The red Mercedes stopped alongside the Toyota, and for several beats it seemed as if nothing would happen. Traffic flowed around the two stopped vehicles, but everything else seemed to be in stasis. Like a time bomb ready to go off.
A uniformed cop jumped out of the back of the van and hurried around the big American car. He carried what appeared to be a large fire extinguisher, but he was holding it as if he were about ready to put out a fire.
Or start one! The chilling thought suddenly flashed into McGarvey’s head. They weren’t cops!
“Get down,” he shouted, pushing Kelley farther back into the book stall.
The driver’s side window in the blue Toyota suddenly burst into a million pieces, blood spraying the inside of the windshield as one of the men in the Mercedes opened fire with what sounded like a silenced Uzi… the clatter of the expended shell casings louder |than the actual shots.
McGarvey yanked out his pistol as he sprinted forward, switching the safety to the off position.
Mowry reared back, inadvertently placing himself between the koban cop and the cop with the fire extinguisher, leaving McGarvey no shot.
“Get back, get back!” McGarvey shouted, knowing that he was already too late.
The cop from the van raised the fire extinguisher, and a geyser of flame twenty-five feet long gushed from the horn-shaped nozzle, completely engulfing Mowry, as well as the koban cop behind him.
McGarvey spun on his heel and darted behind a parked taxi, the heat from the flame thrower so intense even at a distance of fifty feet that it made his eyes water and singed the hair on his head.
Mowry and the koban cop were both screaming inhumanly as they did a macabre little jig, almost as if they were marionette puppets on strings.
The air was filled with the stench of gasoline and burning flesh. Traffic was coming to a screeching halt, people were falling back, running away, screaming in terror.
The Lincoln started to pull away from its parking place, but got only five feet before its windshield disintegrated in a hail of automatic gunfire from the driver’s side of the police van.
A second burst of flame from the bogus fire extinguisher completely engulfed Mowry and the koban cop again as McGarvey popped up and fired three shots in rapid succession.
The column of flames suddenly veered wildly left, splashing the fronts of the buildings across the sidewalk as Mowry’s assassin staggered backward.
McGarvey snapped off a fourth and fifth shot, the last hitting the flamethrower’s fuel tank which erupted in a huge fireball, instantly killing the man.
The police van burst into flames, and the driver, also dressed in a police uniform, jumped out, firing his Uzi toward McGarvey, forcing him down behind the taxi, glass and bits of bullet fragments raining down on his head.
Mowry and the koban cop had stopped screaming. They were mercifully dead. But in the near distance McGarvey could suddenly hear the sounds of sirens. Probably behind the police headquarters in the last block.
He popped up again and fired two shots at the cop who was scrambling into the back seat of the already moving Mercedes. Then a third. The fourth time he pulled the trigger the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
The answering automatic weapons fire raked the taxi McGarvey was crouched behind, almost completely destroying it.
He ejected the spent clip from his Walther PPK, slapped home a fresh one, relevered the ejection slide and jumped up as the Mercedes accelerated down the street.
He managed to get off two shots before the risk of hitting an innocent bystander became too great. Then he turned, looked toward the still-burning remains of Mowry and the cop, holstered his pistol and hurried back to Kelley Fuller, who was shaking with fear and rage. The sirens were very close now.
“We have to get out of here,” he told her. “But you’re going to have to act normal.”
“What?” she cried incredulously, but she didn’t resist as McGarvey took her arm and led her away, back toward the Imperial Palace gardens, past the Police Headquarters building.
Chapter 29
“Who the hell was that bastard?” Tanaka demanded. He was an expert driver and he knew Tokyo very well. He’d gotten them clear before the police arrived.
“I don’t know,” Igarshi shouted wildly. “He came out of nowhere. Kozo didn’t have a chance.”
“We have to find out. He’s with the girl, and she may know too much.”
“We have to kill them,” Heidinora Daishi said from the front seat. “They’re witnesses.”
He’d killed Mowry’s two bodyguards in the Toyota.
“I agree,” Tanaka said. He glanced in the rearview mirror at Igarshi who was changing out of the police uniform. “Are you injured?”
“Just a scratch on my leg. But it was close.”
“Did you see where they were headed?” Heidinora asked. He was a bulldog of a man, with a short, thick torso and massive arms. He was a ruthless, efficient killer.
“The Imperial Palace,” Tanaka replied through clenched teeth. “We’ll go there now and finish the job.”
“We’d better,” Igarshi muttered. “I for one don’t want to go back empty-handed. But we have no flamethrower.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll enter the garden from three different directions to cut off any possible escape. The moment we spot them we shoot.”
“What about the car?”
“We’ll leave it,” Tanaka said, hauling the big car around the corner onto Hibaya-dori Avenue. He pulled up in front of the east gate into the Imperial Palace’s Outer Garden.
“Take this entrance,” he told Heidinora. “Igarshi and I will come from the south side and drive them toward you.”
“Very well,” Heidinora growled, and he got out of the car and entered the garden.
Police units seemed to be converging from all over the city on the scene of the killings.
Violent crime was relatively unknown in Tokyo, and when it occurred the police were quick to respond. McGarvey led a shaken Kelley Fuller across Harumi-dori Avenue into the Imperial Palace’s Outer Garden. Most of the joggers were already gone on their circuit of the palace grounds, but a few stood at the outer portal looking to where black smoke rose into the morning sky.
“They weren’t the police,” Kelley said.
“You’re right, but there’s nothing we can do about it for the moment,” McGarvey said.
He pulled up short just within the garden and studied the approaches behind them.
The Mercedes would be back. Today’s attack had been well planned and coordinated.
Whoever they were, they would not want to leave any loose ends dangling.
“I tried to warn Mowry, but his secretary told me that he’d already left. And your hotel said you hadn’t checked in yet.”
“Where were you going?”
“I was trying to lead them away. But God, I didn’t know this would happen.” She was distraught, and clearly on the verge of breaking down.
“All right, listen to me. They saw which way we headed, and they’re probably going to come back for us. Have you got someplace to go? Someplace where you can hide at least for the rest of the morning?”
“I had an apartment, but I’m not going there now,” she said. “Maybe the embassy.”
“No,” McGarvey said. “The moment the authorities found out you were there they’d demand that you be turned over to them. You’re a material witness to at least one killing.”
“So are you,” she said.
“That’s right. But so long as we make no contact with the embassy the police won’t know who we are.”
“That’s just great,” Kelley said bleakly. “If we run for safety the Japanese police will take us. If we stay on the streets, the maniacs who killed Shirley and Mowry will have us.”