Yoshima turned back to the massive window, ignoring the crowded street scene beyond and instead focusing on his reflection. In addition to his perfect accent, there would also be no way for the people surrounding him to determine his foreign birth from his features. They were a gift from the Japanese soldier who had raped his grandmother during the war—a strange trick of genetics that had not gone unnoticed by the Chinese government.

He’d been taken from his family just before his fourth birthday under the cover that he’d been identified as deeply gifted and would be educated at an exclusive boarding school. To this day his family had no idea that the school he’d been shipped off to was actually a training facility for spies and assassins.

From before he could even clearly remember, he had been immersed in the Japanese language and culture, the subtle art of espionage, and of course the shining glory of the Communist Party. Upon reaching adolescence, he’d been issued a forged passport and begun traveling to Japan on a regular basis, honing his ability to blend in under the watchful eye of his trainers and classmates.

There had been thirty of them in all, split equally between male and female. Friendships had been a luxury none of them could afford, and the endless competition had been both cruel and brutal. Mistakes, weakness, and even the slightest hint of a lack of patriotism or resolve were all severely punished. If enough of these usually trivial violations were incurred, that student was expelled.

Of course he knew now that this was just a euphemism. The level of secrecy that had to be maintained around a program that stole children and turned them into anti-Japanese weaponry was oppressive, to say the least. No, it was clear that the children born without the necessary intelligence or physical capability—and even the gentle ones whose nature was unsuited to the tasks they would be charged with—now inhabited a series of unmarked graves in the Chinese countryside.

Only nine of the thirty had survived their training, and those nine went on to become China’s top covert operatives. Or at least that’s what he was told. He’d never seen any of them again, and that separation generated a strange emptiness in him that he’d never been able to completely fill. His teachers had in some ways done their jobs too well. Now he straddled two different countries, two different cultures. Which did he really belong to? Certainly his loyalty to Beijing had been beaten into him throughout his childhood, but he was a man now and his allegiance to that country was beginning to feel more like a habit than anything else.

The pretty waitress returned and he smiled at her as she slid the latte onto the table in front of him.