He didn’t know exactly who. He didn’t know what they’d be wearing. He didn’t even know if it was a good idea to have come here.
Perhaps he was meeting a pedophile and had been lured into something he should never have gotten involved in. He shook himself. That couldn’t be the case. The guy from the forum was looking for someone who could hack into the Department of Defense databases in Guam. Whoever he was looking for, it wasn’t a 15-year-old kid. He was looking for someone with extensive hacking experience, and who understood how government agencies protected themselves.
But Winters was bright. He’d spent the last three days researching the military installations in Guam. He made phone calls. It was easier to break down the weakest barriers to any security system—the human. Adam asked ostensibly insignificant questions and received ostensibly insignificant answers. He then leveraged those answers to make more calls and get more detailed answers. And so on, and so on. He worked his way up the chain of command until he had what he needed; just a snippet, just enough to know what system their database was running on, where their servers were located and what their likely weakness was. It was enough for him to run a practice test, get through the firewalls, video a screenshot, put it all on a USB flash drive, and destroy the evidence from his computer. That flash drive was tucked into his pocket now, a new USB-C device, not easily identifiable.
But, what if this was all a ploy from the agency itself, the DOD testing their security, or another intelligence organization? Perhaps the CIA? Was he getting in too deep? The thrill of danger was cloaked by a roiling churning in his stomach, which felt a lot like apprehension and vomit.
He fingered the flash drive. Still there.
For a moment, Adam was overwhelmed by his own grubby-teenager stink combined with that of the subway station. It was the smell of human sweat and days of non-showering, blending in with the stale odor of old vending machine snacks and spilled coffee. He almost left.
But instead, Adam waited. Those had been his instructions: Wait by the umbrella vending machine near 7番線. He looked at his phone, checked the message again, deleted it. It was internalized now, memorized. He’d make a good spy, he was sure of it, although the sick feeling in his stomach seemed to contradict that idea. Did real spies ever overcome that nausea, or was it a profession in which throwing up was an ongoing job hazard?
Buy the bright pink umbrella with a picture of a panda bear on it, the message had said, at exactly 2100.
Adam glanced at his watch again, and lifted his head to observe the people streaming by. He looked into their faces. He checked the time. Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. Five.
He pressed the numbers on the keypad and inserted 600 yen. Chump change. Sure, his parents would kill him if they found he’d sneaked out, but this was worth it. Maybe. If he hadn’t been suckered into chasing his own tail by some Internet troll, this 600円 would mean a down payment of $10,000 US in his account, with another forty on the way if he could pull off the infiltration of the security system at the Joint Region Marianas.
He reached down and picked up the pink plastic umbrella and pulled it out of the vending machine. There was writing and advertising and happy panda bears all over the shrink-wrap packaging, but Adam knew very little Japanese, nothing beyond hai and arigato gozaimasu, and he certainly couldn’t read kanji or hiragana. He unwrapped the umbrella and hoped there was no secret message written on its packaging.
He looked down at the pink pandas and wondered what he was supposed to do, now he’d done what the message said. There hadn’t been anything else, just that—pink umbrella, 2100, exactly.
Adam’s heart thumped in his ears. The sound of rushing blood fell into sync with the shuffle of feet around him, emphasizing and the smells of humanity moving in waves, back and forth from work that never ended. He almost ran. His feet almost took off without him. Instead, he moved them and planted them even more firmly in the ground. He’d give it 20 minutes, and then leave.
He turned back to the vending machine to check that he hadn’t grabbed the wrong umbrella by mistake. He wasn’t sure if he was color blind. Nobody ever really knew, did they, unless they’d been tested. He might be color blind and think that pink was pink, when really it was purple, or purple was red or red was orange.
It didn’t matter. It was too late. He figured he most likely wasn’t color blind. He’d never had any trouble doing those tests where you had to look for something within an image that looked like something else, that kind of visual illusion had always worked for him, and he’d seen 3D movies before.
Adam’s research into the Joint Region Marianas had shown him Guam was close enough to japan. Three hours and forty-three minutes, by air, anyway. Maybe he’d be able to go down there as part of all this. Maybe he could get away from his family by striking out on his own, leaving his new international school and the stupid teachers and the arrogant uptight kids who attended with him. They were all jocks with no understanding of the real world or the problems it brought.
A rough hand wrapped itself around his wrist, and Adam felt a sharp prick in the skin of his neck.
A warm liquid filled his veins.
Shinjuku Station and its waves of people swam before his eyes.
He slumped to the ground beside the vending machine.
He shouldn’t have come.
Chapter Six
The shot went wide and Ray Hammer rolled into the bushes as a barrage of M-16 fire was smacked into the earth. Clouds rolled over as if attracted by the ruckus, as if they wanted to be a part of the excitement. A sprinkle of rain fell, just spitting on Hammer’s head. The hairy-nose-guy was curled up in the car, and the suit-and-BDUs guy, fired another volley in Ray’s direction. The 5.56 bullets kicked up dirt and splintered wood beside him, filling Hammer’s eyes and mouth with grit. Then, the guy jumped into the driver’s seat, and the car roared off down the road.
Hammer stumbled forward onto his feet and sprinted down the hill to his own car, which he’d parked around the corner and out of sight. Guam wasn’t big, so he figured he’d be able to catch the Ford Taurus if he was quick. He got to his hire car, a white Buick Regal and took off down the street after the Taurus.
The kidnap team were a couple hundred meters ahead and pushing out farther and farther. Hammer cranked the engine of his 4-cylinder rental, but it was no match for the V8 roaring around the corner in front. He considered giving up, and then it hit him that he could take a shortcut through the dirt road that ran along the back of the military base. He wrenched the wheel right, hard, and skidded along the dirt.
The guards on the watchtowers turned their gaze down on him and trained their guns on his car. Hammer looked up and waved.
“It’s okay, boys,” he said, to himself because nobody could hear him. “It’s okay.”
He leaned forward in the driver’s seat and looked out the passenger window across the field towards where the black Taurus was making a loop around the blacktop. He could cut them off. He fishtailed out and almost careened into the fence surrounding the naval base; all steel mesh, razor wire and electric lines. He glanced up at the security towers.
Hammer brought his eyes back to the dirt track he was traveling along. If only he’d taken the SUV they’d offered him when he arrived, but it was a small island and the Buick Regal was cheaper. He cursed his stupidity. The bald tires on the Buick were a joke, the tread was practically non-existent. The tires skid and slid across the dirt. A large pothole loomed and Hammer tried to skirt it, but ended up driving the front wheel down into it. The Buick jerked as it smashed into the dirt road, the front fender scraped, and then the whole vehicle bounced up and out of the pothole. The back wheel did the same.
He must have looked so ridiculous, a grown-ass man skating around in this fucking stay-at-home-mom car, like a video clip from a World’s Stupidest Tourists compilation. He almost expected to hear a funny little soundtrack, dueling banjos or something, playing above the banging and crashing of the car. Hammer was sure
the alignment was screwed, probably permanently.
He fought with the wheel to get the car on track and struggled to keep it pointing in the right direction. He’d almost come to the end of the dirt track, and as he glanced out of the front window, he noticed the black Taurus was moving around in the same direction, picking up speed. He glanced to the right and realized the gates of the base were open. The guards lifted the barricades to allow the Taurus to enter.
The lusty roar of the Taurus grew louder and louder in Hammer’s ears as he strained the Regal’s engine, which protested with a horrible screech. He tried to avoid the potholes, but there were so many on this shitty track that it all boiled down to picking his poison. He was almost there. He could make it, he figured. But then what? Smash into a car entering a Naval base with all the watchtowers above fitted with armed soldiers, their eyes—and weapons—trained on him?
He considered it, contemplated the possibility of giving up, of losing Hatashi into the base. But the consequences were too dire . . . at least, according to Deputy Marshall Frank Whitcombe.
The black Taurus leaped in front of him and across his path, cutting him off. Hammer urged the reluctant Buick forward. He wasn’t going to make it. They were almost through the gates, the Taurus’s hood was already under the barricade as Hammer brought the front fender of the Regal into the back corner of the kidnapper’s car.
The cars crunched, metal on metal.
They pushed forward, crumpled, the way they’re designed to.
The airbag burst out of the steering wheel in the Buick. And that was the moment he realized he wouldn’t get his deposit back on the rental. Given the way he drove, it wouldn’t be the first time or the last.
Hammer was out of the rental and he struck out around the side of the Taurus. The guy in the BDUs with the gun did the same. The men on the towers were on full alert; some had a bead on hammer while others were swarming down to ground level.
Hammer reached into the back of the vehicle, tried to pull Hatashi out. She was still breathing. That was a good sign.
With his body halfway inside the back of the Taurus, Hammer held his Smith and Wesson high, and pointed it at the man in the passenger seat. He fired a round out through the windshield.
A miss.
Shattered glass rained down on the guy with the nose-hair.
The other guy, the BDU man, propelled himself at Hammer.
The guy swung and kicked Hammer’s legs out from under him and slammed him into the ground.
Then he smashed a desert boot into Hammer’s head.
Everything went black, as if God had switched off all the lights in heaven.
Chapter Seven
The odor of fried tofu, squid and karaage brought Adam back to consciousness. He struggled to open his eyes, and instinctively his hands moved down his legs to the pocket where he’d hidden the flash drive. It was gone.
His eyelids fluttered uselessly, and his vision returned.
The world above him was cast in a hazy red light. Weird. But then Adam realized the light was filtered, and came through the plastic of a red tablecloth. There was chatter in Japanese, a sizzling of frying food, which took him back to the moment just before he’d passed out, just before someone had . . . injected him with something? Poisoned him? Kidnapped him?
Adam should have been more careful. He should have known he was a target for pedophiles or criminals or whoever was doing this. Where was he? He looked up at the tablecloth above him and thought: restaurant.
Chopsticks clacked on the tables around him, and Adam crawled up onto his butt and looked out from under the table at the sea of legs. People were wearing track pants and Nikes, and spilled beer and chunks of dropped food slopped noisily onto the floor around him. So, not a Michelin star joint, then.
There was a shuffling and a scuffing of furniture on the hard wooden floor, and then voices were raised, and then raised again. Bar brawl? Oh, perfect.
A hand slammed down on a table nearby, and then a glass smashed and someone careened into the table above Adam. The whole thing went over—the plastic tablecloth, the wooden table. A tall man crashed down next to him.
Adam scanned the room. The space was small—hell, even smaller than his bedroom at home, but somewhat larger than the space under the stairs that he’d made his own. The walls were paneled in wood. The door was two wooden sheets, chipboard, blocking out the vague light from the night sky outside, neon filtered through flopping advertising panels with pictures of food that he’d never seen before, not even in Tokyo.
People yelled, and the tall man picked himself up off the floor; blood smeared his chin. The man launched himself at his attackers, jumping directly over Adam’s head. He picked up a glass full of Orion. Adam knew this because it said so on the side of the glass, through the condensation and framed at the back by the amber liquid. The glass tumbled and doused another man in a suit. The suit was rumpled but decently cut, so the guy stood out from everyone else in this hole of a joint, against the locals with their sweatpants and wife-beaters.
Adam still had no idea where he was, but he knew he had to get out of there.
He scrambled towards the door, and would have made it through under cover of the melee if a large hand hadn’t planted itself at the back of his shirt. It scrumpled the fabric and lifted him to his feet, pulled him backwards away from the door, away from the neon lights, away from the street and safety and a crowd of people that he could disappear into. It dragged him back into the brawl, into the way of flying fists and glasses, into the incoherent yelling in Japanese, and into chaos.
Adam struck out and tried to fight—not something he did often, even with the bullies back at his posh private school. He scrabbled with his hands, slapped at the man holding him. He scratched out again at the guy’s hands and then his face. In other words, he fought like a five-year-old girl. Or rather, like someone who lived in a hole under the stairs like a bridge troll?
And then, he realized, the man wasn’t Japanese. His face was familiar even, the kind of face you’d expect to see on a movie star, a Matt Damon or a Brad Pitt, or even a Tom Cruise, the kind of face you wanted to grow into or imagined you had when looked at from the right in the mirror but only in the right light, with the right shadows. The kind of face that said: ‘I’m all-American’.
The man held Winters out at arm’s length, raised one long scarred finger to his lips, and made a “shh” noise as he pulled Adam back into the corner of the bar to watch the fight in front of them. There was a lot of blood now, crimson poured from several faces. Fists flew, arms flew, clothes were ripped and torn. Adam tried to turn, both sickened and scared. But, the man held his chin, made him watch, and then whispered into his ear in a thick Southern accent, “So, you think you can get in there, into Guam?”
Adam wasn’t sure what to say. He figured he could, but he didn’t know who this man was. No doubt it was the guy he was meant to be meeting in Shinjuku, but this sure as hell wasn’t Shinjuku, and Adam wasn’t sure he wanted to get into this kind of thing—whatever it damn was.
“Who’s the guy in the suit?” asked Adam in a loud whisper, watching the man twirl and land a kick right in the throat of another man, sending him flying backwards over the already upturned table.
“You ever seen something like this, kid?” asked the guy holding him.
Adam shook his head, shamefaced, but he remembered a fight back home, the fight which had made his parents decide to move to Japan. At least, that’s what he thought. A fight with kids at school, the ones who dragged him through mud, who tried to flush his head in a toilet, who kept turning his laptop off when he was doing his schoolwork, or pretending to, at least.
“I heard you’re an old hand at this sort of thing,” said the man and he pushed Adam into the fray.
Adam swung wildly and his fist connected with the leg of the man in the suit, who spun away and brought a fist up onto Adam’s chin.
“Scram, kid! This ain’t your fight,” said the man in
perfectly fluent English.
Adam swung again, but this time his fist went wide, an unpracticed haymaker. nowhere near connecting. Several of the men surrounded him now. One grabbed at him and threw him across the room and into one of the walls. Adam felt the crunch of his bones as his body slid down to the floor.
He didn’t get up, didn’t even try, he just stayed there. This wasn’t his fight. The man in the suit was right, and the man with the all-American face and the Southern accent was someone Adam didn’t want to know.
But it didn’t matter what Adam decided.
Things were already in motion…
Chapter Eight
The metal cot was hard and the thin mattress did nothing to distract Ray from the cold and the creaking springs. He was sick of looking at the desolate walls painted in that horrible yellow and etched into with years of drunken nights and indiscretions. There was a small toilet in the corner. It smelled and looked like shit; overflowing, bubbling out, and Ray avoided it studiously. It reminded him of the cubicle in Trainspotting or the scene in Wet. That’s to say, it turned his stomach and made him feel like he needed a stiff drink.
He looked down at himself, noticing how badly his hands shook. Maybe he shouldn’t have been driving or shooting or staking out Okai Hatashi’s place. Now he was here, inside the Naval base. But, on whose orders?
Sure, he’d crashed into a vehicle, but that could be written off as an accident. It happened outside the base, and in a civilian car. But then, he’d been a wild man, raving, with his Smith and Wesson six-shooter. Hell, he’d attempted to pull a hostage out of the backseat. It didn’t surprise Hammer that he’d been brought in and locked up, and it wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night in a military police cell. He half-heartedly hoped it would be the last.
Strike (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 3) Page 2