Non-Stop Till Tokyo (34 page)

I drifted off to sleep with his warm, heavy arm wrapped protectively over me. And a few hours later, my phone started ringing.

I was so tired, I couldn’t even work out what the awful noise was or why there was a flashing light in the room. I muttered and groaned and put my hands over my ears, and Chanko reached over me and grabbed the damned thing off the floor.

“Yeah, what?” he snarled in English. “Uh,
moshi
—
Nanni
?
Yukkuri itte
.” Slow down.

I sat up, blinking.

“Sonja-san? Shit. Where?
Shit
. Where are you? What? Get out of there, right now. Okay, calm down, I heard. No, hold on—shut up. Yes, I will, but get out of there right now. Don’t head home. Go to—got any money? Crap. Okay, hang on. Butterfly, somewhere near your bar Minachan can wait. With people around.”

I couldn’t think of anything. It was three in the morning, Tokyo would be mostly shut down, and I was sick from tiredness. I opened my mouth to ask what was happening, saw Chanko’s expression, and said, “Um—God—
Ōwada
Hospital. Go under the expressway to Sakuragaokamachi.”

He repeated that. “Go to the emergency department. Where there’s light and people. Fake something. Hurry. I’ll come get you from the hospital. Get the hell on with it.”

He ended the call and immediately started dialling again. A phone gave a muffled shrill. It came from the room next door.

“Shit.” He grabbed for his sweatpants. “Get up, Butterfly, we got a problem. Taka!”

I thrust my arm into a dressing-gown sleeve that didn’t seem to work properly, and pulled the thing haphazardly around myself as I hurried after him. Chanko hit the light switch in Taka’s bedroom to a cry of protest, then yanked off the quilt under which Taka was burrowed. Yoshi sat up on his own futon, blinking.

“Get up. The yakuza have taken Sonja. We need to get Minachan before they grab her too.”

I clutched at the doorframe. “No. Oh, no.”

“Sonja-san?” Taka shook his head, eyes dull.

“Christ, of all the times for you to sleep at night. Where’s your bike keys?”

Taka jerked himself up, then fumbled a set of keys out of a drawer and threw them over. Chanko snatched them out of the air.

“Right. I’m going to get Minachan. You call the yakuza right now. Tell them we got the disc, and if they hurt Sonja, we’ll send it to the cops. Whatever you like. Stall them. Right now, Taka.”

I lurched out of the way as he strode past, back to our room. He dressed fast, scooped up his mobile, then took something from a drawer.

“You’re taking a gun?”

“Just in case.” He checked the safety and shoved it inside his baseball jacket. “Get in there and get Taka moving. I’ll bring Minachan back. You work on Sonja.”

“She must have said something. I told her—”

“Save it. Move, Butterfly!”

He sprinted down the stairs. I looked after him, then swung into Taka’s room, where he was frantically flicking through a phone book. Yoshi was in the study, and I heard the chime of a computer booting up.

“Find out what happened,” Taka told me.

I grabbed for my phone and dialled Minachan’s mobile. No answer.

“Shit. She’s not answering.”

“Try again!”

I did. On the third try she answered with a semi-shriek of “
What?
”

“It’s Kerry. Are you okay? Where are you?”

“Sorry, sorry. I thought it might be them. I’m in a cab.”

“Cab? Where to?”

“Roppongi. They followed me. They came out after me and shouted and chased after me, and there was a cab going by and I nearly fell under it making him stop, and he wouldn’t go anywhere but Roppongi because nowhere else is open, and I don’t have enough money to go anywhere else anyway.” She was breathing heavily. Her voice was adenoidal, as though she had a cold, and she sounded close to tears.

“Hold on. Taka, call Chanko, she’s gone to Roppongi!” I yelled. “Meet him at…the police box opposite that pink coffee shop on Roppongi Crossing, okay? That should be as busy as anywhere.”

Taka signalled assent and reached for his phone. I took a deep breath. “Minachan, be careful of the driver, but what happened with Sonja?”

I heard the clunk of Minachan pulling a glass partition across. “It was that bastard, Oguya. Yukie came in tonight. He’d beaten hell out of her, and then he ordered her in and said she had to work as a cleaner all night because she wasn’t fit to be seen. Black eyes, puffy lips, cheekbones bruised. Bastard.”

Bile rose in my throat.

“Yukie was crying, and Sonja was so angry. She said not to worry, Oguya would soon be getting his too, and she yelled at him, she said he was a psycho, a rapist, she knew what he did—”

“She
didn’t
. Oh, no no no. Why can’t she ever shut up?”

“Well, why did you tell her anything?” Minachan said in a suppressed shriek.

“I wanted to stop her from picking a fight with him. Oh, bloody
hell
. Then what?”

“When the bar was shutting, he and his friends didn’t let us go. Two of them told her to come with them. To their headquarters. There wasn’t anything we could do, they grabbed her, they were hitting and pulling her with them, and I tried to stop them and one of them hit me in the face, and my nose is bleeding, and they kept us there for
ages
. I had to climb out of the toilet window to escape, and they came after me and I ran, and they were going to get me if the taxi hadn’t come—”

“When? Minachan, when did they take her?”

“About an hour ago.”

An hour. What could they have done in an hour?

Too much.

“Okay. Try to calm down. It’s okay, Chanko’s coming for you. We’ll get Sonja. I have to go now, honey.”

Taka was waving at me, having found the number he wanted.

“They took Sonja to the Mitsuyoshi-kai HQ an hour ago,” I told him, putting down my phone. He nodded grimly and began to dial.

“What are we going to tell them?” I started asking, but he waved an airy, reassuring hand.

“Hello?” he said politely. “Hi, is that the Mitsuyoshi-kai family? I want to speak to the Brother. The live one. Why, yes, I do think you should wake him up, thanks for asking.”

His speech switched abruptly from courtesy to snarling rudeness.

“Because I’ve got his bag, his disc and his password, that’s why, asshole. You wake up your bosses and tell them we’ve got the disc, and you can tell them Banzuiin1622. I don’t give a flying fuck if you don’t understand. I’ve got what the old man was murdered for—oh, do I have your attention now? Banzuiin1622, that’s his password, and it proves that we’ve got the disc, and we can send all the documents for the meeting to anyone we like. We can have your bosses arrested, got it? Good. Now, I’ll be calling back in exactly one hour. I want to speak to a senior man, and I’ll want to speak to Sonja, the gaijin hostess your fuckwits just kidnapped. And if she’s hurt, if you lot have abused her, if she’s even mildly annoyed or a little bit hungry or if her period is troubling her, I am going to make sure everyone in Tokyo sees this information by the morning. Have you got that? So the first thing you do is stop anyone even
thinking
about hurting her, because if she’s dead, so are you cocksuckers. And get your fucking boss waiting for my call. One hour!”

He turned off the phone.

“Well, that was great,” Yoshi said. He and I had stood in stunned silence listening to Taka’s tirade. “Was that call traceable?”

“I blocked the number. Anyway, it got their attention.” Taka’s eyes were snapping with fury.

“It’s ten past three. We have an hour to work out how we’re going to play this. We need to discuss—”

Yoshi went on, but I wasn’t listening. Everything I didn’t think about, everything I flinched from, seemed to be crowding out my mind. Noriko, and Sonja, and indomitable Minachan sounding so frightened. Yukie, beaten and broken. Yoshi’s grey face. Kelly’s happy smile, frozen from years ago. Soseki and Oguya, smashing up our lives with such casual cruelty. Ian.

“Kechan, are you listening?”

The guilt was raw and bloody in my mind, but it was nothing to the rage that darkened my vision and fizzed through my bloodstream and effortlessly swept my control away. If this was how Chanko usually felt, I reflected vaguely, it was amazing he hadn’t ended up like his brother long ago.

“Kechan? We need to work out what we’re going to do!”

“We’re going to do damage,” I said.

Chapter Fourteen

Four minutes later, we were jammed into the study, with a large-scale map of Tokyo spread out over the futon, a huge underground map and a pile of yakuza magazines. Yoshi was connecting an array of wires and boxes to one or the other of Taka’s workstations. Taka was chopping a small pile of white powder on a black lacquer tile with the side of a credit card.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve had maybe an hour’s sleep. Coffee isn’t going to do it.”

Yoshi and I glanced at each other. His eyes were darkly ringed, and I knew mine were the same. The sleeplessness was giving me a dizzy, unreal feeling of floating on top of the roiling anger.

“Okay,” I said. “But just enough for an edge.”

In Taka’s case, that was a thin line snorted through a ten-thousand-yen note. He shook his head as he sniffed up the last few crystals, his pupils widening. I licked a finger and dabbed, rubbing the powder onto my gums for a slower effect. The vile taste, bitter and metallic, made me shudder, but I could feel my senses sharpen as the exhaustion evaporated. I passed the tile to Yoshi, who took a reluctant dab and screwed up his face hideously as he sucked the speed off his finger.

“Right.” Taka clapped his hands. His razor-blade smile was glittering, and I found myself grinning back as the amphetamine rush built. “Time to play.”

Fifty-two minutes later, we’d come to an agreement on almost everything. Almost.

Yoshi’s laptop whirred as he tapped frantically.

“Any luck?”

“No. I can’t get a number anywhere. I sent an email through an anonymous remailer, but that’s it. What are the chances of him checking his email in time?”

“He might have gone,” said Taka.

“With no money?” Yoshi asked.

“Or they might have him already.”

“We have to work on the assumption that he’s still there. You know that.”

We knew. Taka scowled. “If we don’t give him up, we might not get Sonja out.”

“And if we do, they’ll kill him,” said Yoshi. “There’s no point pretending they won’t. They’ll probably make him talk before they kill him, and if they do, he’ll probably mention Higuchi. Higuchi can name you.”

Taka gave an irritable sniff, wiped at his nose. “We can get to Higuchi first, and he doesn’t know where I live. We can’t risk it with Sonja. And screw Hearn.”

They looked at each other. Then they both looked at me.

“This whole mess is Hearn’s fault,” I said. “I’m not protecting him at Sonja’s expense.”

Taka nodded sharply.

“There’s a difference between not protecting him and giving him up,” said Yoshi.

“I know.”

“Three minutes.” Taka held out the tile to me. I licked and dabbed, just a few crystals, enough to keep it sharp, and looked at my scrawled list of notes.

“Is this going to work?”

“Sure it is,” said Taka confidently.

“Probably not,” said Yoshi. “But it’s all we’ve got.”

They picked up the phone on the third ring. We had them on loudspeaker so we could all hear. Our connection was being routed through the internet and via half a dozen countries and twice as many exchanges, and Yoshi assured me the FBI wouldn’t be able to trace the call, let alone a bunch of technophobic goons.

It didn’t stop me clutching my dressing gown around me against the goose bumps when I heard the voice.

“Yes?”

“Good morning,” I said. “Who am I talking to?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is Kerry Ekdahl. My colleague called you one hour ago. Please inform me who’s speaking.”

There was a brief, muffled conversation at the other end, then an old man’s voice came down the phone, slow and creaky. “This is Mitsuyoshi Junichiro,” he said. “You have something of mine.”

“We have the bag that was stolen from your honourable brother Mitsuyoshi-san when he was murdered,” I said. “We have the disc that was in the bag, and the password. We have seen the documents on the disc.” I was speaking
keigo
, the highest level of respect speech I knew. It wouldn’t hurt.

“I see.”

“I would like to speak to Sonja, the hostess your men took tonight,” I said.

“I can assure you of her well-being. For the moment.”

“Unfortunately, I’m afraid that it will be necessary to speak to her.”

Another mutter in the background.

“Perhaps you will inform me how you came into possession of my property.” The old man sounded a bit more lively than the brother I’d known, with a dry, scratchy, measured voice that gave little away.