The knock. It had been that simple. Envisioning a pouting Lizza standing in the entrance, I’d opened the door to Soga. They had played it brilliantly. Tomorrow’s sneak attack had been preempted. The next morning, my backup would arrive and find me long gone.
We’d lost the battle before it began.
CHAPTER 64
S
OMEONE
slapped my left cheek. Hard.
I heard myself say “Stop that” but the sound came out as an unintelligible rumble. The rumble echoed through the darker reaches of my mind. I forced my eyelids open. It felt like someone was standing on them. Dermott Summers floated in a milky haze before me. He struck me a second time, putting some body weight behind the blow, and it rocked me. The only reason I didn’t tumble to the floor was because I was already on it, secured by a thick cord.
“You are once again among the living,” Casey said dryly.
“But not for long,” Dermott added with a smirk.
I was in a panel van, with Casey, Dermott, and a driver. There was brown pile shag on the floor and white auto paint on the interior. The back panels had no windows. Between the bucket seats at the front, the van’s headlights illuminated a two-lane country road with forest on either side. We were a long way from Manhattan. A long way from Renna, McCann, and the rest of the task force.
“We’re almost there,” Casey said from the passenger’s seat.
“Where’s that?”
This time my words were decipherable.
“Where we’re going to crate you,” Dermott said. He sat facing me on the carpet, leaning against the opposite side with his knees raised. “Tonight you’re missing, tomorrow you’re just another New York stat.”
I fought back a fleeting panic. “I don’t believe it.”
Dermott sneered. “Believe it. You’re about to be raw meat for maggots. Raw, red, and dead.”
I sneered back and tested my bindings. Inches from me sat the man who had killed Abers. Hate scorched my heart but I could do nothing. My hands were tied behind my back. My legs were wrapped in some kind of cloth restraint. A rope around my midsection was secured to a metal apparatus anchored to the side of the van behind me. I wrenched the ropes around my wrists. They held firm. I ran my fingers over the hardware digging into my kidney—and found a thin metal tab with a sharp edge, on the back of the framework. It was one of those bits of metal they need during the formation process but never bother to trim away since no one can see it in the finished work. I pushed, felt some give, and began to work the tab back and forth.
“That true, Casey?” I said, glaring at the man who’d ordered Abers’s shooting.
“Afraid so.”
Uh-huh. First-class kidnappers, fourth-class liars. They were pushing the scare, but I knew a hoax when I heard one.
“Nice try, but it doesn’t wash.” I worked the metal tab some more, meeting less resistance. “You wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of kidnapping Jenny. Wouldn’t have killed the cop.”
“Fairy dust,” Casey said. “To get you to New York.”
“Still doesn’t wash, guys.”
The tab separated from the hardware’s superstructure and dropped into the palm of my other hand. It was the size of a dime and had a thin cutting edge. I slid it into the fleshy V between my thumb and index finger.
“Ah, we’re here,” Casey said.
The van ground to a halt in front of a fifteen-foot tower of wrought-iron grillwork bristling with security cameras and razor wire. Ornate yet impenetrable, the gate was the construct of a moneyed owner who valued his privacy.
The driver punched a code into a control panel below an intercom and the structure swung open. We rolled through. Ten-foot-high stone walls with more razor wire encircled the compound. Inside, the grounds were densely wooded and encompassed ten or fifteen acres, maybe more. We crawled along a twisting single lane of paved drive for nearly half a mile. Around the fourth bend, the trees broke and a three-story
French manor with maybe twenty-five rooms swung into view. Flaunting an immaculate brick façade, the manor also boasted four chimneys, a large undulating lawn, and white wooden shutters on all the fifteen upper-story windows that I could see. Partially obscured by trees, what appeared to be guest cottages sat off to the right, and farther on, the shadowy forms of larger outbuildings loomed.
It took a moment before I got it. And only because I’d been
there
—to the village. A sharp stab of fear rippled my stomach muscles. I sat very still and drank in what passed in front of me. What very few, if any, outsiders had ever seen.
They were building the modern equivalent of a Soga village.
On American soil.
CHAPTER 65
B
EYOND
the immediate grounds, everywhere I looked I saw pine and oak and dense undergrowth. Beyond the house, I saw more trees and, between them, slivers of moonlight flickering on water. The Sound.
That was the giveaway. We were on Long Island, at the house Noda had unearthed. Only it wasn’t a house but a budding Soga community. A Japanese export of unique and horrifying proportions.
When Dermott released me, I wobbled unsteadily to my feet, my vision blurred, my head muddled. Floodlights bathed the manor in an icy blue brilliance. In the shadowy darkness beyond the illumination, men and women milled about in Soga black, their voices soft, ghostly whispers reverberating in my ear with drug-enhanced clarity.
We’d been outmaneuvered on every level.
With Casey leading the way and Dermott serving as rear guard, I was paraded across a gravel driveway, up the entry steps into a large marble foyer, then to a vast study with a baby grand piano on one end and a large colonial desk and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at the other. Gleefully, Dermott prodded me from behind with a steady stream of shoves. Once in the study, he thrust me into a chair near the desk and tied my hands behind my back, weaving the rope through the chair spindles exactly as he had done in my shop with the handcuffs.
Casey whispered into the ear of a tall, limber man in his mid-seventies. He had skin the color of marmalade from a bad indoor tanning experience and a severe face: thin lips, a sharp chin, and smoky brown eyes that moved incessantly and missed nothing. He wore a black
Japanese samue with the usual roomy pants and truncated kimono-style top belted at the waist.
When Dermott had finished his handiwork, he stepped to the side and bowed.
“Well done, Casey. Dermott.”
They bowed deeply. Somewhere along the line, they had picked up flesh-colored earpieces, no doubt with the prerequisite wireless transmitters hidden somewhere on their persons.
In a deferential tone, I said, “You must be an Ogi.”
Dermott stepped forward and slapped my face. “Speak when you’re spoken to.”
“Fourteenth generation,” the older man said in accentless English, his chest expanding in pleasure. “And Mr. Summers is right to caution you about your manners.”
Ogi threatened with the same regal bearing as Casey, and moved with the same lightness. The final luster of Soga’s training, I imagined, something that had not rubbed off on Dermott, though the lack of polish made him no less deadly.
“It was merely an observation,” I said.
Dermott raised his hand but the Soga patriarch shook him off. The ploy didn’t fool me. From the outset my manner had been modest, but their game was submission and terror. The first time around, Dermott would have slapped me no matter what I said, a variation of the routine at my shop that culminated in the shooting of Abers.
I would need to choose my words carefully.
“Your attitude was inappropriate,” Ogi said without humor.
Dermott resumed his position alongside Casey, a pace behind his master. No one stood behind me or could see my back. I slipped the metal tab from its hiding place next to my thumb and began to rub the sharp edge against the rope.
“I apologize. The slight was unintended.”
“Accepted,” Ogi said too quickly, already bored. “I only regret your visit had to be an unwilling one.”
“You left your signature in Japantown. That’s nearly an invitation.”
Ogi frowned. “The kanji was meant as a warning. One you chose to ignore.”
“I didn’t know what it was.”
“Hara did.”
“He didn’t share the information.”
“The fee Brodie Security received suggests otherwise.”
“I thought I was dealing with a distraught grandfather.”
Ogi’s eyes became slits. Then he gave a spiteful laugh. “You know what? I believe you.”
As a direct descendent of General Ogi, he carried himself as grandly as his noble ancestor must have. A steely condescension inflated him. No doubt commanding your own private army could enlarge your sense of self-worth. Or maybe he was simply proud of coming from a long line of blue-blooded butchers.
“It’s a pity you’ve been so resourceful, Mr. Brodie. Had this been a social call, we might have discussed art,” he said. “I have two Klees, three Brancusis, and a half dozen Diebenkorns.”
I was silent. Ogi examined my face in brief, predatory flicks. His skin gave him a sickly gleam but he was fit, his muscles taut. I wondered about his coloring.
“Over the years,” the Soga leader said, “there have been three or four who have come as close to our core operation as you have. Others have survived a visit to Soga. But until now no one has managed both. It is a feat to be applauded. We respect such accomplishments, especially since we work so hard to be, ah, self-effacing. It is essential to following our Way. Our tradition goes back three hundred years and requires perfection. When we meet superb execution in another, we feel honor bound to applaud it. Unfortunately, your skills failed you in the end. In our eyes, yours will be an honorable death, as were those of your predecessors.”
There it was again. So matter-of-factly laid out. Given the risk they took to kidnap Jenny from under the nose of the police, it made no sense whatsoever. But, illogical or not, this time I heard the truth in the firmness of Ogi’s tone, saw the finality in the austerity of his look.
The stillness I’d rediscovered late at night after Abers’s shooting settled low in my stomach. I could die if it came to that. If I were alone. But I wasn’t. I had Jenny to think about. Was my daughter’s life to be cut short because of callous men like Ogi and his crew?
I continued to saw at the bindings, my progress slow but steady.
“What about my daughter?”
“We told you. Nedayashi.”
“You told me to back off.”
“But you didn’t, did you? You took a risk and were caught. Face it like a man.”
“There’s Noda and George,” I said.
The fingers of Ogi’s right hand lingered at the left cuff of his samue. From the angle I had, seated and lower, I could see a glint of metal inside his sleeve.
Ogi’s look was stern. “Who, you would have us believe, are on flights to Shanghai for a new assignment, as we demanded. We intercepted emails to your Tokyo office and checked the flight manifests. They bought tickets, and indeed men with their passports boarded their flights. Yet they are here in New York.”
How early had they caught on to our double fake? It had been my idea to use the tapped computer terminal in Tokyo against Soga—to let them “intercept” the email—but that plan too had failed.
I sighed. “You’ve been thorough.”
“We always are.”
I didn’t know how, but Soga had penetrated every aspect of our operation. Their efficiency gave rise to an unbearable arrogance. But keyhole peepers were always paranoid about missing the bigger picture.
I said, “Good habit, that.”
“Pardon?”
“Being thorough.”
Ogi narrowed his eyes at me. “What are you saying?”
“Maybe you’re not the only one who thinks ahead.”
“If you’re stalling for time, you’re wasting your breath.”
“We know all about Teq QX, for example.”
Ogi’s head swiveled toward me, his eyes pooling with curiosity, the first spark of life I’d seen in them since my arrival. “What do you know?”
“It’s the plum. The prize.”
A grin spread across his face with the languid ease of a rattlesnake slithering silently over cool desert sand toward its prey, and I knew I’d
guessed wrong. Again. I waved Teq QX around in an attempt to show him I knew too much to be silenced. His grin told me the ploy had backfired.
It told him how much I
didn’t
know.
“That’s why,” Ogi said with relish, “it makes the perfect camouflage. Hara angered too many people with his aggressiveness.”
So Japantown
was
an attack on the renegade mogul, but not because of Teq QX. I said, “Camouflage or not, Teq QX is going to generate billions going forward.”
“In Japan, money is secondary to power. You know that. Once you have control, you can squeeze the money out anytime you want.”
Damn if he wasn’t right. On both counts.
“Teq QX was a decoy, then. That your idea too?”
“Yes.” Ogi beamed with an unequivocal pride, and I drew back, repelled at his uninhibited display and what it implied.
He shared his secrets far too freely, which served to confirm what Dermott and Ogi had told me: my death warrant had been sealed.
CHAPTER 66
I
SCRAMBLED
desperately for a new foothold. The problem was this: Ogi could no more share his creative genius with the world at large than an S&M aficionado could display his whips and chains at a neighborhood block party. The Soga leader could, however, reveal his mastery in front of someone who wouldn’t be taking the secret far.
Think, Brodie, think.
“Sharp,” I said, hoping my voice sounded assured, “but you killed a whole family in Japantown. Which must have fetched a hefty price tag. Not too many people have that kind of money to toss around. Either one of Hara’s bigger rivals or someone in the government with a solid slush fund. I’m banking on the government.”
Ogi’s eyes sparkled. I’d regained some ground, and time. “Very good. But
why
?”
“Government means the ministries, right?”