On their way out of the building Hadashi remarked, ‘It’s probably a strange coincidence, but this Dragon’s Nest the old man was talking about. ..‘
Yeah?’
‘It’s in Tanabe. It is now AMRAN’ s corporate headquarters. And Hooker is head of AMRAN.’
3
He hurried through lunch and left Hadashi with a fast ‘Thank you,’ anxious to meet Lizzie and the Magician and exchange information. But something else was gnawing at his brain, an insistent thought that had been bothering him ever since they arrived in Tokyo. He was thinking about what Kami-sama had said, feeding it into his memory bank for future reference, and it merely bolstered his ideas.
If Chameleon had died at Hiroshima, why had it taken Army Intelligence five years to officially declare him dead?
Taking shortcuts through alleys and side streets, he hurried across the city toward the hotel. He was three blocks from it when he first sensed that he was being followed. He stopped at a street corner and casually looked around but it was hopeless to try to single Out anyone in the crowds. He slowed his pace, began zigzagging through more isolated byways, hoping to confirm his paranoia. O’ Hara did not like surprises, and the intuition was undeniable. So he altered his course, working in a tightening spiral toward an enclosed alley that connected two of the most crowded boulevards in the Ginza, Showa-dori and Chuo-dori.
The walkway was dark and forbidding, coursing through a building that had been condemned several months earlier. It was rarely travelled because it was dim and the building was unsafe. Only two overhanging lights illuminated the block-long passage. O’Hara entered it and started toward Showa-dori.
In its dying years, before the building had been scheduled for demolition, the passageway had become a seedy shopping mall, its cheap antique shops and trinket parlours now deserted. Some were boarded up, windows had been smashed out of several of them, others were exactly as they had been left when the building was closed. Doors stood open, sale signs still dangled in dusty show windows, trash tittered the vacant stores. If he was being followed, O’Hara felt sure he’d be able to confirm it here.
Was he simply being followed? Or was he marked?
Walking down the alley, he listened to each step crinkling in the glass underfoot. The sounds of traffic faded away, and then he heard the telltale echo of his own footsteps. One. And a moment later another echo behind hint Two.
The third man was in front of him in one of the deserted stores, betrayed by a rustle of cotton, an errant breath. O’Hara exhaled slowly through his mouth, slowing down his own keen senses, listening, judging distances. The two behind were ten or so yards back. The other, the one in the store, was closer.
They were good, moving swiftly on feet of air. The alleyway was alive with energy. Ions swirled about O’Hara like seaweed in the surf.
Then they surprised him. The man in the store stepped out and stood before him not six feet away, a trim, hard-bodied youth in black, wearing Adidas sneakers, his back pole- straight, legs slightly bent. O’Hara flashed a look back up the alley. The other two were frozen in place, statues of rock framed against the dim light at the mouth of the alley.
These are not street fighters, 0’ Hara thought. They have too much style. The one in front moved slightly; residual light etched the side of his face. His smile and his bow were as subtle as a memory, but he made the challenge. Traditionalists, thought O’Hara, probably Okinawan. They were working as a triad and he guessed that the man directly behind him, the man in the middle, would be the best, the one in front the fastest and the last man would be the backup, the toughest to take out. He instantly decided on his moves.
It was 0’ Hara’s turn to surprise them. He whirled on the ball of one foot and made three hop steps toward the two men behind him, heard his challenger accept the bait, and then O’Hara stopped and executed three basic higaru moves almost as one, focusing his first blow on the lead man’s stomach before he even turned. The moves were designed to confuse the man at his back, to make him think O’Hara was attacking the middle man, a fast left to right jag, a thrust forward, and then as the lead man rushed forward, O’Hara executed a perfect ushiro-geri, forward and down from the waist until his head almost touched the ground and lashing out with a vicious back kick, straight into the attacker’s gut. O’Hara’s foot shattered the hard muscles in the lead man’s stomach and thrust deep up into his diaphragm. Something inside of the man exploded, his face seemed to crumble and he flipped forward to ease the force of the kick, but it was too late — his reflexes were not working. He landed badly and flopped over on his back in time to take a second kick to the temple. He rolled away, unconscious. The moves were so fast that the other two hardly had time to react. O’Hara dove between them, rolled and landed on his feet and launched himself straight up, shattering the third man’s jaw with the top of his head. The surprised assailant soared backward through one of the empty shop windows in a shower of glass.
The man in the middle whirled and kicked, jumped sideways, crouched and struck, O’Hara was waiting. He parried the blow, caught the fighter’s wrist and twisted it out and down and thrust a knee into his side. The fighter rolled away from him, got his feet under him and charged again, this time throwing a uraken, a back fist strike at the jaw. It was perfectly executed, his fist moving in a rotary movement and arcing past O’Hara’s elbow and catching the American on the edge of the jaw. The blow knocked O’Hara sideways into the boarded-up front of another store. He shattered the boards, burst through them and felt a nail tear at the shoulder of his jacket as he fell into a dusty window display of tasteless, gaudy lingerie. He kept rolling, bending his back and flipping back on his feet as the middle man dove after him, pressing the attack. O’Hara met him and then rolled back again, using the attacker’s own momentum to throw him farther into the store. Flipping backward and landing on his knees on the middle man’s chest, he struck twice, the first a nukite, a spear hand thrust straight to the bridge of the nose, the second a crippling chop to the throat. The middle man gasped, tried to throw a nukite and missed. O’Hara’s third blow should have finished him, but the fighter was tough. He rolled, threw O’Hara off balance, then twirled violently the other way, and O’Hara was thrust off.
The backup man now appeared in the shattered storefront, his face slashed by broken glass, one arm sliced open and bleeding. O’Hara did not retreat. He leaped sideways, deep into the darkness of the store, out of sight of the two remaining men for an instant, then charged the backup man from the darkness, jogging to the right and left and twisting sideways and diving under the man’s outstretched arms, coming up with a palm-heel shot that demolished what was left of the man’s jaw, knocking him back into the alley. A second later he felt a knife foot shot to his kidney, a blow that sent pain streaking up his spine and cramping his shoulders. It knocked him forward, but again he did the unexpected. He took two quick steps and then thrust backward, twisting as he did and colliding with the middle man, dropping to his knees, grabbed two handfuls of sweater and flipped the man over his head through the shattered window. The middle man landed on top of his backup.
O’Hara ignored the pain in his side and attacked again, this time using his favourite move, one which combined the arcing swing of the side foot blow with the ball of foot, a move requiring total commitment, for he had to literally twist in midair, picking up momentum from the swing of his foot, then turning it so the ball of his foot landed up under the nose. It was a perfect strike and the middle man sighed as he whirled away and collapsed.