all over the world. A man who’d faced combat in Vietnam and even more
danger all over the world, he was again a stranger in a strange land, but his
age and experience worked against him. Even the angry ones in the middle
of the crowd hadn’t been all that nasty-and, hell, did you expect a man to
be happy when he’s been laid off? So it wasn’t all that big a deal-was it?
But the whispers grew louder as Goto took a sip of water, still making
them wait, waving with his arms to draw his audience in closer, though this
portion of the park was already jammed with people. How many? John won-
dered. Ten thousand? Fifteen? The crowd grew quiet of its own accord now,
hardly making any noise at all. A few looks explained it. Those on the pe-
riphery were wearing armbands on their suit coats-damn, John swore at
himself, that was their uniform of the day. The ordinary workers would auto-
matically defer to those who dressed and acted like supervisors, and the arm-
bands were herding them in closer. Perhaps there was some other sign that
hushed them down, but if so Clark missed it.
Goto began talking quietly, which stilled the crowd completely. Heads
automatically leaned forward a few inches in an instinctive effort to catch his
words.
Damn, I wish we’d had more time to learn the language, both CIA offi-
cers thought. Ding was catching on, his superior saw, changing lenses and
locking in on individual faces.
“They’re getting tense,” Chavez noted quietly in Russian as he read the
expressions.
Clark could see it from their posture as Goto spoke on. He could catch
only a few words, perhaps the odd phrase or two, basically the meaningless
things that all languages had, the rhetorical devices a politician used to ex-
press humility and respect for his audience. The first roar of approval from
the crowd came as a surprise, and the spectators were so tightly packed that
they had to jostle one another to applaud. His gaze shifted to Goto. It was too
far. Clark reached into Ding’s tote bag, and selected a camera body to which
he attached a long lens, the better to read the speaker’s face as he accepted
the approval of the people, waiting for their applause to subside before he
moved on.
Really working the crowd, aren’t we?
He tried to hide it, Clark saw, but he was a politician and though they had
good acting skills, they fed off their audience even more hungrily than those
who worked before cameras for a living. Goto’s hand gestures picked up in
intensity, and so did his voice.
Only ten or fifteen thousand people here. It’s a test, isn’t it? He’s experi-
menting. Never had Clark felt more a foreigner than now. In so much of the
world his features were ordinary, nondescript, seen and forgotten. In Iran, in
the Soviet Union, in Berlin, he could fit in. Not here. Not now. Even worse,
he wasn’t getting it, not all of it, and that worried him.
Goto’s voice grew louder. For the first time his fist slammed down on the
podium, and the crowd responded with a roar. His diction became more
rapid. The crowd was moving inward, and Clark watched the speaker’s eyes
notice it, welcome it. He wasn’t smiling now, but his eyes swept the sea of
faces, left and right, fixing occasionally in a single place, probably catching
an individual, reading him for reactions, then passing to another to see if he
was having the same effect on everyone. He had to be satisfied by what he
saw. There was confidence in the voice now. He had them, had them all. By
adjusting his speaking pace he could see their breathing change, see their
eyes go wide. Clark lowered the camera to scan the crowd and saw the col-
lective movement, the responses to the speaker’s words.
Playing with them.
John brought the camera back up, using it like a gunsight. He focused in
on the suit-clad bosses on the edges. Their faces were different now, not so
much concerned with their duties as the speech. Again he cursed his inade-
quate language skills, not quite realizing that what he saw was even more
important than what he might have understood. The next demonstration
from the crowd was more than just loud. It was angry. Faces were … il-
luminated. Goto owned them now as he took them further and further down
the path he had selected.
John touched Ding’s arm. “Let’s back off.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s getting dangerous here,” Clark replied. He got a curious
look.
“Nanja?” Chavez replied in Japanese, smiling behind his camera.
“Turn around and look at the cops,” “Klerk” ordered.
Ding did, and caught on instantly. The local police were ordinarily im-
pressive in their demeanor. Perhaps samurai warriors had once had the same
confidence. Though polite and professional, there was usually an underlying
swagger to the way they moved. They were the law here, and knew it. Their
uniforms were as severely clean and pressed as any Embassy Marine’s, and
the handguns that hung on the Sam Browne belts were just a status symbol,
never necessary to use. But now these tough cops looked nervous. They
shifted on their feet, exchanged looks among themselves. Hands rubbed
against blue trousers to wipe off sweat. They sensed it, too, so clearly that
nothing needed to be spoken. Some were even listening intently to Goto, but
even those men looked worried. Whatever was happening, if it troubled the
people who customarily kept the peace on these streets, then it was serious
enough.
“Follow me.” Clark scanned the area and selected a storefront. It turned
out to be a small tailor shop. The CIA officers took their place close to the
entrance. The sidewalk was otherwise deserted. C’asual strollers had joined
the crowd, and the police were drawing in also, spacing themselves evenly
in a blue line. The two officers were essentially alone with open space
around them, a very unusual state of affairs.
“You reading this the same way I am?” John asked. That he said it in
English surprised Chavez.
“He’s really working them up, isn’t he?” A thoughtful pause. “You’re
right, Mr. C. It is getting a little tense.”
Goto’s voice carried clearly over the speaker system. The pitch was high
now, almost shrill, and the crowd answered back in the way that crowds do.
“Ever see anything like this before?” It wasn’t like the job they’d done in
Romania.
A curt nod. “Teheran, 1979.”
“I was in fifth grade.”
“I was scared shitless,” Clark said, remembering. Goto’s hands were fly-
ing around now. Clark re-aimed the camera, and through the lens the man
seemed transformed. He wasn’t the same person who’d begun the speech.
Only thirty minutes before he’d been tentative. Not now. If this had begun as
an experiment, then it was a successful one. The final flourishes seemed styl-
ized, but that was to be expected. His hands went up together, like a football
official announcing a touchdown, but the fists, Clark saw, were clenched
tight. Twenty yards away, a cop turned and looked at the two gaijin. There
was concern on his face.
“Let’s look at some coats for a while.”
“I’m a thirty-six regular,” Chavez replied lightly as he stowed his camera
gear.
It turned out to be a nice shop, and it did have coats in Ding’s size. It gave
them a good excuse to browse. The clerk was attentive and polite, and at
John’s insistence Chavez ended up purchasing a business suit that fit so well
it might have been made for him, dark gray and ordinary, overpriced and
identical to what so many salarymen wore. They emerged to see the small
park empty. A work crew was dismantling the stage. The TV crews were
packing up their lights. All was normal except for a small knot of police
officers who surrounded three people sitting on a curb. They were an Ameri-
can TV news crew, one of whom held a handkerchief to his face. Clark de-
cided not to approach. He noted instead that the streets were not terribly
littered-then he saw why. A cleanup crew was at work. Everything had
been exquisitely planned. The demonstration had been about as spontaneous
as the Super Bowl-but the game had gone even better than planned.
“Tell me what you think,” Clark ordered as they walked along streets
that were turning back to normal.
“You know this stuff better than I do-”
“Look, master’s candidate, when I ask a fucking question I expect a fuck-
ing answer.” Chavez almost stopped at the rebuke, not from insult, but from
surprise. He’d never seen his partner rattled before. As a result, his reply was
measured and reasoned.
“I think we just saw something important. I think he was playing with
them. Last year for one of my courses we saw a Nazi film, a classic study in