Kusanagi

by Clem Chambers

  They walked swiftly outside to a black Toyota Crown. It was an old car but it shone like new. They got into the back. Yamamoto was in the front passenger seat. ‘I think I have found her. Let’s go.’

  The chauffeur set off. Jim noticed he was a very old man, who drove as carefully as if the car was stuffed with nitro-glycerine. The roads were busy but the traffic flowed. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘Where are we going?’ repeated Akira in Japanese.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Yamamoto.

  Jim got out of the Crown and looked at the polished grey granite building. Across the broad entrance it said ‘Yamamoto Towers’ in English, then probably the same in Japanese characters.

  Yamamoto was striding towards the entrance and Jim jogged to catch up. The Japanese businessman bustled through the revolving doors to where a reception committee stood.

  Everyone bowed. The welcoming party saw them to the lifts and bowed at them as the doors closed. The lift was saying something to them and Jim wondered what it was. He hadn’t been in a talking lift before. They were heading for the roof.

  When it stopped, Yamamoto strode out, and around the roof garden to the far side. Jim gazed at the rocks and gravel, all perfectly placed, and thought how bizarre it was that anyone would want a rockery on the top of an office block. A telescope was set up at the far end with a young guy of about Jim’s age beside it.

  Yamamoto squinted through the eyepiece and smiled at his employee. He said something that sounded to Jim like ‘Well done.’ Then he indicated that Jim should look through the eyepiece. Jim crossed to the telescope and found he was focused on another giant tower. The floor in the centre had some kind of garden in it – with what looked like an aviary. If you’re going to build a rock garden on top of a building, he thought, why not a greenhouse?

  Yamamoto was talking to Akira.

  ‘So, so, so,’ said Akira. ‘Evans-san, your lady is being kept in the zoo you can see before you.’

  He stood up. ‘That’s a zoo? Whose zoo?’

  ‘Kimcorp Zoo.’

  Jim was scanning the floor for a glimpse of Jane, but all he could see was vegetation and birds. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What the fuck is Kimcorp?’

  ‘Huge property company,’ said Akira, ‘one of the top five.’

  ‘Can’t we just get the police to bust in?’

  ‘I’m afraid Kim would be the first to know. By the time a raid happened, your lady would be gone.’

  Jim took a deep breath and blew it out, frustrated. He looked back through the telescope. ‘Can we see the other side of the building?’

  Akira asked Yamamoto.

  ‘Yes,’ said Yamamoto. ‘We should have helicopter photographs very soon.’

  The animals went silent and, moments later, the lift door opened. She stood up and held the plate by her side. She had sharpened it in the small hours and hoped they might not have noticed. She had tried to be subtle about it, but if they’d been awake… As she could hear only one set of footsteps, she guessed she had got lucky.

  Kim stood in front of the cage, well back. She watched him closely. Only a small section of the plate’s rim was now blade sharp. If she hurled it through the bars at him she’d pray for a miracle.

  ‘Who are you?’ said the man.

  ‘Who are you?’ she replied.

  He reached into his pocket. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, pulling out the dart gun. He pointed it at her loosely. ‘I don’t need to know your name.’ He fired.

  It took him a moment to register the clank.

  Jane picked up the dart from the floor. It had discharged most of its load with the blow. She didn’t think. She just did. Thinking made the barely possible impossible. She had to be in the moment, in the zone. Accuracy came from the deep subconscious, the brainstem, the hypothalamus. She lanced the dart through the bars at Kim. He flinched as it stuck in his neck.

  He squeaked in shock and reeled back. He pulled the dart from his flesh, dropping it to the ground.

  Jane was smiling. A very satisfactory shot. The tranquilliser was in a puddle at her feet and she guessed the round was spent, but her victory had a kind of small perfection.

  Kim tottered forwards and staggered, then careered headlong into the bars of the cage.

  ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ she said, and ran to the bars. Clearly the round had had some sting left. She knelt down, grabbed his arm and pulled it through the cage bars. He didn’t have a watch or a band on his wrist. He must have a tag under his skin. She took the plate. She couldn’t lift him to the door latch, so she’d have to cut his arm off. In the circumstances it wasn’t such an unpleasant prospect. She pushed up his jacket and shirt sleeves. She went to undo his cufflink.

  ‘Bingo,’ she muttered. The cufflink was the key. She took it out of his cuff and stood up. Red lights around the room started flashing. ‘Damn it,’ she muttered. She pushed her arms through the bars to the control surface.

  Nothing happened. She already knew the problem. She went back to Kim and pulled his other arm through. It was the other cufflink. When they were both in range the system operated; when they were further apart than the length of his arms, they set off an alarm and ceased to function. She tried the lock again and the door clicked open. She leapt out. She opened the gorilla’s door. ‘Come with me,’ she said, but the gorilla just looked at her.

  She didn’t wait. The lift was going down to the floor below. She called it, then looked into the camera. Its little red light was lit. If she could deal with the people in the lift she could get free. She could go back and use the man as a shield, but she wouldn’t be able to carry him with her. No matter. Attack was always the best way.

  Jim looked at the photos. An indistinct figure sat in a cage. Was it Jane? It was hard to tell. He felt sick and his face bunched up in disgust.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Akira. ‘This is horrible.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said. ‘At least, if that’s her, she’s alive.’

  Yamamoto was slumped in a chair, apparently fast asleep. ‘Pay the ransom,’ he said.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Pay Kim.’ Akira told him.

  ‘That’s not going to work, is it?’ said Jim.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For one thing I owe you an object, and for another, if we give them to him, he can’t leave any witnesses behind, can he? Not me, not you, least of all Jane. We can’t take the easy way out.’ Jim sat up a bit. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, smiling ironically at Akira. He reached under his shirt and pulled out the Yasakani no Magatama. He lifted it over his head and handed it to Akira.

  Akira held up his short hand in shock.

  ‘Take it,’ said Jim.

  Yamamoto had woken up.

  ‘No,’ said Akira, ‘not yet. We are not sure if it is Jane-san. Nor do I wish it returned until I have secured the sword Kusanagi and Yata no Kagami.’

  Yamamoto was suddenly wide awake.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Jim.

  ‘I trust you to continue to bear Yasakani no Magatama with honour.’

  Yamamoto was staring at Jim. ‘Kusanagi? Yata no Kagami? Yasakani no Magatama?’

  ‘I’m sorry, old friend,’ said Akira, ‘but I have lured you into a legend.’

  James Dean Yamamoto was sweating profusely again. He watched Jim put on the green glowing necklace and cover it with his shirt. Then he began to laugh uproariously. Sweat and tears were trickling down his face and he clasped his legs.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ asked Jim.

  Akira shrugged.

  ‘This will surely kill us all,’ wheezed Yamamoto.

  Akira translated.

  55

  The lift door opened to reveal four men with stun guns. They’d have to be dweebs not to get the better of her. There was no time to let them surround her. They were fanning out. The guy to the left jabbed at her and she kicked him in the chest.
He fell. She grabbed the guy to the right as he lunged – but the charge from the guard in front shot through her. She flipped backwards, then cried out as another shot pulsed through her.

  When she woke up, she hurt like hell. They’d done a good job of tenderising her. The gorilla was looking through the bars. She lay there for a few moments, then hoisted herself up. At least they hadn’t stripped her. ‘You should have come and given me a hand,’ she said, sitting down by the beast. It put a hand on her head and stroked her hair.

  Jane was wondering whether she was going to get another chance. She looked around the cage. The plate was gone. She checked her pocket. Not unsurprisingly the cufflinks were gone too.

  The necklace felt hot around Jim’s neck, the ends of the jade teeth pressing into his flesh – like fingers. He adjusted it. Then he jumped to his feet. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘Kimcorp! Is that like a listed company?’

  Akira looked up from the photos. ‘Yes, Evans-san, on the TSE main market.’

  ‘Main market listed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jim sat down again with a bump. ‘Well, well, well.’ He clutched the necklace under his shirt. ‘You know what? I think I might have a bit of an idea brewing.’

  Jane stood in front of the gorilla. She put her right hand on a bar and the gorilla did the same. She gripped a bar about a foot away with her left hand and the gorilla copied her. She stood on the two middle bars, then pulled with her hands and pushed with her feet, trying to wrench the bars from their moorings. They didn’t move – but the gorilla might have the strength to bend them and shatter the welding.

  The gorilla watched her curiously, seeming amused by her antics.

  Jane dropped down from her braced position. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said, laughing a little. She scratched the back of her head.

  The gorilla scratched its head too, then offered a hand to Jane. She took it. ‘Got to get out of here,’ she said, ‘before it’s too late.’

  She let go of the gorilla and walked to the middle of the cage. She sat down, legs crossed, and put her hands into her lap. She closed her eyes. She was going to clear her mind. Then she was going to send herself out of her body, float around the cage and imagine it afresh. There was always an answer to any puzzle; it was just a matter of working it out. Once you had the answer, it seemed obvious, but before you had it, it could stare you in the face and you wouldn’t see it. Calm was the platform of survival. It didn’t matter how desperate you were or how close to death, calm was a prerequisite for rescue.

  As she stilled herself she imagined she was like the gorilla: sentient but not quite smart enough to work out a way to escape. If she could double her IQ, she could waltz out of there, but instead she had to strain for the insight that would set her free.

  In trying to fly beyond the boundaries of her mind, she hoped to release herself from her preconceptions and assumptions. Her mental bonds trapped her as effectively as the bars. That was why the mad were especially dangerous. Their thoughts were untrammelled, their solutions often unimaginable to the normal mind. Without the limitations of the sane, they could find the doorway to another level. This was the doorway she sought.

  ‘Do the obvious,’ she told herself.

  She stood up and walked to the ledge where the tiger had lain. She had hidden the chopsticks there. She had put them on the other side of the bars where the cage frame met the floor and was shielded by the ledge. She squatted down, pushed her hand along the cold edge of the metal cage, and fished out a chopstick.

  She smiled. They’d missed it.

  She climbed onto the ledge and put the chopstick between her teeth. The bars of the cage were about six foot above, but the tiled shelf had a ridge to grip about three feet above her reach. She scrambled up the wall to it and hoisted herself onto the bars. She balanced, adjusted her grip, then swung from bar to bar. She turned, rotating ninety degrees to hang between the horizontal bars. She had become so strong over the years that the stress of holding her own weight by her hands was of no account. Finally, all those years of swinging on frames were actually proving useful.

  Jane swung her legs up between the bars and wrapped them around one so that her weight was braced by her feet. She slid along it until she was comfortably below the CCTV camera. She took the chopstick out of her mouth and stretched out to the CCTV with the point. The extra six inches of wood gave her the necessary reach to stab it.

  The camera wasn’t designed to take abuse and, after a couple of minutes, the plastic eyeball fell out of its housing and hung on its wires. Jane put the chopstick back between her teeth, reached up as far as she could and took the camera in her fingers. She tore it out and dropped it onto the floor.

  That’s better, she thought. A little privacy.

  She unlocked her legs and hung from the bar, six feet off the ground. She looked out of the window into the blue sky of the Tokyo afternoon. Hanging felt good: it was like stretching. About half a mile away a chopper was hovering parallel to the window. She focused on it. It was at the same level as her window and in line with it. She dropped to the floor, ran to the window and waved frantically. The aircraft’s nose dropped and it headed away.

  Had it come for her? Was it her people, the DIA? Was it just another pervy moment from the creeps holding her in the cage? Was a tourist having a look at the zoo on the sixty seventh floor?

  She sat down and went back to clearing her mind.

  ‘Evans-san,’ called Akira, ‘we have confirmation. Please come and see.’

  Jim walked to Yamamoto’s desk and looked over Akira’s shoulder. There was a picture of Jane hanging behind the bars of a cage. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ moaned Jim.

  Akira flicked onto the next image. Jane was on the ground, waving at them. ‘Thank goodness for that,’ sighed Jim, ‘I thought she was strung up.’

  ‘No, Evans-san,’ said Akira. ‘She looks to be all right.’ He flicked through the images uploaded from the chopper.

  ‘I hope they haven’t spotted the helicopter,’ said Jim.

  Akira didn’t reply directly. ‘There is no building that overlooks this side of Kim’s head office. It was the only way to be sure.’

  Jim nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Now we’ve got to get in there and bust her out.’ He picked up his satellite phone. ‘Here goes. If this doesn’t work, I’m just going to go in there on my own.’

  ‘I will be with you,’ said Akira, clenching the fist on his short arm.

  For the DIA man it was two a.m., but when his phone rang he answered. ‘Hi,’ he said, his voice gravelly and slow.

  ‘Will, it’s Jim.’

  Will sat up in bed. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve found Jane.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I need your help to get her to safety.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Tokyo.’

  ‘Leave it to us.’

  ‘No,’ said Jim. ‘She’ll be dead as soon as you make a call to the authorities.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘North Koreans connected at the highest level in Japan. I can rescue her if you’ll help me, but it has to be fast and it has to be now.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘OK, this is what I need.’

  56

  Kim was sneering at the doctor.

  ‘I’m afraid, Kim-san, that your heart is weak. You need more rest before you can resume work.’

  He didn’t reply, just held the oxygen mask to his face. The tranquilliser had laid him so low that he had nearly died. He knew he was unfit, and he had not made his health a priority, but he had been shocked to discover just how weak he had become. Now he lay disconsolate in his bed, confused, his whole body aching to sleep again.

  He hated the doctor for the news and despised the nurses who tended him. He was nauseated by the thought that they should see him in such a pathetic and vulnerable state. When he regained his strength he would go up to the zoo and shoot the woman. She was a demon
ic banshee and had to be liquidated at all costs. He didn’t have the strength to imagine what else he would do with her, but it would come to him. Then he would know he was strong enough to get up.

  Jim was downloading his trading software onto James Dean Yamamoto’s computer. He was praying it would work. Software was almost guaranteed not to work first time. Whatever could go wrong would go wrong.

  The installation ended with a prompt for his login and password. ‘Ah,’ he said, mildly surprised that it was working. He typed in his ID and his password: jelliedeel. He offered a prayer to the gods of binary.

  ‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, as the desktop booted up. There was an hour and twenty minutes before the close of trading in Tokyo. He pulled up Kimcorp’s stock chart. It looked OK – but he smiled when it dawned on him that the chart looked as if it was going to crash. ‘You betcha it is! And I’m going to crash it.’

  He called his friend at the bank, Sebastian Fuch-Smith.

  ‘Jim?’ came the startled reply at the other end. ‘You’ve caught me heading to work.’

  ‘You want to make some money?’

  ‘Me, mate?’ said Sebastian, every syllable honed at Eton. ‘I’m never unhappy to make a little extra cash, old chap.’

  ‘Kimcorp on the Tokyo exchange. It’s about to go down like a duchess.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Any time now – count to a hundred if you like. Tell the floor.’ Jim hung up.

  Akira pulled up a chair next to him. ‘May I watch?’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ said Jim, as he laid out the chart of the stock in the right-hand corner of the screen. He placed the order window – the interface where he entered buy and sell instructions to pick up or let go of shares he was trading – to the left. He had all kinds of orders he could place and robots to slice and dice them before they were sent to the market. For Jim it was like a textual version of a computer game where armies were massed and sent against the troops of other players. In this game there were only buy and sell orders and whether, when you called a move in the market, you were right or wrong.

  Traders would stare at charts, hoping to guess the next few seconds and thereby glean an advantage over the other players, but with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people buying and selling, the outcome of every following moment was strictly random, or so it seemed and so they said.