“That is Ivan’s usual order. Borscht. And this is the information we have for him.”
“Borscht?” Komeito repeated, frowning.
“Not really borscht. Ivan requested borscht, so we started keeping beets here. We slice the beets and bake them on top of regular sausage pizza.” Norio shrugged. “Ivan is happy with that.”
Komeito looked at the address on the computer screen. It was nothing more than a numbered aircraft hangar. “You deliver to hangar?” Komeito asked.
“Hai.”
“Ever deliver to his home at night?”
“That’s it. Can you believe it? He lives in that hangar — Hangar 23, it says here. Three men live there, the boys tell me. All Russians.”
Komeito ran to the car to tell Warfield what he’d learned. While they were talking someone tapped on the car window. It was Norio and a younger man with the name Aoki on his Guido’s shirt. Komeito lowered the window.
Norio bowed. “Excuse please. Aoki came to work his shift. Knows Ivan, delivers to him all the time. Can show you way to hangar.” Aoki looked about twenty. He was above average height with jet-black hair cut short. He had a sincere smile.
“Hi,” Aoki said in English.
Warfield asked what he knew about the hangar.
“Hangar 23? Well, that big plane in there, they work on it all the time. Mainly up under the open belly of it, you know, in the middle. They’re working on something else at the other end of the building but I take the pizza right to a little office area and don’t go down there. Think they’re through with what they were doing. Last time I went there the plane was all back in one piece again.”
“When were you there last?”
“Two or three days ago.”
Komeito thanked Aoki and the manager and said they might need more information later.
Warfield and Komeito strategized for a minute at the car and went back into the pizza place to talk with Norio and Aoki again. Warfield asked for their help.
“I thought Ivan was not in trouble,” Norio reminded Komeito.
“He may have some information that will help in an investigation.” Komeito told Norio Warfield was from the FBI in Washington, cooperating with the Japanese government in an undercover investigation.
Norio looked at Aoki. They nodded to each other and then to Komeito and Warfield.
“Good,” Warfield said. “We need to go to the hangar. Is it necessary to use the main airport entrance?”
“No. There is an entrance for service vehicles,” Aoki said. The guards there know the Guido’s car.”
“Can you draw us a route to the hangar and a diagram of the inside?” Warfield asked.
Aoki nodded. “I will drive you there,” he said, looking to Norio for approval.
Warfield shook his head.
“You can’t get past the gate guards,” Aoki said. “Even with the car, they will look for familiar faces. They don’t ask for my I.D. any more but they stop the car and look inside. And Ivan, he knows me. He will freak if you walk in.”
Warfield had no intention of walking in like that, but Aoki had a point. “We’ll do it then. Komeito will go into the hangar with you to deliver the pizza and get the lay of everything. Say he’s your boss, riding with you today. I’ll stay out of sight in the car until you come out. Komeito and I will take it from there.”
Aoki and Norio nodded.
Warfield said, “But you need a reason to go there. Ivan will wonder why you are there if he hasn’t placed an order.”
“I surprised him one time,” Aoki said.
Komeito went to the car and gave TK instructions to follow them to the guard gate. He was to park there and wait. When Komeito got to the delivery car, Norio handed him a green and white Guido’s Pizza shirt and hat to wear and two boxes of pizza. To save time, Norio had added beets to a sausage pizza already in the oven. Aoki got into the front with him and Warfield crawled into the back seat.
When they were close to the gate Warfield shrunk himself into the rear floor space and Komeito hid him with extra uniform shirts he found in the car.
When they reached the gate Aoki handed the guard a box of pizza. “Making me fat, Aoki,” he said, patting his stomach. When the guard peered in at Komeito, Aoki said Komeito was new and the guard waved them through.
Hangar 23 was at the end of a service road in a remote corner of Narita about a mile from the service gate they’d used. Sprigs of grass that poked up through cracks in the pavement testified to the low volume of traffic in the area and Warfield saw no other buildings close enough to worry about. The only other cars he saw were on an expressway in the distance. As they approached the mammoth hangar Warfield ducked down behind the seat again.
The road went to the left just before the beginning of the tarmac and ran alongside a dense hedge that lined the outside hangar wall. Aoki slowed and followed the road to the back corner of the building. “I always park around the corner here,” he said. A moment later they came into view of the parking area and Aoki stopped in the middle of the road.
“What’s wrong?” Komeito asked.
“That car,” he said, pointing. “Ivan said I should never stop if a government car is here.” It was a dark blue sedan with an official-looking insignia on the door. Komeito told Warfield the insignia was Ministry of Transport.
“What happens if you do?”
“Not much, probably. He said his boss doesn’t like outsiders coming here.”
“What do you think, Warfield?”
“You two go in as planned,” he said from the floor. “We’ll talk when you come out.”
Aoki drove on to the parking area and turned off the engine. Warfield reminded Komeito to memorize the layout inside.
The whine and whoosh of jet engines in the distance were the only sounds after they left the car. Warfield thought about the time, and remembered his slow-motion powerlessness as a kid when trying to run in a pool or the ocean. August sixth was approaching faster than he could get everything out of the way.
Aoki and Komeito walked to the personnel entrance beside the huge hangar door and Aoki froze in his tracks. “Look!” he shouted. “It’s gone! The big plane is gone!” Aoki’s voice echoed through the cavernous hangar. “The office over there, that’s where I take the pizza,” he said, nodding toward a chain-link enclosure at the center of the left wall. They ran across the floor in that direction. No one was in sight.
“What’s going on here?” Aoki mumbled, when they reached the office area. The building was almost empty. Two computers sitting on a desk in the center of the area had been smashed and the hammer that did the damage lay nearby on the floor. Aoki stood with his hands on his hips and looked around. “That canvas there,” he said, pointing to a big roll of tent cloth outside the office area, “it used to hang on the fence. Ivan said it was there to make the office more private.” Aoki kicked at two old Guido’s Pizza boxes lying on the floor next to an over-full trash can. “Everything’s gone. The plane. Ivan, the other two. The big thing they were working on at the other end. What has happened?”
Komeito ran back to the car. “Warfield! There is no one inside.”
As Warfield, Komeito and Aoki inspected the hangar together, Aoki pointed out the small enclosed area the Russians used as their living quarters and told them other details he knew from previous visits. In contrast to the disheveled office, the rest of the hangar — tools, machines, a supply of what appeared to be aircraft parts and the Russians’ living quarters — was okay. Warfield finished looking around the makeshift dormitory room and was making a second pass through the office area when he spotted the edge of a notebook peeking out from beneath some papers on the cluttered desk. He flipped it open and saw the Cyrillic characters of the Russian language. He called to Komeito.