Stones (Data) (22 page)

Could it be that they are looking for Matt?

There is only one way to tell. Matt walks briskly down the corridor and around several corners, making a large circuit that takes him through the restaurant section of the airport and back past the ramen shop. Five minutes later he passes the
ramenya
and takes a quick backward glance.

No doubt about it, they’re in pursuit, making no effort to look innocent. A knot forms in his stomach and wraps itself around a novel thought.

Maybe dad was right after all.

His left hand instinctively gropes for the jax, and he fingers a message inside his pocket.

Dad, being tailed by a couple of Yaks at the airport. Not sure what to do. I’d rather not let them know I’m flying to Sapporo so they can contact their comrades on the other end and arrange a pick-up. Any enemies in Japan you haven’t told me about?

Matt’s fingers tremble and then erase the message. Sending it won’t help. It might even bring his dad to Japan after him. Better to handle it on his own.

As Matt moves down the corridor, the crisp tap of footsteps behind him draws closer. In his mind’s eye, he can see himself, bound and gagged, driven off to an abandoned warehouse along the Arakawa River in the backseat of a black Mercedes Benz.

He makes an abrupt left turn a few feet down a crowded hallway and ducks into a men’s restroom. It’s empty. Good thing the doors on Japanese bathroom stalls go all the way to the floor and hide their inhabitants. Rushing into one, he bolts the door behind him, tears off his backpack, drops it down and waits.

Then he curses himself for walking into exactly the kind of trap the Yakuza thugs have been waiting for.

The restroom door squeals open. There is the same crisp tapping of shoes on the tile floor. Matt struggles to control his breathing as the laughing voices of two men bounce off the walls. From the rough Japanese they speak, he knows they are from Osaka, a Yakuza stronghold.

“Where did the stupid
gaijin
go?” The younger one speaks first. “I couldn’t tell if the scum came this way or not.”

“Don’t worry,
Taka-chan
.” The low voice of the older man drifts closer. “At least we had some fun with him.”

“Did you see the look on his face when he ran off?” The younger voice seems to move to the urinal against the wall.

Staring through a crack in the stall door, Matt watches as the older man leans back against the sink and lights a cigarette.

“Like a little scared dog. All Americans are the same. Worthless cowards.” He blows a thin plume of smoke up to the ceiling.

“Did you ever kill one?” The younger man still stands at the urinal relieving himself as the sound of falling water echoes in the room. It goes on for more than a minute.

“What, a dog or an American?” The older man laughs open-mouthed, exposing deeply stained teeth. “Yes, once. When I was younger, like you. You should try it sometime.” He turns and looks at himself in the mirror, adjusting his shirt collar.

“Tell me about it.”

The older man inhales sharply. “We were selling cheap Twilight fresh from China down around Shinjuku. An American student, one of our regular customers, refused to pay. He said the drugs were dirty. Called me a filthy Jap.” He pushes off the sink and starts walking slowly toward the stalls.

Matt freezes.

“What did you do?” The young man zips his fly.

“I told him I had something even better he could try for free.” His footsteps are just outside the stall. “He got in the car with me and Bobo-chan. We took him for a ride to Roppongi. Got a rope and some knives from the club. We played with him for a couple of hours before we finished him off.”

The restroom door opens and a man with two chattering children enters.

As Matt watches through the crack, the older Yakuza man takes one look at the children and heads for the door. “Let’s go. I’ll tell you the rest later.”

There’s the sound of a toilet flush and footsteps going out into the corridor. Then the sound of children’s laughter.

An hour later, Matt walks into the boarding area for the flight to Sapporo with two minutes to spare. The navy blue T-shirt and black cargo pants are gone, replaced by a windbreaker and jogging pants, both with fully adjustable color and looking white at the moment. Spiked hair and a black mustache complete the disguise.

His dad is the one who slipped the urban-camo kit into his backpack and taught him tricks to avoid detection when he was a kid.

Matt chuckles to himself as he thinks of the two Yakuza gangsters. They won’t recognize him now even if they are still at the airport.

That wasn’t so hard.

He taps out a message to his dad as he steps onto the auto-walk to board the plane for the hour flight. The backpack, covered with blue camo cloth, slips off his shoulders and goes down between his feet. With a touch of his thumb, the message goes off to his dad.

Now boarding final leg to Sapporo. No problems. Everything smooth as silk.

As the auto-walk turns a corner, he glances behind him. The two Yakuza goons are walking away, backs to him, both doing fist pumps in the air.

The older one fingers the same silver tube he had outside the ramen shop.

K
ent walks downstairs past the open door to Matt’s bedroom. The light turns on when he enters the storage room. He rummages through the shelves looking for the high-density C-cells. They always come in handy when you are going on a road trip. Equipment is piling up in the garage.

He hopes everything will fit in the bed of the Chikara.

It’s been a half dozen years since his last trip, and even that was a vacation with Matt where they did some long-distance surveillance on a low security lithium-dumping site in Idaho. He prefers to do his work in quiet anonymity using only the Mesh, military grade encryption-ware and an assortment of loyal contacts and spies. Physical location is rarely a matter of importance.

But this is different.

Pulling out his jax, he scans the packing list again. He still needs to get the monofilament jumpline and karabiners, as well as a climbing harness, a pair of carbon-stretch gloves and ball bearings. A grapple wouldn’t hurt either. You never know what you might have to deal with.

On the way back upstairs, he wanders into Matt’s room to see how much of his climbing gear he left behind. It looks like he’s taken couple of the newer nylon cords, but there are still plenty to choose from. Kent rummages around some more, runs through his list one more time and walks upstairs with cables and ropes dangling from the boxes in his arms.

Dropping into a chair at the kitchen table, he picks the slate up in his hand. This time around, intel on the Mesh is unusually scarce. The feelers sent out to contacts result in little more than public information, rumors and wild conjecture. MX Global doesn’t want the world or its own organization to know what SciFin is up to.

That’s why he has to go in person.

Kent puts the climbing gear and assorted batteries in a black cargo box and lugs it out to the garage. There is only one open slot left in the back of the Chikara, and he heaves the box into place. Once again he reviews the list while surveying the truck bed. Electronic eavesdroppers, telescopic laser nets, GPS, Torcel lights, even a crossbow. All military grade.

His days as lawyer at a white shoe Wall Street firm seem like an eternity ago.

The face of Ryzaard flashes through his mind. The man in a bowtie and tweed jacket. A former Oxford don. Now the head of the two largest divisions at MX Global. He is the logical place to start.

If there’s anything Kent knows about, it’s corporate mergers. He saw a constant stream of them while a lawyer at Sullivan & Myers. The first few weeks after a merger are always chaos. New personnel learning the ropes. Security systems getting tweaked. Datasites being reconfigured. Working out the kinks. It absorbs a lot of time and energy. The bigger the merger, the bigger the upheaval. And MX Global is right in the middle of one of the biggest mergers in history.

Now is the perfect time to strike.

Back when he had been on the run with his son, Kent remembers reading something in an old military tactics manual he pulled off a dusty shelf in a library in Billings, Montana.

The best time to exploit the enemy’s weakness is when they are on the march.

MX Global is certainly on the march now.

At exactly 2:30 in the morning, Kent completes the loading. He walks into the garage, eases open the door and walks out onto the driveway. The stars are pinpricks of light in the black dome of the night sky. A symphony of crickets plays in the bushes by the house.

He pulls out his jax.

Matt, hope all is well in Nippon. The old snake is going to shed its skin and go on a hunting trip with the Chikara. If things get tight, call Mom. She’ll know where to find me. Love you.

Kent sends off the encrypted message and waits a few seconds. His jax softly pings with the reply.

Enjoy the hunting and take care of the truck. I’m on the last leg. I’ll keep in touch with Mom. Love you too
.

Kent closes his eyes and imagines his son on the flight to Sapporo. Sliding the memory crystal out of the jax, he drops it to the concrete driveway and crushes it with his boot heel, symbolically destroying the only remaining connection between him and the rest of the world. Then he carefully sweeps up the powder. He’ll throw it out the window when he crosses the bridge over the Sardox River.

If there’s an emergency, he still has a link to Matt through MOM.

Walking to the cab of the Chikara, he climbs in and drops down into the seat. An unused jax lies on the carcom. He lifts it and checks to make sure the new ID is loaded. Then he pulls out the tiny power cell from the bottom and watches the glowing jax slowly fade out in the dark, disengaging its tracking function. He’ll only turn it back on if there’s an emergency.

Until then, no electronic footprints.

The Chikara eases out of the garage and down the driveway. He drives off, leaving the sound of whales in his wake.

R
yzaard paces back and forth in his office between his desk and the closed door, hands behind his back. His tweed jacket hangs limply over the back of the chair.

The jax flashes on the desk. A full-color holo of Alexa’s face floats above it, showing her standing on the other side of the door.

“Come in.” He shouts at the face. The door glides sideways without a sound, and she enters.

Alexa walks to the sofa and sits directly under the Chinese wall-hanging. “Any word yet?”

“None.” Ryzaard shakes his head. “It’s been two hours since he landed in Tokyo. They should have found him and reported back by now.” He brings a clenched fist up to his lips. “If we lose him now, we’ll have to restart the tracking algorithm and waste another day. He might be anywhere in Japan by then. Damn Yakuza thugs.”

“They’re not the most intellectually gifted organization, that’s for sure.” Alexa picks a small wooden statue off the floor and begins to examine it closely. “I like this totem. Where did you get it?”

“It’s Maori, and it’s priceless.” Ryzaard hates the way Alexa can sense his stress and her odd habit of making annoying remarks unrelated to the matter at hand. Maybe she does it to relax him, but it only stresses him more. If she weren’t so useful, he would have disposed of her months ago. A snarl forms on his lips, and he marches over and rips the statue from her hands. “Don’t underestimate the Yakuza. Though crude in their methods, they are one of the most dependable organizations in the world, and they always get the job done.” He’s in no mood to argue about the wisdom of involving the Japanese Mafia.

“If you pay them enough,” she says.

“Don’t worry. We already have.” Still gripping the statue, Ryzaard draws in a long breath and walks over to the massive window behind his desk, looking out into the night. Relaxation slowly returns. The streets glow red and white with Midtown Manhattan’s night traffic. “So many of them.” Ryzaard stares down and lets out a long exhale. “Their lives ruled by forces beyond their control, forces that exploit and manipulate them.”