“No, that’s who the United States government decided I should be. It served their interests, and I paid the price. Trust me, they got the better end of the deal.”
Rebecca had to force herself not to step back from the bars. His voice—cold and raw with hatred—was like a blade of icy steel stabbing at her. She shivered, despite the intense heat.
Caine smirked again. “Now, I serve my own interests. I’ve earned that. So how about you drop the jilted lover act and tell me what it is you want?”
“I want the truth, damn it!”
Caine chuckled. “Then you may need to reconsider your career path.”
“Fine. Screw the truth then. I’ll just assume you are what your file says you are. A traitor and a disgrace.”
“And dead. Let’s not forget that.”
“Well, if you’re not interested in debating the truth, neither am I. Besides, I don’t think it will be too long before the facts reconcile themselves. People don’t last long in here. The locals call this place ‘The Big Tiger.’ Know why?”
Caine didn’t answer.
Rebecca finally felt like the conversation was on equal footing. She took a step closer. “Because it eats men alive.”
Caine held up the manila folder in his hands. “And this is what, exactly? My ticket out of here? A favor I do for you, in exchange for my freedom?”
She nodded. “I can fill you in on the details later, but the elevator pitch is in there. Arinori Kusaka is a prominent Japanese businessman with fingers in every technological pie there is. Works with all the major Chinese factories and has close ties to many government officials. He’s also a CIA asset, whose intelligence has been instrumental in thwarting several industrial espionage and cyber-terrorism attacks sponsored by the Chinese government.”
Caine flipped through the dossier, scanning the photos and reports in the folder with a lazy detachment. “You want me to take him to a hostess club?”
Rebecca ignored him. “Kusaka claims he has knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack that will take place on US soil within the next seven days.”
“Well, good thing you’re all such close friends then,” he said without looking up from the folder.
“Kusaka has a daughter, mid-twenties, mother unknown. Apparently, she’s fallen in with a bad crowd. Gangs, yakuza wannabes, that sort of thing. She stole some money and papers from his safe about a month ago and disappeared. Nobody’s seen her since then.”
Caine continued flipping pages in the file. He sighed. “Why on earth are you getting involved in this? Japan run out of cops and private eyes?”
“According to the report, Kusaka hired four private eyes to find her. The body of one was found in Tokyo Bay. The other three simply disappeared without a trace. And Kusaka claims the authorities are burying the case due to yakuza corruption in the department. Bottom line, Kusaka refuses to release his intel unless we help him find his daughter. And like I said, we’re on the clock. We have seven days, including today, to make this happen.”
“And you believe this intel is real? You trust him?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe. Bernatto believes him, and he’s calling the shots.”
Caine’s head jerked up, and his eyes zeroed in on hers. The dark shadow of death that lay just beneath his handsome exterior glowered with menace. “Bernatto? Allan Bernatto? He’s your boss?”
“Director of HUMINT. He’s placed me in charge of a new group, Extra Departmental Assets Liaison, or some other bullshit title. Basically, I get this done, or it’s my ass.”
Caine dropped the folder on the bench next to him. “And a disgraced traitor in a Thai prison is the best you could do?”
She looked down at her taupe leather flats. “I was hoping you could tell me something, anything….”
“Hoping I was innocent? No, that’s not it. You were hoping I could sell it to you. Because deep down, you didn’t believe it, but you want to. So you can use me. Like Bernatto.”
She looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Bernatto was my handler on Operation Big Blind, the op that got my partner killed. The op where he sold me out to the White Leopard clan.”
“Bernatto sold the heroin? He actually used agency assets to facilitate a personal drug deal?”
Caine turned his back towards her. “I’m not saying anything. Get someone else.” He shuffled away.
“Tom, wait!” She moved along the fence, trying to keep him in sight. “Tom, just tell me what happened! Please!”
The clink of his chain grew quieter, then disappeared. She heard the metal crash of a gate slamming shut. He was gone.
She was alone again in the courtyard. The garden was quiet, save for the buzzing of insects and the distant sounds of men, and metal, and pain.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Caine opens his eyes, and he is back. Back in the crumbling stone basement. Back where the harsh sunlight pierces through the cracks in the rock. The thin slices of light burn so bright, they are painful to look at in the darkness.
The chain of the rusty cuffs is slung over a hook in the ceiling. His wrists ache, and the rough metal bands have rubbed his palms raw. His feet dangle about a foot above the sandy floor. Every muscle in his body is taut and screaming. He can not remember the last time he has slept. But nor does he seem to be fully awake. A prisoner now, his state of mind hovers somewhere between life and death.
He has no idea where he is. His captors have moved him several times, always covering his face with a dirty hood. He does not know when they will come again. All he knows are the lies he has to tell. The truth is forbidden. His life, his suffering, is nothing. He has to tell his lies. That is how he can win. The only way left to him.
He has lost the ability to see emotions in his captors, though he knows they are there, hidden in the men’s shadowed features. Hatred, of him. Horror at the atrocities they inflict upon him. Fear. Flickering glances of doubt. Tiny reminders that these are not demons, not monsters from hell. Human beings are doing this to him.
But he can’t see them anymore, those minute glimpses of humanity. Maybe they were never there to begin with, just a trick of the light.
He opens his mouth to laugh, but no sound comes. There is no sound at all. Not the creaking of his chains, not the rats scurrying from the sacks of rotten grain in the corner … all is silent.
Caine opens his mouth again, trying to make a sound, any sound. He shouts for help, he cries out his name, but nothing comes out, not even a dry croak. It is as if a heavy blanket has been laid over the entire room and no sound can escape its smothering embrace. But if he can’t speak, how will he tell his lies? How can he win the game?
He hears footsteps on the stairs. In the unnatural silence, each step echoes like a gunshot. He twists and shakes, struggling to free himself. More blood spills from his ravaged body. Crimson droplets strike the sand beneath his feet.
CRASH. CRASH. CRASH. They are close now. He can not see them, but the sunlight blinks and shifts as they descend the stairs.
And Caine knows one thing. When they come, the pain will start again. And it will feel like forever. Until the next time. And then forever will begin again.
He screams. Not for help. Not in pain. He screams just to scream. But there is no sound.
Caine woke up screaming.
He was laying atop a mattress of tattered, soiled blankets. The cell designed for two prisoners now housed eight men. They had to sleep lying head to toe across the floor. Their elbows and shoulders touched, skin rubbing against sweaty skin. The stench of the open toilet wafted through the still air. A single lightbulb filled the room with a pale, flickering glow.
Caine had found sleep nearly impossible for the first few days, but now exhaustion and hunger had dulled his nerves. Tonight he’d finally managed to plunge into a deep trance before the nightmare woke him.
The other men in the room grumbled and moaned, pulled from their slumber by his screams and thrashing. But no one uttered a world of co
mplaint, not after his violent display in the prison yard.
Caine sat up and rubbed his aching shoulders. He had known the nightmares would come, just as surely as he had known Lau would send his killers. And he had known someone from the agency would come looking for him, once his alias popped up on their radar. But seeing Rebecca again…. It had to be someone. It just happened to be her. She didn’t come for you. She came to recruit an asset.
And Bernatto. He had avoided thinking about the man for years. He had buried the past, with all its pain and betrayal and death. He’d even buried his own name. He had lost himself in his false identity, eking out a meager existence among the smugglers, pimps, and other entrepreneurs of the street. Hiding.
No, surviving, he countered. He almost believed it. But after seeing Rebecca, surviving no longer seemed like enough.
He took a deep breath. Stepping carefully, he picked his way across the carpet of bodies lining the floor. He stepped on a few elbows and fingers along the way, but again, no one confronted him. They grunted and shifted out of his way.
When he reached the wire mesh gate, he pounded it with his fist, sending a metallic clang echoing through the prison. “Guard! Get over here.”
Mumbled complaints and curses drifted from the other cells, as footsteps traipsed down the hall.
“Aow a-rai!” the block guard barked. “What do you want?”
“The lady left me a file. I want to see it.”
The guard stared at Caine for a few seconds. Had he overplayed his hand? Whatever leverage Rebecca had over the warden to set up her secret little meeting, maybe it was played out now.
The guard muttered a curse, then shouted down the hall to his partner as he unlocked the door. The other guard arrived and yanked Caine from the cell. “Let’s go,” he said in a thick Thai accent.
Caine looked back into the cell as the door swung closed. Its dark shadow moved across the other prisoners. They were a tangled mass of bodies, contorted into whatever space was available. Then the door slammed shut. Even under the glare of the buzzing lightbulb, the room seemed lost to impenetrable darkness.
They were the damned. He realized how close he had come to joining them. How childish his earlier refusal had been.
Twenty minutes later, he sat on metal chair in a stark, empty room. A small metal desk was bolted to the floor, and an ancient rotary phone hung from the wall. As he flipped through the pages of the file, a strange sensation flowed over him. He felt neither awake nor asleep. Alive nor dead. The place in his nightmare, where the pain lasted forever … he knew he was not there. But neither had he truly escaped. Not yet.
Rebecca had given him the rundown on Arinori Kusaka, but Caine suspected there were details being withheld from him.
Details … there were always details, hiding in the shadows. And knowing Bernatto, he would not have told Rebecca everything.
The criminal underworld and the intelligence community both operated in a never-ending sea of intel and data. The movements of high-level players like Bernatto and Kusaka left ripples and eddies…. If you looked hard enough, you could just barely see them or, rather, the absence of information they left behind. Caine felt himself sinking into those dark currents now.
He flipped another page in the file to find a beautiful girl staring back at him. The photo was black and white, but he could tell her hair was lighter than most Japanese girls, an auburn brown. Her skin was starkly pale, almost pure white on the glossy photo paper.
She was reclining on her side, propped up on her arms on a small bed. The details of the room were blurry, but Caine guessed it was a flat or apartment, perhaps a friend’s or boyfriend’s. But her eyes … Caine could not imagine anyone looking at a lover with such haunted intensity.
Hitomi Kusaka.
Or so he assumed. The pictures were simply labeled “Hitomi.” There was no other information about her in the file.
He leaned back in his chair. That’s wrong. Rich bastard like Kusaka, with enough juice to pull favors from the goddamn CIA, but no birth certificate for his daughter? No family pictures or outrageously expensive birthday parties or vacations abroad? No paparazzi photos of her cavorting at nightclubs or stumbling out of limousines? He supposed they could be paranoid, privacy conscious. But it still felt off.
He sighed and looked around the empty, dingy room. This was probably the most pleasant thirty minutes he’d experienced since arriving at this prison.
Hell with it.
There was a business card taped to the front of the file folder with Rebecca’s name and phone number on it. Nothing else. Caine picked up the ancient phone and listened to the dial tone for a moment, turning the dark possibilities over and over in his mind. With a shrug and a sigh, he dialed the number on the card.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
Rebecca paused. “Change your mind?”
“Maybe. Does Bernatto know about this? Does he know I’m involved?”
“No. He doesn’t know I approached you. He doesn’t want to know. He wants a deniable asset in case this blows up in our face.”
“All right. Fine. I’m in. Fifty thousand. Half up front. In cash.”
Rebecca was quiet for a moment. He could hear her soft breathing through the phone.
“Why didn’t you come back?” she asked. “If you didn’t do it, if Bernatto sold you out, why didn’t you come back to prove it?”
He thought for a moment, unsure how much to reveal to her. She was tenacious, he knew, and that could be dangerous. “I did come back,” he said. “It didn’t work out. And if I stayed, someone would have gotten hurt.”
“You mean me? Did Allan threaten me?”
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters; it was all bullshit. I killed people, and I thought I was making the world safer, better. But all I was doing was making people like Bernatto richer.”
“This matters, Tom. If Kusaka’s intel is real, lives are at stake. I have to know you can do this, that you’re not just going to disappear again.”
He thought for a moment. “I won’t. Not until it’s done. Fifty thousand, twenty-five up front. Cash.”
“No.” Her voice became cold and hard. “Not on this job. You get paid when you find her. Then you can crawl back under your rock if you want. I’ll send a car for you tomorrow morning.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Not yet.”
He smiled. “Smart. And Rebecca?”
“What?”
He looked around the small, drab room.
“Send the car now.”
“I will.”
Caine listened to the static on the phone for a moment, then hung up. He walked back to the table and picked up the picture of Hitomi.
He wondered who she was looking at. He had a feeling he would soon find out.
CHAPTER NINE
It was about 5:00 pm when the plane landed at Tokyo Narita International Airport. It took another hour to clear immigration.
In the men’s room, Caine splashed cold water on his face and scrubbed his skin. Then he ran damp fingers though his messy hair, slicking it back. He eyed his reflection in the mirror. The face staring back at him looked weary, on edge…. There was a hollowness to his features, a shadow that seemed to hang over the raw, tan skin of his face. His eyes twitched like those of a predatory animal, caged for far too long.
He knew he was giving off bad energy, allowing the darkness inside him to creep its way onto his face, into his voice. Back when he had been operational, he could turn on and turn off the dangerous parts of his psyche, put the killer in the box until he was needed.
But now … Lau’s setup, the fight in the prison, seeing Rebecca again after all these years … there was no box. The scars on his soul, only just healed, were torn open again. The darkness was out, for all to see—and that was dangerous. People keyed into that vibe, whether by training or simply an instinct for self-preservation.
Caine had caught the hesitation in the immigr
ation officer’s eyes as he handed over his carefully forged passport and visa. Luckily the official had decided it wasn’t worth his time to stop a lone American tourist with no criminal record.
He took a deep breath. He hadn’t been on mission in years. His body and mind were not sharp, he knew. Not at their peak. But they were good enough.
As he turned away from the mirror, he caught a look in his own eyes, a look he recognized. It was the same haunted, intense stare of the girl in the picture. Hitomi.
He stopped in the shopping concourse to buy some clothes and other basics with the credit card Rebecca had provided. They had both agreed it was a bad idea for him to return to his apartment, in case Lau had people watching for him. Instead he’d travelled in some old clothes from a bug-out bag stashed at a local bar.
He didn’t like using the card. He knew it was a data point. It could track his purchases and location, but he figured she already knew where and when his flight arrived. He wasn’t giving up any new details.
The glass doors leading out of the baggage area opened with a rush of air. Caine carried his lone suitcase and shopping bags out onto the sidewalk. He took a deep breath. The smell of the air filled his brain with hazy images. He had spent two years here, most of it pretending to be someone else. The images in his mind flashed past, like a movie playing on a warped, translucent screen … a jumble of memories and lies. He couldn’t remember which was which anymore.
As he joined the taxi line, he pulled out the phone Rebecca had given him. It was an older model from the agency, but still global and encrypted. And, of course, completely trackable. None of which matters, he thought. I’m going to use it only once.
He dialed the number she had given him from memory. The phone rang twice before she picked up. He sighed and waited for her to speak the recognition code, as they had arranged.
“I take it you landed. How was the flight?”
[Thomas Caine #1] Tokyo Black Page 5