by Taiyo Fujii
Shiraishi craned his neck. Through the line of trees swaying as one in the blizzard, by the side of the road he saw a green mountain bike approaching. The woman riding it had Asian features and a shaved head, and didn’t appear to be wearing anything warmer than a long-sleeved shirt.
“Shiraishi,” Chance said. “Down.”
Chance’s arm emerged from her coat pocket. Shiraishi saw a red dot appear on the step below him. The laser scope on the gun that was now fused with her hand.
“Think of it as encouragement,” Chance said, noticing Shiraishi’s nervous reaction.
The mountain bike attempted to make it over the planter at the rear of the warehouse and failed spectacularly, throwing its rider into a snowdrift. The woman got to her feet immediately and brushed the snow off her face. The red dot slipped off the staircase and darted across the ground toward her, crimson flickers appearing here and there in the falling snow. Finally reaching her, it drew a line across her path.
The woman froze for an instant, then began to run again.
“Uncle Ageha!” she called.
Akari?
Shiraishi tried to rise from his crouch, but Chance held his head down.
“The laser scope’s not scaring her off,” she said. “Japanese, I presume? Who is she?”
What was Akari doing in a place like this? As he watched her approach, Shiraishi suddenly realized why Meteor News had been so overengineered—and why he had been tracked down so quickly. He had been up against a former coconspirator, a hacker he himself had shown the ropes to.
“Akari! Stay out of this!” Ageha called.
The red dot moved from Akari’s feet to her thighs.
“Don’t shoot her,” he said to Chance. “Please.”
Shiraishi reached above his head to grip Chance’s arm. For a moment, his vision blurred white, and he felt a series of blows to his back. His ankle made an awful sound as it caught on one of the stairs.
He turned his head to look at Chance, now upside-down from his perspective. She had kicked him down the stairs. Without lowering her gun, she descended the snow-thick stairs after him, surprisingly agile for a woman in heels.
Shiraishi saw the blueprint case lying nearby and pulled it toward him. He raised his head. Akari was already close enough for him to read her face clearly.
The gun rang out: a small, dry sound. Chance had fired it into the warehouse wall. A large piece of the snow-caked exterior fell away, sending up a plume of sparks and snow right before Akari’s eyes.
Surprised, Akari came to a halt. The red dot moved to her chest.
“Freeze!”
Chance grabbed Shiraishi by the collar and dragged him to his feet. Shiraishi cried out in pain as his ankle twisted.
“An associate of yours, I gather,” Chance said. “If she doesn’t get in our way, I won’t have to kill her. Consider this the last favor I grant you.” Chance glanced down at Shiraishi’s twisted ankle. “Can’t run?”
Shiraishi shook his head.
Chance tsked. Seeing Akari approach, she shouted, “Don’t move!” and fired into the ground at Akari’s feet before opening the warehouse door. The stink of gasoline came from within.
“Wait until the service entrance at the far end opens,” she said to Ageha. “Then come out that way. I’ll bring the car around. Meanwhile, no open flames of any kind inside the warehouse. The sprinkler system is full of gasoline, and I’m going to activate it just before I open the shutters at the service entrance. A moment after that, I’ll be lighting it up. If you’d rather not burn to a cinder, wait inside the container.”
Chance turned her gaze to the blueprint case under Shiraishi’s arm.
“I’d appreciate it if you could arrange for that case to be lost in the fire, too,” she said.
Shiraishi clung to the case tightly. Losing it would leave him with no other reason to keep running.
Chance wrapped her arm around his head and pulled him toward her. Her strength was startling. He smelled the familiar scent of her perfume blended with sweat.
“If Akari’s lucky, she’ll survive. Understood?”
Shiraishi nodded.
He turned and hobbled back inside the warehouse, dragging his injured foot. Chance closed the door behind him. The warehouse was illuminated only by what little sunlight fell through the skylight. Shiraishi headed for the container located in the middle of the echoing space.
If Akari was here, that meant that Kazumi had informed NORAD, too. No doubt the CIA would soon be along as well. If Shiraishi was captured, the space tether technology he had brought into being would be picked apart and then put to some practical use by the US—or, worse yet, by some US corporation. People like Ronnie Smark would adopt the new technology greedily. His daughter’s blog had made that much clear just the other day.
The rest of the world would be forgotten, left to fall even further behind.
Shiraishi crawled into the windowless container as Chance had ordered and sat on a D-Fi package with his sketch case on his lap. The slogan written in white marker leaped out at him as his eyes adjusted to the dark:
great leap for the rest of the world
He had to succeed.
“If even someone like me can reach out and touch space, anything’s possible.”
He needed to prepare the way for someone else to take control of the Cloud. Just in case.
Shiraishi searched his memory for a certain email address and began to compose a message.
Chahar-shambeh, 26 Azar 1399, 23:52 +0330
(2020-12-16T20:22 GMT)
Esperanto Hotel, Tehran
There was a muffled buzzing and a faint but familiar melody. An angular xylophone tune. The ringtone heard around the world.
Kurosaki felt his unshaven cheek scrape the pillow as he moved his head. He frowned and forced open his gummed-shut eyes. He saw raised embroidery on the wallpaper, which looked unnaturally thick in the warm light of the floor lamp. He tried to open his mouth, but his lips were stuck together as well. By his bedside he saw a glass of water. That was something to be grateful for.
Kurosaki reached for the glass and drank the water down in one gulp. That was when he noticed the neatly handwritten note:
unboiled water to keep air from drying out—do not drink!
The handwriting was Sekiguchi’s.
“Idiot … Of course I was going to drink it. Use mineral water next time, would you?”
Kurosaki’s head still felt fuzzy. He needed more sleep. What had woken him up this time?
“Oh, right. The phone.”
The ringtone just now had been his.
Kurosaki sat up and looked around the room again. The wallpaper was covered in ethnic embroidery, but it was a perfectly modern hotel room. Beside the desk he saw Sekiguchi’s suit and the field coat he had worn in the van yesterday. Both hung from clothes hangers, looking like servants standing at attention.
At some point Kurosaki himself had been changed into some kind of hotel nightgown. His skin was clean. Someone must have given him a sponge bath and put him to bed. In the bed alongside his own he saw Sekiguchi, lying with his face to the wall.
Kurosaki had fallen asleep while talking to Sekiguchi in the van after folding the flag and putting it in a bag. He could still feel how rough those Iranian cigarettes had been on his throat—uh-oh. Now he desperately wanted one. There was an ashtray on the desk. Must be a smoking room. Didn’t see many of those in Japan these days.
“Pay you back later, Sekiguchi,” Kurosaki muttered. As he recalled, those Iranian cigarettes had gone back into Sekiguchi’s pocket. He slid his feet into a pair of soft leather slippers complete with heels and padded over to Sekiguchi’s suit.
Reaching into the pocket, his fingertips brushed a scrap of thin paper. The cigarettes must be in the field coat.
For no reason in
particular, he snagged the scrap of paper with his fingers and pulled it out. What he saw made him draw in his breath sharply.
中华人民共和国外交行李票
They were somewhat different from the Chinese characters used in Japan but were similar enough to be legible:
People’s Republic of China - Baggage Tag
A red rectangle with yellow stars was printed in the top-right corner—the national flag of China. This must be what Sekiguchi had torn off the duralumin cases and stuffed into his pocket after picking up the Iridiums at the airport.
“Diplomatic privilege,” Kurosaki murmured. “So that’s how you got them into Iran.”
The way Sekiguchi had detected and outsmarted the spy at Fool’s Launchpad. The suite at the Nippon Grand. The chartered helicopter, the fluent Persian, the advance knowledge of an attempted takeover by antigovernment groups of a student demonstration in Tehran … It was just too much to accept as the work of a mere bureaucrat, no matter how elite.
Sekiguchi was a Chinese spy.
He heard the xylophone tune again. His phone.
Sekiguchi sat up. “Good morning. Did you sleep well? Ah—your phone’s ringing. It’s in the pocket of your suit, in the closet.”
“Forget the phone,” Kurosaki said. “You—you’re …” He unfolded the baggage tag again and held it up.
“Busted!” Sekiguchi said, slapping his forehead and falling back onto the bed. “You’ve got me. I was planning to tell you on the way home. Anyway, go ahead and take that call. It’s probably urgent.”
“We’ll be having a long talk about this later,” Kurosaki said. He opened the black lacquered doors of the closet to reveal his wrinkled suit. Rummaging through the pockets, he produced his cigarettes and lighter first, then his phone, which had already stopped ringing. He unlocked the screen and checked the call history. Two calls from Kazumi in Seattle.
“Kazumi,” he said. “Want to hear the voice message?”
Sekiguchi nodded. Kurosaki set the phone to speaker and played back the message from Kazumi.
“Kurosaki-san! I’m looking at Shiraishi right now. You have to help persuade him to cut his ties with North Korea. Please call me back on video.”
Kurosaki stared at the screen. With Shiraishi? Wasn’t he supposed to be in China?
He was about to tap the button to call Kazumi back when Sekiguchi leaped to his feet.
“Not a voice call!” Sekiguchi said. “It has to be video, or we won’t be able to see what’s going on over there.”
Kurosaki tapped the video-call button instead. After the whistle announcing the connection, the screen showed a mass of white. Snow.
“Shirashi-san!” they heard Kazumi yell in Japanese. “Open the door!”
“Step aside, Kazumi.” A man’s voice they didn’t recognize, speaking in English. “I’ll break us in.”
There was a sharp, metallic report, and after some confusion a dim room appeared on-screen. A woman in cargo pants with a shaved head—Akari—ran across their field of view.
“Uncle Ageha!”
“Please come out, Shiraishi-san. We just want to talk.”
The picture shook again. They saw a carelessly stacked pile of boxes. Containers, a crane. Kazumi was in a warehouse.
“Looks like things are heating up there,” Sekiguchi said. He stripped off his own hotel nightgown and grabbed his coat from the hanger rack. “Let’s put it up on the TV. I’ll turn the lights on.”
Sekiguchi picked up Kurosaki’s smartphone and connected it to the television with a cable he pulled from his suitcase. He then carefully set the phone at the right angle for the two of them to appear in the video call.
Kurosaki watched impatiently. “We don’t have time for—”
“It won’t do any good to get excited,” Sekiguchi said. “Our job right now is to stay calm and back Kazumi up.” He zipped up his coat and dragged the sofa over in front of the television. “Unlike them, we aren’t in any danger of getting shot. So let’s stay calm.”
“Shot?”
“We don’t know if Shiraishi has a gun or not. Either way, though, there’s bound to be someone with a gun watching over him. You’d better get dressed. There’s probably time for a cigarette too.”
Sekiguchi took another coat from the hanger rack and tossed it to Kurosaki.
“The battlefield’s over there now.”
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 12:23 -0800 (2020-12-16T20:23 GMT)
Pier 37 Warehouse, Seattle
Chance raised her collar to protect her eyes from the pelting snow and crouched behind the planter. She looked back and forth between the service entrance Shiraishi was supposed to emerge from and the parking lot in front of the building that she had just circled back around. The falling snow began accumulating on her right side almost immediately.
The Porsche Cayenne they would use to make their escape was parked beyond the two trucks in front of the service entrance. Shifting her position, Chance noticed an air force–blue Chevy wagon stopped next to the Cayenne. Tsk. It must have rolled up just moments before. There was no snow covering the white star painted on its hood yet. NORAD, then.
That woman who had arrived by bicycle—Akari—was no longer the sole obstacle to their escape. Chance searched her memory map for Akari’s full name. There it was: Akari Numata. Quite a coincidence. How unlucky could one man be? Chased down in a foreign country by someone who knew him personally!
Not that Chance was doing much better in the luck department. If a man was in the picture as well now, he might be able to break the door to the warehouse she’d stowed Shiraishi in.
Chance went over the escape plan in her head once more. She would use the smartphone in her left hand to activate the service entrance shutter and the ignition inside the warehouse. When the building caught fire and Shiraishi came hobbling out on his bad leg, she would pull him to the Cayenne by his left arm. Akari and whoever was here from NORAD would be sure to give chase. If she used her gun to keep them at bay, she would run out of free hands. That meant that she needed to unlock the Cayenne now, while she still could.
As Chance rummaged in her pocket for the remote control, another problem occurred to her: that black man who had been flying down Alaskan Way at ridiculous speeds in his Mustang. There was no question that he had looked directly at her. He must have been headed for the coast guard base between this pier and the next one.
Chance rose slightly and turned her head from side to side. She was just in time to see two figures running toward the warehouse from Alaskan Way. Both were carrying M4 carbines.
The black man was in the lead, still wearing the same inappropriate suit but with a helmet on now too. Probably a CIA agent, Chance surmised, but she did note that the brisk pace he kept up through the snow in his combat boots suggested some experience under fire.
The other man followed closely behind. He was wearing body armor and a fluorescent harness. This was the coast guard, then. He was just as sure on his feet as the other. The two of them exchanged hand signals and dropped into crouches, advancing in alternation toward the warehouse a few yards at a time to minimize the amount of time each of them was exposed.
“Just great,” Chance murmured.
Both men were armed professionals. Even one of them would have posed a threat to Chance, who was carrying only a pistol.
Squinting against the snow, Chance watched their route and hand signals closely. The CIA agent pointed at the trucks in front of the warehouse’s service entrance and raised two fingers. They would split up and go around the vehicles separately.
The trucks were ten meters away. If Chance ran, she would get there first. If she could put one of them out of action, her escape would be certain. Both, and she could take Shiraishi with her.
Chance waited for the exact moment that the two men disappeared behind the trucks, then leaped out from
behind the planter.
Her target was the coast guard sailor bringing up the rear. She opened the front of her coat and tore open her shirt, letting the buttons pop off. Snowflakes fell on her chest.
“Help!” she cried.
Carefully timing her move, Chance ran around the corner and threw herself on the coast guard sailor’s chest. She quickly read his name tag: a. nash.
“Nash, look! Over there!”
Nash was so taken aback that he turned unthinkingly to look where Chance was pointing.
Chance darted around behind him as if cowering from some enemy. As she clung to him with her left arm, she searched the nape of his neck, his shoulders, and his lower back for seams in his body armor.
Nash tilted his head back, still looking where she’d pointed, and asked, “What am I looking at?”
“Inside the shutters! Look!”
Nash looked at the service entrance again. Chance jammed her pistol into his side and pulled the trigger.
There was a muffled crack, and Nash’s whole body shook. The reduced-powder hollow-point .45 round had made mincemeat of his insides, then hit his body armor and stopped, just as Chance had planned. On a snowy battlefield, a spurt of enemy blood could be the giveaway that ended your own life. She didn’t want the CIA agent in the suit to realize that his companion from the coast guard was dead. When pressed directly against a human target, her SIG with its resinous modifications was even quieter than it would have been with a silencer. Out in the open during a snowstorm, the noise was unlikely to have carried to the far side of the trucks.
She reached from behind to grasp Nash’s neck warmer and pulled it up to cover the bloody foam coming from his mouth. Then she lowered his body to the ground and leaned him against one of the truck’s tires, carefully arranging him on one knee to look as though he were still providing covering fire. Finally, she hid behind him and waited.
No sooner had she concealed herself than the CIA agent appeared at the other end of the truck. He flattened his back against the wall of the warehouse and gestured: Come. Chance carefully took hold of Nash’s sleeve and raised his arm. This was the army hand signal for Understood. The snow was falling thick and fierce in front of the warehouse where the agent stood; at a glance, he would not notice her lurking behind his companion.