“A bug scanner?” Craven said.
“That’s most likely how they found it. We initially assumed they had come here for business reasons—money laundering, drugs, human trafficking—so we didn’t think a clock was ticking. When they disappeared, we began to think we might be wrong. Since then, we’ve been trying to pick up their trail before calling Oscar.”
The clock on the wall threw seconds into the room.
“As it turned out, a clock was ticking, and last night the bomb went off as a kamikaze run. So now I need Oscar’s help to find them as well as track them.”
“They’ll be armed,” someone said.
“We’ll need an ERT package.”
“The call’s already gone out, Chief,” Craven replied.
If ever there was a throwback to the last frontier, it was Sgt. Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski. As the son of a Yukon trapper, he could take the eye out of a squirrel with a .22 at one hundred feet before he was six. Now when he went hunting on his days off, it was for elk on Pink Mountain or grizzly bears at Kakwa River. On days at work in the city, he hunted for bigger game, like punks threatening standoffs against the emergency response team. In this age of modern redcoats recruited from universities, the Mad Dog harked back to that era when hard-knuckled, sharp-shooting action men policed the wilderness from the vantage point of a saddle. With jet black hair and eyebrows, a droopy mustache, and a permanent scowl, he was the cop DeClercq used to answer the age-old question, “What does the rational man do when confronted by the barbarian?”
He fights fire with fire.
He unleashes the Mad Dog.
Before the phone had finished its first ring, Rabidowski was wide awake.
“Uh-huh?” he grunted into the receiver, hoping not to disturb his sleeping wife.
Having listened to the caller, he swung out of bed, wrapped a robe around his muscular frame, and padded off down the hall to the guest bedroom. The second the door cracked open, Ghost Keeper snapped awake too. Yesterday, they had decided they would take the Cree’s birthday gift—the SIG nine mil—to the range for an early morning shoot, so he had bedded down here.
“Shoot’s off,” the sergeant said. “That plane that crashed into the pier? Oscar just called, requesting an ERT package. Time to mount up.”
Robert DeClercq made a point of never—repeat never—eating breakfast in a joint that wasn’t one of a kind. He was making a valiant last stand against franchising, a battle that was about as winnable as Custer’s last stand. At least he knew that he wouldn’t be served rubber eggs or that slop they make with synthetic stuff. He was at an age when he viewed life as too short not to demand the little joys of existence, like food that a chef cooked just for you.
Call him a rebel.
“Thanks for meeting me so early.”
“I’m an early riser,” said Yamada, the diplomat who had warned Special X that Genjo Tokuda had brought his gang to Vancouver.
Despite its unappetizing name, the Greasy Spoon was DeClercq’s favorite morning eatery. It was a typical mom-and-pop establishment, except that mom and pop were a pair of gay men. Pop—he was actually dubbed that—whipped up gourmet fare in the kitchen while Mom—he was dubbed that too—worked the front room, berating diners who didn’t eat every scrap on their plates. Politically correct the Greasy Spoon wasn’t; instead, it offered a flamboyant shtick that worked all the way to the bank. Even at this early hour, “the Spoon” was packed.
“You didn’t bring your ‘sister’?” asked DeClercq.
“She’s at the consulate, waiting for instructions. The message you left with our answering service said that you require a new memorandum of understanding from Tokyo, ASAP.”
“I do.”
“So she’s ready to process it.”
“Hello, handsome,” said Mom, sashaying up to the table as fey as could be. “And who’s this sexy bugger? In case you want to know, I get off at three.”
“That’s soliciting.”
“So what’ll you have?”
“The blueberry pancake.”
“Oooo, sidestep the question.” Mom rolled his eyes.
“Pancake?” said Yamada.
“They’re huge,” cautioned DeClercq.
“How huge?”
“This huge,” interjected Mom, reaching down to give DeClercq’s waist a gentle pinch. “You have to pass a chub test before I’m allowed to place the order.”
“Don’t order the breakfast sausage,” warned the chief.
“You’re testing me, aren’t you?” said Yamada.
“How so?” asked DeClercq.
“Choosing this place for breakfast.”
“It serves the best eye-opener in town, and we both have to eat.”
“You think I’m a buttoned-down diplomat with Japan’s obsessive-compulsive focus on cleanliness.”
“You won’t find a restaurant cleaner than this.”
“It’s run by gays, and gays help make up its clientele.”
“So?”
“So you wonder if I’ll be afraid of the cutlery. Or worried about the health of the chef.”
“That would be Machiavellian. Why would I do that?”
“For the same reason I called Lynda West my sister when we met in your office the other day.”
“Your half-sister,” said DeClercq.
“I was testing your reaction. Your gullibility.”
“To see if I was a flat-foot who would dismiss it as beyond the realm of possibility? Your father was an American occupier posted to Japan. So was Lynda West’s. But what are the chances of one man fathering both a mixed-race diplomat and a white woman who end up working in the same consulate?”
“Not too slim?”
“No,” said DeClercq. “It’s not impossible for that to be the reality behind your so-called joke. Before dismissing it, I’d need to know if there were facts you were hiding from me.”
Yamada bowed slightly. “But why test you?” the diplomat asked.
“To see if I’m sharp enough to deal with Tokuda.”
“And why test me?”
“To see how diplomatic you are. How expedient. To test if you’re Machiavellian enough to help me deal with Tokuda.”
Yamada bowed again.
“We see eye to eye, Chief Superintendent. This restaurant reflects the real world, not some germ neurosis. So you will see me eat breakfast as heartily as you.”
“That’s diplomatic.”
“And expedient.”
“Because the Special External Section handles all cases with links outside this country, political wrangling is a major part of my job. When something goes wrong, there’s always finger pointing, so memorandums of understanding are how I cover my ass.”
“Of course. MOUs are shields.”
“I have an MOU from you that covers the GPS tracker. Japan’s jurisdiction over it ends at Canada’s border, but technically, this was still a Japanese intelligence file. In a run-of-the-mill case, we’d have tracked Tokuda on the sly until he left Canada, and he would never have known that we were on his tail.”
“Was a Japanese intelligence file?” Yamada picked up the hint.
“Tokuda came here to smash that kamikaze plane into our convention center last night. That turns the case into a Canadian criminal investigation, and given that it’s the yakuza that Special X is up against, Japanese nationals will be in the line of fire. I need a new memorandum to cover my ass.”
“How broad an understanding?” asked the diplomat.
“Carte blanche from Tokyo to deal with Genjo Tokuda in any way I see fit.”
Crowded Womb
In the hours before the sun came up, Lyn Barrow thought back to dialogues she’d had with her half-brother.
“How did that happen?” her brother had asked.
“Good question,” Lyn replied.
“I thought we were brother and sister, born a year apart.”
“So did I.”
“But we’re actually twins?”
<
br /> “That’s what Mom told me,” said Lyn.
“I assumed that she’d had sex with some Asian guy just before the fall of Hong Kong. Then I was born in Stanley Internment Camp, after she was captured.”
“And I assumed that she’d had sex with some British prisoner while in Stanley Camp, and as a consequence, I was born in captivity a year or so after you.”
“What’s your first memory of me?”
“I can’t recall,” said Lyn. “You were always just there. I thought you were my sister.”
“I hated that!”
“What? Being dressed in girl’s clothes?”
“Yes.”
“Be thankful. That’s probably why you’re alive. Had the others in camp known you were the son of a Japanese soldier, you might’ve been killed and eaten for revenge.”
“You’re joking!”
“That’s what every mother feared would happen to her kid. And if it came to that—cannibalism to keep from starving to death—who better to consume first than the Japanese boy?”
“Mom told you that?”
“Yes. That’s why she started the rumor that you were her illegitimate daughter by a Chinese lover. Many called her a whore, but it kept you alive. Girls have lower status in the Far East. And whites can’t tell the nationality of an Asian face.”
“You were Mom’s favorite. She didn’t want me. That’s why she’s confiding in you.”
“She’s dying,” said Lyn. “It’s the drugs. Morphine has her revealing stuff that she’s kept locked inside.”
“Like what?”
“Mom finally told me the name of my dad. He wasn’t a captive in Stanley Camp. He was a British officer in the hospital where she nursed.”
“What was his name?”
“Captain Richard Walker. They had sex in a closet that Christmas morning, just before the Japanese stormed the building.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed by one of the Japanese soldiers. He was bayoneted in front of Mom.”
“No wonder she’s crazy.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Face it, Lyn. Can you remember a time when she wasn’t in and out of the loony bin?”
“You hold that against her?”
“Sure I do. You weren’t the one they abused in that foster home after the war. I was the Jap, remember? The one the old guy burned with his cigarette. The one the old lady locked in the crawlspace under the stairs. You heard me screaming. Alone and scared to death. We’d never have gone into foster care if Mom weren’t nuts.”
“You wouldn’t blame her as much if you knew the whole truth.”
“Which is?”
Lyn struggled with the pros and cons of revealing what Viv had told her.
“What?” pressed her brother.
“Mom was raped.”
“Raped!”
Lyn nodded sadly. “That same morning—Christmas. At St. Stephen’s. And the man who raped her was the Japanese soldier who bayoneted my dad.”
“You mean ...?”
“Yes. Mom was raped by your father. We were both conceived on Christmas Day, during the fall of Hong Kong.”
“How is that possible?”
“Apparently, it’s not that uncommon,” Lyn said. “There are several cases documented on the Internet. In a normal single birth, an egg from the mother is fertilized by a sperm from the father to create an embryo that travels down the oviduct and lodges in the womb. That single cell then develops into a baby.
“With fraternal twins, two eggs from the mother’s ovaries are fertilized by two sperms from the father to gestate two embryos. Unlike identical twins, which develop when a single cell splits in two, fraternal twins have different DNA. Identical twins are always of the same sex. Fraternal twins can be brothers, sisters, or one of each, like us.”
“I’d say we’re more different than most.”
“Of course,” said Lyn. “Because ours was a crowded womb. Mom released two eggs in the way that usually results in twins. But one egg was fertilized by a sperm from my dad—Captain Richard Walker—while the other was fertilized by a sperm from your dad—the Japanese soldier who raped her.”
“Did Mom tell you his name?”
“Yes. Corporal Tokuda. She heard another Japanese soldier call him that when the corporal used his samurai sword to decapitate a baseball player.”
“Decapitate! Are you saying my father was a war criminal?”
“I’m just telling you what Mom said.”
“Did she know anything else about Tokuda?”
“Just the name of his sword. The other soldier—those imprisoned in Stanley Camp called him the Kamloops Kid—told the captives that if anyone tried to escape, Corporal Tokuda would return to the camp and hack off their heads with his sword, Kamikaze.”
That first exchange, Lyn now recalled, had led to a second one.
“I found him,” her brother had said a week or two later, waving a page of scribbled notes in his hand.
“Who?” Lyn asked.
“Corporal Tokuda.”
“How?” she inquired.
“Through British colonial records. After Hong Kong fell in 1941, government bureaucrats interned in Stanley Camp began keeping detailed statistics on births. Twenty-two babies were born in 1942, about twenty of whom were conceived before the Japanese attack. Ten were born in 1943. Thirteen in 1944. And six up to August 1945.”
“There’s a record of you?”
“Yes. That many births worried both the British and the Japanese. More mouths to feed, and more pressure on limited accommodations. In October 1943, the Japanese threatened to segregate males from females if there were any more births.”
“Sex in the camp disturbed them?”
“Marital sex was okay. What bothered the Japanese command was promiscuity.”
“Why 1943 and not before?”
“Women were giving birth to babies when their husbands weren’t in Stanley Camp.”
“So the Japanese did the math?”
Her brother nodded. “Guess what they did to stop it? The commandant decided that any woman who didn’t register the name of her child’s father would work as a prostitute.”
“That’s incentive.”
“I’ll say. Fail to register my dad, and Mom would have had to bed all the Japanese troops.”
“So she named Corporal Tokuda?”
“After that information was passed to the Japanese forces, they must have given the British registrar Tokuda’s first name, since it’s penciled into the camp’s birth records.”
“What was his first name?”
“Genjo.”
“How did you find this out?” Lyn asked.
“I queried Britain’s Public Record Office, and they checked their War Office and Colonial Office papers. Then I went looking for a Genjo Tokuda on the Internet.”
“And found him?”
“Most likely. A Genjo Tokuda was in the Japanese Imperial Army in Hong Kong in 1941. After the war, he lived under another name until the occupiers declared an amnesty for war criminals. By then, he was active in the Tokyo yakuza.”
“He’s a gangster!”
“Not anymore. He’s in his eighties.”
“You’re not thinking of contacting him, are you?”
“I have to, Lyn. I want to know who I am. I feel like I’ve lived my entire life in no man’s land. How often have I heard you complain about not knowing your father? If you knew he was alive, wouldn’t you feel compelled to seek him out?”
“Not if he was a gangster. What if he doesn’t believe you’re his son? That’s a good way to get yourself killed.”
“I’ll be careful. He lives in a tower above his old headquarters in Tokyo. I’ll write and offer a blood sample so he can test my DNA.”
But things hadn’t gone according to plan. Just days ago, her brother told her that his father hadn’t shown for a meeting he’d set.
“I thought he’d at least fly someone in
to collect the sample of my blood. According to what I’ve read, he doesn’t have an heir. Chances are that I’m his son. How could he not care?”
Her brother was downcast. “Rejected by Mom. Rejected by Dad. At least I’m not rejected by you.”
“We’ve been through a lot together, and you’ve always been there for me.”
“I love you, Lyn.”
“And I love you. Forget about Tokuda.”
But he hadn’t forgotten. While their mother lay dying in the hospital, he’d tried again to make contact with his father. And that second time, he’d succeeded. Tokuda had come to Vancouver, and earlier tonight, father and son had finally met. What the gangster and her brother had talked about was a mystery to Lyn. For the first time since they were children, he was keeping secrets from her. But that was okay with her, because she had a secret of her own.
Lyn knew how her brother’s mind worked. He had an obsessive need to understand who he was and where he came from, and she had used that to achieve her own ends. She’d told her brother his father’s name because she knew he’d go to the ends of the earth to find him. And he hadn’t disappointed her. He’d saved her the work of tracking her quarry, and had even brought the prey right into her backyard. Now all she had to do was strike.
Their mom was dead.
Her rapist—and the killer of Lyn’s dad—was in Vancouver.
He was the cause of all her family’s suffering.
Her mother’s insanity.
Her brother’s abuse in foster care.
And her own wretched life, which had been spent shouldering the burden of both their ordeals.
“Will you see him again?” she’d asked her brother.
“Lyn, I’m going with him to Japan. I want to learn the code of bushido—the way things used to be—and he’s going to teach me.”
“Don’t be absurd!”
“Oh, I’m deadly serious. My father is a samurai, the last of his kind. I want to learn everything I can from him before it’s too late. You know, all my life, I’ve felt as if I were shit on someone’s shoe,” he explained. “But no longer. I’m going back to a time when men were men and people lived with honor.”
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