Getting a meeting with Koizumi was easier the second time around.

Before, it had taken three weeks of back and forth — letters of introduction; small, complicated gifts; drug tests; and a slow and somewhat loving body cavity search — before I got to walk into his office. It had been a test, of course, of patience and persistence and the level of ceremony, corporate and otherwise, I was willing to tolerate. For almost anyone else, on planet or off, I would have skipped it, walked away. I don’t do well in highly structured environments or with the endless, senseless protocol that goes into meeting someone with a company, country or religion named after them. But Yukio Koizumi… It was an opportunity that a low-grade asphalt stain like me doesn’t get that often, especially if quick, embarrassing sex isn’t involved. If Koizumi wanted people dead, well then, I was the man to kill them.

Plus, three weeks was plenty of time for Chet to work up the psych and activities profiles. They hadn’t been much help in the clutch, but at least now I knew that Koizumi had a life different from the one he lived on the public record.

This time, instead of enduring the kabuki, I planned to just walk in the front door. Maybe Unresponsive was on to something.

Hand it to Oaks, he doesn’t make the same mistake twice.

A security detail — same guys, different guys, I couldn’t tell; they all had the armor on — started trailing me as soon as I hit the Center, and the heavy downtown crowd cleared around me as I walked. Anybody with a government-issue implant could see the suits’ mass signature, and the fact that there were several of them moving together, surrounding something that nobody in their right mind would want to be near. It was a strange feeling, walking easily along Hill, the shanty town almost totally empty.

The shanties had sprung up during the six-month city lockdown that followed the Spears trial riots. A lot of foreign and Mid-Western news organizations had found it cheaper to cut their reporters’ credit lines and promote an intern into their jobs than wait out martial law and ship everything home. With the courthouse empty and a good portion of the rest of the city in flames, the media people and various hangers-on took up residence in offices and news vans, and the whole area — three blocks in the Center — slowly merged into a seething, semi-autonomous shithole.

A narrow, irregular strip of asphalt, just wide enough for bikes and rickshaws, functioned as the road now, and it was strange walking it unhindered, without the usual defensive attention that must be paid in the city. Which is why my guard was down when I stumbled directly into a small knot of Deniers coming the other way.

“Hi, there!” one said. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

I dropped my eyes and pulled my hat down, but I was too late — there was nobody else nearby they could latch onto. They enveloped me and began patting me on the back and trying to shake my hand.

“Yes, a very beautiful day!” another said. “We should go to the beach!”

Oh, if only they would. Oh, God, please. Just drop them all in Santa Monica Bay, and let me listen to them dissolve.

“Why, that sounds wonderful!”

“Or a picnic! We could have a picnic!”

“Hey, guys,” I said. “How about a picnic at the beach?”

This was greeted with more general delight and back-thumping and abortive hand-shaking, and the only thing that brought the orgy of good cheer to an end was someone saying, “And you’ll join us, of course!”

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment.”

“Oh, no,” someone said. “That just won’t do. You must join us!”

“Appointment,” I said.

“You will come to our picnic at the beach,” a smiling face said, a dark vein of threat in his voice. “And you will enjoy yourself. Maybe play some paddle ball.”

At this point, I normally would have driven someone’s nose back into their brain and run, but instead, two of Koizumi’s security staff broke from their positions and took an offensive posture around us, planting the Deniers in the middle of a potentially ugly cross-fire. It would be fun to watch from anywhere but the inside. Weapons went on-line, and something hard and cold burrowed past whatever thick layer of unreality the Deniers carried around in their heads.

“Y’know,” said one, “if Mr. Grumpy Gus here doesn’t want to have fun at the beach, well, I say let’s go without him!”

“Yeah!” said another. “Let’s go have our picnic at the beach without him!”

“Yeah!”

And they moved off, greeting and re-greeting each other and noting the general wonderfulness of the weather and saying how nice it would be to have a picnic at the beach. Or maybe go to the petting zoo, yeah, the petting zoo.

Freaks.

I looked up at the Koizumi security guys and said, “Hey, thanks. I—” But they just powered-down their weapons and moved back to the surveillance perimeter.

When I got to Koizumi Plaza and walked through the door, Oaks was in the lobby, waiting for me. He looked unhappy. He, apparently, was always unhappy. The receptionist dutifully ignored me.

“How’d you know he was here?” he said.

“The plans for this building show a dormitory on the sixteenth floor, but with redundant power, an administration desk and a large empty room next door. That looked an awful lot like an I.C.U. and an O.R. A Dr. Shunduro Oki is a Koizumi employee and claims this building as his residence.”

“I underestimated you.”

“Easy to do,” I said.

“How’d you know we’d keep him here? Why not U.C.L.A.? Or Japan?”

I took off my hat and handed it to him. “You’ve never followed a hunch in your entire life, have you, Oaks?”

He shook his head. “Not my style.”

“And that” — I pointed a finger at him and counted at least four sudden movements around the theoretically empty lobby — “is why I’ve got a meeting with someone as important as Koizumi and you’re just his successful, highly-paid security chief.”

Oaks stared at me levelly.

“No wait,” I said. “That didn’t come out right.”

“Let’s go,” he said, turning on his heel and heading to a bank of elevators. “Might as well get this over with.” He held his hand up to a scanner next to a pair of polished ceramic doors and they slid open to reveal a circular industrial-metal staircase, leading up.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

“Company policy,” Oaks said. “Cheaper health insurance.”

I said, “What’s health insurance?” But Oaks ignored me and started to climb.

“Hey,” I called up after him. “I got to ride an elevator yesterday!”

“Yesterday, you were a guest. Today, you’re an employee.”

“Don’t I traditionally get a say in that?” I said, but clank of his boots against the metal stairs was the only answer I got.

I sighed, hefted one foot onto the first step and started up. Twenty minutes, three rest breaks and one unexpected bout of vomiting later, I staggered into the landing on the thirtieth floor, out a pair of sliding metal doors and into the lobby of Koizumi’s office.

The door had been fixed. Or, maybe, had never been destroyed. The replacement was an exact duplicate, also of real wood. They either had a backup supply of very expensive doors somewhere in the building, or a stash of lumber and a carpenter. Either was impressive or insane, depending on how you looked at it.

Oaks was waiting for me, looking fit and smug, and after I’d spent a few sputtering moments with my hands on my knees, he pushed the door open and ushered me in.

The office was restored, too, perfectly. No bullet holes, no splintered furniture, no bodies. The only difference was that this time, there was a better class of thug.

Two dozen paramilitaries in armor suits stood shoulder-to-shoulder in staggered rows between me and what I presumed was Koizumi, behind them, sitting at his desk. Their weapons were out, but not pointed at anything in particular. Their eyes were fixed on the wall behind me. You couldn’t hear it, but I got the feeling that they were all humming tunelessly. If there was a way for six tons of weaponry and armor to seem casual, just in the area, hanging out, they were doing their damnedest to seem that way.

A voice leaked over the guards. “Mr. Baxter? Hello? Is anyone here?”

“Mr. Koizumi?” I said. I stood on my tip-toes and craned my neck.

“Yes, hello!” he said. I saw fingertips give a small wave from behind the suits.

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

“I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said, a shock of black-gray hair and elderly Asian forehead making a sudden, brief appearance behind a black metallic shoulder in futile effort at eye contact. Just as well. “But our last meeting” — hop — “has left Mr. Oaks” — hop — “a little over-zealous.”

“No problem whatsoever, sir,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“You’ve passed the interview, of course, so I’ve taken the liberty of adding you to the payroll. Your creativity and resourcefulness are what got you this job, Mr. Baxter, but I want to be able to fire you for insubordination should you ever decide to demonstrate them on me again.”

“Yes, sir.” Presumably “fire” was a euphemism.

“I need you to kill someone for me,” he said. “A someone who will live an inconveniently long time without your intervention. You can name your price, because it is very important that you — specifically you, Mr. Baxter — do the killing.”

This last was significant, because I could hear him grunt slightly as he climbed up on his desk and his head appeared over the guards between us. His eyes were a flat, dark brown. No changes. I nodded at him.

“I’m not going to try to trick you, Mr. Baxter, or bargain or wheedle. I need this done and I will gladly offer you everything I have, everything I can borrow or steal as well, for you to do it.”

“Okay,” I said, a bit taken aback. People usually expect hits to come cheap. “Um. Who? I’m suddenly very nervous about how hard this job is going to be.”

“Ah. Please, Mr. Baxter, put your fears to rest. This person is unprotected, of no significance to anyone except me.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Koizumi, the up-front thing is appreciated, but you’re not doing a very good job of it. There is a lot more going on here than you’re letting on. I’ve got some rules I live by, and I need to know a few things.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Baxter.”

“Is the target a woman?”

He laughed. “Surely you don’t object to killing women!”

“No, no,” I said. “Of course not. It’s just that if she’s a woman, there’s a chance that I’ll end up sleeping with her and have to come after you. I don’t understand why it works out that way, it just seems happen a lot.”

“Ah, yes. I see,” he said. “Of course. But, no, the target is not a woman. His name is Roland Danning.”

“Beautiful daughter, maybe?”

“No. No children.”

“Wife? Girlfriend?”

“Unmarried and unattached.”

“Is he a particularly attractive transvestite?”

“No.”

“Any good at female role-play with dildonics?”

“No, not that I know of.”

“Okay,” I said. “Just being sure. Covering all the bases.”

“I understand.”

“Does he have a pretty mouth?” I said.

“I happen not to think so, Mr. Baxter,” Koizumi said. “Mr. Danning is not special in any way whatsoever. His death will not mean anything to anyone, except perhaps the city workers who will heave his body into the crematorium.”

“And you,” I said.

Koizumi’s eyes narrowed and they seemed to darken of their own accord. The tuneless humming I couldn’t hear stopped dead.

“Yes,” he said finally. “His death is very important to me.”