Executioner 053 - The Invisible Assassins Read online

  "The Ikida case?" Suki asked him.

  "No new developments," Nakada replied with a weary nod. "It's the affair I was helping out with this evening, Colonel Phoenix, a contract execution. But if we don't nail the killer soon, we might end up with a war on our hands."

  He watched Bolan handle his chopsticks with polished ease as the American deftly selected a morsel of pickled tomato. This gaijin was a man of mysterious depths, he thought to himself. And Nakada was surprised at his assessment, for he suspected that if Colonel Phoenix had not come with the highest recommendation, he might well have placed him on the far side of the law.

  "Have you ever had to deal with industrial espionage?" asked Bolan, making it sound as casually conversational as he could.

  Nakada finished the last of the appetizer tidbits. "No, that's not my field.... I cannot imagine it's as interesting as murder."

  The two men were psychologically circling each other like sumo wrestlers sizing each other up.

  Suki, meanwhile, wanted to ask their visitor where he had learned to handle chopsticks so comfortably. Then she realized it was most likely that Colonel Phoenix had seen service in Vietnam, and she felt embarrassed at her earlier remarks in the car. "I hope you will be here long enough to see some of the countryside outside Tokyo. Perhaps there will be time. . ."

  Suddenly Bolan felt that prickling tingle. There was no mistaking the warning this time. He signaled with his hand like a television director that she should continue talking.

  " . . . time for you to visit Mount Fuji or even Kyoto," Suki continued, playing along.

  Nakada watched as Bolan slipped quietly to his feet and moved with catlike grace across the golden matting. Bolan padded silently to the paper wall opposite the sliding partition through which they had entered.

  Suki chattered on as Bolan reached for the latch. Abruptly he slid the panel back, and the man outside tumbled into the room.

  A second shadowy figure followed the first. He went straight for Bolan.

  The other wall panel was yanked open, and two more hoods charged in.

  "Watch out, King!" Bolan shouted the warning before grasping his attacker's wrist, using the man's own momentum to send him crashing into the first eavesdropper.

  Nakada spun in one fluid movement to fend off the assault from his side. His right foot continued lifting in a high arc. The kick connected with the leading thug's rib cage, snapping bone as he was driven backward with a harsh yelp of pain.

  Suki whirled around, pulling out the long pin in her hair. The two guys on the floor beside her were groggily sorting themselves out. The one with a pockmarked face was reaching into his jacket. She did not wait to find out what weapon was concealed in there; Suki stabbed him through the hand with the needle-sharp point.

  A fifth goon appeared in the doorway, his gold-capped teeth flashing as he barked out an order for his men to retreat.

  Bolan grabbed the nearest man before he could make a break. Using his hip as a lever, Bolan threw the punk onto the mat for a second time, following through with a smart chop to the neck. He wanted this guy in one piece—there were some questions he had to ask. The hardguy's partner, clutching at his punctured hand, took advantage of Bolan's momentary engagement to scuttle back to the corridor.

  Nakada sent the last of the assailants flying with another kick to his fleeing rear. The thug stumbled forward and crashed through the flimsy paneling. Gold Teeth helped him to his feet, and they ran toward the kitchen exit.

  The commander turned, saw the hoodlum at Bolan's feet sliding a knife from his pocket, and dropped with his knee smashing down across the windpipe. When Nakada got up, his target lay motionless, staring glassy-eyed across the floor at the spilled remains of the supper he had so unwisely disturbed.

  The action could not have taken much more than sixty seconds—five against three in the confines of a private dining cubicle—but it looked as if great beasts had been on the rampage.

  The splintered door frame hung on shreds of paper, and the dead man's foot rested in Bolan's sukiyaki.

  Nakada turned to face the startled Mr. Miyasaki, who hovered between an apology that such a thing could have happened to his honored guests and shock at the sight of the damage. Suki calmly pushed the pin back in her hair, rearranging a fallen strand as if she had merely been caught in a gust of wind.

  Bolan knelt to take a closer look at the corpse. He cursed under his breath that King's action had been so thorough, so terminal. Still, there had not been time to ask him to go easy. The knife was still clutched in the dead man's hand.

  It riveted Bolan's attention. Not the knife, but the hand: the top two joints were missing from the little fingers, just like the big guy in the photograph.

  9

  "IT IS THE SIGN of the yakuza," said Nakada, slurring the word quickly so it sounded like "yuksa." "The mark of a gangster. As I told you, if a policeman in this city is honest, he will end up with some powerful enemies."

  Bolan had had to ask twice before the security chief would give him a direct answer. The previous night, when they had escorted the American back to his hotel, both Nakada and Suki had almost tripped over each other with their profuse apologies. This morning Bolan wanted to know more about these mobsters of the Japanese cosa nostra.

  They were driving south around the bay, well beyond the city limits, to Nakada's headquarters. The Japanese officer seemed preoccupied as he stared moodily out of the window.

  "So the missing finger joint marks him as a soldier for the mob?" persisted Bolan.

  "Yes. If a retainer should fail in a mission or somehow foul up, then he must cut off part of his finger with a samurai sword to atone for his mistakes—though it's so common a sight I suspect the oyabun sometimes set things up merely to test their lieutenants' loyalties."

  "Oyabun?"

  "They are what you would call the godfathers, but they live more like daimyo, the great feudal lords of the past."

  "Tell me more about these yakuza."

  Nakada hesitated, searching for a place to start. "Frankly, I don't know to what extent you've had to deal with gangsters in your own country, Colonel Phoenix, but I don't think the yakuza are quite the same as the Mafia."

  "Oh?"

  "The kumi, the criminal clans and families, derive much of their income from the usual illegal sources—prostitution and pornography, drugs, gambling, blackmail, protection rackets. But they have as many legitimate fronts: hotels, nightclubs and discos, steakhouses, laundries and pachinko—you know, pinball—parlors. They can pass as pillars of the establishment. Indeed, they are often accepted as such. It's a seven-billion-dollar-a-year business."

  Mack Bolan felt a chill of recognition.

  "Quite," nodded Suki. "They also have close ties to several political groups and influential institutions, not to mention some of the zaibatsu, our giant corporations."

  "I think the point Suki is trying to make is that the yakuza are not to be trifled with, but they are a domestic problem and not likely to be of much interest to you, Colonel," Nakada said curtly, seemingly disturbed by his assistant's interruption. "No, what we've got to worry about from the point of view of security are the international terrorist groups and the private armies. One of Japan's most famous novelists, Yukio Mishima, started his own private army. He committed hara-kiri when he saw it wasn't going anywhere. But there are others less romantic, more practical. Those are potentially the most dangerous. But the yakuza are not interested in causing trouble in our area. They don't want to draw that kind of attention to themselves."

  Bolan made no comment, but everything he had just learned about the yakuza make them sound sickeningly like the organization he had fought in the States.

  "It'll take about another ten minutes to get there," the commander informed Bolan, relaxing slightly as he changed the subject. He tapped Suki lightly on the shoulder. "I'd like you to show Colonel Phoenix around the grounds and through our records department. Yamashita is expecting you. Then you can en
d the tour in my office."

  They completed the journey in silence. As Bolan stared out at the market streets and warehouses and residential enclaves they passed, he tried to puzzle out the meaning behind the attack in the restaurant.

  Was it some longstanding local hatred that had erupted? Were those thugs really out to get Nakada? If not, what interest could the yakuza have in Mack Bolan?

  "Not at all like Virginia, is it, Colonel?"

  Bolan looked across with a start.

  Nakada controlled a small smile of satisfaction. After all that circling and probing, he had Phoenix pegged: he was certain now that the colonel was a colleague of Paul Ryan at the embassy. Nakada could not resist underlining this minor victory. "No, it's not at all like Langley."

  Bolan gave the merest shake of his head. At first, he had thought Nakada was revealing some knowledge of the Stony Man operation. It was with relief that he realized Nakada was referring to the CIA.

  Rather than being located in a modern concrete office block or in a more traditional Japanese villa, Nakada's headquarters were housed in a rambling Victorian monstrosity, complete with Gothic towers, decorative tiling, and a graveled driveway lined with chestnut trees. As their car approached the house, King Nakada described the place.

  It had been built, in what was then almost a rural area, by Willem Reemeyer, a Dutch importer who had prospered during Yokohama's heyday as an international port. On a fateful morning—September 1, 1923—Willem and his wife, Mary, were seeing friends off at the docks. They both perished in the first massive shock wave of the Great Earthquake.

  The house, so solid that it withstood the jolting tremor, was taken over in the reconstruction period as a storage center for the jumbled remnants of municipal records. Over the years it had passed through the hands of a dozen different governmental departments, finally being converted into the secluded HQ of the security team now headed by Nakada.

  The huge riding stables had been altered to accommodate a gymnasium and firing range. The high walls had been strengthened and fitted with alarms.

  Bolan could see a group of agents receiving training in hand-to-hand combat on the lawn, but they were lost from view as Suki drove up to the front steps.

  "I'm sorry I must desert you," said Nakada, almost jumping from the car before it had stopped, "but I have many phone calls to make. I intend to get to the bottom of last night's unfortunate affair."

  Bolan nodded pleasantly, thinking that was precisely what he, too, intended to do. "See you later then," he said.

  It started raining again when Suki drove around the side of the mansion to leave the car in the garage where a small team of mechanics were making a thorough inspection of a heavyweight limo. Bolan guessed it was bulletproof and bomb-proof.

  "Well, Suki," he said. "Let's go through Records first. There's a lot here I've got to see for myself."

  MR. YAMASHITA had been on the staff longer than anyone else. Kingoro Nakada was the third boss he had had in the six and a half years since he had established the records department in the cavernous basement of the Reemeyer house. But in all that time, Colonel Phoenix was the first American to be shown through the guarded facilities.

  Yamashita wore gold-rimmed glasses and only a light linen jacket, although the air conditioning kept his underground archives a little too cool for comfort. As he showed their visitor the computer connections that gave Nakada's unit access to the information filed by all sections of the Japanese National Police Agency, Bolan noticed that Yamashita would often punctuate his speech with a hiss. It was just a tactic to gain time to think over what he was about to say.

  "Instead of describing how all this works, it would probably be easier to invent an example to demonstrate our system in action."

  Yamashita paused again, and Bolan jumped at the chance to suggest, "Well, let's suppose you've had a tip-off concerning . . . oh, say, the United Red Army."

  Yamashita hesitated yet again, but then he shrugged. One example was as good as another.

  His sensitive fingers stroked over the keyboard as he alerted the machine of their request.

  "Since Nagata and Sakaguchi were sentenced to death, the Red Army is pretty much a spent force," Suki said as they waited for the computer to print out its answer. "The group split apart. There was too much internal dissension."

  The terminal chattered.

  "I've asked for the printout in English," Yamashita told him. He seemed almost apologetic for having taken this initiative. "So much intelligence work is done in English."

  The paper moved rapidly as the high-speed printer went to work. The first thing to emerge was a computerized diagram of the assumed power structure between known cells of the Red Army, with further references directing the user to individual files.

  "That gives you the overview," said Yamashita, before Bolan could digest even a percentage of it, "and this is a listing of all known members by specialty."

  The new sheet listed names under subheadings such as Explosives and Kidnapping. Again the reader was directed to separate files. Bolan scanned the lists of suspects. Tanaga's name was not there.

  "Next it will produce a chronological digest of their activities. It takes some time—the machine is collecting information from various sources, including the Interpol link."

  "Well, how about showing me some of these other files? How would you follow up on, er, this guy—Tanaka?" Bolan deliberately picked the closest name he could to the one that he sought.

  "Like some coffee?" Suki asked.

  Bolan nodded, and she went off to get some.

  Yamashita unlocked the T drawer and opened it for Bolan's inspection. They were labeled in Japanese and English. The American pulled out Tanaka's folder. The guy had engineered a skyjacking in 1977.

  The printing machine began to click excitedly. Yamashita walked back to check it.

  Bolan quickly tugged up the Tanaga Zeko file and flipped it open. One look at the photo confirmed the identity; there was no mistaking that twisted sneer.

  Presumed deceased, it said.

  The information was the same as they had back in the States. And it had probably been fed into this network from the same tainted source.

  So it was another dead end. In a way, not dead enough.

  Both brown folders were back in place before Yamashita returned with another scroll of data on the Red Army.

  Over coffee, Bolan asked, "What about these yakuza? What information do you have on—what was it King called them—the oyabun?"

  Yamashita hissed twice before admitting, "Very little."

  "The metropolitan police have the usual criminal records on the rank-and-file members of these gangs," added Suki, "but the oyabun themselves are respected as part of the establishment. They are looked up to as successful businessmen.... " Her explanation tailed off into a frustrated shrug.

  It was not until they were walking across the wet grass toward the gymnasium that Suki finished what she had to say. "You must understand, Colonel, that the top gangsters here have very influential connections with politicians .. . and with the police. Perhaps that is why there is so little information about them ever put on record."

  SUKI WATCHED with increasing regard for the tall stranger as Bolan and his handpicked opponent bowed and took their positions. The tips of the bamboo swords clicked as they touched.

  Benkei bared his teeth behind the metal face guard—he would cut this outsider down to size. He would show Yumoto, their tyrannical instructor, just how good he was.

  "Hajima!" Yumoto gave the order to start, noting with some distaste how Benkei swaggered.

  The trainee feinted, hoping to draw Bolan off balance. It did not work. He sliced in a downward chop. The visitor calmly parried the practice blade away.

  Bolan stepped back quickly, and Benkei was tempted to follow with a quick jab to the breastplate. Again he was deflected.

  Benkei tried for the head—he would rap this American on the left temple. He lifted his split-bamboo sword
to strike the decisive blow. . .

  Bolan moved so fast that Benkei did not see the forward lunge. The big foreigner pulled the thrust, but the point of his sword was pressing lightly on the other man's throat protector.

  "Yame," called Yumoto. The bout was over.

  "You show a natural aptitude for the sword." Yumoto congratulated Bolan in the changing room as the Westerner discarded the unfamiliar robes. They were alone.

  Yumoto had iron-gray hair, cut very short. He was about sixty. "These recruits they send me do not grasp the essence of the sword. It is no longer relevant to their work as bodyguards and the like. But one does not study it to learn how to kill, rather it is to submit to a moral discipline."

  Bolan nodded. He understood.

  "With formal training, Colonel, you could be very good—perhaps one day a master."

  "I am not worthy to receive such a compliment," Bolan replied.

  The rough old man was won over by the American's modesty; that, too, was a virtue in short supply these days.

  They talked about the various training methods that Yumoto employed to get the recruits into shape for their potentially dangerous assignments. Many traditional weapons were used to improve the men's timing and their reaction speed.

  Yumoto laughed when Bolan asked him about ninja techniques, not because he took their visitor to be yet another thrill seeker, but at the thought of trainees like the just-defeated Benkei mastering the skills of the black warriors.

  "The ninja practice walking across taut rice paper until it can bear their weight without making a single tear in the paper. With small grappling hooks sewn into their suits they can climb smooth walls. The ninja use sai-min-jutsu—" Yumoto searched for the right word in English "—the power of the mind . . ."

  "Hypnosis?"

  "Hai. Hypnosis. Some people think they are wizards. There are few men left who know the secrets of the ninja. No, Colonel, we do not teach such things here."

  Bolan could have spent a lot longer with Yumoto, and he apologized for having to leave. Even as Yumoto escorted him to the gymnasium door, the instructor was still ruminating on his favorite topic. "These young men do not grasp its importance, for to understand the art of the sword is to understand the strategy underlying any confrontation. I shall retire soon, I think. They have no use for the sword."