pushed open the concertina door and, leaning forward, climbed up the aisle toward my seat. The aircraft was still gaining height and the attendants were a little while from serving coffee and tea. The sessions I'd been doing to combat my fear of flying were working; I was almost getting on top of things. Actually, once airborne, it wasn't the fear of flying that chewed on me, it was fear of un-flying, like maybe the plane would suddenly realize it was doing something it shouldn't and drop out of the sky. Irrational, I know, but that's a phobia for you. I repeated the mantra: The higher you are, the safer you are, the higher you are, the safer you are, the higher…
We'd been airborne for ten minutes now, well outside the forty-second danger zone where there wasn't enough altitude for the pilots to prevent a catastrophe if things went into the shitter and, say, a wing fell off. Actually, not even Chuck Yeager could do anything about a wing falling off—except to eject, of course—not an option, even for passengers traveling first class, last time I looked. My bowels were churning and my heart rate was up. Six months ago, the only way I could have done this would have been with a headful of barbiturates. Now what I wanted sleeping tablets for was so that I could maybe get some shut-eye and perhaps find myself in a dream with Anna, which was the only way I could see that I'd ever be able to spend any time with her.
THREE
The Tokyo city coroner, Dr. Samura Hashimura, wore a plastic sheath and clear plastic industrial glasses, and he breathed through an industrial face mask of the kind spray-painters use, while he worked over the corpse on the stainless-steel autopsy table. She stared with open milky eyes at the ceiling and appeared completely unconcerned that the coroner was digging around in her small intestines as if he was looking through his sock drawer trying to match a pair. My nose told me the woman had been dead about ten days, and hadn't been refrigerated for most of it. Once you experience the smell of death, you never forget it.
I was chaperoned by a uniformed officer from the local Tokyo police force who didn't know any words of English except for “Make my day,” which he'd repeated enthusiastically several times already. An interpreter-slash-liaison officer provided by the U.S. embassy also accompanied me. Michelle Durban was around twenty-five, blond, petite, with pale blue eyes and a dimple in her chin. Think cheerleader. She'd look great in a schoolgirl-style tartan microminiskirt, the local male fantasy of choice if the advertising around town selling everything from motorcycles to seaweed snacks was anything to go by.
Needless to say, my interpreter-slash-liaison officer was not dressed in a microminiskirt. For one thing, it was too cold. The outside temperatures had taken a nosedive below freezing. Snow had begun to fall, sweeping off the mountains of Siberia and blanketing the island of Honshu. For another, Durban was CIA and microminis were not part of the dress code. Instead she wore slacks, boots, and a puffy parka that looked like a pink marshmallow with sleeves.
Dr. Hashimura set down a couple of instruments that looked disturbingly like chopsticks and mumbled a few words be hind his mask. Ms. Durban replied in Japanese. The coroner grunted. His rubber nonslip shoes squeaked on the polished concrete floor as he made his way out the door and across to a bank of stainless-steel drawers. He detoured to a computer screen and consulted it before returning to open one of the drawers. He pulled out the tray within, which rattled lightly on its bearings as if it wasn't carrying any weight. On the tray sat a rectangular stainless-steel box covered by an opaque plastic sheet. The coroner nodded at the box. I didn't need to speak Japanese to know that here were the remains of Dr. Hideo Tanaka, U.S. citizen and former employee of Moreton Genetics, the DoD contractor.
The coroner peeled back the plastic and said something to Ms. Durban as we looked down on what was left of the late doctor. “What'd he say?” I asked.
“He said that they thought at first it was a coconut.”
A coconut? The hairy ball in the tray could well have passed for one, especially if you weren't prepared to see it for what it was—a severed head. The coroner retrieved a large pair of forceps from a nearby tray