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

by J. T. Brannan

  He bowed his head again and awaited his daughter’s response.

  But before Michiko could speak, the club manager came quickly over to the table, whispering urgently into Mitsuya’s ear. He nodded his head and looked across at Cole. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but I have to take a telephone call. Please excuse me.’

  Mitsuya stood and walked off through the club, the manager by his side and one of the bodyguards close behind.

  Cole wondered what it meant, but realized Mitsuya had a business to run, and probably distrusted cell phones like many gangsters; there was probably a secure landline in the manager’s office.

  He waited for Michiko to respond, aware that they could still not speak openly; although Mitsuya was gone, Asada and another yakuza soldier were still there, and he knew that Asada spoke excellent English.

  ‘I accept your apology,’ she said, face as still as stone. ‘Thank you for coming here.’ There was a pause, then she spoke again. ‘I find sometimes that my English is insufficient to express my meaning,’ she said apologetically. ‘I can converse better, I think, in French. Parlez-vous français?’

  Clever girl, Cole thought; she must know that Asada doesn’t speak French.

  ‘Oui,’ Cole responded, ‘un petit peu.’ Yes, a little bit.

  ‘Good,’ she continued in French. ‘Now why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re doing here, monsieur Jowett?’

  Cole looked out of the corner of his eye at Asada, saw that he was paying little attention to them, a young Japanese hostess now seated next to him and occupying him in Mitsuya’s absence. The yakuza foot soldier who sat with them seemed to not even have noticed that they’d switched languages; he was watching the girls dancing on the nearby stage.

  ‘I came here to see you,’ Cole explained, still using French. ‘I don’t know what you believe about me, what your mother might have said, what Mitsuya told you –’

  Michiko opened her mouth to speak, to argue, to stop him saying more, but Cole cut her off with a wave of his hand. ‘Let me speak,’ he said in a voice which brooked no argument. He leaned closer to her, looking into her eyes, wanting her to see how earnest he was. ‘Whatever you believe, I want you to know that – if Aoki Asami was your mother – then we loved each other very much. I don’t have time to explain, Mitsuya might be back any minute.’

  He looked around the club again, looking for the man; turned back to her soon after. ‘I tried to look into what happened to you back in the States, I heard you’d been shipped back here and that you’d disappeared. I was worried.’

  ‘Worried?’ Michiko said in surprise. ‘You shot me, the last time we met.’

  Cole nodded. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. But that was the first time we’d met, and I had no idea who you were. And you did try and shoot me first.’

  Cole saw the brief flicker of a smile cross her lips, saw perhaps that her attitude toward him had softened over the preceding weeks and wondered what might have changed.

  ‘Look, we don’t have much time. I know you have no reason to believe me, you might still want to kill me; hell, you might even have good reason to, I don’t even know. But first things are first, we’ve got to get you the hell of out here.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘You can’t be here.’

  ‘Oh?’ Michiko asked. ‘So you’re playing the father now? And no daughter of yours is going to work in a place like this?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Cole said with a hard edge to his voice. ‘And if you want to argue, that’s fine. But I don’t think you want to stay here any more than I do. Less, probably. So let’s talk about how we’re going to do this, and you can try and kill me again later if that’s what you still want to do.’

  Michiko held his gaze, eyes hard yet undecided. ‘Maybe I will,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. For now, let’s concentrate on how to get you out. Now, I don’t have any weapons and I’ve counted about thirteen gangsters inside the club that I can see, and most seem to have handguns at the very least. And then we’ve got the big boys on the front door. So I don’t think blasting our way out is going to be an option. Do you stay here?’

  Michiko nodded sadly. ‘I am a prisoner here,’ she whispered.

  ‘Okay,’ Cole said. ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘Third floor,’ Michiko answered.

  Cole nodded his head, thinking. ‘I know where this place is now. Presumably there are times it’s less busy, times when security is weaker. Does your room have windows?’

  ‘Yes, but they are welded closed.’

  ‘Where do you eat?’

  ‘In my room.’

  ‘Wash, use the bathroom?’

  ‘An en suite to my room, still no windows.’

  ‘Do you get to leave?’

  ‘Only to work, another room on the same floor.’

  Cole’s blood ran cold at the thought, his mind unwilling to consider the things she would have to do in that room. How could Mitsuya do that to the girl? Keep her trapped here, a prisoner only brought out of her room to work? She was a slave, like so many other girls here and across the world, and he began to feel sick to his stomach.

  ‘Access?’ Cole asked.

  ‘I am escorted there and back, one narrow corridor. No windows.’

  Cole sat and nodded, thinking of what he could do. It seemed hopeless, but there would be a solution, of that he had no doubt.

  There always was.

  Mitsuya watched the table through the security cameras of the manager’s office, Michiko and the American talking animatedly to one another, ignored by Asada and his guard.

  ‘You are sure?’ Mitsuya said into the telephone handset cradled to his ear, his body perched on the edge of the manager’s desk.

  ‘Yes,’ the voice said, ‘absolutely. Mitsuya, you can trust me, yeah? The man – the one sitting in your club now, if what you say is true – is not Hank Jowett.’

  ‘Then tell me who the hell he is then,’ Mitsuya spat.

  ‘This is high-level intel,’ the friendly voice came back. ‘If I help you, what will you do for me?’

  Mitsuya gritted his teeth, infuriated by the caller’s lack of manners. But his informer was reliable, and had helped him many times in the past with information that had always paid off. And, he reconsidered, the man’s greed might even play into his hands on this occasion.

  ‘You know those shootings?’ Mitsuya asked.

  ‘The Shimazaki-kai killings? Yes, of course.’

  ‘I might know who was involved.’

  ‘Ah,’ the voice said, ‘that would be information worth having. In addition to my normal fee, of course.’

  ‘You little snake,’ Mitsuya whispered fiercely, scarcely believing the man’s gall, ‘who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? I’ll have your balls cut off and stuffed in your mouth before you wake up in the morning, you piece of shit. Now tell me who the fuck this guy really is, and make sure you’re grateful for whatever I give you in return.’

  There was a sigh on the other end of the phone, as if the caller was weighing up how far he could push things with Mitsuya. But the Omoto-gumi wakagashira knew he would offer up whatever he knew with no more fight; Mitsuya’s reputation for instability meant that people were unwilling to test him. The reactions of ordinary men could be predicted, but not those of Mitsuya. It was why he had never accepted control all these years, had kept to his violent, animalistic ways; it threw people off, made them nervous, gave him the edge he needed.

  ‘His real name’s Richard Baxter,’ the voice said finally, ‘he’s a freelance reporter working on something for the Washington Post about the international sex trade and the Omoto-gumi’s role in it.’

  ‘Son of a bitch!’ Mitsuya exclaimed, thumping his fist down onto the desk, the manager’s neatly stacked papers scattering across the surface, drifting toward the floor. ‘He’s a fucking dead man! He’s dead!’

  Mitsuya was already on his feet, eyes hard on the camera lest the couple should move before he
could get to them.

  ‘Mitsuya . . . ’ the voice asked gently.

  ‘It was the Tanizaki-kai,’ Mitsuya spat out. ‘Low-level trigger-men for the Tanizaki-kai.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the voice said. ‘Please don’t make too much of a mess. The man is an American after all.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mitsuya said gravely, ‘when I’ve finished with the bastard, there won’t be anything left to make a mess with. Your money will be with you in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t – ’

  But Mitsuya put the phone down before the man could finish speaking, his hand reaching for the manager’s radio which would alert the club staff and his own yakuza guards.

  Richard Baxter was never going to leave here alive.

  2

  Toshikatsu Endo was still the prime minister of Japan, but he had no idea for how much longer this state of affairs would last.

  It was still early but tonight – instead of working – he was feverish beneath the sheets of his bed, shivering next to the warm body of his beloved wife Aya, who held him like a child. He realized he was suffering less from an illness of the body, but of the mind; the stress was becoming unbearable.

  The influence of Zen Ai Kaigi was on the rise every day, threatening to overwhelm the LDP’s power base. The calls for a snap election were becoming ever more forceful as the days went by, and Toshikatsu could sense the sharks in the waters around him, the LDP hierarchy looking to replace him if any such election were to take place – a fresh face to combat Zen Ai Kaigi, who were campaigning on a platform of being different, of changing the status quo.

  The press weren’t helping either – normally supportive, the owner of the severed head had nevertheless been identified as Yamamoto Tsuji, and questions were already starting to be asked about a possible relationship between Toshikatsu and the Yamaguchi-gumi godfather. One of the things that upset Toshikatsu the most was that Zen Ai Kaigi – an organization founded by Class A war criminals with the full support of various yakuza groups right from the start – was now taking the moral high ground and claiming that Toshikatsu was a mere puppet for criminal gangs, put into his position by yakuza influence.

  He was looking into what legal proceedings he could take against Zen Ai Kaigi, and wished – for the first time in his life – that Japan had the same strength of slander and libel laws as the United States.

  The thought of a yakuza gang war also troubled him; if the killings in Tokyo recently were anything to go by, the election of a new Yamaguchi-gumi leader might not be as smooth as had been hoped. Still, if that meant that Yamaguchi Chomo and the Omoto-gumi didn’t seize power, that might actually be a good thing, he considered. The Omoto-gumi was connected to Zen Ai Kaigi, and such a marriage would be one made in hell; it could ruin the country he loved.

  It looked like the country was moving toward change, and Toshikatsu knew that he no longer had any choice; he would have to take the lead, change the constitution, give the people what they wanted. Actually, thought Toshikatsu bitterly, not what they wanted; only what they thought they wanted, what they were being told they wanted by the ultranationalists.

  He sighed, settling down slightly as his wife wiped the sweat from his forehead. A new constitution might destroy Japan, but if it meant that he could cling onto power and keep Zen Ai Kaigi out of government, then at least he could see that such a constitutional redrafting was not misused.

  If, he thought with sudden alarm, he lived long enough to accomplish this task; as if the decapitated head had not been enough, he had been receiving a string of messages ever since, polite on the face of it but with sinister meaning hidden within. The writer was never explicit, but somehow Toshikatsu knew it was the man who had killed Yamamoto and now wanted to kill him.

  This evening, he had found the latest handwritten message on the side cabinet in the Sori Kotei entrance hall where he routinely put his wallet and keys after returning from his day’s work.

  He had read the message, but it wasn’t the words which had whitened his pallor and caused his heart to squeeze tightly in his chest; it was the fact that the killer had been in his house.

  His fraught mind immediately started to conjure up a series of ever more sensational scenarios. Was a member of his security team involved? Or the entire network? Had the LDP ordered them to do it? Were they trying to frighten him, scare him off? Make him bow out and retire gracefully?

  Then he realized that his wife had been in the house all day, and he was suddenly struck with the fear of what the killer might have done to her if he had wanted to. Unless his wife herself had planted the note?

  And it was at the thought of his wife’s possible involvement that he had collapsed on the floor, note clutched tightly in his hand, unconscious and suddenly very, very ill.

  And now he held on to his wife, guilty for his suspicions, guilty for being in bed and not working, guilty for his association with Yamamoto, guilty for having to go against his principles and authorize the Japanese constitution to be redrafted.

  But he felt so dizzy, so sick, so terrible; he would face the guilt tomorrow.

  For now, he only longed for the sweet release of sleep.

  Kenzo Hiroshi enjoyed a tray of jellied eels from a street vendor in Iidabashi, savoring the flavors as he moved off down the neon-lit streets, away from his new hotel room. He didn’t like to remain in one place too long, unwilling to stay long enough to linger in anyone’s memory, and changed rooms every day or two; with over seven hundred hotels in the city, he certainly wasn’t going to run out any time soon.

  As he ate, keeping an eye on his environment at all times, he wondered briefly about the state that Toshikatsu would now be in. He was sure the man would have picked up the note upon his return home, and would have been immediately assailed by fears associated with its appearance.

  Who had put it there? What did it mean? He would at least suspect his security staff of some involvement, maybe the domestics, maybe even his wife; but whatever his private thoughts on the matter, they would be enough to create significant mental stress and fatigue. And this certainly wouldn’t have been helped by the natural poisons that Kenzo had used to line the paper he had used; when Toshikatsu held it in his hands, the exotic mix would have seeped through his skin and created all the symptoms of a fever. The medical records Kenzo had read at the hospital the previous evening had enabled him to tailor the poison perfectly. And in his delirium, Toshikatsu’s situation would have seemed even worse.

  It was a continuation of Kenzo’s policy of psychological warfare, and it was certainly not down without reason.

  The timing of Toshikatsu’s death was tricky. It had to carry maximum emotional impact for the nation, yet the hand of Zen Ai Kaigi or the Omoto-gumi could never be suspected. It would suit the ultranationalist movement more if it could be shown to be a result of foreign influence, perhaps even a covert CIA operation. Such an action would draw even the liberals over to Zen Ai Kaigi, and all but guarantee their takeover.

  Placing the note had given Kenzo the chance to scope out the prime minister’s home security, which had been just as easy to penetrate as Yamamoto’s had been just a few days earlier. Even on high alert, the security forces were ill prepared for someone of Kenzo’s abilities.

  If he wanted to kill Toshikatsu in his home, there would be no problem whatsoever. Indeed, with a different poison he could have achieved the man’s death this evening, as he picked up the note.

  But that was not the plan.

  Toshikatsu’s death had to occur on a much larger stage.

  It was, after all, what a man in his position deserved.

  3

  ‘Oh shit,’ Cole whispered under his breath.

  ‘What?’ Michiko whispered back nervously, seeing the look of concern on Cole’s – her father’s? – face.

  Cole merely indicated with his finger to the guards around the room, all of whom were listening to a message coming through their radios, and Michiko understood immed
iately; they had been discovered.

  Cole didn’t know who it had been on the phone, but whoever it was had told Mitsuya something that the man was immediately acting upon. Had his identity been compromised? And if so, which one? Richard Baxter the journalist, or Mark Cole the covert agent? Or was the table bugged, and the suspicious Mitsuya had simply retired to hear what the two would talk about in his absence? He was yakuza muscle, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t understand French.

  But whatever it was, the end result was the same; armed men would soon be converging on the table, and Cole would either be killed or captured. And in a club with its own basement dungeon and Heaven only knew what else, he certainly didn’t like either prospect.

  The foot soldier at their table leant toward Asada and whispered in his ear, and the shategashira straightened immediately and gestured for his female companion to leave the table.

  But the yakuza hoods didn’t come any closer to the booth, Cole noted; it was only their posture which had changed, their bodies alert and ready for action.

  Cole saw Mitsuya moments later, strolling happily toward them. With a smile, he sat back down at the table, amused.

  He looked at Cole, his smile widening. ‘So, Mr. Jowett,’ he said. ‘I have a question for you. Do you think it is possible for a man to be two different people at the same time?’

  Cole shifted in his chair, subtly priming his own body for action, his mind running rapidly through options like a football coach assessing plays during a fast game, looking for the edge he’d need over the opponents.

  ‘Anything is possible,’ Cole said, ‘and I suppose it’s part of man’s duality, isn’t it? We are always many different people to different people; we act as we want to be perceived, no? Take me, for instance,’ he said with a smile of his own.