Kamikaze (25 page)

The West End runs up to the south shore of Lost Lagoon, where Stanley Park stretches north to the Lions Gate Bridge. From Jervis Street to Lost Lagoon was no more than seven city blocks, so now the Suburban—with four cops inside—hightailed it along the deserted center lane of the bisecting causeway. The traffic both ways had snarled to a halt, an everyday bottleneck that clenched the teeth of commuters.

“What’s the layout in T1?” the Mad Dog asked, pedal to the metal as he overdrove the foglights. He used the parallel lines of cars to guide him like a luge chute.

“Two bad guys in front and two in back,” said DeClercq through the plug in his ear. “The colonel’s sandwiched between the two in back. He’s American. They’re Japanese. He’s in his eighties. They’re between twenty and forty. He’s wearing a light green jacket with a red turtleneck. They’re in ninja black.”

“Confirmed,” said the Mad Dog. “The cutoff from the park drive’s coming up. We can’t ram T1 with the colonel in it. If these four are quick and armed to the teeth, one of them will shoot Hett before we can bust in.”

“The gap’s coming up,” said Ghost Keeper from the shotgun seat.

“Hang on, Chief. I got some driving to do.”

The seaside road around Stanley Park crossed the causeway on an overpass just this end of the bridge. Halfway around the circle, sightseers could abandon the park by way of a short cutoff that gave them access to the causeway before it arched across the narrows to the North Shore.
So many accidents clogged the main artery every day that a tow truck stood ready to respond at the junction where the cutoff met the thoroughfare. Currently, that truck deliberately blocked the northbound lane a few yards this side of the exit from the park, creating a gap for the cops.

The Mad Dog spun the wheel and turned in front of the truck. The Suburban drove the wrong way up the tree-lined cutoff to the park road, where it peeled rubber in a clockwise direction toward the seashore. The cops and the yakuza were on a collision course.

Ghost Keeper flicked on the FLIR.

Forward-looking infrared.

“T1’s coming to a halt,” said the new control, the pair that had spotted the target car driving around Lost Lagoon.

“Where?” asked DeClercq from the command van, which was farther back on the park drive.

“Alongside the figurehead.”

“The
Empress of Japan?
”

“Affirmative.”

“Where are you?” asked the chief.

“On the T road.”

“Did they spot you?”

“I doubt it. If so, would they be stopping?”

“Don’t move.”

“Roger.”

“You’ve got the eye.”

“That’s touch and go,” the driver said, “depending on the fog. It’s in a tug-of-war with the rain.”

“Then pitch your foot.”

A pause.

“My foot’s out, Chief.”

“You hear me, Foot?”

“Yes sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Singh, sir.”

“Okay, Singh. It’s up to you. Find somewhere you won’t be seen, but keep your eye on T1.”

“Roger.”

“Mad Dog, where are you?”

“Approaching Lumberman’s Arch, near as I can tell. We’re using FLIR to pick up heat signatures.”

“Chief?”

“Yes, Singh.”

“They’re vacating T1.”

All four yakuza unbuckled their seatbelts. Joe took that to be an ominous sign. If he was about to be butchered, he figured they’d all want to see. Tattoo swung open the rear door on the harbor side, holstering his pistol to free up his hands, then hauled Joe out of the back seat by his biceps and flung him toward the water.

On the other side of the car, the Mole—known to the yakuza thugs as the Claw—opened his door and climbed out too.

He said something in Japanese.

Tattoo drew his pistol and aimed it at Joe on the ground, then he leaned back over the roof of the car to catch what the Mole was saying.

Joe knew this was it. He was about to die. And his death would seal the fate of Jackie as well. Pearl Harbor had taught him how to stare down the fear of death.
His
death, but not the death of someone put in peril because of him. Staring down the muzzle, Joe felt an overwhelming dread grab hold of him, and he loathed himself for giving in to guilt-driven panic as he exited from life.

Forgive me, Jackie, he prayed.

“They’re gonna do him, Chief. They’ve thrown Hett clear of the car and are about to shoot.”

“Clear the air,” snapped DeClercq.

Time to earn the big bucks.

“You’ve got the eye, Singh. Call it,” he delegated.

“Hit ’em head-on,” said the foot.

A veering jog left, and the Mad Dog had the Suburban zooming along the waterfront curb. The forward-looking infrared caught the heat signatures—and relative positions—of every human body on its screen. “Hang on,” he told the other three commando cops onboard, then the huge Suburban rammed the stationary vehicle like the
Titanic
emerging suddenly from the Atlantic mist—
bang!
—and plowed it back along the seawall curb.

Smash, smash ...

Splat, splat ...

Two red starbursts stained the bulletproof windshield as the Wheelman’s and the Navigator’s heads exploded like watermelons hurled against the glass.

Tattoo and the Claw were both standing behind the open back doors, so the force of the shove scooped them off their feet and propelled them along the road. Tattoo had been near the car, listening to the Claw, so he was thrown straight. The Claw had been moving away from the car to circle around to Joe, so the edge of the door clipped him and spun him off into the park.

One moment, he was there.

The next, he was gone.

Like gangbusters, the strike team stormed out of the battering ram. On the curbside, the Mad Dog rushed T1 while the commando from the back seat knelt down in front of Joe, protecting him behind his armored vest as the submachine gun in his hands swept the air for a target.

“Clear!” the Mad Dog shouted after checking inside the car. “Two dead in the front seats. Two unaccounted for.”

Ghost Keeper and the commando cop from the passenger’s side of the Suburban were somewhere in the rain and fog, playing “now you see them, now you don’t” with the hoods who’d been thrown back by the doors.

“Drop it!”

Bam!

Bam!

Bam!

“One down,” reported a voice from the haze.

That’s when the Mad Dog caught sight of the Claw through the vapor, sprinting toward the aquarium with a 9mm Storm Carbine in his hand.

Like a bucket of water dumped over a drunk, the downpour began. Black clouds let loose a deluge, returning Vancouver to what it called normal weather. The fog was no match for the sudden onslaught, so it liquefied like a waterlogged ghost. Up from the sea and between the scattered trees, the Mad Dog chased the Claw, slopping through a curtain of raindrops. Ironically, the runners splashed toward the Japanese-Canadian War Memorial. The monument loomed at the end of its tree-lined path like a beacon luring warriors to their fate.

The sight of the severed head at Jackie Hett’s feet on the Navigator’s digital screen had warned the Claw that there was danger lurking up the mountain.

“If something goes wrong,” the
kumicho
had told his enforcer, “claw the eyes out of the colonel and put a bullet in his brain. Dump him somewhere fitting.”

The figurehead of the
Empress of Japan
had seemed a significant enough killing ground to the Claw.

And it was nearby.

Things had gone from bad to worse, however, and now the Claw was running for his
kumicho
’s
life. There was nothing he could do to reverse the situation in the sushi bar, so he had avoided calling Tokuda until the colonel was dead. Those were his orders, and in the yakuza, orders were obeyed.

But different rules applied to the situation he was now in. For botching his assignment, the Claw had to die. If he
escaped, he would kill himself with his hara-kiri knife. And if it came to a last stand, he’d go down with honor in a kamikaze run.

After he warned his
kumicho.

The Claw fished his cellphone out of his black pants. Tokuda’s number wasn’t programmed in, just in case the phone was seized in a sneak attack, and it was hard to punch in the numbers as he ran full tilt. But a few yards short of the monument’s plinth, the phone began to trill.

Then ...

Bam!

The Mad Dog shot him in the back.

The Claw’s arms flew wide as in crucifixion. He dropped the cellphone and the gun, and crumpled to his knees.

With a final spurt, the Mad Dog reached the monument. He was about to grab the fugitive and cuff his arms together when the shot yakuza lunged with his hara-kiri knife. The razor-sharp blade sank to the hilt above the Mountie’s groin, where the armor didn’t protect his gut.

A grunt escaped the Mad Dog’s throat as the Claw spiked him up on his toes and swung him around on the skewer so his back slammed against the column. Blood gushed down his legs and pooled around the gun, which had clattered from his fingers. The Claw used his shoulder to pin the cop against the pillar, then he crooked his other arm up to gouge out the Mad Dog’s eyes. Their faces were so close together that they breathed each other’s breath, and the blood that spewed from one man’s head drowned the features of his foe.

“You’re looking at the Rolls-Royce of nine mils, pal. Y’ever seen a Europellet popper like that? Even unmodified out of the box, the P210 will shoot sub-two-inch clusters at twenty-five yards. When accuracy is paramount, it’s the closest thing to perfection in a pistol. That’s why it’s a fixture at European prize shoots. One thing about the Swiss, they know their precision engineering.”

Ghost Keeper was too far away to safely take the shot, and the curtain of rain blurred the target at this end, so it was up to the accuracy of the Cree and the SIG.

The slug caught the Claw behind the ear and blew out the front of his temple. Since the day his mother sent him into the woods on his spirit quest, Ghost Keeper had been hunting on the last frontier. What the woods had taught him guided his aim now, and the P210 was as accurate as a Swiss cuckoo clock.

The Claw was dead before his remains hit the ground.

By the time the Cree got to his partner, the Mad Dog was bleeding out.

“A member is down,” Ghost Keeper told his open mike. “We need an ambulance, and we need it
now!
”

Hara-Kiri

The TV screen to one side of the executioner’s chair jumped to life when a car approached the external camera. How long had it been since Jackie had watched the last car leave? That vehicle had vanished into the tendrils of fog clawing up the mountainside. But this car materialized from a sheet of rain.

Here we go, she thought.

And she didn’t know which would be worse.

The return of whoever had hacked off the Sushi Chef’s head with what Jackie—judging by the clean cut across the neck and all the samurai films she’d seen—concluded was a sword?

Or the return of Tokuda’s yakuza gang, unaware that someone had taken out her would-be torturer at the top of the stairs?

Knock, knock ...

Who’s there? she thought.

Whoever sat behind the tinted windshield of the car had a remote control that opened the garage, and after the vehicle was inside, the TV went black again.

Moments later, the Third World War erupted overhead. Deafening explosions reverberated down the stairs, quickly followed by storm troopers armed with laser-guided weapons.

Sweep ...

Sweep ...

Sweep ...

“She’s alive!” someone shouted.

And the next thing she knew, Dane Winter was releasing her from the chair and using his jacket like Sir Walter Raleigh to hide her naked breasts from macho cop eyes.

“Say something,” her partner said.

“Man, do I have to pee.”

“How’d you find me?” Jackie asked, rubbing circulation back into her numb wrists.

“If you and I were sent to Tokyo to kill Tokuda, how do you think we’d find our way around?”

“A navigation program. A GPS map.”

“One thing about the Japanese, they love their digital magic. What the yakuza used to navigate through Vancouver was a global positioning system with pinpoint accuracy. They punched in their destination—this house atop the mountain—and the software offered up every possible route to evade us. At any given map point, they knew where they were, so all the wheelman had to do was follow his navigator’s directions: ‘Turn left here. Turn right there. And gun it three blocks straight ahead.’”

“Reverse engineering?” said Jackie.

Dane nodded. “DeClercq had several problems. A clock was ticking. He didn’t know where you were. And if he did, he couldn’t have your kidnapping turn into a hostage situation. So as soon as he got intel that the yakuza were using a navigation system, his priority was to seize one of their cars before they could erase this destination and destroy the equipment.”

“Which you accomplished?”

“Uh-huh. In the West End. Before they knew what hit them, they were dead. We had not only their destination—the
address
here—but the remote control to this garage as well. Since the windows are tinted, we had a Trojan horse.”

“Slam, bam, thank you, man,” Jackie said.

“That’s what partners are for.”

The headless corpse of the Sushi Chef lay sprawled in a pool of blood at the top of the staircase from the sushi bar. Near him was a
katana,
the big samurai sword, which appeared to have come from a
daisho
rack on the far side of the room. Whoever had done the beheading had waited at the mouth of the stairs, and as the yakuza finished ascending from below, that person swung the sword in a sweeping arc—Jackie could almost hear the swish—lopping off his head and sending it bumping down the stairs to her feet.

Ouch!

What jumped into her mind was a Second World War photo from
Life
magazine. In it, a blindfolded Australian
captive in tropical khaki wear kneeled on the ground, oblivious to the fact that a Japanese soldier with a samurai sword was about to whack off his head.

Then she remembered an even more visceral photo she’d seen reproduced on the cover of an Italian magazine. It showed a kneeling Chinese peasant, his face scrunched up in fear, an instant after a samurai sword had swept through his neck. The head was still in position above a necklace of spraying blood, and the Japanese swordsman stood frozen in the follow-through of his blow.

Those images, of course, were history to her. But then she thought of Nicholas Berg, the Jewish-American businessman whose decapitation in Iraq had sparked a modern uproar when it was broadcast on the Internet.

Jackie shuddered.

What a dreadful way to go.

“This guy was lucky,” Dane said, “compared with what happened to the old man over there.”

He ushered Jackie across the floor to a
shoji
screen that hid the other cadaver from view. The room felt very Japanese, all
tatami
matting and Oriental antiques. Watercolors and decorated fans hung on the walls. A delicate sake set adorned a short
kotatsu
table. A sheet covering a section of the floor was all but red from too much blood and piled high with spilled guts.

“Ugh!” Jackie exclaimed.

“A true samurai,” Dane said, “was always armed with a pair of swords stuck through his kimono belt. One to kill his enemies. The other to kill himself.”

“Both got used,” said Jackie.

“So what do you think happened?”

“Tokuda and his henchman were downstairs with me. Tokuda was eating sushi. A closed-circuit camera showed the arrival of a car, and I thought Tokuda said the Japanese word for ‘son.’ He left the sushi bar and climbed the stairs, leaving me with the Sushi Chef. Tokuda must have been ambushed up here. He was knocked out, stunned, gagged, or something. His henchman heard a noise—I saw him cock his head—and went to investigate. When he reached the top of the staircase, the swordsman struck, and his head came bouncing down to land at my feet. Then I heard grunting and a voice upstairs. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. After that, the camera showed the same car leaving the scene.”

“There must have been a falling-out among the hoods,” Dane concluded. “Some disgruntled yakuza whacked both his boss and his boss’ faithful bodyguard.”

“I suppose,” Jackie said. “That would explain this.”

“How so?”

“It looks to me like someone thought the yakuza boss should have committed hara-kiri to atone for some dishonor. And because he didn’t, the killer performed it on him.”

Genjo Tokuda was kneeling on the bloody sheet. Each wrist was lashed to an ankle, and then the cinched limbs were tied to a heavy wooden chair. The weight of the furniture kept Tokuda upright, even in death. The old man’s gray kimono had been parted to expose his naked belly.
Following the time-honored ritual of seppuku, the shorter
wakizashi
sword from the
daisho
rack had been plunged into the left side of his abdomen. The hara-kiri blade still protruded from Tokuda’s stomach. The pinkish-brown coils of the
kumicho
’s
intestines had spilled out onto the floor. His vacant eyes stared down at the mess he’d made.

“I wonder how long it took him to die?” said Dane. “There was no swordsman to lop off his head.”

“Oh, there was a swordsman, all right,” Jackie speculated. “But he stood by, taunting Tokuda as he died in excruciating pain. It had to be a he, if the killer was yakuza. The gangs don’t trust women and won’t let them in.”

“He isn’t gagged. And there’s no chafing around the mouth, like I’d expect to see.”

“All I heard were grunts.”

“You’d think he’d have screamed blue murder.”

“Tough old guy,” Jackie said. “Where’d he find the courage to go through death like that?”

“Bushido,”
said her partner.