Naturally, the opposite also held true:
Without Ogi dead or arrested, my life was worthless.
Soga had crushed us. Abers was dead, Renna was in critical condition, and Noda and Luke were now officially missing and presumed dead. McCann confirmed that the two men had blown the boats, adding that the noise had probably drawn too much attention. I had no trouble imagining Soga swarming through the woods and pinning Noda and Luke at the shoreline, near the docks. By McCann’s calculations, the pair had become victims of their own success.
I plunged back into the grounds to collect Jenny, the one good thing to come out of the assault. Maybe we could go into hiding until they caught Ogi. But for how long? Soga would never stop looking. I circled around the cottage where my daughter had been held and headed for her airy roost. In my waistband, I carried Renna’s piece.
At distinct points around the grounds, I heard cops shouting out with each new discovery. Confidence among the conquerors was spreading. I wished I had a reason to join the jubilation.
Arriving at the base of Jenny’s oak, I took a minute to compose myself before the climb. She could see no trace of my concern. Under the illusion of safety, I’d escort her home. But with Abers gone, Renna ailing, and Jenny hovering on the edge, how happy would our homecoming be? What would I tell Miriam if Renna didn’t make it? How could I ever look Christine and Joey in the eye? And how long would Jenny and I be forced to hide from a refortified Soga? Our assault had been an unmitigated fiasco.
As I reached for the lowest branch, I heard a noise behind me.
“Hold it right there, Brodie.”
I turned. A shape separated from the darkness, and I was caught staring down the barrel of yet another Soga Glock.
Held by a man supposedly nine thousand miles away.
“You,”
I said. “What are
you
doing here?”
CHAPTER 77
E
NGULFED
in an agonizing silence, we stared at each other from opposite ends of the gun. I didn’t know why he had betrayed me, but the pain of his choice was etched across his face.
“Of all people,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Brodie-kun.”
Staring back from the other side of the Glock was Shig Narazaki, my father’s longtime partner, friend of the family, surrogate uncle.
His appearance on the scene rocked me to the core. I’d been betrayed by
family
.
My head spun with the implications.
He
was the reason Soga was always one step ahead.
He
was the reason they found me in Ikebukuro after I took every precaution before meeting my journalist friend. Now I understood why Narazaki insisted Noda head to London when New York seemed the obvious choice to the rest of us. And it was Narazaki, not Luke, who betrayed our secret plans in New York. I caught a further glimpse into Soga’s successful methodology: they covered their back from multiple angles.
“I tried to keep them away,” he said.
I shook my head in disbelief. The disconnect was enormous. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m Soga born. Halfway through training, I took myself out of the program. Soga and I reached a compromise. Brodie Security was it. When Jake opened the first Western-style PI agency in Tokyo, it was thought that his place would attract some big cases. And it did.”
There were legends about Jake’s prowess. By the time he opened his
doors in 1973, the free-for-all of postwar Japan had gone underground. Developed a good public front. Black market racketeers, yakuza, Italian Mafia, and carpetbaggers from Texas, Moscow, Paris, and a dozen other Allied cities all operated virtually unchecked by an emasculated Japanese police force in the two decades after the surrender of 1945. It was a time ripe for private enterprise—legal, gray, and otherwise. By 1973 they were still operating, had more to protect, and often resorted to the same methods of enforcement. The Japanese police were all but useless against this more evolved criminal element. For those in desperate straits, Brodie Security provided an alternative. Jake solved more than his share of headline-grabbing cases, and his enterprise thrived.
“How is this possible? You ran the agency with my father for forty years.”
“All legit, too. We did some great things. Only occasionally, maybe once a year, when a case related to Soga came up, I’d assign it to an inexperienced employee and let it flounder. I’d been doing that for years, without hurting Jake or the firm. Soga would give us just enough information to save face with the client, but in truth the cases were never fully resolved. I supplied inside information on some of our clients to Soga when necessary, and with those minor concessions I got to work the
good side
of the trade. I’m sorry things went this far. I did everything I could to keep you clear of it. Twice I tried to get you to drop the whole thing.”
A long speech but not one folksy fishing metaphor in the lot. Soga was landlocked.
“You let them take my daughter.”
His reaction was startled and immediate. “Little Yumi-chan? Never! But no one asked me. Or told me.”
“Who hired Soga to kill my wife?”
“I don’t know.”
I believed him on both counts. The string of killings that took my wife and her family had unwound across the water, far from Tokyo. “But you did send them after me in Ikebukuro, didn’t you?”
He held the gun steady. “After you and Noda ran through a whole team of trainees in Soga, I had little choice. I could no longer protect you. I begged, but Ogi was adamant. Initially, he’d promised to let
you pass through the village unharmed, but your showing up in Soga proved a temptation he couldn’t resist and he double-crossed me. When I heard what had happened, I confronted him, but your very success proved his point. Hooking up with Kozawa only increased Ogi’s determination to see you dead. Yanking you off the case and sending you into hiding was my last-ditch attempt to protect you. But you wouldn’t budge. I came here to plead your case one last time with Ogi but it was a lost cause.”
Shock, disbelief, and disgust rippled through me in continuous waves. With our client setting us up and my partner giving away our secrets, we were hemmed in on all sides from the start.
“So you were in on all of it?”
“Yes.”
“The bug at Brodie Security?”
“A built-in excuse should you or Noda ever suspect a leak from the inside. Toru wasn’t supposed to find it.”
“The hacker?”
“Meant as a diversion. A time-waster. I wanted you and Noda distracted in Tokyo. I never imagined Mari and her flaky boyfriend would actually be able to catch our computer guy, let alone tail him to our home ground. Especially after I
warned
him he was being stalked.”
“You can’t shoot me, Narazaki. You know that.”
Remorse pooled in his eyes. “Until tonight I couldn’t. Now, if you live, Soga will come after
me
. When you escaped from the village, Ogi accused me of assisting you. In our three-hundred-year history, no one has ever inflicted so many casualties in the village. Because of that, Ogi not only refused my request to leave you alone but also said he’d hold me personally responsible if you lived through the next attack. And you did that when you escaped from the kidnap attempt in Ikebukuro. Ogi thinks I helped you out in both places. He repeated the threat tonight once you broke free.”
His words drained the fight from me. Burned by the man I’d sought to emulate as I stepped into my father’s shoes. This was
not
the world I knew. “You could still let me go. Pretend you never found me.”
Narazaki regarded me sadly, the gun never wavering. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t be doing you a favor. You’re already dead. By tomorrow every
Soga operative in the world will be hunting you. This way, at least one of us lives.”
“Because of the village and Gilbert Tweed? Why press it? They’re exposed.”
Sorrow wrinkled his brow. “No, it’s not either of those. Any chance I had of swinging a last-minute reprieve vanished when you killed the heir apparent.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You don’t know, do you? Casey. He was an Ogi. And next in line to lead.”
For a moment I stood speechless, absorbing the implications.
Casey the heir apparent?
No wonder he spoke with such a commanding arrogance. Ordered the shooting of Abers with such cavalier abandon.
My old family friend was right. In killing the heir, I’d killed myself.
Narazaki’s finger closed on the trigger. “Now or later makes no difference.”
“Don’t shoot my daddy, Uncle Shig.”
No!
My heart plunged. She’d
almost
made it. Tonight had been all about Jenny. No matter what happened to me, I’d taken immense comfort in knowing I’d removed her from the field of fire. She was safe—my one consolation should I take a fall. Now Jenny would die too.
Exhausted, I shook my head in defeat. Narazaki wouldn’t let her live. With Dermott, Jenny’s timing had been brilliant, but this time I was too far from cover, or Narazaki, to take advantage of the surprise.
He glanced up into the darkness without taking the gun off me. “You hid her in the tree. Clever. Just like Jake. I wish she hadn’t heard our conversation.”
“Forget about it,” I said. “In a week she’ll have blanked out the whole episode. Kids are like that.”
Narazaki frowned. “Can’t do it. Sorry.”
“If not for me, then for Jake.”
“Wish I could oblige, but she has to go. Big shame. If only—”
Without warning, a silenced weapon coughed behind me. Narazaki’s legs buckled beneath him and he sat down with a grunt, an entry wound in his shoulder staining his clothing red.
Noda stepped from the shadows, a gun trained on his boss.
He’d survived!
Narazaki’s resigned smile was tinged with gratitude. “Thank you, Kei-kun. I didn’t want to shoot Jake’s kid.”
“I know,” Noda said.
“If it had to be someone, I’m glad it’s you. Finish what you started.”
Noda hesitated.
“Go ahead, Kei-kun. My life’s over. It’s either prison or Soga.”
Noda stared at his old friend. “Won’t do it.”
“You don’t, I’ll shoot Brodie.” Halfheartedly, Narazaki raised his weapon. From the trees, another shot opened a hole in Narazaki’s forehead and my father’s longtime partner pitched over into the deadfall.
Luke stepped from the foliage.
“Garbage in, garbage out,” he said.
Eyes dark with grief, Noda gazed at his fallen friend for a beat before mumbling a gruff thanks to the CIA man. Nodding, Luke holstered his gun. Noda turned away and Luke stepped in behind him, uttering a single word: “Ogi.”
Brodie Security’s chief detective grunted, and together they slipped through the woods in search of the Soga leader.
CHAPTER 78
I
FERRIED
my daughter from her roost, and once on solid ground I smothered her in an embrace. Jenny threw her arms around me and squeezed for all she was worth. Neither of us spoke. Despite the lifeless forms at our feet, or perhaps because they bore testimony to how far we had come down a hazard-strewn path, the silence between us was long and full and freighted with a sense of relief and renewal. Everything we had endured, everything we meant to each other, and everything that had unfurled in the last nine days spilled out in the embrace.
After a time, I said, “Let me look at you, Jen.”
Lifting her head, Jenny gazed at me with her mother’s probing brown eyes. They were bursting with questions. For the first time in days, I laughed. A foreign and unfamiliar sound. My daughter was beautiful, and she was mine. The thought swept over me with undiluted joy. We’d get past Ogi. Somehow. Even if it meant hiding out for months.
“Jen, I just want to tell you that no matter what—”
The bushes behind me exploded with movement, then a voice hissed in my ear: “The world’s a funny place.”
Even distorted with hatred, I recognized the inflection.
After all, he was the mayor’s eyes on the scene.
Supportive. By the book. All of us grateful to find a pol without an agenda.
All of us suckered.
With a .22 trained on Jenny, DeMonde circled around the front, stepping back until he was beyond the range of a swift karate strike.
The man was well informed. “If your wife hadn’t been at her parents’ house that night, she wouldn’t have died and you wouldn’t have such a hard-on for this case. But she was and you do. Now Soga’s on the verge of collapsing, incredible as that seems, which forces my hand. With all the bodies tonight, you and your daughter will be just two more casualties. I’ve always been lucky that way.”
My mind reeled. What was DeMonde raving about? Had he snapped? Then revelation cleared the mist.
Sales yak and self-made millionaire
, Renna had told me the first time I’d met the deputy mayor. DeMonde must have sold
cars.
Owned
car
lots. That’s what Renna had tried to tell me tonight.
DeMonde had hired Soga to orchestrate the “accidental” deaths of three car dealers whose lots he coveted, among them those owned by Mieko’s uncle.
An all-consuming rage roiled my blood. The man responsible for my wife’s death stood two yards away pointing a .22-caliber pistol at my daughter. I did the calculations. The caliber was small. I could absorb two or three bullets and still take him down and survive, but a single round was more than enough to kill a six-year-old child at close range.
Inwardly I was incredulous. After running a gauntlet of Soga obstacles—the village, a near garroting, Jenny’s rescue, skirmishes with Dermott
and
Casey—I was going to die because DeMonde had waltzed in under the guise of an ally. The simplicity of his plan stunned me.
And with Jenny in my arms, I was helpless to stop him.
Another revelation overtook me.
DeMonde
had worn the wire for Soga during our meet at the hotel. Narazaki knew the basics but not the details of our New York operation, or the words spoken behind closed doors.