Japantown (24 page)

Noda grunted.

Mieko, Hara, Mrs. Mori, the innkeeper’s son, and now Noda. The victims living and dead were piling up.

“Your brother, was he good?”

“Taught me everything.”

“But he went in cold?”

“Yeah.”

My head began to throb.
As good as Noda and he ended up dead.

We might not be able to dig ourselves out of this one.

CHAPTER 39

SOGA COMPOUND, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

S
ET
at the back of a heavily wooded plot of land, the gymnasium was equipped like no other in the world. Inside along the north wall, three men and a woman flung knives with supreme accuracy at human-shaped silhouettes twenty feet away. In the center staging area, Casey directed four people in scrimmages combining karate, judo, Indonesian silat, Shaolin kung fu, and original Soga fighting techniques.

This week, twelve men and women attended the private training session, some flying in from as far away as London, Los Angeles, and São Paolo, where they made their homes. Twice a year they arrived in shifts of sixteen each, minus those on assignment, to maintain their skill levels.

In total, Soga had thirty-two full-time active field operatives. A group of eight handled a kill, four to carry out the assignment, four to sweep in afterward to monitor post-strike events and deal with any complications: witnesses, slipups, persistent police.

Each assignment was managed with a meticulous professionalism that eliminated mishaps during execution and allowed for the subtle suppression of any disruptive postoperational issues. Put an overactive detective in the hospital after, say, an unfortunately severe case of food poisoning and his investigation tended to stall. Threaten a witness’s family or career, and nine out of ten grew forgetful. For the prideful few—like the Swiss banker—the carry-through was swift and irrevocable.

Japantown was an example of a perfectly executed operation. The client wanted a very public, very violent display, and Ogi had obliged with a spectacular show. Casey carried out the kill with the other three members of his crew strategically posted to secure the site. Then Dermott’s group slipped in for post-kill surveillance and containment.

Rarely had a Soga operation failed, and never had any of their people been caught alive. Under Ogi’s reign, only two men had taken a fall. One in Africa, a freak death, and the other, well, he would rather not think about that one.

The Soga leader waved Casey over. “Run them through Sakov again. Crank it up a notch.”

“Yes, sir.”

A technique developed by the KGB in the early 1970s, the Sakov maneuver was a series of three swift hand movements used to disarm an opponent at close quarters. Soga had uncovered the technique in its never-ending search to upgrade its repertoire of advanced combat methods.

Along the south wall, a woman hurled the hook end of an ultrathin cable at one of a series of rooftop replicas sixty feet above her head, snagged an outcropping on the first try, and clambered to the top, pressing a button in the handle of the hook to retract the telltale cable in 1.8 seconds. Her spotter called out her time: “Thirty-four-point-seven plus cable.”

Ogi peered up at the ledge. “I need to see thirty-five flat with cable, Bonnie.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ogi’s eyes ran over every part of Bonnie’s body. “You’ve put on a few pounds too. Lose them before the next session.”

“Yes, sir.”

The cell phone in Ogi’s hip pouch vibrated. Snapping it open, he said, “Speak.” After listening to the response, he asked, “What do you mean
escaped
?”

Patience, patience.

He turned his back on the trainees and swiftly exited the back door of the gym before giving rein to a volcanic annoyance that distorted his features. Pacing under the forest canopy, he swore softly. The art
dealer and his friend had burned three of his people and put a fourth in a wheelchair. They had wiped out the entire Iroha team. All were still first-year trainees, only a third of the way through the mandatory three-year program, but the assignment should have been a cakewalk.

“Are you sure there were just two of them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me everything.”

Ogi pressed his ear to the phone.
They’d had information beforehand,
he thought as he listened. But even forearmed, they should never have left Soga alive. Brodie and company had strolled in and out of the village like it was a goddamned temple garden.

Ogi said, “They knew something. Have research run a full profile on both men. Somewhere along the line we’ve met one or both of them before and I want to know where.”

Very little else, Ogi thought, could account for such an outcome.

“Hara hired them, remember.”

“But
he
only suspects. Get me what I don’t know. It’s there. I can feel it.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

While considering his response, Ogi reentered the gym and watched Casey demonstrate Sakov to perfection. His chest swelled with pride. One day the boy would make a good leader. Into the phone, Ogi said, “Finish the job in Tokyo. Usual procedure.”

“Could you repeat that, sir? Tokyo?”

“Yes, Tokyo.”

Nearby, Bonnie’s spotter called out, “Thirty-six-one, with cable.”

The voice said, “Understood,” and disconnected.

Ogi surveyed his people. An elite group. The best in the world. They operated with impunity in fifty-seven countries. Varying methods, target areas. Never too often, never repeating kill scenarios in the same city. Sometimes disabling, sometimes kidnapping, sometimes killing. Secrecy was the key. Brodie and his bunch now threatened that secrecy. Every four or five years someone mounted a challenge, but most challenges were dispelled with little effort. Brodie had the backing of the police and a detective agency, which called for circumspection.

Ogi was irritated. Why did he have the feeling that his primary
source in Tokyo was holding out on him? After collecting more information, he would crush this outbreak.

“How many times have you been up the rope today?” he asked Bonnie.

“Five, sir.”

“Well, you stay on that station until you get back down to thirty-five. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Patience, patience.

Jake Brodie’s son was a clever one. And he had a “wide face.”
Kao ga hiroi.
He knew people. Too many people. If he turned up dead under suspicious circumstances, those people would come looking. If he met with an accident, they would examine every aspect of the event.

The art dealer needed to be eliminated.

Soga would handle damage control.

DAY 5

SHADOW SHOGUN

CHAPTER 40

W
E
arrived in Tokyo at ten the next morning. Back at Brodie Security, I searched my desk for a message from Hara, but there was none to be found, so I dialed the mogul’s direct number. The same secretary answered.

“This is Brodie again for Mr. Hara.”

“I’m afraid he’s flown to Taiwan, sir.”

“Did you pass on my message?”

“Yes, sir. He appreciates your checking in.”

“Does his trip have anything to do with Teq QX?”

“You’ll need to ask him.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Yes, sir. He said to keep on as you’ve been doing and he would be in touch shortly.”

Keep on as I’ve been doing?
He couldn’t know what I was doing. Or could he?

“Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Wonderful,” I said, and hung up.

Next, Noda took me aside. We had to stay alive long enough to gather what we needed, but in the meantime he wanted to remove Brodie Security employees from the equation. Otherwise, Soga would feast on them the way a grizzly feasted on a riverful of salmon.

“Can we protect the others if we keep them out of the loop?” I asked him.

“Probably.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Then no one but George and Narazaki here. And Renna and his people overseas. Fewer people to protect’ll make our lives easier.”

So we drew the line and some of the weight lifted.

For the debriefing, the Japantown team gathered in my office. Noda filled in Narazaki, who agreed we should keep the encounter at Soga-jujo to ourselves, then we called George in and swore him to secrecy. No sense in spooking the troops. Narazaki congratulated me on my first successful assignment, and when I protested that it was Noda’s show from start to finish, my father’s partner smiled knowingly.

In the broad sweep of Noda’s strategic readjustment was a review of Toru and Mari’s work. Narazaki decided to continue the computer probe as long as we could keep our pair of keyboard jockeys out of the line of fire. The two of them had taken up residence in the southwest corner of the office, where Toru presently snoozed on an army cot. In shifts, they tracked the intruder with high-grade antihacker software. As Mari explained it, the program shot down the lines the way a fiber optic camera was thrust down a human throat, illuminating the hacker’s digital tracks. By monitoring the software, they knew within two minutes when our digital “black hatter” logged on anywhere on the Net, and while he surfed forward, the software blazed his “back trail,” untangling the maze of sites and electronic bottlenecks used to disguise his base of operation. Last night, they had backtracked him through the Brazilnet exchange to Istanbul and Morocco before losing him to interference.

While we were closeted in my office, an EU operation swung into overdrive and Brodie Security cleared out. After our meeting broke up, I rang Renna, hoping he’d put me through to Jenny, but Renna advised me to leave her be. All was well, and Jenny and Detective Cooper were getting along famously. I asked him to put extra people on Jenny and he told me the department would never allow it. “Yes, they will,” I said, “when they hear my end of the story.” I fed him information on the kanji, the hacker, and our narrow escape from Soga-jujo. After his initial shock, Renna told me he would station a two-man crew outside the house but I’d hear the chief’s howl in Tokyo. He inquired if I had any proof. I said no. Witnesses? No. Anything at all he could show his superiors to indicate progress and justify a three-person team on Jenny?
Soon, I said. We discussed the case for another minute, then hung up, Renna clearly frustrated with the lack of anything concrete.

I returned to my hotel, showered, shaved, snacked, and slept. The rest rejuvenated my brain cells, and they reciprocated by shuffling the pieces of the Japantown puzzle. Over and above the threat of Soga, I worried about Jenny. I couldn’t talk to her yet, and I knew her anxiety must be building. She’d been in a fragile state when we moved her to the safe house. At least by tomorrow morning, a team of three would be watching all flanks.

Wanting to run some new ideas past Noda, I called the chief detective on his cell phone and he suggested we talk over noodles at Murata’s around five, just before the dinner rush. I agreed, and at the appointed time I strolled into the soba shop, slid onto a wooden bench across from Noda, and asked if he’d come straight from the office.

“Yeah.”

“Toru and Mari making any progress?”

“They’re getting a little ripe. Bought them a bar of soap and chits for the local public bath.”

“Any
other
progress?”

“Traced the screen blip backward to London, Madrid, and New Zealand.”

“Toru say when they’ll have results?”

“No.”

Murata appeared with two trays of
zaru-soba,
glistening handmade brown pasta cooled in ice water and then perched on a red lacquer tray with an inset bamboo grate that allowed the noodles to drain. As the chef set the food before us, I could detect the faint scent of freshly ground buckwheat.

“One thing still puzzles me,” I said once we were alone again. “When you called me in San Francisco, you told me to get to Tokyo because they don’t kill in their own backyard. You said it again in Soga.”

“Yeah, so?”

“How do you know that?”

“The third guy.”

“The one who made it back to Tokyo?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say?”

“Not
say. Did
. Flew to Sapporo three weeks later. Got dead real quick.”

His reply left me speechless. Noda, however, with his usual nonchalance, dug into his meal.

I scrambled to unravel the implications. Were we trapped in Tokyo? Alive only as long as we breathed the smog-tinged air of the Japanese capital?

Tamping down a rising panic, I asked the obvious question: “How did he die?”

Eyes locked on his pasta, Noda hesitated for the first time. Immediately, I knew that he’d been protecting me. And that I would not like the answer.

“Kaji,”
Noda said. “In his hotel room. He never woke up.”

Fire
. The same MO used to kill Mieko and her family. My heart bucked and vertigo blurred the corners of the room. I felt queasy and disoriented, and as if the world were disintegrating around me. No wonder Noda had stayed mum. With this knowledge beforehand, I would have gone ballistic in Soga and gotten us both killed.

Noda snagged another clutch of noodles. Fighting back dizziness, I tried to focus my thoughts. I felt a new rage building and wondered how to come at these guys. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Let me get this straight. They waited until he left Tokyo? For three weeks?”

“Yeah.”

“So what does that mean for us?”

“Don’t know. Open season if we leave town?”

“Jesus, Noda.”

“ ’Course, they’ve been on you since San Francisco.”

Meaning that after five years of operating under Soga’s radar, Noda had willingly tossed himself into the mix.

I said, “What else the third guy tell you?”

“Not much.”

Noda swallowed more soba. My appetite waned and the pasta Murata had so carefully prepared languished untouched on its lacquer tray.

I said, “Well, I’ve got some new ideas on the subject. I think I know why Tokyo’s a safe haven.”