Rules of the Hunt (66 page)
"No," said Chifune.
"He never had a chance and he was too trusting.
The rot ran too deep."
"Hodama's death," said Fitzduane.
"The strike team knew all the security
precautions, the kind of things only an insider would know."
Chifune was silent.
"He
deserved to die," she said.
"It had to be done and I'm glad it was done — but I wasn't
involved..."
"Directly?" said Fitzduane.
Chifune sighed.
"Very
well," she said.
"I supplied
information.
I knew about Katsuda and
his plans and that the Namakas had stepped out of line.
We had them under surveillance because of
their suspected terrorist connection, and that in turn led us to hear about
this weapon they were making.
At last
Hodama and the Namakas became vulnerable.
The Americans were not happy and Katsuda was let off the leash.
I just eased the process, and I've no
regrets."
"Adachi?" said Fitzduane.
"He damn near got killed."
"I love that man, in my way," said Chifune, "and I got myself
assigned to the case to keep an eye on things and keep him out of trouble.
I never thought Katsuda would go so far, and
I never suspected that the prosecutor and Sergeant Fujiwara were his men.
But it just goes to show how widespread is
the cancer."
"Are you working with Yoshokawa's clean-government group?" said
Fitzduane.
Chifune nodded.
"It was my
father's death which convinced them that Gamma must be kept secret.
Eventually, the money politics of the government
will be exposed, but meanwhile it's safer to fight them in secret."
Fitzduane poured Chifune and himself more champagne.
"So now Hodama had done and one Namaka
has gone, so you are making progress.
And doubtless you have a whole lot on Katsuda to bring him into line
when he thinks he's the new
kuromaku
.
What a web you people do weave.
No wonder Adachi-
san
blew a fuse.
Which
leaves our terrorist friends, Yaibo:
what about them?
The Namakas may
have planned it, but they are the people who tried to terminate my worries once
and for all."
Chifune shrugged unhappily.
"We thought they were contained," she said.
"We had driven them out of
Fitzduane looked at her.
"You
have someone on the inside of Yaibo," he said.
"Hell, that's why you let them
play
.
These people
are almost impossible to penetrate, and you've done it.
So now you think it's better to keep them on
a long leash than have them break up into a number of cells you know nothing
about.
But," he snarled, pointing
at his scarred chest, "the one flaw is that even if they are not running
around much in
they've been plenty busy in my part of the world."
Chifune put her arms around him and stroked him.
He could feel her breasts pressed against him
and the heat of her sex as she wrapped her legs around him.
"We didn't know.
It made sense at the time."
Fitzduane felt himself become erect and slip inside her.
Still inside her, and his arm around her, he
lay back so that he could look at her.
"Chifune," he said, emphasizing every syllable.
"You are the most beautiful and
desirable woman and you have the most heartrendingly beautiful name and you
touch my heart.
But why do you tell me
all this?
I'm an outsider, a barbarian,
a
gaijin
.
This is not my battle."
"Don't move, Hugo," she said, and she put one arm down between
her legs and took him in her fingers and wrapped the other around his lower
body and did things to him and kissed him and did not speak again until they
came together.
"It's because I love you," she said, "and I want to give
to you and I want to help you in every way I can."
Fitzduane put his arms around her and caressed her and held her
close.
"Chifune," he said, and
soon they slept.
*
*
*
*
*
June 30
Looking down from the Koancho helicopter at the seemingly unending urban
sprawl that surrounded and then became
Fitzduane tried, at first, to put his feelings about the women in his life into
some sort of order.
After Anne-Marie had been killed in the
their marriage, he had been involved with, and had enjoyed, many women, but had
been reluctant or unable to commit.
The
pain of Anne-Marie's death had take a long time to fade, and the nature of his
job, traveling from one war to another, did little to encourage lasting
involvements.
Then
came
Etan and a strong desire to settle down and build a life with this woman whom
he loved and the sheer continuing joy of his first child.
But life did not work merely because you wanted it to.
Fate, in Fitzduane's opinion, was heavily
laced with black humor.
And in this
vein, Etan departed because she wanted her own freedom, just when he wanted to
give up his.
The next stage should have
been simple enough, but it was not because he continued to love her, and she
was the mother of his child, so she could never just fade into the past.
Still, they had never married and they had
parted and they lived separately, so their relationship was the most clearcut.
When he thought of Kathleen, Fitzduane felt a surge of emotion and love,
together with feathers of uncertainty.
Kathleen was a marvelous, tender, beautiful woman, physically desirable
and a natural homemaker, yet she had come into his life almost too conveniently
when he had been at his most vulnerable, and he was far from sure about his own
feelings.
Also, he was concerned about
her ability to live under the permanent state of threat in which he now found
himself.
Kathleen was a gentle and
caring soul, and she deserved a normal way of life.
Yet clearly she loved him and Boots adored
her, and she had settled into Duncleeve as if born for the role.
Unfortunately, Fitzduane thought, for no reason that made logical sense
to him, he seemed to like a hint of danger in his women.
It was an immature trait and troublesome, but
its reality could not be denied.
Etan
had it and Chifune had it in spades, but it was the one element missing in
Kathleen.
Still, that was more his
weakness than Kathleen's.
Chifune was an impossible situation in just about every way and should
just be put down to a magnificent sexual conflagration, and yet the thirty-six
hours they had spent together had affected Fitzduane deeply.
Although he had been as promiscuous as any
highly sexed young male in the past, as he grew older Fitzduane found it hard
to sleep with a woman without his emotions being engaged, and Chifune, giving
herself physically without any restraint and confiding in him both the
confidences of her trade and her feelings, had won a place in his heart.
It was also true that there was an affinity between them that was not
merely sexual.
Both he and Chifune
needed the stimulus of danger and were at their absolute best when living at
the edge.
But this was a recipe for
eventual destruction, and if Fitzduane wanted nothing else, he wanted a stable
and happy home for Boots t be an only child.
Children should have other children to play with.
Fitzduane found no solutions as the helicopter flew on.
He reflected that life was more than about
choices than answers — and then living with the consequences.
*
*
*
*
*
The staff at the Fairmont — who had heard he was dead, and were not
entirely surprised; and then had heard he was alive, and were not entirely sure
they were relieved — still greeted him s if nothing untoward had happened.
Their bows were deep and friendly.
How exactly you could tell a bow was friendly, Fitzduane was not quite
sure, but there was a difference.
Fitzduane liked the staff at the
He
reflected that when the world is going to hell, it is nice to find that some
standards are maintained.
It was not an
academic thought.
The hotel was going to
be his home for a little longer.
His killing of Kei Namaka had accomplished part of his objective, but it
had upped the stakes.
He, Fitzduane,
and, almost certainly, Boots and Kathleen, were now in even greater
danger.
Faced with the loss of his
beloved elder brother, Fumio Namaka would be like a man possessed.
Something serious was going to have to be
done about him and Yaibo before Fitzduane could return to
any degree of equanimity.
It had come down to an elemental reality:
Destroy or be destroyed.
21
July 1
"Let's kick this thing around," said Schwanberg.
He was sitting in the secure bubble in the offices of the
Research Federation at the New Otani, together with the two other members of
what he thought of as his ‘private team.’
The private team were paid, as was Schwanberg, by the CIA, but their
motivation was profit and their loyalty was only to their boss.
That loyalty had nothing to do with Schwanberg's personality.
It was based upon mutual self-interest
.
Their charmless
superior had used the CIA as his personal profit center since
had made all three men extremely rich.
The best pickings of all had come in
The scale of corruption in the
second-most-powerful economy in the world was, for the three men, beautiful to
behold.
And what
better cover for their operations than the CIA, with its obsession with
secrecy.
As station chief, Schwanberg had brought ‘need to know’ and
compartmentalization to such a high art that not only did few people know what
the others in the station were doing, but
They were right.
Schwanberg attached great importance to
operational security, even if it had little to do with the well-being of the
And operational security meant leaving no
loose ends.
"We've lost the North Korean thing," said Palmer, a thickset,
hard-faced man in his mid-forties who was the muscle of the private team.
"Your pal Fitzduane and that Koancho
chick have fucked us.
Namaka Special
Steels is now crawling with cops."
Schwanberg shrugged.
Hodama's
refusal to pay more was what had precipitated the move against him and his
supporters, and their involvement in supplying
difficult to handle.
The private team
could not be seen to be overtly involved in the enterprise.
That would have given Hodama and the Namakas
too much leverage.
Skimming was one
thing.
Direct involvement in supplying a
hostile foreign power was something else.
Instead, Schwanberg had tried to squeeze some of the nuclear profits from
Hodama and the Namakas without letting on that they knew about the North Korean
deal, and the effort had backfired.
They
had not realized that the Namakas were in such a financial mess and could not
pay more even if they had wanted to.
But
once they discovered that, there was only one logical move.
Destroy Hodama and the Namakas and bring in a
new, financially stronger
kuromaku
.
Enter Katsuda, who had his own reasons to do
the actual work.
It was perfect.