The Man With The Red Tattoo

by Benson, Raymond

  “And what were your findings?”

  “It is my opinion that the cause of death was a highly virulent form of West Nile disease. Do you know it?”

  “No, but it sounds as if I’m about to become an expert.”

  “Pretty serious stuff. Victims normally experience fever, headache, aching muscles, sometimes rashes or swollen lymph glands. Some individuals experience more severe symptoms like neurological damage, encephalitis and coma. In extreme cases it can be fatal. When we heard about the outbreak of West Nile in New York City a couple of years ago, we were all a bit concerned. They actually think that the virus came into New York via Asian mosquitoes that had been brought into the country accidentally inside a shipment of tyres.”

  “I remember reading about that. Didn’t someone die?”

  “There were a couple of deaths, but in the majority of cases it just made people ill. West Nile doesn’t do what happened to this girl. The symptoms were similar, but they were magnified ten-fold. The onset was apparently very rapid. As I understand it, she boarded the plane in good health and became ill during the flight. She was dead within twelve hours. That’s very fast. Normally, West Nile would take days or weeks to go through that kind of cycle.”

  Bond whistled appreciatively. “Is there a cure?”

  “Unfortunately not. Look here.” The doctor gestured for Bond to step around the desk and look at the laptop. Lodge punched some buttons and a cross-section of brain tissue appeared on the screen. “The mechanism of death, that is, what actually killed her, was that her brain suffocated. The high fever caused the meninges, the membranes surrounding the brain, to swell from the inflammation. An abscess was formed and grew very quickly, cutting off oxygen and blood flow to the rest of the brain. See this?”

  The doctor pointed to indistinct blobs as Bond said, “Mmm hmm.”

  “She went into a coma, which is why the flight attendant thought that she was sleeping. At some point her brain simply shut off and she began to asphyxiate. The cause of death? I suppose I would say “natural” or “accidental.” Depending on what the toxicology report says.”

  Bond sat down again and thought for a moment. “Were there any unusual marks on her body? Needle marks?”

  “No,” Lodge said. “As far as I could see, there was no evidence of drug taking. No herpes simplex virus, which can be a cause of encephalitis. However, speaking of mosquitoes, she did have a fair number of insect bites and they looked to me like mosquito bites. Mostly on her arms and legs.”

  “Could that have been it?”

  The man shrugged. “West Nile disease is normally carried by mosquitoes, and humans are infected with the disease when they are bitten by them. And while the symptoms are similar, whatever this was, it was certainly not West Nile. I’m not ruling anything out, but in my experience a mosquito isn’t capable of transmitting a disease that has this kind of reaction.”

  The sound of a crash in the back of the building caused all three men to turn towards it.

  “What the hell was that?” Lodge asked.

  “I’ll go and see,” Greenwell said as he stood and left the room, still holding a mug of coffee.

  Lodge grinned at Bond. “Our guests back there are restless, perhaps?”

  Bond did not acknowledge the joke. Instinctively, he rose and went to the door. There was a shout of surprise from the back of the building.

  Lodge looked alarmed. “Was that Bob?”

  The Walther PPK was in Bond’s hand; Lodge could have sworn that the weapon had materialised from thin air.

  “Which is the way to the post-mortem room?” Bond asked.

  Lodge replied, “Go through the lobby and into the other office. There’s a door at the back of the room that opens into a corridor. Go right, and then left. You can’t miss it.”

  “Stay here.” Bond peered into the dark lobby and saw nothing. He darted across and into the empty office behind reception. The door to the corridor was ajar. Bond crept to it and listened.

  Silence.

  He went through the door and into the hallway, where he found Greenwell’s broken coffee mug. He heard something—a noise, a scuffling—coming from the post-mortem room. Bond moved slowly towards the door, which was also ajar. He carefully leaned in to look and felt a significant drop in temperature.

  Greenwell was unconscious on the floor next to the postmortem table. Two men were bending over a nude corpse that was lying on one of the mobile metal carts. They were attempting to wrap it in a blanket. Bond could see twenty refrigerator doors lining the wall in rows behind them. Three were open. One had obviously contained the woman’s body that they were wrapping. The other two cubicles were empty and were also open at both ends. The other side of the refrigerated cubicles opened into the body reception room, which was where bodies were delivered from the outside.

  The two men were wearing surgical masks and from where Bond was standing they appeared to be Asian.

  One of the men must have sensed Bond’s presence, for he suddenly whirled around, his pistol spraying fire at the door. Bond ducked back into the hall and crouched. He heard the men shout to each other in Japanese. Bond dared to look low around the open door and saw both men climb into the open refrigerated compartments so that they could escape through the body reception room.

  Bond fired the Walther at one of the men, but the intruder pulled his legs in just in time to avoid being hit. As Bond got up to run into the room, a third man who had been hiding against the wall beside the open door kicked the Walther out of Bond’s hand. Before Bond could register surprise, the attacker struck him with two lightning fast tsuki punches to the chest. Bond fell backwards and crashed into a metal table with a scale used for weighing dissected organs.

  Then Bond was hit with a powerful blow to the solar plexus, knocking the breath out of him. He fell to his knees, gasping for air as his assailant stood back, ready to kick. The young man wore sunglasses and a surgical mask. His hairstyle was a “punch perm,” short and permed into tiny skull-hugging curls.

  Acting quickly, Bond reached up to the metal table and grabbed the first thing he felt, which happened to be a metal tray covered with dissecting instruments. Bond flung the tray at the attacker just as the man’s right foot left the ground for the kick. The tray bashed loudly into his boot, scattering the instruments over the tiled floor.

  This gave Bond the time he needed to get to his feet, but not enough of an interval to defend himself against a perfectly executed mawashi-geri, or roundhouse kick, to the chin. Bond fell back again, this time knocking several metal trays off the post-mortem table. He hit the floor next to Greenwell, who was moaning softly.

  This boy is a professional! was the only thing Bond was capable of thinking.

  When he looked up, the “boy” had slithered through a refrigerated cubicle and escaped with his friends.

  Bond got up and went to Greenwell. “Are you all right?”

  The man nodded and put a hand to the back of his head.

  “Who’s the corpse?”

  “It’s the McMahon girl,” Greenwell answered.

  Without hesitation, Bond retrieved his handgun, dived into one of the refrigerated cubicles after the men, and crawled to the other end. He unlatched the door, then jumped down into the body reception room. The door to the car park was just closing. Bond hugged the wall and looked outside.

  The back of the building was adjacent to a driveway where hearses and ambulances could pull up to drop off bodies. Beyond that were bushes, hedges and trees lining the edge of the cemetery. A black Toyota was pulling out of the driveway into Kingston Lane. The man he had fought was just jumping into the back seat as the tyres squealed. The light had diminished greatly, but Bond could still see well enough to take a shot at the driver. He held the gun with both hands, assumed a modified Weaver firing stance, aimed carefully, and squeezed the trigger. The Walther recoiled with a satisfying jolt.

  The Toyota swerved out into the street and crashed into a telephone pole
. The horn blared.

  The two remaining men jumped out of the car and fired in Bond’s direction. The bullets flew around him. Bond leaped for the pavement and rolled behind a tree that would shield him from the gunfire.

  “Mister Bond?” Dr. Lodge called from the body reception room.

  “Call the police!” Bond shouted. “And get back inside!”

  Bullets sprayed around the tree, then at the open door of the building. Lodge disappeared from view.

  Bond was pinned down. He was safe but he couldn’t move to either side of the tree for fear of taking a bullet. He knew that the thugs wouldn’t wait forever; they would have to move eventually. He just had to be patient.

  When a siren could be heard approaching, the two men decided to go for it. Bond heard their footsteps as they ran off across Kingston Lane and into the cemetery, which was growing darker by the second.

  Bond swung out from behind the tree and fired. One of the men jerked, cried out, and fell to the ground. The other man leapt to the side, taking cover behind a large gravestone. Bond began to run towards him, but the man reached around and fired his handgun, forcing Bond to take cover behind another tree.

  As the police cars pulled into the front car park with sirens blaring, the gunfire ceased. After a few seconds, Bond carefully looked around the tree and could faintly see the man running. Bond raised the Walther to shoot, but at this light and distance, hitting him was unlikely. He let him go.

  Bond sprinted to the man who was down and examined him. It was the same man he had fought in the post-mortem room. The bullet had caught him in the upper chest, a direct hit. Bond pulled off the surgical mask. He was a young Japanese, probably in his early twenties. Bond searched his clothing and pulled out a Dutch passport and a Colt 1911 A1 semi-automatic from underneath a light jacket.

  Lodge came running outside with a torch. “Mister Bond, are you all right?”

  “I’m over here. There were three of them. One’s in the car. The third one got away.”

  Lodge crept warily up to the body and directed the torch on it. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know. Shine your torch on his passport here.”

  Lodge took it and read it. “Somebody Hito. He lives in Amsterdam. Lived. What did they want?”

  “It looked to me like they were trying to take Ms. McMahon’s body.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s a very good question.”

  Then Bond noticed something unusual on the dead man’s neck. “Shine that torch over here.”

  The light illuminated something sinister and extraordinary. Bond carefully unbuttoned the man’s shirt and opened it. The dead man’s entire upper torso was decorated in an elaborate, colourful tattoo depicting dragons and waterfalls.

  It was a signature of the Japanese mafia, the dreaded yakuza.

  FOUR

  YAMI SHOGUN

  THE MBB-KAWASAKI BK 117 EUROCOPTER LEFT BEHIND THE LAND MASS OF Hokkaido, the northern-most island of the cluster that make up Japan. It flew north-east towards the Kuril Islands, the so-called “Northern Territories” that Japan and Russia have been in dispute over since 1945. The Sea of Okhotsk stretched to the horizon ahead of them, while Russia lay hundreds of kilometres to the left and the Pacific Ocean expanded endlessly to the right.

  Yasutake Tsukamoto shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was not usually a nervous man. He was one of the most feared and respected men in Japan, the reigning oyabun, or father, of the Ryujin-kai. As kaicho, or boss, he had hundreds of men under his thumb, all willing to do his bidding. They were prepared to die for him. And, as the Ryujin-kai was one of the strongest and most powerful yakuza organisations in the country, with tentacles that reached into Japanese communities worldwide, Tsukamoto had no reason to be afraid. He was superior to every man in his organization—except one.

  He always felt uneasy going to see the Yami Shogun. Even after all these years …

  Tsukamoto didn’t enjoy the flight across the sea to Russian territory. He hated the fact that Russia had occupied the islands since the 1945 Yalta Conference because they rightfully belonged to Japan. He hated doing business with Russia at all, but circumstances with the Yami Shogun dictated that it must be so. After all, the master was exiled from Japan and could not set foot in the country without being arrested. The deal the master had made with the Russian Organizatsiya ensured that he would have a safe haven where he could live with his private army, train them and prepare them for the battle yet to come. The Yami Shogun hated the Russians as much as Tsukamoto did, but business was business. Tsukamoto thought that one day the time would come when business partners would have to change.

  The Kuril Islands were an ideal spot for the Yami Shogun to hide. They are considered a mysterious no man’s land by both Japan and Russia. While they are governed as part of Sakhalin Oblast, in many ways they are still culturally tied to Japan. The islands are heavily forested and contain many active volcanoes. Hunting, fishing and sulphur mining are the principal occupations of the inhabitants, among them the Ainu, an ancient race believed to be indigenous to the area.

  Eventually the helicopter approached the island called Etorofu by the Japanese and Iturup by the Russians. The helipad was on private property hidden amongst the trees. The property owner was associated with a mining operation that worked a nearby quarry; if anyone at the firm were questioned, they would have no knowledge of who that owner might be. If someone dug deep enough, they might discover that the owner was a Japanese corporation called Yonai Enterprises. It was a legitimate diversified company, involved mostly in chemical engineering.

  It was also a front for one of the biggest yakuza gangs in Japan.

  It was not unusual these days for yakuza to infiltrate “Big Business” in Japan. It was an unspoken and accepted part of the way society worked. Many kaicho and oyabun were heads of or sat on the boards of directors of large, influential companies. Any formidable yakuza gang in Japan had to flaunt its wealth and management skills.

  Yasutake Tsukamoto was on the board of directors of Yonai Enterprises, which was one of the many reasons that he had no reason to complain about his life. He was successful. He was very wealthy. He was powerful. Two bodyguards travelled with him wherever he went. They sat across from him there in the helicopter, two burly men with punch perms and sunglasses. He saw them more than he saw his wife.

  So why did he always feel like a child in the presence of the master?

  Like the Yami Shogun, Tsukamoto was a nationalist. The type of yakuza he headed was Uyoku, which roughly meant “political right.” It was ironic, Tsukamoto thought, that when Uyoku groups first came into fashion, Big Business was one of the enemies along with communists, anything from the West and anyone who suggested a deviation from a traditional monarchy. Today, however, Big Business was big business. Yonai Enterprises was a megacorp, soon to become a major player in Japan and abroad. Today’s Uyoku might still hate the Russians and the Americans and the British and the Chinese but they didn’t have a problem with taking their money.

  Just as the helicopter landed in a square patch of flat land surrounded by tall trees, Tsukamoto suddenly understood why he was nervous about seeing the Yami Shogun. It had nothing to do with pleasing one’s master. The ideological direction in which the master wished to go was what troubled him. For he, of all people, knew that the master was deadly serious about the upcoming project.

  Tsukamoto knew the Yami Shogun better than anyone else.

  He had first met Goro Yoshida when they were both children. They had gone to the same school when Goro was nine and he was eight. It was during the Occupation, when the United States dominated everything in Japan. Tsukamoto could remember the anti-American propaganda that circulated underground, the impassioned speeches of nationalists who deplored America and what it stood for. Even then, Goro Yoshida was emotional in his beliefs. He had embraced the rhetoric profoundly and it hardened into a fundamental principle as Goro grew into his teens.

  Goro�
��s family owned a consortium of small industrial and chemical engineering firms that later consolidated into what was now Yonai Enterprises. He had been born in 1943, just in time for the climax of the war and the Occupation. His only sibling Yukiko came along a year later. Despite his family’s prosperity, Goro had had a troubled childhood. As a teenager, he had turned to street gangs for a place to fit in. Wayward teenagers were prime recruitment material for the yakuza, so by the time Goro was thirteen he was involved in various levels of a Tokyo yakuza called Ryujin-kai. So was his friend Tsukamoto.

  During this early period Goro despised his family. Tsukamoto remembered the horrible things Goro would say about his father. His father represented big business, and this was a Western thing. He was doing business with Western companies, many of them American, some British.

  It wasn’t until Goro was sixteen that he changed his mind about his father, who had secretly joined the Red Guard, a volatile nationalist group that was often blamed for terrorist incidents. And, to the amazement of young Goro, his father’s name was ultimately attached to several bombings around the globe and he became a wanted man. Japan forced Goro’s father into exile, so he went to live in Europe—in the West that he detested. He travelled around, working for various militant groups and was in London when a series of explosions rocked that city. Informants talked and Goro’s father was identified as being a suspect.

  The official word was that Goro’s father died resisting arrest.

  Yasutake Tsukamoto was with Goro Yoshida when the news came. They had just celebrated Goro’s twentieth birthday. The sake had been flowing and Goro was very drunk. They had been talking about the latest work by Yukio Mishima, the writer who had become the most controversial and honoured Japanese author of his time. They both admired the nationalist themes that ran through Mishima’s works and hoped that they could meet him someday.