The sonar officer started. Park heard it too: a sudden silence. Where there had been a faint stuttering hiss coming from the speaker, now there was nothing.
Park didn’t wait. “Commence silent operation,” he commanded.
37
The banister was worn smooth. So were the steps that led downstairs to the back door of the hotel. Tracy, in stocking feet, heels clutched to her chest, followed Scott down the stairs. When they came to the back door of the fortune-teller’s shop, he signaled “stop” by raising a hand.
Scott peered between the strands of a beaded curtain into the empty shop. Normally it was busy, but all he saw now was a low table surrounded by pillows and, on the floor, a stack of utagaruta cards, the kind fortune-tellers used in the traditional poem-matching games they played with clients. There wasn’t a sign of the fortune-teller, an elderly woman in her eighties. And no sign of the whores and their customers, the salarymen. Scott’s heart thudded and his palms sweated. At Matsu Shan, he’d been lucky to see his targets before they’d come at him. That wouldn’t be the case here, he realized, even though he sensed someone might be hiding in the darkened hallway or behind a door.
Scott held the Glock at his side, muzzle down. He looked to his right, at Tracy: She was trembling and almost on the brink of panic. He tried to calm her by taking her hand and squeezing it; he got a squeeze back.
He shifted his weight, and together they eased past the fortune-teller’s doorway, careful not to disturb the beaded curtain and set it clacking, and started down the hallway. Thirty feet away was an open door leading to an alley behind the hotel. Earlier he’d walked the escape route Sammy Shin had shown him to make sure he had it down.
Wood creaked. Scott froze. A door across the hallway shivered open a crack. Scott dove across the hallway, pushing Tracy ahead of him, and landed on a shoulder hard against the wall next to the opening door. He held the Glock out two-handed, prepared to fire, unless it was Sammy Shin or a young whore and her salaryman inside the room. Instead it was the man from the train in his black raincoat and armed with a silenced pistol.
Scott sprang forward into the man, crashing the Glock’s short snout into his skull. The man fell backward against the door frame. The silenced pistol spit twice with a dull phit-phit, like a can of soda popping open, bullets splintering the lintel over Scott’s head.
The man tried to scrabble to his feet, but Scott, legs driving like pistons, slammed a shoulder into the man’s gut, pinning him against the doorjamb. The man’s free hand tore at Scott’s jacket. He grabbed a fistful of it and slammed his body into Scott, knocking him off balance. Scott staggered backward, glimpsed Tracy with both hands clamped over her mouth to cut off a scream.
Scott rebounded off the jamb, his arm a blur as he drove an elbow into the man’s throat, and again as he slashed the Glock’s snout down on the bridge of his nose, crushing cartilage. The assassin’s silenced pistol skittered away into the darkened room. He lunged, the edge of his rigid hand a blade, which he chopped into Scott’s rib cage, dropping Scott to both knees.
Scott, ribs seared, rolled away and got to his feet. The Japanese shook his head to clear it, heedless of the red skeins crisscrossing his white shirt front. A wicked-looking knife with a hooked blade appeared as if by magic in his hand. He uttered a blood-chilling cry, suddenly pivoted like a whirling dervish, the skirt of his raincoat flaring wide like the wings of a predator, gave a high leg kick, and charged.
The explosion from the unsilenced Glock inside the narrow hallway sounded like a bomb going off. The 9mm slug tore apart the kneecap of the man’s flexed leg, shredded gristle and bone, knocking him off his feet. For a split second he seemed to hang suspended in midair on his predator’s wings before crashing to the floor on his back.
The Japanese assassin looked up at Scott, eyes filled with hatred and searing pain. Scott stomped on the man’s wrist to immobilize the knife in his hand. He pointed the Glock between the pair of blazing eyes and, fighting for breath, said, “I know you speak English… who sent you?”
The man writhed like a smashed bug under Scott’s boot.
“Was it Tokugawa?”
Scott saw a reaction, not to pain but to Tokugawa’s name.
“Where’s the girl? Where’s Fumiko Kida?”
The man’s front teeth dug into his lower lip. His body started to shake as shock set in; a horrid smell rose from his voided bowels.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Scott said. “I know that’s what you’d like me to do. Instead I’m going to blow your other kneecap off unless you tell me what I want to know.”
“Fuck you, man,” he croaked, gargling blood from his broken nose.
“Jake, don’t do it!” Tracy screamed before she vomited.
Scott aimed the Glock at the man’s uninjured kneecap. “Where’s the girl, where’s Fumiko Kida?” he roared. But the man had slumped unconscious.
Scott moved like lightning. He grabbed Tracy’s hand and pulled her down the hallway hopping on one foot as she put on her high heels. She tried to wipe vomit off her mouth and shirt front with a handkerchief, but Scott dragged her through the door and down the alley.
“Let go of me! I hate you!”
“Hate me later.”
They raced down a narrow stone path that led to the main drag and emerged into light, noise, and crowds. Cold drizzle made Kabukicho’s streets glitter like jewels. At the Pink Pussy Club, Scott turned down another alley to a minuscule private parking lot, where Tracy had left Rick’s silver Lexus wedged in a space between two BMWs, the space for which he’d paid Sammy Shin ten thousand yen.
“You drive.” Scott unlocked the car and got in; it reeked of Rick’s cologne.
Tracy didn’t budge. “You really are a complete bastard,” she said. “I don’t know you, Jake Scott. I didn’t know what you were capable of till now.”
“You also don’t know what I’m up against.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? That what you did was right?”
Police sirens started hee-hawing from several directions at once.
“Trace, time’s running out.”
“Goddamnit, Jake, what are you trying to do, save the world again?”
“No, just one part of it.”
38
UNIDENTIFIED flashed red at the bottom of the Rubikon monitor long after the contact had vanished.
Deng Zemin couldn’t tear his eyes away. A submarine contact couldn’t just disappear in an instant. Fade, yes, but not vanish as if someone had thrown a switch. But vanish it had.
The sonar technician looked up sheepishly at Zemin, waiting for instructions. Zemin’s mind raced through the possibilities: sound masking, interference, temperature gradients, the list was endless. But the Rubikon system’s failure to identify the contact nagged at him, too.
The Rubikon’s archive had the resources to identify almost all of the warships in service around the world, yet it couldn’t identify a contact that he was convinced had been a North Korean submarine. The DPRK had only five submarines in commission, all of which were known by their sound signatures to every navy in the world. Was it possible, Zemin mused, that the DPRK had secretly deployed a new type of submarine with advanced quieting technology? It had been assumed that such technologies were beyond their reach. Were they? Chinese intelligence had, in the past, often underestimated the capabilities of North Korea’s military. Had they again?