Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘It would need to be daily and use an army of vacuums to match their power budget.’

  ‘So… We’re missing something. Hidden door?’ He was excited again. There was something going on here which had been concealed. That was a good sign, for his career anyway.

  ‘Now we look for it.’

  There were obvious places to look: closets which seemed to serve little purpose, the main utility room. It turned out to be in none of those. Tatsu was walking down a corridor when she spotted some odd thermal characteristics on one of the walls.

  ‘It’s here,’ she said, pointing at the spot on the wall.

  ‘What is?’ Ono asked. ‘It’s a wall.’

  ‘It’s a wall with a square panel warmer than the surrounding wall.’

  ‘You can see heat?’

  ‘I can see infrared and ultraviolet light. There’s a warm spot. Also, looking at the floor plan, there’s an unexplained void at this point, right behind that wall.’

  Ono nodded. ‘Okay, let’s get some men in here with crowbars.’

  It took ten minutes. The plasterboard fixed over the door came away easily enough, but then they were faced with a reinforced metal door with no obvious means of opening it. There was, presumably, a control somewhere, but there was no indication of where. In the end, they used breaching charges. Behind the door was a flight of stairs leading down; four of the assault team led the way down, followed by Tatsu and Ono.

  ‘What is this place?’ Ono asked as they walked through the main corridor they found below. Off to each side were open bays, square rooms with one wall missing. Each had… equipment in it. The equipment varied. In several, there was just a bed, in others it was bondage furniture, a gynaecological examination seat, a dentist’s chair…

  ‘I’d suggest it was fetish gear they kept secret,’ Tatsu said, ‘but the simple sets don’t match that idea. Sets sounds right though. I think this might be a studio.’

  ‘Studio? For what?’

  ‘At a guess, fuser porn.’

  Ono grimaced, which Tatsu could understand coming from him. Fuser – more properly FSR, or full sensorium recording – was point-of-view video taken to the next level. The process used a neural interface to record all of the senses, and those could be played back through a neural interface to anyone willing to view it. Generally, there was an editing process in between, though ‘fuser idols’ had become popular, letting people live the lives of the rich and famous vicariously and live streamed over the internet. Porn was the obvious subject matter, but fuser could be educational, therapeutic, or just escapist. There was, of course, a market for illegal fuser recordings too.

  ‘Fuser porn is not illegal,’ Ono said. ‘Hiding your studio behind a reinforced door suggests something… less pleasant.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it does.’

  That was backed up by the next set of rooms they found. There were four of them and they did not have an open wall. Or they did, but it was sealed off by bars. There was a mattress on the floor of each, a bucket to use as a toilet, and one occupant. She was lying on the mattress, naked, face turned to the wall, and she did not move at the sound of the assault team’s boots on the linoleum outside her cell.

  ‘She’s alive,’ Tatsu said. ‘Infrared is showing heat and her MedStat is… yellow and orange. No data.’

  ‘They probably hacked her implant and removed the software,’ Ono said.

  At the voices, the girl turned over, squinting at the two people looking in on her. She was Japanese and fairly young. Short dark hair and dark eyes, pretty aside from the puffy, reddened eyes. ‘W-who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Police,’ Tatsu replied. ‘We’ll have you out of there shortly… Ren. Facial recognition got a hit. She’s Ren Izumi, reported missing from her home in Saitama six days ago. Aged seventeen and I am going to find out who’s operating this place and string them up by their genitalia.’

  ‘Contact.’ The voice over the radio came from the forward assault team. Tatsu turned toward the end of the corridor, hoping for someone to shoot.

  ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I surrender. Don’t shoot, I’m just the technician!’ A different voice muffled by distance and dashing Tatsu’s hopes of a target.

  The owner of the voice turned out to be a small man who looked like he should be tending the huge array of computer equipment in the last room on the floor. There were racks of it, all with lights blinking manically. The tech was sufficiently wild-eyed that he matched the manic lights well.

  ‘Katsuro Maki,’ Ono said. ‘Technician or not, you are under arrest. What is all this stuff?’

  ‘Network storage,’ Tatsu said before Maki could speak. ‘Multicast units. Network switches. Computers, obviously. Quite the setup. They have to be streaming fuser out to quite a number of clients.’

  ‘We’ll get their client list,’ Ono said. ‘Won’t we, Mister Maki?’

  ‘I-I-I-’

  ‘I think that’s a yes,’ Tatsu said. ‘We’ll get it, even if I have to go in there personally to find it, but Mister Maki’s going to tell us all about his management too. Aren’t you, Mister Maki?’

  ‘I-I-I-’

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes too.’

  Chiba.

  ‘So, the manufacturing plant is gone,’ Tatsu said, ‘and so is a particularly nasty fuser snuff studio. We’ll have their entire distribution network destroyed in a couple of days, and their clients will need good lawyers.’

  Sachiko’s nose wrinkled. ‘Snuff?’

  ‘Snuff. I watched some of it and then I had to scrub my brain with bleach. They’ve been kidnapping girls from all over the Tokyo–Yokohama region, locking them up underground, and using them for all sorts of “interesting” scenarios. Gangbangs were popular, and also about the least unpleasant thing they were up to. Would you believe there were women willing to pay to experience it from the girl’s side?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sachiko said flatly. ‘Nothing much surprises me at this point, but rape fantasy isn’t entirely uncommon and fuser lets you experience the reality without the danger.’

  ‘It’s a point. Anyway, that’s why we’re in the least offensive room here I could think of. Bondage scenarios are not high on my list of things to be involved in tonight.’

  Sachiko smiled and stroked soft fingers over Tatsu’s cheek. They were in one of the medieval rooms in the Dream Castle; after sampling the output of the Nichibotsu gang’s studio, Tatsu had needed some stress relief. ‘I’m just glad you could get the time to be with me,’ Sachiko said.

  ‘There were four deaths and seven hospitalisations today,’ Tatsu said, ‘but they’re mostly being handled by other officers. Tomorrow I’ll be back to work trying to stop a full-scale gang war, but tonight… Tonight I needed soft and comforting.’

  ‘I can manage soft and comforting.’

  ‘Chase the nightmares away for me.’

  ‘No nightmares. I promise.’

  ‘That sounds like a tall order, to be honest.’

  Sachiko’s hand slid downward across Tatsu’s chest. ‘No nightmares. Satisfaction guaranteed.’

  Part Four: Tourists

  Tokyo, Japan, 20th August 2099.

  ‘Ariella Ray,’ Tatsu said, ‘social influencer, fuser idol, and Chiba success story.’

  Ariella Ray was now also a corpse. A posed corpse, lying on her large, sumptuous California King bed with her ankles secured behind her neck by a rope. It was, presumably, symbolic and the message from the killer added to that impression. Her past comes back to haunt her. She dies as she lived. The card had been held in Ray’s teeth.

  ‘I don’t get why this dragon killer chose her?’ Nakano said. ‘What does she have to do with organised crime?’

  ‘Nothing. Now. When she started out, she was Zima’s mistress. Off and on for about three years.’

  ‘I thought he liked them younger.’

  ‘She’s only twenty-five and this was a few years ago. She was maybe about fifteen when they started. When she got to eighteen, h
e cut her loose, but he liked her enough to stake her the money she needed to get her career going. Rumours persisted in Chiba that he was still backing her, but I doubt it.’

  ‘Right. Still seems tenuous.’

  ‘I’m not necessarily arguing. Look at her.’

  ‘I am.’ Nakano sounded less than pleased about that.

  ‘She was tortured. Multiple shallow wounds. Burn marks.’ Tatsu waved a hand at a knife lying on the floor, a large cook’s knife with no signs of blood on it. ‘I’m guessing the burns are from that. It wasn’t used to cut her. There are no serious wounds at all. I think she bled to death.’

  ‘I wonder whether that was intended, or a horrible disappointment.’

  ‘No idea, but he’s escalating in savageness and broadening his target base. This is bad.’

  ‘The media are going to be all over it.’

  Tatsu nodded. ‘And that’s just one of the reasons this is bad.’

  24th August.

  Bad was not quite covering it. Tatsu stared at Commissioner Yamashita for a long second before responding to the order he had just given her. ‘There’s close to open warfare breaking out across the western end of Chiba, we have a serial murderer cutting people up with abandon, and I’m supposed to escort a reporter and her crew around that war zone for a week?’

  Itsuki Yamashita was not a young man. Not too old either, but he had been on the job for a number of years and felt that his experience should earn him a degree of respect. He was forty-two, according to his bio on the TYMPD website, preferred wearing glasses to having his eyes fixed, and was not an unattractive man. He wore his pressed-within-an-inch-of-its-life uniform well over a body which had not seen excessive exercise in years. He had come up from the bottom, but that had been a while back, and all his experience came from Tokyo. His office was big, tastefully decorated, and should have belonged to the executive officer of a medium-sized business, not a cop. He had a big, solid-wood desk with a leather chair too.

  ‘Show some respect for your elders, Sergeant,’ Yamashita said.

  ‘You’re a little more than four years older than me, Commissioner.’

  He coughed. ‘That is not the issue. Your disrespect is one of the reasons you haven’t been promoted above sergeant.’

  ‘That and me not wanting to be. I was basically forced to become a sergeant. Why are we pandering to a reporter from a network with known anti-refugee sympathies?’

  ‘We need good publicity. The death of Ariella Ray has brought the recent murders under the spotlight. Some of the streaming services have picked up on the gang violence in Chiba and stoked the idea that it may spill out into Tokyo. The public wants to know what we’re doing about this.’

  ‘So, tell them. Letting Haruka Yamauchi wander around Chiba with a camera crew is just going to make matters worse. She’s going to spin anything she sees in a bad light. If anything, the public is going to think every refugee in Chiba is out for their blood by the time Yamauchi is finished.’

  Lacking in experience of Chiba or not, you could tell that Yamashita more or less agreed with that assessment. ‘I have my orders, and now you have your orders. You’re to meet Yamauchi and her team at eleven this morning at Funabashi Station.’

  Tatsu saluted as sarcastically as she could manage. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And, Sergeant…’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Make sure they remain in one piece.’

  ‘That, sir, is something I can only do with their cooperation, and I doubt I’m going to get it.’

  Chiba.

  Haruka Yamauchi was a tall, slim woman with blue hair. Her hair was her major distinguishing feature in a world where attractive was a given: a short cap or pixyish bob in a colour which was maybe something like teal, maybe a little too blue for that. It seemed like she had had it permanently recoloured because it was always the same shade and never showed her original colour at the roots. She could have done with having larger eyes, and she did not have the best profile; her face was rather flat aside from a sharp triangle of a nose which looked great from the front. Her lips were quite full and formed a sharp bow, her cheekbones were high, and she had a full, rounded chest. She was very attractive with enough flaws to make her just a little more human than some of the manufactured presenters the multicast channels tended to use.

  She was standing beside an armoured van outside the Funabashi Transport Hub. Her outfit was perfect for the summer heat: a bluish-purple summer dress with a deep V neckline and a short, flouncy skirt, blue hose, and high-heeled slingback pumps.

  Sitting in the rear door of the van beside Yamauchi was a man who looked like an underweight sumo wrestler: massive muscles, no belly. His nose had been broken, probably more than once, and his head was shaved to a fine stubble. His outfit was a better fit for Chiba: dark jeans, running shoes, a band T-shirt, and a leather jacket which, Tatsu suspected, had some in-built ballistic protection. The way his jacket hung suggested that it was concealing a weapon, probably just on the right side of legal. He looked like trouble, possibly like he was there as Yamauchi’s bodyguard.

  Tatsu was coming out of the station to get to them, which meant she could also see the woman sitting in the van’s driver seat. That one was small, flat-chested, big-eyed, and unassuming. Pretty, certainly, but preferring to avoid attention. Her short hair was mid-brown, as were her eyes which, thanks to being a little larger than average, gave her a doe-in-the-headlights look. She did not seem the type to be driving a van for a reporter’s crew.

  Yamauchi smiled as soon as she spotted Tatsu. Put the cop at her ease. Make pleasant knowing that this was not what Sergeant Yamada wanted to be doing with her time. ‘Sergeant Yamada, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I know you’re a busy woman, and I thank you for taking the time to make this special report possible.’ The speech was accompanied by a bow which was several degrees deeper than Tatsu felt she deserved.

  ‘Miss Yamauchi,’ Tatsu said, bowing a lot less deeply. ‘I have my orders.’

  Yamauchi gave a small wince. ‘This is my cameraman, Gorō “Shisen” Suzuki. Best eyes in the business and also not too bad with his fists. He doubles as my bodyguard.’

  Tatsu nodded to Suzuki. ‘What are you packing?’

  Suzuki raised an eyebrow, but he pulled his jacket aside to reveal a revolver in a shoulder rig. Then he lifted the pistol out and handed it to Tatsu, butt first. ‘I suppose you’ll want to check the calibre.’

  Taking the weapon, Tatsu nodded. ‘I’m not expecting it to be out of range, but that’s a big gun, Mister Suzuki.’

  ‘Eight-round cylinder,’ he explained. ‘Three-fifty-seven Magnum load. Packs a punch.’

  It was also chrome-plated and flashy, but it was legal. ‘Takeda are a good manufacturer. Try not to use it. The paperwork will be mountainous. Are all of you carrying?’

  ‘I carry a Takeda too,’ Yamauchi said. ‘A P-twelve-forty with flechette rounds loaded.’

  ‘Okay…’

  ‘It’s for self-defence, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously. And your driver?’

  ‘Huh? Oh, Hanae’s not my driver. I mean, she drives the van, but she’s really my assistant. Hanae Watanabe. And she doesn’t carry a weapon.’

  ‘No matter how much we tell her to,’ Suzuki added.

  ‘I don’t like guns,’ Watanabe called out.

  ‘Good attitude,’ Tatsu called back. ‘So, exactly what are you trying to report on, Miss Yamauchi?’

  ‘My information suggests there’s a war brewing in Chiba,’ Yamauchi said. ‘The deaths of Anastas Zima and Evgeni Nikolaev of the Funabashi gang have caused a chain reaction which is spreading rapidly through the criminals in western Chiba, maybe the whole zone.’

  ‘I’m aware,’ Tatsu replied.

  ‘Normally, no one would care.’

  ‘Of this, I am also aware.’

  Yamauchi flashed a tight grin. ‘Yeah, I guess you would be. The murder of Ariella Ray has pushed the murders into the public spotlight. Imm
igrant or not, she was well liked. She had influence. She had a strong fuser following. She was also out-of-pattern, not the killer’s usual kind of target. People are asking whether they could be the next in line, and that’s my in. We cover the murders and the gang violence. We cover the living conditions in Chiba and how that’s resulted in this kind of occurrence. And we see where that takes us.’

  ‘And where do you think that’ll take us?’

  ‘Down some dark alleys. I want to see the real underside of Chiba. I want to show people what life is really like here. And, obviously, I’d like to see some gang action. It’ll make for a good stream.’

  Tatsu stared at her for a second, trying to discern whether she was being sincere or not. TNM, her network, had an agenda and not one sympathetic to refugees. They called them immigrants, which suggested that they had a choice about coming to Japan. Just what was Yamauchi’s view on Chiba and its residents?

  ‘Okay, let’s get going,’ Tatsu said. ‘We’ll do the tour and, as you say, see where that takes us.’

  ~~~

  ‘Basically,’ Tatsu said, ‘Chiba is split into three sections.’ The van was driving north from Funabashi to Shiroi, taking something of a winding route. Suzuki was sitting in the passenger seat with his camera while Tatsu and Yamauchi sat behind, opposite each other, on seats mounted to the sides of the vehicle. It let Yamauchi do her interview thing. ‘Here in the west, the Russian gangs rule, and by rule, I mean that they hold the territory and control the street gangs below them. The street gangs around here are mostly Yankees, though the Denshitoakuma have a solid presence around Funabashi.’

  ‘The Denshitoakuma?’ Yamauchi asked.

  ‘Basically a collective of sex workers, started by a group of Japanese women. East of here, the two surviving tongs hold territory. It’s a largely Chinese region, some Hispanic and American residents. Out past Yotsukaido, there are no major criminal gangs operating and the Hispanic street gangs rule the roost.’

  ‘You personally took down one of the tongs last year, I believe.’

  ‘There were other people involved,’ Tatsu replied, smiling. ‘I led the operation and, yes, I did a lot of work on it. They were a small gang, but they were trying to get a lot bigger, pushing into the other tongs’ territories and the Funabashi mafia areas. Their tactics were brutal. The area they exclusively held remains largely unoccupied. The Denshitoakuma hold that area if anyone does. They have their main HQ there.’