The CIA’s safehouse was in a building used by foreigners doing business with the government. Activities unusual for any other part of Tokyo were common here and raised few suspicions.
“So far Mowry hasn’t officially told anyone that he’s stashed Kelley over there,” Carrara had said.
“Which means he’s got something to hide.”
Carrara shrugged. “The Station leaks, and he doesn’t want to end up like Shirley.”
“What’d the girl tell him?”
“That she saw Jim Shirley’s murder and that she’s frightened she’ll be next.”
“But he hasn’t told any of that to your Technical Services team?”
“No, but they’re keeping an eye on him twenty-four hours a day. They know he’s got a girl there, but they don’t know who she is.”
“And you haven’t clarified the situation.”
Carrara shook his head.
“You really are a bastard after all,” McGarvey said, but the DDO hadn’t responded.
It was the business, McGarvey thought, watching the street. When government policies became the primary consideration, people became expendable. It had happened to him, only he’d been tough enough—and lucky enough—to survive. So far.
Already the first of the clerks and bureaucrats were heading to work, and traffic was beginning to pick up. In another hour or less all of Tokyo would become a congested mass of humanity on the move. Half-hour taxi rides would take two hours or more. Buses and trains would be packed to overflowing. The city streets would become anonymous for the field officer as well as for the killer and his victim.
Crossing Harumi-dori Avenue with the light, McGarvey headed past the Police Headquarters keeping his eyes and ears open, trying to absorb what was the norm for this area; looking for the routine, the ordinary, the usual ebb and flow so that he could pick out the odd, out of place person or vehicle.
In Europe he understood what he saw. Here, though, it was different: The people, the scenery, even the flavor and odors on the air were odd by Western standards.
“Between you and the girl you can keep an eye on Mowry,” Carrara had said. “If they do make a try on him, you’ll get your lead.”
“Short of that?”
“Keep your eyes open,” Carrara said. “Something will come up. With you it always does.”
The safehouse was in the block beyond the Police Headquarters. Some shops were beginning to open, and traffic, especially pedestrian, was getting heavy.
At the near corner a uniformed police officer was speaking on a telephone at a police callbox outside a tiny cubicle. At the far end of the block a blue and white police van was parked on the opposite side of the street.
As McGarvey passed, the cop at the callbox glanced up at him, but then turned away.
Something was happening here. Or was about to happen. That much he could pick out.
Then he spotted her. Kelley Fuller had just emerged from a building in the middle of the block and was heading directly toward him. She was thirty yards distant, but he had no trouble recognizing her from the photographs Carrara had included in the briefing package.
Nor was there any doubt from the way she was moving that she was in trouble. Immediate trouble.
Igarshi could hardly believe his eyes. It was Mowry’s whore. She was on the move. Now! Of all times! She must have seen something and warned the American. She’d probably spotted Ido. The bastard!
He grabbed the walkie-talkie, pushed the READY TO TALK button and screamed into the microphone. “Tiger, this is lion. The woman just left the apartment. She’s getting away!”
He hit the TRANSMIT button and a moment later, Tanaka came back.
“Never mind her for now. We’re just around the corner from you. Get ready.”
“We can’t let her escape,” Igarshi shouted.
“Stand by. We’re coming.”
Igarshi tossed the walkie-talkie aside, and started the van’s engine, as Mowry’s chauffeured Lincoln appeared in his rearview mirror, the opposite direction from where he’d expected it.
Ten feet from McGarvey, Kelley glanced over her shoulder, back the way she had come, and she pulled up short, almost stumbling over her own feet.
A big American car had just turned the corner at the end of the block and was barreling up the street. A light blue Toyota with two men inside was directly behind it.
The woman started back, but McGarvey caught up with her in two steps and grabbed her arm.
Something was starting to go down. The blue and white police van was pulling away from the curb, and a red Mercedes was squealing tires coming around the corner.
Kelley tried to yank her arm free, but McGarvey forcefully pulled her off to the side. “Miss Hataya, it’s me. Kirk McGarvey!”
For a split second Kelley’s face was screwed up in a grimace of terror and the raw animal reaction to being cornered. She looked back over her shoulder, wildly thrashing her free arm in an effort to escape as the Lincoln made a sudden U-turn and stopped in front of the apartment building.
“We have to warn him,” she cried.
The blue Toyota pulled over to the curb across the street, the police van and Mercedes right behind it.
“We’re not going up against the Tokyo Police,” McGarvey said, hauling her into the shelter of a small used-book stall.
“Something is wrong, I tell you.”
“Wait,” McGarvey said forcefully. Something was wrong here, but he didn’t know what it was. No matter how agitated the Japanese authorities were because of the incident involving the CIA, arresting an American diplomatic officer was an extreme move.
The koban cop from the corner came past in a run, his pistol drawn, as the police van pulled up opposite Mowry’s limousine. The acting chief of station got out of the car, and turned to see what was happening.
The red Mercedes stopped alongside the Toyota, and for several beats it seemed as if nothing would happen. Traffic flowed around the two stopped vehicles, but everything else seemed to be in stasis. Like a time bomb ready to go off.
A uniformed cop jumped out of the back of the van and hurried around the big American car. He carried what appeared to be a large fire extinguisher, but he was holding it as if he were about ready to put out a fire.
Or start one! The chilling thought suddenly flashed into McGarvey’s head. They weren’t cops!
“Get down,” he shouted, pushing Kelley farther back into the book stall.
The driver’s side window in the blue Toyota suddenly burst into a million pieces, blood spraying the inside of the windshield as one of the men in the Mercedes opened fire with what sounded like a silenced Uzi … the clatter of the expended shell casings louder than the actual shots.
McGarvey yanked out his pistol as he sprinted forward, switching the safety to the off position.
Mowry reared back, inadvertantly placing himself between the koban cop and the cop with the fire extinguisher, leaving McGarvey no shot.
“Get back, get back!” McGarvey shouted, knowing that he was already too late.
The cop from the van raised the fire extinguisher, and a geyser of flame twenty-five feet long gushed from the horn-shaped nozzle, completely engulfing Mowry, as well as the koban cop behind him.
McGarvey spun on his heel and darted behind a parked taxi, the heat from the flame thrower so intense even at a distance of fifty feet that it made his eyes water and singed the hair on his head.
Mowry and the koban cop were both screaming inhumanly as they did a macabre little jig, almost as if they were marionette puppets on strings.
The air was filled with the stench of gasoline and burning flesh. Traffic was coming to a screeching halt, people were falling back, running away, screaming in terror.
The Lincoln started to pull away from its parking place, but got only five feet before its windshield disintegrated in a hail of automatic gunfire from the driver’s side of the police van.
A second burst of flame from the bogus f
ire extinguisher completely engulfed Mowry and the koban cop again as McGarvey popped up and fired three shots in rapid succession.
The column of flames suddenly veered wildly left, splashing the fronts of the buildings across the sidewalk as Mowry’s assassin staggered backward.
McGarvey snapped off a fourth and fifth shot, the last hitting the flamethrower’s fuel tank which erupted in a huge fireball, instantly killing the man.
The police van burst into flames, and the driver, also dressed in a police uniform, jumped out, firing his Uzi toward McGarvey, forcing him down behind the taxi, glass and bits of bullet fragments raining down on his head.
Mowry and the koban cop had stopped screaming. They were mercifully dead. But in the near distance McGarvey could suddenly hear the sounds of sirens. Probably behind the police headquarters in the last block.
He popped up again and fired two shots at the cop who was scrambling into the back seat of the already moving Mercedes. Then a third. The fourth time he pulled the trigger the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
The answering automatic weapons fire raked the taxi McGarvey was crouched behind, almost completely destroying it.
He ejected the spent clip from his Walther PPK, slapped home a fresh one, relevered the ejection slide and jumped up as the Mercedes accelerated down the street.
He managed to get off two shots before the risk of hitting an innocent bystander became too great. Then he turned, looked toward the still-burning remains of Mowry and the cop, holstered his pistol and hurried back to Kelley Fuller, who was shaking with fear and rage. The sirens were very close now.
“We have to get out of here,” he told her. “But you’re going to have to act normal.”
“What?” she cried incredulously, but she didn’t resist as McGarvey took her arm and led her away, back toward the Imperial Palace gardens, past the Police Headquarters build-wing.
29
“WHO THE HELL WAS THAT BASTARD?” TANAKA DEMANDED. He was an expert driver and he knew Tokyo very well. He’d gotten them clear before the police arrived.
“I don’t know,” Igarshi shouted wildly. “He came out of nowhere. Kozo didn’t have a chance.”
“We have to find out. He’s with the girl, and she may know too much.”
“We have to kill them,” Heidinora Daishi said from the front seat. “They’re witnesses.” He’d killed Mowry’s two bodyguards in the Toyota.
“I agree,” Tanaka said. He glanced in the rearview mirror at Igarshi who was changing out of the police uniform. “Are you injured?”
“Just a scratch on my leg. But it was close.”
“Did you see where they were headed?” Heidinora asked. He was a bulldog of a man, with a short, thick torso and massive arms. He was a ruthless, efficient killer.
“The Imperial Palace,” Tanaka replied through clenched teeth. “We’ll go there now and finish the job.”
“We’d better,” Igarshi muttered. “I for one don’t want to go back empty-handed. But we have no flamethrower.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll enter the garden from three different directions to cut off any possible escape. The moment we spot them we shoot.”
“What about the car?”
“We’ll leave it,” Tanaka said, hauling the big car around the corner onto Hibaya-dori Avenue. He pulled up in front of the east gate into the Imperial Palace’s Outer Garden. “Take this entrance,” he told Heidinora. “Igarshi and I will come from the south side and drive them toward you.”
“Very well,” Heidinora growled, and he got out of the car and entered the garden.
Police units seemed to be converging from all over the city on the scene of the killings. Violent crime was relatively unknown in Tokyo, and when it occurred the police were quick to respond. McGarvey led a shaken Kelley Fuller across Harumi-dori Avenue into the Imperial Palace’s Outer Garden. Most of the joggers were already gone on their circuit of the palace grounds, but a few stood at the outer portal looking to where black smoke rose into the morning sky.
“They weren’t the police,” Kelley said.
“You’re right, but there’s nothing we can do about it for the moment,” McGarvey said. He pulled up short just within the garden and studied the approaches behind them. The Mercedes would be back. Today’s attack had been well planned and coordinated. Whoever they were, they would not want to leave any loose ends dangling.
“I tried to warn Mowry, but his secretary told me that he’d already left. And your hotel said you hadn’t checked in yet.”
“Where were you going?”
“I was trying to lead them away. But God, I didn’t know this would happen.” She was distraught, and clearly on the verge of breaking down.
“All right, listen to me. They saw which way we headed, and they’re probably going to come back for us. Have you got someplace to go? Someplace where you can hide at least for the rest of the morning?”
“I had an apartment, but I’m not going there now,” she said. “Maybe the embassy.”
“No,” McGarvey said. “The moment the authorities found out you were there they’d demand that you be turned over to them. You’re a material witness to at least one killing.”
“So are you,” she said.
“That’s right. But so long as we make no contact with the embassy the police won’t know who we are.”
“That’s just great,” Kelley said bleakly. “If we run for safety the Japanese police will take us. If we stay on the streets, the maniacs who killed Shirley and Mowry will have us.”
“I want you to go over to my hotel and wait for me in the coffee shop, or the lobby. Anyplace that’s public, where there are a lot of people.”
Kelley’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about? You mean right now?”
“Yes. Take a cab.”
“What about you … ?” She looked closely at him. “You’re going to wait here for them?”
“One of them is already dead, and I may have wounded the second. Which leaves two more, possibly three. I’d like to even the odds a bit, and then have a little chat with whoever is left.”
“You’re crazy.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“You saw what they did to Mowry. God, they did the same thing to Shirley.”
The red Mercedes slid to a halt a hundred feet away on Harumi-dori Avenue. McGarvey spotted it out of the corner of his eye and pulled Kelley back out of sight behind the gate as a slightly built man got out of the back and started up the broad pedestrian walkway. He was limping. The car left immediately, but not before McGarvey saw that the driver was now the sole occupant.
“He’s the one from the van,” Kelley said. “At least I think so. But he was wearing a uniform then.”
“It’s the same one,” McGarvey said. “But one of them is missing. He’s probably somewhere behind us, and this one means to drive us into him.”
Kelley looked wildly from the approaching figure, back down the tree-lined concourse that led into the garden. Already the park was beginning to fill up. “We have no idea what he looks like.”
McGarvey had gotten a vague impression of a bulky man in the front passenger seat, but he had not gotten a clear look. “No, but he shouldn’t be so hard to spot once this one tells me what he looks like.”
The driver of the Mercedes would probably abandon the car and come in from the west, boxing them in, leaving them only one direction to run. The killers were taking a big risk of being spotted by the police, which meant they considered McGarvey and Kelley very important.
“We can let him pass and duck out behind him,” Kelley said.
The police imposter was less than fifty feet away, his right hand stuffed into the light brown jacket he wore now. Passerby didn’t look directly at him; the Japanese were too polite to stare. But it was clear that his presence, blood on one leg of his trousers, was causing a stir. It would be only a matter of a few minutes before the alarm was sounded and the police showed up.
“A
s soon as he comes through I want you to do just that,” McGarvey said. “Grab a cab and get out of here.”
“I don’t want to leave you here like this, not with three-to-one odds,” she argued, and McGarvey looked at her with a new respect. She was frightened half out of her mind, but she was willing to stay and help.
“Are you armed?”
“No.”
“Then go to the hotel and wait for me there.”
The killer was nearing the gate, and McGarvey pulled Kelley farther back behind the portal, so that they were completely hidden for the moment.
“What if you don’t show up?” she whispered urgently.
McGarvey took out his pistol and switched the safety off. This was the last of the ammunition he had with him. But he was going to avoid at all costs any kind of a shootout here in a public park.
“If I’m not back by noon, make contact with Phil Carrara, he’ll know what to do,” McGarvey said. “Now get ready to go.”
“This is stupid,” she whispered in desperation.
“You can say that again,” McGarvey agreed.
The man came through the gate, and as soon as he was past, McGarvey stepped out from around the portal and fell in behind him. Kelley darted around the corner and out the gate.
“I don’t want to kill you, but I will unless you do exactly as I say,” McGarvey said in a conversational tone.
Igarshi practically jumped out of his skin. His step faltered and he started to withdraw his hand from his pocket.
“I killed your friend back there, I won’t hesitate to put a bullet in your spine,” McGarvey warned.
“Who are you? What do you want here?” Igarshi demanded, his English very bad but understandable.
“My questions,” McGarvey said. “But first I want to know who hired you to kill Shirley and Mowry …”
Igarshi was incredibly fast. With his right elbow he knocked McGarvey’s gun hand aside, and then spun around, smashing three well-aimed blows into McGarvey’s chest and throat within the space of barely one second.
On instinct alone, McGarvey was just able to fall back, sidestepping the killer’s next blows, and smash the butt of his pistol into the back of the man’s neck. Igarshi went down with a grunt.
Critical Mass Page 17