Tengu (15 page)
“Sure,” I said. I could imagine what it must be like, having someone you love taken. The ransom was everything. Justice probably seemed a luxury, an abstraction that was burned into irrelevance by the white-hot urgency to get your kid back.
Inouye continued. “The financial resources were at hand and only awaited certain other arrangements . . . ” he paused here. Traffic was light and we moved smoothly toward the Midtown Tunnel. The whirring of the tires was magnified as we entered the curving tube that would take us under the East River.
Inouye sighed slightly. “It was hoped that the ransom process would take place without complication. The police were involved, of course. And at the same time, elements from our government were monitoring the exchange . . . ”
Micky was shaking his head. “Must have been crowded at the drop point, Inouye. Way too many actors for my taste. It was bound to spook somebody.”
“Indeed. So I have been told. It was unfortunate . . . ” Inouye said nothing for a while.
“What happened?” I eventually asked. The car climbed out of the tunnel and headed up town.
“I do not have all the details, Dr. Burke. Suffice it to say that events did not go as planned.” In the front seat, Micky snorted at the diplomatic understatement. We rolled on for a few blocks and then headed west. I wasn’t really surprised—the Japanese Embassy was on Park Avenue between 49
th
and 50
th
Streets. Inouye seemed to be gathering his thoughts.
“From what I understand, the situation was . . . messy,” Inouye said. He frowned a bit at the untidiness. Diplomats prefer their world to mirror their language—smooth and without unforeseen complications. Inouye and Hatsue probably had much in common. “The Philippine government is not pleased with my government, Dr. Burke. The Abe family is most distressed that their daughter has not been recovered, not to mention the loss of several million dollars in ransom money. And now, of course, we fear that the goodwill of the kidnappers has been lost.”
Goodwill
. It seemed an odd quality to attribute to felons, but I got his point.
“I am very sorry to hear all of this, Inouye-san,” I told him. The car floated to a halt. “But I am not sure how I am involved or even how I could begin to help.” I looked at Micky. The disgusted expression on his face suggested that he knew more than he was letting on. “Perhaps the FBI . . . ”
Inouye held up a hand. “Please, Dr. Burke. We seek you out not because of your professional background.” This was not a surprise, since Ph.D.s in history are not on anyone’s list of first responders.
The second undersecretary continued. “There is, however, a personal link here which, combined with your skills, suggests to some in my government that you could be of help to the Abe family.”
Then he and Micky told me the details, and the bottom fell out of my world.
They gave me a fuller briefing at the embassy. I met a more senior functionary—I nodded at his name and then forgot it, still stunned. He was pretty smooth, despite the obvious tension that buzzed in the room. He discussed the Abe family’s willingness to assist me if I would assist them, fanned out a series of papers with travel details and vouchers, and for all his smoothness I could see the urgency in his eyes.
My brother had sat there with me, his face a mask equal to that of any diplomat. He didn’t watch the people from the embassy. He watched me. I turned to him.
“What are the odds?”
He shrugged and for a minute the play of subdued lighting in that hushed and elegant room made him looked tired beyond words. “Hard to say. Kidnapping is an industry in most of the third world countries. They do it for the money. Now that they have the money, who knows what they’ll do. Whatever’s easiest would be my guess.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “How’re the cops?”
Micky shrugged. “They’re like cops everywhere, I suppose. The good ones are only as good as their resources—as good as they’re allowed to be. The rest . . . ” he trailed off for a minute, then looked up at me. “She disappeared somewhere in the hills, Connor,” he said in reference to Hatsue. “Indian country. They play by different rules in places like that. The cops, too.” My brother shook his head. “It’s a deep dark hole you’re thinking of going down.”
As if I really had a choice. That certainty covered me like a cold, inescapable net. Every step in my life had led me to this juncture, and every stratagem I had ever devised to repress fear and avoid the final plunging step into the unknown was shattered. I wasn’t sure that I could do this alone. I wasn’t even sure I could do this at all. So I swallowed and asked the question we both knew was coming.
“Will you go with me?”
My brother grunted, and asked for a phone.
Departmental wheels were greased. Formal diplomatic requests made and honored. And two NYPD detectives were assigned to take a trip in an effort to promote intergovernmental cooperation between law enforcement agencies. That’s what the men with the smooth words cooked up.
I saw the worry in Deirdre’s face when she dropped Micky off at the airport. She turned her head to face me, her expression flat and angry, her eyes glistening with emotion. “You bring him back, Connor,” she told me, hissing with urgency. “Bring him
back
.”
I heard it in Sarah Klein’s voice when I called to tell her where I was going.
“I’ve got to go,” I told her simply.
“I know,” she answered, discipline fighting with sadness in the timbre of her voice.
The ransom drop had gone wrong. Someone—maybe one of the Filipino cops, maybe one of the Japanese security guys shadowing the man carrying the ransom to the rendezvous—had somehow been spotted by the kidnappers, and a gunfight had erupted. It didn’t matter. The man carrying the ransom had been snatched as well, and the kidnappers took him and the money, melting away into the busy city streets.
“Who was the poor guy?” I had asked.
The man from the embassy cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Dr. Burke,” he said, “I thought you knew.”
I shook my head. The man looked at my brother as if asking for help.
“Connor,” Micky said, “It was Yamashita.”
The rain fell and muffled her weeping. Hatsue yearned for the coming of darkness, when her captors would leave her alone in the night. It was the tail end of the rainy season, and she knew that soon the winds would shift to the northwest, blowing the scent of salt water up to the mountain heights where they had their camp. In the past, the smell of the sea had brought comfort—memories of childhood and home. In this place, it seemed another element in a cruel season. Late afternoons often brought rain, making the men in the camp seek shelter. For that, she welcomed the odd, dim green light of the storms as a kind of refuge.
They had run her down easily enough and brought her away from the Higuanon territory. Hatsue flailed through the underbrush, panic robbing her of any agility. She heard the pounding of their feet and the slap of their bodies whipping through the underbrush as they rushed downslope. She drove herself forward at the same time that the muscles in her back and the skin on the rear of her head strained to sense what was approaching. Terrified, it was almost a relief for her when they ran her to ground: the shock of impact, the jet of adrenalin that made her heart leap, and then the collapse. Dry-throated and winded, she hadn’t made a sound as they started to drag her off. When she recovered her voice and started to scream, one of her abductors jerked her around by her hair and slammed the butt of his rifle into her midsection. The force of it almost made her faint. In some ways, the shock that someone would physically attack her was almost more disturbing than the sensation of the blow itself. Her face spasmed in a mix of confusion and pain. The man watched her dispassionately—a swarthy figure in a drab and dirty T-shirt, an olive green bandana wrapped around his sweaty head. He was young and unremarkable except for the rifle he held and the look in his eye.
The man with the bandana watched Hatsue gasp for air. She retched and spit, then straightened up and started to protest.
He slammed the rifle into her again, but with more force. The others watched impassively. She fell to the ground and the man straddled her. Hatsue looked up at him, a dark form looming over her. He was a hulking shape silhouetted by a distant sky that was slowly surrendering its light to darker things.
“Shut up,” the man said in fairly good English, glaring down at her. “You make a problem, I hit you. You make a noise, I hit you. Okay?” He jerked the rifle to emphasize his point. Hatsue flinched defensively at the movement, hating herself for the reaction. But she nodded her understanding.
The young man said something to one of his companions in a dialect Hatsue did not know. They bound her hands behind her back. She tried to be as cooperative as possible, but it did not seem to mollify her captors. They jerked her bonds so tightly that her hands began to tingle almost at once. When they were done, the man with the bandana slapped the side of her head with a casual brutality. His hand was hard and horny with calluses. It seemed an old thing for one so young. The impact made her head ring. He gestured that she should follow the fast-moving line of men, already disappearing into the forest. Hatsue’s head buzzed with pain, her ear on fire, but she stumbled after them in silence.
They traveled along mountain trails, slowly working their way north and west in the growing darkness. Dropping down to a dirt road, they trundled her into the back of a rusted white pickup truck. Men piled in after her, and in the crowded confines of the truck bed, their bodies rubbed against her. She tried to pull away. One of them noticed her motion and said something to the others. They laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. For a while, the vehicle bounced along the slick ruts of a backcountry track. Eventually, it led to a highway. At this point, the men wrapped Hatsue’s head with cloth to blindfold her and shoved her under a muddy tarp. She could smell the moist earth on the fabric, a scent grown familiar through her months with the Higuanon. But the smell held no comfort for her now.
Hatsue tried to make sense of the abduction. It wasn’t random —these men had come looking specifically for her. The fact that they spoke English to her indicated they knew something of their victim. The question was why she was chosen. These men were not locals, and while there was no shortage of armed groups in the region, she saw no political point in taking her hostage. During her fieldwork, she had stayed clear of any action that could be construed as political in any way. Besides, the guerilla factions tended to seek fights on their own terms. Kidnapping a foreign scholar seemed a good way to bring far too much government attention to a group. So perhaps it was simply an act designed to generate ransom. Her family was a wealthy and influential one. She was sure they could negotiate a deal.
The thought offered some solace. Hatsue tried to stay attentive to whatever details she could note about their journey—the patterns of turns, the engine sound that suggested rates of speed. It might help later on. She had never known such fear, a fear so intense it warped her senses. She compartmentalized her terror into a little box and tried to stay alert for a way out. Her ancestors would have approved.
They drove in shifts through the night. Hatsue eventually dozed, a sleep with no real rest in it. The truck ground through gears. Its tires whined along the highway. She could smell the faint scent of tobacco from the cigarettes that the men smoked.
At dawn, they stopped for a meal. The men dragged her out of the truck bed like a sack of rice and dumped her in the weedy grass by the roadside. Birds called in the heavy, wet morning air. She could hear the men moving about, talking quietly, laughing occasionally. Still blindfolded, she waited in the dark world of the prisoner, tense with expectation and stupid with the dullness brought on by emotional strain.
After a time, someone jerked her to her feet, untied her hands, and led her off into some bushes so she could relieve herself.
They rebound her hands when she was done and led her deeper into the underbrush.
Then they raped her.
It was a thing made more horrible by the bonds, by the darkness of the blindfold. She was battered and stripped and entered, crushed by unseen bodies. She raged and struggled, but was ultimately forced into a world dominated by fear, pain, and the body odor of her rapists. They left her collapsed and gasping on the ground, alone with the smell of crushed plants, oozing their green essence into the earth.
When they hauled her out of the truck a few hours later, Hatsue thought they were going to rape her again. She trembled, her shivering making her teeth chatter uncontrollably, and fleeting sparks danced in the blackness behind her eyelids. She tried to sense what would happen, to reach out somehow beyond the blindfold and divine what was next. Her imagination conjured up the approaching forms of new attackers. Her body ached, but it was a distant sensation, a muffled experience. It was as if the rape had severed some connection. She was alive only to the threat of the outside world. She jerked tensely as she heard new voices. Then the noise of the truck as it whined into reverse. Rock and dirt sputtered under the wheels. She felt the impact of them as they struck her legs. Then the vehicle faded away. For a moment, hope flared—perhaps she had been abandoned.
But her hopes were quickly extinguished. Other hands took her by the arms and prodded her forward. An involuntary sob escaped before she could catch it. Then suddenly, she was yanked to a stop. There was the sudden, cool hardness of a knife blade next to her skin. It made her flinch, but strong hands grabbed her head and held it still. There was no care for her welfare in the action, just a hard efficiency. The blindfold was sliced away and Hatsue opened her eyes to the muted greens of the forest. As her eyes adjusted, the muted tones differentiated themselves into a half dozen men dressed to blend with the trees. Each man was armed with AK-47s, and they watched her expectantly. On a silent signal, they set off with Hatsue in tow, moving up the narrow path into the hills.
