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

by J. T. Brannan

  ‘Because you, my friend, can identify him,’ Nakamura said. ‘You are the only man who has seen him and lived to tell the tale.’

  5

  Kenzo Hiroshi wasn’t near the prime minister, but that was not a problem. As a late hire for an external security company brought in at the last minute, he had been recruited to help man the barriers and control the crowds outside the venue, which is what he had been doing for most of the afternoon.

  He had, however, been shown around the entire venue as part of his security briefing, and he had met many of the men working for the government security forces who would be guarding Toshikatsu from up close. As such, he would not be regarded as a stranger if they were to see him again later that evening.

  He had also used this earlier opportunity to hide the tools of his trade, to be used when he was finally in position.

  The method of assassination was particularly pleasing to Kenzo, as it was a traditional warrior skill, and one in which he was extremely proficient. The bow of the ninja – much shorter than that used by the samurai – was highly accurate in the right hands. And with the right arrows – such as the explosive heads and razor-tipped ones that Kenzo had hidden alongside the bow – it was better than a gun. Silent, too.

  He would fire off two arrows in quick succession, razor tips, one through each eyeball; and then he would use the explosive heads, one to the gut and one to the skull. The sight would be hideous, a truly memorable execution caught on TV cameras from all over the world.

  The plan thought up by his ninja clan was clever, he had to admit, though rather dangerous for himself, as it relied upon him being caught after the prime minister was dead.

  But that was necessary for the aftermath; under interrogation, he would reveal – to be corroborated by perfect ID and a fully backed-up history – that he was a Japanese American, a martial arts expert hired by the CIA to assassinate Toshikatsu and blame it on ultranationalist groups such as Zen Ai Kaigi.

  He would eventually escape from custody, of course, but not before the damage had been done. The whole of Japan would be outraged by what they had seen and – blaming America as they would be encouraged to do by the media – they would clamor for the election of a new, anti-US, militaristic government.

  It would be perfect.

  But Kenzo hoped that he wouldn’t be accidentally killed as he tried to give himself up. It was a risk, but one that he could manage; he would be wearing body armor, and he would use the lighting to make himself a poor target if people started shooting. He could always escape if necessary, and allow himself to be ‘caught’ later on, when things had cooled down and he was less likely to get shot.

  That bit, he could play by ear; he would simply react to what happened, as he’d been trained to do.

  He thought about the American he had killed recently, with some regret. That man had been trained too, that much was obvious. He had never learned who the man was, but it was evident that he was exceptional, almost as well-trained as Kenzo himself; he was the only man outside his clan that Kenzo had ever seen who could hold his own with a ninja.

  But although a part of him was sorry that the man had had to die, another part of him understood how useful the presence of the American had been, adding credence to Kenzo’s own story of illegal, covert paramilitary activity within Japan’s borders by the US intelligence services. The media were already discussing it, and Kenzo’s own crime was going to be a whole lot more believable because of it.

  Toshikatsu himself was upstairs in the Skytree, wining and dining the great and the good of Japan and beyond, eating caviar and discussing how government and business could mutually help each other – in other words, making deals and carving up territory in exactly the same way as Kenzo’s own employers did. Only for Toshikatsu and the LDP, it was legal.

  But Kenzo wiped the thought aside, nodding in greeting to a couple of Special Assault Team members as they showed their identification and passed through the barrier into the Skytree complex.

  ‘Hey,’ said one of the men, recognizing Kenzo from their meeting on the earlier security familiarization, ‘did you manage to get those tickets?’

  Smiling, Kenzo tapped his pocket before removing two tickets for next week’s Yomiuri Giants baseball game. ‘I sure did,’ he said, holding them out for the SAT man. But as the cop reached for them, Kenzo teasingly pulled them back out of the way. ‘But remember,’ he said, ‘don’t give me any shit if I need to get past you guys for a piss later on.’

  The men turned to each other, then back to Kenzo and smiled. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ the second man said. ‘If you gotta go, you gotta go, right?’

  Kenzo handed over the tickets, then sighed as he turned around to the crowds waiting to gain entry to the complex, the hordes of banner-waving LDP supporters to be directed to the fourth floor rooftop square of the Sky Arena. ‘Well, back to work, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the first cop, ‘the same for us. Have a good evening, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Kenzo said, stepping away and toward the crowd, pretending to focus his attention back on his job.

  He was pleased that the men had remembered him, and that he had so easily been able to win their confidence. And it wasn’t just those two either. Over the past few hours – and indeed, ever since he’d been given the security job – he had used his skills to build up relationships with many of the people protecting the prime minister. He could insinuate himself into people’s lives with sublime ease, win their trust and friendship in mere minutes.

  Yes, he considered, when Toshikatsu finally came down from the sky-high restaurant, Kenzo would have no problem whatsoever gaining access to the Sky Arena, where his weapon and his target would be ready and waiting for him.

  Toshikatsu was as good as dead.

  6

  Cole looked at the vast bank of screens which surrounded him, dazzled and confused by the sheer amount of information.

  He was sitting in the security room of the Skytree complex, plugged in to all the cameras in the venue, along with another bank of monitors which had been brought in to provide real-time footage from the low-flying surveillance drones which also covered the area.

  He was the guest of honor, placed in the center of the Skytree’s security technicians so that he could constantly monitor each and every image that came up.

  The recognition software was working overtime, sorting through individual face after individual face and trying to match them to the features it had been programmed with. The only trouble was that the features came not from an actual photograph, but from an identikit likeness that Cole had provided; and he was all too aware that the man now probably looked completely different. Added to which was the fact that the key measurements such systems relied upon – the width between the eyes, the distance from the midline down to the chin, and others – could only be guessed at, as there was no reliable information to go on.

  The result was a glut of false positives, which Cole also had to wade through, another task which took his attention away from the other screens he was supposed to be monitoring.

  Cole was used to processing information quickly, but this was just too much, and he felt his head begin to swim, to ache painfully, and he remembered how he had still not fully recovered after his recent fall. His body and mind were starting to rebel, and there was little he could do about it.

  The good news was that security seemed to be pretty good. In addition to government security and members of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, hundreds of extra security staff had been drafted in, and controls on the entries and exits were tight. Each and every person was being checked for weapons on the way in, which theoretically meant that they should pose little danger. And yet Cole knew this wasn’t necessarily the case; he had built a career on assassinating enemies of the United States with just his bare hands, and knew the ninja would be equally accomplished. The rally had been advertised well in advance too, and it wasn’t inconceivable that the man would hav
e placed weapons there earlier, hidden them on the site so that they were already in place when he entered the complex this evening.

  But at least long-range options seemed to be out of the question, which lessened the headaches to a certain extent; the surrounding buildings were occupied by JSDF sharpshooters, and nobody else was allowed anywhere near a location which looked out over the Skytree.

  Prime Minister Toshikatsu was just finishing up at the restaurant, three hundred and fifty meters above ground on the tower’s Tembo Deck, and would soon be coming back down for the rally itself, which is where the real danger would be present.

  While entertaining guests upstairs, Toshikatsu was relatively safe; the restaurant was pretty small and – compared to the Sky Arena rooftop below, at least – there weren’t many guests to keep an eye on, and pretty much all of them were known to Toshikatsu personally.

  But a ninja could still have killed him there – they were experts in the use of poisons, for instance – and so Cole had suggested that the chefs, waiters and bar staff were all carefully supervised by the security forces. Cole didn’t think that poison would be the method of choice, however – while effective, it wouldn’t have the media impact that a more gruesome death would generate.

  No, Cole knew that if Toshikatsu was going to be targeted, it would be during the public rally itself, in the eye of the world media who would report the incident around the globe in real-time. The psychological impact would be at its greatest, and – when the CIA was falsely accused of involvement – the outcry would therefore be all the greater.

  Cole considered the hordes of people who had been arriving at the huge complex all afternoon, the thousands of civilians who were even now being channeled up to the rooftop square of the Sky Arena, and knew that he couldn’t possibly check them all.

  Stuck in the computerized control room, surrounded by technicians and sterile electrical equipment, he knew he could do no good there, could be of no help to Toshikatsu. He had to be there in person, monitoring the crowds with his own eyes; a brief glance was all it could take, the identification of a simple body action, a familiar step, the holding of the shoulders – all things he couldn’t sense through remote monitors.

  If he was there in person, he could pick out the likely places a hand-to-hand attack could come from, could calculate the best places for concealing a weapon, could put himself into the mind of the assassin.

  That was it – the mind of the assassin.

  Cole had been there himself for many years, and he knew the advantage he had wasn’t in recognizing the ninja’s face, it was in recognizing his method.

  To catch the assassin, Cole would once again have to become the assassin.

  7

  Kenzo smiled as he approached the armed JSDF men who were patrolling the lower entrance to the Sky Arena. They weren’t the men who’d received the tickets, but they had seen him before, and his presence there didn’t ring any alarm bells.

  ‘Hi guys,’ Kenzo said in a friendly tone, ‘I’m on a break, can I just go inside to use the toilet?’

  ‘Well, we don’t want you pissing in the street,’ said one of the men, moving to the side. ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Kenzo said as he walked past, into the building. ‘Can I bring you guys back a coffee or anything?’

  The guards were pleased and gave Kenzo their orders, turned back to their posts and thought no more about him.

  Kenzo smiled – access to even a place such as this, at so crucial a time, was ridiculously easy if you were wearing the right clothes and had the right badge on your chest.

  Kenzo walked quickly through the building, nodding his greetings to the guards who patrolled the corridors, once or twice having to answer questions about where he was going, but otherwise being left unmolested to go about his business.

  He bypassed the restrooms, and also the main elevators which were being used by the LDP supporters, and the freight elevators which had been hijacked by the world media, and instead moved on toward the service stairs.

  The stairs were blocked by another pair of guards, this time agents of the SAT. They smiled as he approached and when he told them about wanting to have a quick look at the rally, take some pictures for his father-in-law, who would never forgive him if he came back empty-handed, they agreed to let him upstairs. He was a security guard, after all. They even radioed ahead for their partners on the fourth floor to let him through when he reached the rooftop square.

  Kenzo checked his watch as he trotted up the concrete stairwell – still over fifteen minutes until Toshikatsu was due to mount the stage and give his keynote speech. There was plenty of time to get himself into position, and yet not enough time for the people he’d talked with to become concerned over his whereabouts.

  As he reached the fourth floor, he gave the steel door a knock and was pleased when it was opened, and this time it was the men he’d given the tickets to. They were pleased to see him, told him where the best food was, and then put in their request for coffee too; and then Kenzo was gone, inserting himself into the crowds like a ghost.

  8

  Cole walked past the ninja, within mere feet of the man; but he did not see him, did not recognize him.

  For Cole was no longer looking for a man, and was no longer trying to recognize a face which might well have changed completely. Now he was looking for the best place from which to kill Toshikatsu.

  The stage had been set up by the glass and steel entrance foyer to the Skytree itself, so the illuminated edifice – all six hundred and thirty-four meters of it – could provide an exciting, exotic backdrop to the LDP’s speechmakers.

  One of them was up there now – Fukuda Yoichi, deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, who was extolling the virtues of the LDP’s current economic reform program. Or at least that’s what Cole had been told he would be talking about; the Japanese language was still something of a mystery to him, and he understood only the occasional word of the minister’s speech.

  Cole examined the stage, saw that it was guarded from all sides by armed and armored Special Assault Team officers, facing out to assess and react to any incoming threat. Cole knew that the surrounding snipers would also be taking a bead on the stage area in case it was attacked, and he checked the known positions of the sharpshooters in their sky-high eyries. Personal bodyguards also accompanied the ministers onto the stage, to help ward off any direct physical assault.

  Cole considered the set-up, connecting it to what he knew about the possible assassin. Ninja agents would typically carry out their work alone – as this man had already proven during his attack on the Yamaguchi compound in Kobe, and when he had come for Michiko in Sounzan. He was obviously adept at close quarter combat, and could use a wide range of bladed and chain-like weapons to kill, as well as projectile implements such as the throwing stars. Was he also proficient with firearms? Cole didn’t know, but considered the fact that a ninja had been hired in the first place was probably to make some sort of point; anyone could point a gun and pull a trigger. No, Cole thought, something more special was planned here tonight, something worthy of the ninja’s skill.

  To kill the prime minister from close up, the ninja would essentially have had to become a part of Toshikatsu’s own private security team, close enough to use his hands on the man; and Cole knew that this wasn’t the case, as he had checked the background of all the immediate guards who would be around the prime minister, and also studied their images on the cameras. None was even remotely like the man Cole had fought on the cable car.

  This meant that the next possibility was to attack the stage from the crowd immediately in front; but Cole believed that the stage was simply too well guarded for a direct attack to work, even with a relatively long weapon such as a katana sword. There was a space in front of the stage which separated it from the crowd – for exactly this reason – and the security team would have too much time to react.

  A projectile weapon such as the shuriken, or even
a standard throwing knife, could work though, Cole considered. The ninja had already shown his skill with such a tool, and if he could put himself in a good position, he would be able to hit Toshikatsu in the head or neck – targets which could easily be fatal.

  Cole edged toward the front of the crowd, showing his top level security pass whenever he needed to, and watched as Fukuda finished his speech to rapturous applause – some of the crowd members must be ringers, Cole thought uncharitably, never before having seen so much enthusiasm over what was essentially a financial report – and the man was ushered smoothly and expertly off stage, making way for the big event.

  So this was it, Cole thought suddenly – almost out of time. Toshikatsu would be out there any minute, and could well be dead soon after.

  Cole examined the people in the crowd who were in a position to target the stage with projectile weapons, even as the sound of raucous cheering and applause rang out around the rooftop square, the LDP crowd going into a frenzy as Prime Minister Toshikatsu appeared from the Skytree foyer and began his approach to the podium.

  Frantic now, Cole moved up and down the crowd, eyes searching for a position the assassin could attack from.

  Where would he attack from, if he was the assassin?

  Dammit, where?

  9

  Kenzo Hiroshi looked down at the crowd, his black-clad body invisible in the shadows cast between the lights of the Skytree.

  He had spotted the position on his earlier nighttime recon, knew that it couldn’t be seen from the square below. When he moved, someone looking directly at him might see the arrows being fired, but by then it would be too late; Toshikatsu would already be dead.