Kage (33 page)

Kage

I ignored him. “We’ll need to distract them, pull them off

balance.”

“I can get my hand on some flash-bang grenades,” Daley

said. “Work better indoors, but they’re loud as hell.”

The interior of the house was a shambles. It smelled of

heat and dust and old paper. I looked out the front windows.

“Someone could cover me from here.” I turned around and

walked to the back wall. A wooden screen door sagged in the

back doorway. “Out here if things got tough, into the ditch and

off and over the western hill. Sun’ll be in their eyes.”

I turned around and walked out the front. “This’ll work.”

“I don’t see how,” he said.

So I told him.

“And this,” the voice on the cell phone said, dripping sar-

casm “is your big plan?”

I took a breath. “Hey, it’s best to keep things simple. And

you told me to keep in touch.”

“Yeah,” Micky said. “I feel much better now.” He may have

been concerned, but his sarcasm was still in place.

“You got anything for me?” I demanded. “Otherwise I can

hang up and we can argue when I get back.”

Daley’s apartment was a box, a place where he waited. Noth-

ing more. The walls were painted with the flat, off-white color

contractors buy in five gallon tubs. The carpet was cheap and

grey. My voice echoed in a room that was largely devoid of any

sign of real human habitation: Daley decorated it with a fold-

ing lawn chair, some upended plastic milk crates that served as

tables and a small television set. Laid upon a bare mattress on

the corner of the floor, a rumpled sleeping bag looked like the

covered body at a crime scene. Daley sat in his cheap aluminum

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chair sipping a beer and watching me as I paced in front of the

windows, phone to my ear.

“Burke,” he whispered. I looked over at him as he gestured

at me. “The windows. Get away from them.”

The sun was setting, but there was still daylight outside.

The lights weren’t on in the apartment, so I doubted I was

being silhouetted. I thought Daley was being a bit paranoid.

“What, you afraid of snipers?”I said, half joking.

He wasn’t smiling. “A surveillance team with a parabolic

mike can pick up the vibrations of your phone conversation

through the glass. Get away.” I humored him and left the broad

window at the front of the apartment.

Micky heard the conversation. “Is Daley there?” he

demanded. “Put him on.” I handed the phone over and Daley

wandered into the galley kitchen. I had been in there earlier and

it was like the rest of the place: the occasional signs of life only

served to heighten the sense of emptiness. The kitchen featured

cheap cabinets, a metal sink with a curled yellow sponge, and

a case of Bud Light in the refrigerator along with the seem-

ingly inevitable bag of apples. The fake butcher block counter

was the resting site for the gnawed remains of half a loaf of

stale Italian bread, now the shape and hardness of the head of a

medieval war hammer.

Daley’s voice reached me as a murmur. I stopped trying to

listen and sat down, facing the wall. Sinking into the medita-

tion posture of
seiza
is a movement I have repeated so often

in my life that it brings its own sense of comfort, a muscle

reminder of who I am and what I do. I needed that centering

now.I began the cadenced series of breaths that would slow the

body and calm the mind. My thoughts were jumbled, a racing,

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Kage

disconnected montage of images and ideas. My emotional state

wasn’t much better. I knew what I had to do. I had an idea of

how I would do it. But any fight is a thing of angles, probable

moves, and possible permutations. If you dwell too much on

the endless ways in which an attack can occur, your focus is

shattered. You spend more time dreading what might happen

than you do being watchful enough to see what is happening.

Breathe.
There were so many ways this could go wrong.

Let the thoughts bubble off.
I wasn’t sure I could go through

with it. And if I did, would Sarah ever speak to me again?

Breathe.
I was so exhausted.

I sat, eyelids barely closed, and the warrior’s meditative dis-

cipline began to take hold. I was sinking and rising, a stone

centered on itself, both intensely aware of everything and com-

pletely out of the moment. And in that space, I heard Yamashi-

ta’s voice. Not a memory of him, but his actual voice in striking

clarity.

“A battle is won by many things, Burke. Weapons and skill.

Terrain. Planning. But most important of all is spirit. Do not give

in to doubt or fear. You think you are tired. You are not. Your

mind is troubled and uses your body as an ally. Ignore it.
Hakka

yoi
, Burke.”

My pulse jumped.
Hakka yoi,
the samurai’s stern admoni-

tion to endure. I opened my eyes, seeing nothing but the blank

wall in front of me. At that moment I didn’t know what I was

more afraid of: what I would have to do or the possibility that

I’d be able to do it.

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20

Shinken

I stood, the warm rays of the sun at my back. The dust

swirled in front of the old adobe house. Near the souped-up

Hummers that El Carnicero and the other members of TM-7

had driven to the rendezvous, silent men in dark clothes and

sunglasses were methodically forcing gang members to their

knees and shooting them through the back of the head.

I was frozen, hands up, while a man with a gun watched

me intently. Thought was gone; sensation ruled. There was

the sight of the reddish wash of light from the setting sun, the

glinting metal surfaces of vehicles and weapons. Shadows were

growing long. I heard weapons popping and the squealing and

the scuffling sound of bodies as they spasmed on the ground.

I could smell my own sweat, the resinous scent of creosote

bushes, cordite. And the sharp, coppery smell of blood.

I knew then that my plan had gone about as wrong as it

could go.

After he finished his hushed phone conversation with my

brother, Daley tersely said he needed to go out for a while. It

suited me fine. He dragged a heavy duffle out of an otherwise

empty closet, kneeled on the floor, and began to remove a trove

of weapons from the bag. He laid them side by side in front of

him, with a methodical care that reminded me of Yamashita

tending to his swords.

“See if anything here looks familiar,” Daley told me.

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Kage

“Whether you might be able to handle it. You’ve used these

sorts of things before?” I nodded, but he didn’t seem encour-

aged. Daley stood up and looked at me with his washed-out

eyes. “They’re unloaded. Keep ‘em that way until I get back

with the flash-bangs.”

I sat slumped on the floor with my back against the wall,

watching him. I didn’t move toward the weapons. When he

left, I made a phone call of my own.

Steve Hasegawa met me on the fringe of the garden apart-

ment property where Daley kept his lair. There was a mean-

dering pathway ringing the complex, studded with decorative

cactus and large rocks. It was supposed to strike you as aes-

thetic, but I suspected that there were less elevated motives at

work. I had seen the shoddy nature of the apartment buildings

close up. The rocks were there because the contractor had sim-

ply not wanted to bother with the expense of removing them.

We walked for a time in the night. Steve listened to my story

without comment, but hesitated when I asked for help.

“I saw the pictures on the wall,” I urged. “You used to be a

pro.” The framed picture on the
dojo
wall had showed a leaner,

younger Steve Hasegawa, cradling a sniper rifle and wearing

the tabs of an Army Ranger.

He smiled sadly. “Long time gone, Burke.”

“The skills don’t go away,” I said.

He looked at me with a type of bemused tolerance. “No,

but the attitude does. All that ‘hoorah’ stuff and the feeling that

you’re invincible. And maybe the skills don’t go away, but they

do get rusty.” His voice trailed off to get lost in some interior

reverie.

“But you
could
do it,” I prodded. I had described the layout

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of the meeting place and what I had in mind. He nodded reluc-

tantly, sighing. “Probably. The distance isn’t that great.” A faint

smile appeared. “I’m rusty, but I’m not that rusty.”

“I’m out of options, Steve.”

“I know,” he said. He looked off into the west where the

sun had dropped down out of sight behind the mountains. The

distant hills were outlined with a bright line of gold. Above us,

stars were coming out.

“It’s a pretty night,” he began. He stopped walking and

looked at me. “You know that my father died?”

I remembered the old man in the wheelchair entering the

dojo
and the tender solicitude that Steve had shown him. There

was pain in his voice.

“No,” I stammered. “I’m sorry…”

He waved my sympathy away. “It was no way for him to

end his life. Strapped in that chair, a prisoner in his own body.

In the end, it was a blessing.” He walked along the path and I

followed.

“You should have seen him in his prime, Burke.” The pain

in his voice had given way to a sad, gentle pride. “Nobody on

the mats could touch him. Nobody, not even your Yamashita.”

I wasn’t going to dispute the claim. We’d be like two overgrown

kids arguing about whose father could beat up whom. Steve’s

memory wasn’t about the facts, but about the power of love and

the way his father’s presence was woven into his life, filling it

almost to bursting.

“It was no way for him to go,” he repeated. He stopped and

looked at me. “We train all our lives, Burke, always trying to

get a little better. And for what? Most of us are never going to

use these skills in a fight.”

“I know,” I said. “We strive for perfection,” I said, quoting

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Kage

an old article I had written once, “but to what end? We train to

be brave, but in what service?”

“Fancy stuff,” he grunted.

I shrugged sheepishly. “I have a Ph.D. Sometimes it gets out

of control.”

“Sure—and what you said was true enough. And, in the

end, life will wear us all down.”

“Relentless as fire,” I agreed, remembering his parting com-

ment the last time I had seen him. My stomach muscles were

clenched with tension. I knew the effect my own decision to

act had on me; I could imagine Steve Hasegawa’s state of mind.

“I know what I’m asking you to do isn’t legal,” I began.

“Yeah,” he grunted, letting out a breath. Then he was silent.

“It’s got to be done,” I prodded.

He squinted at me. “Not legal, just right?” I nodded.

“Man, Burke,” he sighed, “who are we to judge?”

I shrugged. “Two
bugeisha
. Who better?”

Steve Hasegawa nodded thoughtfully, staring at the dirt.

Nothing happened for what seemed like a long time. Then he

looked up to the fading line of hills and finally craned his neck

to take in the stars.

“
Mono no aware
,” he told me. “You know the idea?”

“Sure,” I said. The sad, powerful beauty of transience.

The Japanese insistence that the most beautiful things are, by

nature, fleeting.

“I used to think all that old samurai stuff about
bushido

and the glory of death was nuts,” he confided. “These days…

I dunno. I wouldn’t want to go like my father.” We walked for

a time and then he halted, turning to face me. “So maybe—

maybe for once we can
be
the fire, Burke.” His rueful smile

flashed faintly in the growing dark. “I’m in.”

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John Donohue

The next day, they came right on time. I had dragged some

dilapidated chairs from the house and set them out in the clear-

ing facing each other along an east/west axis. I placed an empty

fifty gallon drum between them and put Westmann’s manu-

script on top. It was, after all, why they were coming. I sat with

my back to the western slope where Steve Hasegawa waited

with a long rifle, a laser-sighted Bushmaster Predator. The set-

ting sun would be in their eyes. They would, of course, proba-

bly all be wearing sunglasses, but I hoped the placement would

give me some small edge. I had a wireless earphone on and

Steve’s voice was clear and calm through it: “They’re coming.”

I stood up. Daley was right: the Butcher, El Carnicero,

wasn’t coming alone. The two big Hummers jounced along the

road, the wide tires throwing rocks and kicking up the dust.

The adobe building was to my left. Daley had placed himself

deep in the interior shadows near a window, cradling a snub

Heckler and Koch MP5. He took one look at the approaching