by Thomas Green
I crept out, my steps soft on the carpet. The hallway led right, where another room lay. This one was also a bedroom. Two smaller beds lay by the side while broken Lego covered half of the ground. A PlayStation sat by a TV that was fixed on the wall.
A child room apparently inhabited by two children. Miller said something about losing a son during the nightmare plague, but this didn’t look like a child was missing.
I left the room and descended. Downstairs lay a living room, well-cleaned and arranged. In the kitchen, the oven burned, baking potatoes.
A scowl crept onto my face. Light flooded in through the windows. I ducked instantly. A car entered the gate and approached the garage. Damn. I remained crouched and swiftly crept toward the stairs.
As I was ascending them, the house’s door opened. A child burst into the room, just out of sight, his steps soft and quick. My sweat turned ice cold.
“Pull off your shoes first,” a woman shouted from behind him, her voice youthful and energetic.
I swiftly crept up the stairs and headed to the bedroom. I opened the door and steps echoed from the stairs. After I slid inside, I closed the door and heard a child running into the other room. I got to the window, glass grounding beneath my steps, and leapt out.
My legs gave me burst of pain when I fell on the ground. Hastily, I shuffled my feet to disguise the tracks I created. I picked up a rock and threw it into the broken window.
In sharp step, I crossed behind the garage and vaulted over the fence to get to the neighboring house’s garden. Stalking toward the road, I glanced into the window. A blonde woman was finishing the late dinner in the kitchen and the two kids were watching TV in the living room. Miller losing his son to the nightmare plague was apparently a lie.
Well, not that it was a big deal, anyway. The main problem was me finding no trace of Evelyn’s kidnapping, ruling out the option of Miller acting on his own, at least as far as I could verify. Plus, a man with a wife and two kids wouldn’t cross me with a kidnapping. He had too much to lose to go rogue for no apparent reason. The FBSI actions matched Miller’s story, so I had nothing to go on in this direction.
Time to meet with Sora.
I chose the Black Tap because it had a large underground section and limited parking options. This time, I smoked a cigarette to calm myself down. I was running out of ways to find Evelyn and the clock was ticking. Twenty-four hours have almost passed since someone kidnapped her and that was always a problem.
Whatever trails the kidnapping may have left behind were cold now or would be soon. I was also running out of ideas. The remaining possibilities were Sora and the Yakuza safe. If those didn’t work out, I had nothing else and worse, I had to meet with Vivian at midnight. If I didn’t have Evelyn at that time, I would need to ask the bloodsucker to help me, which would cost me dearly and most likely not help at all.
A black Lexus parked near the pavement of the opposite street and I hid behind the corner, crushing the cigarette tip against the wall.
I waited, listening. Sora’s steps soon sounded from around the corner. The door opened and closed. I waited ten seconds and then rushed to his car.
The black Lexus looked perfectly ordinary. I waited for an elderly couple to disappear further down the street before I drew my knife. I filled it with aether, pressed it into the gap of the door and pushed. I broke the lock and the door opened.
Yes, Sora would know someone broke into his car, but I needed answers I couldn’t get otherwise. Since he was apparently working alone, he would kidnap Evelyn using this car, which would leave traces.
I sat inside. The door contained nothing but chewing gum packages. The container in the board has an old photograph of a young girl. She had long, ginger hair and a happy smile. The photo’s back had something written in Japanese.
No matter how I looked, I couldn’t see a single crimson hair. Damn it.
Nothing else presented itself, so I pulled the latch opening the trunk, got out, and softly closed the door. It didn’t hold well in position, but there was little I could do.
The trunk contained a sports bag, a samurai hat, and large amounts of Sora’s sky-blue aether. Not a single crimson hair, no sign of struggle, nothing useful. I opened the sports bag. Inside were piles of clipped files and an assortment of medieval, Japanese weapons. Shurikens, daggers, straight short swords, this bag had it all.
I took the files and closed the trunk. A van passed through the street next to me. In swift step, I went to my car, sealed the files in the trunk and entered the Black Tap.
Sora sat inside by a table with a glass of water in front of him. His coat lay on the bench next to him, clearly arranged to conceal his sword.
I took the seat across the table. “Sorry for coming late.”
He shook his head slightly. “It’s nothing.” His voice was even, calm, and without a hint of stress or anger or any other emotion.
The waitress arrived and took my order, a double cheeseburger with fries and coke.
“I’m preparing a raid on the Yakuza safe,” I said to start the conversation. “But first, I need to ask you, have you seen a crimson-haired woman with orange eyes recently?” I observed him, searching for any reaction to anything I said. He let nothing slip.
“Orange eyes? That’s a rather unusual color.”
“Her origin isn’t precisely natural.” I drank from the coke the waitress just brought. “She’s someone close to me and disappeared last night.”
His expression turned sour. “Well, you’ve got Yakuza in town now, so things like this will be happening.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is what they do. You don’t even have to cross them. All that’s needed is that you’re a potential threat and they’ll kidnap someone close to you in case they’d ever need leverage.”
I lost my appetite. He was correct, of course, but I never thought of it before Evelyn disappeared. “You sound like you know a lot about this.”
He nodded. “A year ago, I got engaged to a woman named Mizaki.” His face slackened. “But I was already a member of a team investigating the Yakuza. The evening before our planned wedding, Mizaki disappeared. I never found a trace of her.”
I frowned. “Move so I can sit next to you.”
With wide eyes, he did. I sat next to him, whipped out my phone, and went to install Japanese keyboard.
“What’re you doing?”
“I got a huge file cache from Gonnosuke Muso. If they have a `high-profile kidnapping like your spouse, she may be mentioned in there.”
His eyes widened. “How did you get that?”
“I broke into Gonnosuke’s flat and threatened his family.”
“You’re a madman.” But as he said that, he smiled. “And I hope you’ll survive this.”
Perhaps. Once I had the correct keyboard, I navigated to the folders I had downloaded from the ftp server and opened the search. “Put in her name.”
He took the phone and typed in some Japanese symbols. We watched the progress bar under Searching in absolute silence.
The waitress came around. “Is everything all right with the food?”
I glanced at the untouched burger and fries at my side of the table. “Sure, sorry, we are fine for now.”
She got the point and left.
A file appeared in the search. With shaky fingers, Sora touched the first one. The document was written in Japanese, which wasn’t very useful to me. But a picture of a ginger-haired girl was printed in the document. I recognized her from Sora’s photo. Except here, she was bound and terrified.
Sora bolted to his feet, grabbed his phone and dialed a number.
He didn’t look like he would answer questions, so I eyed the burger instead. My stomach turned and sealed itself shut. Was I too anxious to eat?
Sora started shouting into the phone in Japanese. I didn’t understand a word, but by the urgent intonation of his voice, it was something important. It took about two minutes, during which I sat back in my
seat. Sora didn’t kidnap Evelyn. Someone who went through having his loved one taken would never do that.
He finished the call and sat back down, his face covered with sweat and breath shallow.
I took a sip from the coke and arched an eyebrow.
“Right, you don’t understand, sorry,” he stuttered. “The file says Mizaki was kidnapped and is being kept alive, forced to work in a brothel in Kyoto. It even had her new identity and the brothel’s address. I called my friend, a Kyoto detective, to go find her.”
My stomach clenched. Was this what would happen to Evelyn? To be kept as a sex worker for the Yakuza, ready to be used as an insurance against me? “They already used her against you, haven’t they?”
He nodded, slowly, his happiness gone. “I know it’s dishonorable, but yes. The reason none of my investigations ever led to anything was because they told me she lived in their possession. They said they would torture and kill her if my investigations ended in any other way than a dead end.”
“And the reason you beheaded Akiyama back in the docks was to ensure he couldn’t tell his bosses you were involved.”
“The lower ranked members wouldn’t recognize me, but he could.”
I took back out my phone. Only now, I realized any note on Evelyn would be in Japanese, meaning my search in English was doomed from the start. “Could you type me the name Evelyn in Japanese?”
He walked to my side and did. My sweat turned ice cold as I watched the search. Nothing. We tried variations but found nothing else.
I sighed, my heart sinking. Then again, they would hardly know her name, so they could had filed her under anything.
“I’m sorry,” Sora whispered and took back his seat. “Though if they took her, she’d be in their vault now. Their infrastructure here in New York is still in its infancy, so they don’t have other places to stow away people that someone is searching for.”
“Okay, well, I’ve got a plan for the safe.” I gulped and took a long, steadying breath to calm down. “I know the rough security detail, that they have no magical protections and I know their today’s passcode. They likely know that I know though.”
“Can you get help from the FBSI?”
“Already did. The strike time is 2300.”
Sora smiled. “That’s in half an hour.”
We finished our drinks and left. “Meet you there in fifteen minutes,” I said as we exited the inn, “Need to handle something in the meantime.”
He nodded with a bright smile. “I’ll go sharpen my blade.” With his head held high, he walked toward his car.
I scuttled toward my car. The time I had wasn’t enough to go through the files. I still drove my car a few blocks away and searched through them.
Sora didn’t lie about the Yakuza infrastructure. To avoid detection, the local Yakuza spread slowly, having only one affiliate local gang, the one I scattered, and then a handful of safe houses. By the detail Sora captured in the files, the Yakuza spent all their resources on the local headquarters, leaving them an insufficient amount of men to cover all the other locations.
All right, if they had Evelyn, she was in the safe. That was pretty much my last shot at this. Beyond the Yakuza, I had no other trace, no culprit to follow, nothing to go on.
With a heavy heart, I left my car a block away from the Yakuza headquarters and walked toward the towering palace of glass and steel. This time, Miller wasn’t being secretive. The street was closed, and black vans covered the pavements. Three SWAT teams were readying their gear and Miller stood in the middle, directing everyone. He sure got the search warrant quickly.
Sora stood to the side; his sword sheathed by his waist. Atop a tall streetlamp, Kenji stood invisible, the statuette hanging by his waist. He clearly didn’t want to endanger his wounded friends by leaving the statuette behind. Everyone has arrived.
Time to strike the Yakuza down.
Chapter 14
MY STOMACH WAS acting worse than an emo teen. When I offered it a burger earlier, it refused the tribute. Now, as I stood in front of the Yakuza headquarters, my stomach grumbled from hunger.
Agent Miller was finalizing the strike plan. The building of glass and steel we were about to enter loomed lifeless. The issue was that the last time I was in the safe, I entered when the defenses were down. The security detail Sasaki gave me back then didn’t cover what the defenses actually were. In fact, all it contained were codes to put into panels of each security system.
Now, those systems would be on with new codes, so odds were we would have to get past the defenses ourselves.
Sora walked to me, silent with his steps.
He greeted me with a nod, murder shining in his eyes. “My friend found Mizaki. She’s safe and being given police protection.”
How I wished I would find Evelyn as well. I banished the thought since I had to focus on the task at hand. “To get to the safe, there are three defense layers and then the vault door. I’ve got the vault code, but it may not work on the individual defense systems.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He put on the samurai hat. “There’s no defense that can stop me.”
Okay, sure. At least we knew who would go in first.
Miller reached us. “We’re ready and starting in two minutes.”
“The safe is underground with heavy defenses in place,” I said and straightened my coat. “Sora and I will handle those.”
“I’ve got specialists for vaults,” Miller said. “But I won’t stop you from going first.”
I nodded and lowered my hat into my face. Miller left and motioned the first SWAT team to approach the building’s door. The normally automatic door didn’t open. One agent approached the door and placed what looked like a small, brown package on the door. He stepped back and took cover behind the shield wall of his colleagues.
An explosion sounded from the door and the glass shattered. The SWAT team leader motioned forward, and the unit moved in. I gazed into the opening, seeing the familiar hall with two sets of turnstiles and wide stairs leading upward. The other two teams followed and then so did Miller, Sora, and me.
As the SWAT teams fanned through the hall, two going for turnstiles and one for the wide stairs leading up to the balconies of the upper floor, a male voice sounded through the hall.
“Your search warrant is illegal, and you are thus violating our private property,” Sasaki said through the speakers hanging in the hall’s corners. “Leave or we will use our right to defend ourselves.”
The agents ignored them and proceeded as planned to secure the upper floor, the elevators and the emergency stairs. I fuelled my gaze with aether. A dozen shades of blue littered the floor.
I paused. It was Sunday, so the building was closed through the day. With how fast aether dissipated, that meant people moved through here recently.
A chill ran down my spine. “Take cover!” I shouted.
As everyone stopped in their tracks, the sound of a hundred feet echoed from above. The balconies filled with men who had been hiding. All held assault rifles or machineguns. The SWAT teams dashed toward the columns, Miller leapt over the reception and I bolted toward the left turnstiles, filling my body with aether.
Gunfire roared into the night. Glass shattered and men started shouting. Over my shoulder, I saw Sora standing straight in the middle of the hall. His sword flashed around him, so fast I couldn’t see the blade.
I tried to knock aside bullets with a knife once. The challenge lied in the natural inability to being both strengthened for defense and moving fast enough. I still have the scar. Yet Sora didn’t even look tense.
The few bullets that reached me bounced off my aether-imbued coat. Low caliber bullets had no chance to pierce my defenses. I vaulted over the turnstiles and burst onto the emergency stairs. The SWAT teams could handle the men in the lobby. I was here to find Evelyn, not to do the FBSI’s work.
My steps echoed through the stairs as I ran down four levels. The steel door in front of me had a control pan
el by the side. Like I cared. I kicked the door, shattering the lock and making it fling open.
Sasaki Kojiro and eight men in tactical, combat armor stood in the small hall in front of me. Sasaki held a two-handed katana, a nodachi, and the men had high-caliber rifles. Fuck. I leapt to the side, just in time to dodge as they opened fire from their weapons.
I needed to start carrying grenades. The fire ceased.
“You truly have a death wish, Mr. Johnson,” Sasaki shouted from the inside.
Not precisely. “You took someone from me and for all I care, you will go to hell in the process of me finding her.”
“What makes you think we took her? Because I don’t remember kidnapping anyone in past two days.”
Like I’d believe him. I drew my guns, pushed my aether defenses to the maximum and bolted around the corner. Sasaki’s companions had some aether, sure, but their defenses were basic. And while their rifles were higher caliber, they were neither shotguns nor sniper rifles, so my shields could handle them. As I leapt in, I stretched my hands and fired. They did the same and Sasaki stepped forward to swing his blade.
One, two. Both into the knees of the men standing at the sides. I weaved from Sasaki’s swing and a dozen bullets hit my chest. Each stung like getting hit by a golf ball. Three, four, both into the ankles of two more men. Sasaki spun and slashed. Holy shit, he was fast. I leapt sideways. His blade scratched my shoulder, draining from my shield. The bullets that hit me now hurt more, almost knocking the air out of me.
Five, six, two more knees and Sasaki kicked me in the chest. I flew to the wall, breath forced out of my lungs. Seven, eight, all Sasaki’s men down. He stabbed. With gritted teeth, I weaved my body away. The blade pierced the concrete wall.
Nine, ten, both at Sasaki’s left ankle. His shield withheld the shots with ease. He stepped back and kicked me in the stomach. I flew across the room and spat out bile.
He released his blade from the wall and turned. Half-blind with pain, I holstered my guns and gasped for air. Smirking, Sasaki stepped forward. Misty gray aether swirled in the door and Kenji burst into the room, kicking at Sasaki’s head.