At the Sharpe End

by Ashton, Hugh

  Katsuyama smiled, but again without any warmth in it. “Not completely. They knew of the image-recognition work, and they were interested. Not as much as I led you to believe, perhaps, but they did make me several very serious offers. They didn’t know anything at all about the financial side, of course. The main thing is that I wanted to get the thing off my hands to someone they would never dream of suspecting or following round.”

  “And then you went and planted my card in that poor bastard’s pocket?” Sharpe asked. “That doesn’t sound very smart. Leading the police straight to me.”

  “Best I could do at the time. Thought the police would have to keep an eye on you. That was other thing. Keep Kim and bitch away from you.” The repeated gin and tonics were now starting to have a marked effect on him. His speech was slurring and his eyes were closed. His body was swaying from side to side, and each time he tipped to right or left, there seemed to be an even chance whether he would be able to right himself, but somehow he was still managing to keep his balance. There was no point, Sharpe reasoned, in trying to talk to him about putting the trading system to rights again. Even if he’d been capable of coherent speech, there was no way that Sharpe reckoned he could persuade Katsuyama into improving the system to meet current market conditions. In fact, given what he’d just been told about the ultimate destination of the money, Sharpe wasn’t sure he wanted anything at all to do with Katsuyama or anyone connected with him ever again.

  “Why did you want me to come to Seoul?”

  Katsuyama didn’t seem to notice the question, so Sharpe repeated it.

  “Needed a change. Needed to buy some things,” he mumbled with his eyes closed. He pitched forward, and Sharpe put his hand out to stop Katsuyama’s head from crashing onto the table. As he slowly returned Katsuyama’s body to an upright seated position, he was uncomfortably aware of the Vietnamese minders crowding round the back of his chair. While he was sure that they wouldn’t try any violence in a public place like the hotel lobby, he felt the need to reassure them of his innocence.

  “He’d had too much to drink. You were watching him and me. These were gin and tonics. I didn’t make him drink them. They were his choice.” The four men, compact and lithe in their dark suits, just stared at him. “Look, do you guys understand what I am saying? Do you speak English?” He tried repeating his words in Japanese. The same silence in reply. “Look, I don’t speak Vietnamese at all.”

  “It’s OK, man,” said one of Katsuyama’s guards in American English. “The boss gets this way quite often. Don’t you worry yourself about him. We’ll get him back where he needs to be.”

  Relief flooded over Sharpe as he realised he wasn’t going to get the living daylights beaten out of him for something that wasn’t his fault.

  “You stay at this hotel for one more night,” said the Vietnamese, holding up a single finger to show the number of nights Sharpe should stay. Or it might have been an insult. “Maybe boss will want to talk to you tomorrow. He’ll surely telephone you before 2 tomorrow afternoon. So you stay here till then. If not, then go back to where you come from. Have a nice day.” He bowed slightly. The bow was echoed by the other three, who picked up Katsuyama’s slumped body, and guided him to the exit, watched by several concerned waiters and hotel staff.

  -o-

  A waiter came up to Sharpe. “Is your friend all right?” he asked, with some concern. “Are those men his friends?”

  “Definitely his friends,” Sharpe answered. “And he’s just had too much to drink, that’s all.”

  The waiter shrugged, and handed Sharpe the bill to sign. Eight gin and tonics, he saw, six of which had been Katsuyama’s. And doubles at least. No wonder he was out cold. He signed and handed the bill back to the waiter.

  “Your billfold, sir,” pointing to a brown leather wallet on one of the chairs.

  “Not mine.” It was Katsuyama’s chair.

  “Shall I give it back to him and his friends, sir?” asked the waiter.

  “No, I’ll do it. Maybe I can still catch them.” He snatched up the wallet and rushed to the front door, but there was no sign of Katsuyama or his minders. He pushed open the revolving doors and tripped over a mat as he pushed his way through. He recovered his balance, but the wallet flew out of his hand and landed on the floor. As he picked it up, a few sheets of paper fell out. He stuffed them back in, hardly noticing that they were photographs. He scanned the area in front of the hotel for Katsuyama and his party, but they were nowhere in sight. As he returned to the reception desk, he took a closer look at the photos, which were still partly sticking out of the wallet, and received a severe shock. There was one picture of him and one of Mieko, and one of the two of them together, as well as one of the outside of his block of flats, with his flat circled in black felt-pen. They appeared to have come from a poor-quality digital camera, maybe a mobile phone camera, and had been enlarged and printed so that the individual pixels making up the picture were clearly visible.

  He held them closer to examine them, and became aware of a faint, but distinctive odour that he vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. He stuffed them back into the wallet, and went to the concierge’s desk. As he reached the desk, the Vietnamese bodyguard who’d spoken to him earlier came swiftly across the floor towards him.

  “That belongs to the boss, I think,” holding out his hand. Wordlessly, Sharpe gave him the wallet. “Thank you.” He bowed and went towards the door.

  One of Sharpe’s peculiarities – at least, he’d never heard of anyone else who had the ability, or maybe they just didn’t talk about it – was the ability to imagine smells and tastes in his mind. He tried to remember the smell of the photos and match it with his memories. A glaring fluorescent light and bare cement walls and Al Kowalski – “Ben” – and his cigars came back to mind.

  What the hell were those photos doing there in Katsuyama’s wallet? He remembered the kid they’d arrested – Osaki – talking at the police station about the photos he’d been shown by Al Kowalski. Were these the same ones? What sort of connection was there between Katsuyama and Kowalski?

  -o-

  Time to get straight back to Tokyo, Sharpe reckoned. It really didn’t seem like a good idea to be in close contact with, or even in the same city as Katsuyama, a man who seemed to be prepared to kill casually and without any sense of conscience.

  Damn the man, he thought, as he stepped into the lift to return to his room. Maybe life wasn’t wonderful before he stepped into my life, but at least it was nowhere near as complicated as it was now. He punched the button for his floor, and turned to the two other men who had followed him into the lift.

  “Which floor?” No answer. Oh well, maybe they didn’t speak English, but they made no move to push their floor button as the door closed.

  As the lift started to ascend, one of them said, in a heavy accent, to Sharpe, “The same floor for you.” He emphasised his words with a small pistol that he held pointed at Sharpe’s navel.

  “OK,” Sharpe replied, holding his hands away from his body. “Whatever you say.” He tried to behave as though having guns pulled on him in luxury hotels was an everyday occurrence. He failed and he was aware that his legs were shaking.

  The lift stopped at Sharpe’s floor, the doors opened, and Sharpe led the way to his room, highly conscious of the two men following him, and of at least one gun pointed at his back. As he reached for his card key to open the room door, he toyed with the idea of dashing through the doorway fast, slamming the door in their faces, and phoning the reception for help. The more he thought about it, the better an idea it seemed to be. Could he manage it? he asked himself, watching the red light in the electronic lock flash and turn green. He pulled the card key out of the lock and deliberately dropped it on the floor. “Damn!” as he bent to pick it up, the two goons offering no assistance, standing there passively. He watched the green lamp turn red and heard the door click locked again. Too long – at least three seconds while the lock stayed open. But the
re would be a chain on the other side. He could put the chain on and hold them off. Maybe.

  He put the card in the lock again. This time his companions seemed a little more relaxed. And there was a laundry cart or room service being pushed along the corridor just round the corner. Better and better. As soon as the light turned green, he half-opened the door and slipped through the gap faster than he had ever done anything before in his life. He had time to slam the door shut and put the chain on before the two men outside appeared to react. He leaned his weight hard against the door, hoping to keep it shut until the autolock clicked. The door-handle rattled furiously as he tried to keep it from turning, but it held and suddenly he felt it stop twisting. Obviously the lock had clicked shut. There was a hammering on the door that stopped suddenly as he heard voices outside the door, and he seized the opportunity to grab the phone and dial the front desk. He had no time to try to make a simple English explanation, so he simply shouted the word “Police!” in English several times down the line, hoping that this and his tone of voice would be enough to do the trick. As he put the phone down, the shouting outside the door rose to a crescendo, and there was a loud bang, followed by the sound of breaking crockery. Sharpe thought he could hear footsteps running away from his room in the direction away from the lifts, but it was hard to say.

  About a minute after he had heard the explosion, there was a loud knock on the door. He peered through the spyhole and saw several uniformed figures. Well, whoever they were, they weren’t the people who’d been chasing him. He unchained the door and opened it.

  Two hotel security men (or so he assumed – they certainly didn’t seem to be official police) were standing there, with a young woman wearing a female version of the same uniform standing beside them. Behind her was a male figure in a white waiter’s jacket and dark trousers, lying motionless on the floor. An overturned room service cart was behind him, with a red stain spreading across the white cloth that had been pulled off it, one corner still firmly in the waiter’s grasp.

  “I do not speak good English,” said the older of the two men. “Miss Pak will speak for us.” He turned to the young woman and said something in Korean to her.

  “This is not your doing?” she said to Sharpe in almost impeccable English.

  “Of course not. What happened, anyway? I was inside the room,” said Sharpe.

  “He has been shot,” replied Miss Pak, without waiting for the security man’s prompt. “He appears to be wounded, but not dead.” She spoke in Korean, presumably translating this conversation. Another burst of Korean from the security guard.

  “Who was it, then?”

  “Two men.” Sharpe described them and what had happened as best he could. “To be honest, they were behind me most of the time in the lift and while I was opening the door here. I didn’t really get a good look at them.” More translation. “One of them had a gun he was pointing at me. I suppose it must have been one of them who shot that poor man.” At this point a team of medical orderlies carrying assorted medical equipment and a stretcher spilled out of the lift and clustered round the injured man. One clapped an oxygen mask to the victim’s face, and the others gathered round, examining the damage and preparing the stretcher.

  “Please wait here with us until the police arrive,” the senior security guard said, speaking through Miss Pak.

  “May I sit down on the bed?” asked Sharpe. “I feel completely exhausted.” It was true. The adrenaline rush and the sheer terror of the past few minutes – he’d never had a gun pointed at him like that before – had exhausted him. Miss Pak passed on the request.

  “Yes, you may,” she replied. “And,” in a quieter tone, “I would advise you to change your pants.”

  Automatically, Sharpe looked down, embarrassed to see that he had actually wet himself at some stage in the proceedings. “Thank you. I honestly hadn’t realised that this had happened.” Hardly surprising, he supposed. He really had had the piss scared out of him. He was only grateful it hadn’t been worse.

  “I guessed you didn’t know. Don’t worry, I won’t look while you’re changing.” She gave a shy smile and deliberately turned away. Sharpe rummaged in his overnight bag for a pair of jeans – the only other trousers he had brought with him – and a clean pair of underpants.

  “I’m going to have to go and wash myself,” he called back over his shoulder.

  An exchange in Korean, a little laughter from the men, and then “Go ahead” in Miss Pak’s voice.

  He went into the bathroom, cleaned himself up, and changed quickly, putting the wet clothes into a plastic laundry bag. He realised as he did so that the trousers belonged to one of his best suits, and would have to be cleaned in the very near future. When he emerged, there were two policemen standing talking to the security guides, as well as someone who looked as though he was from the hotel management. The medical team and the victim had disappeared.

  One of the policeman came forward. “Mr Sharpe. Would you mind showing us your passport, please?” in English.

  They seemed particularly interested in the fact that Sharpe was resident in Japan, and then, somewhat to his surprise, started to question him about Katsuyama, explaining that the hotel staff had noticed Katsuyama’s performance earlier in the lobby. Well, they could hardly avoid noticing it, Sharpe told himself. Who was Katsuyama? they wanted to know, and where had he come from? Sharpe told them that Katsuyama was a business acquaintance whose technology his Japanese company had been using for some time and whom he was consulting to seek improvements. As far as he knew, Katsuyama was resident in Vietnam. No, he didn’t know where Katsuyama was staying in Seoul, when he had come to Korea, or when he was returning to Vietnam.

  “Please come to the police station with us.” The words were polite enough, but the tone of voice hardly seemed friendly.

  “May I make a phone call first?”

  “Who will you call?”

  “The British Embassy.”

  The policeman laughed. “We want to ask you some questions, but we are not arresting you. Do you really need your embassy to protect you?”

  “No,” Sharpe admitted. “But it would let my friends back in Japan know what was happening if they will pass on a message from me.”

  A nod. “Go ahead.”

  Sharpe looked through the hotel magazine, looking for the number, but the hotel manager coughed discreetly, and passed him a slip of paper.

  “Oh, thank you very much.”

  He dialled, and when the phone was answered, asked to be put through to Consular. He explained that he was being taken by the police for questioning regarding a crime of which he was innocent, and asked that the Consulate do whatever they felt was necessary in such cases. He gave them Mieko’s mobile number and asked them to contact her and let her know what was happening. And, as an afterthought, he asked the embassy to contact Tim Barclay at the Tokyo embassy and let him know what was going on. He wasn’t quite sure why he did it, except that he knew that Barclay and Jon didn’t seem to get on, and he wanted no friend of Jon’s involved in this.

  “All right,” he said to the policeman as he put the phone down. “Let’s go.”

  The hotel manager coughed. “Excuse me, sir. If you wouldn’t mind settling the bill so far? Just in case …”

  Just in case what? Sharpe asked himself. In case he got hauled off by the Korean police, never to be seen again? It seemed like a strange sort of request, but the little party made its way to the hotel’s checkout desk where Sharpe’s credit card was processed. While he settled up, the police talked on their radios. “We’ll keep the room open for you unless we hear otherwise,” the manager promised. Again, that vague nebulous threat of something unknown.

  Sharpe was hustled (there was no other way to describe it) into the back of a police car, where he sat between two officers, and they sped, siren screaming, through the streets of Seoul.

  -o-

  At the police station, he was hurriedly whisked down a corridor to a bare-walled
windowless room, similar to the one in Tokyo where he had first met Sugita/Ishihara and Ben/Al Kowalski. His uniformed escort saluted and left him alone in the room with an ascetically thin man wearing a light suit.

  “Sit down.” Sharpe sat on the hard chair facing the desk. It was just too close to the desk for comfort, but when he tried to move it back, he discovered it was fixed to the floor. Trying to settle himself into the chair, he also discovered that the front legs were somewhat shorter than the back legs, tending to pitch him forward, unless he braced himself, wedging his feet firmly against the floor. His thighs started to ache and his head was starting to hurt. The light was shining into his eyes. Just like all the bad films.

  “Passport, please.” Sharpe handed it over. It was examined briefly, some data entered on a laptop computer, and the passport then disappeared into a desk drawer.

  “Hey! Can I have that back, please?” What right had they to confiscate his passport? He was innocent of anything – except maybe failing to report a murderer who had killed in another country.

  The other held up a hand. “All in good time. Now, please describe to me what happened with the two men who held you up. I don’t want to know about the other man for now.

  Sharpe described the events in the hotel while the other tapped on the keyboard.

  “You seem to have been lucky, Mr Sharpe.”

  “I agree. I was quite scared, to be frank with you.”

  “Perfectly natural reaction, I would say. Is there any chance you would recognize these men again?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “All we Orientals look the same?” A smile that appeared to have some warmth behind it.

  “Of course not. I live in Japan, remember?”

  “Sorry. Have a quick look at these.” He turned the laptop so that Sharpe could see the screen, and started to display photos. Most of them seemed grainy and many of them were monochrome. Obviously not studio portraits, Sharpe thought to himself.

  Suddenly, “Stop!”