McCoy Jefferson left the Daewoo SUV parked in a deep drainage ditch a short distance from the villa. He found Scott’s rental car and looked it over and saw that it was empty. In shadow, Jefferson dug out black cammies, black balaclava, and gloves from his bag, put them on, and jammed the silenced pistol into a thigh holster.
Ready to go, he checked his watch, then unclipped a miniature transmitter from his belt and pressed a button to send a burst signal, to activate the transmitter’s built-in homing beacon. As he did this, a digital timer on the transmitter started counting down from thirty minutes. All he was missing, Jefferson lamented, was a mini MAV, like the ones they’d used on Matsu Shan, to probe Tokugawa’s villa to find Scott.
Moments later he had a small grapnel and line laid over the wall. He tested it with his weight and vaulted over the top in one fluid motion. On the other side he used a magno-discriminator to locate and avoid hidden laser beams and motion pads, then he tucked himself into a shadow cast by the short roof that overhung the gallery surrounding one of the villa’s wings. Set, he eased onto the gallery’s deck and duckwalked to one of the low windows. Inside he saw a large, modern kitchen and an elderly Japanese couple busy cleaning up.
Jefferson noticed a bamboo and cedar trash storage crib next to the kitchen door. He ran a pencil light over the crib’s simple guillotine latch, which held the crib’s double doors shut. He lifted the latch, opened the doors, and looked inside at four large, open metal trash cans awaiting the thrice-weekly trash pickup. Neatly packed inside the cans were the requisite transparent plastic bags of sorted paper, glass, aluminum, and organics. He rocked a can back and forth to test its weight.
Perfect.
He tugged and kicked, and a can crashed onto the cobblestones from the crib and rolled across the courtyard, disgorging its contents. Jefferson sprang to the kitchen door and got ready.
A spotlight came on, then the old man, armed with a broom, stuck his head out the door and shouted, “Shoo, shoo, shoo!” He stepped outside and waved the broom to scare away the pesky sika deer he thought had raided the trash.
Jefferson clamped a gloved hand over the man’s mouth and dug the silencer into his neck. “Don’t make a sound or I’ll kill you,” he warned in Japanese. “Understand?”
The old man’s jaw stuttered, but no words came from his mouth. “Understand?”
He nodded, and Jefferson lifted his hand away. “How many inside?”
“Don’t kill me.”
“How many?”
“Five. The gaijin — he is an American. And a woman.” He hesitated, but the silencer’s cold steel made him speak again. “Master Tokugawa and two bodyguards.”
“The gaijin, where is he?”
“With Master Tokugawa.”
“The woman?”
The old man pointed to the second floor.
“The bodyguards?”
“Ito is with Master Tokugawa and the gaijin. Ojima — I don’t know.”
Jefferson pressed the muzzle against the man’s cheek.
“Please, I don’t know.”
Jefferson believed him. “Call your wife. Tell her you need help.”
The old woman almost fainted in Jefferson’s arms. He herded the couple back inside the kitchen at gun-point and stood them in a corner facing the wall. The old man tried to calm his wife by patting her back.
Jefferson found a container of rice flour, dumped it on a counter, and spread it out in a thin layer.
“Draw a layout of the house,” he ordered the old man.
With a finger the old man drew a crude sketch in the flour. It placed the main room of the villa at the end of a dogleg off a long corridor from the kitchen. The old man also made marks in the flour to show the locations of the villa’s half-dozen entrances, and he drew a box in the adjoining wing that represented the upstairs room where he said the girl was being held.
Jefferson scattered the rice flour. “Okay,” he said, “face the wall.”
He taped their mouths with Plastex and bound their hands and feet with nylon wire ties. The timer said he had twenty minutes left.
41
Jefferson held the automatic pistol loosely against his leg, silencer pointed down. He took a deep breath and moved out. At the dogleg, he stopped and heard voices: Scott’s and that of someone he guessed was Tokugawa.
Jefferson flattened himself against a sliding door facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass panels, in which he saw his own reflection mingled with the softly lit garden outside. He inched forward; where the hallway turned into the main room, he rolled on a shoulder and peeked around the corner. Scott and Tokugawa were alone in the room. Jefferson pulled back, unsettled that there was no sign of the two bodyguards. Not good. He checked the timer on the transmitter: He had to move, now.
A bright reflection in the glass across the corridor caught his eye. He looked left, where a shoji screen had silently slid open, leaving a tall black rectangle in the wall. Light from an outdoor fixture had struck a shiny object inside the rectangle, and for a split second Jefferson had seen its flare reflected in the glass.
A fury of splintering wood and shredded paper exploded into the narrow corridor like a bomb. A muscular man holding a knife in his fist burst through the thin shoji screen at Jefferson.
Jefferson saw the flashing blade, rapier-thin, and instinctively whipped his head back as the point whistled past his chin. He reacted on pure instinct, ducked, pivoted on his haunches, and swung the automatic up in a one-handed grip. The man lunged again; Jefferson shot him in the face.
The silenced 9-millimeter round tore the top of the man’s head off, pulping his brains into a raspberry-colored mist, knocking him backward to the polished floor.
Jefferson sprang to his feet, spun around, and thrust the pistol, cradled in the cup of his left hand, at Jake Scott.
“Nice to see you again, Scott,” said Jefferson, “but you really should have followed the general’s orders.” He yanked the balaclava off his head, motioned with the pistol that Scott and Tokugawa should back up, and, eyes locked on them, stooped cautiously to pick up the dead bodyguard’s knife and the single spent cartridge case.
Scott looked past Jefferson at Ito, lying faceup in the hallway, his head shattered, brains stuck to the woodwork. Scott cycled through possible scenarios, searching for one that fit the current situation. Jefferson’s look of cold determination said what Scott had realized perhaps too late: He, like Fumiko, was expendable too.
“You’ve got a date in Yokosuka,” Jefferson said, eyes darting around the big room. “I’m here to see that you keep it.”
“Some unfinished business needed attention,” Scott said.
“Is that so?”
Tokugawa, seemingly unfazed by what had just happened, said calmly, “Your business, it seems, is to break into my home like common criminals and murder my servant. And now will you kill me too?”
Jefferson thrust the pistol at Tokugawa. “Shut up!” He jerked his head at the dead man. “Where’s the other one?”
“He’s bringing Fumiko down from upstairs,” Scott said.
“The hell for? She’s not our problem. You are. We’re getting out of here.”
“Uh-uh,” Scott said. “I came for Fumiko and I’m not leaving without her.”
Jefferson leveled the automatic at Scott. “My orders are to bring you in one way or another. She’s not part of the deal, get it?”
“She is now,” Scott said, looking behind Jefferson.