The War of Immensities (68 page)

Kevin Wagner
grimly regarded the rag-tag bunch of people brought before him.
Fourteen in number, a cross-section of humanity, Japanese style—men
and women, old and young and three children of indiscernible sex.
They were dirty and exhausted, dressed in rags, and shuffled as
prisoners do when herded by armed soldiers. Captain Tonishu handed
him a clipboard on which there was a long list of names, with
crosses beside the fourteen that presumably belonged to these
folk.

“Where did you
find them?” Wagner demanded coarsely of the police captain.

“They were in
Hondo’s Shrine, on Mount Fuji. They had run out of water and
someone saw them when one of them tried to get to the spring.”

Wagner nodded
grimly. Poor bastards. If they irritated him beyond imagining,
still, once confronted with the unfortunate reality of these folk,
he shook his head in dismay.

“There are
three other groups of similar number, we think, hiding out in
shrines. My men are searching them one by one, at this very time,”
the captain continued.

“Thank you,
Captain. And again, thank your men for their efficiency. But once
more warn them that time is running out.”

“Only
sixty-three escapees remain to be found. The locations of at least
half of them are known to us. They will be found.”

“And only
eighteen days left in which to find them. Every last one of them,
Captain.”

“In time, they
will all be found.”

“In eighteen
days, they will all be found, and on the plane and gone from here.
It’s crucial.”

“Yes, Mr
Wagner. This I try to impress upon my men. But it is hard for them.
They have found so many. There are so few remaining to be found.
And they do not understand the reason for haste.”

“Neither do I,”
Wagner mumbled and the captain’s eyes widened. Wagner inwardly
cursed and then strove to cover his error. “What I mean is, those
who are not found will miss out on receiving the cure and may
remain afflicted for the rest of their lives.”

“Yes. So I
understand.”

“Okay,” Wagner
said with a dismissive wave. “Leave these to us. Find the rest, and
hurry.”

The captain
bowed obedience and Wagner nodded his head in faint reply. When the
policemen were gone, Wagner did not need to do anything. Everyone
had been through the procedure enough times to know what to do
without being told. The geishas rushed into the room immediately
and within a short time, the captives would be washed and dressed
and fed. There was a doctor and two nurses to assure their health
and administer injections. There were three Japanese officials on
the fulltime staff to facilitate identification, passports, visas
and other travel arrangements. There were gifts for all, to placate
them and assure them that Project Earthquake would generously
reward them for their co-operation. Within four hours, they would
be processed and at the airport, ready for the next JAL flight to
Rio De Janerio. Fifteen thousand, eight hundred and forty-one had
travelled thus in the last two months, these fourteen plus
sixty-three more and every sleeper would be gone. But the fewer the
number became, the harder they were to find.

Yet they all
wanted to go, because they were vilified in their own land and
Brazil promised a cure and an end to their torment. Those that held
out did so for personal reasons—criminals more afraid of the police
than the mobs, drug addicts afraid to be separated from their
dealers, people who would not leave their dogs or other pets or get
too far away from their favourite shrine, old folk who had never
left Japan and were determined they never would.

Only they had,
since old people were easier to find. All pets were now transported
with their owners. Japan’s first official heroin dispensary now
operated in the House of the Golden Carp, there were temporary
pardons arranged. It had been a phenomenal feat of administration
and it had worked, except for sixty-three people hiding out for
sixty-three reasons that no one had thought of yet.

“These people
are all of one family,” Tamiko, the counsellor, informed him, for
all along she had been interviewing them in urgent terms. “The
daughter was to be married next month. The family wanted to remain
until after the wedding. The groom is not afflicted. It would be a
bad omen to postpone the wedding.”

“A month will
be too late,” Wagner told her. “Tell them the wedding need not be
postponed. We will fly them back in time for, and meet all added
costs for the inconvenience.”

“I will tell
them so.”

With the wisdom
of Solomon, so Wagner commanded. Promise them whatever was
necessary to assure their co-operation—that was the way forward. He
had no idea whether such promises could be kept. That would be up
to his underlings. With a sweep of his hand, Wagner made a data
bank full of such promises, all of them the easy way out of
whatever situation they faced.

“And see it is
done,” Wagner told her.

The girl bowed
and left and the nurses came to lead the captives out. Sixty-three
to go. Eighteen days. Wagner’s head buzzed. But not so much that he
did not take the trouble to give them one last look over.

He wanted to
contemplate Miss Tamiko and the secret pleasures that they would
share again that evening. Only vaguely did he mentally check the
captives off as they filed out the door.

He cursed, and
immediately rushed through the doorway. “Keep them here!” he roared
at Tamiko. He charged out onto the balcony and leaned out. In the
car park below, Captain Tonishu was just climbing into his
vehicle.

“Tonishu, you
idiot! There’s only God-damn thirteen of ‘em!”

It was probably
for the best that Harley Thyssen was not required to appear before
the Senate. Clyde Pascoe, the leader of the team of attorneys whom
Joe had employed to undertake the case, was able to read a
statement from Thyssen and that he wished to take the 5th Amendment
and on those grounds did not wish to answer any of the Senator’s
questions. The gentlemen on the high bench, seated all in a row
like bottles on a shelf waiting to be knocked down by whomsoever
dared, consulted, protested, but then adjourned. When they convened
next morning, it was agreed that it would be sufficient that
Professor Thyssen’s statement be read into the record.

“How’d you
manage that?” Joe asked Pascoe in the next break in
proceedings.

“Harley planned
to put into the record an accusation that President Grayson knew
all about Project Earthshaker’s activities and approved the
payments himself.”

“You mean he
wasn’t going to take the fifth?”

“Since he’s
Norwegian, not American, I don’t think he can. But anyhow, can you
imagine Harley doing something like that?”

“No.”

“Nor would he.
He planned to get acknowledgment of Earthshaker into the record and
then let them fight over it.”

“They wouldn’t
have let him...”

“The important
thing about a show trial is you make sure you control what gets
shown.”

“And where does
that leave me?” Joe asked, though cheerfully.

“In the toilet.
You’re all they’ve got now. Since you deny all knowledge of the
original source of the funds and since you refuse to incriminate
Thyssen, that just leaves you out on a limb.”

“I can handle
that.”

“Are you sure?
Is he worth protecting like this? After all, he has happily landed
you right in it.”

“I’m not
protecting Harley. I don’t really know whether I trust him or even
care about him myself. Although I do admire him. It’s the project
I’m protecting.”

“But the
project is Thyssen.”

“So they would
have you believe. And they ridicule him and call him a fake and a
liar and therefore discredit the project in the eyes of the public.
It seems that no amount of truth and evidence can combat media
lies.”

“Are you sure
he’s not really a very charismatic crank?”

“Is that what
you think?”

“It’s not my
role to have such an opinion.”

“And the
evidence you’ve seen doesn’t convince you otherwise.”

“I’m not sure.
Maybe it does. But I don’t wish to believe what the evidence tells
me. That doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“Oh I see.
Better to believe the lie than face unpalatable facts.”

“Yes, Joe. I
think so. If Thyssen and all those other Loony Tunes are right and
the planet is about to blow itself up and there isn’t a damned
thing we can do, why worry yourself to death about it? Better to
just ignore it and carry on normally.”

“All the other
Loony Tunes are Loony Tunes, Clyde. Every fucked-brain fanatic in
the world has hopped on this bandwagon. Only Harley is not one of
them.”

“He seems like
one of them.”

“They make him
seem like one of them.”

“In this age of
media domination, Joe, it’s the same thing.”

Another family
group, seventeen members this time spanning four generations,
recumbent about the single room. Wagner would have thought they
were sleeping, had he not known they were dead. Outside a clutter
of ambulances and police cars stood waiting helplessly, and the
paramedics who had been first on the scene now stood back, smoking,
and averting their gaze.

“They are
waiting for forensic, but I can tell you what happened,” Captain
Tonishu said bitterly. “They waited until the children were asleep
and then burned the candles you see on the table which were laced
with a chemical, turned to a poisonous gas by the flame. It is a
common enough method in this country, sure and relatively
painless.”

Wagner, from a
distance, gazed upon the faces of two small children that were
turned toward him. Pain and fear showed there plainly. The poor
kids had wakened in the last moments of life and had known...

“And they were
all on our list?” he asked, to be sure of the obvious.

“Oh yes. They
left this message.”

He held up a
scroll with the square of carefully painted characters—the mass
suicide note must have taken hours to write.

“How can this
happen?” Wagner asked the room in general, ignoring the
message.

“It is a common
enough occurrence,” the captain said in his flat dispassionate
tone.

Perhaps, Wagner
liked to think, it was the man’s unsure command of English that
make him sound so heartless. “In Japan, the suicide rate is very
high, especially amongst the young. Many of those removed from our
list did so by this means. This is only the most shocking case and
I thought it would be best if you saw it.”

“Thank very
much,” Wagner said in disgust.

He remembered
now, lines drawn through names with the symbol for suicide placed
by Tamiko. He had ignored it at the time. Just another one we don’t
have to find, he thought. And perhaps the Captain knew that, or
suspected it, and he brought him to see this to place him more in
touch with the reality. Perhaps, just as the captain seemed to lack
compassion to him, so did he to the captain.

Three more
groups and a number of individuals had been located and processed
and were on their way to Brazil. Before this happened, the list had
been reduced to twenty-eight, plus one. Katsumi Sukurai, a young
man, had been captured three times and each time escaped—he was on
the run again.

He had escaped
from the airport when he was found to be missing from the flight
manifest, he had escaped while being transported to the police
station, he had escaped from the House of the Golden Carp when the
rest of his family had been brought in. You can’t leave even one
behind, Thyssen had told him, and Wagner knew that and wondered.
Katsumi Sukurai was the subject of his worst nightmares—until
this.

Wagner turned,
leaving the room and its horrors, and walked out into the
sunlight.

“Don’t you want
to know what the message says,” the captain asked as he hurried
after Wagner.

“No!” Wagner
said ruthlessly. “But I guess you better tell me anyhow.”

The captain had
not brought the document with him. He had carefully replaced it
where it was found, for the benefit of the official investigators.
But he could recite it.

“It sought many
blessings from spirits and friends and asked their forgiveness for
the sorrows to follow. It said that they had heard that the
American press reported that Professor Thyssen was a mad scientist
conducting unnatural experiments on human subjects. It said they
wished to take this more honourable path to the cure of their
wandering disease.”

Mad scientist,
Wagner heard an inner voice shriek. Unnatural experiments, it
shrieked again. Bastards. The lies were always most dangerous when
they paraphrased the truth.

For the first
time since his arrival in Washington a week ago, Thyssen discovered
he was alone. It was hard to credit really. His watchdogs—a
rotating roster of indistinguishable Secret Service agents—declared
that threats had been made against his life and that he was in
protective custody. The difference between that condition and house
arrest, which had been his status last time he’d been here and even
in the same room—who could forget 3333—at the same hotel, was that
arrest meant the guards stayed outside his room and he wasn’t
allowed to leave whereas protective custody apparently permitted
them to be right there in the room with him. But he could go
anywhere he liked, with one man before and one after and two more
prowling wide on the flanks.

He didn’t have
anywhere he wanted to go and certainly not with them, but each day
they took him someplace else where he was questioned by different
people—Treasury, Senate advisers, FBI, tame scientists and someone
named Cornelius who didn’t seem to belong to any agency at all.
They were all very friendly and so he answered all of their
questions with absolute honesty.