Fitzduane 02 - Rules of The Hunt

by O'Reilly-Victor

  Master Sergeant Lonsdale, Barrett at the ready like a modern-day incarnation of an avenging angel, watched over the Rangers at the ford.

  When it was over and the helicopter had departed, he rose and walked back the few paces to the command Guntrack. The Colonel looked up from the console, his expression unfathomable. He looked as if he was going to speak but said nothing.

  The radio operator in the back of the Guntrack had the miniature folding satellite dish extended. There was a break in his arcane work and he looked up and shook his head. "It doesn't look good."

  Lonsdale stood there, knowing he had shot better that day than ever before in his life, but that it still had not been good enough. Could he have been just a few seconds faster?

  * * * * *

  The watcher, higher up the hill, had a better overview of the terrain and was also less tightly focused.

  He had first been alerted by the sight of a vehicle traveling at high speed toward the castle. He hadn't warned his people below, both because they were so close to achieving their goal and also because the vehicle did not seem to represent any threat. At first it did not appear to be heading toward them. Apart from its speed, there was nothing unusual about it that he could see from a distance. Then it turned toward them.

  They had been warned to expect a Land-Rover and maybe a car or two. Nearer, this thing was unlike anything he had ever seen before. At first he thought it must be some piece of tracked farm machinery.

  He watched it through his binoculars. As it got closer, his heart started to hammer as something close to panic gripped him. He could see a machine gun on a mounting by the front passenger, and he realized that he was looking at something designed solely for the purpose of killing.

  The two flares went off in the sky.'

  He looked up, then at the killing team below, and felt a sudden terrible fear.

  He began to run. He had chosen his escape route well. He had found a slight dip in the ground between two hills, which was so angled that it could not be seen from the land below. In addition, there was cover from rocky outcrops and heather. He ran and ran, his very being telling him that whatever mysterious force had slaughtered his companions was now searching for him as well.

  From time to time as he fled, the watcher waited for a few moments to see if he was being followed. As he grew more confident, he waited longer and it became clear that he had gotten away without being spotted. He started to relax. Soon he made it to the bowl in the hills where the helicopter lay.

  He was halfway across the open ground to the helicopter when he heard a voice behind him. His automatic rifle was in his hand and it was cocked and loaded. He had practiced many times for this contingency and could turn and hit a target at fifty paces in a fraction of a second.

  His practice nearly paid off. He might have been a shade faster than the Ranger behind him, though whether he would have got a shot off in time was entirely another matter. It was a moot point much debated thereafter.

  As he turned, the remaining two crew of the Ranger Guntrack that had been tasked for the hills and redeployed to ambush the helicopter site double-tapped him twice each through the upper body, then through the head, with armor-piercing ammunition. Body armor was getting better and better and was turning up on the most undesirable people. It was best to be sure.

  * * * * *

  A regular army unit was ordered in to search the island, together with armed detectives.

  The nearest mainland hospital, Connemara Regional, was alerted and an army trauma team experienced in gunshot wounds helicoptered to the hospital.

  Other precautions and contingency plans were implemented. Nationwide, the Rangers and the various security organizations were put on full alert. Passengers and vehicles entering and leaving the country were suddenly subject to intense scrutiny. Such precautions were usually a massive waste of time, but not always. There were certain security advantages to Ireland's being an island with limited access and exit points.

  3

  Tokyo, Japan

  January 2

  Detective Superintendent AkiAdachi was lying on the couch in his private office in Keishicho, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's headquarters, with his shoes off, his shirt open, and his tie hanging from a desk lamp.

  He rarely used his office, preferring to sit in the general office with his team when he was officially working, but for serious relaxation such as that required after a particularly energetic kendo bout at the police dojo, a horizontal position and a couch were more appropriate.

  The only trouble was that the couch was not long enough. In Adachi's opinion, the bureaucrats who supplied such things were like civil servants the world over and running a couple of decades behind the times. They had not yet wised up to the fact that today's Japanese were several inches taller than their parents — and their children, brought up on McDonald's hamburgers and milk shakes in addition to sensible things like rice, raw fish, seaweed, raw egg, and miso soup, looked like they were heading skyward still further.

  Adachi looked at his feet, which rested on the armrest of what was supposed to be a three-man sofa. At forty-two, and five foot ten inches, he was a little long in the tooth for the Big Mac generation, but had grown to above average height anyway. This was useful if you were staring down a suspect, but a bit of a pain if you were trying to tail somebody. Still, those days of pounding the streets and hiding in doorways were mostly over. Rank was a wonderful thing.

  He wriggled his toes and practiced his foot-stretching and ankle exercises. He had been a paratrooper for ten years before transferring on fast-track promotion to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, and jumping out of airplanes meant that sometimes you landed in the wrong way and in the wrong place. Which at times was not healthy. His tendons complained. His ligaments were appalled. Still, what the hell; it had been a lot of fun. And he still jumped occasionally. It was a thoroughly ridiculous activity for a sane adult in his middle years, and that appealed to him.

  Adachi swung his legs off the sofa and poured himself a generous slug of sake, then another. The alcohol on top of the pleasant lethargy imparted by his recent violent exercise gave him a pleasant buzz. He swung his legs back on the sofa and idly picked up a report. It showed comparative crime statistics. The twenty-three wards of Tokyo, with a population of eight million, had seen ninety-seven murders last year. New York, with a slightly smaller population, came in at just under two thousand. Robbery came in at three hundred and forty-three for Tokyo and ninety-three thousand for New York. The rape figures were a hundred and sixty-one compared to over three thousand two hundred.

  He smiled in satisfaction. It appeared as if the Tokyo cops were doing something right. On the other hand, paradoxically, he liked New York and wouldn't mind at all living there. Man does not live by crime-free streets alone. Still, for making his outstanding contribution to Toyko's law enforcement efforts, he felt entitled to a rest. And he did not grudge his forty-one thousand fellow metropolitan cops their share of the glory. He closed his eyes, thought of Chifune looming over him naked and beautiful and sexy, and slept.

  Outside in the general office, the seven members of the special task force investigating the links between organized crime and politics nodded approvingly to one another. They had wagered useful money on Adachi winning the detectives' kendo championships, and they wanted their man to keep his strength up. Besides, things were quiet.

  And then the phone rang.

  * * * * *

  Senior Public Prosecutor Toshio Sekine, a gray-haired man in his early sixties and actually rather slight, had the kind of physical presence and gravitas that would have dominated the big screen if his orientation had been that way. Instead, he had settled for the law and a life of public service and a career of distinction even by the high standards of the Tokyo Public Prosecutor's office.

  Sekine-san specialized in putting bent politicians behind bars. In most countries that was a career with unlimited lifetime potential. In Japan,
there was the additional complication of major links with the Boryokudan, the organized crime syndicate. Further, the whole corrupt mess was so institutionalized that it was becoming hard to know what was actually illegal anymore. If the norm in politics was corruption, was it corruption anymore or merely the way the system worked?

  The prosecutor sipped his green tea. He came from a samurai background wit a tradition of service to the state. He regarded the Japanese political system with distaste. It seemed to him that most elected politicians were small-minded and venal. Fortunately, they were largely irrelevant to the orderly governance of Japan. The country had an excellent and largely incorrupt civil service and a law-abiding population driven by the Confucian work ethic. In Sekine's opinion, elected politicians were more akin to a branch of the entertainment business. They provided distraction but had little to do with the serious business of running a country.

  Superintendent Adachi was shown in. He bowed respectfully. He had enormous respect and affection for the senior prosecutor. They were both of the same social class, their families knew each other, and both the prosecutor and the superintendent were graduates of Todai — TokyoUniversity. Even more to the point, they had both taken law degrees. That made them the cream of the crop. TokyoUniversity graduates constituted an elite, and the inner circle came from the law faculty. Todai alumni practically ran the country. Senior Prosecutor Sekine had not selected Superintendent Adachi by accident. The investigation of political corruption linked to organized crime was a tricky and dangerous business. It was essential to have people on your team you could trust and who were predictable. Sekine trusted Adachi to serve him well.

  The prosecutor gave Adachi time to relax, collect his thoughts, and sip his tea. The policeman had just come from the crime scene and had supervised the removal of Hodama's body. He had had a long day, and his fatigue was showing.

  "Hodama?" the prosecutor said, after Adachi had sipped at his tea.

  Adachi grimaced. "An extremely unpleasant business, sensei," he said, "a massacre. Everyone in the house was killed. The bodyguard in the front was shot where he stood. Two others died inside the house. The manservant was shot in the bathroom. Hodama himself was boiled alive in his own bathtub."

  The prosecutor made a sound of disapproval. "Guns," he said disdainfully. "Guns. This is very bad. This is not the Japanese way."

  Adachi nodded in agreement but silently speculated whether or not the victim would have been any better off chopped to death with a sword in the more usual Japanese style. On the issue of being boiled alive, he thought a couple of 9-mm hollow-points were preferable any day of the week. Anyway, execution by boiling had not been much in vogue since the Middle Ages. The last person he had heard of being killed that way was IshikawaJoemon, a notorious robber. He had been a Robin Hood figure, supposedly robbing the rich and giving to the poor — less deductions for expenses. Hodama had not quite been in the same tradition.

  "The method of Hodama's death," he said. "I wonder if that is indicative in its own right."

  The prosecutor shrugged. "Let's not speculate just yet. First the facts."

  "We think the killings took place around seven in the morning," said Adachi. "Hodama was a man of regular habits, and the physical evidence would tend to support this. The police doctor cannot be quite so precise. He puts the time at somewhere between six and eight.

  "The bodies were not actually found until 3:18 P.M.. Hodama normally received from 2:45 P.M. onwards. Today, the outer gate was not open and there was no reply to either the bell at the gate or the phone, so eventually a local uniform was called. He nipped over the wall to check out if anything was wrong and left his lunch all over the first body he found. They are not used to blood and guts in that part of the world."

  "So the Hodama residence was unguarded from about seven in the morning until after lunch," said the prosecutor. "Plenty of time to remove what needed to be removed."

  Adachi nodded. He knew exactly what the sensei was getting at. Hodama was one of the most powerful men in Japan, and a constant stream of visitors brought money in exchange for favors. The operation was extensive. There should have been some written records and considerable sums of money on the premises. The first question the prosecutor had asked when they had spoken by phone earlier in the afternoon was whether any records had been found.

  "We went over the place again," Adachi said. "We used the special search team, optical probes, and all the gizmos. We turned up nothing written at all — nothing — but we found thirty million yen in a concealed safe." He grinned. "It was in a series of Mitsukoshi shopping bags."

  The prosecutor snorted. Thirty million yen — roughly three million dollars — was chicken feed for Hodama. As for the shopping bags, Japan was a gift-giving country and Mitsukoshi department stores were favorite places to buy gifts. Their elegant wrapping and ornate shopping bags were part of the symbolism. Shopping bags were also the containers of choice for carrying the large bundles of yen notes that were the preferred currency of Japanese politicians. He had heard that American politicians preferred briefcases.

  "Do you have any leads so far?" he said.

  Adachi took his time answering. He felt extremely tired, but the thought of a nice long soak in a hot tub was not as appealing as usual.

  "The scene-of-crime people are still rushing round with vacuum cleaners and the like," he said, "but it does not look encouraging. We found a couple of empty shell casings and a neighbor reported seeing two black limousines arrive around seven in the morning. And that is mostly it."

  "Mostly?" said the prosecutor.

  Adachi removed an evidence bag and placed it on the table. The prosecutor picked it up and examined it carefully. The he took a file out of his desk and opened it. He removed a photograph from the file and compared it to the object. There was no doubt. The symbol was the same. The object was a shasho — a lapel pin — of the kind worn by tens of millions of Japanese to identify their particular corporate or social affiliation.

  The symbol on that particular pin was that of the Namaka Corporation.

  "Namaka?" he said, puzzled. "Where did you find it?"

  "In the copper bath, jammed down by the wooden seat under Hodama's body," said Adachi. "Very convenient."

  The prosecutor nodded and sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. His arms were folded in front of him. He said nothing for several minutes. Adachi was used to this, and quite relaxed about waiting.

  The telephone rang. The prosecutor took the call facing half away from Adachi, so the policeman could not hear much of what was being said. It did not seem to be a deliberate gesture, and after he put the phone down the prosecutor went back to his eyes-closed position. Eventually he opened them and spoke.

  "This investigation will be difficult, Adachi-san," he said. "Difficult, complex, and quite probably dangerous. There is scarcely a politician or an organized-crime leader who had not had something to do with Hodama over the years. Whatever we find, powerful interests and forces will be displeased."

  He smiled with some affection, and then his expression turned serious. "You will always have my support. But you must be careful who you trust. You must take the fullest security precautions. At all times, you — and your team — will be armed."

  Adachi's eyes widened. Although the uniforms were armed, he rarely carried a gun. It just was not necessary except in certain specific circumstances, and it was difficult to get his suit jacket to hang right with a lump of metal strapped to his belt. He said the Japanese equivalent of "Holy shit!"

  "One extra thing," said the prosecutor. He pressed a button on his desk twice, and a buzzer rang in his assistant's office. "Koancho will be involved."

  Adachi heard the door open, and he could smell her perfume before he saw her. Koancho's brief was internal security and counterterrorism. It was a mysterious and sometimes feared organization and officially reported directly to the Prime Minister's office, though there were links with Justice. It did what was necessary to pre
serve the constitution. Whatever that meant. It was not an organization that pissed around. It was small. It was effective.

  "Involved how?" said Adachi.

  "A watching brief," said Chifune.

  "Quite so," said the prosecutor.

  ChifuneTanabu bowed formally at Adachi, who had risen from his chair. He returned her bow.

  "I think you two know each other," said the prosecutor, "and, I hope, trust each other. I asked specially for Tanabu-san."

  I know your lips and your tongue and your loins and every inch of your exquisite body, thought Adachi, but trust? Here we are in uncharted waters. "I am honored, sensei," he said to the prosecutor, but including Chifune in the remark. He bowed again toward her. "It will be a pleasure," he added, somewhat stiffly. He felt decidedly disconcerted.

  Chifune said nothing. She did not really have to. She just looked at him in that peculiar way of hers and smiled faintly.

  * * * * *

  Adachi's apartment was not a ninety-minute commute away in some godforsaken suburb. It was a comfortable two-bedroom, one-living-room affair of reasonable size on the top floor of a building in the Jinbocho district conveniently close to police headquarters. The area specialized in bookshops and, for some obscure reason, cutlery shops selling an intimidating array of very sharp instruments.

  Just up the road was Akihabara, where anything and everything electronic could be purchased. Turn in the other direction and there were the moat and grounds of the ImperialPalace and, nearby, the Yasukuni Shrine, the memorial to the war dead.

  The area had character and amenities, and it was on a subway route. It was a nice place to live. Occasionally, Adachi jogged up the road and rented a rowing boat and paddled around the moat of the ImperialPalace. Other times, he took his ladder and went up through the roof-light onto the flat roof with a bottle of sake and sunbathed. There was a low parapet around the edge of the roof, so he had a modicum of privacy.