First Abers, and now Jenny.
I drooped against the wall, my eyes stinging, my head spinning.
CHAPTER 71
S
WALLOWING
hard, I peered through the green gloom at the petite form of my daughter’s lifeless body. A salty sting burned the corners of my eyes. Dazed and numb, I stared at what had once been my flesh and blood. A vision of little Miki Nakamura limp on the cobblestone of Japantown floated before my eyes.
Trembling, I bent down and kissed Jenny’s cheek. It was warm. Body temperature. Not cooler, as it should have been. I raised the goggles and squinted closer. There! Movement! What was imperceptible in the foggy green tint of the night-vision glasses clarified itself as my eyes adjusted to the natural darkness of the room. Up close, Jenny’s chest rose and fell in an unnaturally sluggish cadence.
She wasn’t dead.
But her breathing was shallower than her normal sleeping pattern. Why? What could explain her deathlike sleep?
She’d been drugged
. That had to be it. Soga could hold on to their ace while rendering her mute. My daughter was alive!
A second look tempered my joy. Jenny’s body language revealed a more gruesome tale: under the light spread, she was tucked into a tight ball, her scalp brushed with perspiration. Her stay, asleep or awake, had been anything but peaceful.
Stashing the Beretta in my waistband, I pulled back the blue quilt and scooped her up in my arms. Her eyes fluttered open. Groggy but attentive, she stared at me with unbridled fear.
I lifted the hood. “It’s me, Jen.”
“Daddy?”
Her voice was a wisp of air over strained vocal cords, struggling with the tail end of a drug-induced stupor.
“Yes.”
She pressed her palms against my cheeks. “It
is
you.
Finally
.”
She sighed and burrowed her face into the pocket between my neck and shoulder. I clasped her to my chest. I felt her heart beating and mine kicking back. Her body was warm and soft and frail. Her breath, moist and delicate, flitted across my neck. I was incredulous. I thought I’d lost her for good.
“I want to go home, Daddy.”
“That’s where we’re going.”
“Are they still here?”
“Not in the house. Are you hurt?”
“No. Are they outside?”
“Yes.”
Her body tensed.
“But not for long,” I added quickly.
“Are you beating them?”
“You could say that.”
She turned her head and lay with her ear on my shoulder, her breath stronger now against my neck, her body perched on my left forearm. With my right hand, I grabbed a blanket and a sheet from the bed, flung them over my free shoulder, and whisked Jenny to the door. Drawing the Beretta, I dared a quick look up and down the hall. Clear both ways. I swept through the door, down the stairs, and out the back of the house, pausing at each juncture to check for Soga troops. There were none.
Once outside, I plunged straight into the woods, deeper into the estate, traversing the soft undergrowth, avoiding the trails. I padded silently along, past pine and oak and hickory. I checked back over my shoulder every ten paces, until I had put the guesthouse far behind us.
Then I slipped behind a towering oak and fell back against the trunk, breathing hard. We were safe, for now. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. My breathing came in short bursts. My heartbeat was off the charts. It was one thing to be fighting for my own life, quite another to be defending my daughter’s.
I pressed Jenny close. Just holding her seemed a gift beyond measure. Safe for the moment.
Once more, the corners of my eyes burned. I couldn’t lose her a second time. It would kill me. But how could I protect my daughter against Soga? Even if we eluded them tonight, our escape would be temporary at best—unless the police rounded up Ogi and all his troops. Soga was already on the move. They would, as Ogi had so confidently proclaimed, simply disperse and relocate, after which they would hunt us down on their own timetable. Three hundred years of success lent ample testimony to the claim. And then there was nedayashi, the vicious but necessary Japanese tradition of protecting your own clan by eliminating your enemy’s. The practice was savage and unforgiving—and allowed for only one survivor.
I’d gotten it entirely wrong.
We were nowhere near safe.
CHAPTER 72
J
ENNY
raised her head. “Why are we stopping?”
“I have more work to do.”
“Fighting work?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes glittered with fear. “Don’t leave me, Daddy.”
“Actually, I need your help.”
She shivered. “You want me to fight them too?”
“No, I need you to wait for me here. Can you do that?”
She shook her head back and forth like a mechanical doll whose circuits had gone haywire. “
No, no
. No more alone, Daddy. No more alone.
Please
.”
Each word was a knife in my chest. I was asking the impossible of her. She had been abducted, and the prospect of being separated so soon after our reunion terrified her.
I hugged my daughter for all I was worth. Leaving her alone was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done. But there was no other way.
“Listen,” I began in a whisper, “the world is spinning. At the moment, badly. But
now
—right this minute—you and I have a chance to put it right.”
“Daddy, please don’t . . .” Her voice faltered.
“We’re together again, aren’t we?”
“Yes, but—”
“And that is good. So first, I’m going to make sure you’re safe. Which will be another large dose of good for us. As soon as I let you down, I want you to climb on my back.”
Reluctantly, Jenny slid to the ground. I slung the sheet and blanket around my neck, then crouched down and Jenny clambered up my back.
“Slip your hands around my waist.” She did, and I looped the sheet over her head and let it drop down to her hips before knotting the ends at my stomach and binding her slim body to mine. “Is that too tight?”
Jenny shook her head. I couldn’t see her but I felt the movement.
I said, “Okay. Now, hold on tight. We’re going up.”
With the night-vision goggles, I examined the tree I’d selected. It was a massive oak ballooning open overhead, with a stout base. I peered upward into the foliage, my eyes threading through the branches. When I found one high enough and thick enough for my purposes, I hoisted myself onto a low branch and began to climb.
As we ascended, leaf clusters grazed our skin and I felt Jenny flinch with each unexpected touch. Thirty feet aboveground, I edged out onto a sturdy branch, sat, and scooted backward until Jenny’s back rested against the trunk. The perch I’d chosen had the circumference of a large medicine ball where it met the trunk and would support Jenny’s weight and mine twice over without effort.
Instructing her to wrap her legs around the limb and latch on to it with her hands as soon as she could, I untied the sheet and inched away, putting a safe distance between us before swinging my left leg over the limb to sit sidesaddle. I found my balance, then swung my other leg over the branch so that I was facing Jenny. I scooted forward and she flung her arms around my neck.
“I
knew
you’d come,” she whispered, laying her head once more on my shoulder.
We were still for a long moment. Around us the sounds of rustling leaves and humming insects soothed our nerves. I recalled the times she had fallen asleep in my embrace in just this manner. Recalled all the quiet evenings we’d spent together at home, Jenny snuggled into my lap as we chatted or laughed or watched a Disney movie. Tonight, the weight of her diminutive head on my shoulder was the most perfect burden I could imagine. If we lived through the next several hours, never again would I take a moment with my daughter for granted. Things would be different. When her breathing grew calm, I slid away. Sadly. Reluctantly. Inevitably.
Jenny raised her eyes to mine. “Time to go?”
“Yes.”
Her lower lip quivered. “Are there a lot of them?”
“Fewer than there were. Not only that, Christine and Joey’s father is here with a lot of police.”
A note of excitement crept into her voice. “He’s a big one for our side. He can arrest them, can’t he?”
“Exactly.”
“Then what happens?”
Recalling our disastrous phone conversation, I answered with care. “With luck, they will disappear forever and never bother us again.”
“What do I do?”
“You stay up here where they can’t find you and be very, very quiet until I come back for you.”
“Up here? By myself? What if I fall asleep?”
I lifted the sheet and smiled. “I am going to tie you to the tree.”
“And the blanket will keep me warm! I’ll be camping out in a tree. I can do that!”
“Good, but keep your voice down. And after I leave, no noise, okay? No calling out, no talking, no singing like you love to do. Not tonight. Up here you’re safe because there are thousands of trees around us and no one will think to look up.”
“No talking? What if something happens?”
“I doubt anything will happen.”
“But what if it does?”
I looked at my daughter. Her jaw trembled. “You’re a big girl now, Jen. You’ll have to decide for yourself. Like I’ve always taught you. Just make sure that it’s the right thing to do.”
“But how will I know?”
The eternal question from a six-year-old. Finding the right answer under normal circumstances was hard enough. With Soga lurking in the shadows, the task bordered on impossible. I thought about the stillness. I thought about Japantown. I thought about the thief and the Okazaki Hills and returning to the core. There was only one answer.
There always had been.
“Just listen,” I said.
“What does that mean? I’m only a kid, Daddy.”
I blew out my breath in frustration. She was right, of course. If I couldn’t provide her with an anchor to ease her fears, I couldn’t leave her.
“Ask
yourself
the question that’s bothering you, then stay still and the answer will pop into your head.”
“From where?”
I tapped her chest. “From here.”
Her brow knitted as she gave my words what she believed to be mature consideration. “Is that how you know the things you know?”
“For the tough ones, that’s the
only
way I know.”
Then, with the greatest reluctance, I left her—and headed back into the night.
CHAPTER 73
I
N
my haste to put distance between us and the cottage, I’d left a trail Soga operatives could easily follow. Once they spied fresh tracks with abnormally deep impressions, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out the additional depth signified Jenny’s extra weight, so I needed to move on in order to draw attention away from my daughter’s cozy nest.
I’d dropped from the tree but hadn’t gone more than five steps when a shot hummed past my left hip, shearing off the top of a pine sapling.
“Stand very still, Brodie. The next one won’t miss.”
Dermott stepped from behind a large spruce with a .45-caliber Glock aimed at my midsection. He wore Soga black and night-vision goggles.
“You made a mess back at the cottage. Now I’m going to make a mess outta you.”
Panic flooded my thoughts. At close quarters, with his weapon already drawn, I saw no way out.
“Where’s the girl?”
“Long gone,” I said. “To the neighbors.”
“That doesn’t seem likely. You stash her up in the tree, like a squirrel?”
“Daddy?”
Instinctively, Dermott eyes shot skyward. “Called that one, didn’t I?”
Hoping Dermott wouldn’t shoot up at Jenny, I slipped swiftly behind the broad, scaly trunk of a nearby hickory the instant his eyes left me, drew the Beretta, and stretched my arm around the far side of the tree, firing blindly at the spot where I’d last seen him, a shrewd little maneuver my Korean neighbor in South Central taught me. Spraying
shots high and low, a bit to the left, a bit to the right, I emptied the weapon without giving my opponent a target for return fire. I heard him grunt and fall. I popped the empty clip, slammed home the new one, and tried to chamber a new round. The gun jammed. Shit.
I peered cautiously around the other side of the trunk. Dermott had collapsed to his knees. His Glock hung limply at his side, as if the weapon were too heavy to raise. With his free hand, he held his stomach, blood seeping between his fingers.
My gun trained on the faux homeboy, I stepped into the open, ready to dive back behind the hickory if the Soga assassin raised his weapon. He didn’t. He saw me but didn’t seem to care. A second round had caught him in the chest, probably puncturing a lung. His breathing had become labored.
“A kid,” he said. “Taken out by a six-year-old kid and her punk father.”
He toppled over.
Before I could move, a figure approached from my blind side and nudged the back of my head with a gun muzzle.
“Mr. Brodie, you are one lucky man,” a voice said. “Or should I say
were?
”
—
Protected from sniper fire by a bend in the road, Renna paced restlessly two hundred yards from the front gate of the Soga compound. “It’s taking too long, Jamie.”
McCann pursed his lips. “Hang on, Frank. They’re ten miles out. They’ll be here any minute.”
“There’s no time left. Brodie’s been in there too long.”
“We’re pinned down. Our first approach was a disaster.”
Trailing fingers through his hair, Renna continued pacing. “I know, I know. But we’ve got to do something. Keep them focused on us and not our people inside. They got Brodie and his girl and probably Luke and Noda.”
“Nothing we can do until backup arrives. No one expected so much firepower. We took too many casualties, Frank. I can’t authorize a second approach without more equipment. You know that.”
“We got four people in there and time’s run out. There’s got to be something.”
McCann looked away, frustrated. “My hands are tied. I got orders to stay put until we have full riot gear this time.”