by Elle Gray
“Do you know who this is?”
Although I’ve only heard her voice once, I immediately know who it is on the other end of the line.
Gina Aoki.
“Yes, I do,” I say.
“Ozuma Tea Garden. One hour. Not one minute later,” she says. “And if you’re not there at the appointed time, I’m gone, and you’ll never hear from me again.”
The line goes dead in my hand and I look at my phone like it’s a bomb set to go off. I look at the clock on the wall. One hour. Not one minute later. Ozuma is about twenty minutes from here. Plenty of time. But wanting to account for every possibility so I’m not late, I rush into my office, grab my things and head out, leaving my team staring after me.
Twenty-Eight
Ozuma Tea Garden, Queen Anne District; Seattle, WA
With five minutes until our meeting, I get out of the car. I’ve been parked here for more than half an hour, waiting for our designated time. I wasn’t about to risk missing my window to meet with her, so waiting half an hour was no hardship. I still don’t know what changed Gina’s mind and why she’s suddenly agreeing to speak with me after being so curt on the phone. Whatever it is was that changed her mind though, I’m grateful for it.
I walk to the admissions gate and find a pleasant-looking Japanese woman behind the plexiglass smiling at me.
“Blake Wilder?” she asks.
I nod. “Please, go through the gate.”
“Thank you.”
I push through the gate and am met by a young man in khakis, a blue button-down shirt, and a blue blazer emblazoned with the garden’s logo on the breast pocket. He’s got a two-way radio in his hand.
“Follow me please, Ms. Wilder.”
I follow him through the gardens, soaking up the atmosphere as we pass cherry trees, copses of bamboo stalks, and a giant pond filled with reeds, lily pads, and koi fish, larger than any I’ve ever seen. The place is beautiful, there is no doubt. And it’s tranquil. Everything is so quiet and still. You can’t help but soak up the natural beauty of the place.
I follow my guide up a set of stairs that had been cut into the side of a small rise that leads up to a traditional Japanese tea house. The tea house is surrounded by thickets of bamboo and flowering bushes that lend a sweet, delicate aroma to the air around us. The man steps to the rice paper door and pulls it aside, ushering me in. And when I cross the threshold, I find Gina Aoki sitting cross-legged at the low table in the center of the room.
“Shoes, please,” she starts.
I take off my shoes and set them and my bag down at the door, then cross over to where she’s sitting. I take a seat on the giant cushion, folding my legs beneath me. Gina reaches out and pours me a cup of tea. She’s an older woman, probably a few years younger than my mother would be if she were still alive. If that. She’s got straight black hair flecked with gray, fawn-colored skin, and dark, almond-shaped eyes set into a smooth, wrinkle-free face.
“I apologize for all of the cloak and dagger, but I can’t afford to be seen with you. My security team didn’t want me to meet with you in the first place, but it is my duty. It’s nothing personal, but I’d like to live,” she says bluntly.
A grin pulls the corner of my mouth upward. “I’ve been getting that a lot lately.”
We both take a moment to sip our tea and reflect internally on why we’re there. I’ve tried to put my questions in some sort of orderly fashion but now that I’m faced with this moment, I’m completely at a loss. But I sit up a little straighter and look at Gina, whose face is pinched and drawn. She looks sick to be sitting here with me at all. But she also looks grimly determined.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I say.
“Don’t thank me. I’m not here because of you,” she replies. “I’m here because I made a promise a long time ago.”
“A promise to whom?” I ask.
“To your mother,” Gina says. “And like her, you’re annoyingly stubborn.”
Her words are harsh, but there’s a sense of affection in them as well, so I say nothing. Her words also send a charge of electricity shooting straight down my spine. I feel myself trembling. I open my mouth to ask another question but Gina cuts me off.
“She made me promise that if anything happened to her and your father, that I would tell you what I knew,” she says. “But I will tell you right now I don’t know much, Blake.”
It’s like my mother knew, even all the way back then, who and what I would eventually become. It’s like she knew I would dedicate my life to figuring out who murdered them and how to bring them to justice. It sets my pulse racing and my heart spinning to know that even all those years ago, that my mother was thinking ahead enough that she wanted me to know what happened to her.
“I joined their working group a few months before they were killed. The working group was very tightly=knit,” she continues.
“Like a family,” I echo the words my parents always told me.
She nodded. “Very much so. They welcomed me in from the start and I never felt uncomfortable around any of them. In many ways, I did love them like my family. But when they were killed, I knew something was very wrong, and that things would get much worse. So, I ran. I ran all the way here and haven’t looked back. I have security that keeps me safe, and I live a quiet, comfortable life.”
“Do you think they’ll still come for you? Even after all these years?”
“I don’t think they’ll ever stop. Ever. I think, like you, they believe I know more than I do,” she says. “That’s why I exercise as much care and caution as I can. It’s selfish I know, but I don’t want to end up like the others.”
“Who is this, ‘they’ you keep referring to?”
“The organization that killed your parents and the rest of our working group,” she says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“I get that. But who are they?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But if you ever find out, tell me,” she says, then pauses. “Wait. On second thought, don’t tell me. I actually don’t want to know.”
“What happened out there, Gina?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know for sure. But after your parents were killed, the other members of the work group started to die. And that’s when I knew they were purging our work group. And that I had to get out of there.”
“What were my parents looking into? And was the entire work group looking into the same thing?”
“They all tended to examine the same things, yes,” she replies. “As for what they were looking into, I don’t know the specifics. I was still a junior researcher at the time. I only came into the group a short time before they were killed.”
“Tell me what you can. What you remember,” I urge her. “Please.”
“The working group had become suspicious of elements within the government. They were looking into certain people who they believed had ties to an organization known as The Thirteen,” she says.
For the second time in the last few minutes, her words send a charge of electricity coursing through me. I think about Mr. Corden’s notes and the mentions of the Thirteen in them. I feel the connections forming in my mind as some of the gaps are starting to be filled in.
“And what is the Thirteen, Gina?”
“They suspected there was an organization within the government, made up of high-ranking officials, who were orchestrating world events—political assassinations both here and abroad, regime change in other countries, and of course, getting the right people to pass certain pieces of legislation favored by the Thirteen. The end goal was power and wealth.”
“Power and wealth,” I say. “Those are powerful motivating factors for people to do all sorts of evil things.”
She nods. “It is. This group, so far as they could tell, had no real political ideology. They did what they did purely to enrich themselves,” she says. “I’ve discreetly kept tabs over the years, and I think that’s changed. Oh, the core ideal is still power and money. The
Thirteen is all about accruing wealth and consolidating their own power. But I also see more political bents to the events I believe they are engaged in than before.”
“Who are they? The Thirteen? Who makes up its membership?”
“That’s a very good question. And before you decide you really want an answer to it, you should make your peace with whatever god you may or may not believe in,” she replies. “You open that door you are inviting untold evil into your life. You’re inviting your own death into your life. Look at what happened to your parents and our working group. That should be example enough to you of what happens when you start poking around the Thirteen.”
I sip my tea and consider her words, letting them all rattle around inside my head for a moment. Before I can ask another question though, she speaks first.
“That is truly all I know, Blake. I wish I knew more I could tell you. I wish I could make you understand why your parents are dead. But I can’t,” she says, her voice suddenly thick with emotion. “My advice to you is to drop this. You can’t bring your parents back, and believe me when I say that if you open this can of worms, you will be putting a target on your back. They will come for you and they will kill you. They’re probably watching you already.”
I shake my head. “Why would they be watching me?
“Because of who you are. Because of who your parents were,” she says. “I can already tell the apple did not fall far from the tree. And if I can see that, I know they can. And they will see you as a threat to them. To their power and wealth. And they will stop at nothing to eliminate those they view as threats to those two things.”
“I’ve never seen anybody watching me,” I say. “I’m good at spotting tails—”
“They’re better at evasion. You’ll never see them coming, Blake. They won’t be ham-handed about putting surveillance equipment in your home. They’ll insert people into your life to keep tabs on you. And these people will stay with you for years,” she says. “That is how committed they are to their cause.”
Insert people into my life? To me, that sounds far-fetched; more like something from a book than real life. I can’t believe that somebody would give up years of their life pretending to be somebody they weren’t, all for the sole purpose of keeping an eye on me. That just sounds flat-out paranoid.
“That’s all I have to tell you, Blake. That’s all I know. All I will say is: be careful,” she says. “Watch your back. Because they are out there. You may not see them, but they see you. They’re watching you, and if you prove to be too much trouble, they will kill you.”
This all sounds so crazy. And I feel crazy for even considering it. But there is a ring of truth in her words. I believe she’s being honest with me. I believe she’s being sincere. And that scares the hell out of me.
“Wait five minutes before you leave, please. Finish your tea,” Gina says. “And for the love of God, do not contact me ever again. I no longer exist to you.”
I hand her my card. She hesitates but takes it. I look her in the eye, holding her gaze.
“If you ever need help with anything, call me, Gina. If you’re in trouble, call me,” I tell her. “My cell is on my card. I mean it. I’m here to help you.”
“Thank you, but I very likely won’t be calling,” she says, but I notice she slips my card into her pocket anyway.
At the doorway, Gina hesitates and looks back at me, the ghost of a smile upon her lips.
“You really are like her. Your mother,” she says. “Seeing you is like seeing her again.”
And with that, she’s gone, leaving me with even more questions than I had walking in here. But at least I got a few answers. It’s not much, but it’s something to build on. I know Gina thinks I need to give this up, but I can’t. Not that I now know the truth. Or at least some of the truth. It’s up to me to reveal the rest of it.
I owe it to my mother and my father. To Mr. Corden. And to the rest of their working group, who were slaughtered for daring to seek the truth.
Twenty-Nine
Wilder Residence; The Emerald Pines Luxury Apartments, Downtown Seattle
Still charged up after meeting with Gina, I went home and immediately got to work. I moved my whole operation into the second bedroom in my apartment, rearranging the furniture to give me more working space and to make it easier to hide what I’m doing from anybody who happens by. All I have to do is close the door. This is my war room.
I make a mental note to buy a new doorknob. One that has a lock on it, so I can be sure the room and all the files in it are secure. As I look around, I realize I’m also going to want to install surveillance equipment. If even half of what Gina said is true, if the Thirteen tumble onto the fact that I’m looking into this, they’ll do whatever they can to stop me from getting to the truth. I wouldn’t put it past them to break in and take everything. Cameras may not stop them, but at least I’ll have some faces.
That also means that I’ll need copies of everything I’m working on stored in a secure location outside of my home. I run through a mental list of everything I’m going to need to get and install. Once I get this ball rolling, I’m going to need to be as smart about it all as I can be. And I’ll need to protect myself as well. That means leaving instructions with somebody I trust in case something happens to me.
I sit down on the edge of the bed and try to clear my mind. But Gina’s words continue rattling around in my head on a non-stop loop. I’m exhilarated and terrified at the same time. This proves my parents were killed as part of some conspiracy cover-up. They’d gotten too close to the truth and were eliminated because of it.
And as I have that thought, I have another. My parents were smart. They planned for every contingency—such as my mother telling Gina to pass onto me what she had. If they were deep into this conspiracy, they would have kept notes. They would have done something to light the path that led to what they were doing. Which means I’m going to have to take a look at everything I kept from the storage unit and look at it with fresh eyes. Surely there has to be a clue somewhere in with the photos and papers I kept.
It worries me, though. When I purged the storage unit, I threw out a lot of things. The vast majority were household goods. But there were other things, too. Lots of things they could have hidden a clue in. All I can do is hope I didn’t throw out the wrong boxes. I’ll have to dig through the boxes in the closet again at some point soon. There has to be something in there. There just has to be.
With my war room set up, I sit down at the desk and force myself to concentrate. I pore over the files I took from Mr. Corden’s RV and I take another run at deciphering his notes. I still can’t crack his code entirely, and it’s frustrating me because I’m sure there’s important information contained within what looks like total gibberish. But I can’t interpret it.
I open the file and look at the dossiers of the Supreme Court Justices again. I know they’re significant, otherwise Mr. Corden wouldn’t have put them in the file he intended to give to me. I know one old trick spies used to use is to load a file up with a lot of useless information and red herrings. That way, if the file falls into the wrong hands, the person who got it won’t know what they’re looking at. But Mr. Corden intended for me to have the file the night he died. And because it’s so thin and he’d had it hidden, I’m confident there isn’t anything superfluous in it.
I walk over to the whiteboard I set up in the corner and write the three Supreme Court Justices names across the top—Ellen Sharp, Reginald Boone, and Jonathan Kettering. Below their names, I write their cause of death and the day they died. Heart attack, stroke, and car accident respectively. Kettering was the first to die, a couple years ago. Boone died of a stroke eighteen months ago, and Sharp had a heart attack just in the last couple months.
Boone, Kettering, and Sharp were replaced by Justices Wilfred Orman, Kenneth Brighton, and Angela Lorane. Outwardly, I don’t find anything that suggests they all have some wild political agenda. They actually seem to have ver
y bland, very non-controversial judicial records. Nothing about them screams extremist or activist. From what I can tell, they’re well respected and judge fairly.
But not everything is as it seems. Something I’m very familiar with. Just because they’re not wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth conservatives or liberals, it doesn’t mean they don’t come in with not just an agenda, but marching orders as well. Yeah, it’s kind of Manchurian Candidate-ish, but it’s not something I’m willing to rule out just yet either. Right now, every option is on the table.
The fact that three Justices all died so close to each other is a pattern that troubles me. It’s almost like they were on a schedule. The other thing that bothers me is that each of them died of something easy to set up and mimic. You can stage a car wreck. And you can give somebody drugs to induce a heart attack and a stroke. But the question is, why would somebody want to remove these three Justices specifically?
“The answer has to be in the cases they decided,” I mutter to myself.
I sit down in front of my laptop and call up a search engine, then call up all the SCOTUS decisions over the last few years. Most of them are mundane and won a clear majority one way or the other. There weren’t a lot of one-or-two vote decisions. But I do find a couple of cases that the newly-minted Justices were the deciding factors in. One had to do with property rights, with the SCOTUS ruling that a land claim by a large corporation was valid even though it decimated what had been to that point, a private land holding. The other ruling was also very favorable to a corporation—a defense contractor this time.
Those two cases netted the big companies millions. Tens of millions, probably. And if what Gina said is true—if wealth and power is at the core of the Thirteen—they would have to be very happy with the outcome of those cases. It makes one wonder if the Thirteen somehow engineered all of this to happen exactly as it’s unfolding now.
I know it seems preposterous. Like something out of a Jason Bourne movie. And maybe it is. All I’m saying is that the confluence of these different events, all coming together at the same time, benefitting people allegedly trying to influence if not outright orchestrate major events, is interesting to look at. To say the least.
