by Mark McKay
‘Just stay where you are and pump it every minute or so,’ said Shauna.
Oyama had taught her how this worked, he thought. The first European woman swordsmith in the making. Except she was a fraud.
‘You killed Julian,’ he said, keeping his voice level.
She still had the gun on him and she could easily hit him from eight to ten feet away. At the same time, she was using one hand to set up a video camera on a tripod. Exactly as the man in Kensington had done.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘We were setting Katsu up. You were all being set up, actually. And when you came along to investigate Julian’s murder it got ridiculously easy.’
‘Would you like to explain?’
Shauna laughed. ‘Do you really want to hear it?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, we have time, I guess.’ She had the camera mounted, now. She sat on the floor and crossed her legs. Nick looked at her. She was certainly an accomplished actress. That whole Irish belle facade had crumbled away now and the woman underneath was a no-nonsense, unfeeling killer.
‘Yamada sent you, am I right?’
‘He sent two of us. Unfortunately, you killed my colleague.’ She checked Mariko again, who was still out for the count. Then she started telling the story.
‘The first time we met, do you remember? I was coming down the stairs after getting changed to work in the forge. While I was upstairs doing that, I went into your room and put some bugging software on your phone. We were recording you the whole time. When you went to see Ray Curtis we saw an opportunity to send you right off our scent. Kenji, my colleague, killed Mr Curtis. And you started to believe this was all about something else. Classic misdirection.’
‘Was it you in Regent’s Park?’
She nodded. ‘Just playing with you. You see, my instructions were not to kill you immediately, but to make you suffer. And the shooting in the park also helped push you in the wrong direction. When you bought a new phone and went to Peru, we lost the trace. But it didn’t really matter. In the meantime, I had Katsu in my bed and in my pocket. He didn’t suspect a thing.’
The pieces were falling into place. ‘Do I owe my escape from the altitude chamber to you?’
‘That’s right. When you told me you were going to the clinic in Norfolk I followed you. I killed that big bastard who beat you up and opened the door.’
‘Why not just leave me in there?’
She laughed again. She was getting into her stride, now. She might get a little cocky and careless, if he could keep her talking. It was worth a try, but given her competence in deceiving them all up to this point, he wasn’t betting on it. She answered the question.
‘You don’t understand, do you? You weren’t his to kill. I’m being paid a great deal of money to do that, and it has to be done properly.’
‘What about the shooting in Japan? Yoshi and Mariko?’
‘That was Mr Yamada’s people. But when Mariko showed up here it played into our hands once again.’
‘So you sent your friend Kenji to tie her up and kill her for the camera.’
Shauna sighed. ‘Just following Mr Yamada’s brief. He wants it all on camera. I think he gets off on it. Not for me to judge, though.’
He knew now, what was coming. And there seemed to be no easy way to change it.
‘What about Katsu? He’s going to prison, if you have your way.’
‘Where he’ll suffer, as prescribed. Then, at some point, he will die. Not by my hand, though.’
The furnace was heating up, now. He kept pumping the oxygen into it.
‘You never answered my original question,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’
‘You’ll never know the answer to that, Nick. All you need to know is that this is what I do. And that my name isn’t Shauna. The question is irrelevant.’
He didn’t bother asking again. They were both quiet, now. He could hear the air, softly roaring inside the furnace. Feeding the fire and raising the temperature until it exceeded 1000 degrees Celsius. Hot enough to melt steel, and human flesh. He knew this because the last assassin to visit the cottage had ended up in the furnace. But he was dead when he went in. And when he came out, he was just a pile of ashes.
Mariko began to stir. She tried to move around and found she couldn’t. She turned her head, trying to figure out where she was. Shauna stood up and went over to her. She placed the gun next to Mariko’s temple.
‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’
Mariko nodded. She couldn’t see Nick from where she was, but somehow she knew he was close by. She called his name.
‘I’m here,’ he said.
‘Quiet, both of you,’ said Shauna.
In the silence that followed, he made a decision. He thought about the two other women that he’d cared for deeply, who were both dead. They had died in violent circumstances and the responsibility for their deaths rested with him. Whatever should happen in the next few minutes, he wasn’t going to allow a third woman he loved to follow their example. If he had to die to make that happen, so be it. He closed his eyes and began to consolidate his energy just below the navel, as he’d been taught by Oyama. He needed to focus it and build it up like the fire in the furnace, so it could be released in one devastating rush. He disregarded the part of his mind that said it was impossible to get to Shauna before she emptied the gun into him. He opened his eyes again and pumped the handle; he didn’t want her to think he was going into some sort of trance. But his mind was concentrated, and becoming more so by the minute.
Fifteen minutes later, Shauna checked her watch. She turned on the camera and positioned it so it was in line with Mariko on the trolley and the furnace door.
‘Open the door,’ she said. She threw a pair of thick, heatproof gloves in his direction.
He put them on and pulled the door open. The heat rushed out in a wave and he felt his eyebrows singeing. He moved back a bit.
Shauna stood up. ‘Over here,’ she said, pointing to the trolley. She took a few steps back, she didn’t want him too close. He walked over to the trolley and stood looking down at Mariko. She had that inscrutable look, that could hide any number of emotions. But she was trying to tell him something with her eyes.
‘Push her in,’ said Shauna.
He moved around to the top of the trolley, where Mariko’s head was. She was blinking furiously, and he realised that she was directing his attention down the line of her body. He could see a bulge in the front pocket of her jeans. It looked like she had her phone in there. He stood there, unwilling to do what Shauna wanted him to.
‘I love you,’ said Mariko.
Those three words filled him with a power he’d only dreamed of. He began pushing the trolley slowly towards the furnace. He could see Shauna in his peripheral vision, crouched on the floor, gun in hand. He made a show of stepping around to the side of the trolley and adjusting Mariko’s position. He got both hands into her pocket.
Shauna was getting impatient. ‘Don’t fuck around, Nick. Do it.’
The jaguars he’d met in the jungle suddenly came to him. Yes, he thought. I’ll do it.
He turned around and roared, the primeval roar of a madman. The energy came out of his body like a runaway train and he hurled the phone at Shauna’s head. The yell had her transfixed for just a second and the phone hit her smack between the eyes. It was long enough for him to get to the sword and pick it up with both manacled hands. Then he was charging at her and she was shooting at him and the bullets were hitting him in the arms and the chest, but it didn’t matter, no force on earth was going to stop him. She was on her feet now and he got the tip of the sword right into her gut, and kept going. She screamed and dropped the gun and then she was down on the floor, moaning like the wounded animal she was. And he was standing over her with his hands on the sword, impaling her.
Then he felt his vision going and his legs buckling and the last thing he was aware
of was the sight of Mariko rolling off the trolley and coming his way. He tried to keep his hold on the sword so the murdering bitch he’d skewered with it couldn’t get up, but his strength was failing him. He lost his grip, and crashed to the ground.
When he regained consciousness two days later, he found himself in a hospital bed. There were tubes in his nose and in his arms and he heard monitors beeping. He blinked and blinked again. He felt pretty good, actually. He had the sensation of floating and he felt quietly euphoric. Being shot wasn’t so bad after all. Then he remembered that he didn’t know what happened next and he panicked. The monitors beeped faster. They seemed to be all around him it and it was like being inside a bloody pinball machine. He heard a door being opened, far away. A moment later a girl in a starched white uniform was leaning over him.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re back.’
‘I never went away.’
She looked at him in an appraising sort of way. ‘I think you’re getting too much morphine. I’ll see what the doctor says.’
Then she was gone and it was just him and the pinball machine.
Mariko arrived, not long after. She kissed him and then she stroked his cheek and asked him how he felt.
‘Very well, all things considered. Will you tell me what happened?’
She had to repeat herself a few times because he kept drifting away, but he got the gist of it. He had collapsed on top of Shauna, who still had the sword in her and was now finding it impossible to move with his bulk weighing her down. Mariko had managed to sever some of the ropes by leaning herself against the blade of the sword, and soon she was able to free one arm and get them all off. Then she used her phone, which was miraculously still working, to call the ambulance and the police, in that order.
‘I didn’t think you would make it,’ she said, squeezing his hand.
Shauna had got four bullets into him. One in the right arm and another in the left shoulder, and two more high up in the chest area. The only reason she hadn’t put one in his head was down to the fact she was crouched down when he came at her and by the time she stood up, it was too late. By the grace of god, or whoever it was that doled out grace, none of the bullets had hit organs or arteries and he would live to fight another day. But it had taken six hours in surgery to dig out the slugs and sew him up again. He was in a stable condition, apparently. As stable as you could be after suffering multiple gunshot wounds, anyway.
He had to spend two weeks in a private room at the hospital, living mostly on fluids. They reduced his morphine dose and he realised that his arms and upper body were sore and stiff. There was a lot of recovery work ahead. After Mariko, Oyama was his next visitor. He was now out of prison and feeling more than a little used.
‘So, sensei. She wasn’t the woman we thought she was,’ said Nick, when Oyama arrived.
‘And I thought I was immune to deception. She was very skilled. I was a fool.’
‘She fooled all of us.’
Shauna had survived the sword thrust and was currently in a prison hospital ward, recuperating. Russell and Richards had tried to question her, but so far they’d got nowhere. Nick thought that Shauna, or whatever her real name was, would be a tough nut to crack. But if they didn’t charge her with Julian’s murder they had more than enough evidence to charge her with the attempted murder of one Nick Severance. That should put her out of circulation for a while.
He made good progress and they discharged him in week three. He was told to rest, take painkillers when necessary, and do some gentle exercise. He went back to the cottage with Mariko, where she began to treat him with her own Japanese herbal and physical therapy cure. He could walk of course, but his upper body had lost some mobility and he needed to do specific exercises to stretch it in all the right places. There were herbal teas to endure, and massages, and she would manipulate his arms and shoulders in a certain way twice a day, to get the energy moving as it should. Oyama was back in residence and he made a point of letting them have as much uninterrupted time together as possible. But whenever Nick was resting he would often hear Mariko and Oyama in animated conversation about something, most of which he couldn’t understand as it was all in rapid Japanese. But he knew what was on their minds; Takashi Yamada, and what they were going to do about him.
One day a letter arrived from Peru. It was from Isabella and when he opened it a newspaper clipping from one of the Peruvian dailies dropped out. All in Spanish, but she’d done a translation for him. Someone had been shot dead in Lima just a few days ago and Isabella had underlined the names ‘Xavier Torres’ and ‘Oswaldo Mendoza’ in red ink. There were separate photographs of both men in the newspaper article. He read through her translation. According to the report, Colonel Oswaldo Mendoza of the Peruvian National Police had been at his home in a smart suburb of Lima when two men had burst in with sub-machine guns and riddled him with bullets. A placard with the words ‘For Xavier Torres’ was found pinned to his body. Mendoza had been a commander in the ‘Grupo Colina’, an anti-communist death squad active in the early nineties. They had allegedly committed various human rights abuses and carried out massacres of civilians and anyone suspected of collaborating with Shining Path. During one of those massacres, Xavier Torres, a Shining Path leader, had been brutally tortured and killed. The police thought that Mendoza’s murder bore all the signs of a professional hit. An execution, in effect.
Nick remembered his conversation with Ibanez, just prior to leaving Peru. Mendoza was the man who’d ordered the fire-bombing of the rebel camp. The name Torres must have rung a bell with him and he’d made the connection with the man he’d killed so many years ago. Edward’s father. But why would he want to kill the son as well as the father? Then it all fell into place. He must have known that the son wanted revenge. And that was Edward Torres’ other reason for going to Peru with so much cash. He wanted Mendoza dead, and the missing $350,000 must have paid for it. Even if Mendoza had succeeded in killing Edward, the hit was already sanctioned. He was a dead man either way.
Nick folded up the clipping and stuffed everything back into the envelope. He thought about the emotions that drove people to exact vengeance, regardless of the consequences to themselves. He’d done it once when he killed the men who had murdered Lauren. Torres had risked everything to avenge his father. And Yamada had done it to Yoshi Mashida and tried to do it to Nick, Mariko and Oyama. He wasn’t so sure about Yamada’s motivation, though he thought loss of face probably had a lot to do with it. But the Japanese billionaire had only partially succeeded and now, if he wasn’t mistaken, Mariko was planning a little revenge of her own.
Chapter 18
It was October in Japan, and in the highlands of Kiyosato the temperature was mild. The leaves on the trees around the Aikido retreat centre were starting to show their autumn colours. There were muted shades of gold, scarlet, orange and red, all hinting at the brilliance to come. If it was a clear day, you could see Mount Fuji’s snow-capped peak in the distance, rising majestically above the rolling hills and mountains that formed such a prominent part of this area. It was arguably the best time of year to be here.
They had been back a week, now. Mariko had been to Tokyo twice in that time, to talk to officials at the Ministry of Justice. The Crimson Dragon Society operated outside the official intelligence infrastructure and was discreetly funded by the government. With Yoshi Mashida’s death, doubts had arisen in high places about its future. Certain powerful people thought the CDS would no longer serve a useful purpose, now its charismatic leader was gone. Others disagreed. And if the Society should continue to operate, it would need a new boss. The politics and alliances that would influence the final decision had formed and Mariko was fighting her corner. She wanted the job.
That wasn’t the only thing on her mind. When she wasn’t in Tokyo she spent a lot of time practising her martial arts skills and at the moment archery seemed to be the prime focus. She and Nick had resumed their usual morning Aikido sessi
ons, after which they almost always went to the archery range. Mariko had set up a target at almost 200 yards, which was three times the maximum distance used in traditional archery. She had another high-tech bow now, with much more power than the wooden version used by ordinary practitioners. It was made from titanium and extended into the bow shape from a base rod, all the parts clicking into place as it did so. It was light, very strong, and easy to conceal.
She would shoot a dozen arrows and he would retrieve them. On the first day, six arrows fell short. The next day, it was four. Yesterday, only one had missed. This morning, they stood in the usual place and Nick handed Mariko her first arrow of the day.
‘Today,’ she said, ‘I want them all in the centre circle.’
She took her stance, placed the arrow on the string and drew it back. She judged the elevation needed at this range and let the arrow fly. Then the whole thing was repeated for the other eleven arrows, which he handed her at five-second intervals. When she’d finished they walked towards the target together. They arrived, and looked at the result. All the arrows were within inches of each other inside the innermost circle and two were in the bullseye.
‘You’ve done it,’ said Nick. ‘Great shooting.’
Mariko permitted herself a small crooked smile of satisfaction. ‘Good. Now I’m ready.’
Two days later, she went back to Tokyo to learn what the fate of the Crimson Dragon Society would be. Nick was left to his own devices and although there were two of Yoshi’s old security team about the place, they weren’t that communicative. There was nobody else to talk to, so he took a long walk in the woods that bordered the retreat centre. He was healing well but there was some way to go before he’d be fully fit again. He could move his upper body without pain, but his arms and shoulders felt stiff and to his mind, sluggish. It would all improve with time.
