“You don’t want to stumble around in the dark woods with a wild man shooting at you,” Kenji yelled.

No response.

“I would pay you $10,000.”

He heard a single sharp crack as though the man had shifted his weight. He listened intently. Brushy sounds overlain with a noise like falling Venetian blinds electrified Kenji. He staggered forward at a near run.

Listening while striding through the brush became a bizarre dance of the sounds. When the photographer moved, Kenji moved. But Kenji’s gut told him that he was lagging farther behind.

“All right, twenty thousand cash.”

There was an urgency about this situation unlike any other in his forty-one years. The equation was simple. His Harvard-educated Japanese wife would not stand for philandering of any kind. It was the apple in the Eden of their marriage. If she left him for adultery, his position as head of Amada, a subsidiary of her

father’s sprawling financial empire, would go with her. And under anybody’s laws he could be disinherited. Kenji Yamada would become the paper tiger, sentenced to a living death.

Of late, his wife had become wily. She had caught him once. A hot day, a cool drink, a soft leather couch, the brown of it matching the skin of his personal secretary, the woman impressed with his power, his position, and his good looks.

Without artifice his wife would never have discovered his secret, but she had resources and she used them. It was a simple matter to plant a bug in his office. She had heard every groan, each exclamation of success, Kenji’s bragging about doing two women in the same day—everything. He had been given both a warning and ultimatum: one last chance. That chance was about to be spent by a two-bit photographer running through a darkened forest. He had to find this man hiding in the woods; he had to get the film.

On the next round of their game of listen and seek, Kenji made his desk-softened body go faster, risking injury. The photographer was

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