NEVER SAY DIE: Mark Cole Takes On the Yakuza in His Most Thrilling Adventure Yet!

by J. T. Brannan

  ‘We can all agree that Zen Ai Kaigi are a huge problem, certainly,’ Nishikawa agreed, ‘and we might even suspect them of having a hand in Yamamoto’s murder. Don’t the Omoto-gumi have a close relationship to the group? And isn’t their oyabun in Kobe right now, trying to gain leadership of the Yamaguchi-gumi?’

  Nomura nodded his head vigorously. ‘Yes, you are absolutely right,’ he said. ‘It seems that the whole thing has been engineered to enable the head of the Omoto-gumi to take over the Yamaguchi-gumi. And with their close connections to Zen Ai Kaigi, that would give our main opposition the backing of the largest yakuza group in Japan. Heaven only knows what they would do with such power at their disposal, but a new government would surely not be long in coming.’

  Everyone at the table paused to think about that one. It was one thing to recommend emergency expenditure to fight a gang war; it was another altogether if fighting such a war would help them remain in power.

  ‘I am moved to support Kazuo’s request,’ Toshikatsu said, secretly pleased at the way the conversation had turned. The last thing he wanted was for the Omoto-gumi to seize power; he had no links at all to the group, and knew he would be gone from office pretty quickly if they got their way. Increasing police funding would help secure the streets against any potential gang violence, as well as any possible street demonstrations engineered by Zen Ai Kaigi, not to mention helping to beef up his own personal security which had been so recently threatened.

  ‘I propose an emergency reserve of two billion yen to be made immediately available to the National Police Agency,’ Toshikatsu announced, ‘to make preparations for a potential gang war and the subsequent fallout. The protection of a nation’s citizens should always be its primary concern. Do we have an agreement?’

  He looked around the table, pleased to see all hands raised in favor of the proposal, even that of the notoriously tight-fisted Fukuda Yoichi.

  He smiled, knowing deep down that it had nothing to do with the cabinet’s desire to protect Japanese citizens, but only their desire to protect their jobs and their own way of life.

  But a win was a win, whatever the reason.

  Kenzo Hiroshi watched the prime minister as he left the Cabinet Office Building, ensconced between six personal bodyguards, a police escort surrounding the inner group as they crossed Route 246 on their way back to the Sori Kantei.

  He was hidden behind the parapet on the roof of the Sanno Park Tower, the second tallest building in Nagata-cho. Housing several multinational corporations within its forty-four floors, the skyscraper also contained restaurants and a closed observation deck on the twenty-seventh floor ‘Skylobby’. It overlooked the prime minister’s private residence, as well as innumerable government buildings, including the Cabinet Office. Aware of the threat of a sniper, the residence had no windows on the side facing the Sanno Park Tower, and the windows of the tower itself were all locked on that side.

  Not that locking windows concerned Kenzo, sandwiched as he was between the concrete parapet at the edge of the tower’s roof and the rail system which transported the powered davit carriage units for window cleaning around the building’s perimeter. From his elevated, open position he could use his Zeiss Special Glass binoculars to see everything he needed to see; and if he wanted to kill Toshikatsu using a sniper rifle, there would be nothing to stop him.

  But the time for Toshikatsu’s death had not yet arrived; his employers wanted to make the man’s assassination symbolic, to get the most propaganda value out of it as possible. Kenzo had been given a potential date for such an attack, but was waiting for the final word. And in the meantime, he was determined to learn as much as he could about his prey and the protection which surrounded him.

  He had seen Toshikatsu Endo make the reverse trip earlier in the day, crossing from the Sori Kantei to the Cabinet Office Building. He had made a metal note of who was escorting him, the way they moved, any weapons they had. He had taken photographs with his digital SLR, its telephoto lens making the images pin-sharp; if the men’s faces were on record anywhere, he could get their names, their files, their home addresses. Maybe he would use them, maybe he would not; but you could never have enough information.

  Kenzo was a firm believer in technology, despite his predilection for the hands-on art of killing itself; that was purely for psychological effect, rather than it being in and of itself more efficient. Kenzo was the first to admit that sniper rifles and car bombs were much safer methods for the assassin. But he was a master of his particular profession, and welcomed the challenge presented by his methods.

  But the gathering of intelligence – the reconnaissance before the kill – was a field where modern technology could be usefully exploited, and Kenzo had been trained in the use of a wide array of surveillance devices, by instructors who had worked closely with Japan’s secret service, as well as military and intelligence agencies around the world.

  It was through such technology that he had managed to listen to the cabinet meeting that had just happened, by using a parabolic microphone, adjusted perfectly to pick up the resonating sounds passing through the windows of the target building.

  He wasn’t worried about anyone seeing him, or his equipment; the only building in the area which was officially taller had only gained the distinction through its antenna height – the Shin Marunouchi Building only consisted of thirty-eight floors above ground level and the Sanno Park Tower’s roof was actually higher by a few meters. The only thing able to detect him in real time – unless another human being actually came out onto the roof – would be a surveillance drone, and his sources had assured him that none would be flying over this sector today.

  He had been pleased at the content of the meeting, glad that the murder of the Shimazaki-kai soldiers had been brought to the attention of the authorities so quickly. They had thought the killings to be the opening shots in a gang war, just as Kenzo – and Kenzo’s employers – had hoped they would. It had been Kenzo himself who had killed them though, and not a rival gang at all; he had even gone against type and used a handgun to kill the men. It was an ex-US military Beretta 92F, popular among Japanese gangsters and a weapon often imported illegally into the country. When the gun was traced to the Tanizaki-kai – as it inevitably would be, once it was found in the drain where Kenzo had thrown it – then all hell would be liable to break loose across the streets of Tokyo.

  Although he was a killer, Kenzo was much more than this, as were all the members of his clan. Ninja were – and always had been – assassins par excellence, but they were also trained in sabotage, propaganda, exploitation, surveillance and intelligence gathering. Sowing the seeds of dissent inside the enemy camp was very much part of their remit, and Kenzo was an expert in cho ho and bo-ryaku – espionage and strategy, key skills of his art that were incredibly useful as force multipliers, making each ninja as powerful as a battalion of regular troops. By the use of such tactics, Kenzo could help direct the players in his game like puppets on a stage. If he played the game right, they would move when he wanted them to move, do what he wanted them to do.

  And as Kenzo watched Toshikatsu pass through into the Kantei compound, escorted through his front door by nervous guards and police officers, he knew that he was a master of the game.

  And it was only just getting started.

  13

  Clark Mason was seated at a table in the main dining room of DC’s famous Palm Restaurant, an upmarket but honest steakhouse on 19th Street near Dupont Circle. Over the years almost every congressman and senator – and almost every president – had eaten there on a regular basis. In fact, it was George Bush Senior who had encouraged the owner of the original Palm in New York to open a branch in DC, back in the 1970s. Mason himself – the vice president of the United States – had his photograph on the wall, prominent among the hundreds of other pictures of the famous and infamous who dined there.

  He sipped from his glass of Château Lafite Rothschild, a 1989 Pauillac which had cost over fifteen h
undred dollars for the bottle. But money was not a problem for Mason – he had been a wealthy man long before entering the world of politics, born into high society with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth.

  He was used to getting what he wanted, but after all these years he was still no closer to realizing his ultimate goal – to become the president of the United States of America. It was the position he felt he had been born to fulfil, and he had worked his entire life to get there. As vice president, he was close – so very, very close. But his ambitions had been stopped in their tracks just a few short weeks ago, and Mason was still having a hard time adjusting.

  Part of the problem, he could admit now, was due to such ambitions – ambitions which had driven him into an attempt to usurp President Abrams and have her impeached for her involvement in a covert action group that he believed was illegal. But then his mistress had been paid off, and had entrapped him in a sex game – with him dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman dominating a black slave girl – which had been secretly filmed. To stop the film coming out – an act which would have destroyed his marriage and his political career – he had agreed to keep silent about his suspicions. And what was worse, he’d been forced to agree to support Ellen Abrams with whatever policies she wanted to push through for the remaining years of her second term.

  Upset was too benign a word to describe how the situation had made Mason feel; for the past few weeks, he had made himself feel better by running through scenarios in his head of how he could assassinate Abrams. But of course he couldn’t, even indirectly; if anything happened to her, the film would be released and he would be ruined.

  He was therefore now in the unenviable position of having to help protect the one woman who stood in his way, the one person between him and the presidency.

  He shook his head, sipped once again at his wine, and looked across the table at the man who had invited him to dinner that evening – Air Force Colonel Manfred Jones, the new commander of the Joint Special Operations Command now that Miley Cooper was temporarily out of the picture. Jones was the de facto head of special operations for the US military, and the fact that the man was willing to fly up to DC from Fort Bragg to meet him so soon after his appointment had piqued Mason’s interest in the extreme.

  But he had learnt his recent lesson well, and was all too aware that it could be another game, another attempt to entrap or ensnare him; he had no remaining trust in the American intelligence or military communities, which was why he had only agreed to meet in a public venue, everything open and above board.

  Manfred Jones looked back at Mason and sipped from his own glass, hand trembling slightly. Mason could tell the man was nervous, but why? What the hell did he want?

  ‘So,’ Mason said at last, gently but wanting to get things moving, ‘do you want to tell me why you wanted to meet?’

  Jones’s gaze remained leveled at Mason as he adjusted his wiry frame in his chair, leaning slightly forward, angling closer to the vice president.

  ‘I understand that you were making enquiries recently into the Paradigm Group,’ he said cagily, and Mason’s blood ran cold at those words. The director of that group, Bruce Vinson, was the man who had arranged for the filming of the sex game, the turning of Mason’s mistress; and Mason was pretty sure that the think-tank was a front for the illegal covert action group he suspected Abrams was running. Mason wondered what Jones was up to, glad when the waiter arrived with their entrées; it would give him a few moments to compose himself before replying.

  The waiter placed Mason’s baked clams carefully in front of him, before serving Jones his calamari fritti. Of course the young man would serve him first, Mason thought; he was the damned vice president of the United States, and the thought gave him some much needed comfort. Whatever Colonel Jones threatened him with, he would be ready.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s officially on record anywhere,’ he said casually.

  Jones nodded his head. ‘I’m aware of that,’ he said, ‘but it was brought to my attention anyway.’ He cleared his throat nervously. ‘Now, I’ve taken what I have to my friends here and . . . well . . . they think I need someone higher up the food chain, someone with real political muscle.’

  Mason paused, surprised as he started to sense that the colonel was perhaps not here for the reasons that Mason had at first thought. The man sounded worried, unsure of himself, perhaps unsure of what he was even doing there. And this, Mason knew, indicated that Jones had information he wanted to share, information stemming from his job that he thought was bad, perhaps even . . . illegal?

  Mason’s interest was on high alert, his brain working on overdrive as he wondered what could possibly be serious enough to have to share it with the vice president. Jones had only been in his job a few days, weeks at the most. Had he learned something since taking over Miley Cooper’s job?

  But Mason was careful not to appear too eager, and so he hesitated, waiting for Jones to continue in his own time. He tried the clams, which were as excellent as they always were, and stared back at the colonel, waiting for him to get to the point.

  ‘It’s just that since taking over from General Cooper,’ Jones continued finally, trying the calamari briefly before looking back up at Mason, ‘I’ve been finding certain . . . anomalies in the paperwork.’

  ‘Oh?’ Mason asked, sipping his wine a little faster now, straining to control his heart rate. ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, it’s things like vehicle requisitions, troop secondments, that sort of thing. An order gets put in for a Black Hawk for an infil somewhere, but there’s no official mission connected to it. When I came on board, that’s the first thing I saw – a questionable infil operation, unconnected to any other ongoing mission. And when I saw that, I started probing a little deeper. That’s when I realized that this thing is systemic, it’s been ongoing for months at least. I don’t know what it means exactly, but I can guess – there’s some unrecognized covert group in existence which gets support from JSOC on an unofficial basis.’

  Mason ate more clams, nodding his head in thought. What he was hearing was too good to be true – somebody else wanted to investigate Abrams’ little private army. And if somebody else did it, it might leave Mason in the clear when Abrams was impeached.

  But then again, he remembered sadly, it had been pointed out to him that his job now was to protect Abrams and her unknown team of secret commandos; if he didn’t, the film would be released and the chances him becoming president would be exactly zero.

  ‘Why come to me?’ Mason asked, still unsure if he was being tested; it would be just like Vinson to throw him a curve ball, try and trip him up. Jones seemed to be genuine; but, he remembered bitterly, so too had Sarah Lansing, the mistress who had betrayed him at Vinson’s request.

  ‘The fact that you’ve been checking out the Paradigm Group,’ Jones said, eyes glancing nervously about the restaurant. ‘I get the feeling that you’ve got questions of your own, ones that might tie in with mine.’

  ‘Oh?’ Mason said, still playing it cool. ‘How so?’

  ‘Come on,’ Jones chided, starting to come out of his shell slightly. ‘You know what I’m saying. There’s a covert action cell out there which hasn’t been approved by congress, and I can’t believe that General Cooper didn’t know about it. The Paradigm Group is one of the organizations he appears to have close ties with, and I know you went in there asking questions. If you want me to put my cards on the table, I will. I believe that the Paradigm Group is a front for this secret unit, and I believe you think so too. I also believe that you lacked the proof to go anywhere with your theories. But I can provide the proof, and you can provide the political muscle to do something with it. And I have friends here in the capital who’ll back you if you decide to run with it.’ Jones held Mason’s gaze. ‘So what do you say? Is this something you want to go into? Do you want to work with me on this?’

  Mason finished his clams and took some more wine, thinking long and hard about what Jones had said. I
t made sense, on the face of it; Jones would be Mason’s inside man, investigate this thing from within and provide the necessary proof. In return, Mason would have to run with it. But how could he? If Vinson got so much as a hint that Mason was involved in any sort of investigation, then out would come the sex tape, and all the horrendous ramifications that would result.

  But an inside man! Damn, it was tempting. If he could get Abrams impeached – or even force her to resign – then he would achieve his lifetime ambition and become president. But only if that tape never saw the light of day. And how was he going to get around that?

  He’d already tried to undermine Abrams twice already, and had two failures under his belt to show for it. Was he ready for a third attempt? What would be the result of failure this time round?

  His eyes gazed into the middle distance, over Jones’s shoulder toward the wall behind, covered in pictures; but he saw nothing except what was there inside his own mind. What had he achieved in life so far? He had been a congressman, a senator, the secretary of state and now vice president. It had been a life most normal men would have been happy with; hell, it was a life most men would only ever dream of.

  But he was no ordinary man, he knew that as well as he knew anything. His picture was on the wall here, but he was with the also-rans, the nobodies; he wanted to be among the presidents and the other world leaders, and nothing else would ever be good enough.

  If the tape came out, what would happen? His wife would leave him and he would be hounded out of politics. Would that be so bad? Without the presidency, he had achieved all he was going to achieve in this game anyway; and he’d only remained married for so many years as it looked better for the public. A divorce wouldn’t destroy him as it would other men. He was wealthy too, and would never lack for the things he needed. He would be free to pursue other ventures, change his life.

  Could he live with such changes if he failed at his third attempt? As he finished his glass, he made up his mind.