Rules of The Hunt f-2

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  "Boss!" shouted Fujiwara.

  Adachi looked up.

  Inspector Fujiwara was waving his telephone handset around and grinning. "Progress. We turned over the homes of all of Hodama's people, and we've hit pay dirt at Morinaga's."

  "Who the fuck is Morinaga?" said Adachi. He was tired and felt drowned in paper. Reports written on the heat-sensitive paper used by the built-in printers of the little word processors used throughout Japanese officialdom seemed to be curled up everywhere, interspersed with even curlier faxes. Adachi longed for good, old-fashioned plain paper. Apart from being horrible to handle, heat-sensitive paper had an annoying habit of fading when exposed to direct sunlight. He could just see the crucial report. "And the murderer is..." fading as he looked.

  "Harumi Morinaga was one of the Hodama bodyguards shot inside the house," said Fujiwara. "He took a burst in the torso and a couple in the neck. Kind of a slight physique for his line of work. Aged mid-twenties."

  Adachi flipped through the file. He knew most of the victims through the photos taken as they lay dead. They were the ones that left the most vivid impressions. Somehow, the pictures collected afterward of a victim while still alive seemed to have an air of unreality. The real thing, the most memorable image — the most recent picture — was that of the corpse. He nodded at Fujiwara as he found the bloody mess that had been Morinaga.

  "Morinaga's father," said Fujiwara, "was with Hodama for many years. Father and son, it appears, were estranged for a while. Father wanted son to work for Hodama and carry on the family tradition, and son wanted to go his own way. He went to work for one of the big corporations. Then, unexpectedly, he left the corporation, acceded to his father's wishes, and went to work for Hodama."

  Adachi nodded. They had expected an inside man. It was common in such killings, and there was the detail that the front gate had not been forced. Someone had given the intruders the combination — or they already knew the code.

  "We found young Morinaga's financial records," said Fujiwara. "He's been buying more on the stock market than he could ever afford from a bodyguard's salary — and there was over a million yen in cash in his apartment."

  Fujiwara was still grinning.

  "There's more?" said Adachi.

  "We found a nightclub receipt and a couple of cards in one of his suits. We went to the places concerned and had them identify Morinaga and the company he was with. Young Morinaga was out with some people from the Namaka Corporation."

  "Eenie, meenie, miney, mo!" said Adachi.

  "What does that mean?" said Inspector Fujiwara.

  "Damned if I know," said Adachi. "Let's grab a few of the boys and go have a beer."

  * * * * *

  Chifune lay concealed behind a pile of packing cases on the third floor of a warehouse near the Fish Market at the back of the Ginza, and reflected upon the psychology of informers.

  One of the packing cases held the pungent Vietnamese fermented fish sauce Nuoc Mam, and clearly a bottle or two had broken. The stuff stank. What the hell was wrong with good old-fashioned soy sauce? she wondered. The Japanese had the longest life span of any nationality, living proof that the traditional diet was superior.

  Strictly speaking — if you wanted to evaluate the pure functionality of the issue — it was scarcely ever necessary to actually meet an informant. Information could be communicated by phone, by radio phone, by fax, or even posted — and that was without the more exotic methods of communication beloved of spies: dead-letter boxes, loose bricks, hollow trunks of trees, and the like. If you were computer literate, you could even use CompuServe, for heaven's sake.

  No, the communication of information in itself did not require a meeting. It was the human element that dictated such an impractical, functionally unnecessary, and dangerous activity as a face-to-face encounter between informant and controller.

  In accordance with Koancho operating procedure, Chifune had been trained not only by Koancho themselves, but also be a designated foreign intelligence agency. Traditionally, the foreign agency of choice had been the CIA, but Japan's ever-growing economic success had fostered a desire to exert some degree of independence, and in the late sixties, America's — and the CIA's — prestige being at somewhat of a low point thanks to the Vietnam War, Koancho had started trolling the field. There was plenty of precedent for Japanese traveling abroad to pick up foreign expertise. The initial impetus for the success of the Japanese economy had come from exactly this approach.

  In the case of intelligence, Koancho hit pay dirt with Israel. Chifune's foreign training stint had been spent with Mossad, ‘the institute’ — in Hebrew, Ha Mossad, le Modiyn ve le Tafkidim Mayuhadim, the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.

  She had undertaken the arduous course at Mossad's training center north of Tel Aviv that produces the elite of highly effective katsas — case officers — which are the backbone of Israeli intelligence. Chifune's grandmother was Jewish, a fact known to Mossad, which played no small part in the care they put into her training.

  It was the Japanese side of her character that had Chifune waiting for a meeting with her informant. The Israelis had emphasized the inherent dangers and threats to security of such meetings, and had stressed that sheer logic dictated the importance of keeping such arrangements to a minimum. In contrast, her Japanese upbringing and even her Koancho training stressed the importance of ninjo, human feelings.

  Ninjo were fundamental in all human relationships, even between police and yakuza or in the grubby world of case officer and informer. Even in the deadly business of counterterrorism, in Japan there was a need to respect one's giri, or obligations. For her part, Chifune felt a strong sense of obligation toward her informants. This was sensed and normally returned, and the resulting bond helped greatly toward her operational effectiveness.

  The price she paid was that her life was not infrequently in danger. Her solution was her own personal version of ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick.’ She put a great deal of care into the preparations for every meeting and carried not a big stick, but her silenced Beretta.

  Unless there was a foolproof cover story, Chifune varied the location of each meeting with an informant and tried to make each meeting place a plausible scenario.

  In this case, her informant — code-named Iron Box — had a brother who was the accountant for the food importers who owned the warehouse and had his office in a partitioned-off area of the floor below. Accordingly, Iron Box had a solid reason for visiting the place, and right now, though the regular warehouse staff had gone home, her brother was working away downstairs on his abacus trying to reconcile stock. This was never an easy task where food was involved. The damn stuff was too portable and too easy to dispose of. The brother was convinced that packing cases of food had legs.

  Iron Box was a code name randomly selected by the Koancho computer, and by design it was singularly inappropriate for the slight, demure, and rather pretty twenty-seven-year-old medical receptionist, one Yuko Doi, that Chifune was waiting to meet.

  Miss Doi was also a terrorist, a member of a group known as The Cutting Edge of The Sword of the Right Hand of the Emperor — a name which did not roll easily off the lips, even in Japanese, and which was known as Yaibo — Japanese for ‘the cutting edge’ — for short. But Yaibo, despite their ridiculous name and rightist propaganda, was no laughing matter. It was the most effective Japanese terrorist group since the Red Army, and its specialty was assassination.

  Yaibo also operated a five-person cell structure and was exceedingly difficult to penetrate. Iron Box was something of a coup. She was a by-product of Yaibo's habit of conducting regular purges, of killing its own people who were suspected of being informers.

  Iron Box's lover had been just such a victim. He had been beaten to death over several days by her cell — including Iron Box herself — and the experience had dented her idealism. She had made a rather shaky call to the kidotai, the riot police who were in the front line of the battle agains
t terrorism as far as the media were concerned, and then the connection had been quietly handed over to Koancho.

  Slowly and carefully, Chifune shifted her location from the cover of the fish sauce to a pallet of bags of rice. Whatever the smell, the thought had occurred to her that if shit started to fly, the undoubtedly rice had better ballistic stopping properties than glass bottles of fish sauce. Better still, it was Japanese rice. Thanks to subsidies, it might be many times the world market price for rice, but every good Japanese knew it was superior.

  The elevator started to creak and groan. The warehouse floor was rectangular in shape, with the elevator and stairs located side by side to one end. Directly facing the elevator door, but to one side, Chifune was concealed. Her position gave her quick access to either the fire escape or the stairs if she had to make a run for it. Locating the fastest way to get the hell out was one of the first lessons you learned in training. Heroics were not encouraged.

  There was a rattle, a further series of groans, and a crash, and the doors of the goods elevator were open.

  Chifune's gaze was fixed on the opening. She was expecting Iron Box, dressed in her normal smart suit, too-high heels and crisp blouse, but it could be the night watchman up to check the stock and decide what to steal that night. Chifune had noticed in her reconnaissances that with typical Japanese modesty he limited himself to one case per night.

  The minimal warehouse lighting, presumably a gesture toward security, was provided by a series of low-power naked lightbulbs dangling above the intersections of pallets. The filthy ceiling of the room and the matte colors of the packing cases absorbed the light, and clear visibility was difficult.

  It was dawning on Chifune that she should have brought an image intensifier. Still, perfection was an aspiration, not a human characteristic. Instead she focused the EPC optical sight of her silenced Beretta on the elevator entrance, just as a small figure wearing either slacks or trousers stepped out and looked uncertainly from side to side.

  It was Iron Box. Chifune registered that fact just as the significance of the flared sighting dot in the sight hit home. The sighting dot reacted to infrared light. Someone was scanning the gloom with an invisible infrared beam — invisible except to someone with an infrared viewer or the EPC sight. Someone else, who wanted to be covert, was in the warehouse.

  Chifune tracked the source of the beam. Through the sight, it was like tracking a beam of light. Her gaze terminated at the crude wooden structure on top of the elevator shaft that housed the motor. She had considered that very hiding place herself, and she went cold at the thought. Her next question was, how did someone get up there without being seen by me?

  There were two alternatives: either the watcher had arrived before Chifune and knew the Koancho agent was there, or else the watcher, or watchers, had entered the small motor room directly from a roof trapdoor in the elevator. Chifune tried to remember if she had seen such a trapdoor and decided she had not. It was an old, crude installation dating back to the postwar building rush, by the looks of it, and constructed with scant regard for building regulations.

  Iron Box walked out hesitantly onto the warehouse floor, just as Chifune came to her disturbing conclusions. A split second later, flame flashed from the motor room, there was a hollow explosion, and almost immediately afterward, the Vietnamese fish sauce behind which she had been hiding exploded in a lethal mist of shrapnel and glass shards.

  The destruction was near total. Two seconds later, there was another flash and double explosion from the grenade launcher, and what was left of the warehouse's trial shipment of Vietnamese Nuoc Mam sauce was vaporized. Chifune flinched behind her rice as hot metal thudded into the rice sacks, and gagged at the smell. She was spotted from head to toe with the awful stuff.

  Iron Box was crouched on the floor, trying to take cover behind a pallet-load of drums of cooking oil. She was screaming, and oil was spewing from several of the drums where grenade fragments had penetrated.

  The access door of the elevator room flew open and three figures in black ski masks jumped down onto the main warehouse floor.

  Two figures with slung automatic weapons grabbed Iron Box. The third stood guard, a U.S.-made M16 automatic rifle fitted with an underbarrel grenade launcher in his hands.

  Chifune realized that she was supposed to be dead, and certainly it was not for lack of trying. Two M79 grenades against one slight Koancho case officer and a few cases of fish sauce was overkill. The explosions had blown out the lightbulbs in her section. She crouched down behind the rice bags, thankfully shielded by the darkness. One handgun against three automatic weapons was not good odds. It did not make sense to die for an informant.

  For a split second, Japanese giri and Israeli pragmatism fought a battle, and in the end sheer irritation at being fucked around by three goons won out. She heard a cry of fear and, looking over the top of her barrier, caught a glint of metal. Iron Box was struggling in one terrorist's hands, and he was pushing her onto her knees as the other raised a sword above his head. The third terrorist still kept a lookout, his weapon traversing the gloom of the warehouse as he scanned from side to side.

  Chifune placed the red dot on the third terrorist and fired four shots when the combination was pointed well away from her. In case he was wearing body armor, she aimed for his head, and all four rounds impacted. The grenade launcher exploded with its characteristic double blast, and a pallet of the local version of Scotch whisky at the other end of the warehouse went up in flames.

  Distracted by Chifune's attack, the terrorist with the sword looked away from his victim toward this new assailant, and Iron Box kicked him very hard in the balls.

  He doubled up in pain just in time to be missed by Chifune's next burst of fire. She swore and ducked down, as the remaining standing terrorist got his automatic weapon into play. Rice showered in the air. It was like a wedding.

  She sprinted a dozen paces to fresh cover, changing magazines as she ran, then rolled into the aisle and fired again in a long burst of aimed shots, just as Metsada, the action arm of Mossad responsible for the more direct approach, had trained her.

  The standing terrorist was ducking down to change magazines as she skidded on the cooking oil, invisible in the gloom. Her weapon slid under a pallet.

  The surviving terrorist had raised himself to his knees and now brought his katana down in a sweeping blow. Chifune just managed to roll to one side, but her left arm was gashed and she felt suddenly weak with shock.

  Iron Box cried out a long "Nooooo!" and then there was a dense dull sound as the terrorist's next blow cut down through the side of Iron Box's neck and on through her torso to terminate close to her pelvic bone. Nearly split in two, the informant, a look of horror on her face, slumped forward.

  The terrorist looked fascinated at her as she collapsed.

  Chifune picked up the fallen M16, switched the fire-selector switch to automatic, and with two bursts forming a rough Y, which she thought was appropriate, terminated the killer's short career as a swordsman.

  Flames were licking up the warehouse, the floor was slick with blood, and the smell of the slaughterhouse and burning whisky mixed with Vietnamese fermented fish sauce was indescribable.

  Iron Box had been due to tell Chifune about the involvement of Yaibo in a hit on an Irishman called Fitzduane. The terrorist group was indeed ‘The Cutting Edge,’ but the real issue had been who was wielding the blade. Chifune had her suspicions, but proof was in short supply.

  It did not look as if Iron Box was going to be of much assistance.

  7

  Connemara RegionalHospital

  January 31

  Fitzduane had worked out a routine which — as he thought of it — allowed the hospital ghouls to do their thing, and him to do his.

  In the morning he seemed to be an object for the medics to play with. He was woken at an ungodly hour, washed, fed, and otherwise got combat-ready, and then inspected.

  The inspection tended to be detail
ed. He now knew what a packaged chicken must feel like as it waited on a supermarket shelf. He was getting used to being poked, prodded, and otherwise examined in the most intimate ways. He felt like hanging a sign around his neck saying: "Despite a little wear and tear, I am a human being; I am not a dead chicken."

  Trying to persuade the medical profession to treat patients as real, thinking, sentient people seemed an unwinnable battle. Perhaps a doctor had to have a certain distance to survive mentally in the midst of a constant stream of damaged humanity. By thinking of yourself as separate — a different and superior life-form — you could fool yourself into thinking the same things you were witnessing daily couldn't happen to you.

  Well, that was his benevolent theory. It was suspect because the nursing staff — who worked in exactly the same environment — didn't conform. Almost without exception, they tended to be warm and caring, even when emptying bedpans.

  Lunch was early. After it he would sleep for a couple of hours. Then, refreshed, he would work or receive visitors until his evening meal. Again he would sleep for a few hours and then awake in the early hours, for what he was beginning to think of as the best part of the day. It was quiet. There were no distractions. He could think and plan. And there was Kathleen. He was growing very fond of Kathleen.

  The wall clock read 1:00 A.M.. The curtains, at his request, were only partially drawn, and the room was bathed in moonlight. The room was on the third floor and could not be looked into from the ground, but nonetheless this was a breach of security. Fitzduane knew it wasn't wise, but he found the confines of the hospital claustrophobic at times and he loved moonlight.

  Boots was asleep on a camp bed beside him. He lay sprawled on his back, one arm behind his head, his eyelashes long, his cheeks plump and full. His breathing was deep and regular. In Fitzduane's opinion, there was nothing more beautiful than a sleeping child — except his very own child.