Central Tokyo sprawled out endlessly beneath him in every direction. Smog blanketed the basin, muting its lights, but he could still see Tokyo Tower, the moat and the grounds of the Emperor's Palace. The corporate logos on surrounding buildings were a who's who of Japanese capitalism: Nissan Motors, Fuji Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Steel.
Bells chimed nearby, and for some peculiar reason, breathing heavily with his task, passing what he counted as the twenty-second floor, Galt found himself recalling the day he and Kate were married by a judge in that small-town red brick courthouse. As they were leaving the brief and modest ceremony in the kindly judge's chambers, workmen outside, who were restoring an old bell tower atop the courthouse, called out their congratulations and began gonging the antique brass bell for the whole world to hear. Wedding bells for the newlyweds. The world had welcomed these lovers. He blinked away the memory.
He reached the windows of the penthouse. The spacious conference room had bookcases along one wall and windows along the others. A long polished oak table dominated the room.
A man he recognized as Rikihei Ugaki was seated at the head of the table. The Oyabun looked sharp, dapper in a white silk suit. Galt also "made" the other men in their well-tailored business suits, seated around the table: kobun, the Red Scorpion Clan's top lieutenants and station chiefs. Each man sat with his left hand on the left knee, his right hand extended palm upward with his eyes turned to their Oyabun, the traditional yakuza sign of respect.
Galt's foot and hand suction pads securing his weight, he pasted himself against the face of the building, just below and to the side of the window, so that only his left eye peered into the room, at approximately eye-level.
Those present, including Ugaki who sat facing the window from the far end of the conference table, were wholly involved in a drama unfolding at the conference table. Even these most jaded of human sharks found the illusion of security in this cocoon, aloft on the thirty-fourth floor, which is why Galt had chosen this manner of gathering intelligence. Unfortunately, he was "dropping in" about twenty minutes into their conference. Galt needed the cover of night. Anyone spotted scaling a skyscraper would surely draw attention during the daylight hours. On the other hand, he suspected that the first part of this meeting would be the ceremonial greeting of the Oyabun as each of the kobun arrived individually, in order of their rank within the organization. And so he and Tuttle had chosen to wait until night cloaked the city. He was hoping that he had only missed the introduction ceremonies and the customary serving of sake.
He used his feet suction pads, and that of his left hand, to maintain his adhesion to the sheer face of the skyscraper. He unclipped a small microphone component from the device at his belt and attached the mic to the window. With its miniature suction cup to the glass, it looked like a child's dart. Galt heard guttural exchanges in Japanese between two of the men seated at the table. Japanese was one of the six languages in which he was fluent.
Far below, Tuttle would be keeping watch. There was the building's normal security staff, which was minimal. Far more importantly, there was the collective security force of Ugaki and his yakuza. The interior of the Tanaga Building, every hallway, would be thick with them. Ugaki could have the outside of the building under surveillance from street level or from surrounding buildings. The worst-case scenario was that they would be equipped with infrared Night Vision Devices, in which case they would see him. That was the risk. But he had come halfway around the world to find Kate. Too far to be dissuaded by the element of risk.
At the conference table, amenities and ceremonial greetings were past.
Ota Anami, seated at Ugaki's right, was engaged in heated debate with a man who sat opposite him, to Ugaki's left. "We have invested too much time and resources to double-cross the Korean, this Colonel Sung, now," Anami was saying. The CEO had a softness about him that looked out of place amid the others seated at the table, but he spoke with authority. "The airfield has been monitored through every phase, has it not?" Anami nodded deferentially to the dapper man, who sat unmoving, implacable, statue-like, at the head of the table. "Most often it has been Oyabun Ugaki who flew into North Korea at great personal risk to supervise Colonel Sung's preparations. Sung will gain possession of the shuttle before the Americans or the Chinese or the North Koreans, because he is the nearest one to it. He will not betray us, because he fears the power of yakuza. It is a matter of honor."
Despite longstanding and deeply rooted inter-clan warfare among some of these men, an officious air of business permeated the room in observance of enryo, a highly respected part of the Japanese culture: the code of proper conduct, which emphasizes reserve, restraint and emotional control.
"Honor." There was scorn in the opposing gangster's tone. "I disdain the notion of letting the Korean live. They are not people, but one step above baboons in intellect and honor. Sung has fulfilled his purpose. We should kill him and take command of his troops. Events will overtake themselves in a situation as fluid and volatile as this. Sung could be persuaded by his superiors to tell them everything. He must be eliminated at this crucial phase."
There was no surprise to Galt that a Japanese gangster would not trust a North Korean. Koreans were essentially the Asian "blacks" of Japan. Discrimination in Japan is subtle, never mentioned to foreigners, but it is common. The Japanese do their best to isolate those of Korean heritage from the mainstream of society, segregating them into ghettos like Heuisa Street, with housing projects and their own shopping areas.
At the conference table, all eyes remained on Ugaki who considered, at some length and without comment, what he had just heard.
This made for dead calm in Galt's earpiece. From his birdlike perch, so far removed from street level, he again vaguely heard the sound of the city, which, at this height, was merely a faint, metallic cacophony.
"You are both persuasive in your points of view," Ugaki said finally. "At this stage, I concur with Anami-san. It is not yet time for the removal of Colonel Sung. I will personally take possession of the, uh, merchandise after the colonel has possession of it, and I will oversee its importation into Japan. Colonel Sung is in preparation to attack and eliminate Chai Bin. Retrieval of the shuttle is imminent." Ugaki paused and smirked. "I will deal with Colonel Sung at the appropriate time, after he truly has fulfilled his usefulness." He glanced at the yakuza who had argued with Anami. "Doing so will eliminate the only connection to us from within North Korea, and their government will take the blame internationally."
The yakuza being addressed responded respectfully to his Oyabun.
Galt could hear nothing. The breeze whispered along these heights of the building wall and played with his hair, but his earpiece had gone dead; no speaking in Japanese, no static, just flat-out dead. He considered breaking radio silence with Tuttle.
Before he could say anything into his lapel mic, the doors of the conference room were flung open. Shouting men poured in carrying weapons, everything from pistols to automatic weapons to shotguns, with bodyguards shouting and gesticulating empathetically with a sense of urgency to the men seated at the table.
Ugaki was on his feet, head held erect, arms crossed authoritatively, concentrating on the window dominating the wall before him while the kobun around him and a frightened Anami scrambled for cover.
The bodyguards collectively tracked their weapons at the window and opened fire.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gunfire erupted from the window, spewing muzzle flashes that shredded glass.
Galt had reared his head away from where his eyes were pressed to the lower corner of the window. Freeing his right hand from its suction mitt, he delved into a pocket of his black jacket, grasping and activating, with a thumb flick, the sixty-second fuse on a high explosive device, round and no larger than a marble. He slid his other hand from its suction glove and yanked his feet free from their confinement with the right twist that disengaged them. As he fell away, he pitched the HE up and through the hole in th
e wall that had been a window.
And Galt was airborne.
He went into a backward free-fall, and everything seemed to go strangely into slow motion for him. As he fell, he started picking up speed, plummeting down, down, down, the air rushing by him, flapping his clothes, whipping at his hair, and another thirty-three floors to fall! He tore at the tear-away jacket, revealing the harness strapped across his back, and he yanked at the ripcord. The mini-parachute flapped open with a snap that broke his fall with a bone-jarring jolt.
Ugaki's security measures had extended to having lookout posts for scans of the Tanaga Building with NVDs and motion sensors. They had spotted Galt and radioed the bodyguard inside the building.
He reached for the guidelines and looked up to see the gaping hole full of faces, and guns tracing in his direction: Then came the orange-red blast of the HE, which may have been small enough to roll across the conference room floor without notice amid all the excitement. The window spewed flame and red lightning and human bodies and body parts, belching them into the night like an angry god. Galt worked the guidelines and, less than sixty seconds later, was guiding himself into a running stop on the ground at the base of the building, next to the canopied entrance to the underground garage.
Tuttle emerged into view as Galt was shucking off the parachute, which he rolled up into a ball less than the size of a basketball, and handed to Tuttle, who stuffed it into the tote bag without looking. His attention was skyward, at the point on the penthouse floor where smoke could be seen billowing. Tuttle struggled with the bag's zipper as they hurried away from there. "Was that absolutely necessary?"
"Dunno," said Galt. "It seemed like a good idea at the time, taking out a nest of vipers like that. Uh, watch your back, sir. They had a lookout that made me. I think they lost me in the fall, but I could be wrong."
Fire alarms were going off inside the Tanaga Building. Galt and Tuttle easily negotiated the chain link fence, as they had coming in, and dropped to the sidewalk adjacent to the vacant parking area. They started, at a brisk pace, in the direction of the nearest intersection.
"I trust you have something for us," Tuttle groused. "That bunch you just blew up was our best lead."
"We have what we need," said Galt, "and here it is. Ugaki and his yakuza have paid off a North Korean military officer who commands an airfield up north near their border with China. It all ties in, General. The yakuza set up that technician in Houston, Fraley, to bring down the shuttle. They'd co-opted their own landing strip, courtesy of this bought-off North Korean colonel. But things seem to have gone haywire. That's what tonight's meeting was about. So we tap into North Korea's military files as deep as we can, and we find out where a colonel named Sung is commanding an airfield; then we'll know where we're going."
Tuttle sent a parting glance over his shoulder at the skyscraper and the plume of smoke snaking into the sky from the penthouse. The wailing beeps of approaching sirens filled the night.
"And all we leave behind is a roomful of dead and injured yakuza? Yeah, I see your point. Good riddance to bad trash."
"You get to work tracking down that colonel and his airfield," said Galt as they reached the intersection, joining the pedestrian flow. "I've got a date to keep with Meiko. It's time for another goodbye."
A wind had picked up, whipping across the tarmac where the Concorde basked in the night lights like a giant queen bee, fawned over and catered to by the scrambling, last-minute maintenance and baggage-loading activity seen beyond the observation windows of the indoor boarding area, where travelers crowded, awaiting admittance onto the Los Angeles flight.
Sachito Kurita had been driven to the Haneda Airport to meet Meiko. The widow's large, almond eyes were red and moist, but she held her chin high and only the slightest tremble of her lower lip betrayed inner emotion. Her shapely figure was encased in a tasteful black pants suit, with pearls and earrings that matched. Straight, shoulder-length midnight black hair was tied back. Her handshake, when she greeted Galt upon his approach, was as firm as when they'd first met yesterday at this airport, yet lacked the vibrancy of only the day before.
Her chauffeur, who was certainly her bodyguard, lurked off on the periphery of people visiting with friends, associates and loved ones.
Galt saw no sign of General Tuttle.
Meiko had changed into another decidedly Western-style blouse-and-skirt outfit since she, Galt and Tuttle had parted company after their return trip to Tokyo aboard the bullet train, squashed in amid the rush hour commuters at sunset.
Galt and Meiko exchanged a hug, with an extra squeeze from her. He saw the questions in her eyes. She had not been told the details of tonight's mission, and would be terribly frustrated right now, apparently not wanting to ask, in front of Sachito, if he and Tuttle had uncovered any criminal involvement on the part of her father. And the hug lasted longer than it might have. He felt her magic touch him inside.
She whispered into his ear so only he could hear. "Trev, I love you so. I'm sorry. Good luck. Come back safely, with Kate. What is meant to be will happen." Then they mutually ended the embrace, and she smiled deferentially in Sachito's direction. "I only asked my stepmother to send in my luggage. She was gracious enough to come see me off." As well as he knew, Galt discerned no trace of insincerity in her words.
Sachito accepted this with a modest nod. "Please return to your homeland soon, Meiko. It is my wish that we become acquainted under less trying circumstances."
"Thank you for your hospitality, Sachito, and for allowing me access to my father's office today. You have been most kind." Meiko clasped a shoulder strap bag, and held her boarding pass. She said to Galt, "Part of me doesn't want to leave. What's happening in Washington has to be covered, but things are happening here too."
"Is that right?" said Galt neutrally.
"Sachito received word on her cell phone on our way here. There's been some sort of occurrence in one of the buildings downtown owned by Kurita Industries."
"Occurrence?" said Galt, feeling Meiko's eyes, watching him, grow speculative.
"We don't know the details," said Sachito. "It happened less than an hour ago."
"Some sort of explosion," said Meiko. "Ota Anami was killed, as were several other men."
Galt wore the same black slacks, shirt and jacket that he'd worn when he'd scaled the face of the Tanaga Building to that penthouse conference room where hellfire erupted, and here he was awash with mixed emotions as the three of them stood surrounded by people conversing in various languages, saying their goodbyes. He did not want to see Meiko go. His respect and love for her was equaled only by, well, by his respect and love for an equally formidable specimen of womanly perfection whose name was Kate, and Kate was still his wife. And he had come halfway around the world to find her. Yes, there was the shuttle. Yes, there was the brewing of international crisis, enemies with nukes aimed at each other and those closest to the center of power, including the president of the United States, understanding that Galt's lone wolf covert op posed not a threat, but possibly the only hope of avoiding a military collision course that could very quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange that would cost the life of practically every American serviceperson in Korea, as well as countless civilians. Yes, yes, all of that was true. But he would not have broken the rules, would not have gone mad dog lone wolf, cutting from the White House basement to thrust himself into the belly of this monster, had he not been driven by the need to get to his woman because she was in trouble, simple as that. He had come to kick all the ass that needed kicking, on his side and theirs, whatever it took to find his wife. That's how much he loved Kate Daniels. That's what drove him. Love drove him.
And he could see in Meiko's eyes that she maybe understood him better than he understood himself. She extended her hand for a polite handshake.
"You'll find her," she said, as if she'd read his mind.
Their handshake sent those same old electrical jolts through him, just as the hug had; just as the
ir first physical contact had, the day he and Meiko first shook hands. It had seemed too simple then, so pure and okay, falling in love with her because after all, Kate had left him. Hell, she'd wanted away from him so bad, she'd gone into outer space. Jesus, he told himself. Shut it off, you dumb nihilistic idiot. And with that, the surreal disorientation went away. He was not the first man to be in love with two women. But right now he had a job to do, and Meiko understood. He fell in love with her a little more because of that. Damn, as Tuttle would have said.
Then her flight's departure was announced, and with a nod to both of them, she was gone, joining the stream of passengers boarding the Concorde, leaving Galt standing there next to Sachito.
She extended her hand again to him. "Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you, Mr. Galt."
He smiled cordially. "I believe that I should be saying that to you." She had not commented on the fact that he was not departing Tokyo with Meiko, as he'd arrived.
"You will excuse me," she said. Her almond eyes were unreadable. "I must leave now to learn more about what happened to Mr. Anami."
Galt acknowledged this with a parting nod, thinking, whether you find out or not, lady, with any luck I killed him.
Tuttle sidled over from amid the dispersing crowd surrounding them. He stood beside Galt and watched Sachito walk away, accompanied by her chauffeur. Tuttle sighed, a man-to-man sigh.
"No disrespect to the recently widowed, but there goes one mighty fine figure of a woman"
Galt grinned tightly. "And no disrespect to an old goat, but you have been burning up that cell phone of yours, right, General?"
Tuttle snorted indignantly. "I'll have you know that I'm a happily married man. Jesus, Galt. I wouldn't expect you to be a prude."
"Just trying to keep us on mission, sir. Not always easy with beautiful women around, I grant you. So what have we got?"
Korean Intercept Page 21