by Barry Lancet
“The town’s a vacation spot for the rich and famous,” another staff member chimed in. “The emperor met his future wife there.”
“I’m not denying the prestige of the place,” I said. “Or that it’s a resort town. Only that no one does any serious shopping there. The mall caters to bargain hunters from Tokyo.”
I knew all about the buying habits of the Karuizawa gentry because several years back I’d explored the idea of selling American and European antiques through a local gallery, but they stocked only commercial pieces that were little more than pricey souvenirs. The rest of the shops toed the same line. The moneyed crowd dropped big money in Tokyo or elsewhere closer to home.
“But the Karuizawa outlets have Gucci, Bulgari, Ferragamo, Armani, Bottega Veneta, and others.”
“Except they are still outlets,” I said. “Everything in Mari’s report puts the Komeki label leagues above the standard luxury brands. The outlet location breaks the pattern.”
“It allows the owner an excuse to visit home a lot.”
“Does she need one?” I asked.
The conversation dried up.
I pondered the problem. “Has anyone been to the mall? Is it elegant?”
“Well, the interiors are as nice as each store chooses to make them, but the site itself is a series of strip malls with some trees and a pond.”
“So we have a mismatch,” I said.
“Or,” a new voice ventured, “it’s an aberration for the owner’s convenience. She still has a home in Kanbara. She works out there. She can certainly afford to indulge her whims.”
All of which, unfortunately, was true.
Stalemate. We were back where we started.
Then Mari broke the standoff: “So, like, I’ve done what you asked, Brodie-san.” Everyone looked her way. “I hacked their back-office network.”
“And?” I asked.
“It’s a supertight system and a little scary. I didn’t want to risk it before. But now’s different, so I got a couple of friends to watch my back. Then I checked for recent activity. They’ve got a GPS mapping system. It tracks truck routes in real time. The Karuizawa truck made a pickup at Narita Airport two hours ago.”
Where Naomi and her husband had recently landed.
“They shouldn’t be sending a truck to the airport,” I said.
“I know, right? So I looked around some more. Komeki has these supercool software graphics. Run your curser over the truck icon and images of the items it’s carrying pop up. You can see all the blouses, sweaters, wallets, purses being shipped. On the truck heading to Karuizawa it’s got all of those, but some cargo comes up blank.”
“What about the other trucks?”
“No blanks.”
A murmur of excitement rose up. From Mari’s report, we knew Komeki’s clothing was hand-stitched in Japan. The material was from the finest Japanese textile houses. They didn’t import product or material. They didn’t export. The designer didn’t show overseas.
There would be no reason to pick up cargo at the international airport.
Unless it were human cargo.
CHAPTER 55
YOU’RE closing the gap,” Mari said, by phone.
Noda sluiced into the well-guarded fast lane to zip around a dawdler before easing back into the slower artery without dropping his speed. In this case, 240 kilometers per hour. In miles, 150.
“Gonna be tight,” the chief detective said.
Noda and I were chasing the Komeki truck in a company car. Mari manned the computer back at Brodie Security, where she could monitor the truck’s movements without losing its location due to poor reception.
Once we broke loose of the traffic on the expressway, Noda’s foot hit the floor and stayed there. The highway leading out to Karuizawa varied from two to four lanes, so the chief detective continued to weave in and around plodding clusters of traffic, avoiding at all costs the cameras trained to catch speed demons tearing up rubber in the fast lane. The illegal black box that alerted practiced speeders to a hidden camera or radar gun sat on our dashboard.
“After the expressway we take Route Forty-Three to Eighteen,” I said, double-checking the car’s built-in navigation system against a printed map. “Somewhere along the way that becomes Prince Road. We drive by a couple of prestigious golf courses and past one of the Prince hotels.”
Echoes of royalty.
Noda nodded but said nothing.
After a closer examination of the outlet map, I said, “The mall complex is huge. There looks to be three or four groups of stores.”
Noda flashed a lightning glance my way. “Is Komeki on its own?”
“No. It’s with a bunch of other shops.”
“Then we’d better start looking elsewhere.”
Son of a bitch. He was right. Outlet operations were streamlined by definition. Everything beyond the backrooms of the stores unfolded in the public eye. Including shipment arrivals. In most outlets, trucks pulled up to the stores and unloaded in plain sight. Whether at the front or back or from a shared loading dock.
Hard to transfer a body in plain sight, even when disguised.
Mari picked up on the first ring, her voice tense. “Something happen?”
“We may have a problem. Can you see if Komeki has any other buildings in the area? A location more secluded than the outlet?”
“Give me a minute . . . searching . . . searching . . . yeah, they have a warehouse . . . but . . . let’s see . . . it’s a long ways away, up Route One Forty-Six . . . hold on . . . I’m looking at a local map . . . now a satellite image . . . it’s a weird location.”
“Why?”
“It’s on the other side of Mount Asama . . . in . . . Tsumagoi . . . Kanbara . . . of all places.”
Kiyomi Komeki’s hometown.
Noda grunted. “That’s our spot.”
Mari’s voice turned tentative. “Brodie-san, maybe she really is the Steam Walker.”
“Hate to admit it, but it’s looking more likely,” I said. “Were you able to check on her movements like I asked yesterday?”
“I did and I couldn’t find anything that gave her an alibi during any of the attacks. But she’s way off the grid, so I can’t really track her either way. I also can’t find her personal email account. Wherever it is, it’s well hidden. There’s no personal correspondence on her company email.” Excitement edged into Mari’s voice. “If she is the Steam Walker, it would tie up all the connections perfectly, including the Komeki logo at Napa.”
“It would,” I said, not to mention the police artist’s impressions about the suspect’s features leaning toward the feminine side.
My phone buzzed immediately after we made our goodbyes, this time with an incoming call from our affiliate at Narita Airport.
“Been trying to get you for the last couple of minutes,” he said.
“Sorry. I was on the phone with the office.”
“Tried Noda’s phone but it went straight to voice mail.”
I turned to the chief detective. “Your phone off?”
“At these speeds, yeah.”
I checked the speedometer. We’d edged up to the 280 mark. Around 170.
“Sorry,” I said to the caller. “What have you got?”
“A living, breathing body.”
“Naomi?”
“No, her husband.”
CHAPTER 56
CAN he talk?” I asked.
“He’s bashed up pretty bad.”
Tad had been beaten unconscious, then pumped full of narcotics and shut in a toilet stall. When the drugs wore off, he’d stumbled out into the terminal, blood splattered all over his clothing. The airport police pounced on him and were all set to arrest him before our affiliate stepped forward.
“So where are you now?” I asked.
“Outside the airport first aid station. . . . Hold on. The nurse is waving me over.”
He kept the line open, but the sound was muffled. I took the opportunity to bring Noda up-t
o-date.
“Get what you can,” the chief detective said, “then get off. I need your eyes.”
Meaning for cop lookout and tracking the route, in that order.
“Right.”
“Brodie, you still there?” our Narita contact said.
“Yeah. What’s the story?”
“Sato can talk. In fact, he insists on it.”
“What are they saying about his condition?”
“The attending physician wants to keep him for observation. He’s got a gash on his head that took ten stitches. There’s a suspicion that the ‘happy cocktail’ the thugs injected him with was a gray market item and could have harmful side effects. So after he talks to you, they’re carting him off to a hospital, where they’ll hold him for at least two days, maybe three. Here’s Sato-san now. I’m going to put it on speaker so I can follow.”
I heard shuffling sounds as the phone was passed, then: “Brodie, is that you?”
“Yes, Tad. You okay?”
An erratic panting erupted over the line. “. . . dizzy and nauseated, but so what? Can you tell me about Naomi? Nobody here’s saying anything. Have they found her?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, God,” Tad said, the tenor of his voice leaping to hysterical in two beats. “It’s happening to her too. You’ve go to stop this, Brodie. You’ve got to.”
“I will, but I need you to fill me in first.”
“Anything. How can I help?”
“Tell me why you disappeared in Los Angeles, then ended up back here in Japan instead of Singapore?”
“What do you mean disappeared?”
“We lost track of you.”
“No, you didn’t. Your man was on our flight.”
“What?” The comment ran in the face of everything Stockton had told me. “All right, start from the beginning. With your landing in LA.”
“Naomi couldn’t stop worrying about her mother,” he said, his breathing loud in my ear. “By the time we got to Los Angeles for our connection to Singapore, Naomi was feeling so guilty we traded in our Singapore tickets for ones to Japan. There was nothing going to the Kyoto area soon enough, so we settled for Tokyo.”
“Is that when you dumped your protection?”
“I told you, he was on our plane. And if anything, he deserted us.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I don’t know, Brodie. One minute he was two steps behind us, the next he was gone. We waited. We started to worry. Then we got a text from him. We gave him our new departure information. He said he’d be on the plane but we wouldn’t be able to spot him and we shouldn’t try.”
“Did you see him after that?”
“No.”
“Not even on board? In passing?”
“No. But it was a jumbo Airbus. More than five hundred passengers on two levels.”
“Why didn’t you give me a heads-up?”
The heavy breathing kicked up a notch. “What do you mean? We thought he was in touch with you.”
I had no answer to that. The Steam Walker had found a weakness in our plan and exploited it.
Tad plowed on. “Are you close to finding Naomi?”
“We’ve got a lead. We’re heading to the Karuizawa area and a place called Tsumagoi.”
With brisk verbal strokes, I apprised him of our progress, and how we were closing the gap.
“Can you stop by and pick me up?” Tad asked. “I want to be there when you find her. I want to help.”
“We’re way beyond your position. The truck left Narita hours ago.”
“Really? I was only out ten or fifteen minutes.”
“You were attacked some three or four hours ago. You need to rest, Tad. You do that and we’ll go after Naomi. What can you tell me about the people who mugged you?”
I heard him shuffle around. “Almost nothing, I’m embarrassed to say. We arrived in Narita and had time to kill before boarding our flight for Tokyo, so we ate. Then we split up to go to the restrooms. The women’s was right next to the men’s. I was soaping my hands when they hit me from behind and kept hitting me. I heard two, maybe three voices. Then I felt a needle prick. I never saw any faces. When I came to, I went looking for Naomi, but airport security nabbed me. I was covered in blood. I was so worried about Naomi, I never bothered to look at myself in the mirror.”
What I understood from the few tidbits Tad had just supplied was that the attack had unfolded in two stages. First, the Steam Walker’s team had breached our security in LA, where they stripped away the bodyguard. Second, the message Stockton had received just before takeoff from Southern California had not mentioned a change in itinerary, so it had been a decoy.
I said, “And there’s still no sign of your wife over there?”
“Your man here’s shaking his head.”
The Steam Walker had Naomi.
CHAPTER 57
I CALLED Mari. “Where are they?”
“Three hundred yards from the exit. You’re only twenty kilometers behind.”
A little more than twelve miles back. At this speed, only four minutes away. If they weren’t about to leave the expressway.
“Let’s keep an open line from here,” I said. “I’m putting you on speaker. If you have nothing to report, just continue tracking.”
“Okay.”
I set my mobile in the dashboard cradle. Around the next bend, we entered extreme terrain. Taller mountains with abrupt upheavals of rock filled our windshield. The new peaks were high and dramatic. Evergreens ran up leaf-covered slopes until towering reddish-brown stacks of volcanic stone interrupted their progress, jutting into the sky, mighty and proud, demanding and dominant. No evergreens could tackle them.
With each turn in the expressway, a new stony butte swung into view, shooting skyward with authority. These weren’t volcanoes themselves, but rather hardened beds of lava rock shoved upward at a later time with the tumultuous buckling and thrusts of the earth’s crust. It was as if we’d jetted back through time and entered some long-lost terrain.
This was the world of the Steam Walkers.
* * *
“The truck just exited the expressway,” Mari said. “You’re coming up on the same turnoff.”
Noda nodded but stayed focused on the road. He maintained his speed until the last two hundred yards, then decelerated swiftly and swung into the sharp turn of the ramp far too fast.
The car drifted sideways. Burning rubber reached my nostrils. The back tire edged onto the shoulder and caught the lip of the embankment, a forty-foot drop beyond. Noda flicked the steering wheel, and the rear of the vehicle whipped back onto the roadway, swinging into position.
I kept my eyes straight ahead, and my mouth shut. Working with Noda was never dull.
Mari’s voice broke the silence. “Okay, you’re on Route Forty-Three. They’re on Route Eighteen, just passing the last golf course.”
“How far back are we?”
“Eight kilometers.”
Damn. Still five miles behind. In a flash we’d lost ground.
No, not ground, time. At the expressway exit, we’d narrowed the gap to within three minutes, but now, on surface streets, at lower speeds, while our physical distance jelled at five miles, the time to traverse the distance ballooned from three to twelve minutes.
Which was why Noda had held the highway speed until the last possible second, milking the road for every inch he could manage.
“They’ve hit the edge of the outlets,” Mari announced. “They’re three hundred yards from the intersection . . . they’ve turned . . . heading toward the outlet entrance . . . closer . . . closer . . . oh no!”
“What?”
“As expected, they’ve driven past the outlet, but they’re headed away from the warehouse.”
I checked the map. She was right. Was there a third location? Hidden and not on the company books?
Noda and I swapped a look.
* * *
Mari came back on with an update:
“There’s no third building. The driver took a detour to avoid construction.”
Mari guided us through the alternate route, then said, “They’ve turned back toward the warehouse access road.”
Noda saw an opening in the traffic, zipped in and out between three cars, then ran two red lights. We hit the access road, Route 146, and soon after began our ascent toward Mount Asama. Kyu-Karuizawa, where the emperor met his future bride, was a few miles to the east. Mount Asama, which had buried the hamlet of Kanbara, was somewhere directly ahead.
As was the Steam Walker’s home ground.
Had Mari pegged the Walker’s identity? Were we actually chasing a fashion designer–assassin? One, moreover, who moved like a ghost in and out of Japan, killing at will?
Route 146 snaked up the mountain, its curves long and lazy. Lush forest bordered the roadway. The trappings of the resort town yielded to pristine woodland with low grasses and shrubs underfoot. Pines. Birches. Elms. Then they, too, began to thin, and small stacks of lava rock poked through the groundcover.
Without warning, Mount Asama sprang into view, tall and brooding, its peak shrouded in cloud cover. The sky darkened. A heavy downpour pummeled our vehicle. The volcano commanded its own mini-climate, and it was dismal.
We raced onward. Off to the left I glimpsed Onioshidashi. The name translated as What the Devil Pushed Out—awkward in English but in Japanese a perfect summation of the nightmarish landscape streaming by outside our window.
More than two hundred years ago, around the time the volcano buried the people of Kanbara, it had also loosed a monstrous lava outpouring that buckled and cracked and built towers of rock ten, twenty, and thirty feet high. The outcroppings sprawled as far as the eye could see, wild and desolate and alien and unknowable.
We rolled on.
* * *
“You’re close,” Mari said. “Another three-quarters of a mile, on your right.”
By degrees, nature reversed itself. The gruesome volcanic pilings gave way to shrubbery, then virgin woodlands, then plebeian roadside attractions—Japanese diners offering tempura, noodles, and fresh-baked pastries. Not civilization as it was meant to be practiced but at least no longer primeval.
