Girl Takes Up Her Sword (14 page)

“If you won’t tell us, he will.”

“Him? He doesn’t know anything.”

“If he doesn’t know anything, how did he make it out of there alive?”

“I needed someone to help me lift the clone’s body into the truck. That’s the only reason I kept him alive.”

“So, the clone’s dead, then? How’d that happen?”

“You really don’t know? I mean, you’re not just playing dumb to piss me off?”

Berea shook his head, his eyes staring with urgent expectation.

“This is a matter of national security, Miss Kane. We need to know what happened.”

“You guys are unbelievable. You conspire with that woman to destroy my family, you help her steal a child to force me to go with her, and then, when it doesn’t turn out the way you planned, you come looking for me again. I ought to end you now, all of you.”

Her voice was trembling as she said this last bit, practically vibrating with anger. But the look in her eyes was truly off-putting. Something dark flashed there, Tice caught a glimpse of it and it shook even him. Berea didn’t risk another word.

Whatever it was swirling at the bottom of her heart, it seemed to have subsided after a moment. She fished a flash drive out of her jacket and tossed it to Berea.

“Here’s a video of the main events of my stay there. The Chinese evidently didn’t feel like sharing it with you. Maybe it will answer your questions.”

Berea attached the drive to a laptop and opened the video.

“If he’s dead, as you say, what happened to his body?” he asked, after a moment.

“I buried him at sea, about an hour outside of Avacha Bay. Didn’t the old man tell you all about it before you tortured him to death?”

“What old man?”

“Don’t play the innocent. It doesn’t suit you. The old boatman, Kuznetsov, the harbormaster who helped me get away, he’s the only one who might have been able to figure out exactly where we buried Ba We. But now that you’ve killed him…”

She turned to leave.

“You realize we can’t just let you go. Why not just come with us voluntarily?”

“And if I don’t?” she asked provocatively, over her shoulder. “Surely you don’t think you can force me, after watching that video.”

Tice
had
been watching it, and he knew exactly what she meant. Part of him still wanted to give it a try, emboldened by long training and an enormous advantage in size and strength. Another part of him, speaking mutely, argued against the project. The scenes depicted in the video were daunting. When she threw him into the wall, somehow he knew she’d been careful to protect him from injury. That kind of control, if turned not to solicitude but to vengeance… well, he wasn’t sure he wanted to test her. Berea gestured impatiently at the two of them to get after her.

“We can have you on a plane for the States in an hour. You can’t hide indefinitely.”

“What makes you think I’m hiding? Maybe you don’t realize exactly who I am.”

“Fine,” he said, in an exasperated voice, seeing Tice and Parfitt hesitating. “Tell us who you really are.”

She turned and fixed him with a dark stare.

“I’m Emily Kane. That
means
I’m David Walker’s niece.”

She let that name hang in the air for a moment. It cast a pall over the room.

“And you didn’t think I came here alone, did you? My friend Connie has locked down the entire hotel with the help of the NIS. You couldn’t sneak a suitcase full of towels out of here.”

That second name had as powerful effect as the first. Berea was struck dumb. He fell back into the sofa, reaching behind to find it. Emily turned and walked out of the room.

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Chapter
18

Shinjo in
Gangnam-gu

“What do you mean they had guns?” Jo Tae Chang demanded of the young man standing in front of him.

“They had guns, Uncle. They stuck ‘em right in our faces. What else were we supposed to do?”

The old mob boss shook his head. It wasn’t the first time this nephew had disappointed him. Shinjo listened quietly from his perch on the back of a sofa, as he looked out an enormous plate glass window. Two large sedans pulled up to the gate of Jo’s compound, the standard black “Equus” all the gangsters favored.

“What do you think, Shinjo-sama?” Jo asked, in as respectful tone as he could muster, given his frustration. “Do we have new competition?”

“I think we’re about to find out,” he replied, tipping his head toward the window.

He betrayed no emotion, despite how disconcerting the scene unfolding outside threatened to be. This was what the
oyabun
back in Osaka valued most about him. Just another street kid when the local gangsters spotted him, eleven when his mother died, leaving him with no father and no name, he learned to survive the cold, the hunger, even the loneliness.

One day, a fancy car pulled up to the curb and a tough guy offered him cash for a few hours work. He didn’t refuse, even though his mother would have disapproved. These were the very people who had ruined her. But he couldn’t see another way off the streets. “Just try to look tough,” the local boss’s head bodyguard said. They needed extra muscle for a meeting with a rival.

“I don’t have anything, not even a knife,” he said

They threw a leather jacket over his shoulders and told him to act like he had a gun in his pocket. An hour later, everyone was dead, except him and his new boss. The rival was dead, as were the bodyguards on both sides who hadn’t run off. As for him, he’d been stabbed several times in the chest and arms, but stood his ground. He was stronger than the toughs expected. And the local boss was safe. When the
oyabun
heard about it, he gave him a new name, Shinjo, saying “I could build an empire with a few kids like him.” He was a made man from that moment on. No one would remember a street kid named Koji. The only mark of his transformation: the experience burned a fear of knives into his heart.

Jo and Kang peered over his shoulder at the scene unfolding outside the gate. Two large men in dark suits stood next to the second car, bulges where guns hung under their jackets.

“Who the hell are these guys?” Jo asked.

Two more men and a tall woman, all foreigners stepped out of the second car. After a brief conversation through the open rear door, a young Asian woman emerged. She was little more than a teenager, but the others all seemed to defer to her.

“That’s them,” Kang said. “That’s the girl from Noryangjin. The
hakujin
next to her, he’s the one who started the trouble.”

They watched as the two of them approached the gate. The guards warned them off, gesturing threateningly. The girl’s face remained utterly placid, unmoved by the angry words they were barking at her.

“We might as well hear what she has to say,” Shinjo said.

Jo sent a man down with instructions to admit them. Kang stepped into the next room, returning a moment later with his associates from the fish market. Another moment passed before the girl and boy entered Jo’s study. Neither one looked particularly impressive, certainly not threatening. Kang’s men grabbed the boy by the arms and held him against the wall. He was large and thickly built, probably an American.

“I’ll teach you to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong,” Kang snarled.

He brandished a large knife in front of him. The girl stepped between him and the boy.

“Tommy,” Jo barked out.

“Uncle, we have to cut him. Then we can parade him through Noryangjin.”

Shinjo understood Jo’s nephew perfectly. He wanted to retrieve the embarrassment he had suffered earlier. This was the instinctive way gangsters think. If they look weak, collections become more difficult. The obvious solution is to show what they are willing to do to anyone who stands up to them. And yet something about this girl didn’t seem right—Jo obviously sensed it and so did he.

“I want a word with them,” Jo said. “Then we’ll decide what to do.”

Kang snarled at the girl and waved his blade in front of her face. She paid him no attention, showed no fear, as if he posed no more threat to her than a common insect.

“What can we do for you,
hime-chan
?” Jo asked, with a sneer in his voice. Calling her “little princess” was meant as an insult, Shinjo knew well enough. But he also felt the resentment toward himself in this use of a Japanese term. Both of them were taken aback when she replied in very formal Japanese.

“Please accept my apologies, Jo-san. I’m afraid my associate may have caused you some embarrassment earlier today. This was not his intention. He only meant to prevent an insult to my person.”

“Who sent you?” Jo demanded, brushing aside her apology. “Lim? Or Jin?”

“What does it matter, Uncle? Let’s just put them in a hole. That sends the right message to whoever it was.”

Kang was growing more impatient by the second. Jo silenced him with an angry glance.

“No one sent me. I am here out of respect for you, Jo-san.”

“A private apology does me no good,
hime-chan
,” he replied in crude Japanese, his limited knowledge of the language beginning to show.

“How can I make it up to you?”

“My nephew thinks I should let him cut you and your friend and throw you in a pit,” he said, translating for her and hoping for an effect.

Her face betrayed nothing, still perfectly placid, though her eyes radiated a new intensity. The effect was peculiar, as though she were both angry and sad at the same time. Shinjo’s mother had such a look on her face before she died, as if she were angry at the world for all the torments she had endured, angry at the anonymous father of her little boy, and saddened by the prospect of leaving him at the mercy of such a world. When he looked at this girl, the sorrow impressed him more than the anger, operating on him like a balm, soothing his spirits and something else… what?… maybe reconciling him to his loss.

“Those people at the fish market, the Lee family, how much do they owe.”

“Thirty million.”

She smiled, then slipped the bag off her shoulder and pulled out a small stack of banknotes.

“This should more than cover their debt.”

“Your money means nothing to me. Who are your friends outside?”

“They’re with the NIS,” she replied, pulling out another stack of notes at least as large as the last. “Please accept this as a token of my respect.”

“I don’t care who they are,” Kang shouted. “And I don’t care about her money, Let’s just kill them and leave the bodies outside Noryangjin.”

Jo looked like he hadn’t heard a word his nephew said. The idea that she was working with the National Intelligence Service had frozen him. Shinjo knew the history. Under the dictators, precursors of the NIS periodically swept through the gangs, arresting leaders at will, executing people without trial.

Kang was too young to remember, and too impatient to wait for an answer. He lunged at the boy, still held against the wall, meaning to slash his face with the knife. It was a rash move, and hardly out of character for such a young hothead. But what happened next caught Shinjo by surprise.

Before Kang could possibly understand what was happening, the girl seized his wrist and pulled his arm down. With what seemed like no effort at all, she twisted him down and around, until he let out a shrill cry and spun head over heels, landing on his shoulder with a thud, arm twisted back awkwardly, legs dangling in the air.

One of the men holding the boy stepped forward and placed a hand on her shoulder, meaning to pull her down from behind. Without releasing Kang’s wrist, she grabbed the hand, twisted it up, out and over, forcing him into a clumsy flip. He landed hard against a large potted jade plant in the corner, the back of his neck jammed against the wall. She turned to the last man and froze him with an angry glance. The boy pulled himself free from his grasp and rubbed his shoulder.

With an odd sort of detachment, Shinjo watched the scene unfold as if it hardly concerned him. She crouched next to Kang, took the knife from his hand and placed it quietly on Jo’s desk. In a little voice, she spoke in his ear.

“You have a fierce spirit. I respect that. Try to let yourself be guided by something calmer in you.”

He wondered whether Kang understood enough Japanese to appreciate her kindness. She released his wrist and let him roll over onto his back, groaning and rubbing his shoulder. All the fight had gone out of him.

As Shinjo mulled over what just happened, it occurred to him that she hadn’t done anything he hadn’t seen before. Just a few simple joint locks and throws, nothing that couldn’t be learned in a year or less of
aikido
. But the clarity and decisiveness of her technique was impressive. No hesitation, no panic, as if Kang and his men posed no real threat to her. She seemed not to know fear.

He knew the value of appearing fearless. He’d survived lots of fights against men who gave into fear. More often than not, they died because of it. Himself, he was not really without fear. He just knew how to resist it, how to wait until his enemy gave into his fears and made himself vulnerable. But in his own heart, he was terrified of being stabbed again. He concealed a visceral revulsion at the sight of a blade from everyone—he couldn’t afford to let anyone know. The mere thought of metal tearing his flesh was
almost
unbearable.

The girl stood to face Jo again. He seemed only dimly aware of what had just happened. When he finally brought his eyes to focus on her, he had more questions.

“What does the NIS want with me?”

“Nothing, Jo-san. They aren’t here for you.”

“Then why are they here? Why are you here?”

“They’re only here to protect me. They have no interest in you.”

“Please, tell me your name?” Shinjo asked, seeing that Jo was making no progress.

“Tenno Michiko.”

Her reply was preposterous, of course. What did she mean giving herself a name like that, a royal name? And yet, something about her seemed to command his respect. He began to feel the impropriety of allowing Jo to sneer at her with the term
hime-chan
.

“Would you tell me your name?” she asked.

He looked into her eyes for a long moment. Resisting her was hard to imagine, though he worried about the consequences of revealing too much of himself.

“Shinjo. Ryonosuke Shinjo,” he replied, giving a name not genuinely his own. He had no father and no family name. This name, too, he had on loan from the
oyabun
, the use of which bound him ever more closely to the gang.

“Shinjo-san. I would ask something of you, a personal favor. Would you watch over the Lee family for me, keep them safe?”

“Why do you care? What is so important about them?”

“Nothing. I scarcely know them. But there are those who would seek to cause me distress by harming them.”

“Why not ask the NIS to protect them?”

“It is easy to see that you are more trustworthy.”

He nodded to her. She reached once more into her bag and pulled out a stack of notes as large as the other two put together.

“Please accept this as a token of my esteem, Shinjo-san. I am in your debt.”

She reached out to touch his hand and looked into his eyes again. As far as he could tell, the air in his chest had congealed, pressing out against his ribs, a completely new sensation. Would it burst out altogether, or just smother the beating of his heart? He felt the weight of her gaze: a caress as well as a probe. The words he now heard, were they hers? She seemed to speak from somewhere inside of him… or perhaps he just imagined it. “I know your fear, Shinjo-san,” he thought she said. “It is safe with me.” She withdrew her hand and he could breathe again.

“I am honored to have met you, Shinjo-san.”

This was not right at all. He knew it the moment she lowered her head, however slightly. It felt completely out of balance for her to abase herself for him. The moral repugnance of the gesture nearly choked him. He bowed deeply to her.

“No,
Ohime-sama
. It is you who honors me. Thank you. We will keep them safe.”

Jo and Kang stared at him, puzzled at the extremity of his deference to this strange girl. He retired to his perch on the edge of the sofa and watched as she rejoined her entourage outside the front gate. Once they were gone, he mused on his present circumstances.

Jo’s people would never appreciate whatever it was he sensed in her. Neither did her NIS protectors, that much was clear even from this distance. He looked around the room and shuddered at the coldness of it, all done up in black marble, steel and plate glass. It felt like a fish bowl, or maybe an office park. At that moment, he longed to be back in Osaka, in the familiar neighborhood of his childhood, with its old-fashioned wood and brick buildings, with people he knew, his people. Unfortunately, he had no people there.