“I need a karuma.”
The man glanced at the clock, saw it was past midnight. “Impossible. No one on duty.”
Scott stuffed yen in the man’s fist. Twenty minutes after showing a passport and international driver’s license that identified Scott as Mr. T. Jacobs, he squeezed behind the wheel of a tiny commuter car.
Noda’s streets were not well marked, and none were marked in English. Even though he had an address gleaned from Fumiko’s classified file, he couldn’t find Tokugawa’s villa, which was described as having a high stone wall around it, and, at the entrance, an ancient iron gate with pikes. He drove through the streets until he found a narrow lane half hidden by cryptomeria and wild foliage. There! At the end of a narrow lane, a high stone wall and a gate with pikes. He parked up against a stand of shrubbery, aware that if the prefecture police entered the lane, they’d see the car and investigate. He had no choice.
Scott switched off the engine and rolled down the window. He heard the Tokyo Express on the Chiba Line over-pass and, after it had gone, ticking from the car’s hot engine and exhaust system. He sat there, not moving, needing time to sort through what he had to do, and to let the tension in his body ebb after the encounter with Tracy. Even the short time they’d been thrown together had made him willing to risk smashing his psyche.
He forced himself to wait a beat, then he scanned the villa’s gates and a section of the ten-foot-high wall for intrusion sensors. He didn’t see any. Though the wall had no chinks or cuts suitable for use as handholds or footholds, a stand of spruce, its boughs overgrowing the wall, presented possibilities.
Scott got out of the car and, bent low, trotted across the lane. Back against the wall, he crept through shadows until he reached the trees. He climbed one using its branches for a ladder. After making sure there were no sharp obstacles or hidden sensors on top of the wall, he dropped to the ground on the other side into a garden of moso bamboo.
Crouching, he faced the villa, which had been built as two separate wings, each surrounded by a gallery. The wings, set at a forty-five-degree angle, were connected by an arch through which passed a cobblestone driveway. A courtyard facing a closed four-car garage was illuminated by light spilling from a row of small windows in one of the wings.
Scott gripped Rick’s Glock in his right hand. Still crouching, he inched toward the villa. He’d advanced barely ten feet when he saw a dot of blue light suspended above the ground: a laser beam motion detector. He scanned to either side and saw its mate by the driveway. Break the invisible beam and alarms would go off in the house. There had to be more sensors, perhaps ground motion pads and trip wires. It had been too easy so far. He approached the beam path and stopped to scan the garden for a way around the beam, but he didn’t see one.
Suddenly a white light exploded in his head. He felt his knees cave, and for an instant he saw Tracy. Why had she come back? Why wasn’t she at the Embassy with Rick, and what the hell was she doing in Japan anyway?
Part Four
Red Shark
40
Scott, flat on his back on a tatami mat, opened his eyes and saw a face enter his circle of vision.
“Welcome to Noda, Commander Scott,” Tokugawa said in excellent English. Resplendent in a royal blue kimono, white tabi and getas, he looked every bit the shogun. “I was expecting you.”
The fog cleared and Scott sat up. He looked around and thought for a moment he was in an art museum filled with lacquer work, scrolls, and ceramics. Then he remembered the hammer blow delivered to the back of his neck by someone unseen, perhaps the man standing motionless, like a statue, in a corner of the room. He was solidly built and looked like a dozing Buddha with both arms folded across his chest and a pair of hooded eyes, but his tense facial muscles and rigid stance said otherwise. Even now he seemed to sense something and lifted his head, as if sniffing the air.
Tokugawa offered Scott a cup of hot saki, which he refused. “I am puzzled, Commander Scott. What did you think you were going to do? Storm my home and free Ms. Kida?”
“Where is she? I want to see her.”
“Who sent you?”
Scott slowly got to his feet and felt shaky for it. “No one. I’m acting on my own. I want to see Fumiko.” He rotated his head to work out pain and stiffness.
Tokugawa frowned. “You are in no position to make demands. You were ordered out of Japan, but since you saw fit to disobey, I summoned security forces, who are on their way here to arrest you and Ms. Kida. You have violated Japanese security laws, a very serious offense.”
“The director general of JDIH keeps you pretty well informed.” Scott saw his cell phone, passport, and Rick’s Glock lying on a small table across the room. “I know why you tried to kill us — because we discovered your secret plan to attack the United States with nuclear weapons. But the old man — Higashi — you didn’t have to kill him.”
Tokugawa, unfazed, wiped an eye. “Nuclear weapons? You and Ms. Kida seem to have a penchant for fantasy, Commander. Perhaps it is fueled by your country’s habit of bullying weaker countries into submission under the pretext of making America secure. You see terrorist plots and treachery everywhere. Even in Japan, your ally.”
“Does the director general know about your collaboration with Marshal Jin?”
Tokugawa’s face turned stony. “Unlike you, he does not meddle in my affairs. You are involved in something you don’t understand.”
“I understand Jin’s a madman. But what can you possibly gain?”
Tokugawa felt behind him for a chair and sat down. “In the seventeenth century, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the sworn enemy of Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun, wrote on the subject of a man’s duty to his family. He said that a man who does not avenge his father’s death in battle is a coward and traitor. Every Japanese soldier who fought in the Pacific War understood Yoshimitsu’s words. But they also understood something else: gyokusai, a word that describes what it means for a Japanese to face an overwhelming enemy force and to die a glorious and courageous death.”
“And you want revenge.”
“For men like my father who fought against American imperialism, the war was seisen — sacred. A man who fought for Japan and in defeat was condemned to death by the victorious Americans had to be avenged.”
“By destroying the United States?”
Tokugawa’s voice took on an edge. “Not destroying but crippling the United States to halt its relentless pursuit of global hegemony.”
Scott looked at the old man with loathing. Powerful, corrupt, willing to collaborate in the murder of millions for an ancient cause no sane man would embrace. But how to stop it? Tokugawa was old and immune to fear and guilt, and even the prospect of death would only harden his warped beliefs.
A shoji screen slid open, and an elderly man and woman bearing trays of covered dishes entered the room. The couple kept their eyes on their work while Tokugawa watched them arrange the dishes on a table. Finished, they bowed deeply and withdrew.
Tokugawa said, “Please join me, Commander. It is late, and you must be hungry.”
“I want to see Fumiko,” Scott said.
Tokugawa considered. At length he clapped his hands, and another shoji screen slid open. A wiry man in a powder-blue suit entered the room and bowed. Tokugawa spoke to him in Japanese, then turned to Scott and said, “Ojima will bring her.”