Kusanagi (20 page)

The pretty young secretary trotted quickly into Yamamoto-san's office. She held a plastic tray in both hands. Yamamoto smiled at her, his eyes friendly and paternal. The tray contained a book barely held together by decayed old rubber bands. It was his accounts from his shady days. The boy Akira flashed into his mind.

‘Oh,' he said, long and low, and picked up the relic of his past. ‘Who brought you this?'

‘A Professor Nakabashi and his friend present their compliments and ask if they may see you.'

Yamamoto nodded slowly and got up. ‘Please bring them in to me.' His round, lined face was suddenly shiny with perspiration.

Akira was here: Akira, the honoured Imperial Curator, the esteemed professor, his determined little friend from his previous, half forgotten shadowy world. Akira was part of his past life as an outlaw, a life that was, in practice, only just submerged below the surface of a successful businessman. He supported himself on his desk. He had always wanted to see Akira again, but his new life precluded it.

As he had risen in wealth, standing and legitimacy, so had Akira's prestige. It had never seemed fitting that Yamamoto should re-establish contact. It seemed not in the best interest of his lost friend, the renowned Professor Nakabashi. He could not risk embarrassing or compromising Akira. Yet now Akira was here, the plucky one armed kid who had carried his nefarious packages to his no-good clients. Those were the days.

He stood upright as his office door opened. He recognised Akira immediately, not from his pictures in the media, but from the remnants of the child in his face and by the signature of his stunted arm. A tall American was with him.

‘Yamamoto-san,' said Akira, ‘it is so good to see you.'

Yamamoto felt a tear roll down his face, ‘Akira,' he said, embracing him. ‘It's been so long.'

Akira was surprised and clearly moved. ‘James Dean-san it has been too long. It has been forever.'

Yamamoto looked up at the American and blinked.

‘I'm Jim.'

He was Australian.

‘This is Evans-san,' said Akira, ‘from England.'

‘Yamamoto.' He pulled himself together and bowed.

‘Jim Evans,' said Jim, bowing awkwardly.

‘We need your help, James Dean-san,' said Akira. ‘We are in desperate straits.'

‘Anything, Akira, anything in my power. What is it?'

‘My friend Jim's girlfriend has been kidnapped and is here somewhere in Japan.'

‘Kidnapped?'

‘By someone very powerful. Very, very, powerful.'

‘Oooh,' muttered Yamamoto.

‘I am hoping that you can help us find her. She is American.' He took a photo from his inside jacket pocket.

The picture showed a woman soldier crawling under barbed wire. She was very pretty. ‘Kidnapped here in Tokyo?' He was confused.

‘No, in London but brought here.'

Yamamoto looked incredulously at Akira. ‘Kidnapped in London and brought to Tokyo?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes.'

‘Interesting.'

‘Can you help?'

Yamamoto was staring out of the window. ‘Yes.'

‘How can we repay you?'

Yamamoto laughed. ‘You can't, Akira, not unless you have a spare ten billion yen. Maybe in a couple of years you can buy some ramen noodles for a broke old man.'

‘Perhaps Evans-san can help you while you look for his girlfriend.'

Mrs Yamamoto had about thirty thousand pounds in her forex trading account. It looked like she had started with a hundred and fifty thousand but had traded it away. For everyone but Jim, forex trading was a random game where you won and lost on a fifty-fifty basis but chewed through your capital with broker expenses.

The trading software was configurable in every conceivable language. Helping people trade away their savings with forex was a huge worldwide business and, with gambling restricted in most countries, it was a proxy for the slot machine or the roulette wheel.

He clicked the link and the software was in English. ‘Fuck me,' said Jim, inspecting the yen chart. ‘That's going up.' The account had a hundred times leverage, which meant that fifty grand could represent five million. ‘All in,' he said, ‘buying five million in yen.' Ten minutes later the yen was up 1.5 per cent. Mrs Yamamoto's account registered a profit equivalent to 15 million yen, about $150,000. Yamamoto's eyes bugged out. Akira stood impassively behind him.

‘Let's do that again,' said Jim, this time shorting. The yen seemed to collapse just after the trade went on. ‘Fuck me,' said Jim. ‘This is like shooting fish in a barrel.'

‘What is he doing?' whispered Yamamoto, as another ten million yen profit popped onto the screen.

‘Trading well,' said Akira, quietly.

‘I can see that – it's as if he's telling the yen what to do next.'

‘He is a professional.'

‘Professional? If professional traders could do this they would own the world.'

‘They do,' murmured Akira.

Yamamoto didn't know how to respond. Traders might own the world but even they could not trade like this. The Englishman had tripled the account in twenty minutes. ‘I will follow up with my people,' he said, his eyes still riveted to the trading screen.

‘Any chance of a cup of tea?' called Jim. ‘And have you got any antacid tablets? My stomach's killing me.' He laughed. ‘Look at that! Blimey! Bombs away. Something really is fucking up the yen.' Then he realised it was probably him and his stupid demand for untold billions of dollars in return for the regalia. The news and associated mutating rumours were flying around the market creating financial carnage. Was the bill a hundred trillion now? Were they talking about nuclear weapons hidden in Japan instead of a few mythical artefacts? Whatever the news had become it was causing consternation and panic.

A motorcade of silent police bikes was making its way around the Imperial Palace. It was heading for Yamamoto Tower. In a pouch there was a letter, no text, with the ‘chops' of the Emperor and the prime minister at the bottom.

Eating dog in Japan wasn't against the law, but it was rare. The way he had it prepared, though, was illegal. Tradition held that dog meat was healthy, and Kim enjoyed it, particularly if it was from the right place and was prepared correctly. The dogs were flown in from Korea in small versions of what he used for human cargo.

To the outside world Kim was a highly successful property tycoon, but the engine of his empire, the business that generated the cash he leveraged into bricks and mortar, was smuggling. His illicit gains from trafficking had funded his property empire. Clandestine money gave him the edge, letting him outbid all comers in the legitimate world and kept him from going broke.

Japanese business relied on borrowing huge sums of money at negligible interest rates, which made it easy to hide financial realities. Money borrowed at one per cent could be squandered without anyone realising it was gone and would never be repaid. You could repay one per cent of the capital for decades without anyone suspecting the bulk was long gone. Borrowing money at one per cent was a never ending financial merry-go-round. One per cent interest rate loans need never be repaid or shown to be in default.

In the financial environment when all businesses were addicted to massive levels of debt at low interest, it was hard to see that Kim's deals didn't make commercial sense and that other sources of money had to be keeping his sprawling property empire afloat. But, even with his vast illegal earnings, the property still didn't make financial sense. He was slowly being crushed by the economic Godzilla of Japan: deflation.

Japan had suffered deflation for two decades. Simply put, prices fell in Japan: every year things got cheaper. Which meant in its turn that every year debt got bigger because the money owed became more valuable. The Japanese economy had been on the rack of deflation, unable to escape its vicious circle, since the asset bubble crash of the late eighties that had seen the land of the Emperor's palace become, at one stage, worth more than all the real estate in California. It had been followed by a crash from which the economy had never bounced back.

Kim's property empire had been crumpled by cycles of deflation and he was indebted to such an extent that even the proceeds of his global crimes couldn't bail him out of an impending commercial implosion. He smuggled people, money and now, as his financial pressures worsened, drugs and animals. The drug trade was profitable but the lynch pin of his operation was still smuggling people to and from North Korea. He ferried in people and shipped out the fake dollar bills and euros that the North Koreans printed.

Smuggling rare animals had started as a sideline, a symptom of his desperation for cash. But it had also become a hobby – then an obsession. Exotic animals and their body parts were highly prized and Kim shipped them wherever they needed to go. Meanwhile it allowed him to indulge himself with his zoo. The animals were his only passion. People meant nothing to Kim: they were like puppets to be bent and twisted to his plans. His masters, North Korea, always needed a fresh supply of people to teach languages. They especially needed Japanese but they also needed Europeans and Americans. North Korea needed kidnap victims to teach its spies their languages. It was of utmost importance to know exactly what the enemy was saying and be able to transplant agents with fluent local language skills into the countries it wanted to monitor.

Foreigners never lasted long in the North: before they could acclimatise enough to have a hope of escape they were done away with. Because of this, Kim was tasked with providing a constant supply of new tutors. This meant he had to capture and smuggle more than a hundred people every year to North Korea. It was a huge task, paid for in gold, fake money and in kind.

He had run the operation ever since he was a young man sent to Japan to spy on Tokyo and now, thirty five years on, he could not stop. For sure, he didn't want to: he had to make his empire financially solid again. He had delivered living flesh into North Korea for most of his life. He wasn't scared of that business. It was the drug running he feared. There were many clever enemies to confound him in that business and at some point they would make a breakthrough.

His edge was that his operations were manned by North Koreans. Back in North Korea, his workers' families lived or died on his command. So while his smuggling ring spanned the globe, his security was absolute. Now if he could capture the Imperial regalia he could buy his way out of his predicament and perhaps, at last, disengage from his more dangerous activities. One day, bad luck would catch up with him and destroy the façade. With the risks he was now taking, that moment could not be far away. This might be his last opportunity to escape the noose of his karma.

The dog tasted good.

Before it had died, it had hung by its broken legs, trussed up in his restaurant's kitchen, for two days. It would be tender and have the special taste that only animals that die in torment develop. The thought of its suffering gave him comfort and peace.

Yamamoto stood in the door of his office as the police guard marched towards Akira. Sweat pricked his brow. After all these years of being almost straight, he had police in his office. Something terrible was happening.

Jim looked up from his screen. There was no reason to get excited, he thought. The policemen were extremely respectful. One handed the professor a package with military precision and bowed low. They saluted and marched out. ‘What was that about?' he asked.

‘My
carte blanche
.'

‘Maybe you could get the government to pay Yamamoto-san his hundred million instead,' said Jim. ‘This is getting boring.' He grinned at the professor. ‘Only joking.'

‘How is it?'

‘Er… two million dollars.' Jim waved his palm back and forth. ‘Ish.'

Yamamoto was on the phone, jabbering away. He hung up, ‘Now I'm in trouble. That was my wife. The trading company has been on to her. They want to know if she is OK. She wants to know what I'm doing.' He was sweating heavily. ‘I told her not to worry. She will be hard on me.'

‘Do we have any news from your sources?' asked Akira.

‘No,' said Yamamoto, ‘but I fear when we do, it will not be good.'

‘What do you mean?' said Akira.

‘Let us wait till there is news. I do not want to invent ghosts.'

‘Fuck,' swore Jim. ‘This thing won't let me put on more than fifty million in a trade. Never mind, I can batter the Swissy as well – that looks choice.'

‘What's wrong?' Yamamoto hadn't understood what he'd said.

‘Nothing,' said Akira. ‘Just a little local difficulty.'

Kim watched the cage through the closed-circuit TV. The gorilla was grooming the woman's hair through the bars. Kim was biting his lip, chewing on it almost hard enough to break the skin. A thought sent a shiver through him. He took a pistol from his bottom drawer and went towards the lift that rose straight up to the zoo.

The animals quietened. Jane heard footsteps on the tiles.

‘You,' a voice said.

‘Me?'

‘Who are you?'

‘Who are you?' she replied, getting up. The gorilla pushed its arm through the barrier to try to hold her, but she was out of reach.

The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a pistol. It was a dart gun. He aimed it at Jane but he was not taking a proper bead.

She cocked her head at him. ‘You should let me go.'

He lowered the pistol, walked over to the gorilla cage, aimed and then fired. The gorilla grunted, jumped up and ran at him, grabbing the bars. It screamed, then fell silent, staggering back dazed. It sat down, head tilted forwards, breathed heavily for a time, then rolled onto its side.

Jane saw the man run his wrist across the door and heard a clunk. The cage door opened. He knelt down by the gorilla and began to stroke it gently. He was looking at Jane and starting to strip off.

You're kidding me, thought Jane, looking away in disgust. She sat on the tiled ledge and gazed out of the window at Tokyo. She considered how surgeons violated a patient's body with their scalpels when they worked feverishly to save a life. The patient would awake from the ordeal none the wiser as to the awful details. The anaesthetic would leave their mind unsullied. She wasn't worried for herself but for the ape.

Then she thought about him opening the door with his wrist. Was there a tag in his watch, or a simple band on his arm? Maybe he had an implant, a small RFID under the skin. She would continue to sharpen the plate, and if she could get hold of his hand she would slice it off and open the cage. She wondered what Jim was doing. Had he called the cavalry? Would they come? Would he come for her? She didn't think so. She was probably alone. That was nothing new.

Things were going to get even uglier.

The nose of the Antonov opened and a ramp lowered onto the tarmac. The containers were unloaded and hitched up to trucks, which filed out of the airport gates. High value electronics were constantly being flown into the UK as consumer crazes came and went. One day it would be phones, the next games consoles, then flat screen TVs. Whatever the next big thing was, it would be flown in from the Far East as quickly as possible. By weight, the newest fad gadgets were worth almost the same as a precious metal, but, unlike gold or silver, they went off like strawberries and were soon valueless.

The containers were heading for an anonymous warehouse in Dagenham. It was run by Koreans who minded their own business and never paid late or broke any rules. It wasn't a busy warehouse: it shipped three or four consignments a year. Just another mean, grubby building in a zone of such.

Yet the business of the warehouse was remarkable. The consignments it marshalled were of people, plucked off the streets almost at random. These unlucky souls would be added to the ranks of the missing and were sent to spend the rest of their short lives teaching English in North Korea. This time they were taking delivery of a dozen grey plastic containers, each containing a man.