Girl in a Box Read Online Free Page B

of store—kimono-descended and railway-descended—flourished as Japan rebuilt itself, especially during the prosperous 1980s. But in the 1990s, the ever-stretching bubble burst. The economy tanked and Japanese consumers stopped shopping. Instead, they funneled most of their yen into savings accounts at the Japanese post office.
    There followed several pages of graphs illustrating profit-and-loss statements for Japan’s twelve major department store chains. Mitsutan followed the same highs and lows as everyone else—until 2003. Then, its numbers started tracking upward. The store’s reported inventory holdings, cash reserves in its private bank, and reported profits were huge. And unlike many other department stores, Mitsutan paid out generously to its stockholders. It seemed like a glorious situation for all.
    I closed the folder. Still, I was wondering why a complaint from an American banker had received such serious attention from the U.S. government in the first place. Michael had said it was because of suspected malfeasance on the part of the store, but I just didn’t buy that a successful exception to a retail trend mattered.
    Would Michael keep a secret from me? I glanced at him. He was bent over his own folder, which was marked “top secret.”
    Of course he knew things he wouldn’t tell me. But I hoped to God he wasn’t withholding something of vital importance, something that might lead to my making a monumental mistake that would send me to the same place Tyler Farraday had gone.

4
    Arlington in late winter was chilly, but it was less windy than Monterey.
    This became the mantra I silently repeated to myself as I hustled the seven blocks to work early each morning, the Persian lamb collar pulled up around my ears. Everywhere there was ice, the remnants of past snowstorms. And on my arrival, it snowed again, though as Michael had said, with my apartment’s proximity to the OCI office, there was no reason to take a snow day. The federal government closed for two days, but Michael steadfastly went in, leaving me no choice but to join him.
    The fact was that I liked going to work, because I hadn’t experienced being in an office routine for so long. I arrived at eight; Michael was already there, with my double skim latte and his triple-sugar espresso, carried out from a nearby Starbucks. The first hour was spent reading—briefs that had come in, by e-mail or fax, from various intelligence agencies, as well as the U.S. embassy in Japan, and the State Department a few miles away in Foggy Bottom. We also reviewed the daily newspapers. Michael brought the New York Times , and the Asian and American versions of the Wall Street Journal. I picked up the Post , USA Today, and once a month the Washingtonian , because I always had my eye on the party page, looking for a face I would be better off forgetting. It was all a matter of strategy; if I could pretend that this was a normal office, with a normal colleague, I could almost forget that the next step in the process might result in death.
    Throughout the day, Michael met with visitors whom I’d learned not to ask about—special informants, like myself, who delved into the mysteries of Japan and other parts of the Pacific Rim for OCI. They always talked with Michael in a back room; and even if I strained my ears to hear what was going on, I couldn’t catch a word—the place was annoyingly soundproof. At some time during the day, I worked in another private back room, or I went over to the Pentagon for tutorials with various technicians who were training me in the nuts and bolts of bugging.
    Quickly, I found out that it wasn’t very hard to drill a listening device into a table. The challenge was that the drill itself was often concealed as something else, such as a fountain pen, and pulling the pen apart to put a working drill together was sometimes more of a challenge than installing the bug. And bug