[Thomas Caine #1] Tokyo Black (8 page)

Caine stepped into his room and drew back the drapes. The lights of Tokyo spread out before him, a rolling carpet of stars, twinkling, flickering, burning, and dying. They surrounded him, taking up his entire field of vision. There was no other city like it. No other place on Earth felt so alive. It was like watching evolution on fast forward.

He locked the door behind him and taped over the security hole. He considered dragging the dresser in front of the door, but he was just too tired.

He collapsed on the bed and looked around the small room, his vision blurry. It nothing like the spacious, luxury suite he had left at the Hyatt. But it was anonymous. No one knew he was here. He was hidden. Invisible. Safe.

And that was the greatest luxury of all.

Within minutes, he was sound asleep. No nightmares disturbed his rest. Instead, he dreamed of dark, haunted eyes. They were waiting for him in the sea of light, just outside his window.

Rebecca wiped her brow and took several shallow sips from her water bottle. She had begun her run early, leaving the lobby of the Bali Hai Bay hotel at 6:00 am. She had been out only an hour, but the temperature was already in the high eighties and climbing. The humid air made the park trails and walking streets feel like a sauna, and her sleek body glowed with a sheen of sweat.

She had circled around the hotel and then made her way down the Bali Hai pier and back. The pier was of recent construction, part of Pattaya’s efforts to attract family tourists. The pristine, white beams jutted out over the teal sea water. An array of bright, colorful fishing boats were docked at the various berths along the way. Few tourists ventured out so early in the morning, and she was grateful to have the serene beauty of the ocean to herself for a short time. But even the stunning view couldn’t distract her thoughts from one uncomfortable subject…

 Caine.

She was still processing the series of events that had brought him back into her life. One moment, he was a memory, a shadow, dead to her and the world. The next, has was standing in front of her, staring at her with those intense green eyes. She shivered in spite of the heat and humidity. The anger in those eyes, in his voice … something had happened to him. Something not in his file. Something so bad he preferred the anonymity of death rather than seek her out. Rather than confide in her.

Operation Big Blind. His last mission. The file said Caine had been working a long-term deep cover operation, posing as an arms dealer and international criminal operating out of Japan. Through his association with the yakuza, he was able to forge connections to Aydin Turel, a Turkish arms dealer. Turel was believed to be the primary weapons supplier to a collection of fundamentalist terror groups in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East.

Turel was simply a step along the way in Caine’s mission, which was to identify and eliminate key players in the White Leopards. The Leopards were an upstart drug cartel operating out of the southern Kandahar region of Afghanistan. Their drug money was believed to finance numerous extremist terror groups in the area.

The yakuza linked Caine to Turel. Caine gained his trust, then set him up for a CIA rendition. All standard procedure. After a short but brutal stay in a black site prison, Turel was ready to play ball. He vouched for Caine, and introduced him to the Leopards.

A meet had been set, complete with merchandise samples. Caine and his partner, an operative named Tyler, were both there when something had gone wrong.

Intel was sparse on what actually happened. All anyone knew for sure was Tyler was reported killed, and Caine had dropped off the grid. Turel’s guns and the Leopards’ heroin disappeared with him. It had been a simple matter to connect the dots. Caine was a highly trained operative. He was a living, thinking weapon in the war against terror. A machine. And sometimes machines malfunctioned.

Bernatto had been Caine’s handler at the time. His final analysis of the operation was that Caine had played the various parties, including the CIA, and gone rogue. He had killed Tyler and taken the guns and drugs for himself, to sell on the black market.

In a follow-up report, Bernatto’s intel suggested that the Leopards had tracked Caine to Indonesia, and killed him in a retaliatory attack. General consensus around the CIA was, true or not, it was a tidy end to the story of a traitor. Caine was either dead, or soon would be. He had too many enemies to survive for long as an independent operator. He was no longer a concern.

Rebecca remembered the night she had heard the news. The emptiness in the pit of her stomach. Sitting alone in her cold, silent DC apartment as she had sifted through the reports over and over. She had searched in vain for something, anything that could refute Bernatto’s claims. But she had arrived at the inescapable conclusion that the man she had fallen in love with, the man she had shared laugher and memories and even her body with … that man was a cypher.

His past, his background, family, friends … all just shadows. She knew so little about him. She had never truly known Tom. And back then, she had thought she never would. He was gone. All she had left were a series of slim reports filled with damning accusations. Sketchy, fleeting glimpses of a stranger.

Now here she was. Thailand. Japan. Caine.

That look he’d given her, the anger and betrayal in his voice. That, she knew, was real.

By the time she reached the air-conditioned lobby of her hotel, she had made a decision: she was going to use this operation to uncover the truth about Caine, Bernatto, and Operation Big Blind.

On her way to the elevator, she noticed a man sitting in a lobby armchair, playing with his cellphone and reading a newspaper. She felt a ping in her subconscious. The man was young, late twenties, and white. Blond hair, blue eyes, chiseled features. He was wearing a Hawaiian print shirt, khaki pants, and work boots. The boots looked odd. She would have expected sandals or flip flops this close to the beach.

She made a note to keep an eye out for him. Strange taste in footwear wasn’t enough to set off her mental alarms, but she would have to be careful moving forward. This mission was off book…. She had no back up, no support. And if Caine’s story was true, then Allan Bernatto was even more dangerous than she’d thought.

As the steel elevator doors clamped shut, she realized that, if that was the case, she had stumbled upon a secret Bernatto needed to keep hidden … a secret he’d already sacrificed two CIA agents to protect.

Caine sat in front of the small pachinko machine and twisted a pink plastic wheel, feeling vaguely ridiculous. The machine was covered with pictures of kittens and ice creams cones, and emitted a nonstop cacophony of electronic chimes and sugary pop music.

Earlier that morning, after a workout in the hotel gym and a traditional Japanese breakfast, he had made some phone calls to his old contacts. Yakuza bosses and lieutenants he had done business with, smuggling counterfeit jeans and purses through his operation in Thailand. Most seemed surprised to hear he was still alive. News of Lau’s takeover must have travelled fast.

Like all criminals—himself included—they were a suspicious, paranoid bunch, and they all sounded vaguely uncomfortable to hear from him. The conversations were polite, but terse. Until they could figure out what exactly happened in Thailand, no one was going to give him what he wanted: a sit-down with Isato Yoshizawa. Isato was the oyabun, or leader, of the Yoshizawa clan, a powerful yakuza family based in Tokyo. They ran the local bukuto gambling trade in Kabuki-cho, and other neighborhoods.

There was protocol to observe, in Japan more than most places. Business deals could take weeks to close. Social meetings—to exchange business cards, share drinks, give gifts—were all part of the complex process. Each step followed its own rules of etiquette. In the underworld, things moved at a faster pace, but the principles were the same. There was an established order, a way of doing things. There were rules.

Caine didn’t have time to wait. So he planned to change the rules.

As he twisted the pachinko wheel left and right, a stream of tiny metal balls poured into the machine. The wheel altered their speed, making them drop faster or slower, but the flow never ceased. Each tiny metal sphere would fall down the length of the machine, bouncing off a pattern of metal rods along the way.

If the speed and angle of the ball were just right, it would spill out an exit hole, into a plastic bin. If the ball hit a “jackpot” bar on the way down, it would trigger more balls to come pouring out, increasing the player’s total ball count, and triggering flashing lights and music to emit from the machine.

The object of the game was to accumulate as many balls as possible in the winning bin. By hitting multiple jackpot bars, the final ball count could far exceed what the player started with.

Caine had chosen this particular machine not for its confectionary charm, but because it sat under a 360-degree security mirror. By looking up, he could observe the long, narrow room behind him. It was filled with flashing lights, blinking machines, and curiously sullen Japanese men who seemed to take no joy whatsoever in the lively, noisy game they were playing.

He continued twisting the plastic wheel, then stole a quick glance at the security mirror. Pachinko was mostly a game of chance and, like all games of chance, an underworld of gambling had sprung up around it. In this section of Shinjuku, pachinko gambling was controlled by the Yoshizawa clan.

That was why he was here.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, a pair of Japanese men sauntered into the parlor. They were clad in shiny, sharkskin suits, their white silk shirts opened down to the chest. Their long hair was slicked back with pomade. A variety of chains and jewelry hung from their necks, and tattoo ink peeked out from either side of the open V across their chest.

Yakuza.

The two men made no effort to avoid jostling the gamblers as they navigated their way through the crowded room. Instead, the men and women at the machines shifted in their chairs or stood up and moved aside to make room.

The men stared at Caine as they walked past. His was the only Caucasian face in the parlor, so he knew he stood out. Caine smiled at them. One of the yakuza scowled, but the other returned his smile, an exaggerated leer, and dropped his hand to the left side of his waistband. Brushing aside his coat, he casually revealed the butt of a gun.

Caine watched as they walked past the redemption booth, where the manager of the parlor sat reading a manga. He put it down and bowed as the men walked past. They ignored him, disappearing through a red curtain hanging in the back of the room.

A loud, blaring buzzer and blast of Japanese pop music distracted Caine. One of his balls had hit a jackpot bar. A stream of winnings cascaded out of the machine. The LCD screen burst into white light, then faded to black. A computer-generated graphic of an anime girl stepped onto the screen.

Her hair was neon green and spiked into a mohawk down the center of her exaggerated head. Floor-length pigtails spun and twirled as she danced to an upbeat pop song. The character picked up a microphone, belting out the lyrics in chirping, high-pitched Japanese. A heavily accented announcer spoke over the singing: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Masuka Ongaku!”

The machine’s light show flashed in time to the music. Caine shook his head and stood up. Only in Japan.

Caine pushed the call button at the base of his pachinko machine. A few moments later, an attendant came out from behind the curtain, grabbed his winning bin, and escorted him to the manager’s booth. The young man dropped the bin on the counter, next to others Caine had accumulated throughout the day. The manager was once again buried in his manga. He looked up as a few errant balls rolled across the counter and fell to the floor.

He stared at Caine for a second, then dumped the balls into a funnel behind the counter. A computer counted the winnings and spat out a receipt from the cash register when it was finished. The man tore it off, read the number at the bottom, then handed it to Caine.

He turned and looked at the shelves behind him. Rows and rows of cheap electronics, random household items, and bizarre souvenirs stretched up to the ceiling. The mirrored wall behind multiplied them into a never-ending kaleidoscope of shoddy goods.

The manager stood on his tiptoes to reach a slim box on one of the higher shelves. Caine looked it over as the manager set it down. The writing on the box was in Japanese kanji, but the picture showed a DVD player of some kind. Caine placed his hands on the counter and stared the manager in the eye.

The manager squinted back, scratched behind his ear, then sighed. He produced several small, colorful plastic cards from a hidden spot under the counter and fanned them out on the glass countertop. He nodded his head towards the curtain in the back of the room.

Caine picked up the cards. “
Arrigato gozimasu
,” he said, dipping his head in a slight bow. At the back of the parlor, he parted the red curtain and stepped into a small concrete room.

Water dripped from a leak in the ceiling, creating a puddle on the floor. The attendant who had collected his winnings sat on a stool, slurping down some instant noodles from a styrofoam bowl. At the end of the room, a wooden jam propped open the metal fire door. The attendant didn’t even glance up from his meager meal as Caine walked past him and out into a long, narrow alley.

As he walked, Caine looked up at the edges of the buildings that towered over the narrow alley. His mental alarm bells were ringing. It felt like a good place for an ambush, but he saw no sign of any snipers above him.

He continued down the narrow passage. Ahead he could see flashes of green cabs and pedestrians, passing where the alley connected with the street. Just a few feet away was an entry to his right, a metal door painted over with several coats of thick, industrial grey paint. It was completely unmarked save for a small metal panel set in the center.

Perfect. The local tuck shop.

Gambling on pachinko was illegal in Japan, but the parlors, with a little help from the local yakuza, had found a way around that. Prizes could not be exchanged for cash in the pachinko parlors themselves, but winners could bring their tokens to hidden spots like this one. The yakuza bought back the prizes for cash and took a percentage of the winnings. They played the role of the “house” and, as usual, the house always won.