online world as a counterweight to the things he lacked in real life. And, for a time, it had worked. He spent hours lost in online games, using a hack he had written to level up a mage in World of Warcraft until he was so powerful that he was almost a God. When he bored of that, he made a name for himself on the forums where hackers met to buy and sell data. There were skilful coders there, but he knew he was better than all of them. He adopted a boastful online persona and defended his reputation against anyone who claimed that they had his measure. He developed a data packet that could be transmitted through forum posts, with the eventual consequence of wrecking the recipient’s machine. A man of his talents could make himself rich beyond measure in a place like that, but he performed hacks mostly to inflate his status.

He thought that the distractions would be enough to take his mind off the fact that he was alone, but they had not. He still found himself drawn to porn sites, and he still found himself looking at couples who walked hand in hand in Roppongi with a hot stab of jealousy. In the end, he had to admit it to himself.

He was lonely.

He was determined to fix it just as he would fix any other problem. He would use data and logic to optimise his opportunities. He conducted a survey of the local online dating scene. It was big in Tokyo, and getting bigger. None of the sites he remembered from his time at home had been able to crack the market, but home-grown businesses, built on the same principles but with a Japanese slant, were gaining market share.

For someone with Ziggy’s particular set of skills, that was an opportunity.

He chose the one with the best reputation. It was called JapanCupid and had the best-looking women in Tokyo, who, fortunately, were reputed to have a preference for rich Western men. Ziggy had the ethnicity and he could add money whenever he needed it by ripping off credit card information and selling it in the forums. The problem he had experienced during his first forays, however, was that women evidently didn’t find him attractive. They ignored his profile and, when he did manage to meet a girl in real life, she inevitably turned up her nose, made her excuses and left him embarrassingly early.

Ziggy was not what would be considered good looking. He was short, with a thatch of untidy ginger hair that he had no interest in taming. His eyes bulged a little and, since he worked at night and rarely saw the sun, his complexion was as pallid as a ghost’s, pitted with the old acne scars that had blighted his adolescence. At least he was self-aware enough not to pretend that he was attractive. He wasn’t vain and didn’t labour under the misapprehension that he was better looking than he was: he knew his appearance was a problem, especially in a culture where the women put so much store in a handsome mate.

He had considered using a fake photograph on his profile, but what was the point of that? He could string them along for as long as he liked, and that might be enjoyable to a point, but, in the end, he was going to have to meet them in the real world and his ruse would be busted in seconds.

No. He would be clever.

He improvised two workarounds that improved his efficiency. First, he registered with another dating site and posted a profile that targeted women in Nagoya. Far enough away that he wouldn’t be found out, close enough that the women would share the same characteristics. He wrote an automated script that approached women who met a number of selection criteria. The script changed his profile picture and copy, switching through a series of eight, and then compiled the results of the split test so that he knew which combination of picture and copy was most likely to elicit a favourable response.

That was the first part. With that information in hand, he created an optimal profile and wrote a second script that contacted every eligible woman on the site in Tokyo. The script texted him every time he received an interesting response and, at a prompt, would begin pre-scripted conversations for him.

It had been effective. The script had contacted over five hundred women thus far. Fifty of them had replied. Five of them had graduated through the automated sequence and he had taken over the correspondence himself.

Two of them, in particular, were promising.

He met the first woman for dinner at Mikawa Zezankyo, and, over flawless tempura served straight from the wok to the plate, he had suffered through the most excruciating two hours that he could remember. The girl was self-absorbed and purely materialistic, and he had found her quite awful. He escaped as soon as he could, his wallet lightened and his confidence shaken.

And then he met the second woman.

Her name was Shoko Miyazaki.

And she was special.