NEVER SAY DIE: Mark Cole Takes On the Yakuza in His Most Thrilling Adventure Yet!

by J. T. Brannan

  Cole had used his organization’s resources to investigate the Yamaguchi-gumi anyway, but had managed to find nothing useful – the last actual Yamaguchi family member to serve as head of the organization, Yamaguchi Noboro, had died way back in 1942. A man named Yamamoto Tsuji headed the family now, and Cole could find no link between him and Asami, nor any link between Asami and any previous godfather.

  But the involvement of the Criminal Investigation Bureau interested Cole, and he had worked hard to find a contact within the CIB from whom he could get further information. But, unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to talk to him. But still he persisted, until he made contact with a friendly Assistant Inspector who spoke excellent English.

  Kadena Masaaki had been receptive to Cole’s imaginary journalist, and he was pleased to have found someone who was finally eager to help. Kadena didn’t want to talk over the phone, but insisted that if Cole could make his way to Japan, he would be happy to meet him, and to try and set up a meeting with the head detective involved in Michiko’s case.

  Cole was delighted – having intended on going to Japan anyway, his ticket was already booked – but then came the bad news.

  Cole had asked for a current address for Michiko, at which stage Kadena had turned recalcitrant. A bit more pushing got Cole the answer he feared.

  Two CIB agents were supposed to meet her off the plane, and had been waiting for her inside Tokyo Narita International. The problem was, she’d never turned up – she’d boarded the flight, and then passed through immigration in Tokyo, and had then disappeared off the face of the earth.

  ‘Do you have any idea where the girl is now?’ Cole had asked.

  ‘No,’ Kadena had replied sheepishly. ‘We have no idea whatsoever.’

  Cole shook his head as he finished his glass and turned once more to look out of the airplane window.

  His daughter was missing.

  Missing, and possibly in terrible danger somewhere in Japan.

  He checked the time, scowling; he couldn’t get there fast enough.

  2

  Toshikatsu Endo tried to smile at his wife across the breakfast table, but the result was painfully easy to see through.

  He had been married to Aya for thirty-five years, and she had supported him at every step of his political career. Together they had not only managed to successfully ride the turbulent waves of Japanese politics, they had also raised a family; and they were blessed now with grandchildren from their two sons and one daughter, all of whom had gone on to have successful careers and families of their own.

  Through it all, Aya had been his stoic supporter, his defender, his protector; she knew him more intimately than anyone could ever dream.

  To his weak smile, Aya had no need to say anything at all; she merely raised an eyebrow very slightly, the subtle movement demanding an explanation from her husband.

  Toshikatsu shook his head sadly. ‘I am sorry,’ he said to her. ‘It was a long night.’ When Aya’s expression didn’t change, he knew she expected more. But what could he tell her? That he was upset because his long-time friend and political supporter, the man who’d helped him reach the top – and who, by the way, was the most powerful yakuza godfather in Japan – had been assassinated last night? That his major ally, his most powerful defense against the right-wing zealots of Zen Ai Kaigi, was now dead, the man’s decapitated head still missing? That he feared that he might well be next?

  Toshikatsu sighed slowly; of course he could tell her. She knew everything about him, the good and the bad.

  ‘Tsuji was killed last night,’ he said, the first time he had spoken the words aloud since the news had come from Watanabe Haruto, Yamamoto’s wakagashira.

  Aya’s face exhibited no emotion, a mask that Toshikatsu knew must cover a swirling maelstrom of thought and feeling; but she had accepted it as her job to protect her husband, and subjugated her own passions for the benefit of the man she loved – and also for the country that she loved.

  ‘That is terrible,’ she said evenly. ‘Such a tragic loss.’

  Toshikatsu knew she understood what he was feeling; he was indebted to the man, but wouldn’t even be able to attend the funeral, nor even to express his formal condolences. Yamamoto had, after all, been the head of Japan’s largest crime family.

  He also knew that Aya would work it out for him, find some way of delivering his sympathies to Yamamoto’s family and the remaining Yamaguchi bosses.

  But he was at a loss to know what to do next. Who had killed him? And why? What did it mean?

  Toshikatsu feared it would be the start of a gang war which would erupt across the streets of Japan – a national disgrace which would be one more nail in his political coffin.

  And, he asked himself, if Yamamoto wasn’t safe in his heavily protected compound in Kobe, anything was possible. He thought again of the bullet holes which adorned his current home; the assassination of prime ministers was hardly unknown in Japan.

  He looked across the table at his wife, and he knew she could tell exactly what he was thinking.

  ‘I’ll increase security immediately,’ he told her, and watched as Aya nodded her head slightly in agreement.

  He just hoped it would be enough.

  Kenzo Hiroshi strolled casually through the streets of Tokyo, a tourist from the countryside come to gawk at the sophisticated, metropolitan delights of the capital.

  He wore a pair of large shades against the early morning sun, his head covered by a mop of light-brown hair and a Yomiuri Giants baseball cap. He wore the casual hipster clothes of a student, and carried a backpack slung over one shoulder.

  As he walked east along the Inner Circular Route in Nagata-cho, the area of central Tokyo almost entirely composed of government buildings, he watched the heavy traffic humming steadily along beside him; allowed the rushing, suited men and women to stride past him on their way to work; watched as tourists – just like him – stood looking around at the ministry buildings, wondering which was which and taking endless photographs for their family and friends back home.

  Kenzo too had a camera, and he wielded it expertly although he feigned mere amateurish enthusiasm. He already knew the area well, but time spent on reconnaissance was seldom wasted.

  At the crossroads with National Route 246 – a major highway which originated in the neighborhood and stretched over seventy miles south to Kanagawa Prefecture – he let the crowds pull him left, onto the narrow sidewalk which bordered the 246.

  To the right, on the other side of the highway, Kenzo could see the steel, glass and concrete bulk of the Cabinet Office, while on the left just ahead, he knew lay the Kantei, the residential and working compound of the Japanese Prime Minister.

  The Kantei complex was screened from the sidewalk by walls and high trees – not unlike the home of Yamamoto Tsuji, Kenzo thought with a suppressed smile. Only here there were armed police in evidence rather than armed yakuza.

  The first cops had been at the crossroads – ostensibly monitoring traffic flow, although Kenzo knew their real remit was a first line of defense for any vehicular attack on the Kantei.

  Further up Route 246 was an armed police box protecting the eastern entrance to the complex, the one that led directly to the Sori Kotei, the Prime Minister’s residential building.

  Kenzo observed it slowly as he sauntered up the road with the other pedestrians, shaking his leg imperceptibly as he walked so that the object snuggled into the inside of his waistband would dislodge and slide down his leg to rest at his ankle, just underneath the cuff of his pants leg.

  The sidewalk was narrow, and Kenzo knew he would be passing within inches of the armed guards who patrolled the entrance. There were steel, toothed obstacles spread before the metal gate, designed to stop cars with bombs coming too close, a metal guard rail on the other side between the sidewalk and the pulsing traffic of the 246.

  Ten feet now, then eight . . . six . . . Kenzo flicked his foot, let the object fall to the sidewalk, unseen among the hordes
of tramping shoes . . . four feet . . . two . . . and then Kenzo was passing the armed police guards, who looked at him once and discounted him instantly as he carried on along his way.

  As he passed the police box, Kenzo let the backpack slip naturally from his shoulder, held it loosely in his right hand, the camera in his left, body inclined slightly to one side. He didn’t have to check his watch; he knew the time precisely.

  In the next instant, chaos erupted as the firecrackers he’d dropped went off behind him, the violent cracks like gunfire, sparks and smoke immediately drawing the attention of the police.

  Pedestrians were yelling, screaming, shouting, and then the police were racing forward with guns drawn, ordering everyone – Down! Down! Down! – and the attention of everyone, every single person in the street, was on that single area for the short moment it took Kenzo to twist his body violently to the left, arm swinging as he threw the backpack in a long, looping arc over the protective walls and trees of the Kantei compound, right into the heartland of the Japanese government.

  Toshikatsu Endo looked at his Patek Philippe watch – a gift from his parents that he’d worn since his twenty-first birthday – and noted the time with satisfaction. Despite everything – the bad news that had arrived during the night, his lack of sleep, his alarmingly high stress levels – he was still leaving the Sori Kotei at almost exactly eight o’clock, cleaned and shaved and ready for another day at the Kantei.

  He strolled from the front door, under the colonnaded entrance, covered by his elite protective detail – men whose number would soon be expanding – and stepped into the clear late summer sun of Tokyo for the short walk across the compound to the Sori Daijin Kotei, the impressive modern building that housed his offices.

  The sun shone brightly into his eyes, and he was forced to raise a hand in order to see where he was going – and it was only then that he saw it, a small object flying over the perimeter fence, over the trees, towards . . . him?

  His protective detail reacted before he did, two men crashing into him, pushing him back inside the house as other men called back to their colleagues, everyone – Toshikatsu included – watching the object with dread fascination as it neared the concrete expanse that lay in front of the house, in those desperate few seconds hoping beyond hope that whatever it was wouldn’t blow them off the face of the earth.

  And then the thing landed, striking the ground hard but not exploding, not erupting, not even moving – it just lay there, inert and apparently harmless.

  Toshikatsu could feel the men who held him relax slightly, heard the call of one of the team. ‘It’s a bag,’ the man said. ‘A backpack.’

  And from his covered position by the front door, Toshikatsu could see that the agent was right – it was just some kid’s backpack, cheap and tatty and not dangerous looking at all.

  But Toshikatsu knew that anything could be hidden within it, and reflexively shrunk away from it, even as some of the men began to approach it.

  There was talk of the bomb squad, and then word came through over the radio of firecrackers going off on the street outside, and – despite everyone’s alertness to the threat – Toshikatsu was convinced that it was just kids playing around. Firecrackers and a backpack?

  ‘Open it,’ he ordered, and the nearest man edged nervously closer, head leaning away from the hands which extended toward it.

  Gently, the agent pulled it up from the floor, everyone again braced for an impact. When it didn’t come, the man visibly relaxed. Still on guard, he let his hand find the zip and slowly – ever so carefully – started to open the bag.

  It opened, and still there was no explosion, and everyone relaxed even further.

  And then Toshikatsu watched the man recoil in horror, dropping the bag back to the floor, face green with nausea, a hollow thud echoing round the courtyard as the backpack hit the floor and spilled open, dispersing its contents across the concrete.

  The bag, it appeared, had contained one thing, and one thing alone, a thing that fell out of the bag and rolled across the hard ground, not explosive at all, not even a weapon.

  It was a man’s head, severed at the neck.

  The head of Yamamoto Tsuji.

  Kenzo Hiroshi was long gone before the security storm hit, hundreds of armed personnel sent on an immediate hard search of the surrounding area.

  The police team outside the Kantei compound had finally identified the gunfire as firecrackers, and had contacted the internal security team who – it turned out – had problems of their own.

  It didn’t take long to build up the picture – someone had dropped the firecrackers to distract the police officers long enough for the bag to be thrown over the compound wall.

  Quick questions were asked, memories searched, and one cop vaguely remembered a young student, sunglasses and hat, with a bag on his shoulder.

  The message went out, and before long, Nagata-cho was in total lockdown.

  But it was too little, too late – Kenzo had already changed his appearance, stripping off the hat, wig and glasses casually as he walked up the street, natural bodily actions disguising his movements even as he stripped off his casual outer clothes to reveal a suit beneath, everything else discarded, thrown into the bushes which lined the Kantei.

  Kenzo thought it amusing, the manpower that would be wasted in trying to track him through those clothes and accessories when they were inevitably found; they were common enough items which could have been bought anywhere. And even if they weren’t, Kenzo was impossible to trace – he had no official identity, and was a man of a thousand faces, a master of disguise and misdirection.

  By the time Nagata-cho was closed off, Kenzo had already made it to Kokkaigijidomae Station, and as he boarded a train, he was invisible, just one more well-dressed sarariman on the Marunouchi line to Ikebukuro.

  He was pleased with his morning’s work.

  Warning Toshikatsu so obviously might well make his mission harder, but Kenzo embraced the challenge. And he’d never forgotten what his masters had taught him, all those years before.

  Success was only partially down to physical skills and tactics; psychological dominance of the enemy was fundamentally more important.

  And with Kenzo’s gift to Toshikatsu of his friend’s severed head, the first blow in that psychological war had been struck.

  Kenzo was eager to see what would happen next.

  3

  Kadena Masaaki was a busy man. An assistant inspector within the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department – the largest urban police force in the entire world – his office was located right next to Nagata-cho, the epicenter of a colossal search for a student with sunglasses and – now, at least – without a bag.

  Whereas Japan’s National Police Agency was the country’s highest level law enforcement organization, the fact was that it was, in the main, merely an administrative organization with very few real police officers among its ranks; it carried out research and set policy. The real action in Japan was with the TMPD, whose membership numbered over forty thousand active duty officers. And within the TMPD, Kadena was proud to say, the Criminal Investigation Bureau took care of the meatiest cases.

  He had a full caseload as it was, not to mention an airport pickup later that day – an American journalist from the Washington Post, looking for information on a repatriated teenager who’d been linked to Aryan gangs back in the US. Apparently, the Post had picked up on her story from a local piece in the Tucson Herald, and wanted to investigate further – it was suspected that there might be some human trafficking angle which might be of national interest. The man’s enquiries had been passed from pillar to post, but Kadena had finally spoken to him and, at length, had agreed to help him. He did, after all, know something about Aoki Michiko, and the TMPD – although exciting to work for – hardly paid well; a reporter for the world-famous Washington Post would surely do better.

  He also had other reasons to want to keep a close eye on the
journalist; if Kadena could control what the man found out, he might stand to make even more extracurricular cash.

  But all of that was moot for the time being – with a purported attack on the Kantei to deal with, everything else was being pushed aside for now while the matter was investigated. It was all hands to the pump, and even his colleagues who were on days off – even some who were on vacation – were being recalled.

  It had seemed like overkill to Kadena – firecrackers and a backpack? – but then the rumors had started circling about what had been in the backpack, and the reaction started to make a little more sense.

  It turned out that there had been a severed head inside the bag which had been thrown over the Kantei wall and – although nobody really knew more than that – Kadena had a good idea of whose head it was.

  It had happened only last night, and hundreds of miles away, but Kadena – like all members of the CIB – had already heard about the death of Yamamoto Tsuji at his home in Kobe. And he knew for a fact that the body had been missing its head.

  It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together – whoever had cut off Yamamoto’s head had brought it to Tokyo and thrown it into the Kantei, presumably as a warning to Prime Minister Toshikatsu.

  The question was, why would they do such a thing? Why bring extra attention on themselves? If they truly intended to kill the prime minister, it made no sense at all to warn him – they would surely know that security would be immediately increased.

  The answer, therefore, was that whoever was behind the incident did not want to kill Toshikatsu; and rather than a warning, the presence of Yamamoto’s head – if indeed it was Yamamoto’s – was instead intended to bring the prime minister’s yakuza links out into the open.