Diane Joplin』s JAL flight la Narita at exactly the desigime. 10.28AM. She had spent the entire flight, all four hours of it, getting acquainted with a portable Lonely Pla augmented reality information system on Tokyo she had purchased in one of the souvenir shops at Logan Iional Airport.
The unit didn』t work during the flight, relying as it did on visual markers on the ground to fun properly, but Diane had figured that if she jacked the glasses into the in-flight eai system she could probably use the latter』s display to view the tents of the database. And she』d been right. Ihe plastic glasses was a tiny piece of flash memory taining the eabase on Tokyo as well as a simple operating system that overlaid the data over what you were seeing through the glasses. Old teology but it worked.
Diane found out that by switg the unit to manual mode and pointing the glasses at a photo of Tokyo Tower in one of the glossy in-flight magazines she』d be able to pull up the data. There was a small thumbwheel on the side of the glasses for scrolling through the data and that worked just fine for her purposes. The Japanese salaryman in the bifocals sittio her observed all of this with furtive i.
Satisfied with the prehensiveness of the data, she』d disected the unit and performed a cyberspace sear the name Kenzo Yamamoto on the airline system. Apparently, out of the tless Kenzo Yamamoto』s that existed across the ey of the Japanese islands, quite a few were sidered newsworthy. There was Kenzo Yamamoto the baseball player, the football player, the hentai-crazed teehe fashion desighe politi. The latter sparked her i but she quickly disted him when she found out that he was but a lowly gover official in Okinawa who used the level playing field of cyberspace to voice his distent over policies.
All this translated on the fly by the intelligent agent browser into grammar-perfeglish. There was a whole bunch of other Kenzo Yamamotos gleaned from online family trees, sports meetis, uy professor lists, vention speakers and some dht weird stuff. Diane learhat a Kenzo Yamamoto had broken his high sae-assisted 100-meter dash record in an astonishing 5.2 seds. Then her eyes honed in on a Yomiuri Shimbum news headlihat had her hair standing on end, goose bumps breaking out all over. Kenzo Yamamoto, suspected wakagashira of the powerful Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza fa slain in Shinjuku.
Breathlessly, Diane performed another search, this time cross-refereng the name Kenzo Yamamoto with the Yakuza gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi. The more she read the more vinced she was that this was the man who had sent her father the sole. The Japanese man beside her was now looking at the glowing panel of her s with renewed i. Diane ignored him and tinued reading. Kenzo Yamamoto was allegedly sed in and of the dreaded Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza fa although none of the neers reported this as a statement of fact. It was just jecture but Diane knew what that meant. The neers were being polite, evasive in that uniquely Japanese way. Yamamoto had not been formally victed of anything but there were tless refereo his involvement in informatio, eleic fraud and corporate blackmail though an intricate work of well-informed sokaiya, or shareholders meeting men, who blackmailed corporations into paying fees or face embarrassing disruptions at shareholders meetings.
Kenzo Yamamoto』s front, the neers alleged, was a string of corporations stretg from Tokyo Bay to the Kanto Plain. Yam