by Victor Milán
CHAPTER 30
Talks dragged on until evening, as Michiko had known they would, without issue. Miyagi was an unpleasant little man, snide, not deigning to hide his anger. Yet he was determined to stand his ground—and utterly scrupulous in dealing with his rival.
It was too damned bad.
Somewhere past eight she got back to the Western-style suite Miyagi had assigned her, having declined an offer to join him for dinner in the executive dining rooms, which Michiko was morally certain was the first insincere thing the skinny little man had said to her all day. The door slid to behind her and, of course, refused to open when she tried to walk out again.
Fine, she thought. A touch of suspicion makes everything easier. If they trusted me totally, if the door had just opened, I’d probably start screaming and never stop. She walked to the sideboard and poured herself a stiff slug of Chivas. Then she took her cosmetics case out of her suitcase, walked into the bathroom, and ordered the shower on full. Good and hot and steamy. Quickly and efficiently she went to work.
Shortly she emerged, blow-dried her hair, dressed in a gray-blue skirt and short jacket cinched with a wide thick belt of blue-dyed leather over a mauve blouse with a yoke of frills. She activated the com/comm and requested that a small steak, rare, a baked potato, and an artichoke be sent to her rooms. She sat down to wait.
When the plump young woman from the commissary walked in smiling behind her wheeled steel tray, she found Yoshimitsu Michiko standing in the middle of the room, legs braced, shoulders pulled back, aiming a handgun at her with both hands.
The door slid shut behind the two guards who’d followed the service tech inside. Their uniform jumpsuits were blue, their web gear and berets white. Their submachine guns were slung behind their backs.
The guard to the left reacted first, trying to haul his weapon up and forward by its sling. Michiko shot him once. An actinic flash seared her eyes, and he went down. Immediately she swung her weapon right, past the commissary woman, who threw herself shrieking to the carpet. The second guard had his weapon in his hands, but Michiko didn’t take time to register the fact, just pumped three rounds into him with quick little squeezes of her hand. The upper half of his body exploded. He fell back against the oyster-colored wall, splashing it blood and black.
It was amazing, what reliance on technology could do for you. Michiko herself, and the single suitcase she’d been allowed to bring under the terms of her safe passage, had both been politely but thoroughly subjected to an exhaustive electronic scrutiny: X-ray, magnetic metal detection, “bomb sniffer” chemosensors. They’d turned up nothing. The negative result, added to the natural assumption that the chairwoman, president, and owner of the most powerful zaibatsu in Japan wouldn’t do her own dirty work, and respectful reluctance to subject such a person to the indignity of a body search, had gotten her inside without raising an eyebrow.
YTC’s new security chief had been a busy gnome, between the middle of the night before and early this morning. Given the extent of the Yoshimitsu empire, he had managed to turn up the requisite equipment. Michiko’s pistol, for instance. A terrorist’s toy, an assassin’s tool, detection-proof: it was glass, glass and plastic and those new miracle resins. It fired 12mm glass rockets, each carrying a small shaped-charge warhead. Its shape was reminiscent of a pair of brass knuckles with a fat grip; of that knuckleduster squirtgun she’d had when she was young, with the plunger in back instead of a trigger, that you worked by pumping like those ancient flywheel flashlights the village cops had way back in some parts of ura-Japan. Pressing in crushed a little catalyst pellet that touched off the tiny rocket motor; letting out again popped the next round into the chamber. It was a desperate little beast, nearly as dangerous to its user as its targets—no accuracy beyond five meters, and if you dropped it on a hard surface it was liable to gangfire all five rounds in its magazine. But it served.
The room was crowded with mingled stinks of explosives and blood and shit and burned flesh. Someone was screaming… not quite screaming, really, keening, one thin high tearing note, and Michiko hoped Miyagi soundproofing was up to YTC standards. She moved forward, shoulderblades drawn together as if magnetized, just waiting to see/hear the door sliding open and the room filling up with blue uniforms and orange muzzle flashes. She knelt beside the serving cart, ready to slap the commissary woman if she didn’t shut up and tell her what she wanted to know.
But the food server wasn’t making any noise. She was coiled into a tight ball of fear. Her face was dead white, eyes wide open and mouth shut. She stared at Michiko and vibrated.
Frowning, Michiko checked the guards. The one on her right had had his upper torso split right open. Michiko remembered a time one of her roommates in Pasadena had stuck a potato in the microwave to bake without piercing its skin. The water inside flash-boiled, and it popped right open—just like the guard’s rib cage. Bile geysered sour in her mouth and spilled out over her lip. She turned him over, forcing her mind to the imperative of claiming his weapon, and found that a hit had melted the receiver like plastic. Her heart thudded like an impact. She knew she’d come within millimeters of setting off its load of ammunition.
On bean-curd legs she wobbled to the other guard. He was making the keening noise, somehow. Her first shot had caught him in the throat and blown his neck apart, torn off his lower jaw and cooked the shreds of tendon hanging below his wide-open eyes. He was alive. The noise must have been coming right up out of his chest.
Her eyes exploded in tears. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, don’t be hurt—” Don’t be a jackass. You burned his face off. He is hurt. But she couldn’t stop herself, babbling in Japanese, in English, in pidgin-Malay, and he just looked up at her and rocked his charred head from side to side and beseeched her with those awful staring blue eyes until she stuck the muzzle of her little barrelless glass demon against the bridge of his nose and blew his head apart with the last shot. Then, still crying and choking up runny acid foulness, she took his weapon, a 10mm submachine gun, and with a presence of mind she never believed she possessed, took three spare 32-round clips as well.
She straightened, grabbed a towel off the tray, wiped her face. She bent over the woman from the commissary. “The computer room.” She spat to clear her mouth. “Where’s the main computer room?”
The woman shut her eyes and trembled harder. Michiko hit her with an open hand. She moaned. Christ, you’ve got a way with people, Michiko thought, you can tell you’re executive material… “Tell me. Tell me or I’ll kill you, I swear.” Without opening her eyes, the woman told her. Michiko taped a rag in her mouth with surgical tape from her suitcase, taped her wrists behind her and her ankles with the same stuff. This is taking too damn long, Michiko thought, moving to disable the com/comm console. Yet she felt oddly calm. There was no reason any audiovisual bugs in her room would be active, or monitored if they were, unless Miyagi thought that she was under enough stress that she’d start babbling secrets to herself. And if they were watched, she’d step out into the corridor into a spray of gunfire, and save herself a lot of suspense and strenuous exertion.
Nobody was waiting for her. The well-lit corridor was deserted. Holding the submachine gun in what she hoped was the ready position, she set off.
A horrid game of hide and seek, rendered no less nightmarish because no one seemed to be looking for her. Another weakness in security in a facility like this: it was geared to keep people out. Once you got inside it was a whole different story. Nobody knew to look for her, so nobody was. But if anyone saw her…
It was late enough that not too many people were stirring about on the better residential levels. The stairway down to the depths where the computer center lived was like a journey into hell. Three times she dodged out into corridors as people approached from above or below, footsteps echoing infinitely in the switch-backed stairwell, and providentially found them empty. And then she passed a door through which she distinctly heard several voices raised in conversation
, and a few ^ steps farther down froze at the sounds of more voices moving up the stairs. She crouched there, feral, finger on trigger, trying not to squeeze off an inadvertent burst, knowing that at any minute someone would turn onto the landing below her, look up and see her, would raise the alarm—by screaming or by dying, take your pick—and that she would die here, crouched futilely on these cold metal stairs like a rabbit pinned by the headlights of an oncoming car, her mission unaccomplished…
Two people mounted to the landing below and swung about, a man and a woman, chatting casually. Michiko held down a scream that screamed to get out, raised the SMG. The man politely opened the door into the corridor for the woman and followed her out without either looking up.
Michiko slumped against the cool wall of the stairwell, feeling as if all her bones had melted. Her blouse was soaked with sweat, stuck to her like plaster. It was soaked with worse things too. She made herself go on.
There was a single guard outside the main computer center. It would have taken old Musashi himself, or maybe one of the brothers Kusunoki, to do anything but what he did on being confronted with a stinking maenad, wild-eyed and wild-haired and covered with blood and puke and Christ knows what, who appeared from thin air and poked a submachine gun at him and told him to open the door: he punched the entrance code on the little panel by the door, and wished he’d never come to this fucking loony country in the first place.
The computer room didn’t look like anyplace in particular as she prodded the guard into it at gunpoint. A largish room with a dropped-tile ceiling lit by fluorescent panels, several rows of what looked like nothing so much as white filing cabinets, the heart and guts and CNS of the Miyagi headquarters computer system, its various physical components laid out for easy access to repair-and-maintenance types.
Facing her from the right a handful of technicians in pastel jumpsuits busied themselves at a line of consoles, monitoring the system’s vital functions. One man wearing a headset glanced up incuriously, then screamed, “Sound the alarm!” and lunged for a red button on the wall behind him.
Michiko’s long burst cut down the hapless guard in a spray of blood and bowled over two seated female techs before catching the man in the lower back. He turned to face her, all doubled up with his hands clutched to his stomach, and then sat down and started to cry. Just like that. Like a kid with a skinned knee. She felt herself clouding up again; it was never like this in those shoot-’em-up adventure flicks she’d watched, and she never much liked them anyway, and felt guilty as hell she’d watched any at all, if this was what it was like—pain, white-faced fear, smell of spilled intestines, and crying like a small boy for his mommy…
Get hold of yourself. “Away from there,” she croaked to the three unwounded technicians. “Help your friends if you want to. But don’t go for the alarm.”
They were Japanese, except for the sobbing gut-shot man and the one uninjured woman. They obeyed quietly and quickly. The gaijin woman, an overweight blonde, responded more slowly. “Somebody heard those shots,” she said defiantly. “You don’t have long.”
“Long enough,” she said with theatrical and totally spurious confidence. She could hardly make herself accept the reality of what was happening, what she was doing. If she says, “You’ll never get away with this,” I’ll just die. “Since you’re so clever, suppose you tell me where the central processor is. The unit the data passes through, in and out.” The pudgy face stared at her. The blond woman didn’t move. Michiko found herself facing the great moral dilemma of those who point guns at other people: what the hell do you do if they don’t do what you tell them? If she shot these techs, they’d have a hard time telling her much of anything.
With sudden inspiration she reached up her left hand and jacked back the weapon’s charging handle. That accomplished nothing concrete besides spinning a conventional cartridge unfired in a gleaming brass arc off to the left, but it made an impressively jarring metallic noise and called attention to the submachine gun and its function.
The blonde went a shade paler. She nodded her head at a long white cabinet, set against the wall behind her, that didn’t look a whole lot different from the other cabinets. Michiko looked to the others. “Is she telling the truth?”
A man knelt by the two women lying on the carpet amid spreading red stains. One was moaning softly, and the other seemed pretty thoroughly dead. The kneeling man nodded. A moment later the other, standing empty-eyed with his hands limp by his sides, nodded too.
Still no way to tell if they’re telling the truth. At this point she didn’t have much choice; holding the SMG one-handed, she moved sideways to the alleged central processor, slipping off her belt with the other hand. Sewn inside it were a half dozen charges of malleable plastic explosive, sealed in plastic against curious chemosensors. She draped it over the top of the low plastic cabinet, inside up, snapped off the buckle, and used it to pry open the belt’s lining, revealing a small blue packet with several tabs: chemical timers. She pulled one that would set off the high-velocity explosive charges in four minutes. The delay she estimated would give her enough time to do what she had to without giving Miyagi’s security time to come peel the thing off. I hope, anyway. She moved back toward the consoles.
“Can you open a line to the outside?” she demanded.
The blond woman bit her lip. “Yes.” Her voice was husky with fear.
“Do it.” Glancing nervously over her shoulder at the wavering muzzle of the SMG, she seated herself at the console, pressed buttons, spoke briefly. She looked up at Michiko.
“Who do I call?”
Michiko gave her a sequence. The blonde repeated it aloud. Michiko waited, scarcely daring to breathe.
“Michiko.” TOKUGAWA’s voice from the speaker, his face glowing on the monitor. Pent-up breath gusted from her. “What’s wrong? Has there been treachery?”
Yes, she thought, mine. “Trouble. I’m inside the Miyagi computer center. Is there any way I can patch you into their system?”
He frowned. “I—I think so.” Michiko gestured the tech away from the console, came and stood crouched over it, trying to keep an eye on the screen, the technicians, the door.
“Tell me what to do.” He questioned her about the layout of the control console and the design of the central processor. She answered as best she could with her stomach tying itself in knots of anticipation.
“For God’s sake, darling, hurry,” She didn’t think the explosive charge would hurt her over here when it went off, but she didn’t want it scrambling the brains of the complex before TOKUGAWA got inside them.
“I need you to punch out a sequence for me,” TOKUGAWA said. The corner of her eye caught movement. She fired reflexively. The burst caught the blank-eyed man in mid-lunge and sent him reeling back into a row of mass-storage units.
TOKUGAWA’s eyes went wide, but he recited the sequence. Michiko keyed it; he asked for another. Sweat was running into her eyes so fast she could barely blink them clear, but she complied, glancing incessantly at her watch as the seconds ticked away.
“There,” he said. “I’ve got it. I’m in. Simple, with someone on that end.”
The door opened. Michiko yanked the trigger. Nothing happened. She ducked, fumbling the spent magazine out of the weapon, a new one from a skirt pocket and into the receiver, just so. A security man walked in, frowned at her, then snapped up his own submachine gun and aimed it. And the prospect of firing up several million yen worth of the very equipment he was supposed to be guarding froze his finger on the trigger Michiko fired, the gun almost tearing itself from her grip. A bullet hit the guard in the knee and he sprawled.
“Open the doors, TOKUGAWA. Let our people in.” Another guard poked his head in. Michiko fired a quick burst, and he jerked back. The two techs still on their feet had vanished.
“Michiko, what’s going on?”
“Never mind! Just do it!”
“It s—it’s done, But what—”
Someone stuck in
a submachine gun and opened up. Michiko ducked as chips of plastic flurried around her like snow. “I love you, TOKUGAWA,” she shouted, “Remember that always—I love you—”
The explosives blew. Michiko felt plastic shrapnel sting her side, her cheek—felt TOKUGAWA going away from her as the contact broke.
They poured in the door in a brave heedless rush. She cut down two, three, a half dozen. The SMG clicked empty. She reached into her pocket for the third magazine. It was gone.
She stood upright and threw the useless weapon at them. “I love you, TOKUGAWA” she cried again. She threw open her arms, accepting the bullets that entered her like lovers.
* * * * *
Miyagi Taro died with a submachine gun in his hands. Twenty-three hours later, Australia pushed the button.
PART FOUR
AI UCHI
The teaching is “Ai Uchi,”
meaning to cut the opponent
just as he cuts you.
It is the ultimate timing… it is
lack of anger. It means to treat
your enemy as an honored guest.
—VICTOR HARRIS, from the translator’s
introduction to Musashi, A Book of Five Rings
CHAPTER 31
The procession left Hagi with the dawn. A line of vehicles, splendid limousines condensing the mountain mists on their glossy paint; armored carriers, their tracks grinding at the asphalt, soldiers sitting tall and proud in the cupolas; open combat cars carrying generals in medals and sunglasses—all led with suitably feudal pomp by Major General Ushijima Gogen, Japanese Self-Defense Forces (retired), mounted with gleaming spurs and scabbarded tachi bouncing at his side on a gorgeous bay stallion. Newsmen capered among the rocks like ambushing Pathans in the Khyber, aiming digicams like rocket-propelled grenade launchers, while media helicopters buzzed in swarms overhead—all Japanese, of course; foreign newsmen had been interned as enemy aliens even before the bombs fell. More reporters were packed into a line of cars dragging behind like a train, several times as long as the procession itself.