White Matter

Kurt - Miranda's arrival

Tokyo, July 20

Nearly four months had passed since Spurious Developments first put me on the payroll, time enough to expose as fiction the pretence that anyone really cared about the account of their activities I had ostensibly been hired to compile. I knew this but I didn't let it stop me. I still held to my original instinct: that something important was happening here, that in time people might be curious to know how it came about.

So when I accompanied Graeme on the flight to Tokyo only to be abandoned on arrival so he could pursue his own inscrutable affairs, I spent the time this made available doing much the same as I would have done back home: working conscientiously on the manuscript.

Miranda, meanwhile – a role model for the conscientious if ever there was one – had been delayed by the need to perform some errands for Lance. Today she was due to arrive.

She had given strict instructions. Graeme was not to take valuable time from his research work just to meet her at the airport. Instead she had e-mailed an itinerary that itemised her movements, complete with flight number, train timetable and planned arrival times. Her intention was to catch the Skyliner from Narita into the city. We were to wait for her at the railway station, a much more efficient arrangement.

This was a woman whose professional duties included the arranging of business travel: we wouldn't have disputed her even if it had occurred to us to do so.

Her instructions had made no mention of me, however. That nothing was so pressing on my time that I couldn't have made the trip out to the airport, accompanied her on the return trip, an hour together in a railway carriage. I noted this omission but made no comment – neither to Graeme nor in the privacy of my own mind – accepting it simply as how things now stood.

I might not even have gone along to the station if Graeme had not explicitly invited me. I agreed readily enough. It wasn't like I had other plans for the afternoon.

The small satellite station at Ueno, last stop for the airport express, was a dour pre-war bunker. Its twenty-first century air conditioning, though, made it as good a place as any to be waiting for a train. When Miranda's appointed 11:46 arrival time came and went, we weren't concerned. "Must have been slow getting through customs," I said to Graeme as the brief flush of jet-lagged and suitcase-totting passengers dwindled to a few stragglers. She wasn't answering her phone – no big deal, she must have forgotten to turn it on again after getting off the plane. Graeme texted, Where R U?, and we went back to waiting.

I yawned and retook my spot, leaning up against a convenient pillar, looking out across the concourse to a newspaper kiosk and a row of antiquated ticket machines they kept on to serve technophobes and tourists who lacked the only-works-in-Japan smartcard. The next train was not for another twenty minutes.

A little more time passed to no discernible effect.

"Your friend not coming."

I looked up, pushing aside my daydream. A thickset Japanese man was standing there. Fiftyish, no taller than my shoulder, wearing a sports jacket and a plaid cap. He looked like he had just come from a day at the horse races.

He held out a piece of paper.

"You want your friend, you follow instruction." He released the paper from his hand and it sliced the air to the floor like it was weighted with lead. For a moment, neither of us moved as we held each other's gaze, his expression bored, as if he did this sort of thing every day. In a different context, I wouldn't have noticed the violence in his eyes. Then he turned and walked across the station lobby and out onto the street.