Ida Pradesh, who’d commandeered a stool in the bar, fending off passes from several men, had also seen the Doctor General. She trailed him and his entourage through an archway.
Khodo motioned for the manager roaming about to come over. “Taking a break, folks. See you soon.” There were groans of disappointment as he handed over his knives, apron, and hat to a sour-faced Yoshida.
“I’m rusty,” he complained.
“It’s just like riding a bike, brudda,” Khodo replied. He moved off, the more inebriated patrons clapping loudly as he joined Pradesh.
“I put a tracer on one of his guards,” she said. One of the men who I was able to get close to.” She batted her eyes.
“Solid, doll baby.”
They entered the kitchen where Khodo had left a leather, deep-bodied attaché case between the industrial-sized refrigerator and a metal table. He retrieved this and the two went through a side door into a service hallway that led to a small room used by the staff for smoke breaks. The smell of tobacco was heavy. There was no desk or table but there was a built-in ledge that Khodo put the case on and opened it.
Among grenades, a grappling hook attached to a knotted nylon line, and other items in the case, was a built-in metal panel that resembled the face of Pradesh’s compact-radio. But when he switched it on, a blueprint of the high rise the Buckhorn Club was located in was displayed. A red blip was ascending on the blueprint. They both watched the red dot intently. It soon stopped. They looked at each other, nodding.
* * *
Andor Solango was displeased that one of his fingernails had been trimmed unevenly. He’d have to reprimand his manicurist. He was six-four, muscular, prematurely white-haired and bronze-skinned. An accident years before had left his face immobile, emotionless. His pale eyes were like looking into an arctic abyss. He wore a tan colored Nehru jacket and matching slacks.
Solango refocused. His guests had been served refreshments and were chatting about various geopolitical matters from Vietnam to the Congo. Among the gathered was the five foot, one inch hunchbacked Major Vitally Malachinko, his brilliance the reason the Soviet’s got into space first with Sputnik. Solango held up a hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and we’ll get the auction underway.” Double doors to his left opened and escorted in by one of his leg breakers was rocket scientist Victor Rodar. Previously he’d been secreted away by the Defense Department, working on a hush-hush project involving satellites capable of shooting laser rays with pinpoint accuracy as the key to a sophisticated anti-nuclear missile defense system. The Defense Department had dubbed it the Flash Gordon Initiative.
Rodar was a compact aging man with thinning hair in a rumpled tweed jacket. The muscle indicated for him to sit in a comfortable chair positioned before the gathered. He looked nervous, but not frightened. He was a man since childhood who’d come to accept the vagaries of fate. One had to maintain a certain determined pragmatism about such things he’d long ago concluded.
“Care for a chardonnay, Professor?” Solango asked.
“Why not,” Rodar said in his Austrian accent. A glass of white wine was brought to him.
Solango began as this was done. “I don’t have to give you an overview of this man’s accomplishments. You know what he was working on and you also know if he were to perfect his system for your respective country, what sort of nuclear superiority that would grant you in this madcap world of ours.
“To underscore what Dr. Rodar has to offer,” Solango continued, “I give you one simple demonstration for your edification.” He turned his head and said, “Krieg.”
In stepped Krieg, a large muscled bald headed man in fatigues and a tank top wearing what looked like a large flat battery on his broad back. This was connected by a thick cable and wires to a futuristic looking rifle in his hands. He aimed the weapon at a five inch square of steel wheeled into the room on a cart. The yellow-white concentrated beam released from the rifle sliced off a corner of the slab. The severed piece fell to the floor, making a dent in it beneath the carpet. A din arose and subsided.
If Solango was capable of smiling, he would have. “You’ll notice the ray’s length was pre-adjusted such that it cut through the steel but didn’t extend to the wall beyond. The prototype is based on the good professor’s schematics. I’ll throw the ray rifle in with the purchase price.”
The West Coast’s Marquis of Crime surveyed the eager faces in the room. Then, “The bidding begins at six million.” Several hands went up as dollar or pound sterling amounts, each topping the other, were shouted out.
The eventual winning bid for the scientist was thirteen million and was made by the hunchbacked, dwarfish Malachinko of the Soviet Union. The room began to empty by the main door. That was when the side double doors burst inward, a henchman stumbling backward through the opening. He fell over, arms outstretched, eyes rolled up in his head.
“Krieg,” Solango yelled.
The big man turned his laser rifle in the direction of the door. Two smoke grenades rolled in from there, emitting a gray pall. At the same time, the air duct covering in a wall up toward the ceiling was kicked out and feet first, Agent 77 dropped into the room. He was wearing special goggles that allowed him to see forms in the smoke and a mini-oxygen breather.
Dr. Ida Pradesh seemingly sprang from nowhere and jumped on Krieg’s back, attacking him. They went at it in the ante room on the other side of the double doors.
Crouching low and pivoting around in the main room, Khodo dropped two of Solango’s guards with shots from his field-issued .45. He rolled and the strike of his hand made another one tumble and he put a bullet in his skull. But a kick to the side of his face knocked him over though he recovered quickly. He was on his feet and in his Wing Chun stance. He kicked his gun laying on the floor aside.
As he suspected, his opponent was the woman who’d accompanied Doctor General Xiang. She too was in a kung fu stance. The smoke dissipated as the remaining people hurried from the room.
A slight bow and fist to palm salute from each, the two then engaged in fierce, close quarters combat. There was a succession of blows and kicks, Khodo delivering hammer strikes that would fell a man twice her size but not stopping her. The woman partially ran up a wall to do a back flip and nearly cold cocked him with a foot sweep. Their hurtling bodies and chops at one another turned chairs into kindling.
Krieg had thrown off Agent 82, slamming her into a wall, dazing her. He rushed back into the main room and shot his weapon at Khodo. But the man from CODE had heard the whine of the apparatus as it powered up and dove out of the way. The ray blast meant for him cleaved the Doctor General’s woman in two—the horror of her predicament forever etched on her face.
Fortunately for Khodo it took several seconds for the rifle to recharge between bursts. He was across the room lunging for the big man as Krieg clicked dry on the trigger. Their fight was brief and intense, a showcase of hand-to-hand combat of various styles including American boxing, kung fu and even footwork involving capoeria. Each breathed heavily and had bloodied the other’s face. Krieg then stepped in, feinting like he was going to throw a right cross, but actually intending to land a left flush to Khodo’s chin.
But the man from CODE had sensed this. He slipped the punch and countered with a heel strike of his palm to the big man’s jaw that made him blurry eyed. From his standing position, Khodo launched himself straight up in the air and whipped his leg around. His foot connected with the side of Krieg’s face. There was an audible crack as the bone broke. The bruiser’s body spun about on impact and went down hard. As he sought to rise, Khodo finished him with a fury of pummeling fists to his head that broke the nose and drove him to the floor, still and spent.
Khodo quickly stripped him of the weapon and running, lashed the battery pack on, heading for the roof. He didn’t even take a moment to check on his colleague. There wasn’t time. Too much hung in the balance.
Solango, Malachinko, and two henchmen wer
e herding Victor Rodar toward a flying craft of a modernistic design Khodo hadn’t encountered before. It was saucer-shaped, of silver-grey metal and glass. Clearly the Marquis of Crime was putting his ill gotten gains into R&D to further his criminal enterprises.
One of the hoods heard Khodo’s footfalls on the roof and fired at him. The spy sought cover behind the two story tall Buckhorn Den neon sign supported on struts and angled on the roof. The gunfire exploded several letters that sparked and sprayed fissions of electricity in all directions. Khodo returned fire with the ray rifle, searing a hole clean through the gunman’s chest. Solango, Rodar, and Malachinko were at the saucer. It was splayed out like a metal jellyfish, sloping upward to a plexiglass canopy over a cockpit in the center of the circular fuselage. It sat four.
The remaining goon made to also get in but Solango pushed him back and before the man could object, he shot him dead. The criminal mastermind was counting on Khodo having orders to bring Rodar back alive—which he’d been instructed to do. The craft began to lift off, a central turbine engine underneath providing lift.
“Dammit,” Pradesh said, suddenly beside him. “Now what do we do?”
He turned to her, smiling. “Lisbon.”
“Lisbon,” she agreed.
Solango was at the controls. He didn’t give a damn about the Russkie Malachinko, only he hadn’t been able to make a call to have his money transferred, so there it was. The ship was hovering about twenty feet above the roof and Solango was about to switch over to forward motion.
The deformed Malachinko was leering as he glared out the clear canopy. “Glorious,” he said happily.
Solango and Rodar looked at what he saw. It was the voluptuous and brainy Dr. Ida Pradesh bearing her wonderfully developed breasts. Reflexively, Solango dipped the aircraft toward the woman for a better view. But just as he did that, he realized this was a diversion a fraction too late.
Khodo had climbed up the metal sign and from the angle he was now, he could shoot into the craft. As Solango pulled back on the yoke, Khodo put a ray blast through the canopy, boring into the control panel. The airship spun around in the air and crashed into the roof at an angle, partly embedded in the roof’s shingles and wood underneath. The occupants were shook up but alive. While Pradesh held a handgun on the two, Khodo roughly hauled Solango and Malachinko out of the aircraft and trussed them up.
“You haven’t seen the last of me, Khodo,” Solango vowed.
Ignoring him, he said to Pradesh, “Good work, Agent, 82.”
“You too, 77,” she replied.
They stared at each other and kissed, pumped on the excitement of the recent events. By the time the CODE cleanup crew arrived, Professor Rodar had a gun on the imprisoned brigands, feigning ignorance as to the whereabouts of the two agents. When in actuality they were several floors down in a suite getting it on to the strains of Dean Martin on the stereo.
Dino sang, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” as Agent 82 murmured, “Oh, Bret.”
For unlike the speed he’d displayed earlier pretending to be a hibachi chef, he was slow and deliberate with his hands now—very deliberate.
THE SUSHI BAR AT THE EDGE OF FOREVER
by
Calvin McMillin
— :: —
I’ve always thought that the little moments in life count just as much as the big ones. If you really stopped to think about it, you’d probably go insane. I mean, let’s say your shoelaces come untied. If you bend down to tie them, you just might end up meeting the love of your life. But if you decide to ignore the situation and walk just a little bit farther—WHAM!—you’re flattened by an out-of-control eighteen wheeler. One little moment can change your life forever. Or end it.
Now, I’m not sure how many of those little moments it took to get me halfway across the world, but there I was—stranded in Singapore. Of all the wonderful places I could have been on this tiny island nation, I had the dumb luck of spending my entire day at a stuffy academic conference. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no ivory tower intellectual. Not even close.
It’s a little hard to explain everything, but here’s the gist of it: I came here because a wealthy client of mine hired me to retrieve an artifact—an ancient black mask that had been smuggled out of China during the First Opium War, only to be discovered in Malaysia a few months back. I’ll be the first to admit that this is not an assignment most private detectives would ever accept. But I was strapped for cash and in desperate need of a change of scenery. At the very least, I figured I could get a vacation out of it.
The Black Mask has quite a story attached to it. In 221 BCE, under the reign of Qin Shi Huang, legend tells of a brilliant Chinese alchemist who was able to forge a mask that could cheat death itself. He modeled the design on the face of Sun Wukong, known more commonly as the Monkey King. According to Chinese mythology, all departed souls must stand before Yan Luo, the judge of the underworld. If you’ve lived a virtuous life, Yan Luo will allow you to be reincarnated. However, if you’ve committed terrible sins, then you may find yourself sentenced to torture somewhere in the eighteen levels of hell. It is said that Yan Luo possesses a book listing the allotted lifespan of every creature in existence. The Monkey King is the only being in Chinese legend known to cheat death by erasing his name from Yan Luo’s book. Consequently, any person who obtained the Black Mask and wore it would achieve everlasting life. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Luckily, my client was just a collector of Chinese antiquities, not some cackling megalomaniac seeking immortality. And she paid well.
My client also felt that the conference would serve as the ideal location to make the transaction. The fence was an archaeology professor at the National University of Singapore, and I was posing as an academic so as to not arouse too much suspicion. In another life, perhaps it wouldn’t have been a masquerade. But I chose a different path. How in the hell had my life come to this? I suppose it was all thanks to God, fate, or a universe built on coincidence. Hell, maybe L. Ron Hubbard was to blame.
Whatever the real reason, I had to admit that this whole experience had taken a major toll on my patience. Hanging around all day with these professor-types was, in a word, excruciating. So as the day’s proceedings came to a close, and it became clear that my contact would not be meeting me on this day, I detached myself from the crowd and discreetly slipped out the back of the room. Once I got back to the hotel suite, I figured I’d mix myself a nice Scotch and water, watch a little idiot tube, and then call it a night. So much for seeing the sights in the Lion City.
But when I found myself inside the hotel elevator, I had a change of heart. Stomach actually. Just as I was about to punch the button for the fourteenth floor, I noticed some signage on the control panel listing all the hotel facilities. The Nexus Restaurant was on the second floor. The swimming pool and the gymnasium were located on the fifth. And the popular Boku Bar resided on the ninth. But there was one listing I hadn’t noticed earlier, a place located on a floor marked “12A.”
MUGEN
Japanese Steakhouse
and Sushi Bar
The comical way my stomach growled at the mere thought of food seemed like something straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. But as hungry as I was, I couldn’t help but wonder about the dress code. I had a strong hunch that Mugen was a classy establishment, and since I was still dressed in my best suit and tie, I figured I’d better forget about changing clothes and just go straight there for dinner. When the doors of the lift opened, I stepped out onto floor “12A,” presumably the building’s thirteenth story, just renamed for superstition’s sake. There, I was greeted by a slate grey corridor with matching marble floors. Large cubes were cut out in the walls, and inside those hollow spaces were flowerpots filled with Easter lilies dotting the whole length of the hallway. As per its name, Mugen’s external features were meant to look Japanese, although hyper-stylized, if not downright futuristic. Case in point: the two suits of fearsome samurai armor guarding the entrance door were far from trad
itional, as each bore a strong cyberpunk influence, design-wise. Similarly, the door between the two figures resembled a shoji screen, albeit with a sleek mechanical appearance by way of Star Trek. Sure, the faux roof overhang seemed conventional enough, but its shape was so distorted that it gave an unsettling impression. It was like an actual Japanese castle had somehow magically sprouted from within the hotel itself. As I drew closer, I couldn’t hear any noise coming from inside. The place seemed dormant. Guess I came at the wrong time.
While I searched for some indication of whether the restaurant was open for business, the stillness of my surroundings was soon disrupted when the front doors parted automatically, revealing a bustling restaurant inside. I would have never guessed. The walls must’ve been soundproof or something.
Just from the look of things, I was pretty sure the meal would be pricey. Sushi always is. But what the hell, I could afford to splurge just this once. I was getting quite the hefty payday. Good thing I was still wearing a suit. Might’ve been turned away if I’d shown up wearing my trusty aloha shirt.
A young woman dressed in a blue kimono greeted me as I approached the reservation counter. She looked to be in her early twenties. Very pretty. In fact, she looked a helluva lot like—
“Irasshaimase,” she said.
“Howdy,” was my automatic response. Unless she thought I was a Japanese tourist (and since I’m half-Japanese, she’d be about half right), I was betting she’d probably revert to English or Mandarin once the traditional greeting was out of the way. But just to be on the safe side, I figured I’d speed up the recognition process just a bit with my Oklahoma twang. Strange as “howdy” might sound to her, I knew that just by saying it she’d immediately peg me as an American. Sure, I could have responded with some half-assed Japanese, but I really didn’t feel like embarrassing myself. I’m sorry to say that my fluency in the language is about as refined as that of the average Japanese six year old.
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