Rules of The Hunt f-2

by VICTOR O'REILLY

  The Eel, sounding immensely relieved, gave Adachi instructions and hung up.

  Adachi contemplated his next move. Up to the Fujiwara business, he would have telephoned for someone in the squad to drive him over and provide backup if need be. Now he hesitated. Suppose there was another leak. The investigation was still ongoing. There was no one he could trust absolutely.

  He settled for calling a uniformed patrol. They could drive him up and wait outside while he spoke to the Eel. That would keep the contact secure while providing some backup on call if needed.

  He checked his weapon and then looked at the tapes. He did not feel safe leaving them anywhere. Then his eye caught the hideous parrot alarm clock given to him by Chifune. He opened up the back and slid out the battery pack. There was room. He inserted the eight microcassettes and replaced the batteries. Now, who would think of searching a parrot?

  His door buzzer sounded and he looked out the window. The reassuring sight of a Tokyo MPD patrol car was below. "I'll be right down," he said into the door intercom.

  This is turning out to be an extraordinary day, he thought to himself, as he descended the stairs. He thought again of the Eel hiding in the darkened aquarium with nothing but twenty thousand fish for company and laughed out loud.

  He was still laughing when the policeman showed him into the back of the patrol car with a sharp salute, then leaped into the driver's seat to await instruction.

  "SunshineCity," said Adachi, trying to control his mirth, and then the thought of the Eel and his fishy companions hit him again and he roared with laughter.

  He was still smiling when he reached his destination. He had not felt so good in years.

  22

  Tokyo, Japan

  July 10 – 11

  The telephone seemed to explode in Fitzduane's ear. Muzzy from being arbitrarily awoken from a deep and satisfying sleep, he looked at the bedside clock. It was 2:20 A.M.

  The telephone erupted again. As he picked it up, there was a banging on the door. He ignored the door while his caller spoke. Thirty seconds later, he replaced the receiver slowly in a state of deep shock.

  The banging on the door continued. It was forceful but polite and very much in the style of Sergeant Oga. Fitzduane opened the door. "I'll be down in five minutes, Sergeant-san," he said to Oga, then closed the door and headed for the shower. He allowed himself two minutes of icy water under full pressure and then dressed.

  The roads were quiet as, lights flashing, the convoy containing Fitzduane headed toward SunshineCity and its centerpiece, the NamakaTower. No one in the car said anything. Fitzduane felt sick inside.

  Access to the complex had been cordoned off. There were dozens of uniformed police there, and some wore the distinctive paramilitary uniform of the antiterrorist riot police, the Kidotai, and carried automatic weapons.

  Chifune arrived as they were about to ascend in the elevator. Fitzduane touched her briefly on the arm in a gesture of support, and their eyes met. For a moment, Chifune's guard was down, and then the elevator doors opened and some police he did not know entered with them, and her formality and mask returned.

  Much of the aquarium had been taped off, and inside the cordon a white-overalled scene-of-crime team was at work.

  They were guided outside the tape to a small group, and as the new arrivals approached, Fitzduane saw the Spider and Yoshokawa-san and a tall, distinguished-looking man in his sixties who looked familiar but whom he did not know. All three men were in evening dress, and then Fitzduane remembered Yoshokawa's saying something about a formal dinner of Gamma's ruling council. As he made the connection, he realized who the third man must be: Adachi's father.

  The Spider made the introductions. He looked devastated. There was little trace of the imperturbable Deputy Superintendent-General here. His normally slicked-back hair was tousled, and shock and grief were etched into his face.

  The Spider acted as their guide. He took them past the cashier's office to where the fish tanks started.

  The floor was slick with fresh blood. There was so much of it, the atmosphere reeked.

  First there was an immense irregular pool of thick crimson, with a pile of what looked like blood-soaked clothing to one side. Then a long, broad streak indicated where something had been dragged toward some tanks in the farther distance.

  Floodlights had been brought in to supplement the aquarium's normal lighting, and shoals of multicolored fish of every shape and size swirled and pirouetted and flashed and glinted in the unaccustomed glare.

  Bloody footprints marked other parts of the floor.

  "We can reconstruct what happened, I think," said the Spider. "Adachi-san was going to meet an informant, a man with criminal connections known as the Eel. Adachi-san entered the aquarium, and as he turned the corner here" — he pointed at the pool of blood — "he was struck by an assailant with a sword. The blow split his skull and cut deep into his body, killing him instantly. He was then struck a second time. This second blow was not necessary, but it was made, I surmise, as a gesture of contempt for the victim. It opened up his torso down to the groin. Effectively, it eviscerated him.

  "Next, Adachi-san's clothing was removed and his body dragged to the fish tank across there." He pointed again.

  Fitzduane, fighting hard to suppress nausea, walked to the tank and looked through the glass.

  The water inside was pink and streaked with long strands of crimson. In it, Adachi's naked body was suspended like some giant medical specimen in a container. Entrails drifted from it. As Fitzduane watched, the body moved slightly in the current of the oxygenating system.

  It was without question one of the most horrific sights he had seen in his life. It was the stuff of the worst nightmares, and it was real.

  This man had been his friend. He wanted to cry out loud.

  Chifune stood beside him, her face immobile, and then she swayed. Fitzduane caught her as she crumpled. He held her, and she seemed to regain strength. Her face was a mask.

  Fitzduane, with Chifune at his side, waked back to where the Spider and Adachi's father stood. "How do you know about the Eel?" he said.

  The Spider made a gesture toward the farther recesses of the aquarium. "We found the Eel back there," he said, in a voice of barely controlled rage. "One of my officers knew he was an informant. He had been shot once in the head. No evisceration, no removal of clothes, no fish tank. That charade was reserved for the superintendent. The informant, having lured Adachi-san to his death, was merely executed. He had outlived his usefulness."

  "Why was Adachi-san stripped?" said Fitzduane, and then answered his own question. "They were looking for something. The question is — did they find it?"

  "I have already ordered the superintendent-san's apartment sealed," said the Spider. He looked at Chifune. "Tanabu-san, I would appreciate it if you would search it first. You knew him well."

  Chifune nodded in acknowledgment, and then the Spider indicated that Fitzduane should go too. Help her, help us, the Spider's eyes pleaded.

  Aware that time was critical, they made it to Adachi's apartment in less than twenty minutes. There was a police guard on the door when they arrived, but as soon as they ascended the stairs and entered Adachi's living room, they knew they were too late.

  The apartment had been methodically ripped apart. The systematic nature of the destruction made it seem, for some reason, even more distressing. This was not the casual vandalism of a burglar. This was the cold-blooded clinical dissection of their victim's home.

  Walls and ceilings had been opened up and the wood and plaster swept into tidy piles. All the furniture had been taken apart and the pieces stacked. The floor had been raised. Electronic equipment had been taken apart. All bedding and clothing had been slashed open and cut up and then stacked.

  Chifune surveyed the damage as if mesmerized, then suddenly darted into the bedroom. "I know where," she said. "I know what he would have done."

  Fitzduane followed her slowly into the bed
room, respectful of the fact that he was an intruder, but also wanting to give support. In truth, he could have done with a friendly shoulder himself.

  The implacability of these people was terrifying. Always they seemed to be one step ahead. Steadily, their pursuers, despite all their resources, were being whittled down. One of the most powerful men in Japan had been murdered and the bloody trail of death never seemed to stop. Their opponents were people who considered themselves above the rule of law. Adachi, a senior officer of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, had been slain with contempt. No one was safe.

  Chifune gave a cry of anguish and then fell to her knees, her hands scrabbling for something. Pieces of multicolored plastic were thrown up on the bed and then she started to arrange them, crying softly all the while. The shape of a parrot emerged, and then Fitzduane could see that it was a clock. A rather ugly clock.

  Chifune looked up at him and gestured wordlessly at the pieces of the clock, and Fitzduane understood. The attackers had got everything. Whatever was hidden in the parrot was long gone. Every facet of Adachi's life seemed to have been ravaged. He had been killed, stripped, eviscerated as if in an abattoir, and then his home and his personal possessions had been destroyed. He had not just been killed. He was being erased. His killers were without pity, arrogant beyond belief.

  Fitzduane took Chifune in his arms and held her. With her defenses down, she felt slight and vulnerable. At first she just pressed against him, seeking reassurance from the warmth of his body, and then she started to shake and sob, and then terrible anguished cries came out of her.

  Fitzduane held her and stroked her, and long minutes passed and then it was over. She pulled away and then kissed him on the forehead and went into the bathroom to wipe her eyes.

  The Spider and Yoshokawa stood in the living room when Fitzduane came out. Clearly they had been there for a little time. Both wore expressions of concern and grief.

  "Tanabu-san?" said the Spider.

  "She'll be..." Fitzduane started to say, and then realized that he did not know what to add except platitudes. This was a wound that ran very deep. Chifune was as resilient as anyone he had ever met, but this was something, he felt, against which she had no defenses. This was the death of someone she had loved. She would not recover from this loss easily. Nor was it something she would ever forget.

  Chifune emerged from the bathroom, her face washed and her composure restored, and only spots of water on her blouse betraying her recent outburst.

  The four stood there in the wrecked room and there was an awkward silence, and then the Spider started to speak. Fitzduane held up his hand for silence. In it was a plaster-covered, miniature black rectangle with a hair-thin wire protruding from it.

  The Spider, puzzled for a moment, put on his reading glasses and took the small object and examined it more closely. Almost immediately, he gave a nod of comprehension.

  They left the bugged apartment and by mutual agreement headed immediately to police headquarters. It was now after four in the morning, and the streets of Tokyo were as quiet as they ever get. It started to rain, and that added to the somber mood.

  Chifune stared straight ahead as Fitzduane drove, but her hand rested on his thigh, not in a sexual gesture, but merely as if to seek reassurance. From time to time, she shivered. Fitzduane glanced at her with concern, debating whether he should stop the car and put his jacket around her, but the journey was short and soon she would be in warmth again.

  They assembled in the Spider's office around the huge conference table, and tea and other refreshments were brought. The Spider also poured four large brandies. Chifune demurred at first but then drank, and some color came back into her cheeks.

  It was strange, Fitzduane thought, that although there had been no discussion of why they had assembled, all knew why they were there. Adachi's death had marked a turning point. There was now a common imperative for immediate and drastic action. Adachi's death was not going to go unavenged. It was not merely a police matter. It was personal.

  The Spider began the discussion. "Adachi-san and I met yesterday," he said heavily, "and I think you should know what transpired."

  "The superintendent was determined to solve the Hodama murders. He clung to this objective, despite all else."

  "Immediately following the Hodama killings, the evidence pointed toward the Namaka brothers. First of all, a Namaka identity pin was found in the cauldron itself, and then a series of other clues were discovered, all of which pointed towards the Namakas. The puzzle was the motive. Hodama was the Namaka's political mentor and had been such for many decades, so why would they turn on him after all this time? And then some tapes were found and they purported to show that there had been a falling-out between Hodama and the brothers and that he was going to abandon them politically.

  "On the face of it, the steady buildup of evidence against the Namakas was damning, but Adachi-san was not convinced. Instinct is an important part of a good detective's skills, and Adachi-san's instincts told him that something was wrong. He would have been delighted to bring down the Namakas, but he felt that, paradoxically, the one crime they were innocent of was the Hodama affair.

  "The aspect of the case that caused Adachi-san most concern was the manner of Hodama-san's death. Of course, the method could have been an attempt to confuse the investigators, but overall, murder by boiling someone while still alive was such a horrible technique that the superintendent felt it must be personal and that the true motive for the killing was revenge.

  "A great many people had reason to be revenged on Hodama-san, of course, but Adachi-san focused on the flaws, in the chain of evidence involving the Namakas, as he saw them. Investigation here showed a common denominator. In virtually every case, there was a Korean connection. Eventually, it looked to the superintendent as if a Korean or someone with strong Korean connections was behind the hit. Accordingly, he narrowed his search to looking for such a person or organization who might harbor a grudge against Hodama, even from many years ago. He further qualified that by looking for some particularly vicious incident. Some action that would result in a response as excessive as that meted out to Hodama-san.

  "Adachi-san's search was not easy. The postwar period was a confused time, and initial record-keeping left much to be desired. Additionally, Hodama was rarely involved directly in violence. Almost always, it was his practice to have such acts carried out by intermediaries, and, of course, in the early postwar years his favorite enforcers were the Namakas. Later on, the Namakas also became too respectable for much direct involvement and they, too, started to use someone else for their dirty work.

  "The superintendent was eventually pointed towards Katsuda and his organization, when an elderly sergeant he had worked under told him the story of a rival Korean gang being burned to death by the Namakas at Hodama's instigation. This was the kind of crime Adachi-san was looking for. Here was the motive, and it came clearer when it transpired that a survivor of that Korean gang, Katsuda-san himself, was now running the second-largest yakuza gang in Japan. In other words, Katsuda not only had the motive but he also had the means. The Hodama attack smacked of a well-drilled yakuza operation, the kind that only one of the larger organized-crime groups could mount. Naturally, the Namakas could have carried out such an exercise, too, but at least Adachi-san now had another suspect and one that, in his judgment, made more sense.

  "The superintendent's suspicion of Katsuda was further reinforced when an informant, generally known as the Eel and an expert in some of the murkier depths of the financial world, told Adachi-san that a major move against the Namakas was being made by various institutions backed by Katsuda. Of course, it could have been coincidence or Katsuda merely seizing the opportunity to avail himself of the power vacuum caused by Hodama's death, but all in all it seemed to Adachi-san on the balance of probability that Katsuda was the man. Apart from anything else, further investigation revealed that the scale of the financial assault on the Namakas could not have been
mounted without considerable preparation, arguably a matter of months, and yet these moves by Katsuda were initiated within hours of Hodama's death.

  "Suspecting Katsuda and proving it were two different things. Of course, Katsuda could theoretically have been arrested and subjected to interrogation, but, frankly, with his political backing — and I include here the Minister of Justice, who receives handsome campaign contributions from him — such interrogation was not possible.

  "As any good policeman does, Adachi-san went over the case file and other evidence again and again. Previously, he had had some success in enlarging the Hodama security videos. There he was convinced that the evidence he had uncovered was planted, but in subsequent viewings he concentrated on the other figures."

  Here the Spider smiled. "Adachi-san made the perceptive observation that it is a natural human tendency to focus on movement, on the action, if you will. This time he studied every figure individually, regardless of whether that figure was doing anything significant or not. He came to an interesting conclusion. One of the figures was a gaijin" — the Spider looked apologetically at Fitzduane — a foreigner."

  "I saw the video," said Fitzduane. "The attackers all wore suits and were masked. How could he possibly tell?"

  The Spider felt very proud of Adachi. The Spider was a self-made man and the organization that had given him his opportunity was the Tokyo MPD, so he took a strong personal interest in the achievements of its personnel. Superintendent Adachi, he felt, was in the tradition of its very finest.

  "It has to do with body language," said the Spider. "The superintendent examined the video enlarged and in the minutest detail. From it, he could see clearly that there was a leader and a group of subordinates. The leader was easy to pick out, and in contrast his men stood and moved in a particular way. Let me summarize it. Their demeanor, through how they stood and held their hands and numerous other small signs, conveyed respect. It demonstrated the natural ranking that underpins this society. Except for this man."