Read Online RainStorm by Barry Eisler - Free Book Online Page A

in.
    Rio, home to a sports-and
    fitness-mad population, has numerous
    health food outlets, and it was easy for me to indulge my taste
    for protein shakes and acai fruit smoothies. These, along with
    antioxidants, fish oil, and other dietary supplements, enhanced my
    recovery times and enabled me to adhere to a regimen of five hundred
    daily Hindu squats, three hundred inclined sit-ups, three hundred
    Hindu push-ups, and other esoteric body weight calisthenics
    that maintained my strength and flexibility.
    I varied my mornings and evenings training at Gracie Barra, jujitsu's
    modern Mecca, where the fecund Gracie family had taken
    the teachings of a visiting Japanese diplomat and adapted them into
    a system of ground fighting so sophisticated that the art is now
    more firmly established in Brazil than it ever was in Japan. I trained
    frequently and hard, having missed the opportunity to do so during
    the year I had spent underground in Osaka and in Sao Paulo
    thereafter. The academy's young black belts were impressed with
    my skills, but in truth their ground game was stronger than mine-- although certainly less ruthless, if applied in the real world--and I
    relished the opportunity to once again polish and expand my personal
    arsenal.
    In the afternoons I would ride an old ten-speed out to one of
    the city's more isolated beaches--sometimes Grumari, sometimes
    even less accessible slivers of sand, which I reached on foot, where
    only the most determined surfers, and perhaps some nude sunbathers,
    might venture. After a month my skin had become dark,
    like that of a true carioca, or Rio native, and my hair, brown like my
    mother's now that I no longer dyed it black to make myself look
    more Japanese, grew streaked like a surfer's.
    Sometimes I would swim out to one of the nearby islands. I would sit on those deserted outcroppings of gray and green and
    consider the rhythm of waves against rock, the occasional sighing
    of the wind, and my mind would wander. I would think of Midori,
    the jazz pianist I had accidentally met and then deliberately
    spared after killing her father, a man whose posthumous wishes I
    had tried to carry out later, an effort that had perhaps earned ambivalence,
    but that could never lead to forgiveness, from the daughter. I would remember how on that last night she had leaned in
    from astride me and whispered I hate you even as she came, the
    newly acquired certainty of what I had done to her father damning
    the passion she otherwise couldn't prevent, and I would wonder
    foolishly if she might ever play in one of Rio's jazz clubs. And
    I would look back on my new city and see it as an island, not unlike
    the one from which I viewed it; a beautiful place, to be sure,
    but still one of exile, sometimes of regret, ultimately of loneliness.
    I kept the apartment in Sao Paulo. I took care to travel there
    from time to time to maintain appearances, and managed Yamada's
    new export operation remotely, mostly by e-mail. Some simple
    commercial software turned the lights on and off at random intervals
    during preset hours so that it looked as though someone was
    living there, and so that the electric bills would be consistent with
    full-time residency. A faucet opened to a continual slow drip accomplished
    the same end with regard to water bills. In addition, I
    stayed from time to time in various short-term hotel/apartments
    elsewhere in Rio, adding a certain shell game dynamic to the other
    challenges a pursuer might face in attempting to locate me.
    But all this security cost money, and, although I had saved a
    good deal over the years, my means were not unlimited, and what
    I did have was kept in a variety of anonymous offshore accounts that effectively paid no interest. Dividend-paying stocks and IRAs
    and 401 (k)s weren't part of the plan. I told myself that after a couple
    of years, or a few, when the trail someone might try to follow
    had grown cold, and their potential motivations sufficiently remote,
    I