Rules of the Hunt (15 page)
"Morinaga's father," said
Fujiwara,
"was with Hodama for many years.
Father and son, it appears, were estranged for a while.
Father wanted son to work for Hodama and
carry on the family tradition, and son wanted to go his own way.
He went to work for one of the big corporations.
Then, unexpectedly, he left the corporation,
acceded to his father's wishes, and went to work for Hodama."
Adachi nodded.
They had expected
an inside man.
It was common in such
killings, and there was the detail that the front gate had not been forced.
Someone had given the intruders the
combination — or they already knew the code.
"We found young Morinaga's financial records," said
Fujiwara.
"He's been buying more on
the stock market than he could ever afford from a bodyguard's salary — and
there was over a million yen in cash in his apartment."
Fujiwara was still grinning.
"There's more?" said Adachi.
"We found a nightclub receipt and a couple of cards in one of his
suits.
We went to the places concerned
and had them identify Morinaga and the company he was with.
Young Morinaga was out with some people from
the Namaka Corporation."
"Eenie, meenie, miney, mo!" said Adachi.
"What does that mean?" said Inspector Fujiwara.
"Damned if I know," said Adachi.
"Let's grab a few of the boys and go
have a beer."
*
*
*
*
*
Chifune lay concealed behind a pile of packing cases on the third floor
of a warehouse near the Fish Market at the back of the
and reflected upon the psychology of informers.
One of the packing cases held the pungent Vietnamese fermented fish sauce
Nuoc Mam, and clearly a bottle or two had broken.
The stuff stank.
What the hell was wrong with good
old-fashioned soy sauce
? she
wondered.
The Japanese had the longest life span of any
nationality, living proof that the traditional diet was superior.
Strictly speaking — if you wanted to evaluate the pure functionality of
the issue — it was scarcely ever necessary to actually meet an informant.
Information could be communicated by phone,
by radio phone, by fax, or even posted — and that was without the more exotic methods
of communication beloved of spies:
dead-letter boxes, loose bricks, hollow trunks of trees, and the
like.
If you were computer literate, you
could even use CompuServe, for heaven's sake.
No, the communication of information in itself did not require a
meeting.
It was the human element that
dictated such an impractical, functionally unnecessary, and dangerous activity
as a face-to-face encounter between informant and controller.
In accordance with Koancho operating procedure, Chifune had been trained
not only by Koancho themselves, but also be a designated foreign intelligence
agency.
Traditionally, the foreign
agency of choice had been the CIA, but Japan's ever-growing economic success
had fostered a desire to exert some degree of independence, and in the late
sixties, America's — and the CIA's — prestige being at somewhat of a low point
thanks to the Vietnam War, Koancho had started trolling the field.
There was plenty of precedent for Japanese
traveling abroad to pick up foreign expertise.
The initial impetus for the success of the Japanese economy had come
from exactly this approach.
In the case of intelligence, Koancho hit pay dirt with
Chifune's foreign training stint had been
spent with Mossad, ‘the institute’ — in Hebrew,
Ha Mossad
,
le
Modiyn
ve
le
Tafkidim
Mayuhadim
, the Institute for Intelligence and
Special Operations.
She had undertaken the arduous course at Mossad's training center north
of Tel Aviv that produces the elite of highly effective
katsas
— case officers — which are the backbone of Israeli
intelligence.
Chifune's grandmother was
Jewish, a fact known to Mossad, which played no small part in the care they put
into her training.
It was the Japanese side of her character that had Chifune waiting for a
meeting with her informant.
The Israelis
had emphasized the inherent dangers and threats to security of such meetings,
and had stressed that sheer logic dictated the importance of keeping such
arrangements to a minimum.
In contrast,
her Japanese upbringing and even her Koancho training stressed the importance
of
ninjo
, human feelings.
Ninjo
were fundamental in all
human relationships, even between police and
yakuza
or in the grubby world of case officer and informer.
Even in the deadly business of
counterterrorism, in
giri
,
or obligations.
For her part, Chifune
felt a strong sense of obligation toward her informants.
This was sensed and normally returned, and
the resulting bond helped greatly toward her operational effectiveness.
The price she paid was that her life was not infrequently in danger.
Her solution was her own personal version of
‘Walk softly and carry a big stick.’
She
put a great deal of care into the preparations for every meeting and carried
not a big stick, but her silenced Beretta.
Unless there was a foolproof cover story, Chifune varied the location of
each meeting with an informant and tried to make each meeting place a plausible
scenario.
In this case, her informant — code-named Iron Box — had a brother who was
the accountant for the food importers who owned the warehouse and had his
office in a partitioned-off area of the floor below.
Accordingly, Iron Box had a solid reason for
visiting the place, and right now, though the regular warehouse staff had gone
home, her brother was working away downstairs on his abacus trying to reconcile
stock.
This was never an easy task where
food was involved.
The damn stuff was
too portable and too easy to dispose of.
The brother was convinced that packing cases of food had legs.
Iron Box was a code name randomly selected by the Koancho computer, and
by design it was singularly inappropriate for the slight, demure, and rather
pretty twenty-seven-year-old medical receptionist, one Yuko Doi, that Chifune
was waiting to meet.
Miss Doi was also a terrorist, a member of a group known as The Cutting
Edge of The Sword of the Right Hand of the Emperor — a name which did not roll
easily off the lips, even in Japanese, and which was known as Yaibo — Japanese
for ‘the cutting edge’ — for short.
But
Yaibo, despite their ridiculous name and rightist propaganda, was no laughing
matter.
It was the most effective
Japanese terrorist group since the Red Army, and its specialty was
assassination.
Yaibo also operated a five-person cell structure and was exceedingly
difficult to penetrate.
Iron Box was
something of a coup.
She was a
by-product of Yaibo's habit of conducting regular purges, of killing its own
people who were suspected of being informers.
Iron Box's lover had been just such a victim.
He had been beaten to death over several days
by her cell — including Iron Box herself — and the experience had dented her
idealism.
She had made a rather shaky
call to the
kidotai
, the riot police
who were in the front line of the battle against terrorism as far as the media
were concerned, and then the connection had been quietly handed over to
Koancho.
Slowly and carefully, Chifune shifted her location from the cover of the
fish sauce to a pallet of bags of rice.
Whatever the smell, the thought had occurred to her that if shit started
to fly, the undoubtedly rice had better ballistic stopping properties than
glass bottles of fish sauce.
Better
still, it was Japanese rice.
Thanks to
subsidies, it might be many times the world market price for rice, but
every good Japanese
knew it was superior.
The elevator started to creak and groan.
The warehouse floor was rectangular in shape, with the elevator and
stairs located side by side to one end.
Directly facing the elevator door, but to one side, Chifune was
concealed.
Her position gave her quick
access to either the fire escape or the stairs if she had to make a run for
it.
Locating the fastest way to get the
hell out was one of the first lessons you learned in training.
Heroics were not encouraged.
There was a rattle, a further series of groans, and a crash, and the
doors of the goods elevator were open.
Chifune's gaze was fixed on the opening.
She was expecting Iron Box, dressed in her normal smart suit, too-high
heels and crisp blouse, but it could be the night watchman up to check the
stock and decide what to steal that night.
Chifune had noticed in her reconnaissances that with typical Japanese
modesty he limited himself to one case per night.
The minimal warehouse lighting, presumably a gesture toward security, was
provided by a series of low-power naked lightbulbs dangling above the
intersections of pallets.
The filthy
ceiling of the room and the matte colors of the packing cases absorbed the
light, and clear visibility was difficult.
It was dawning on Chifune that she should have brought an image
intensifier.
Still, perfection was an
aspiration, not a human characteristic.
Instead she focused the EPC optical sight of her silenced Beretta on the
elevator entrance, just as a small figure wearing either slacks or trousers
stepped out and looked uncertainly from side to side.
It was Iron Box.
Chifune
registered that fact just as the significance of the flared sighting dot in the
sight hit home.
The sighting dot reacted
to infrared light.
Someone was scanning
the gloom with an invisible infrared beam — invisible except to someone with an
infrared viewer or the EPC sight.
Someone else, who wanted to be covert, was in the warehouse.
Chifune tracked the source of the beam.
Through the sight, it was like tracking a beam of light.
Her gaze terminated at the crude wooden
structure on top of the elevator shaft that housed the motor.
She had considered that very hiding place
herself, and she went cold at the thought.
Her next question was
,
how did someone get up
there without being seen by me?
There were two alternatives:
either the watcher had arrived before Chifune and knew the Koancho agent
was there, or else the watcher, or watchers, had entered the small motor room
directly from a roof trapdoor in the elevator.
Chifune tried to remember if she had seen such a trapdoor and decided
she had not.
It was an old, crude
installation dating back to the postwar building rush, by the looks of it, and
constructed with scant regard for building regulations.
Iron Box walked out hesitantly onto the warehouse floor, just as Chifune
came to her disturbing conclusions.
A
split second later, flame flashed from the motor room, there was a hollow
explosion, and almost immediately afterward, the Vietnamese fish sauce behind
which she had been hiding exploded in a lethal mist of shrapnel and glass
shards.
The destruction was near total.
Two seconds later, there was another flash and double explosion from the
grenade launcher, and what was left of the warehouse's trial shipment of
Vietnamese Nuoc Mam sauce was vaporized.
Chifune flinched behind her rice as hot metal thudded into the rice
sacks, and gagged at the smell.
She was
spotted from head to toe with the awful stuff.
Iron Box was crouched on the floor, trying to take cover behind a
pallet-load of drums of cooking oil.
She
was screaming, and oil was spewing from several of the drums where grenade
fragments had penetrated.
The access door of the elevator room flew open and three figures in black
ski masks jumped down onto the main warehouse floor.
Two figures with slung automatic weapons grabbed Iron Box.
The third stood guard, a U.S.-made M16
automatic rifle fitted with an underbarrel grenade launcher in his hands.
Chifune realized that she was supposed to be dead, and certainly it was
not for lack of trying.
Two M79 grenades
against one slight Koancho case officer and a few cases of fish sauce was
overkill.
The explosions had blown out
the lightbulbs in her section.
She
crouched down behind the rice bags, thankfully shielded by the darkness.
One handgun against three automatic weapons
was not good odds.
It did not make sense
to die for an informant.