Devil’s Road

by Gary Gibson

  Rage stiffened her muscles. ‘Do you know how hard it is for me to race in the Devil’s Run and try not to win?’

  ‘Hard or not,’ said Nat, ‘it’s either that or you go back to jail.’

  And wouldn’t I love to know what it is you’re looking for on Teijouan, she thought, still fighting to suppress her anger. ‘Well, either way,’ she continued, pointing at the binder, ‘if we go driving around Teijouan in one of these things we’ve got that much less of a chance of making it back out alive, whatever reason we have for being there.’

  ‘I’ll wake you early so we can get to the racetrack in time,’ he told her, stepping over to the door. She could tell from the tone of his voice he wasn’t going to give way. ‘Get some rest.’

  She slammed her fist against the nearest wall. ‘Fuck you. I should go out there and steal me something, and I’ll bet you whatever I find’s going to leave that heap of garbage in the dust!’

  His expression hardened. ‘You’ll stay put. We’re still working on how to explain how you got here without having to answer some very difficult questions.’

  She sank onto the edge of the bed. ‘What’s your deal, anyway? You’re not some chauffeur. I saw the three of you talking on that jet, and I could see that Wu paid a lot more attention to you than he ever did to that asshole Harry.’

  ‘I’ll be next door,’ he said, and departed, pulling the door shut.

  ‘You know it’s been years since I got behind the wheel of a car, right?’ she shouted through the door. ‘Maybe I can’t drive any more, did you think of that?’

  No answer. Asshole.

  Dutch sighed and ran her fingers across the bed sheets, then realised she hadn’t had a shower in a couple of days. She went to the bathroom, investigating the complicated faucets and smelling the soap. Once she got the temperature right, she stripped off and cleaned away the grime and sweat, then changed into fresh underwear and another, identical white T-shirt from the shopping bag; at least whoever had picked her clothes had done their research, since she never wore anything else if she had any choice in the matter. Then she went to stare out the window at a skyline she never thought she’d see again.

  * * *

  Something—some subliminal sense born of a billion years of tooth-and-claw evolution—brought Dutch awake in the pre-dawn hours, her heart pounding as if she’d awoken from a bad nightmare. The window stood open, letting in a breeze.

  Dutch stared out the window at the neon lights of Roppongi across the river. It had been closed when she’d gone to sleep.

  In that same moment, she became aware of a dark-clad figure standing motionless next to the window. Then it moved towards her with sudden swiftness, light reflecting from a long, tapering blade held out at an angle from its hip.

  Dutch threw herself off the bed, landing in a tangle of sheets on the floor. The blade whispered past her neck, missing by millimetres. The assassin—for Dutch had little doubt that the intruder intended to kill her—leapt onto the bed, clad in black combats and T-shirt, eyes visible above a patterned bandana pulled up over his nose.

  The blade flashed again, swinging down towards Dutch. She jerked back just in time, the blade again whispering past her neck. Without thinking, she grabbed hold of some of the sheets still on the bed and yanked them hard enough the assassin stumbled and fell backwards.

  By the time the assassin had leapt back upright, Dutch had run into the bathroom. She had just got the door closed when the blade cut deep into the wood, its point emerging a few millimetres shy of her nose. She heard the assassin grunting from the other side as he tried—and failed—to tug the blade free.

  Bad move, thought Dutch. She pulled the door open hard, yanking the sword-handle out of his grasp. His eyes met her for one brief instant before she slugged him hard on the nose, knocking him backwards with sufficient force that his feet became entangled in the sheets on the floor. He landed, arms flailing, on the bed.

  Dutch held the door open with one foot, grasped the handle of the sword with both hands and managed to pull it free.

  The assassin rolled off the bed and leapt back to his feet, a second, shorter blade grasped in one hand. But not quite fast enough: Dutch brought the longer sword around and rammed its point between his ribs.

  He let out an agonised grunt, his eyes wide and full of horror as he staggered back and again fell sprawling onto the mattress, the katana protruding from his chest. His legs kicked and thrashed, and then he stopped moving, a dark stain spreading out across the mattress beneath him.

  The door to Dutch’s room crashed open to reveal Nat in T-shirt and shorts, a pistol gripped in both hands and an underarm holster thrown over one shoulder. He stared at the sprawled body on the bed like he couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he exclaimed, looking back up at her. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

  ‘He tried to kill me.’

  He glanced at the blade still stuck in the assassin’s chest, then back at Dutch. ‘So I see,’ he said, pushing the pistol back into its holster. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Depends on your definition of “fine”.’ She wrapped one arm across her chest, gripped by a sudden chill. ‘He came through the window. He must have made a noise or something, because I woke up before he could skewer me.’

  ‘The way he’s dressed…what is he, a ninja or something?’

  ‘Or something.’ Dutch forced herself to breathe more evenly until her heart rate slowed a little. A more urgent need took hold of her and she turned towards the bathroom, feeling unsteady on her feet. ‘I gotta pee.’

  She locked the door and dropped down onto the closed lid of the toilet, leaning forward and putting her face in her hands, breathing deeply. She stayed that way for a couple of minutes, then got back up and took a look at herself in the mirror. Her t-shirt was specked with blood, as was her skin; she sluiced water onto her face until it was gone.

  When she emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, she found Nat had gotten dressed. He stood at the open window, peering down at the street below the hotel and talking on his phone. She found her Levi’s on the floor and pulled them on.

  ‘You’re going to have one hell of a time explaining all this to whoever owns this hotel,’ she said once he hung up.

  He turned around to look at her. ‘This hotel is owned by one of Wu’s subsidiaries.’

  She let out a weak laugh. ‘I should have guessed.’

  ‘Someone’s coming to deal with all this mess. And I’m moving you to another room.’

  Nat went over to the bed and carefully searched through the dead man’s pockets. When he pulled out a red envelope and a pre-paid travel card, Dutch’s heart skipped a beat.

  ‘Let me see that,’ she said, stepping up beside him and snatching the envelope from his grasp. She opened it, finding it contained a single sheet of rice paper with intricate Japanese calligraphy. Dutch stared down at it with a powerful sense of unease.

  Nat gave her a curious look, tossed the dead man’s travel card onto a side-table and stepped into the bathroom, washing the blood off his hands. When he came back out, Dutch showed him the letter.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t read Japanese.’

  ‘It’s from a woman who calls herself Madame Muto—’

  Nat’s eyes grew wide with clear recognition. ‘Muto?’

  She squinted at him. ‘You’ve heard of her?’

  He blinked like a deep-sea fish confronted by a torch-wielding diver. ‘I…guess her reputation precedes her.’

  ‘So how much do you know about her?’

  ‘Beyond the name, very little,’ said Nat.

  ‘She owns a bunch of clubs and hostess bars all over Roppongi, but that’s a cover for her real business. Any time someone pisses her off enough she wants them dead,’ said Dutch, holding the letter up, ‘these get left on their bodies so everybody knows what a mean motherfucker she is. She calls them “death notices”.’ That the would-be ninja had been sufficiently l
acking in talent he couldn’t even kill Dutch while she was asleep suggested Muto’s standards had slipped badly since Dutch had last encountered her.

  ‘And do you happen to know why Muto wants you dead?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Dutch sighed, letting the rice-paper slip to the floor. ‘I’ll tell you some other time.’

  ‘Anyone else coming after you?’

  ‘Knowing Muto, it’s entirely possible.’ Dutch glanced at the three-ring binder, which still lay on the floor where she’d discarded it. ‘She once told me never to come back to Japan, or she’d kill me.’

  He regarded her with a sour expression. ‘And yet you somehow neglected to inform me.’

  She gave him a hard look. ‘It’s not like I told her I’d be coming back. And I’m only here for the duration of the time-trials, right?’ Her eyes returned to the three-ring binder and a sudden idea came to her. ‘You know, they do say offence is the best form of defence. And unless she’s sold it some time in the last five years, Muto has the car I used to drive in the Devil’s Run.’ She moved closer to him. ‘How about we go get it?’

  Nat’s eyes widened, and he put out a hand. ‘You are not going to get Wu into a war with some gangster because they’ve got a grudge against you. We’ll increase security until we fly out to Teijouan.’

  ‘But—!’

  ‘That’s final, Dutch—I don’t want to hear one more word about this.’ He glanced at the corpse on the bed and shuddered. ‘Stay right where you are while I sort out some extra security.’

  He left the room and she waited a moment before pushing her head out into the corridor. She saw Nat standing close by the elevators with his back to her.

  Her blood still burned hot and spiky with adrenaline. She pulled on her boots and grabbed up her jacket before she had time to reconsider. Her heart raced like back in her car-jacking days.

  She stopped by the door and looked back at the body on the bed, the longer of the two swords still protruding from his chest. She stepped up onto the bed and took a two-handed hold on the katana, tugging it loose before wiping it clean on a pillow miraculously unstained by blood.

  Dutch wrapped the blade up in her leather jacket and held it close to her chest as she looked back out into the corridor. Wrapping it up wasn’t going to do a great job of hiding it from anyone looking closely, but there was nothing she could do about that. There was no sign of Nat, but she could hear him still talking from inside his room next door.

  She snatched up the dead man’s travel card and headed down the corridor in the opposite direction from the elevators, the soft carpeting blanketing the sound of her footsteps. She hurried down a stairwell, hoping nobody paid too much attention to the gaijin woman with a half-concealed sword in her hands.

  Two minutes later Dutch walked out of the hotel entrance and hailed a taxi, the dead man’s travel card in one hand.

  * * *

  The Roppongi District hadn’t changed that much in the six years since she’d last been there. It still smelled of grilled yakitori and hot, damp concrete. She had the taxi—a self-driving pod, naturally—pull up in a narrow alley she had last visited many years before.

  In Dutch’s experience, Muto’s death notices came in threes. The first, left on a target’s pillow as they slept, would terrify them into submission. The second arrived with a phial of poison, indicating that the target should do the job themselves rather than endure the awful anticipation of the third, and final, notice, left on their bloody corpse.

  That Muto had sent someone to kill Dutch outright rather than warn of her impending doom went to prove how really, truly pissed-off she was. Either that, or the woman’s sense of the dramatic had diminished with age.

  The taxi trundled away after she had disembarked. People hurried past the mouth of the alley in bright-coloured shoals, heads down to avoid the rain. She located by memory a narrow doorway between a tattoo parlour and the entrance to a hostess club and made her way up tiny, cramped steps to the third floor. She pressed an ear against a door and heard a series of explosions and popping sounds overlaying peppy video-game music.

  Dutch slid the katana out from under cover of her jacket, then stepped back before kicking the door hard. Its cheap hinges gave way on the third attempt.

  The one-room apartment on the other side was tiny and cramped, its walls covered with pictures torn from games magazines and manga books. A heavy-set man in his mid-thirties, naked but for a pair of shorts, stood gaping at her. A computer screen still ran some techno-pop video game, and she saw a bucket under the chair where he’d been sitting. Dutch wrinkled her nose, smelling urine and body odour, and swallowed back a rush of phlegm.

  ‘Fuck me,’ she said, stepping towards the fat man with the tip of the sword aimed at his chest, ‘aren’t you a little old for this, Hiro?’

  Hiro staggered back from her, his face twisted up in terror, and almost kicked over the bucket beneath his chair. He raised his hands and made little panicked sounds that caused his jowls to quiver. Then, at last, recognition lit up his eyes.

  ‘Dutch!’ he croaked in surprise. ‘It’s you? I thought—!’

  He caught himself, but not quite in time.

  ‘That they put me in jail?’ she asked, coming closer. ‘Or that someone killed me?’ She lifted the tip of the sword until it touched his quivering chin. ‘Which?’

  ‘She—Muto—I—’ He gulped hard, moving back up against a wall beside the computer as he struggled to avoid the blade. ‘I—I didn’t know you were back.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ she hissed. ‘You’re the one who figured out I was back in Tokyo, aren’t you?’ She nodded at the computer. ‘Still her little pet hacker.’

  He stared at her. ‘What? No, I had nothing to do with that. I mean—’ he halted.

  She moved the point of the sword down to his belly button. ‘Imagine the mess,’ she said in a low voice, ‘if all this fat and guts got spilled on the floor. What were you about to say, Hiro?’

  ‘No, please.’ He made a whimpering sound and dropped to his knees. ‘We were friends. You don’t need to do anything like that.’

  ‘We were never friends,’ she reminded him. ‘Who’s the guy you sent to kill me in the hotel?’

  ‘Private contractor,’ Hiro said in a rush. ‘That’s all I can tell you. Even I don’t know his name—he’s one of Miyoko’s personal contacts.’

  ‘How did Muto know I’d be in Tokyo?’

  ‘I swear I don’t know! She told me, Dutch. I don’t know where the information came from!’

  She felt sure the little shit was lying, but she didn’t have the time to figure out the truth: not with the time-trials mere hours away. She kicked him hard in the crotch and his face turned purple. He slid onto his side, gasping, his hands reaching down to try to shield himself.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said, staring down at him. ‘Your chances of staying alive go way up if you tell me exactly what I want to know. Understand?’

  He nodded frantically. ‘Whatever you say, Dutch.’

  She smiled with grim pleasure. ‘I want the car.’

  He blinked. ‘I—what car?’

  ‘You know which one,’ she snarled. ‘The Coupé. I want to know where she’s keeping it.’

  His eyes grew round. ‘No,’ he said, his voice rank with desperation. ‘I can’t do that. You know Miyoko Muto. Whatever you do to me, she’ll do worse if she finds out.’

  ‘Well, since you’re such an elite fucking hacker, you’d better make sure she doesn’t find out—not unless you want your guts to wind up in that bucket of yours.’

  * * *

  It took a few minutes, and she watched him like a hawk the whole time, but soon enough she had both the address of a warehouse where Madame Muto stored some of her vehicles and the combination number for a safe in which, Hiro rushed to inform her, the Coupé’s car keys were locked. She used a bunch of computer cables to tie him up before gagging him with a half-rancid T-shirt she dug out from a pile in a corner. Then she h
eaded back out, the sword once again wrapped up in her jacket, and caught another taxi halfway across town.

  On the way, she used the taxi’s comms service to send a message to Nat care of the hotel, then sat back, brooding as the city sped by.

  * * *

  She found the warehouse down a side-street in Ikebukuro. Dutch stood next to a noodle stall on the opposite corner from the warehouse entrance, pretending to study the menu, and saw a single guard standing next to the ground-floor entrance. Metal steps above the entrance gave access to an upper floor.

  The guard regarded Dutch with suspicion when she walked towards him. She played the naive gaijin to the hilt, acting like a lost tourist until he made to push her away. That got her close enough she could pull him off-balance before slamming the heel of one hand into his nose. His head snapped back, and she pushed the attack, driving the back of his head against the wall behind him. His eyes rolled up and he crumpled at her feet.

  Muto relied on people being so terrified of her that she never bothered too much with strong security. Her true strength, she had once bragged to Dutch, lay in her reputation.

  Dutch dragged the guard inside the warehouse, hoping to hell Nat had got her message. Inside she found a single open space with a metal-floored walkway one floor up; she counted four standard self-driving pods, a vintage Jaguar, and a 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupé with twin V8 engines and a black and red paint job. The very sight of it made her throat turn dry and her cheeks grow warm with blood.

  The Coupé faced towards a roll-down steel door that opened onto the street. Dutch traced her fingers along its hood, full of admiration. Whatever else she might say about Muto, she’d done a terrific job of restoring it after its last race.

  She stepped away from the Coupé with great reluctance and made her way up to an office on the second floor. She opened a cupboard and found the safe. She tapped in Hiro’s code and it swung open, revealing bundles of cash, bags of white powder, and the keys for the Coupé. She took the keys and left the rest.

  Dutch emerged from the office to find a large and muscular-looking Japanese man in a dark suit standing at the other end of the walkway, a Glock automatic aimed at her head.