The Gate

by Bob Mayer

  Okomo bowed at the waist. “Yes, Oyabun.”

  *****

  Lake briefed Araki as succinctly as possible about all they had found, leaving out the detail of the bomb’s location. He felt that since the bomb was in American water, that was more his concern than Nishin’s. They were seated on a bench outside Wellman Hall, the sun shining brightly down on them. Students passed back and forth on the walkways all around.

  “So the bomb might be here?” was the first thing Araki said when he was done.

  “Yes,” Lake answered, feeling like he wasn’t holding too much back from the Japanese agent. For all he knew, Araki knew exactly where it was. “Somewhere off the coast. Maybe within three miles of the harbor.”

  “And that is why the Koreans are coming,” Araki said. “This is very bad news.”

  Lake frowned. “How w6uld the Koreans know that, though? It wasn’t in the records that we found.”

  “Maybe they have other information,” Araki said.

  “What about the trawler?” Lake asked. “When is it due in?”

  “Sometime after midnight and before dawn at its present course and speed.”

  “And your stealth ship is still off shore?” Lake asked.

  Araki gave a half-smile. “Perhaps.”

  Lake had had enough. It was Feliks’s problem now. He stood up. “I don’t know what’s going on and it’s no longer my jurisdiction. I’m done with it.”

  “What do you mean?” Araki asked, surprised at his sudden movement.

  “I’ve been relieved. My superior is coming here to take over the entire case.”

  “You did not tell him about me, did you?” Araki asked, concerned.

  “No. But I’m done with it, so you’re on your own.”

  Araki stood. “It was good to work with you.”

  “Yeah, right.” Lake turned and walked away. After turning the corner, he went into a side door of Wellman Hall. Harmon was in her office, waiting for him.

  “How did it go?”

  Lake settled down onto the old battered couch next to a bookcase. “I told him what he needed to know but not about what we just found out. If nothing else happens, at least the Japanese will stop the Koreans from recovering the bomb.”

  “Why not tell Araki where the bomb is and let the Japanese take care of it? They put it there,” Harmon said, “why not let them take it away?”

  “I don’t know,” Lake said, rubbing his forehead.

  Harmon came over with a mug of fresh coffee and sat down, handing it to him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Beat,” Lake said, taking a sip, then leaning his head back against the wall.

  Harmon put a hand on his forehead and gently pressed down, her fingers strong and firm, massaging from the center around to his temples, then again.

  Lake slowly felt himself relax, the stress of the past weeks receding for a little while at least. He felt her lean closer, her breath on his neck, her side pressing up against him. He opened his eyes and turned his head, looking into her eyes so close. He cradled her head with his hands and drew her to him. He felt her lips on his, then was briefly startled as her tongue snaked out, ran around his lips, then darted inside his mouth and just as quickly was gone.

  Lake turned, sliding his hands down until he had his arms around her waist, then he stood, easily lifting her. Her legs wrapped around his waist, her skirt sliding up around her hips. “I—” he began, but she quieted him with a finger to his lips. “Not a word.”

  He pressed her back against the wall between the bookcase and couch. She reached down and unbuckled his belt. It was awkward but their sudden passion overcame each obstacle, unzipping, pushing aside, until he slid into her.

  Lake felt her mouth on his neck, her teeth biting. He pulled his head back slightly and tried to see her eyes, but they were closed. She leaned her head back and it thumped lightly into the wall with each stroke he made. She didn’t seem to notice but he did. He carried her over to the desk and laid her down on top of the message folders from the Japanese Navy in World War II.

  “What if one of your students walks in?” he softly said to her, leaning over, nibbling on her neck.

  “They’ll get the thrill of their life,” she whispered in return.

  “What about—” Lake paused.

  Her eyes opened. “God, ever the practical one. I’m on the pill. Now shut up.” She punctuated the sentence by grabbing the collar of his windbreaker and inducing her own rhythm over his. Lake shifted his own body, feeling the flow of her body under his, the pressure of her hands, the pace of her breathing.

  *****

  Nishin looked around the hotel room. It was as bare as a room he would have occupied. He’d searched it thoroughly, although there wasn’t much to search. An empty dresser. A bed with one sheet on it that looked like it had never been slept in. An empty closet. An empty medicine chest. If Nishin had not confirmed that the phone number Jonas had given him was the pay phone down the hallway, he would have thought no one had been in here in days.

  He walked over to the grimy window and looked out on a debris-filled alley. The room was on the second floor and a fire escape was right outside. It was exactly the type of room Nishin would have chosen.

  There were footsteps in the hallway. Nishin drew his 9mm and slid across the room so that he would not be seen as soon as the door opened. The door swung wide open and an Asian man wearing a leather jacket and a black watch cap stepped in. Nishin drew a bead on the back of the man’s head.

  “Do not move or you will die,” Nishin said in English.

  He was surprised when the figure answered him in fluent Japanese. “I come from the Oyabun. He had more information about the man you are seeking. The man from this room.”

  The barrel of the gun didn’t waver. Nishin wondered why they couldn’t have told him this when he was at the Japan Center. “Go ahead.”

  “He is an agent of the American government who spies on the Patriot movement. He works for an organization called the Ranch, which is headed by a man named Feliks.”

  “Why wasn’t I informed of this earlier?”

  “I am relaying a message for the Oyabun,” the man simply said.

  “Anything else?”

  “That is the message.”

  “Go.”

  Nishin left via the fire escape on the chance that the Yakuza might be waiting for him below. He hurried to the first pay phone he could find and called in what he had just learned to Nakanga.

  SAPPORO, HOKKAIDO

  WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER 1997

  1:05 P.M. LOCAL

  “The American government had an agent on board the North Korean trawler that was sunk,” Nakanga said. “He perished with the ship when it went down, but the man was aware of the North Koreans and the break-in at Berkeley, so we must assume that the American government knows something.”

  Genoysha Kuzumi watched his chief sensei without expression or comment.

  “The American’s name was Lake and he worked for a secret organization called the Ranch. His superior’s name is Feliks. I do not know whether that is a code name or not. This information was given to Nishin by the Yakuza. I do not know where they got their information from. We do have a file on the Ranch and a man named Feliks,” he added, but he didn’t seem overly happy about that piece of information.

  Kuzumi looked at Nakanga’s hands. They were empty. He felt great irritation. “Where is the file?”

  “There was just a file folder, Genoysha. There was nothing in it. It is among the old records. We do not know when it was started or what happened to the material in it.”

  Kuzumi stiffened. Only the Genoysha could permanently remove material from the intelligence files and he knew that he had not done so. That meant it had been done before his time. Genoysha Taiyo must have hidden or destroyed the material. It also meant this went back many years.

  Nakanga hurried on. “The second North Korean trawler will arrive in the vicinity of San Francisco after midnight
, local American time. About eleven or twelve hours from now.”

  “Why is it heading there?”

  “I do not know, Genoysha. Perhaps to recover something from the sunken first trawler.”

  I do not think so, Kuzumi thought. Not if it was equipped to search for radioactivity. There was much Nakanga did not know, that Kuzumi was getting from his own source. The American named Lake had not perished. The Koreans were on the trail of Genzai Bakudan itself. It was all bad news, but inside the dark cloud of this information there was something that thrilled Kuzumi: to think they had made it so close with Genzai Bakudan!

  Kuzumi’s mind had been racing ever since receiving the news about 1-24. He cursed Taiyo even more. What had the man held back from him? The only thing Taiyo had ever told him about the second bomb was that it had been lost at sea en route from Hungnam to Japan. Obviously that was a lie.

  Kuzumi stiffened. He could see clearly the first Genzai Bakudan, lying in the entranceway to the cave, ready for its journey to the dock. The second bomb right behind it.

  He had done the final preparations on both bombs himself. The thought that sent chills up his spine was the realization that he had prepared the two remote detonators for the 1-24 bomb. One had been taken by an agent of the Black Ocean a week prior to the bomb’s departure. Kuzumi remembered the man now, and he remembered asking him where the detonator was going.

  The man had not answered him other than to say that he was working under direct orders of the Genoysha. He had left the cave, the detonator in a black leather bag, such as that carried by doctors, and gone to the airfield to fly out. Kuzumi had never heard what had happened to that detonator. But now that he knew what had happened to the bomb, he knew what had happened to the detonator.

  The bomb was designed to be towed by the midget sub to its location. It would then be left in place. They would have to wait on final orders for detonation and the proper timing. The crewman would either leave or die with the submarine, but he could not survive underwater for more than a day or so. There was enough air in a midget sub for that long. So they must have prepared another way to detonate the bomb at the target with the remote.

  It was very plain to see now. It was what Kuzumi would do if he had to make such a choice. The remote detonator had been sent to America through the TO network and Kuzumi knew whose hands it had ended up in: Nira’s. Why had she not detonated it? Had it malfunctioned, or, as was more likely, had she been stopped from finishing the mission?

  Was there more to her “suicide” than Taiyo had let on? What had happened? Had the Americans stopped her? Why was the file on this American organization missing? Kuzumi saw plots within plots and he saw the death of the woman he had loved a half a century before at the center of a typhoon of deceit. The question was: who had been the architects of all this? For the first time in his life, Kuzumi turned his head and looked at the painting of the Sun Goddess that hung behind the desk and he was uncertain.

  Kuzumi’s fist slammed into the teak desktop, startling Nakanga, who had been waiting patiently for further orders. “Make preparations for travel,” Kuzumi ordered.

  Nakanga inclined his head, indicating he understood the order. “Where am I to go, Genoysha?”

  “You are going with me.” Nakanga’s head snapped up, his eyes wide in disbelief. “To San Francisco.”

  “But, Genoysha! You cannot—”

  “Prepare for travel.” Kuzumi’s voice left no room for argument. “We leave immediately. How long will it take us to arrive in San Francisco?”

  “By our fastest jet, it will take us nine hours, Genoysha.”

  “Then we may arrive before the trawler?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make the arrangements, quickly.”

  Nakanga paused in the doorway. “And Ronin Nishin, Genoysha? What should his orders be?”

  “He is to do nothing.”

  “But what about the Korean ship? Should it not be stopped?”

  “I have already made arrangements for that,” Kuzumi said. “Now, no more discussion. We must leave immediately.”

  CHAPTER 13

  SAN FRANCISCO

  WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER 1997

  8:23 P.M. LOCAL

  Lake had spent the rest of the day at Harmon’s apartment. They had a more slowly paced, but no less passionate, replay of what had happened in her office. They had not spoken until his portable had buzzed. It was a call from Ranch Central with orders to meet Feliks at ten on the Embarcadero. Lake had been waiting for the call. At that time he could unload the information about Genzai Bakudan and be done with it. If only it was that simple, he thought to himself.

  “What are you going to do?” Harmon asked, her head resting on his chest, her fingers playing along his stomach.

  “I have to meet him. He’ll chew my butt, get an update on everything, and then I’ll be out of here. He’ll have to deal with the little problem resting at the base of the south tower.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know,” Lake said. “I might even be fired, in which case I guess I’ll have to look for a job.”

  “I know a job you could have right now,” she said, her hand straying lower.

  The phone call and impending meeting with Feliks had made an intrusion on the quick wall her presence had built up for him. Reality still was out there and things were happening. There were still all the unanswered questions.

  “There’s something I need to check before I meet Feliks. Can you give me a lift?”

  “Certainly.” She stood up and walked across the room. Lake watched her for a few seconds before he started pulling on his own clothes. Her body was neither voluptuous nor model-thin, but rather lean with smooth, long muscles flowing under the skin.

  Lake had never met anyone quite like her. Her strange aura of purposefulness disconcerted him. He had not expected what had happened in the office, but it did not surprise him. Very rarely did he feel something when he encountered a woman, but on rare occasions there was a chemical attraction. He also knew that the stress of the past few days and the lurking danger of his mission had pushed both their emotional drives into hyper.

  “Where are we going?” Harmon asked, pulling on a pair of jeans.

  “A bar,” Lake said. “I want to play a hunch.”

  She threw on a sweater and they walked out into the cool night air. She drove a red Chevy Blazer and Lake gave her directions. When they pulled up at their destination he could see that the Chain Drive was closed, police tape crisscrossed over the doorway.

  “This doesn’t look good,” Harmon said.

  “Don’t worry,” Lake said. “I’m not going in there. Wait here for me,” he added. “Keep the doors locked. I won’t be more than an hour.”

  “Be safe,” she said.

  Lake went around the back of the bar to an old set of wooden stairs. He climbed them and quickly picked the lock on the door at the top. Lake made sure the shade was pulled on the single window before turning the overhead light on. He was in a one-room apartment above the bar. There was no sign the police had been in there, indeed there was no sign anyone had been in here other than Jonas since the last time Lake had been up here, about four weeks ago to conclude a deal.

  He looked around. A battered sofa sat at the foot of a double bed, both facing a TV. The coffee table was covered with Patriot literature. Clothes were scattered on the floor. A few empty beer bottles sat next to the sink.

  Lake began searching the room as he’d been taught at the Ranch, working top to bottom in a clockwise, descending spiral, foot by foot. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but he was following his instincts. Someone had killed Jonas. Feliks had known about it within a couple of hours. Something wasn’t quite right and he hoped the room revealed a clue as to what that something was.

  It did. It took Lake forty-five minutes to work down to the level of the outlets and he unscrewed them one after another. Removing the cover on the one underneath the window revealed that t
he connection box had been gutted. There were two items in there and Lake removed both. The first was a thick roll of money wrapped in plastic. The outside bill was a hundred and Lake estimated there were at least a hundred of those in the wad. He pocketed it.

  The second item was a top-of-the-line cellular/satellite phone. Lake held it in his right hand as if he were weighing it. Then with his left he pulled out the Ranch-issue phone from his pocket. The two were identical.

  *****

  Nishin slowly hung up the phone. Do nothing? He did not understand. What about the second trawler? He had asked. Do nothing, Nakanga had hissed at him.

  Nishin walked the streets, his eyes unfocused, his mind trying to accept his orders. Perhaps Nakanga did not understand the situation? Perhaps I did not explain it well enough, Nishin thought. Nakanga had sounded distracted and somewhat confused. Perhaps there is something else, going on that is causing Nakanga to lose perspective on this mission, Nishin reasoned.

  Nakanga was his Sensei, but there was a higher authority that Nishin owed allegiance to. The Koreans must be stopped. That had been his orders when he had departed for this mission and if there was a second trawler, that one too must be stopped. The Genoysha himself had said that protection of the existence of the Genzai Bakudan program was of the highest priority.

  Nishin had walked to the Japan Center without even being conscious of it while he had struggled with his new orders. He walked into the restaurant and encountered the same man standing in the small hallway.

  “What do you want?” the man said when he saw Nishin.

  “I must see the Oyabun,” Nishin said. “There is a matter of utmost urgency.”

  The guard spoke into a cellular phone, then jerked his head. “Follow me.”

  After going through the next door, Nishin was searched and relieved of his 9mm pistol. The man patting him down missed the ice scraper again. They went up the metal stairs to the roof.