by Jeff Gulvin
‘Twenty-two years.’ Harada handed over his naturalised US passport and work permit.
The officer nodded, then took the licence over to his female colleague in the cruiser.
Harada sat easily, the papers were in order: the preparatory work for this had been done a long time ago. The cop came back again and looked at the track.
‘What d’you carry in here?’
‘Everything.’ Harada jumped down and opened up the back for him, where it was decked out with racks and shelves carrying all manner of pipes and wires, batteries, switches and locks. ‘You name it, I can make it happen,’ Harada said. He pointed to the side of the track. ‘“C U Safely”. I like to think I do.’
The other cop brought the documentation back and Harada climbed into the driver’s seat. He swung north now, past the zoo, and parked back in the self-storage lot. Closing the roll door, he turned on the interior lights and went into the little office section where he kept a desk and a television set. Switching on the TV, he sat back, arms folded, and watched. The cab was safely back in Edgewood.
The pictures were of the bomb scenes in the Federal Triangle and the reporters were all speculating on what might have happened. The word was the militia, which Harada thought was vaguely ironic, given how the US normally blamed Islamic fundamentalists first. That had all changed with Oklahoma, though, and he had sympathies with the militia and their calls for a return to the old ways. Like him, they had witnessed the erosion of all that had been sacred; and over time it had forced their hand. He thought then of the master, his one hundred chosen men, the Tatenokai, formed as a protest against the new Japan, after the 1969 treaties with America. Another irony: here he was in America, carrying out work that perhaps the master himself might have approved of. He closed his eyes for a moment and then he was back in Jakarta with Shikomoto.
The hotel room overlooking the walls of the US Embassy: 1986, and he was a young man. The two of them lying naked together, in that sweat-filled room, waiting for the moment. The work that had gone into setting up the mortars they would fire remotely, and all of this for Qaddafi, and even more than that—for the money demanded by Shigenobu. He was no more an idealist than the Americans they were bombing. Harada felt that perhaps that had been his weakest moment, the moment when the misplaced idealism of his youth had finally caught him up. That had been nothing to do with the master’s way, it was just amassing wealth.
He stood up and walked the office floor like an animal suddenly aware of its cage. He looked back at the TV screen, but he paced and paced and the thoughts burned uncontrollably in his head. Shigenobu and his Japanese Red Army, the work for the PLO, and for Qaddafi and Carlos. Shikomoto lying naked in that hotel room, with the heat building in his skin and the two of them together through the night. Then later, in the safety of the enclave, away from the clutches of the Americans, or so it had seemed. He stood very still, fists bunched. Everything had crumbled inside him: everything he had ever been, his father and his grandfather before him. All those lives, those generations, those incarnations of warriors—betrayed.
He looked again at the screen and an FBI agent was being interviewed. Harada turned the volume up higher and listened with renewed interest. The man was some kind of spokesman from the Office of Congressional and Public Affairs. He spoke about the bomb and was asked questions about the speed of the evacuation.
‘We did receive a telephone warning,’ he said, ‘exactly forty-five minutes before the three devices were detonated.’
‘What kind of a warning?’ one of the reporters asked him.
‘Just somebody telling us that three devices had been placed and roughly where they were.’
The official gave them no more information than that and Harada pursed his lips. So they were not releasing anything about him at this time. That was interesting. They had clearly primed the police as to who they might be looking for, but that information had not yet been made public. They were playing it close to their chest; a difficult decision, weighing the balance between help from the public and the amount of false alarms they would have to investigate. Later, if they did not accede to his demands, he would ensure they got those calls and their resources would be stretched to the limit. Sitting down once more, he contemplated his next move, then he went to the back of the truck and took a selection of stolen mobile phones from the spare wheel panel. He moved back to the desk and switched the first one on.
Swann and Logan had returned to the field office where Kovalski was liaising with the bomb data agents, now busily combing the blast scenes for the first strands of forensic evidence. Swann poured them all some coffee and Logan answered the phone when it rang.
‘This is Fachida Harada.’
It was his voice: Logan would recognise those clipped tones anywhere now. ‘Why’re you doing this?’ she said.
‘Because you are my enemy. Because this is a war and these are my rules of engagement.’
‘Why’re you at war with us?’
‘Because you are my enemy. Because you have always been my enemy.’
‘I understand.’ Logan was thinking hard. ‘You’re a warrior. A samurai. We are warriors also. Is that right?’
‘The defenders of your country. Your Constitution.’
‘OK, Mr Harada. My name is Cheyenne Logan and I’m from Atlanta in Georgia. My father was a worker in a …’
He hung up. Logan yelled through to McKensie. ‘Carmen, did you get it?’
‘We sure did, Cheyenne. It’s bouncing off the Brookland beacon.’
Kovalski looked admiringly at Logan. ‘Good going, Chey. He had to listen to you.’
‘That’s what I figured, Tom. Declare myself in battle, just like he did.’
‘There’s only one problem,’ Swann said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Now you’ve got to fight him.’
Harada was smarting. She had almost caught him out. Perhaps he had hung up in time, perhaps he had not. Soon he would see. Carefully, he placed the phones in the grey sedan in the adjoining lock-up garage, and then changed into his grey suit without showering first. Hanging up his coveralls, he opened the doors to the second unit and drove out. He was pulling on to North Capitol Street when a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria came up the other side of the road. There were two men behind the tinted glass. They had been quick indeed. Their equipment for monitoring cellphones was better than he had imagined. Still, it did not matter. All they would have is the serial number and the fact that the phone had used the Brookland beacon to bounce off. They would not locate the phone itself because it was a clone, and he had access to as many as he wanted. He drove south and then east and, after a further ten minutes, he phoned Logan back.
She, Swann and Kovalski were sitting in the office waiting for information from the road units to come in. McKensie fielded calls from the media people. The President had been on television to make a brief statement, and every news and radio station in the city was humming with speculation. Three bombs in Washington D.C., coming only a few days after the grenade attack in Arlington Cemetery. Nobody had publicly claimed the attacks and the rumour factory was churning product fast and furiously. Kovalski’s phone rang again and he nodded for Logan to pick it up.
‘Agent Logan.’
‘You’re very clever, Agent Logan. You will make a fine adversary. I look forward to doing battle with you.’
‘Why do you want to fight at all? What’s all this about?’ Logan was looking at Swann, who stood in the doorway watching the technical team in the outer office.
‘Because you have something I want.’
‘What is it? Maybe we can give it to you and stop all this.’
‘I hope so. If you do, then honour will be satisfied, and I will not have to kill you.’
‘That’d be nice. What is it you want?’
‘The release of Tetsuya Shikomoto.’
Swann sat in the meeting room down the corridor from Kovalski’s office. Kovalski chaired the meeting, and
in addition to Swann, Logan and McKensie, there were representatives from the other task force agencies, as well as the Bomb Data Center, the evidence response teams and Fugitive Publicity. The Director was linked to them by conference line from his office at the Hoover building. With him were the heads of the domestic and international terrorism units, and they were linked to the White House and the national security adviser. Kovalski relayed what they had just discovered.
‘At least we know what he wants,’ he was saying. ‘Tetsuya Shikomoto was an active member of the JRA. He was charged and subsequently convicted of attacking our embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mortars were fired remotely from a hotel bedroom next door to the embassy compound. Nobody was caught right then. In fact, it took us ten years to get Shikomoto. We always knew there was a second suspect, but have never been able to identify him.’ He glanced at Swann. ‘You wanna go over what you know, Jack?’ he said.
Swann stood up then, glanced at Logan and gave them his opinion of Harada.
‘Special Branch, back in the UK, identified him as being a one-time member of the Japanese Red Army, which was pretty much disbanded within two years of the mortar attack that Tom’s just outlined. They hid out in an enclave in North Korea, probably living off the millions of dollars they generated from various Palestinian factions and Colonel Qaddafi in Libya. Our information is that Harada then returned to his native Japan, along with a chunk of money, and bought his way into one of the yakuza circles.
‘Anyway, the point I’m making is, he’s a serious terrorist, well versed in the practice. This afternoon’s bombings, I would argue, have been planned for a long time. He identified the Federal Triangle and stretched resources within it. Just enough explosive to cause a problem, but still minimise casualties.’
One of the agents from the Bomb Data Center interrupted him. ‘Your initial thoughts were correct,’ he said. ‘We estimate the explosive was about a pound to a pound and a half of plastic’ He paused for a moment and glanced at Kovalski. ‘C-4, sir. We found traces of it. It’s easily identified by the lab. About thirty to forty per cent nitrate, the rest is PETN, with two per cent colourant and about three per cent oil and plasticity.’
‘C-4,’ Kovalski went on, ‘is military-grade, US army explosive. It cannot be bought on the street.’ He paused. ‘Not only that, you don’t need to buy it on the street. You can make just as big a bang by using sugar and nitrate fertiliser mixed with a little diesel fuel.’ He scratched his head. ‘Which, of course, is what our friends in the patriot movement do. Two questions. Where did Harada get C-4? And why bother with it in the first place?’
‘The bombings have been claimed by three different nazi groups so far, boss,’ McKensie put in. ‘The Priesthood being one of them. They claimed it was in retaliation for the murder of Billy Bob Lafitte and Daniel Pataki.’
‘This is nothing to do with the militia,’ Kovalski said.
‘But the public don’t know that.’ The voice was from the telephone squawk box: Robert Jensen, the national security adviser.
Kovalski lifted one eyebrow. ‘The irony kinda strikes at you, though, doesn’t it? The militia are all jumping up and down about Asians, the so-called government-funded Hong Kong troops in their black Suburbans, and now we’re looking for one too.’
‘The situations are totally unconnected, though, aren’t they?’ the adviser said over the phone line.
‘We think so, yes. Coincidental but unconnected.’ Kovalski squinted round the room. ‘Harada’s demanded the release of Tetsuya Shikomoto. What’re we going to do about it?’
‘Well, we’re not going to release him, that’s for sure.’ The FBI Director spoke for the first time.
‘The question is,’ Swann put in. ‘Why does he want him out? And why three years after he was arrested?’
For a few moments nobody spoke, then Logan clasped her hands together, leaning on the table. ‘There are things we can work on here. Harada is a samurai. He came out and challenged us openly, declared himself—name, background and everything. He’s made no attempt to hide his identity.’ She glanced at Swann. ‘There’s a psychology behind all this that we need to look at very carefully.’ She turned to Kovalski then. ‘Given what we know, Tom, I think we ought to get one of the behavioural people in from Quantico. Run an evaluation.’ She looked again at Swann. ‘Jack, can you get any more background information from the UK?’
‘I can certainly try.’ Swann sat forward then. ‘There’s something else we should consider, something your behavioural people will be interested in.’ He tapped the desk before him. ‘The samurai declared his pedigree before he went into battle with his adversary, so that they knew who they had conquered, if that’s what happened. To kill a samurai was a great deed and the whole affair was about honour.’
‘Honour,’ Kovalski said. ‘We can maybe work some kinda angle on it. Use it against him somehow. How much honour does it take to bomb a fucking hospital?’ He paused. ‘What we need to do is stall him for a while.’
Swann looked at him, face clouded. ‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ he said. ‘Carlos used the JRA to bomb the hell out of France in 1982, when the authorities refused to release Magdalena Kopp from prison. Harada may well have been there. If he was, he’ll have learned something.’
13
THE STREETS OF LONDON were muggy. Low cloud pressed bad air against the roof of the city and tempers frayed below. George Webb, from the South-West London murder squad, sat in the air-conditioned comfort of the office that he and Frank Weir had been allotted, down the corridor from the FBI legal attaché in the US Embassy. Webb leaned his elbows on the polished wood of the desk and looked at the file the US Marine Corps had provided for him. Dan Farrow, the recently appointed regional security officer, kept hovering about the doorway like a cat on hot bricks. Webb, in a perverse sort of way, enjoyed his apparent discomfort—just a few weeks in the job and already one of his marines had been murdered.
Weir looked over at Webb. ‘So who was Kibibi Simpson, Webby?’ He walked across the office and bent over Webb’s shoulder. ‘Thirty-one years old. Impeccable career since joining the US Marine Corps in 1989. Three postings. Germany, Italy and now here.’
‘And this one.’
Weir leaned again for a closer look.
‘Wichita Falls.’ Webb looked at the entry on the file record. ‘It looks like a National Guard base. She was only there for three months. Probably just a training exercise or something.’ Webb sat back and laid the file down. ‘How many men can we draft in, sir?’
‘In here, just you and me.’
‘What about interviews? We can’t do them all.’
‘No, we’ll run the normal incident-room principles, Webby. It’s just that here, it’s you and me.’
They went back to the flat in Paddington, which was still sectioned off with blue and white tape and had a uniformed guard on the door. He moved aside as Webb and Weir came up the stairs. Webb closed the door behind them and they both stood in the hall, looking down at the place where the body had lain, bloodstains dried brown now on the carpet. The forensic team had just about finished, but Webb and Weir were still careful where they placed their feet. The normal path a walker would take on the carpet had been scanned by the electronic static lifting apparatus to try and discern a footprint. They were still waiting for the results from the lab.
Weir looked back at the door. ‘No sign of forced entry,’ he said. ‘So either she answered the door or the killer had a key.’ He tapped the spyhole at eye level. ‘Would she open the door to anyone she didn’t know?’
‘Would she use the spyhole?’ Webb shifted his shoulders. ‘She was a marine, Frank. She probably thought she was tough.’ He paused. ‘Nothing stolen, or even disturbed.’
Weir looked again at where the body had fallen. ‘Not even made to look like burglary.’
‘Not made to look like anything at all.’ Webb went through to the living room and stood with his hands on hips. ‘That means the killer was eithe
r very cool or very scared.’
Weir nodded and made a face. ‘I hate to say it, Webby. But I’d reckon the former. Nothing was disturbed. If he did ring the bell and march her in backwards, he did it slowly, deliberately, making sure nothing was knocked over.’
‘And he didn’t leave in a rush.’
Webb sat down on the settee. The furniture was good quality. There were brushed cotton covers on the chairs, and ornaments and little crystal knick-knacks littered the mantelpiece. He got up and looked at a picture of Kibibi and two black guys also in uniform. ‘Who do you think they are?’ he asked.
‘Brothers, probably.’ Weir looked at their faces. ‘I spoke to her mother in Mississippi. She’s got brothers in the service.’
‘Where are they?’
‘On a posting in Italy.’ Weir slipped a hand into his pocket. ‘The parents are being flown in this evening, though, so they can accompany the body home when the time comes.’
‘But we’re not going to release it yet.’
Weir shook his head. ‘They could be in for a long stay.’
They interviewed her parents the following morning. They were staying at the Marriott Hotel, round the corner from the embassy in Grosvenor Square, and the RSO sent two marines in a car to escort them. Weir and Webb waited in their office, while the Simpsons were greeted by the US ambassador and the FBI delegation. Finally, they were brought down to the office.
‘You don’t mind if I sit in, fellas, do you?’ Farrow asked them.
Weir shook his head and offered his hand to Kibibi Simpson’s father, a very tall, very slim black man, with tightly cut hair. His wife was smaller and her skin was slightly lighter. She wore a dark suit and black patent shoes. ‘We’re very sorry to have to meet you in such difficult circumstances,’ Weir said.
Mrs Simpson nodded in a dignified way and her husband leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at Weir. ‘Who killed her, Inspector? Who killed our little girl?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Weir said. ‘Right now, we have a major incident team working round the clock, trying to establish her movements and whereabouts on the night she died.’