“Good.” Then louder, so others could hear: “Johnson-san, I’m bored. Always the same damn dances, the same tinny tunes. You look around. Enjoy yourself. I’ll wait this out in our room.” Noda flashed me a questioning look, wondering if I could handle “the hunt” on my own, then he veered away into the crowd.
—
Normally, I enjoyed Obon. The ancient festival supplied a sense of continuity. It spoke of troubles endured and victories won. Of loved ones lost but remembered. It was humbling and exhilarating, and if you immersed yourself in the festivities, a palpable sense of connectivity larger than the self emerged.
However,
normal
and Soga no longer presented a balanced equation.
A new song began. A litany of drums, shamisen, and flutes pumped up the joviality. The music churned, and the villagers danced. The women trotted their circular path with a willowy grace, arms waving, smiles slight and dreamy.
Step, step, back, wave, clap.
Their movements were hypnotic, their rhythms infectious. The dance was one of serene
confidence. The way of generations of mothers. It was the picture of restrained abandonment.
Step, step, back, wave, clap.
I had always found the dances spellbinding. I recalled the neighborhood festivals of my childhood in Tokyo when I danced with my mother and netted goldfish with my father. Great times before the divorce. When both my parents were alive and together . .
Focus, Brodie.
Old memories didn’t belong to the here and now. Tonight I was searching for what Noda’s friends had found in the dark.
Or whatever found them.
To wash away the country dust collecting at the edge of my throat, I bought a beer, then settled in to study faces and postures of the celebrants.
I took in the sun-burnished forearms and leathery necks of men who worked the fields. Their skin was a dark, woody brown. They wore hardy, resigned expressions. On the women, I noted a placid but fixed look of endurance, of long hours toiling in the home, then beside their husbands among rows of rice stalks and cabbage. I could easily imagine them shielded by scarves and straw hats as they moved steadily across a field weeding, prodding, trimming.
Among the villagers, some faces were better fed and pale in a way the farmers’ were not. They, I concluded, were the merchants. The shopkeepers and tavern owners. Sometimes plump, sometimes slim, but always eager to serve.
Eventually, I noticed a third type. Not hardy or servile but predatory, with the rigid, calcified brows of hunters. They were few, but as I learned to divide the villagers by occupation, their number grew.
A bead of sweat skittered down the back of my neck.
I’d found them.
By my calculations, five or six hundred people milled about. More moved in and out of shops and taverns. The hunters mingled with the celebrants but they could not disguise what they were. Not from me.
I stumbled across a tall monument of black granite at the foot of a large oak. Strings of ancient kanji carved into its dark face eulogized one General Kotaro Ogi, samurai to the shogun and a rescuer of the village from a famine in the 1700s. Though erected in 1898, thirty years after the shogun system fell to a modernizing Japan, the carved
stone memorial was spotless, clearly someone’s pride and joy. I scanned the inscription twice but the Japantown character was not to be found. At the foot of the marker, more than a dozen bouquets of chrysanthemums, gladiolas, and valerians had been left for the hometown hero.
Three hundred years on, the general remained a popular figure.
Roaming the streets for another thirty minutes, I bought a plate of grilled noodles and more beer. I played tourist to the hilt, gazing in delight and curiosity at everything traditional while watching
them
obliquely.
Their gait was silky and they held their shoulders in a way that allowed them to glide through the crowd without wasted motion. There was a smooth floating quality to their movement. I counted ten certainties and three contenders. Most were young and two were female.
Only once did I detect a sign of their attention. When a schoolgirl giddy with excitement plowed into me from behind, I turned abruptly to steady her small body and caught a glance shifting hurriedly away. In that brief moment I locked onto eyes so cold and unyielding in their appraisal, a tremor slithered through me.
With that look, the illusion of Soga-jujo as a quaint country hamlet evaporated forever, along with the possibility of an unchallenged retreat.
Our stalkers were merely waiting for their chance.
CHAPTER 34
W
E
were back in our room. Noda swallowed two pills, then thrust the meds at me.
“Nonde.”
Take these.
“What are they?”
“Keep you from sleeping.”
Drowsiness and jet lag
could
slow my reaction time. I tossed down two tablets with water and blind trust. “Think they’ll come?”
With fear and disbelief tugging me in opposite directions, I was having second thoughts.
“If we seem a threat,” Noda said.
“Or they might ignore us.”
“Might.”
“You worried?”
“About the
how
, yeah.”
That, indeed, was the question. We could only watch and wait. With the medication, we removed surprise from their arsenal, but they still had the night. How would they use it?
During our absence, the low coffee table had been conveyed to a far corner of the room, and two sets of Japanese futon bedding had been laid out. Starched and folded, a crisp blue-and-white
yukata
lay on top of each futon. Noda and I bathed and changed into the kimono-like sleeping garments, wrapping indigo belts around our waists.
Before extinguishing the lights, Noda extracted a 9mm gun from his bag, jacked a cartridge into the chamber, then screwed on an eight-inch suppressor. He set the weapon by his right leg, within easy reach.
“That’s some silencer,” I said.
“Need to be very quiet.”
“Preparation is all.”
“It helps,” he said. “Sometimes.”
—
Ten minutes later, Noda extinguished the overhead light, steeping our room in a deep-country darkness. Soon I was drifting in and out of a light sleep.
Noda’s pills kicked in gradually. As the minutes passed, I felt myself growing more alert. There was a prickly sensation in my extremities. I felt vessels pulse in arms, legs, and torso. My muscles flexed.
Anticipation and concern occupied equal shares of my thoughts. I became aware of noises inside and out: Noda shifting his legs, a soft breeze tickling the windowpanes. Somewhere in the ryokan, the plumbing hiccupped. A midnight current rustled the leaves of the bamboo grove behind the inn.
Noda’s breathing was steady and unlabored. The hours passed. My edginess waned to a soft medicinal glow.
As the last revelers found their way home, I heard celebrants’ drunken caroling, mothers shouting after children, a dog howling in the distance. The noises of nature slowly usurped the revelry and the town grew silent. Cicadas and frog song grew louder. The cicada’s lament was as vibrant as a shamisen. Male frogs called to prospective mates, the louder, more resonant song attracting the female. A shade too loud and a winged predator would swoop down on them.
Our predators also came from above.
—
A ceiling panel slid back and a man dropped to the floor soundlessly, his knees flexing to absorb the shock of the plunge. Padded footwear stifled all sound of his descent except the small
sphhut
of tatami compressing to absorb the sudden impact of an adult male.
My heart slamming against my rib cage, I feigned sleep, my eyes narrowed to slits, seemingly closed, lashes splicing the room into segments. I hoped Noda was doing the same. This was where I found out
if I had any chance of making the grade. I kept my breathing low and steady, realizing Noda’s pills had saved us: had we succumbed to sleep, we would have died a quiet, slumber-filled death, without struggle or knowledge of our passing.
Sleek and dark, the intruder fanned left, looking upward for a partner whose legs were already coming through the aperture overhead. His companion descended with an identical
sphhut
on the matting.
Female this time,
I thought. Both of them stood motionless for nearly five seconds.
A light sweat bathed my body. These guys were good. Extraordinarily good. A voice in my head screamed
Run!
I ignored it.
I peered at the two intruders. They were sheathed in black. The moonlight filtering through the shoji caught the shiny surfaces of the room fixtures but sank deep into the blackness of the intruder’s clothing. I could just make out a tight belt with loops and snaps and hanging objects at their waist. None of the objects looked heavy or bulky or gave off the telltale glint of metal, but most of them were surely hard, maybe forged from a blackened titanium alloy. Lightweight state-of-the-art tools and weaponry. Like the bugging device Toru had found at Brodie Security.
On my side of the room, a black-gloved hand glided toward the belt. Instinct and training took over. I watched the hands and hips. My every nerve and muscle tensed. The man’s motion was swift and fluid, and as his hand rose—holding something long and slender—I rolled away from it. A slender tensile form smacked into my bedding where I’d lain a moment before.
Noda shot the attacker twice, bullets closely grouped to the right of the sternum, and he crumbled. Reacting to the sound, the woman tucked, rolled, and, keeping herself small and hard to hit, retrieved a knife from her body suit and slung it at Noda.
Fanning left, the barrel of Noda’s gun tracked the tumbling figure and spit two slugs at the coiled mass. The shots struck a half beat before the female intruder launched the blade, their impact altering the course of the projectile, which embedded itself in the tatami matting inches from Noda’s foot.
Noda never moved. He had dispatched both attackers with the gun
tight against his leg, the weapon hidden, the dark mouth of the silencer nudging the top of his thigh. He’d made no telltale movement to give away his attack, to catch their eye and set them off. Very shrewd and very professional.
One of them did. And two of them didn’t.
A shiver crept down my spine. Even forewarned, the ploy had given Noda less than two seconds’ advantage. I rose cautiously, a sense of dread seeping into my bones.
Noda said, “Don’t turn on the light.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. But Christ, what
are
these guys?”
Noda held a finger to his lips. “Keep your voice down. We’re supposed to be dead.”
Deep in my chest, primal shadows stirred. I’d traveled to Soga with the outrage of a hunter, but the terror of the hunted now consumed me. Only now did the full weight of our predicament make itself felt: we stood in a small room of a small ryokan in a small Japanese village completely isolated from the rest of the world—with who knew how many black-suited killers waiting for us outside.
We were trapped. The Viper would be guarded. They would cut us down the second we hit the parking lot. Our only means of escape lay with a rental car miles away on the other side of the mountains.
Stepping forward, Noda shot each fighter through the head.
In a low voice I said, “So what are they? Mercenaries? A private army? What?”
“They’re cockroaches.”
“You know what I mean.”
“There are two less of ’em for us to deal with.”
I said, “Would have been nice to get some answers.”
“Not now. No way to touch them without getting pricked. And one prick . . .”
“Says you.”
Noda jerked his head toward the steel shaft of a knife piercing my futon. “Says that. Poison on the blade. One near me has poison on the handle.”
I squatted for a closer look. The shaft of the weapon in my futon glittered with an oily substance. The weapon was double-edged and
serrated. My chest hammered with recognition. Homeboy’s knife was of the same make.
I said, “The guy who drew on me in San Francisco packed the same blade. Looks hard to use.”
“So he was Soga. They like one-way weapons.”
“One way?”
“Can’t throw it back at them.”
“Why not?”
“Knife’s got a one-of-a-kind balance.”
“You could stick them, though.”
“If you got close enough. And if the poison didn’t get you.”
The blade excreted a sweet fragrance. “What’s that smell? Magnolia?”
“A local scrub extract. Kills in seconds.”
I didn’t have to ask how he knew.
I examined our would-be assassins.
Black body suit, black head covering, and black padded toe socks thickened at the soles.
They wore black from top to bottom.
They used poison.
They fought with one-way weapons.
The Nakamuras never stood a chance.
And neither would my daughter.
“I need to get more protection for Jenny,” I said.
Noda grunted. “Next on the list. After we get what we can here.”
“We can start with their uniforms. Looks like SWAT blacks, only better.”
Noda pinched the material on the woman’s calf, then at her ribs. “It’s thin. Ultralight. Special order.”
Around the openings in the face mask, lampblack covered the exposed facial area. The whites of their eyes were blackened by almond-shaped contacts, the centers of the lenses clear. An involuntary shudder rocked me. No simple mercenaries, these. They were more evolved, more carefully conceived.
In a low voice I said, “You did the right thing.”
Under the black body suits, the flesh was firm and robust and possessed the muscular resilience of professional athletes. I wondered
about the faces behind the masks. Had I seen them earlier tonight? Was the man the one I had caught glaring at me when I’d turned without warning?
I said, “They weren’t going to bother with threats and intimidation, were they?”