High Flight (52 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: High Flight
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Two of the bikes cut out of the pack and suddenly roared toward him from opposite directions, the drivers swinging their weighted chains.
“You stupid bastards,” McGarvey yelled in frustration. He swung the weighted chain twice over his head and let it fly at the biker to his left, then darted across the path of the other bike, jumped up on the back of a park bench, and leaped at the oncoming driver.
It happened too fast for either biker to get out of the way. McGarvey came over the handlebars and crashed into the Japanese, driving him off the bike, both of them smashing into the bricks.
McGarvey yanked the weighted chain out of the Japanese's hand and, as he scrambled to the left, tossed
it at the wheel of one of the other bikes still circling. The chain caught in the mag struts of the front wheel, sending the machine crashing into the bike in front of it.
The bike to his left was down, the driver getting to his feet. The Japanese reached inside his jacket, but then he suddenly looked up and stepped back.
“I want to talk,” McGarvey shouted.
The biker McGarvey had knocked down yanked his still idling motorcycle upright, climbed aboard, and roared away, while the Japanese to his left jumped on another bike's pillion as it raced past.
All of the bikes swung around and charged down the stairs at high speed. Only after they were gone did McGarvey hear the police sirens, a lot of them, closing in.
 
“I've finished with the repeater design, and it won't take me very long to build seven or eight of them,” Louis Zerkel said. “But there's another problem.”
“With the circuit design?” his brother Glen asked. Louis had been in an odd mood all morning. He was twitchy.
“It's embarrassing.”
“What's your problem, Louis? I can't help you if I don't know what it is.”
Louis looked down at his hands resting on the terminal keyboard. “In California it was different. I didn't have to ask anyone, not even Dr. Shepard. I knew where to go to get what … I needed.”
“What?”
Louis looked up, and shrugged. “A woman.”
Glen shook his head and grinned. “Shit, man, I can dig it. You're horny. Now that you mention it, so am I.”
“Can you do something, Glen?”
“No sweat, brother. I'll talk it over with Mr. R. See what we can come up with. Just hang tight.”
“Good,” Louis said. “Only thing that's left after the repeaters will be setting up the signal paths from Tokyo and one test of the sensor unit in the Faraday cage.”
 
 
There was no use running, McGarvey told himself, because he'd been set up the moment he got off the airplane. If they wanted him they would have no trouble finding him. Besides, cops had the habit of shooting at a moving figure first and a stationary target last. Watching the half-dozen or more squad cars, sirens blaring, lights flashing, race into the mall from Nakamise-dori Avenue, he was glad he'd heeded his first instinct to leave his gun at home. It would not have helped him very much against the bikers, and if he had it now it would definitely start to become a serious problem in about thirty seconds.
He stepped into the pool of light cast by one of the globes and raised his hands over his head, his passport in his left.
The first radio units screeched to a halt in front of him, their headlights making it difficult to see anything. Other units were arriving, and he could hear a lot of activity. Of course there were bodies all over the place, and the police had no real idea what they were walking into.
McGarvey stood perfectly still.
Several uniformed cops, their weapons drawn, fanned out on the double on either side of him. Someone from behind the lights shouted something in Japanese, and a man in civilian clothes slowly approached to within a couple of feet of McGarvey. He glanced at the upraised passport.
“You're an American?”
“Yes. My name is Kirk McGarvey. I'd like to speak with someone from my embassy.”
“Are you armed?” the Japanese asked him. His English was very good, but he was dressed in a baggy suit and a rumpled trench coat that made him look like a detective out of a forties movie.
“No.”
The plainclothes cop said something in Japanese, and two uniformed cops hurried forward, took McGarvey's passport, then quickly frisked him. When they were done, they pulled his arms behind him and secured his
wrists with a plastic wire tie. They were quick and efficient.
“What happened here?” the plainclothes officer asked. He pocketed McGarvey's passport without looking at it.
“They called themselves Rising Sun. Said they were going to kill me.”
“This was all of them?”
“There were more of them. Five or six others.”
The cop glanced at the crashed motorcycles and the three bodies. A great deal of blood had pooled up around the biker who'd lost his arm. “Who helped you here, Mr. McGarvey?”
“No one. If you won't call my embassy, contact Mr. Asagiri Eto. I have his number. I had dinner with him this evening.”
The plainclothes cop studied McGarvey. “What are you doing in Japan?”
“I'm here on business.”
Again the Japanese cop studied McGarvey. “I think your business is not possible now,” he said. “I am placing you under arrest at this time.”
“What am I being charged with?”
The plainclothes cop smiled faintly. “Murder, of course.”
“Eight against one?” McGarvey asked. “I call it self-defense.”
“I see only three bodies, Mr. McGarvey. And you are a very large, obviously very powerful man. Whereas your victims were nothing but boys. Not a fair fight, if you ask me.”
 
“I'll be damned,” Reid said, surprised.
“It's not so much to ask, considering everything he's done so far,” Glen Zerkel argued. “Question is, can we get someone out here without putting ourselves in danger?”
“I don't think that would be terribly difficult,” Reid answered. “But I don't know if it would be very smart.” It was late afternoon by the time he'd come out from the
city. He'd put his latest newsletter to bed, and he'd waited until all the copies had been machine-addressed and mailed. This had caught him completely off guard.
“We're not home free yet, Mr. R. We still need him, maybe for another week or two.”
“Can't he wait?”
Mueller came into the living room from outside. “Who can't wait for what?” he asked, mildly.
“Young Louis tells us that he wants a whore,” Reid said.
Mueller shrugged. “Washington has whores. Get him one.”
“We were thinking about the danger.”
“When he's finished with the woman I'll kill her and put her body with Karl's. How are his experiments progressing?”
M
cGarvey was taken to Metropolitan Police Headquarters downtown on Sakurado-dori Avenue. They removed his wrist restraint, searched him with a metal detector, took everything out of his pockets, and locked him in a small interrogation room furnished only with a steel table and three chairs. It was a half-hour before the plainclothes cop who'd arrested him came in.
“I will ask you some questions, Mr. McGarvey,” the cop said, setting up a cassette tape recorder. “It will save time if you tell me only the truth.”
“Fine,” McGarvey said. “But first I want your name, and I'll want to see some credentials. Then I want a cup of coffee or tea, and my cigarettes and matches.”
“There is no smoking.”
“In that case you'd better give my embassy a call right now, because I'm not telling you anything until I speak to a consular officer.”
“You will answer my questions,” the cop said sternly, his expression menacing. “You have no rights here.”
“If you want to create an international incident, go ahead and push. Otherwise, fuck you.”
The cop managed a faint smirk as he eyed McGarvey speculatively. “You are a murderer, Mr. McGarvey, and just now sentiments are running very high against Americans. I meant it when I said that you have no rights here. So this can be easy for you, or very hard. It is your choice.”
“Actually it's your choice,” McGarvey said. “Sooner or later the people I came to see will find out what happened and they'll get me out of here. In the meantime we can chat like civilized men, or you can try to force some answers out of me.”
“The trouble is that you lied to me from the beginning, so I find it difficult to believe anything you say. You are a murderer
and
liar.”
“You cooperate with me, and I'll cooperate with you,” McGarvey offered.
The cop's eyes narrowed. “The number you supplied me has no record of this man you mentioned—Asagiri Eto.”
McGarvey said nothing.
“How do you explain this discrepancy?”
Still McGarvey maintained his silence.
The cop switched off the cassette recorder, got up, and came around the table to McGarvey's side. “Did this man help you murder those boys?”
McGarvey looked up at him.
“You bastard,” the cop said, and he raised his fist.
“If you hit me, I'll take you apart,” McGarvey said softly.
The cop's eyes widened.
“Work it out. There were only three bodies down there, but four motorcycles. If your forensic people are on the ball, they should have discovered the tire marks
of more than just those four bikes. From what I'm told Asakusa is a traditional family neighborhood. There'll be witnesses, but you'll probably have to go banging on doors to find them. And unless I'm mistaken it was the Rising Sun group that staged the riots in Tokyo last week. I was fair game out there.” McGarvey watched the cop. He suspected that there was more to it than that, because of Eto's concern. Problem was he'd blown his chances to ask for the opposition's help.
McGarvey willed the tension out of his muscles and sat back. “I didn't pick the fight, but I sure as hell wasn't going to stand there and take it. They would have killed me. You saw the weapons they carried.”
The cop shook his head in amazement. “You would have actually attacked me if I had slapped you?”
“Yes. If the situation were reversed, and this was New York City, wouldn't you have defended yourself?”
“Against a proper authority?” the cop asked, still trying to fathom McGarvey. “No.”
“Never come to New York.”
“You should not have come to Tokyo, Mr. McGarvey.” The cop opened the door, gave somebody some instructions, then came back to the table. He showed McGarvey his gold shield. “My name is Nobu-hiku Myamoto, and I am a lieutenant of detectives. Tea is being brought for you. Your cigarettes will be brought as well. It will just take a minute.”
“Very well,” McGarvey said. “Asagiri Eto works for someone who wants to do business with the company I represent.”
“Now we're getting somewhere,” Myamoto said. “How was it arranged that you should come to Tokyo and meet with this man?”
“Through a contact at JAL in Washington, D.C.”
Myamoto switched on the cassette recorder. “Did Asagiri Eto pick you up at Narita?”
“He came to my hotel, and afterward took me to the Club Shin-Oki.”
Myamoto was obviously impressed. “That is a very
exclusive club. I'm surprised that an American was allowed entry.”
Someone knocked at the door, and Myamoto jumped up and got it. An older man in civilian clothes said something in rapid-fire Japanese, and Myamoto glanced back at McGarvey, this time a look of wonderment on his face.
 
“The man is a murderer. How am I supposed to report this?” Police Captain Tsutomu Watanabe demanded.
Hiroshi Ozawa had made his way downtown by helicopter the moment he'd heard that McGarvey had been arrested. “I am very sorry,
Watanabe-san
, to interfere in police business, but if Mr. McGarvey is guilty of murder it was certainly in self-defense. His presence in Tokyo is of extreme importance to us.”
“I will not be told why?”
“No,” Ozawa said, lowering his eyes politely.
 
“Mr. Pelham, this is Sam Miller, officer of the day. Sir, I have an amber light for you.”
“All right, I'm switching over … now,” Pelham said after a brief hesitation. He'd been caught by surprise. “I'm secure. What have you got for me?”
The green, circuit-secure light came up on the duty officer's encrypted console. “Mr. McGarvey was arrested a little over an hour ago by Tokyo Metro Police. Apparently he was involved in an altercation of some sort in Asakusa.”
“Oh, Christ, that's just great. Have you reached Gates, yet?” Stephen Pelham was the assistant chief of the CIA's Tokyo Station. Cortland Gates was the COS.
“No, sir. He's hunting at the lodge on Hokkaido. But word has been left for him.”
“Have the Japanese contacted anyone downstairs on his behalf?”
“There's been no call like that.”
“Shit,” Pelham said. “All right, it's a little after two now, which puts it noonish in D.C. We'll have to
message Langley on this. I can make it in about twenty minutes. Traffic will be light. Thank God for small miracles anyway.”
“Yes, sir,” Miller said, but the green light on his console winked out. Pelham had already hung up.
The ACOS showed up thirty-five minutes later at the Company's small operations and communications center on the top floor of the U.S. embassy on Akasaka in Minato-ku. Unlike Miller, who was short, dark, and wiry, Pelham was a corpulent man with wispy, almost nonexistent pale blond hair and nearly invisible eyebrows. He looked like an albino.
“What's he been charged with, Sam?”
“Murder, but it's getting more complicated than that.”
“Not possible,” Pelham said, his acid indigestion rising.
When the bulletin had come from Langley requesting that Tokyo Station be on the lookout for McGarvey, no one had been overly concerned. Such requests were common, and very often bounced downstairs to an embassy officer. Usually it involved visiting businessmen or VIPs whose movements were to be loosely monitored for their own protection. They were to be bailed out of any difficult situation they might put themselves in. But when the follow-up book cable had arrived a couple hours after the first bulletin, filling them in on McGarvey's background, Gates and the entire staff had sat up and taken notice.
“I didn't make the connection until now,” the COS told Pelham. “What the hell is
that
McGarvey doing back here? It's a surprise the Japanese even let him in after what he did to them three years ago.”
He was a tough man to keep track of, and from the moment he'd slipped out of his hotel with a Japanese national, Pelham had known damned well that something would happen.
“Sir, Mr. McGarvey was released about the same time I was talking to you. The charges have been dropped.”
“Jesus. Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is he now?”
“Back at his hotel.”
“Has he got company?”
“The same man he left with last night. We don't have an ID on him yet, but apparently he carries some weight. The hotel has provided him with the penthouse suite.”
“At this hour?” Pelham asked, rhetorically. “Who're we getting this from, Justine?”
“Yes, sir,” Miller said. Justine was the code name of a small network of informants working for the Metro Police. Each person signed on for three years, after which they were brought to the United States, had their eyes Westernized, and were given a new identity and money. They had no trouble recruiting applicants.
“Whoever this Jap is, if he swings enough weight to get McGarvey sprung, we'd better find out who he is.”
“It wasn't him, Mr. Pelham,” Miller said.
“Goddammit, who was it then?”
“MITI.”
Pelham stared at the OD, blankly. “The Ministry for International Trade and Industry? Why? What the hell has that sonofabitch gotten himself into this time?”
“Sir?”
“You were here when the book cable came through. You know what he is, or was. Christ, he's killed people.”
“But he's one of us.”
“Don't count on it, Sam.”
“I don't understand.”
“Whenever McGarvey shows up there's trouble.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don't like the timing. The President is going to be here is less than a month, and I'd like to know what McGarvey is up to. Exactly what he's up to.”
Miller was taken back. “I see what you mean, sir.”
“Keep trying to contact Gates. I'll be in my office putting together something for Langley. Who've we got at the hotel?”
“Shapiro and Littell.”
“Get Isaacs and Ireland down here too.”
“Will do, Mr. Pelham.”
 
In the dawn the air over Tokyo appeared dusty.
“It was an unfortunate incident for which I apologize,” Asagiri Eto said.
“One which you tried to warn me about,” McGarvey replied. “How did you find out I'd been arrested?” The police offered no explanation why they were releasing him, nor would Lieutenant Myamoto answer his questions. But the cop was clearly shook up. He'd been called out of the interrogation room, and when he came back he was subdued. McGarvey's personal belongings were returned, and after he'd signed an inventory release form printed in English and Japanese he was allowed to leave.
“I waited for you at the hotel, but when you didn't show up I became worried. The police said that you'd been attacked. Frankly, I didn't know what to think.”
“Did you arrange to get me out of there?”
Eto looked owlishly at McGarvey. “You are a difficult man. We had hoped to avoid any unpleasantness while you were here, but that's no longer possible. Now we have damage to repair.”
“Was it an isolated incident?”
Eto shrugged, a gesture uncharacteristic for a Japanese. “I don't know.”
“They were Rising Sun. Enemies of yours?”
Eto took a moment to answer, obviously in some difficulty. “It's not so easy as that. My country is in turmoil, you know. We are coming out of very difficult times. Some people in government think they have the answers but there are … factions who believe Nippon will be made to suffer if we continue on our present course.”
“Are you talking about a coup?”
“We're a democracy,” Eto retorted sharply.
“Who is Rising Sun?”
“A group …”
“One of the anti-government factions?”
Eto shook his head. “This is not the West.”
“I had to defend myself. Three Rising Sun are in the morgue. Who's got the pull to have the charges against me dropped? Are you one of these anti-government factions?”
Eto looked past McGarvey out the glass wall at the morning over the big city. The distant mountains were completely lost in the air pollution. “If you still wish to pursue your business with us, we'll leave now.”
“Will I be returning to this hotel?”

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