by Kyle Mills
“So now we’ve got two of the world’s largest economies staring at each other over the brink,” Castilla continued. “China’s got the second-largest military in the world, including nukes. Japan technically doesn’t have an army but has the fifth-largest defense budget on the planet and a quarter million active-duty soldiers.”
The Japanese constitution prevented the country from building a military or projecting power by force, but that clause had always been open to interpretation and now was coming under increasing criticism. In reality, Japan was one constitutional convention away from tossing three-quarters of a century of codified pacifism into the dustbin of history—something China would not take sitting down.
Castilla waved his beer can a little frantically. “And do you know who’s right in the middle of this shit storm? Me. Because we have a treaty saying in no uncertain terms that the United States will protect Japan if it’s ever attacked. If the Chinese decide they don’t like the direction the political winds are blowing in Japan—even though they’re partially to blame—what then? Do they sink that fancy new battleship? Mark my words, Fred, I’m in the process of getting painted into a very tight corner.”
The strength seemed to go out of him and he fell back into the cushions. He didn’t speak again for almost a minute. “Still no word on Jon?”
Klein hadn’t been prepared for the sudden change in subject and he didn’t immediately respond. Thoughts of Smith continued to tie knots in his stomach. Klein was responsible for sending him to Japan and now he found himself second-guessing that decision. Smith had been his best man, but he’d had no real experience operating in that theater. Had Klein made an error sending him there? Was Jon Smith’s disappearance his fault?
“Nothing yet.”
“I’m sorry.”
Castilla stared down at the can in his hand, but he was clearly just waiting for the right moment to speak again. The president of the United States didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the fate of a single man. Even one like Jon Smith.
“Where does this leave your investigation into the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Fred?”
“It’s been a serious setback,” Klein admitted. “Our informant’s dead and the evidence he brought out of Reactor Four is missing along with Jon. After more than two years, I’m afraid we’re back to square one.”
7
Prince George’s County, Maryland
USA
How are you doing?”
Maggie Templeton stood from behind her impressive bank of computer monitors, concern deepening the lines etched into her face by time.
“Good. Why wouldn’t I be?” Randi said, continuing toward an open door at the back of the spacious outer office.
Fred Klein also stood when she entered—a reflex bred into him at a time when formality and manners still mattered.
“How are you?”
“Fine. I’m fine, okay?”
Randi fell into a chair and examined the man. He looked like he always did—like he had in Cairo. Nondescript at first glance but upon closer inspection hiding something behind those wire-rimmed glasses. Cunning. Enough that it made Randi feel like she wasn’t in control of her own life—an unfamiliar sensation that she despised. Of course, Smith would have reminded her that Klein had never used his considerable power or intellect to do anything but stand behind her. Then again, the last time he’d been heard from, he’d been swimming out to sea with an arrow in his back.
“So why am I here, Mr. Klein?”
He settled back behind his government-surplus desk. “What do you know about Fukushima?”
“The nuclear disaster? Just what I saw on TV like everyone else. Earthquake, waves, explosions, radiation. Not really my area of expertise.”
He pulled out a pipe and went through his normal OCD ritual lighting it while the elaborate ventilation system that Maggie had installed started up.
“The plant had six reactors. One through Three were active, Five and Six were in cold shutdown for maintenance, and Four had been defueled. After the earthquake, One, Two, and Three went into automatic shutdown mode. Emergency generators came on to run the cooling system.”
“Then the wave hit.”
He nodded. “Forty feet high. It came over the seawall and knocked out the diesel generators. When the battery backups ran down, things got hot and the explosions started…”
“Causing the radiation leaks,” she said, completing his thought. “That was years ago, Mr. Klein. What’s it to Covert-One?”
“Some things have come to light about the disaster that don’t completely make sense.”
Randi shrugged. “That’s not terribly surprising. Whenever a screwup that big happens the only people working harder than the disaster relief teams are the corporate hacks and politicians covering their asses. They’d probably have had enough power to cool the thing down if it weren’t for all the paper shredders firing up in Tokyo.”
“A fair assessment, but it goes beyond that,” Klein said. “The highest levels of radiation were measured in Reactor Four.”
Randi pondered that for a moment. “Didn’t you say that had been defueled?”
“I did.”
“I’m no nuclear engineer but defueled sounds safe.”
“It should have been. And setting aside the radiation levels for a moment, why, four days after the tsunami, was there an explosion in that reactor?”
She shrugged again. “Jon’s the scientist. But someone must have an explanation.”
“Oh, there are a number of them. Not one is even remotely plausible, though.”
“And that’s what Jon was working on?”
Klein took a long pull on his pipe. “I managed to make contact with a man who had smuggled out some suspicious samples right after the tsunami. He was passing them on to Jon when…when things went wrong.”
“I assume you misplaced the samples, too?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but her phrasing was clearly not lost on him. “The samples are gone.”
“I guess I don’t understand what we’re trying to get at here. Are you saying that the Japanese nuclear contractors might have cut corners and built an unsafe reactor? Or are you—”
“The man I was in contact with suspected some kind of sabotage,” Klein interjected. “And he was scared. He wouldn’t talk about it on the phone or even via encrypted e-mail. He suddenly decided he wanted to be rid of that sample and told me if I didn’t get someone over there in twenty-four hours, he was going to destroy it and disappear.”
“So that’s what got Jon sent to a remote fishing village in Japan.”
“There was no time to bring someone up to speed. Jon was my top operative so I sent him.”
Touché, Randi thought, keeping her face impassive. While she was closer to Smith than she was to anyone else in the world, she was also competitive. That was Klein’s subtle way of telling her that he thought Smith was better.
“Okay, sabotage,” she said. “Nuclear reactors are pretty well secured and pretty sturdy. Attacking them isn’t easy to do. Who? An antinuke group?”
“Maybe, but I’m more concerned about the possibility of foreign actors.”
“China.”
Klein took another pull on his pipe. “You know better than I do how the Chinese feel about Japan, and the situation in the East China Sea is headed nowhere good. The president is putting pressure on the Japanese prime minister to calm things down but, frankly, it’s easier said than done.”
“That’s an understatement,” Randi said. “Sanetomi is the Zen master of politicians, but the position he’s in is impossible. If he goes far enough to appease the Chinese, his own people are going to see him as selling them down the river. And if he stands his ground firmly enough to keep his job, the Chinese are going to start polishing up their ICBMs. The Buddha himself would fall off the tightrope he’s stuck on.”
“And then there’s General Takahashi,” Klein said. “While he’s being typically clever about it, he s
eems to be going out of his way to provoke China.”
“Okay, but why a nuclear plant? And why years ago before things got really hot between them? Are they concerned that the Japanese might be using Fukushima to create a nuclear arsenal?”
“We have assurances from Sanetomi that they’re not, and the intelligence community seems satisfied by that.”
“So maybe the Chinese were just trying to create an incident? Make the Japanese lose face and give them something internal to focus on. Or do you think they actually could have been trying to soften them up for an attack?”
“An outright attack on Japan would be a serious enterprise. It would drag in the US and the rest of the world from the first salvo.”
Randi tapped her fingers absently on the arm of her chair. “Leads?”
“Like I told you, the man I was in contact with in Japan is dead, the samples are gone, and there’s nothing but silence coming out of China. But I know you’re well connected there.”
Before turning her focus to the Middle East, she’d operated a great deal in China and spoke fluent Mandarin. “Okay. Let me nose around a little bit.”
“You have an idea?”
She stood and started for the door. “I just might.”
8
Near Imizu
Japan
Jon Smith took as deep a breath as he could, gritting his teeth as he pushed himself into a sitting position. He closed his eyes for a moment to let the pain subside, then opened them again in order to examine the shackle anchoring his ankle to the bed.
He’d have actually laughed if he didn’t know how excruciating it would be. Of all the desperate situations he’d extricated himself from over his career, this was almost insulting. The strap was fashioned from a simple strip of leather, and the flimsy padlock securing it looked like it came off a piece of tourist luggage.
He eased himself back into the pillows to assess his situation one more time. According to the machine he was attached to, his vitals had stabilized. Generally good news. The chest tube was gone and the hole between his ribs had been closed with a few neat sutures. Even better. On the downside, though, the pain in his back was as bad as ever and now he had confirmation as to why.
The doctor caring for him didn’t speak much English—probably by design—but with some universal medical jargon and a couple of X-ray films, Smith had been able to put together a mental list of what had happened to him: five broken ribs, two of which were smashed beyond recognition, a precariously reinflated lung, massive initial blood loss, a near-fatal case of hypothermia, a scapula held together with a couple of screws, and a sutured hole where the crossbow bolt had been extracted. Actually, extracted sounded better than the pantomime the doctor had used to describe the procedure. Two hands on the shaft and a foot in the small of his back. In the man’s defense, though, combat medicine sometimes rewarded those willing to just dive right in.
So he was technically on the mend, but not so much that the chintzy ankle restraint didn’t look both a mile away and a little like Fort Knox. He scanned the medical cart next to him, but there was nothing sharp enough to cut with or small enough to turn into a pick. And even if there had been, what then? The only escape he could realistically envision involved him shuffling along, dragging an IV cart behind him. Any obstacle more formidable than an unarmed Girl Scout or, God forbid, a set of stairs would be completely insurmountable.
He reached out and carefully retrieved the cup next to his bed, sucking thoughtfully on the straw. No matter how many angles he examined the problem from, he always came to the same conclusion: he was completely, irretrievably screwed. Whoever the man was who had locked him to this bed and called in the medical team hadn’t done it out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted answers and he’d do whatever was necessary to get them.
There was a creak outside that Smith had determined was a loose floorboard ten feet or so down the hallway. He counted to three and right on cue the sound of a key turning in the door disturbed the monotonous beeping of the machine monitoring his heart. Another one-count and it began to swing open.
The unusually tall Asian woman who entered had an athletic grace that in another place and time he would have stopped to admire. A simple brown dress clung loosely to her curves, and a broad-brimmed hat completely shadowed her face. She set a small satchel on the medical cart but didn’t immediately come any closer.
Smith tried to tell himself she was a nurse, but she had a predatory way of moving that suggested something very different. This wasn’t a woman who cared for the sick and helpless. This was a woman who extracted information from the sick and helpless.
He looked away, staring up at the perfect white of the ceiling. He’d never been interrogated by a woman before and that worried him. Since he’d regained consciousness, he’d been preparing himself for a clumsy Japanese guy with a lot of tattoos and a rubber hose. In the shape he was in, he figured he wouldn’t have to hold out long. Death would quickly intervene on his behalf.
This woman was almost certainly a very different animal. She’d be aware of his injuries, inflicting pain carefully and only when necessary. She’d confuse him, drug him, try to make him psychologically dependent on her. And she’d keep him alive for as long as it took.
Smith started going over the story he’d concocted, trying to imprint it into his mind with enough force to make it real. He was a drug addict. An American military doctor from the base in Okinawa who had written one too many bogus prescriptions for himself and had the army’s investigators breathing down his neck. He’d been trying to find another supplier when the man he’d been there to meet was killed. Smith was just in the wrong place at the wrong time—an innocent bystander in a war between his new dealer and the Japanese mafia.
The woman moved soundlessly to the foot of his bed and looked down at him. Her face was still shadowed by the hat, so he looked for hints in her body language about what was to come. Even in his situation, it was hard to ignore the perfection of her outline beneath the utilitarian dress. With a little luck she’d start by trying to use her beauty to play his emotions.
When she lifted her hand and he saw the matte-black blade, though, it was clear that Lady Luck had once again turned her back on him.
9
Yasukuni Shrine
Tokyo
Japan
General Masao Takahashi looked up from the classified documents he was reviewing when his limousine began to slow. Outside, the street was filled with demonstrators numerous enough to force his driver to come almost to a stop in order to pick his way through. To the right, the crowd was dominated by older men carrying the Rising Sun flag, some in deteriorating Imperial Japanese uniforms. Takahashi nodded respectfully toward them, though he knew he was invisible behind the tinted windows. Patriots who still remembered the meaning of courage and service.
Their opposition, fittingly on his left, consisted mostly of college-age representatives of an entitled and self-absorbed generation who had never experienced the slightest hardship. Despite that, all they did was complain about an economy that allowed them to live at a standard he could have never even imagined as a child. Not a single one of these cowards would have survived a week of his youth. The hunger. The cold. The fear and confusion of being a defeated people in a country under occupation.
His driver glided to a stop and Takahashi looked away from the protesters in disgust. Their obscene placards dishonored the men who had fought and died for the country that they now believed owed them so much.
He ignored the chants penetrating his vehicle and looked out over the well-tended grounds of Yasukuni. The leaves had taken on a reddish-gold color, contrasting the unbroken blue sky. The shrine lay just beyond, adding the deep-green sweep of its traditional roof and the graceful white of the banner guarding the entrance. It had originally been built by Emperor Meiji in 1869, and it now honored the almost 2.5 million men who had served and died for Japan.
He wasn’t surprised when his phone rang, no
r that the screen identified the caller as Prime Minister Fumio Sanetomi. He considered ignoring it, but his plans were advancing at a pace that was already at the edge of control. Keeping the country’s politicians complacent was desirable, though not absolutely critical to carrying out those plans. Sanetomi and his hangers-on continued to wrap themselves in the illusion that they were relevant, and for now that was convenient. Soon, though, the politicians would be revealed for what they were: weak and honorless men who had spent three-quarters of a century slowly bleeding their own people.
“Good afternoon, Prime Minister,” Takahashi said, putting the phone to his ear.
“And to you, General. It’s my understanding that you’re at Yasukuni.”
“You’re well informed, as it seems is everyone else. It was my hope to make this a reflective, private affair.”
“I’m certain it was,” Sanetomi replied. His voice was typically even, reverberating with a solemnity that the electorate found hypnotic but Takahashi found insufferable.
“Unfortunately, anonymity is difficult for a man of your stature and accomplishments,” the prime minister continued. “Because of this I must ask you to remain in your car and order your driver to turn around immediately.”
Takahashi’s jaw tightened at the smooth attempt to manipulate him with flattery. Prior to his career as a politician, Sanetomi had been a schoolteacher, and what he’d learned handling children had proved extremely useful in dealing with the sheep he surrounded himself with. But the general wasn’t one of them. He had been defending Japan since Sanetomi was crying at his mother’s breast.
“General? Are you still there?”
Takahashi let his silence draw out. In recent years the shrine had become one of many flashpoints in Japan’s declining relationship with China. The Chinese, instead of wielding their growing power and wealth to break free of the past, had decided to use it to reopen old wounds and humiliate their smaller neighbor to the east.
