“A server farm,” Carver whispered. “They’re hosting their own data center.”
The doors closed behind the workers, until once again, Carver’s only view was of thick ivy. Meanwhile, the men rolled the hardware into one of the adjacent buildings. Carver and Eri moved on to an adjacent wing, through a back door that led to a spotless, white-walled kitchen. Its ample shelves were lined with plenty of canned food as well as some fresh vegetables. Judging by an industrial-size rice cooker in the sink with some intact grain floating inside, someone had already made a big meal today.
The next room was an empty cafeteria. Unlike the rest of the place, there was no decaying opulence here. It had been – and still was – an employee lunchroom.
Eri pointed to the far wall, where the Rising Sun flag hung. She snapped a photo, and they moved on. Further down in the valley was a building that, unlike virtually all others on the property, was newly constructed. Satellite dishes flanked the gleaming, windowless, monolithic building. Concealing the entire array was a thin layer of topsoil and vegetation – stretched across a net – that stretched from end to end. From the air, the dishes underneath would be virtually impossible to spot.
A high-pitched hum emanated from the monolith. Carver could feel it in his bones. He and Eri crept around the other side of a well-tended hedgerow. There they spotted a pair of young men chatting and puffing cigarettes. They were thin, even waifish. Stick figures in identical jumpsuits. They had the long, delicate hands of musicians. Or programmers.
Eri slowed her breathing and cupped her ears, trying to focus on what they were saying. The workers lingered only a moment longer before they stubbed their cigarettes into a planter and went inside the monolith. As the door swung open, Carver glimpsed rows of workers seated at gleaming workstations.
“Could you hear what they were saying?” Carver said.
“Yes. Why were they talking about Native Americans?
“They weren’t. They said ‘Apache,’ but that’s a kind of software that runs on web servers. JSON stands for JavaScript object notation. The only people who talk about that stuff are programmers.”
“Programmers? Here?”
“The Kuromaku have apparently created a cyber warfare team. The question is, were they behind the drone hack? And if so, why?”
Somewhere Over Japan
Mid-morning sun warmed Sho’s face as it shone into the low-flying helicopter. He remained blindfolded as the aircraft skimmed the mountaintops. The Eel sat behind him, exhaling cigarette smoke. He spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard over the buzz of the rotor blades. “The autumn leaves are spectacular today. Just a few more minutes, and I’ll take off your mask so you can see them.”
Sho was in no hurry. These little trips seemed almost routine now. In the nine months since he had been branded, Sho had terminated three targets on the Eel’s orders. The preparation before each kill was always the same. First, Sho was directed to take a small local train to Ninose Station in Sakyo-ku, a tiny village in the mountains north of Kyoto. The trip took about 40 minutes. The Eel always pulled to the curb in a black Lexus sedan with dark tinted windows. The moment Sho got into the car, he was handed a cushioned black eye mask exactly like the one his mother slept in.
He was taken to a helicopter pad. Still blindfolded, he swore he could hear a sizable waterfall in the distance. Later, he had gone looking for it on Google Earth. Despite searching for hours, he couldn’t find a big waterfall anywhere on the map near Ninose. Maybe it was smaller than he had imagined. Or maybe it was tucked within a dense forest. He had reported these facts to Fujimoto, who had promised to go looking for the landmark a few weeks before his untimely death.
From there, Sho was flown to a remote rifle range in a deforested valley. The nameless chopper pilot, whom Sho had come to think of as “Pizza Face,” removed a hard-shell rifle case from the helicopter. Inside was a Sako TRG-42 rifle fitted with a muzzle brake. There were also several boxes of .338 Lapua ammunition and a tripod rest.
Then the Eel would watch through a small telescope as Sho sighted the rifle in on targets the pilot had placed downfield. Human silhouettes were placed at 50 meters, 100 meters and 150 meters. They would shoot into the evening using night vision scopes.
Although a relatively heavy weapon at nearly 11 pounds, the Sako was even more powerful than the Winchester .30-06 he hunted with. Both weapons were a world apart from the featherweight .22 caliber he had used on the Japanese biathlon team.
On each trip back to Kyoto, Pizza Face blindfolded him once again. Along the way, the Eel would make pleasant conversation. How is business? Where do you grow your delicious herbs? How do you get the venison to taste so good? And then there were the veiled threats. Sho, I happened to see your mother in the grocery store last week. What a coincidence! It wasn’t a coincidence. His mother lived in Matsumoto, more than four hours away. She looked well. But you should visit her more often. It would be terrible if something happened to her.
Even if the rehearsals were routine, carrying out the actual jobs had been anything but. The targets were never disclosed until game time. Sho was shown photographs of each person, but he was never given a name, nor was he given a reason.
His first target had been a vacationing middle-aged man with a thick, graying mustache and tiny eyes. Each night, he liked to enjoy a cigarette after dinner on the balcony of his hotel room. On the second evening of his trip, Sho and the Eel waited in the tree line about 80 meters from the hotel. Sho was nervous. Despite the implied threats against his brother and mother, he wasn’t quite sure that he would be able to go through with it. The Eel pointed out that it would be no different from shooting deer. “We are all mammals,” he had reasoned. “If anything, the deer deserve to live more than we do. After all, a deer can’t be wicked, can it?”
At long last, about two hours before midnight, the target emerged from his hotel room. He unzipped the fly of his boxer shorts, pulled out his equipment, and began urinating down onto a flower bed below. It was a small thing, but the primal act was all Sho needed to clear his conscience. He switched the rifle’s safety switch to the off position. And then, just as the Eel had said, the man began smoking. The brand of cigarettes was called Peace. Sho wondered at the irony for a split second before pulling the trigger.
The next morning, Sho learned the man’s identity from a television newscaster. He was Kosuke Ueno. An election official from Gunma with Yakuza connections.
The next two jobs had been handled in much the same way. Both were holiday killings. The second target had been a judge in Nagano. The third was a candidate running for the National Diet from Hokkaido.
Why not just kill them quietly? Make it look like suicide? He wondered all these things but did not ask. He reckoned that the Eel felt the high-profile political killings would serve as intimidation.
Eventually, Sho had reported these crimes to Fujimoto, although he did not confess to pulling the trigger himself. He merely confirmed that the Kuromaku had been behind them. The old detective knew the truth, of course, but he seemed neither surprised nor judgmental. “Fits the profile,” Fujimoto had said. “Keep bringing me information like this, and I’ll continue to keep your name out of my reports.”
Sho had not liked being owned by Fujimoto any more than he liked being owned by the Kuromaku. But he had hopes that the man who had brought down one of Japan’s deadliest domestic terror cults could give him his life back. For that reason, the old investigator’s death had devastated him. Now, en route to the practice session for what would be his fourth and final assassination, he hoped Eri would be able to finish what Fujimoto had started.
The Exclusion Zone
Fukushima Prefecture
Japan
The Eel pulled Sho’s mask off, exposing his enlarged pupils to the blinding sunlight shining through the chopper’s Plexiglas windows. Slowly, his eyes adjusted so that he could see the magnificence on the rolling hills below them. The forest was tinged with red and yellow m
aple trees. He wished this was all a dream. He wished they could stay aloft forever, floating over the autumn leaves.
And yet something was different today. It wasn’t just the colors of the season. “Are we going to the same rifle range?” he asked.
“A new one,” the Eel said. He wore a Yomiuri Giants ball cap. “Farther away. But relax. You will still get back to the Blue Monk in time to serve dinner tonight.”
But he could not relax. His mind was filled with doubt. Were they going to kill him? It was a question he had asked himself every time he did a job.
Twenty-five minutes later, he could see coastline. As the ocean stretched out to the east, he could no longer spot vehicles or people below. Then it dawned on him. They were entering Japan’s exclusion zone. The area that had been abruptly evacuated after the 2011 earthquake that triggered the ensuing tsunami and disaster at the Daiichi Nuclear Facility, some 12 miles away.
The helicopter descended over a ghost town called Tomioka. Sho caught sight of a clock tower on a bank building. The hands were stuck at 2:46 — the exact time of the earthquake.
“No one will bother us here,” the Eel said.
As the pilot touched down and cut the engine, the Eel distributed matching white disposable coveralls, complete with hoods and face shields. “Just a precaution,” he said, stabbing a nicotine-stained finger at the universal symbol for radioactivity that was emblazoned on the uniform’s left breast.
Sho pulled the uniform on over his existing clothes. A few moments later, as the three men stepped out of the helicopter, he noticed how nature had taken over the abandoned town. Weeds, some of them more than six feet tall, lined the streets. Bamboo was growing up and around a building that had caved in on itself during the earthquake. Across the street, a group of monkeys stood atop a boat that had washed inland.
“Wake up,” the Eel said, clapping his gloved hands in Sho’s face. “We have work to do!”
Pizza Face pulled the heavy rifle case from the chopper — the kind built to endure endless abuse by airport baggage personnel — and handed it to Sho. Then he began walking toward a field clustered with mannequins. A set of bleachers stood at the far end.
“Don’t follow him,” the Eel said, his voice muffled behind the face shield. “You and I are going up there.” He pointed toward the only truly tall building in the vicinity, a hotel that looked to be about 20 stories. Broken windows dotted the building’s south side like dental cavities.
They entered via the abandoned hotel lobby. Rays of sunlight shone through where the tinted glass was cracked and caved in. A flock of pigeons spooked from behind the marble check-in desk. The floor was dotted with abandoned suitcases and luggage carts and seashells. Sho briefly imagined the people who had left all these things behind so quickly. When the tsunami alert sounded, had they ran outside, seeking higher ground, or had they simply gone upstairs?
“Up here,” the Eel said, shining a flashlight into a dark stairwell. “The elevator is broken. Pace yourself. We’re going to the 18th floor.”
Sho groaned. In his training days, such a climb would have been no big deal. But these days, the sole exercise he got was de-boning animals in the kitchen at the Blue Monk. “Why so high?”
“We must recreate the exact shooting conditions of the next job as much as possible.”
By the time they reached the 10th floor, Sho had overheated in his radiation suit. The rifle case seemed several times heavier than it had when they had started.
“Save your strength,” the Eel said. He took the rifle case and carried it for Sho the rest of the way up.
One word described the 18th floor: haunted. Room service trays remained on the same carts they had been ferried on years ago. A radioactive breeze came in through a jagged opening in a window opposite the stairwell, blowing the yellowing curtains in a ghostly fashion.
They went into Room 1804, a north-facing room that had once offered guests a view of the abandoned town. The window had been removed completely, and a chair was set up before a shooting bench that was exactly like the one at the government firing range where Sho was required to retest for his annual shooting license.
The Eel set the rifle case on the bed and unlocked it. “Dozo,” he said before collapsing into an armchair.
He watched as Sho plucked the precious hardware from the rifle case, checking the chamber for obstacles before sliding the bolt in. Then he screwed the muzzle suppressor onto the end of the barrel. It would serve the purpose of both masking the sound of the gunshot and the flash of the muzzle.
Then the Eel pulled a pair of powerful binoculars and an old-fashioned walkie-talkie from his duffel bag. He cleared the radio channel and spoke. “Is everything in place?”
Pizza Face’s voice came over the device. “Hai, dozo.”
The Eel smiled. “Go ahead, Kimura-san. Sit down.” Sho sat at the shooting bench. The end of the rifle edged out the open window like a nosy neighbor. “See that park?”
Sho did. A set of baseball bleachers was attached to a tractor. It looked as if they had been dragged from a baseball field on the other side of the park. About 20 mannequins had been arranged on them. All standing, they posed as if they had been taken directly from the windows of a department store.
From there, two more lines of mannequins stretched out across the field in two neat rows. Like an honor guard on either side of a red carpet, awaiting some high-ranking government official. It was a preposterous spectacle. So many mannequins. There were at least 100 of them, maybe more. Had the Eel looted every abandoned department store in the irradiated zone?
Sho did not like the looks of this. The Eel had said he meant to recreate the shooting conditions of the upcoming job, and this looked like some sort of mock ceremony on a grand scale. This time, he feared, the target wouldn’t be some small-time election. It might be someone truly important.
“The distance to the target,” the Eel said, “Is approximately 320 meters, and we are now 65 meters from the ground.”
That was a much longer distance than Sho was accustomed to. He would have to make allowances for distance and wind. He tried to slow his breathing. His clothes beneath the coveralls were now soaked in sweat. He pressed the ammunition clip into the rifle. Returning his eye to the scope, he took note of what the mannequins were wearing. They were all dressed conservatively. The males were in black suits or in Defense Force uniforms. His eye quickly found one of the targets wearing a red tie. Further down, there were others. Most were in between the rows of mannequins, as if they were walking the red carpet.
“Go on,” the Eel urged, having too found one of the targets through with his binoculars. “Start with the mannequin in the suit standing on the bleachers.”
Sho chambered one of the .338 cartridges into the barrel. After he fired, his handler grunted approvingly as the plastic head burst into a thousand pieces.
“Now hit the one standing between the rows, nearest the bleachers.” Sho returned his eye to the scope. He squeezed off another round, blasting the figure through its neck.
The Eel took a stopwatch from his pocket. “Good. Now, on my mark, shoot as many as you can in 30 seconds. Get the females, too.”
Sho lined up three spare ammo clips, setting them within easy reach. On the Eel’s mark, he picked off eight of the mannequins wearing red ties, reloading just once.
“Sugoi!” the Eel squealed in amazement. Then he spoke into his radio. “Engage the moving targets, please.”
At last, Sho’s rifle found Pizza Face. He was driving a quad hitched to a wagon. Standing within it were five suited mannequins with red ties, wobbling this way and that. The spectacle reminded Sho of a clown car he had seen in an old movie.
Sho trained his crosshairs on its driver. How many times had he fantasized about this moment? Getting his freedom would be easier than he had imagined. They were all alone out here in the irradiated zone. He would waste Pizza Face first. Then he would whirl around and finish the Eel at point blank range. Unless, of
course, Sho decided to beat him to death with the butt of the rifle.
The Kuromaku Base
Having discovered the buzzing Kuromaku cyber warfare nerve center, Carver and Eri slipped into the building next to the monolith, where no one seemed to be around. The former resort conference room had been converted to a traditional office with an open floor plan containing nine workstations.
A large portrait of Prime Minister Akira Ito adorned the far wall. The other walls were filled with maps of what Carver assumed were election districts. At the head of the room was an elaborately carved desk, and behind it, a carefully drawn whiteboard listing dozens of political parties and the numbers of seats they currently held in the National Diet.
In the center of the room was a scale model of the Imperial Palace. Carver had never been there in person, but he recognized it from photographs. Detailed plans for renovations were annotated throughout the complex. Existing rooms were labeled with office numbers and official designations, the best of which had been reserved for the Prime Minister’s office.
“It’s not enough for Ito to simply say he’s a nationalist,” Carver whispered. “He’s going to prove it by moving his government into the palace.”
“Impossible. The royal family would never approve.”
“Something tells me he won’t be asking for permission.”
Eri set the Krazy Kisser down and began rifling through a stack of papers on one of the desks. Carver left her side, gravitating to a corkboard mounted behind one of the desks. It was dotted with headshots. In what was perhaps the most ethnically homogenous country in the world, he noted that none of the people pictured were Asian.
Rogue Empire (Blake Carver Series) Page 23