Kamikaze (16 page)

Tokuda recognized both swords as his own.

“Got another cartoon for you,” gloated the Yank. He spiked a grim photograph onto the barbed wire, pinning it to the perimeter of the POW camp. The snapshot, taken by U.S. forces, showed the dead bodies of Ushijima and Cho with what appeared to be blood at their temples.

“Japansies,” the picador jabbed. “They violated the samurai code. The cowards shot themselves because they didn’t have the guts to take it like men.”

“Lie!” Tokuda spat in Japanese. “You faked that to demean their families!”

“Sorry to say, Monkey Man, but we gotta part ways. They’re shipping me out to Ginza for the occupation. I don’t know your name, but I want you to know mine. So if your kids ever ask you, you’ll be able to tell ’em, ‘The Marine who whupped my yellow ass in the Pacific War was Lance Corporal Eugene Kerr.’”

The jarhead turned away, but then turned back.

“Nice cutlery. I’ll take good care of it. I’ll use it in my backyard to pick up dog shit.”

So now he had a reason to live, instead of a reason to die. The thought of his father’s
daisho
being dishonored like that shamed Tokuda to the core.

With the signing of Japan’s surrender aboard the USS
Missouri
on September 2, Japanese soldiers not wanted for war crimes were released from confinement. Nameless and with half his face scarred beyond recognition, Genjo Tokuda was sprung from that U.S. prisoner-of-war camp. He made his way to the bombed-out Ginza district, where he struck a deal with the tattered remnants of the local yakuza for help in regaining his honor. If they would locate Lance Corporal Eugene Kerr for him and aid in the recovery of his father’s
daisho,
he would kill any five
men they wished executed as payment.

What was there to lose?

Before long, a thug known to his gang mates as the Claw reported that they had found Kerr. In the company of Tokuda, the yakuza waylaid the Yank in an alley one night as he staggered drunkenly home from a poker game. The samurai burgled his digs to recover Tokuda’s swords. The next morning, MPs found Kerr’s body, but they never found his head, which had been cleanly sliced from his shoulders by the sweep of a razor-sharp blade. They did, however, find his eyes, which had been clawed out before his death and left to stare up from the filth on the alley stones.

Every year, on the anniversary of his corkscrew-and-blowtorch disfigurement in the Battle of Okinawa, Genjo Tokuda sipped sake in honor of his family from a bowl mounted in the jarhead’s skull.

Jarhead.

What a fitting description.

The Kamloops Kid wasn’t as lucky.

As Genjo Tokuda tightened his grip on the Tokyo yakuza, turning the black market into a profitable endeavor, he kept track of the fate of his former Hong Kong cohort. For beating Canadian prisoners to death, Sergeant Inouye was tried and found guilty of war crimes. At first, his Canadian citizenship saved him. That conviction was overturned because Canada couldn’t try a Canadian for war crimes. But eventually, his Canadian citizenship doomed
him. The Kamloops Kid was tried and convicted of treason, and in 1947, he was hanged at Stanley Prison.

With time, Tokuda sensed he was safe from prosecution. America needed Japan as an ally in the Cold War, and in 1948, Truman granted amnesty to all Japanese soldiers not already imprisoned for war crimes. His past a dead issue, Tokuda revived his real name.

Over the years, he occasionally recalled the pretty Canadian nurse he’d won in a card game and raped at St. Stephen’s during the fall of Hong Kong. Magnanimously, he had let her live while so many others died, and he wondered what had become of her in the post-war years.

With the emergence of his unknown son, that question had been answered.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Tokuda had read somewhere; so he had thought just weeks ago that dissatisfaction would be his fate. True, he was one of Japan’s richest titans. But what was fortune to an old man with no family to inherit his wealth? The Pacific War had wiped out his family tree, and the wounds he’d suffered on Okinawa had left him a eunuch. True, he had forged his yakuza hoods into a force to be feared. But after his retirement, that strength had turned to flab. Gone were the days when a samurai would spill his guts for
bushido
—as the author Yukio Mishima had in 1970—and in place of honor came street punks with no moral ethics, like that “Japansy” he’d had beheaded for missing the Stanley Park meeting. True,
he had used the yakuza to wreak vengeance on America, by flooding its youth with speed and sapping its economy. But that wasn’t
personal
vengeance against the
actual
killers who had slaughtered his family and dishonored their Shinto shrine.

Now, however, he was standing on his pinnacle overlooking Vancouver, sword in hand, as those who had once seemed out of reach were finally drawing closer to his bony grasp.

Tokuda had a son.

Sired by the rape of that nurse.

A son who was morally fit to inherit his father’s earthly wealth.

A son who desired to live by the code of
bushido.

A son who yearned to become a twenty-first-century samurai.

A son who wasn’t afraid to worship at the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan’s 2.5 million war dead—including those so-called war criminals executed by the occupiers—were honored as deities.

A son who, even as Genjo Tokuda slashed at the city with his samurai sword, was down there in that spread of glittering lights, hunting for the bait that would hook one of the
actual
killers of their ancestral family. An American killer who was fated to suffer the same excruciating pain he had once inflicted on this vengeful
kumicho.

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Special O

November 1, Now

“Cascade Consulting,” read the sign out front of a nondescript building in the Mayfair Industrial Park, just this side of the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital at Colony Farm. Cascade Consulting’s business was nebulous, but whatever it was, it required cars to come and go all night. Luckily, the building was situated next to the Trans-Canada Highway, on the north bank of the Fraser River. So wherever the cars were coming from and going to at such ungodly hours, the reps had several routes to choose from.

Question?

What did Cascade Consulting do?

If a door-to-door salesman walked in off the street, he’d be met by a receptionist skilled at thinking on her feet. She might call the boss out for backup, and he would then say, “We don’t need photocopy supplies at the moment,” or whatever was necessary to get rid of the salesman. If you asked a local cop what Cascade was all about, you’d be met with a shrug. That’s because the building was on a jurisdiction
line between two forces, and anything near a boundary gets less police attention. What’s more, when cheap patrolmen wandered in to ask, “Any chance cops get half price here?” they were advised that the business was strictly client-based.

Whatever that meant.

In fact, there was only one way to pierce the veil, and that was to do what this cop was doing now. At four o’clock in the morning, before the break of day would smudge the horizon, he wheeled his aging Mercedes-Benz into the parking lot, climbed out, crossed to the building, pulled open the door, and said to the night guard at the desk, “DeClercq. Special X. Here to see Oscar.”

“ID?” the guard asked.

The chief superintendent flashed his bison-head badge.

“Oscar’s waiting.”

The guard buzzed him in.

For reasons that no one can now recall, “Oscar” is the in-house name for Special O. That’s “O” as in “observation,” the physical surveillance trackers of the RCMP. Special O is so secretive that it might as well not exist. Oscar is “offside” to other officers because it also investigates for the anti-corruption unit of Internal Affairs. Only the brass—the so-called white shirts—know where Oscar has its office.

White shirts like DeClercq.

The cop who greeted him inside the door to the inner sanctum was Corporal Nick Craven. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, and in his mid-thirties, Nick had once worked at
Special X, but he later abandoned urban life to police the rural Gulf Islands. “Be careful what you wish for,” the Chinese say, and so it had been with Craven’s dream of idyllic country policing. Out in the wilds, he had run afoul of a psychopath named Mephisto, and that rotten luck had cost him an ear and one of his hands. Disillusioned, Nick had recently returned to the city, where he had taken a posting with Special O.

“Is everyone here?” DeClercq asked.

“Roger. I called in the old guys. Who knows how many years in O are gathered in this room.”

“Good. This will be dicey, so experience will count.”

Craven led DeClercq to the front of the war room. Although coffee was being guzzled by the gallon, the faces before them were still as puffed and red-eyed as you’d expect in a team that had been rousted from sleep and told to muster fast. There was no mystery about why they were here. Anyone who had to ask would not be in Oscar. Many of the faces were non-white, for it was an asset in O
not
to look like the stereotypical Mountie.

O’s job was to blindside the bad guys.

“You know who I am,” the chief said, “so let’s get down to work. Two days ago, a gang of thugs flew in from Japan. One was the hood of hoods in Tokyo’s yakuza.”

DeClercq withdrew several blown-up passport photos from his carryall and began pinning them on a spread of corkboard that mimicked his Strategy Wall.

“Genjo Tokuda, the godfather. In his eighties. He looks like Two-Face in a
Batman
movie.”

The next tough had an ugly facial mole.

“This one’s the Claw. Tokuda’s enforcer. He gets that nickname from his penchant for gouging out eyes. There have been several Claws over the years.”

Soon, a rogues’ gallery lined the wall.

“No criminal records, and we all know why. Japan’s economic bubble burst under the squeeze of corruption. And now Tokuda has his tentacles in here.”

“Why?” asked a watcher.

“I don’t know. Tokuda’s the right age to have been embroiled in the Second World War. It’s possible he’s here for some kind of revenge. Last evening, a kamikaze plane slammed into a Pacific vets’ convention, and indications are that Tokuda’s to blame. Old men his age obsess over tying up loose ends.”

“Where do we find him?”

“There’s the rub,” said DeClercq. “The Japanese planted a bug in his bags before he left Tokyo. They told us,
after
the gang had arrived, and provided a GPS device to track the bug. The luggage went to a hotel, but the thugs who brought it did not. They vanished and are probably holed up in safe houses.”

“A bug scanner?” Craven said.

“That’s most likely how they found it. We initially assumed they had come here for business reasons—money laundering, drugs, human trafficking—so we didn’t think a clock was ticking. When they disappeared, we began to think we might be wrong. Since then, we’ve been trying to pick up their trail before calling Oscar.”

The clock on the wall threw seconds into the room.

“As it turned out, a clock
was
ticking, and last night the bomb went off as a kamikaze run. So now I need Oscar’s help to
find
them as well as track them.”

“They’ll be armed,” someone said.

“We’ll need an ERT package.”

“The call’s already gone out, Chief,” Craven replied.

If ever there was a throwback to the last frontier, it was Sgt. Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski. As the son of a Yukon trapper, he could take the eye out of a squirrel with a .22 at one hundred feet before he was six. Now when he went hunting on his days off, it was for elk on Pink Mountain or grizzly bears at Kakwa River. On days at work in the city, he hunted for bigger game, like punks threatening standoffs against the emergency response team. In this age of modern redcoats recruited from universities, the Mad Dog harked back to that era when hard-knuckled, sharp-shooting action men policed the wilderness from the vantage point of a saddle. With jet black hair and eyebrows, a droopy mustache, and a permanent scowl, he was the cop DeClercq used to answer the age-old question, “What does the rational man do when confronted by the barbarian?”

He fights fire with fire.

He unleashes the Mad Dog.

Before the phone had finished its first ring, Rabidowski was wide awake.

“Uh-huh?” he grunted into the receiver, hoping not to disturb his sleeping wife.

Having listened to the caller, he swung out of bed, wrapped a robe around his muscular frame, and padded off down the hall to the guest bedroom. The second the door cracked open, Ghost Keeper snapped awake too. Yesterday, they had decided they would take the Cree’s birthday gift—the SIG nine mil—to the range for an early morning shoot, so he had bedded down here.

“Shoot’s off,” the sergeant said. “That plane that crashed into the pier? Oscar just called, requesting an ERT package. Time to mount up.”

Robert DeClercq made a point of never—repeat
never
—eating breakfast in a joint that wasn’t one of a kind. He was making a valiant last stand against franchising, a battle that was about as winnable as Custer’s last stand. At least he knew that he wouldn’t be served rubber eggs or that slop they make with synthetic stuff. He was at an age when he viewed life as too short not to demand the little joys of existence, like food that a chef cooked
just for you.

Call him a rebel.

“Thanks for meeting me so early.”

“I’m an early riser,” said Yamada, the diplomat who had warned Special X that Genjo Tokuda had brought his gang to Vancouver.

Despite its unappetizing name, the Greasy Spoon was DeClercq’s favorite morning eatery. It was a typical
mom-and-pop establishment, except that mom and pop were a pair of gay men. Pop—he was actually dubbed that—whipped up gourmet fare in the kitchen while Mom—he was dubbed that too—worked the front room, berating diners who didn’t eat every scrap on their plates. Politically correct the Greasy Spoon wasn’t; instead, it offered a flamboyant shtick that worked all the way to the bank. Even at this early hour, “the Spoon” was packed.

“You didn’t bring your ‘sister’?” asked DeClercq.

“She’s at the consulate, waiting for instructions. The message you left with our answering service said that you require a new memorandum of understanding from Tokyo, ASAP.”

“I do.”

“So she’s ready to process it.”

“Hello, handsome,” said Mom, sashaying up to the table as fey as could be. “And who’s this sexy bugger? In case you want to know, I get off at three.”

“That’s soliciting.”

“So what’ll you have?”

“The blueberry pancake.”

“Oooo, sidestep the question.” Mom rolled his eyes.

“Pancake?” said Yamada.

“They’re huge,” cautioned DeClercq.

“How huge?”

“This huge,” interjected Mom, reaching down to give DeClercq’s waist a gentle pinch. “You have to pass a chub test before I’m allowed to place the order.”

“Don’t order the breakfast sausage,” warned the chief.

“You’re testing me, aren’t you?” said Yamada.

“How so?” asked DeClercq.

“Choosing this place for breakfast.”

“It serves the best eye-opener in town, and we both have to eat.”

“You think I’m a buttoned-down diplomat with Japan’s obsessive-compulsive focus on cleanliness.”

“You won’t find a restaurant cleaner than this.”

“It’s run by gays, and gays help make up its clientele.”

“So?”

“So you wonder if I’ll be afraid of the cutlery. Or worried about the health of the chef.”

“That would be Machiavellian. Why would I do that?”

“For the same reason I called Lynda West my sister when we met in your office the other day.”

“Your
half
-sister,” said DeClercq.

“I was testing your reaction. Your gullibility.”

“To see if I was a flat-foot who would dismiss it as beyond the realm of possibility? Your father was an American occupier posted to Japan. So was Lynda West’s. But what are the chances of one man fathering both a mixed-race diplomat and a white woman who end up working in the same consulate?”

“Not too slim?”

“No,” said DeClercq. “It’s not impossible for that to be the reality behind your so-called joke. Before dismissing it, I’d need to know if there were facts you were hiding from me.”

Yamada bowed slightly. “But why test you?” the diplomat asked.

“To see if I’m sharp enough to deal with Tokuda.”

“And why test me?”

“To see how diplomatic you are. How expedient. To test if you’re Machiavellian enough to help me deal with Tokuda.”

Yamada bowed again.

“We see eye to eye, Chief Superintendent. This restaurant reflects the real world, not some germ neurosis. So you will see me eat breakfast as heartily as you.”