Start Shooting (25 page)

I look up from 1944, thinking what cops think—always follow the money. “And sixty years later our partner has a problem.”

Hahn nods, then points out the window to the newest skyscraper on Wacker Drive. “The partner is Japan; the
problem
is one of Japan’s premier
good guys
, Furukawa Industries.”

“No.” I cut back to the horror photographs. “Furukawa did … mass murder?”

Nod. “Pay attention. Asking Robbie questions isn’t the whole show. You have to play a role, convince him he has to cut you in. To play that role you have to understand how Robbie and the rest of us all arrived at that alley in Greektown yesterday.”

“The rest of us?”
I glance at the three eight-by-tens and the file underneath.

Her eyes harden. “This mission killed my girlfriend. And people aren’t done dying, that includes you, me, your sergeant, and some others who matter to you.”

“Who?” Photo glance. Skyscraper glance. “What others?”

Hahn waves off our waitress and my question. “Ready? This is survival stuff.”

Nod, teeth bit together. “For you, too, honey.”

“It’s 1937, Japan is ‘provoked’ to invade China. At that time China is in a multi-way civil war—Chinese Nationalists, Chinese Communists, opium warlords, and Vietminh guerrillas, the precursor to the VC your sergeant and his friends faced thirty years later in Vietnam—each battling the other for local control of China, all of them being hunted by the Japanese Army and their colonial pacification policy of
Sankō Sakusen
—‘Kill all, burn all, loot all.’

“By 1944
millions
of peasant bodies are rotting in the rivers, farms, and villages. Those who can’t hide or don’t die in the pacification are captured and sent to Pingfan 731 or a similar facility for experimentation.” She taps the vivisection photos. “All told by mid-1945 it’s believed the Japanese conducted some five hundred thousand such
lethal
experiments on the Chinese peasants and captured soldiers; British, American, and Australian soldiers as well. There’s no official estimates for the numbers killed in the field trials of weaponized plague, anthrax, and cholera, but it would be in the millions. That August, President Truman dropped bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Japan surrendered, saving the emperor and the annihilation of his population.”

I push the nearest photo up against her Guinness. “A shame, huh?”

Hahn doesn’t blink or vote; she continues. “President Truman officially ended World War II on December 31, 1946. Japan was forgiven for what some experts would later estimate at thirty million civilian deaths, then ‘reconstructed’ on the Western democratic model.
Japan
—a once-demonized enemy, a society capable of sanctioning repeated massacres on the scale of Singapore, Nanking, and the Bataan Death March—was to be rebuilt into the West’s Pacific Rim bulwark against Communism. Rural China, the West’s
ally
in World War II, would not be rebuilt nor remain an ally. While Japan rose out of the blood and ashes of her neighbors, rural China descended into hell.

“The descent wasn’t only the continuing civil wars fueled by hate, revenge, greed, and opium. China’s descent into hell was also biological—the germs of Japan’s massive BW experiments don’t die because a peace treaty is signed—and sixty years later no official will discuss any of it on the record. The mainland Chinese Communists won’t because they were the victims and don’t want to be seen as weak; the Japanese won’t discuss it because they had successfully outpaced Adolf Hitler. And
that
wouldn’t be good publicity.”

“And we’re gonna marry war criminals … so we can put on the Olympics?”

“Won’t be the first time.”

I rub my eyes. Hahn continues. “Five years ago I was in China chasing Robbie Steffen’s package before he owned it or its location. It’s been sixty years, but when the Chinese peasants want to scare the incorrigible children working the chicken barns”—she taps the vivisection photo again—“they whisper ‘
Hiou hiou
’—the emperor’s plan to trump America’s rumored
super bomb
and win World War II. Imperial Japan’s
‘Secret of Secrets.’
 ”

I’ve never heard a word of this; not in school, not at work, not in the papers. Tracy Moens and the
Herald
will print a twenty-nine-year-old murder/rape exposé fantasy but not this.

Hahn points out the window. “The ‘major corporation’ blackmail attempt I mentioned happened across the street nine days ago. Dr. Hitoshi Ota, worldwide CEO of Furukawa Industries and Chicago’s Olympic savior, is the target. The CDC in Atlanta was tipped by an ‘unnamed source’ inside Furukawa—probably another exec’s power play for Ota’s job—but not until after two full days had been wasted. The CDC authenticated the paperwork and tested the threat sample. They believe the BW agents the blackmailer provided are a direct derivative of the plague agents developed at Unit 731. And while these
agents are not nearly as virulent as the agents developed by the Russians in the 1980s and ’90s, they are lethal and easily dispersed in any number of ways. In an amateur’s hands—and Robbie’s crew is for sure that—Chicago could have a serious event on the immediate horizon.”

“Robbie Steffen has
plague agents
? More than the sample?”

“Maybe. And if Furukawa doesn’t pay, he’ll do a test dispersal downtown, then tell the world that Furukawa invented the BW agents sixty years ago, lied about it to protect their brand, and wouldn’t pay the ransom to stop it.”

I flash on British Petroleum’s commercials after the Gulf oil spill, telling us they were the good guys. Hard to imagine what Furukawa could say. For sure, the mayor and his economic plans could say sayonara to the Olympics. “No way Robbie does that.”

Frown. “ ’Cause Chicago arguments don’t kill lots of people? St. Valentine’s Day was fiction?”

“Capone didn’t use the
plague—
”

“It’s a
weapon
, Bobby, like a tommy gun. But with more bullets.”

“Who’re Robbie’s partners?”

“In a minute. Dr. Ota has spent fifty years buying and destroying the hard proof that ties him to Unit 731, but he was there, and so were many of his prominent university and corporate colleagues.” Pause. “Robbie’s crew told Furukawa that if they don’t pay after the ‘test dispersal,’ round two is disperse the rest.”

I read Hahn for the better-than-airport-novel-constructed lie the FBI/CIA would put together to get whatever they
really
want. “Okay, what’s Robbie’s demand?”

“Forty million. Assume the blackmailers would settle for twenty.”

“Furukawa can afford twenty; why not pay?”

“Don’t think they believe Robbie’s crew has the 731 matériel.”

“But you do?”

“Don’t know.” She stares at me. “But I need to.”

“Say your story
isn’t
an FBI/CIA fantasy. How come Dr. Ota and his ‘university/corporate colleagues’ weren’t tried after the war? When the proof was still around?”

“The Tokyo War Crimes trial was a whitewash. Why? The cold war. MacArthur and Truman felt the ‘Secret of Secrets’ research was
crucial—if you can call these photographs
research
—to stay ahead of the Russians. We pardoned three thousand Japanese scientists and put them to work developing the next generation of WMD
—bio war
. Cheap, deadly, terrifying. Back then nobody wondered what would happen if the genie popped out of the bottle.”

“We
pardoned
the people in these pictures?”

The cherubic smile again. “Life outside
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
”

“Nah. Sorry, Robbie Steffen’s an American. If he’s got it, he’s not letting this shit loose.”

“No such thing as Timothy McVeigh?”

“Nah. Nowhere in the world Robbie could spend the money.”

“Maybe it’s not up to Robbie anymore. His partners want to get paid. Either way, want to risk it? And they kill ten or twenty? Maybe they screw it up and kill five hundred, at least thirty or forty of them cops and early responders. With families. And you could’ve stopped it. Want to be part of that?”

“Why me, Tania? Why Bobby Vargas, child molester? Why not some guys in white spacesuits and helicopters?”

“Planeloads from Atlanta. The minute we know they actually have it.”

“Still doesn’t explain making Bobby Vargas your bitch.”

She stares. “Big tough Chicago cop gonna listen?”

I wave come the fuck on.

She leans back instead of forward. “If you want to survive Robbie’s hospital room, Robbie has to believe you’re a player, a silent partner stepping in to smooth out whatever it was that tried to kill him. Knowing what I know will be the only way.”

“So tell me. Make me a believer.”

She points. “Pay attention, tough guy. It’s 1945, we’re on the island of Japan, five months before the atom bombs will obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Allied invasion is imminent—the reprisal for thirty million deaths is about to be visited upon the Pacific’s master race. Knowing what’s coming, the Japanese military speaks for the emperor and orders all records of the
Secret of Secrets
and its research facilities destroyed. But not the weapon.

“Prior to demolition, the Pingfan laboratory packages its weapons products under the careful direction of one Dr. Shiro Ishii, the bacteria’s
creator. Ishii is shipping to Tokyo. Imperial Japan’s intent is to mass produce the plague for use against the first wave of invading Allied troops. Japan’s military commanders also create a backup supply—a negotiating threat should a second or third wave of the Allied invasion survive and succeed. They order a separate repository of Unit 731’s formulas and plague samples to be created and suspended in a balanced salt solution they pioneered. Gives the samples a probable half-life of a hundred years. This repository is thirty glass vials, boxed and sent under armed escort to the island of Hokkaido. Since that day sixty years ago, Western, Soviet, and Chinese operatives—government agents and private contractors—have been chasing that repository, nicknamed ‘the Hokkaido package.’ Sort of a deadly sunken treasure, BW instead of doubloons.

“Preinvasion, President Truman estimates the Allies will lose one million men so the atomic bombs land instead of the invasion. Japan surrenders. The
known
Unit 731 formulas and samples that had arrived in Tokyo are turned over to General MacArthur. Dr. Ishii and his scientists are pardoned, then enlisted in the cold war with Soviet Russia, the world’s new merciless enemy.

“In early 1950, while Dr. Ishii is clandestinely in the USA at Fort Detrick, Maryland, his father is kidnapped in Japan by radical elements of the Korean Catholic Church, a sect who’d been enslaved inside Japan during the war. The Korean Catholics intend to use the Hokkaido package to prove the emperor’s involvement in crimes against them and humanity, atrocities the Allies have denied and declined to prosecute.

“The Hokkaido package is demanded of Dr. Ishii. He reveals its location as his father’s ransom. At some point during the three months the Korean Catholics negotiate with the Japanese government, an excommunicated church member steals the package and sells it to the Korean mafia. The mafia smuggles the package to Seoul. The Korean civil war breaks out a month later; the package remains hidden while the Korean War is fought well into 1953.

“Fast-forward seventeen years.” Hahn searches the file and finds another photo—three men behind an ornate iron gate set in a plaster wall capped with tile, and guarded. Behind them, a colonial building’s
second floor rises to a balcony with shuttered windows. She taps: “Courtyard of the French embassy in Saigon; 1970, the same year Nixon renounced the U.S. use of biological weapons and promised we’d dispose of our existing stocks.”

Buff was in Vietnam in 1970. I squint to see better, definitely not Buff.

Hahn says, “The tall man is the Japanese ambassador. The man in the middle is Dr. Hitoshi Ota, in Saigon to buy back the Hokkaido package from the squarish fellow on the end, a ranking member of the Korean mafia.”

“Dead Koreans here, Koreans in Japan, Koreans in Saigon. Lotta Koreans.”

“They’re the bridge, that’s all, not the problem. Can I continue?”

“Be my guest. Korean gangsters got zip to do with anybody I care about.”

Hahn hesitates, staring at my comment. “The Korean mafia was the street power in Saigon, the final arbiters for the river of overspent money and contraband matériel that all wars generate. In this case, U.S. money. The Koreans ran the war under the war, brokers for everything and everyone—for the corrupt South and the Communist North, for the VC in the city and the up-country opium warlords bringing their poison to market.

“When that French embassy photo was taken, the American war effort was under severe stress from the NVA and their Chinese Communist benefactors. With the help of a Carmelite nun and a child prostitute, the CIA disrupts an auction for the Hokkaido package, the bidders being the Chinese Communists and Dr. Ota. Dr. Ota is representing his own interests as well as the Japanese government and its closely aligned corporations.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“I told you, it’s like a treasure hunt, same as the
Atocha
in Key West. I’ve been on this one on and off for eight years. Let me finish, then you can ask.”

Shrug. “So finish.”

“The package disappears into the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal and the eventual fall of South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh takes over the country.
Crime doesn’t go away, just morphs into the Communist version. In 1982 the elements of the Korean mafia still running parts of Saigon open another sale discussion, this time with the governments of Israel and South Africa, a project called the Ethnic Bullet. Before a sale of the vials and papers can be completed to either, the Hokkaido package is stolen by the same prostitute, now twenty, Lý Thi Loan aka White Flower Lý. The Koreans have been whoring Lý to the rich and powerful since she was eight. Lý murders her way out of Saigon, then requests the help of an American GI and the Carmelite nun for old times’ sake.” Hahn pauses, reading me for … who knows?

“What? I wasn’t in a convent. Or the army.”