Spiral (22 page)

28

INSIDE OF AN HOUR, THEY HAD THE BRASS CYLINDER AT DETRICK
.

Dunne watched by video hookup from a nearby secure room as Toloff picked it up and turned it over in her gloved hands. She was inside the USDA class-4 Uzumaki facility, in a full pressure suit with external air. She looked like an astronaut on the moon. The facility had a bunch of cameras, always on, but they were typically used only for archiving. They’d been tapped into, were being broadcast live, with power players up and down the security food chain watching every move. The head of Detrick, a general named Arvenick, was certainly watching, as was the FBI director. Dunne assumed the President was linked in as well.

A team of weapons experts and forensic materials scientists had already poked and prodded the cylinder every way they could. It had identical dimensions to the ones that had been recovered from the Japanese submarines. Something slid around inside when you tilted it, like a marble. They couldn’t do an MRI because the metal shielded out the radio waves. X rays didn’t show anything. A quick and ferocious debate followed about what to do, but in the end they’d simply decided to open the damn thing, and Toloff got the task. On the video, Dunne saw her hand shaking and the rivulets of sweat on her face as she twisted open the cylinder. The camera zoomed in on her gloved hands. “It’s resisting,” she said. Her hand jerked slightly. “All right,” she said. “The threads are sliding past one another. Here we go.”

Dunne braced himself as if he were in the room with her. The cylinder might be booby-trapped. They’d checked the mass against the thickness of the walls, which they had evaluated with ultrasound. It could be an explosive.

She unscrewed the cylinder, then carefully set the upper section on the table. She looked inside the other half.

“Holy crap,” she said. She studied it for a few seconds, then looked up at the camera. “You’re not going to believe this.”

She laid a Texwipe on the table, gently shook the cylinder over it to disgorge the contents.

You’ve got to be kidding
, Dunne said to himself.

It was a bone. A human finger bone. The significance of the finger bone was not lost on Dunne. She had probably taken it from the finger she cut off of the man in Times Square.

Toloff said, “There’s writing on it. Zoom in.”

Etched in letters so small that they were barely readable was a message.

KITANO MUST PAY

Dunne recognized the Chinese characters at the end of the message. They were the characters for
Orchid
.

29

SHE DID EVERYTHING RIGHT. ORCHID MADE JAKE TAPE HIS
own mouth closed, then put him in the lead, where he could see nothing but the way ahead. She directed him out the back door, a path that would take them nowhere near the gun he’d tossed aside. Her exit route was secure and hidden—through a stand of woods behind the herbarium. It was still light out, but the sun was low, the branches casting shadows that cut across the patches of snow like streaks of black paint.

They were hundreds of yards away from the nearest road. If anyone caught a glance from afar, they’d look like a group of hikers.

Maggie was behind him, holding Dylan close. Jake heard her crying. Orchid questioned her as they walked, asking where the Uzumaki was hidden. Maggie kept repeating, “I don’t know.”

Jake’s nerves were on high alert. He was thinking it through, and he didn’t like where his thoughts were leading. If Orchid was after the Uzumaki, Jake had to end this. No matter the cost.

Orchid spoke. “Up there,” she said. “To your left, twenty degrees.”

A white FedEx van was parked on the side of the road.

“The back door,” she said.

The door screeched as Jake opened it.

Maggie screamed, shielding Dylan from the grisly sight. A young woman was curled up on the floor of the van like a discarded doll. She’d been shot in the head. The bottom of the van was sticky red.

“Inside,” Orchid said. Jake obeyed, the smell of iron thick in his nostrils. He recognized her from the red curly hair. Cindy. Maggie’s roommate from Rivendell.

Orchid pointed toward the right wall. “Put that on.” A belt was hanging on the wall, thick and black with a plastic box on the back the size of a paperback book. Jake strapped it to his waist. He had a pretty good idea what it was for.

She tapped a sequence on her leg.

The belt on Jake’s waist hummed as fifty thousand volts shot up his spine. It knocked him to his knees, hands in fists, groaning. “That was a warning,” she said. “At full strength, it will kill you.” Orchid pointed to the woman on the floor. “Get her out. Put her in the woods. Make sure the body’s out of sight.”

Jake did as he was told, carrying Cindy’s lifeless body. He tried to block out the cold, clammy feel of her skin, the terrible whiteness of her arm. A memory hit him from the bulldozer assault, the Iraqi soldiers buried in the sand, cat shit in a litterbox. Afterward he’d seen a sunburned arm sticking out of the sand, clutching a boot. The poor bastard must’ve been asleep, then took off running, grabbing what he could.

Stop it
. Jake focused on the situation, sorting it through,
click, clack
. Jake knew it, the soldier in him knew it. You do what you have to do. And what he had to do was stop this woman.

He laid Cindy down among the leaves. He looked around. He was far enough away. He could make a run for it, might make it or at least get noticed. The other side of the woods led to a major road. He glanced back toward the van. Dylan was crying, Maggie trying to console him. Orchid stood, watching Jake. She had the gun pointed at Maggie’s head. She spoke, just loud enough to be heard: “Let’s go.”

30

“HE’S BEEN SITTING LIKE THAT FOR ALMOST TWO HOURS,”
said Stan Robbins, the man in charge of Kitano’s surveillance. Robbins and Dunne were in a secure National Security Council conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the six-hundred-thousand-square-foot monstrosity across the street from the West Wing. On the screen before them was an overhead view of Hitoshi Kitano’s cell, a real-time feed from the surveillance cameras at the United States Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia, a maximum-security facility.

DUNNE HAD FIRST MET HITOSHI KITANO MORE THAN TWO
decades ago, when Dunne was still a relatively unknown professor at Yale. Dunne’s Ph.D. treatise, then still speculation, on the downfall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of China had caught the old man’s attention. Kitano was by then one of the richest men in Japan. Their relationship had ended twenty-two months before, when, at eighty-three years old, Hitoshi Kitano had been imprisoned at Hazelton. The previous sixty years had been a circular journey for Kitano, starting and ending in an American jail. Dunne had insisted that the FBI closely monitor Kitano since his imprisonment. It had been a mess of paperwork, not to mention demanding the more or less full-time attention of Robbins. But the FBI had more than twelve thousand agents—they could spare one. Where Kitano and the Uzumaki were concerned, Dunne took no chances.

The camera shot of Kitano’s cell was from a light fixture in the ceiling. Kitano sat stock-still, staring into space. The time stamp said four-forty-one p.m. What the hell was wrong with him? Dunne wanted to crack open his skull and peer inside.

Dunne scanned the rest of the cell. On a small shelf on the wall were three books. “What’s he reading?”

“One’s a book on pigeon racing.”

“He’s a fanatic,” Dunne said. “Specializing in long-distance races. Two years ago, right before he was put in, one of his pigeons won the twelfth Sun City Million Dollar in South Africa, the most prestigious pigeon race in the world.”

“Good for him. Book number two:
Institutions, Industrial Upgrading, and Economic Performance in Japan: The ‘Flying Geese’ Paradigm of Catch-up Growth
by Terutomo Ozawa. I read it: the author advocates something called
gankou keitai.
”

“Kaname Akamatsu’s ‘flying geese’ model of Asian cooperation,” Dunne said. “The economies of Asia would develop in the mythical pattern of flying geese, with Japan at the lead and the other nations—China, Korea, Malaysia, and the like—following behind.”

“And book number three?”

“Yukio Mishima.
Sun and Steel:
art, action, and ritual death.”

Dunne nodded. “Kitano idolized Mishima.”

“Why would he idolize a Japanese novelist?”

“Because of how he died. Mishima killed himself in 1970. He was only forty-five and a huge cultural figure. He took the commandant of the Japan Self-Defense Forces hostage, then gave a speech from a balcony in Tokyo, demanding a return to rule by the emperor. He was trying to incite the Japanese military. Then he went inside and disemboweled himself.”

“Why?”

“He thought Japan had been emasculated at the end of the war. He was a fanatical believer in Bushido—the way of the warrior. Kitano bought the sword that was used by Mishima’s second to cut off his head. Kept it hung on his wall of his study.” Dunne watched the old man. Kitano had fought for a victorious Japan but over the years he had come to believe in wealth as much as in force. He helped rebuild the Japanese industrial base and pushed for an expanded role of the military in Japanese society. The way to a reemergent Japan was through both the yen and the sword. But Japan had slipped beneath the waves of history. China was the new dragon.

Dunne knew Kitano’s history like he knew his own. Sixty-four years before, after the events on the
Vanguard
, Kitano had been held in a military brig in Honolulu. The Pacific Command had launched a furious search for the other submarines, each purported to have a brass cylinder containing the Uzumaki. Over the years they’d recovered five of those original seven cylinders, four right after the war, including the one found by the
Vanguard
, and a fifth in the 1970s in a wreck off the southern California coast. The final two, assuming they existed, were never found.

Kitano had been held in a cell no larger than a closet for months on end, a beast in a cage, furious and raging. He had been questioned mercilessly, threatened repeatedly with trial and execution for war crimes. He claimed to have told them everything he knew—names of the Tokkō, information on their targets. They kept squeezing him until MacArthur cut a deal with Shiro Ishii. In May of 1947, Ishii turned over some ten thousand pages of records documenting the “research findings” obtained at Unit 731 about biological weapons, including the Uzumaki, in exchange for immunity. The prosecutions of all Unit 731 personnel were terminated, and Kitano was freed.

After his release, Kitano became part of a network of Unit 731 veterans who took up positions of authority within the Japanese medical and pharmaceutical industries. He was a cofounder of Green Cross, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that rose to prominence after the end of World War II. Green Cross ran one of the larger blood banks in Japan, and Kitano profited handsomely. Kitano abruptly left Green Cross in the early 1980s, selling his stake for in excess of two hundred million dollars. Soon after, Green Cross became enmeshed in controversy for knowingly selling HIVtainted blood. Approximately a thousand Japanese contracted the disease and eventually died.

Kitano took his money and moved to the United States. He bankrolled various biological start-ups, both in La Jolla and north, in Silicon Valley. A few of these hit it big, and by the mid-1990s Kitano’s net worth was approaching the five-billion mark. Through the 1990s, Kitano amassed even more with investments in a number of health-related dot-coms, clearly seeing both the promise and the hype of the Internet. In 2000, he divested from Silicon Valley just before the bust. He was flush with cash, looking for the next wave.

After the events of September 11, he saw it. The Kitano Group, his investment firm, poured money into military-related start-ups, correctly predicting that an administration unwilling by temperament to expand a federal bureaucracy would be dumping money into the private sector. They invested in companies that provided the military with everything from data-mining services to personnel. Kitano himself had personally overseen the group’s investments in biotech ventures, particularly those aimed at bioterrorism countermeasures. They had large positions in most of the major players, from Genesys to DNA Biosystems. Kitano had also begun acquiring biotechnology companies in Japan, Korea, and China, constructing a pan-Asian network that would be the cornerstone of economic progress in the region as synthetic biology replaced silicon microelectronics as the dominant growth technology.

Kitano was not just involved in business ventures. He had also carefully cultivated relationships with a number of prominent American foreign-policy hawks, Lawrence Dunne among them. Kitano funded a trio of neoconservative, pro-Japanese think tanks, including one where Dunne had camped out between posts in Washington and stints teaching. They were a formidable team, working in concert to build a bulwark against the rising power of the Chinese. Their greatest achievement being, of course, the election of the current president of the United States, a pro-America, anti-China crusader.

Kitano had also helped Dunne take a modest nest egg and turn it into a not-so-modest nest egg. He’d also introduced Dunne to some of the other pleasures to be had by those of great wealth and power. Most of Dunne’s colleagues did their best to keep Kitano at arm’s length. Stories still surrounded him, rumors about his role in the Japanese war effort in World War II. This history drew Dunne like a moth. For almost two decades, the two men forged a professional and personal relationship based on their mutual distrust of China and their love of expensive scotch and women.

Kitano had it all—an enormous economic empire, and the ear of the most powerful government on the planet.

Then the old man fucked up.

KITANO WAS A STATUE, COMPLETELY MOTIONLESS AS HE SAT
dead in the center in his cell.

“Does he know he’s being watched?” Dunne asked.

“He’s never shown signs. Never looks up. Nothing.” Robbins shook his head. “I don’t get it. His routine was normal this morning.”

“Show me.”

Robbins hit a few keys and an image on a second screen appeared, the time stamp showing seven-twenty-two a.m. Kitano was doing some kind of knee bends. “Every morning he performs a half-hour of calisthenics. After that he reads until the gates open and he’s allowed to visit the common room. There he watches television. Give me a second. We’ve got a camera in there, too. I’ll bring up the video from this morning.”

The image shifted. The time stamp said eight-oh-four a.m. Kitano sat alone in a chair, watching television, rapt. The rest of the prisoners sat as far away as possible, clearly avoiding him.

Dunne knew why. Soon after arriving at USP Hazelton, a prisoner stole Kitano’s lunch, thinking him to be a powerless old man. Kitano didn’t react. But two days later, the guy’s wife, a waitress in East Fishkill, New York, was bludgeoned almost beyond recognition. They had to use DNA to make the identification. The next day, the prisoner himself was found dead, bled out from a massive cut across the belly. Kitano’s alibi was unassailable: he was locked in his cell. There was no evidence connecting Kitano to any of it, but after that the other inmates avoided Hitoshi Kitano like the plague.

Dunne focused on the screen. Kitano was watching the television with great concentration.

“What’s he watching?”

“Just a second.” He hit a few more keys, and the screen split, the right showing a feed from CNN, with a time stamp that matched the one from the camera showing Kitano.

CNN was showing footage of Bellevue. The reports ran on, a talking head, pretty and blond, with a little curl to her lips. “Can you get audio?”

“Sure.”

Her voice came on, too loud until Robbins turned it down: “… is denying that this is connected to a case earlier in the day of a crazed young Japanese man found in Times Square, but an unnamed source who is an employee at the hospital challenges this assertion. The Japanese man, who sources identify as an undergraduate at Columbia University named Hitoshi Kitano, was missing his right middle finger.…”

Kitano stiffened at the mention of his name. The other inmates looked toward him.

“Hey, that’s you!” someone said. “Kitano! Your name’s on the TV!”

Kitano stood, but he seemed shaky, holding on to the chair a moment, steadying himself. He watched the news piece to the end. Then he walked purposefully out of the room, the other prisoners parting before him.

“And that’s that,” Robbins said, and clicked them back to the live view of Kitano’s cell. “He came back to his cell, turned on his radio to a news site, sat down, and hasn’t moved since.”

Dunne kept thinking of a conversation with Kitano, almost ten years ago now. It was one of the most important conversations of Dunne’s life, before or since. The thirty-six-year-old foreign-policy wonk and the seventy-five-year-old billionaire were discussing the geopolitical consequences of biological weapons, drinking a very fine scotch, as was their custom. Both men believed that biological war was a near inevitability. The technology was moving so fast, sooner or later biological attacks could become commonplace between adversaries.

It was unlikely that Europe would ever attack America with such weapons, nor would Japan. The Soviets had a huge biological-weapons program, but they had the good grace to collapse.

The Chinese wouldn’t hesitate, both men agreed. Not if they felt threatened. Dunne believed the only way to avoid it was Pax Americana. To decapitate the Chinese Communist leadership and replace them with others woven into the U.S. tapestry.

But how? How could one derail the China juggernaut before it became unstoppable?

They’d danced around it for quite a while before Dunne finally said it: the Uzumaki.