by Alex Archer
She thought about Ken. What in the world had made her kiss him on the cheek like that? It was just a peck, after all. But still. Annja wondered what she felt for him. Certainly he was attractive enough. But she sensed there was something else about him that drew her in. The mystery of his family, the missing piece of history and the quest to restore his lineage—she found it all so noble.
And she admired him for it.
Tomorrow, they would start their journey to find the vajra.
She turned over again, aware that her arm was going numb from sleeping on it too much. She propped herself up again.
Her stomach hurt, too.
Now that’s weird, she thought. The last time that happened…
Her body tensed. Could it be? Was someone in her room again?
She cracked her eyes just a sliver, trying to pierce the darkness and discern anything that might indicate the presence of someone.
She knew better than to try to look at things directly in the dark. The human eye changed in low-light conditions, using the rods instead of cones to see detail. And since the rods were at the outer part of the eye, Annja glanced around looking at things out of the corners of her eyes to see.
But all she saw was blackness.
She felt a shift in the air. It tickled her face.
Someone was there.
What to do?
The other night, she’d been in the tub and naked. Now she was at least dressed. But she also realized that being under the covers as she was would be a hindrance to her movement. She’d have to toss the covers and then roll out of bed. A two-step process just to ready herself for combat with a person she couldn’t even see.
Not good. Not good at all.
She watched the room some more. Now she could pick out a black shape moving against the black backdrop of her room. There seemed to be no ambient light coming in from outside that she might be able to use to help her see who had invaded her room—potentially for the second time in as many days.
The shape moved to her desk.
He’s looking for something, Annja decided.
But what?
Adrenaline poured into her system. She could feel her smaller muscles contracting involuntarily as she steeled herself for the possibility of combat. Would they simply search her stuff and then leave?
They.
Where had that thought come from? As far as she could tell there was only one person in the room. And yet…
No, there was one more. Somewhere Annja couldn’t see. And trying to shift in the bed might make her a target again.
Her breathing had shortened now.
I have to move—I’ve got to find out who this is!
She flexed her hands, bunching up bits of the covers and readying her grip. She would whip the covers one way and launch herself out of the bed the other way.
But what if the other person was standing there waiting for her?
She bit her lower lip and almost cried out as it cut too deep. A copper taste flowed into her mouth.
She had to take the chance.
She steeled herself.
One…
Annja took a deep breath in.
Two…
She tensed.
Three!
She threw the covers at the shadow by her desk and swung her legs out off the opposite side. She flipped off the bed and then straightened up with her hands held high ready to fight.
Instantly she felt her legs being swept out from under her. She landed hard and tried to roll, but the small size of her room made that difficult. As she rolled, she felt one of her arms being pinned behind her.
A knee appeared on her shoulder, driving her face first into the carpet. Annja hit hard and exhaled to try to dissipate the impact.
“That wasn’t a very smart thing to do, Miss Creed.”
The gruff voice that spoke in her ear had a vague accent to it. Japanese? She couldn’t tell. Annja tried to respond, but the knee holding her down along with the arm pin made breathing difficult. She coughed and some of the pressure released, but not enough that she could escape.
“What do you want?” she asked.
The voice seemed to float somewhere above her. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“The dorje.”
Annja frowned. “What the hell is a dorje?”
“The item he has hired you to find.”
“Who? What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ogawa approached you last night at the budokan. We saw your meeting. You’ve been with him ever since. And we believe you already have the dorje in your possession. We want it.”
“I don’t know what a dorje is,” Annja said.
The voice paused. “He calls it a vajra.”
Annja sighed. “For crying out loud, we haven’t even started looking for it yet. How can I possibly have it?”
She heard a muttered exchange of conversation between the man holding her down and the other invader. She tried to make out the language but found it impossible to do so.
After a moment, the voice reappeared in her ear. “We were told you had it in your possession already.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Why should we believe you?”
“Don’t believe me—I don’t care. Go ahead and tear my room apart. You won’t find the silly thing.” Annja was frankly tired of being held as she was.
She got no response.
“I don’t know where you got your information from, but it’s obviously a load of crap.”
The voice came closer to her ear. “If we find out you lied to us, we’ll be back…to kill you.”
Annja heard a quick spit of speech again, and then the pressure on her shoulder and arm disappeared. Annja stayed where she was.
“Can I get up now?” she asked angrily.
Again, only silence greeted her question. Carefully, Annja got up off the floor. The room felt empty now. She walked slowly over to the lights and turned them on.
Her window was open.
Annja ran to it and looked out. She looked up, down and all over, but saw no one clinging to the outside of the hotel like a bug. Her room was far too high up, wasn’t it? There’d be no way for someone to get out from this height. It didn’t make sense. Unless, of course, they had parachutes or some other high-tech gear they could use to escape.
And yet, they’d been here. At least two of them.
And they’d very neatly vanished into thin air.
Annja sat down on the side of her bed and sighed. This trip had been nothing but eventful so far. She wondered what the next few days would hold for her.
Part of her wanted to call Ken. She wanted to let him know that other people were after his precious item. Garin had warned her of the same thing.
She frowned.
But Garin wouldn’t be behind this, would he?
What would he want with an artifact like the vajra? What could he hope to do with it? Ever since Annja had found the sword of Joan of Arc, Garin had treated her with a vague, ambivalent respect. Annja wasn’t sure if he thought of her truthfully as an enemy or what.
What she did know was that because the sword was back together now, Garin might not be immortal any longer.
But she had no proof.
She could call Ken. See what he thought about the whole thing. Maybe he knew for certain there would be others after her. He’d hinted at that earlier, hadn’t he? That’s why he had wanted her to stay with him.
Had Ken known about these guys?
Annja frowned. She couldn’t see that happening. Ken seemed far too focused on retrieving the vajra to restore his family’s name than anything else. Being in cahoots with some third party after the artifact seemed unlikely and completely out of character for him.
But Garin had also warned Annja that she didn’t really know Ken that well.
Was it possible she was being totally naive?
Here she was questioning her own judgment. Not good.
She got off the bed and walked to the desk. The laptop sprang to life, and the screen saver vanished and left the search engine flashing at her. Annja sat down and poised her fingers over the keyboard. What am I looking for? she wondered.
She put her hands down and sighed. “This is ridiculous.”
Instead of typing, she put the computer back to sleep, turned out the lights and crawled back into the bed. She needed sleep. A good sleep that would help her get up tomorrow and start the hunt with a rested mind.
There’d be plenty of time to discuss the wacky occurrences of the night with Ken en route to wherever he was taking her.
She settled her head on the pillow and took three deep breaths.
“It appears you weren’t lying.”
Annja’s eyes snapped open. She tried to sit up, but a firm hand held her down. She could make out a set of eyes staring at her, surrounded by black cloth and face paint.
“Don’t. You will only succeed in making me angry if you do that.”
Annja stayed lying down. “I told you I didn’t have it.”
“We needed to see you weren’t lying. But if you had been, the first thing you would have gone for was the dorje. You didn’t do that. So, I believe you don’t have it. That’s good.”
“So, you’ll leave now?”
“Not quite. We want to propose a simple business arrangement.”
Annja shook her head. “Forget it. I don’t make business deals with people I don’t know.”
The man hovering above her paused. “Ask yourself if you really want to know who we are, Annja. Ask yourself truthfully. Are you prepared—really prepared—to know that kind of thing?”
Annja sighed. “What’s the deal?”
“We know he’s taking you west tomorrow. If you find the dorje, we want it. It’s that simple.”
Annja looked at the blackened face. “What do I get out of it?”
He appeared to smile. “Your life.”
“That’s not much of a deal.”
“I could kill you now, if you’d prefer.”
The way he said it was so matter-of-fact, Annja didn’t doubt for a moment he could do it easily. She shifted slightly. “Fine.”
“We’ll be watching you. Don’t renege on our deal, Annja. We’ll know where you are, wherever you are. And if you betray us, there will be no escape from our vengeance. It doesn’t matter where you go, we’ll hunt you down. Remember that.”
“All right.”
“It’s time for you to sleep now.”
Annja felt a soft pressure on the side of her neck.
And then felt nothing.
Nothing at all.
11
Nezuma Hidetaki watched from the back of the black BMW M3 through heavily tinted windows as Annja Creed and Kennichi Ogawa walked into the train station near Ueno Park. He’d been tailing them since they’d left the hotel earlier that morning, using a network of low-grade idiots to do the grunt work while he stayed in his car and monitored their efforts.
But Ogawa was proving himself quite adept at nonchalant countersurveillance skills, purposefully backtracking several times, nearly catching one of Nezuma’s men as he tailed too close by a video store in Kanda. A last-minute break spared the entire team from being burned, but one careless mistake had almost ruined the entire surveillance effort.
That man now lay in the foot well next to Nezuma. He was sweating tremendously and Nezuma sighed once before looking at him.
“You should have anticipated that he would backtrack. You were told to expect such tactics. This man is not a fool.” He sighed. “I wish I could say the same for you.”
The man’s eyes widened. “Master, forgive me. It will not happen again. Please, I beg you!”
Nezuma shook his head. The problem with the youth of today was their rampant sense of self-entitlement. Not one understood the need to work and work hard for what they got in life. Youngsters these days deemed themselves worthy without having to prove their worth. As a result, they were sloppy and inefficient.
Not to mention wholly annoying, Nezuma concluded.
Nezuma blamed the plague of idiocy on a politically correct generation of parents who rewarded failure as if it were success lest they damage a child’s self-esteem. He sniffed. What bullshit. Nezuma knew that the only way to build self-esteem was to challenge oneself on the anvil of life. Only by failing and then trying again, failing more and then eventually succeeding did you prove yourself worthy of victory and all the spoils that went with it.
During his time in America, Nezuma had grown nauseous at the sight of parents coddling their children and never letting them discover the nature of risk. He had also seen an almost complete lack of parenting—no discipline instilled in a misbehaving child.
God forbid they use the word no, he thought.
All of this left Nezuma with a pool of talent that would have perhaps been better if he poured bleach into the mix. His young guns were fools who thought a new Ducati motorcycle made them impervious to seasoned veterans of battle. They imagined their bravado alone would grant them respect.
And when they failed, they still expected to be rewarded.
Ridiculous.
All of his employees were like this, except one. In the front seat behind the steering wheel sat the only person Nezuma trusted with his life—Shuko.
Her ebony hair hung in a tasteful bob, unmarred by the trendy tea-brown staining so common to others of her generation. At twenty-five, Shuko was Nezuma’s finest pupil and most loyal servant. Adept with her hands and feet as she was with firearms and explosives, not to mention an almost superhuman ability to face risk and danger and overcome both, Nezuma valued no one as he did Shuko.
Her voice cut through the whimpering of the man in the foot well. “We should go soon if we hope to stay with them.”
Nezuma nodded. “I would very much hate to miss my train.”
“Master…” The young man in the foot well couldn’t have been any older than twenty. He was weeping now. Mixed with the tears and sweat, the BMW would no doubt reek if Nezuma had cared enough about it.
He calmly withdrew the silenced Beretta .22-caliber pistol and aimed at the man’s head. “Failure is not to be tolerated.”
When he fired, the subsonic bullets barely made a sound. But they penetrated the skull and bounced about inside, tearing open the brain cavity and killing the man.
Nezuma sighed again, disassembled the suppressor and pocketed the gun. As he opened the door, a slight breeze gave him a healthy breath of fresh air and he sucked it in greedily.
Shuko slid effortlessly from the car, retrieved their bags from the trunk and then closed it with a thump. Together, they walked across the street.
“Thank god I have you,” Nezuma said.
Shuko bowed from her waist. “I am yours, master.”
Nezuma smiled as the bright sunshine streamed down through the morning haze. They reached the other side of the street and entered the train station. Shuko sidled through the crowd and acquired two tickets for the bullet train heading west toward Osaka.
She handed one to Nezuma. “We should get aboard. The train will be leaving in a few minutes.”
Nezuma took in a breath and let it ease out through his nose. “You’re right, of course.” He smiled. “But what about the car? We can’t simply leave it there like that.”
Shuko’s eyes danced as she withdrew a slim white iPod from her pocket. She scrolled through the menu for a moment and then handed it to Nezuma.
Nezuma looked down. She had selected a song called “Demolition.” Nezuma pressed Play.
Outside of the train station, the BMW M3 blew apart in a giant fireball that sent metal and body parts skyward for a hundred feet before cascading down to the ground in a fiery rain.
Nezuma clapped his hands amid the screams and chaos. He turned to Shuko. “Very impressive. Is it a new formula you’ve recently cooked up?”
Shuko smiled. “Something I’ve been working on
for some time now. I’m glad I had a chance to field-test it before our trip.”
“As am I.” Nezuma kissed her lightly on the cheek. “You’re marvelous and I don’t deserve you.”
“Master.”
“But I will happily accept your service. God knows you’re the only one I can count on to get things done properly.”
The compliments seemed to run right off of her. “Our train.”
“Yes, yes.” Nezuma walked with her. “It would be rude, I’d imagine, to keep our friends waiting.”
“What if the American woman spots you?” Shuko asked.
“I doubt very much she will. Besides, she is likely still sore from the other night. Probably more so than she will be willing to admit. But the pain will serve to keep her awareness dulled a bit.”
Shuko frowned. “And Ogawa? He is far too dangerous to risk seeing us right now.”
Nezuma followed her to the platform. “I don’t think Ogawa knows the extent of our involvement, if he even suspects it at all. He seems far too interested in recovering the dorje than he does in discovering who is truly after the artifact besides him.” Nezuma clenched his hands into fists. “His devotion to his family will be his final undoing.”
They boarded the train and headed toward the rear compartment, passing a snack car and scores of other passengers.
Shuko said, “I was able to find out their seats are to the front. They are due to get off in Osaka.”
“Excellent. We’ll keep tabs on them anyway, just in case Ogawa has any surprises in store for us. It would pain me terribly to reach Osaka only to discover they had gotten off somewhere earlier.”
Shuko smiled. “I don’t think even Ogawa is foolish enough to risk jumping from a train traveling in excess of one hundred miles per hour through the countryside, over rivers and amid rocky terrain.”
“Nor do I, but he is a ninja.” Nezuma looked at her. “And they are a devious, cunning bunch, even if they have no honor. I will put nothing past him and I would urge you to follow suit.”
Shuko bowed again. “As you say, master.”
They settled themselves into their seats and Shuko immediately began reading the various books she’d brought with her. Nezuma insisted she maintain a steady diet of literature and current affairs.