The Golden City

by John Twelve Hawks

  Boone was moving so fast that Captain Tansiri had to run to catch up with him. “Is everything all right, sir?”

  “No problem. Thank you for your assistance.”

  “Perhaps you could join me for refreshments in the officer’s lounge. It’s air conditioned and the prisoners won’t be there—aside from the serving staff.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got an appointment in Bangkok.”

  A prisoner in rags was squatting in the middle of the yard. As Boone passed, the prisoner glanced up and it was her—her face—here in this fragment of hell. No. Blink your eyes. No. And the vision dissolved into a toothless old man, raising his cupped hands as he begged for money.

  23

  H ollis woke up from a dream and found himself in a cold, dark room. There were no street lights in the village of Shukunegi, and Billy Harano’s aunt turned off everything electrical before she went to sleep. Back in Los Angeles, Hollis could always hear traffic noise or a police siren. Now the only sound came from the wind whistling through a crack in the shutters.

  He slid his hand across the quilt and then reached out to touch the handgun lying near the edge of the tatami mat. The weapon reminded him that he was still a fugitive. Hollis breathed deeply and tried to relax, but at that moment it felt like sleep was in far off land and he didn’t know how to travel there. And then the memory of the Itako chanting and clicking her prayer beads returned to him. He could still recall the old woman’s dead eyes as Vicki’s voice emerged from her body.

  * * *

  After the Itako finished the ritual, Hollis walked out of the house. For several months, a continual anger had directed his actions and given him a fierce power. Now that anger was gone, and he felt tired and confused. Billy Harano stared at him as he stood in the middle of the country road. Exhaust drifted from the taxi’s tail pipe, but Hollis didn’t get back in the car.

  “I need to stay out of sight for awhile,” Hollis said. “Do you know a good hiding place?”

  Billy looked like a doctor who had just been asked a complicated medical question. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he paced around for a few seconds, then kicked a stone into the road ditch. “It is dangerous to hide in a Japanese city. There are police everywhere, and they would notice you. In a village, people would also have questions. But maybe I could take you to Sado Island.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s off the west coast of Japan. My aunt lives there in a village called Shukunegi. There are thousands of tourists on the island every summer, but right now it’s just the fishermen.”

  “So what is she going to say when I show up?”

  “They have television sets in Shukunegi, but they only get one channel. It’s a village of old people. They watch the game shows, but they don’t care about the news.”

  “I’m still going to stick out in that location.”

  “Of course you will.” Billy grinned. “You’ll be a new source of entertainment. Watching foreigners make mistakes is a traditional Japanese pastime. But on the islands, people live their own lives. They do not like to talk to the police.”

  The rest of the day, they took a series of regional train lines over the mountains to western Japan. The fields were covered with long sheets of white plastic as if the soil had to be gradually introduced to sunshine. All the train conductors stared at the black foreigner, but Billy told them that Hollis was an American choreographer who had come to Japan to study traditional dancing.

  During the ferry ride over to Sado Island, the boat passed through patches of snow and rain. At one point, the sun broke through the thick cloud cover and light streamed down on the grey-green ocean like a shaft of divine energy. Hollis doubted if anyone saw it; the other passengers on the boat lay on the floor of a carpeted television room dozing or staring at music videos. He wondered if that was the true secret of history: Great changes occurred in the world, but most people spent their lives half asleep.

  “What happens when we reach the island?”

  “We take a bus to the village and meet my Aunt Kimiko.”

  “What if she doesn’t like me?”

  “You are my friend, Hollis. That is all I need to say. We are guests for the first few days, and then we have to work.”

  * * *

  They arrived at Shukunegi in the evening. The village was a settlement of about fifty homes squeezed into a coastal canyon. At the mouth of the canyon the fisherman had built a bamboo wall with a pair of gates at the center. The wall made the village look like a fort built to resist barbarian invaders, but the real enemies were the ice storms that roared out of Siberia and hit the western side of the island.

  Billy led Hollis through the gates and into the village. The modern two-story houses had electricity and running water, but they were built very close to each other, with dirt passageways between the buildings. A stream ran through Shukunegi; the sound of rushing water mingled with the wind and the faint echo of laughter from a television set in someone’s home.

  Following the stream up the canyon, they walked past a community center and a sprawling graveyard filled with statues of the Buddha and lichen-covered gravestones. Aunt Kimiko’s two-story home was in the middle of the graveyard, toward the end of the canyon. Like many of the villagers, she had placed a black rock on each roof tile. The rocks were supposed to keep the wind from ripping up the tiles, but they made the roof look like an odd board game that was waiting for players.

  There were no locks on any of the houses in the village—only wooden latches. Billy slipped off his muddy shoes and then entered the house without knocking. Hollis remained alone on the doorstep and listened to a woman’s voice coming from within. The voice was high-pitched and happy, as if Billy’s arrival was an unexpected gift. A few minutes later, an elderly Japanese woman—as small as a child—hurried to the door, bowing and talking and welcoming her guest.

  * * *

  Billy spent a few days on the island before returning to Tokyo. He would talk to the other men who danced to rock and roll music in the park and see if there was a safe way for a foreigner to slip out of Japan. Hollis explored Shukunegi and quickly found a job that would help the village. A brick retaining wall at the base of the cliff was beginning to collapse. Using Aunt Kimiko’s tools, he would tear the wall down and build a new one. The fact that a strong foreigner had agreed to do a difficult job for free made the villagers very happy.

  Aunt Kimiko woke around six in the morning. She would serve Hollis a breakfast of sticky rice, miso soup, and one dish that always surprised him. Once she presented him with an enormous sea snail and watched him rip the salty brown flesh out of the black shell. After Hollis finished breakfast, he performed some martial arts exercises, then carried his tools over to the retaining wall. Usually, two or three old women wearing pink rubber boots would sit on benches and watch him work. Hollis had never been so conscious of his own body, the strength of his arms and legs. Whenever he lifted something heavy, the old women murmured to each other and clapped their hands to show approval.

  Working every day calmed him down and brought some order to his life. First he dug a trench, then he began to lay bricks, filling the cavity behind the wall with buckets of gravel he had taken from the beach. Hollis was slow and deliberate with each part of the job, using a length of twine to make sure the foundation was level. As he mixed concrete and slapped it on the bricks, he began see his past choices with a new sense of clarity.

  Vicki had told him that he was on the right path. “If you remember who you are, you’ll know what to do.” So who am I? Hollis wondered. Back in Los Angeles, he had taught his students to never use violence for negative goals. The true warrior used both mind and heart. The true warrior was calm within, not ruled by anger. He remembered standing on a London rooftop with a sniper rifle and felt ashamed.

  More bricks and more mortar. Build the wall higher. Straight and true.

  * * *

  It was his fifteenth day in the village. After working on the wall in the morning, he ate some rice and tempura and wandered through the
graveyard that surrounded the houses. Dead flowers. Old coins in a rusty kettle filled with rainwater. A line of chubby stone Buddhas with white cotton caps and little bibs tied around their necks.

  He went out the gate, and then walked along the tide line to a black sand beach littered with plastic bottles, automobile tires and all the other debris of the modern world. Pine trees clung to the rocks like bonsai, and the waves fell softly onto the shore.

  Know this my love Believe this my love the Light survives. Vicki had traveled a long way to tell him that and now it was the foundation of his faith. If someone truly thought you were a good person, it could change you forever. Perhaps that’s why God had created holy men and women. They saw the Light within others, and sometimes that inspired people to live up to an ideal.

  Gabriel couldn’t have known about the brave bookseller and the yakuza with the gun and the killing in the hotel room, but perhaps he had seen the general direction of Hollis’s journey. Who am I? Hollis asked himself again. He would always be a warrior, but now he needed to be fighting for a something more important then revenge. Staring out at the waves, he felt as if he had cut away all the clutter and confusion that had held back his understanding. If you remember who you are, you’ll know what to do.

  “Hollis!”

  He spun around and saw Billy Harano striding down the beach. Billy must have bought a fresh tube of hair gel in Tokyo—every hair of his Elvis pompadour was in its proper position.

  “These old people like you. My aunt says you are a good worker. If you want, you can stay here forever.”

  “Your aunt is a wonderful person, but I need to move on.”

  “Yeah. I thought you would say that. I talked to some people. There is a safe way for you to get out of Japan. We take a ferry down to Okinawa and the southwest islands. If you pay enough money, the fishing boats will carry you anywhere you want—Taiwan, the Philippines, even Australia.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “These villagers will miss you,” Billy smiled. “I will miss you, too. It is very cool to know a Harlequin.”

  “I wanted to talk about that, Billy. Now that we’re friends, I can tell you my Harlequin name ”

  He was still Hollis for a few more seconds. Gazing out at the horizon, he felt very aware of this choice. He was giving up all attachments, a normal life.

  “My Harlequin name is Priest.”

  “Priest. Yes. Very good.” Billy looked satisfied. “I never really thought you were called Hollis.”

  24

  B oone arrived with his team half an hour before Martin Doyle was supposed to be released from prison. The motorcycle riders zoomed up and down the road a few times, and then everyone waited beneath a banyan tree growing in a field across from the prison parking lot. Children, small and delicate, climbed the branches of the tree and gazed down at the three Thai men and the three foreigners. One of the little girls wore a garland of flowers around her neck. She plucked off the orange and yellow petals and watched them flutter to the muddy ground.

  The motorcycle riders were Thai military policemen who wore jeans and flashy silk shirts instead of their uniforms. They would chase Doyle if he tried to escape. Boone and the two Australian mercenaries would sit behind them.

  The older Australian was a chunky little man named Tommy Squires who followed directions and only got drunk when the job was over. Tommy had brought along a friend named Ryan Horsley. Boone was starting to dislike the young man. Horsley was an ex-rugby player who thought he was tough. There was nothing particularly wrong with that idea, but Horsley also thought he was clever—and that was a sad error. Boone always preferred employees who were smart enough to be aware of their own stupidity.

  The heat and humidity made everyone feel slow. The policeman bought fruit drinks from a road vendor and sat in the shade while Squires and Horsley inspected the lances. One of Boone’s contacts had purchased the lances in Singapore, where they were called ECCDs—Electrified Crowd Control Devices. They were six-foot long white plastic poles with blunt ends. When the tip came into contact with a human being and was compressed slightly, it delivered a 50,000 volt shock.

  In China, the ECCDs were used for breaking up demonstrations where the crowd locked arms or sat down in the street. The problem with Tasers or pepper spray was that the demonstrators never knew when the officer was going to pull the trigger. If a crowd encountered a line of policemen carrying Plexiglas shields and ECCDs, they could see their punishment heading down the street, getting closer, a little closer. When the tip of the lance was about two or three feet from their faces, they would usually panic and run.

  Boone took out a pair of compact binoculars and scrutinized the prison administration building. A Thai driver named Sunchai had parked his delivery van near the entrance. Boone checked his watch. If everything went according to schedule, Doyle would be released in five or ten minutes.

  “You ready?” he asked the Australians. “We’ll wait until the van pulls out of the parking lot, then follow about 100 meters behind. I know it’s hot, but make sure you wear the motorcycle helmets. I don’t want Doyle to glance in the rearview mirror and see three foreigners.”

  “So when is he going to break and run?” Horsley asked.

  “I don’t know. With traffic, it’s a two-hour drive from here to the airport.”

  “But he’s definitely going to do it?”

  “Very few things in life are definite, Mr. Horsley.”

  “This whole thing doesn’t make sense. When he strolls out of the building, we should cuff the wanker, pull a sack over his head and toss him in the van. Instead we’re going to ride around holding these pig stickers.”

  Squires raised his hands like someone trying to stop a runaway shopping cart. “Ryan doesn’t mean to offend, Mr. Boone. He’s just the curious type.”

  “What if your neighbor owned a vicious dog?” Boone asked. “And what if he let his dog wander freely around the neighborhood? Don’t you think that would be irresponsible?”

  “You bet it would,” Horsley said. “I’d take a shovel and kill the brute.”

  “We don’t want to kill Mr. Doyle. But we want to show him that negative actions have negative consequences.”

  “I get the picture,” Squire said and turned to his younger friend. “This is just like what they taught us back in church school. We want this bastard to feel the wrath of a righteous god.”

  Boone’s handheld computer began to beep, so he walked around the tree and leaned against the trunk. His staff in London had sent him an urgent message: HSC Columba. Images attached.

  Three months earlier, Boone and Michael had left Skillig Columba with Matthew Corrigan’s body. Before the helicopter returned to the mainland, Boone sent one of his men down to the island’s dock to install a HSC—a hidden surveillance camera. The device was battery-powered and had a solar chip for recharging. It would only send images if a motion detector triggered the shutter.

  A red flower petal landed on Boone’s shoulder. He glanced up at the branch above him, and two little girls giggled at his reaction. The tree was filled with children, and more children were squatting on the dirt in front of him. Boone tried to ignore them as he studied the eighteen images attached to the email. In the first few photographs, an old man arrived on the island in a fishing boat and began unloading supply containers. In the sixth photo, a group of nuns was standing on the dock. It must have been windy that day; their cloaks and veils were flapping wildly. The nuns looked like giant black birds about to fly off into the clouds.

  In the fourteenth image, a new person appeared in the camera frame: an Asian girl wearing jeans and a quilt jacket. Boone placed a grid over the girl’s face and made the image larger. Yes, he knew her. It was the child he had encountered in the classroom building at New Harmony. She had disappeared into the New York subway tunnels with Maya and ended up on the island.

  The girl in the quilt jacket was a threat to the Brethren’s security. If her story appeared on the Internet it would challenge the carefully prepared explanation of what had happened
at New Harmony. According to the Arizona State Police, a dangerous cult had destroyed itself—no one in the media had challenged that theory.

  The solution to the problem was clear, but Boone didn’t feel like giving the order. This was all Martin Doyle’s fault; he was a blister that wouldn’t go away. For six years, Boone had tried to establish the Brethren’s vision. The electronic Panopticon was supposed to usher in a new kind of society where people like Doyle would be tracked, identified and destroyed. But now a demon was being set free, and Boone was the man unlocking the prison door.

  The handheld computer beeped again as if it was demanding a response. Boone switched on his satellite phone and called Gerry Westcott, the head of operations in London.

  “I saw the images from the island.”

  “Did you recognize the Asian girl?” Westcott asked. “She’s also in the surveillance photos taken in the New York subway.”

  “I don’t want a termination,” Boone said. “We need an acquisition so that I can question her.”

  “That might be difficult.”

  “You have ten or twelve hours to get it organized. If they’re going to London, they’ll take the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead.”

  “That’s probably right. It’s too risky to take the plane.”

  “Give me updates every three hours. Thank you.”

  As Boone switched off the phone, a flower pedal fluttered down and landed on the top of his head. All the children giggled loudly as Boone flicked the petal away.