Struggling to find the right words, Steve studied Susan's delicate hands and thin fingers. "How long was your family kept in the relocation center?"
"Almost four years," she answered sadly. "From December 1941 to September 1945. I'll never forget the dates.
"Actually," she continued, gathering her composure, "they were moved from the stables at the racetrack to another retention center — concentration camp is a more fitting description — in Amache, Colorado. They lived in cramped, partitioned compartments in rows of wooden barracks surrounded by sagebrush and barbed-wire fences."
Lost in her thoughts of the past, Susan looked down at the floor and recalled the afternoon her mother and grandmother unknowingly revealed the family's dark secret that had been kept from the children.
It was a warm spring day in Oakland when Susan's oldest sister discovered the awful truth. Sitting quietly under the open kitchen window, Betty Nakamura heard the two women alternately crying and talking about the atrocities of the detention camp.
Susan was six years old when she found out how her grandfather escaped the utter humiliation of being imprisoned in the wartime camp. He committed suicide by hanging himself with a strand of wire. Susan's grandmother awakened to find her husband dangling from a parallel beam that supported the pitched roof over their 8-by-10-foot room.
After a moment's hesitation, Susan glanced at the movie screen, then turned back to Steve. "At any rate, after enduring years of blazing heat and numbing cold, with hot dust storms in the summer and freezing blizzards in the winter, and suffering the embarrassment of sharing one bathroom with scores of other people, my family was finally released from Amache after the war ended."
Wickham frowned and shifted in his seat. He felt uncomfortable, as if he were prying. "That's when they moved to Oakland?"
"Yes. There was an American-owned company advertising jobs for the Japanese who had been detained in the wartime camps, so that's where my folks headed."
Susan paused. She liked talking about the close-knit family she loved, but it still hurt. "My father got a job with the company and my grandmother moved in with them. My parents, who were afraid to even take a day off for seven years, finally decided it was safe to have children by the early fifties. I was the last of four daughters."
Steve cast a quick look at Susan's attractive face, noting the soft eyes. "That must have been about—"
"Nineteen-sixty," she answered frankly, "and I'll fast-forward from there."
He started to protest and Susan gently shook her head. "I grew up in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in Oakland, attended the University of California-Berkeley, and you know the rest of my story."
Steve was intrigued, but decided against asking her any more personal questions. "Marcus said that the Bureau is going to provide a car for us."
"That's right," she replied, casting a glance at Callaway, "but you'll need to take a taxi to your hotel. Our people will pick you and Marcus up at seven-thirty tomorrow morning."
"Aren't you going with us?"
"No. A friend is meeting me at the airport, and I'll be staying at my home."
Steve grinned and let his gaze linger on her eyes. "I look forward to working with you."
Susan laughed in her polite way. "The pleasure is all mine. After what I've heard about your exploits, this should be an interesting experience."
He laughed and then excused himself and walked to the rest room in the first-class section, noting that the elderly Japanese man was not on this segment of the flight.
"Japan Air Sixty-Two cleared for the stadium visual runway two-four right approach."
The seasoned Japanese copilot keyed his mike and spoke with a slight accent. "Japan Air Sixty-Two cleared visual two-four right approach."
On its fourth trip from Tokyo, the shining new 747 descended and passed over the Santa Monica navigational fix at 7,000 feet. Continuing eastbound, the captain banked to the right when they reached the Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena.
The crew methodically went through their landing checklist while the airplane descended to 3,500 feet slightly east of the Harbor Freeway. Delayed three hours by a mechanical failure in the number-four engine, both pilots were fatigued and silently cursed the smog while they strained their tired eyes to locate the other airplanes in the busy skies over Los Angeles.
Sitting near the tail of the airplane, Mrs. Mayumi Fujitake surveyed the city and the sprawling coastal plain between the San Gabriel Mountains and the blue Pacific Ocean. On her first visit to America's motion-picture capital, the elderly great-grandmother was also enjoying her first ride in an airplane.
Her husband, Shozo, a more experienced air traveler, was still dozing as the 747 entered a shallow bank to intercept the final approach course to the runway.
Sweating profusely while he listened to the portable aircraft radio, Granville Penner sat in the back of the Chevrolet high-top conversion van and opened another lukewarm beer. When Japan Air Lines Flight 62 had not arrived on time, he waited approximately twenty minutes and then walked to a convenience store to call the airline.
After learning the new arrival time, the drug dealer with a felony record and two trips to the slammer bought a six-pack of Old Milwaukee and returned to the van.
The scintillating high from the crack cocaine was wearing thin, and the beer was giving him a throbbing headache, but Penner didn't care about the pain. Not today. He had $20,000 stuffed in his pockets and the promise of another $30,000 if he successfully completed his assignment. The money would be more than enough "talking cash" for a sizable down payment on a new burgundy Cadillac El Dorado and an extended vacation in New Orleans, the city where he was born and first went to jail.
Penner's newfound friend, a self-described affluent Japanese businessman, simply wanted the convicted rapist and burglar to use a .50-caliber machine gun to shoot a few holes in a Japanese airliner. Penner wondered why the small man with the gold and diamond Rolex wanted him to shoot at a Japanese airliner, but, then again, Penner never questioned motives when money was in front of him.
Granville "Big G" Penner figured that shooting a few rounds at a plane wasn't any crazier than some of the other things the Japanese did, like the guy who converted a lime-green eighteen-wheeler into a plush motor home, complete with sunken spa in the roof of the trailer.
Besides, Penner reasoned, he hadn't fired a machine gun since his days in the Army. He had always liked the feeling of power that a weapon gave him, and this would be a piece of cake since it was only two blocks to the warehouse where they would dismantle the van and bury the weapon. Easy money.
Parked next to a vacant storage facility, east of the San Diego Freeway, Penner was in an excellent position between the two sets of runways at Los Angeles International. He had recounted his money and was daydreaming about the new Caddy when he heard JAL Flight 62 check in with the control tower. Startled into action, Penner turned up the volume control on the transceiver and prepared to swing the doors open and slide the tripod-mounted machine gun outside.
"Japan Air Sixty-Two," the clear voice replied in a routine, businesslike manner, "two-four right, cleared to land, wind two-two-zero at eleven."
"Japan Air Sixty-Two cleared for the right."
Penner crushed his cigarette on the floor and started scanning the sky for the big Boeing with the JAL logo. He rechecked the machine gun and the short belt of ammunition. He didn't have many rounds, so he had to make each one count.
The 747 was descending and slowing to the final approach speed as it passed near the Hollywood Park Race Track.
Mrs. Fujitake nudged her sleeping husband, then nudged him again when he didn't respond.