The Man With The Red Tattoo

by Benson, Raymond

  Bond and Mayumi nonchalantly made their way to the chambers to get a closer look. In fact, the cubicles were man-sized terraria. Water covered the floors of each chamber, supplemented by plant life and rocks to make the habitat seem more natural. One of the rooms contained a live goat, presumably a host for the mosquitoes inside. Another chamber held mice. Some were running around frantically; others were huddled and trembling in the corner. A couple of them looked dead. Each chamber had an air lock.

  As he examined the chambers, Bond put together what he was looking at. Each chamber housed mosquitoes that were in different stages of their life cycle. The first one was empty except for the pond. Bond presumed that there were eggs in the water or attached to some of the plants. The second one was also seemingly empty, probably containing larvae in the water. Indeed, there was an enlarged photograph of mosquito larvae posted on the exterior of the chamber. They were long, transparent, tube-like creatures that hung down in the water with their “mouths” attached to the surface to bring in air. The third chamber held pupae, and through a magnifier built in to the glass, Bond could see that some of the pupal skins had already been shed. Young mosquitoes were gliding in the air within the cubicle, looking for a way out. The fourth chamber was full of live mosquitoes. They were crawling on the inside of the glass, covering the surface of the pond, and flying listlessly.

  An extensive workspace separated these chambers from another large room that contained several cages holding various live animals; rats, guinea pigs and goats.

  A technician looked at Bond and Mayumi and barked an order at them. Mayumi bowed to the man and gestured for Bond to follow her.

  “What did he say?” Bond whispered. “I didn’t catch it.”

  “He wants us to go into the chamber and check on the mice,” she said. “What do we do?”

  They walked towards the fourth chamber, the one that was full of flying mosquitoes. Inside, some of the mice were still running back and forth but it seemed that a few more had died since they had last looked. A technician punched a button on his computer and the outer doors opened.

  “I’m not going in there,” Mayumi whispered.

  “We’re wearing suits, it should be all right,” Bond said. He stepped into the air lock and Mayumi reluctantly followed him. The technician closed the outer door and then opened the inner door to the chamber.

  Immediately dozens of mosquitoes landed on Bond’s face-mask. They crawled over the surface, hungrily searching for a way in to the warm flesh. The insects did the same to Mayumi and she couldn’t stifle a scream.

  Some of the other technicians heard her and looked up. They weren’t used to hearing a woman’s voice in the lab.

  “Mayumi, we’re blown,” Bond whispered.

  One of the men stepped forward to get a closer look at them through the glass. Bond and Mayumi turned away so that he couldn’t see inside the faceplates, but the man shouted at his colleagues. Two men grabbed phones and alerted security, while the others ran to the chamber.

  “Let’s get out of here before they bring in the heavy artillery,” Bond said. He went for the inner door but found that he couldn’t open it. The bastards had locked it by remote control. They were caught.

  Bond banged on the glass. “Let us out or I’ll break the glass and release the mosquitoes.”

  “I am afraid you cannot break the glass,” said a man as he entered the room through a sliding steel door, followed by two armed guards. “As it is most certainly bullet-proof, I can assure you that it is fist-proof.”

  Bond recognised him at once. He had white hair, smiling eyes, and a commanding presence.

  “We have not been properly introduced,” the man continued. “I know who you are, Bond-san, but you do not know me. I am Yasutake Tsukamoto.”

  He bowed, but not very low.

  “Pardon me for not presenting you my meishi,” Bond said, not returning the bow.

  Tsukamoto’s demeanour changed rapidly. The smiling eyes vanished as he frowned, obviously insulted.

  “Get them out of there,” Tsukamoto said to one of the technicians. “The Yami Shogun wants to see them helpless before him.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  BITTER GLORY

  THE FIRST THING THEY DID WAS TO MAKE BOND AND MAYUMI REMOVE THE protective suits, revealing their street clothes underneath. Then a guard thoroughly searched the couple and their guns were taken from them. When he found the Palm Pilot, the guard studied it, attempting to decide whether or not it constituted a weapon. Bond grabbed the device out of his hand and the two men struggled for possession of it until another guard raised his rifle and butted Bond on the right side of the face. Bond fell and the Palm Pilot was taken from him.

  “Put it over there with the rest,” Tsukamoto ordered. The guard placed the Palm Pilot on a table, alongside the two guns and Bond’s mobile.

  Mayumi knelt beside Bond. He was clutching his cheek in agony.

  “James-san?” she asked.

  Bond clenched his teeth and forced the pain to dissipate, hoping that his cheekbone was merely bruised and not broken. It felt like hell.

  “I’m all right,” he muttered, then allowed her to help him stand.

  Tsukamoto stood and addressed them. The two guards, Aida and several lab technicians flanked him. Bond considered the odds. Not great, but it appeared that only the two guards were armed. One of them had an Uzi. If he could just get to his weapon in time, or perhaps wrestle the Uzi away …

  “The Yonai Enterprises office in Sapporo warned us that you might be coming this way,” Tsukamoto said. “I am happy that you have decided to pay us a visit. There is someone who would like to speak with you. This is a teleconference. He can see and hear you just as you can see and hear him. Please focus your attention on the screen beside you.”

  A technician brought up an image on a large screen built into one of the walls. A Japanese man came into focus. He appeared to be in his fifties and was dressed in full samurai regalia. A long sword, a tachi, hung at his side. The upper edges of a bright red tattoo could be seen on his neck. The man was sitting cross-legged on a pillow.

  “Good evening, Mister Bond,” he said. “I am Goro Yoshida.” And then he bowed.

  Yoshida! At last, Bond was able to gaze upon the man he had been studying for over a year. This was the man who had built an army of terrorists, who had instigated the bombing attack in France and countless other incidents around the globe. This was the most dangerous man alive, and yet he was not what Bond had expected. Bond thought the man would be wearing army fatigues, but Yoshida was dressed in a medieval costume. It was a ghastly sight; it confirmed that the man was a deluded psychopath.

  Bond stood his ground and refused to bow to Yoshida. The terrorist sat straight and said, “If I had known who you were, Mister Bond, I would have had you killed within the first twenty-four hours of your stepping foot in Japan. You interfered with a business arrangement of mine in France a while ago.”

  The man’s English was surprisingly refined. “I don’t know very much about you, Mister Bond, but I understand that you have a certain … reputation that precedes you so therefore I will show you respect.” He bowed again.

  Bond said, “I think you know what you can do with your respect, Yoshida.”

  Tsukamoto gasped at the insult. “Do not speak to the Yami Shogun that way!” he spat. He gestured for the guard to do something to Bond but Yoshida sat upright, waved his hand, and said, “Stop.” The guard held his stance. “Mister Bond, you choose to waste your last moments with insults.”

  “Let the girl go,” Bond said. “This has nothing to do with her.”

  “You are mistaken, Mister Bond,” Yoshida said. “This has everything to do with her. Her father’s company was instrumental in the construction of our project.”

  “She is no threat to you. Let her go.”

  “Mister Bond, are you forgetting that she owns the majority of shares in the company?”

  “Where are you planning to unle
ash the mosquitoes, Yoshida, in the subway system? Is this another mission from God like the sarin gas attacks?”

  “I respect your thirst for knowledge, Mister Bond. You are a soldier, just like me. I will explain. I don’t want you to die ignorant of how we have beaten you, gaijin. ”

  Tsukamoto and the others present grinned at that.

  “Aida and Tsukamoto, perhaps you would like to tell our distinguished uninformed guest about our new technology,” Yoshida said.

  Fujio Aida, still rubbing his head and glaring at Bond, said, “Certainly, sensei.” He looked at Tsukamoto for approval. The kaicho nodded subtly.

  Aida stepped forward and went to a computer workstation. He used the mouse and keyboard and the screen’s image changed. A magnified, red mosquito replaced Yoshida.

  “Until a few months ago, I was Head of Research and Development at CureLab Inc. My task there was to work with known viruses in attempts to create cures for them. One particular virus interested me greatly—West Nile. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a cure for it, but I found that I was able to alter it—mutate it—so that it would do what I wanted it to do. In studying the disease, I began to learn more about the biology of mosquitoes, since they are the primary carrier of the disease.”

  The movies on the screen began to illustrate Aida’s words. Images showing the life cycle of the mosquito flashed before them; from egg laying and hatching to clips of adult mosquitoes mating.

  “As I worked on the genetic possibilities of altering the mosquito’s physiology, I discovered that I could inject their eggs with certain proteins and chemicals which would affect the mosquitoes that hatched out of them and eventually grew into adulthood. But what I needed was better access to mosquitoes and a laboratory where I could work with them.”

  Tsukamoto took over the narration. “Yonai Enterprises owns this facility. The government contracts its use as a public health organisation. Its purpose is to study mosquitoes and transmittable viruses in an effort to control the spread of those diseases. Since Yonai has a special relationship with the Ryujin-kai, it was no great difficulty for us to take over the management and running of the place. When the Yami Shogun learned of the disease research, he instructed Aida to create a mutation of West Nile disease, one with far more powerful and faster effects than the original. At the same time, the Ryujin-kai made Aida an offer.”

  “I defected,” Aida said. “I went to Yonai from CureLab. And I took my research with me.”

  “We made it possible for him to ‘disappear,’ ” Tsukamoto said. “Tell him about our little assassin.”

  Aida bowed slightly and said, “What we ended up doing was to breed a mosquito with special characteristics. Using genetic splicing and a great deal of experimentation, we eventually took a normal female Aedes aegypti mosquito and genetically altered her so that she would bite furiously. Unfortunately, our mosquitoes have an extremely short lifespan. The adults, after emerging from the pupal state, live only a few hours. We’re still working on solving that problem. Nevertheless, we began to refer to these red widows as ‘kamikaze’ mosquitoes. They are willing to risk their lives just to bite something living. Well, with power like that, we realised that we should find a way to infuse the mutated virus into the genetic formula. So now we have kamikaze mosquitoes that can deliver a deadly disease to any target, providing the target is contained in an enclosed space.”

  “A flying death squad,” Bond said.

  “Something like that,” Tsukamoto said.

  “The trick is to then set a perfectly timed trap,” Aida continued. “You want to deliver the mosquito eggs to the target destination at the right moment, cleverly disguised but able to rest in or near standing water so that at the desired time the mosquitoes will emerge from the pupae and attack. The males, of course, do nothing but fly around and look for food from plants, as they normally do, and mate. The females, however, are full of the virus and crave blood for nourishment. Normal female mosquitoes will bite convenient hosts when they are about to mate or are already pregnant, which in our case, occurs rather quickly.”

  “The bonsai waterfall in the McMahon house,” Bond said. “You planted the eggs inside the porous rocks, which were filled with water. The fountain’s motor was disabled when we found it. The water was standing still …”

  Tsukamoto nodded. “You are correct, Mister Bond. The fountain was delivered to their home as a gift, one week before the McMahon family reunion. The motor was fixed to fail so the water became stagnant. As I understand it, Shinji Fujimoto brought the fountain to the house. When the family informed him the next day that it didn’t work, he promised his niece that he would collect it in a few days and return it to the store where he had bought it.”

  Aida continued. “So the device sat there in the house as the mosquito eggs hatched into larvae which lived in the water inside the fountain. The larvae fed on food that we provided from a timedrelease feeder. They formed into pupae and then became adult mosquitoes—all in seven days. It took another twenty-four to forty-eight hours for the adult mosquitoes’ shells to harden, and by then they were, of course, very hungry for a blood meal. They flew out of the granite rocks and found their victims—the McMahons.” Bond could hear the sound of a sob escape from Mayumi.

  “So Shinji Fujimoto was working with you all along,” Bond said. “Why did you kill him?”

  “Because he was a fool but a briefly useful one. Fujimoto always felt that his brother Hideo short-changed him with regard to the company. When Hideo Fujimoto died and left CureLab to his daughter, Shinji felt betrayed. The Ryujin-kai recognised a potential ally in him, so he was easily bought.”

  Mayumi spoke up for the first time. “My great uncle was really responsible for killing my family? I don’t believe it.”

  Yoshida’s image reappeared on the screen as Tsukamoto explained, “He didn’t know that the bonsai waterfall contained the mosquitoes. He was ordered to deliver the device to the family as a gift. It appears that after they had died, Fujimoto realised what he had done to his niece and her family. He attempted to cover his tracks and obliterate evidence, the fool. He only succeeded in throwing more suspicion on our organisation. Shinji Fujimoto was a nuisance. He was eliminated after he sold his CureLab stock to Yonai.”

  Now it was clear to Bond. He said, “So the yakuza hoodlums in London—the ones who tried to take Kyoko McMahon’s body from the mortuary—they were hired by Shinji Fujimoto. And the arsonists in Tokyo were paid to destroy the bodies of Peter McMahon, his wife and eldest daughter.”

  Tsukamoto said, “That was all Fujimoto’s doing and had nothing to do with us. He was an idiot. We only needed him in the short term. There was another person from CureLab who was co-operating with us, someone who was providing us with everything we needed to instigate our plan.”

  “Then why was the merger necessary?” Bond asked. “It sounds as if you already had the technology you needed.”

  “The merger simply solidified our possession of the technology. We did not want to rely on the continuing co-operation or trust the discretion of the insider.”

  “And are you going to tell us who that was?”

  “I don’t think so.” Tsukamoto grinned.

  “Why was Kenji Umeki killed?” Bond asked. Mayumi gasped. Another shock.

  Tsukamoto answered, “That was entirely unrelated to our business here. Umeki-san was about to reveal the girl’s whereabouts to the authorities. He could not be trusted.”

  “What difference did it make if they knew where I was?” Mayumi asked. “I wasn’t going anywhere. You wouldn’t let me leave. After all I was working for you,” she said bitterly.

  “Once all of this began, we realised that you were a valuable pawn—and a dangerous one. We couldn’t afford to let the authorities find you before the project was finished. You were supposed to have been killed.”

  “And just what is the project?” Bond asked. “You have your killer mosquitoes, what do you intend to do with them?”

&n
bsp; Yoshida was relishing every minute of this game he was playing. He asked, “What is it, Mister Bond, that is classified about your assignment in Japan? Why are you here?”

  “Why don’t you tell me? You seem to know more about my movements than I know myself.” But Bond knew what he was going to say.

  “Come, come, Mister Bond. The G8 summit conference. It’s in three days. I don’t think I’ll go into any detail at this juncture, but you can assume that several world leaders are about to issue their last press statements.”

  “You’re mad, Yoshida,” Bond said. “You’re going to kill your own people! Japan is a G8 country.”

  “The Japanese who are co-operating with Western countries deserve to die. Japan needs to remain pure. To retain the former glory that she once enjoyed, we must hold our noses and swallow our medicine. As the great poet and novelist Yukio Mishima wrote, ‘Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.’ ”

  “It will accomplish nothing, Yoshida,” Bond said.

  “On the contrary,” Yoshida said. “The G8 conference is only the beginning. My message will be delivered far beyond the boundaries of Japan. And this morning we have had a technological breakthrough. Aida, please tell Mister Bond what we are now able to do.”

  Aida smiled smugly and said, “Transovarial transmission. We have successfully engineered the mosquitoes to pass on the virus to their eggs. This version of our kamikaze insects will mate with zeal upon maturing. Before the adults die, the females will lay eggs, out of which will emerge more infected mosquitoes.”

  “That’s crazy!” Bond spat.

  Yoshida chuckled. “A little payback for the Great War in the Pacific, wouldn’t you say? Tsukamoto!”