Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  The other man said softy, “We’ll talk more, soon. Please plan to spend some time with me before we go to fetch our luggage, Mr. Lassiter. The men’s room at the airport would be a good place to do that. It’s a place certain others can’t follow us again as she just did. Once there, I can fill you in completely. Until then, please believe that woman’s not to be trusted, not for a second. And please believe she may even mean you lethal harm, Mr. Lassiter. Don’t you dare doubt that is true. Are we clear on that much?”

  Hector sized the man up, not fully certain. With an uneasy stomach, Hector nevertheless said, “Clear as crystal.”

  ***

  After settling into his seat, Hector instinctively fastened his seatbelt as the jet freshly bucked and rocked through waves of mounting turbulence. A bit worried for Haven, he glanced over his shoulder. She was making her way back up the aisle, holding tightly to seat backs either side to steady herself. As she neared Hector, the plane pitched hard to the left and Haven sprawled indecorously across the lap of the blond, self-proclaimed CIA agent.

  Rising, she apologized, tucking her blouse back into her tailored skirt, then accepted Hector’s hand as she further fought the plane’s jostling. Haven settled in and deftly fastened her seat belt just as the plane took a stomach-dropping plunge.

  Hector, nervous but determined to put up a brave front, said, “I’m sure they’ll just climb a bit harder, go a bit higher—you know, rise above it all again, so to speak.”

  Surely enough, the nose of the jet was already arcing upward.

  Hector chanced a glance over and saw the blond CIA agent was sweating, tugging determinedly at his tie and taking deep breaths.

  The poor bastard certainly looked sick, and also—just possibly—terrified.

  3 / Dead on Arrival

  About an hour out from London Heathrow, the stewardesses began passing out damp towels and last refreshments.

  As everyone else seemed intent on combating in-flight dehydration, Hector ordered a cup of piping black coffee and watched his fellow passengers stir back to wakefulness. It amazed him how many had managed to somehow sleep through the violent turbulence.

  Having napped for about twenty minutes, Haven awakened looking sharp and focused, no trace whatever of a hangover. She was much woman, then, particularly when Hector calculated how prodigiously she’d out-drank him.

  Haven excused herself to the restroom again and returned about ten minutes later, smelling of freshened, musky perfume and the minty aroma of toothpaste.

  Settling in and accepting her own coffee—a morning wake-me-up polluted with cream and sugar—Haven nodded at the bulging seat flap close against his knees and said, “You finished your friend’s book?”

  “About thirty minutes ago,” Hector said.

  “And your thoughts? To use the advert writers’ phrase, was it ‘a corker’?”

  He laughed and said, “It was very good indeed, maybe even Ian’s best and strongest Bond book, although it ends on a sort of a cliff-hanger. Not sure yet how I feel about that aspect. If Ian left it there, it would certainly be quite brave. But since I gather it’s a fake-out of some kind because of subsequent 007 releases?” Hector shrugged. “Afraid I was kind of distracted in 1957 and 1958, so I missed this one when it was new and I haven’t touched the follow-ups yet. You finished the Ambler?”

  “Yes. And it was rather disappointing on the whole, I’ll confess, just as I feared. I’d offer to trade, but I sense it would be a terribly uneven exchange from my end.”

  He pulled out the Fleming and handed it to her. “You take the Bond as a gift. That Ambler I actually read a few weeks ago.” Hector, too, had found the book not quite up to par.

  With a burst of mild static, the pilot interrupted them, warning of their impending landing and directing the airhostesses to begin prepping the cabin for final approach. Their captain asked all passengers return to their seats and buckle in, fearing more turbulence as they again sacrificed altitude.

  Haven sipped more of her coffee, then asked, “Mr. James Bond’s creator—he’ll be meeting you at the airport, I suppose?”

  Hector shook his head, signaling for a last refill of his own cup. “No, I have an accommodation in a very fine hotel before Ian and I fly out together to Japan. Putting up at the Dorchester, courtesy of an American magazine. One of the rare good perks of corresponding.”

  “Good indeed, but surely you’re not going to simply hole up in that posh hotel, smashing though it is,” Haven said. “Wouldn’t you like to get a little time on the town before heading to the East?”

  Hector thought about that. He might like that very much—once he knew more about what Haven truly represented and if what he learned about her proved sufficiently reassuring. After all, according to the man he hardly knew, the alleged American spy across the aisle, Haven possibly intended to kill Hector.

  But the more he’d thought about that ominous claim, the more ludicrous it seemed. What could possibly motivate this dusky, dishy Brit to mean him harm like that? What possible motive could result in this British-looker called Haven Branch wanting him dead?

  Hector made an admittedly idiosyncratic but regular practice of cataloguing his enemies and keeping tabs on their whereabouts to the extent that was at all possible. Haven Branch didn’t seem to line up with any old foes or lingering vendettas that made any sort of sense. She could have no discernible, logical link to the half-dozen or so of his monsters still lurking out there—the ones who’d indeed put Hector in the ground, given any reasonable shot at doing so.

  “Dinner at the hotel would be on my current employer,” he said, “but drinks out after could be wonderful, and maybe a bit of a walking tour after that would be good, too. Last time I was in England was during the waning days of the war. Too much of the city was still a pile of rubble, then. I’d guess that’s all been put right by now?”

  “Put right is one term for it,” she said. A sad smile. “The last war’s scars have been deftly obscured. But most of what was blown up or burned down was never really replaceable, you know. They just don’t build them that way anymore.”

  He said, “I assume you were evacuated during the war?”

  “No, I wasn’t ‘in country’ at the time,” she said. “My father was a kind of diplomat. We were in Japan, of all places, just before and after the war.”

  “You were very young then?”

  “I suppose I was about nineteen or twenty, so not so terribly young,” she said. “I loved Japan. I still do. I very much enjoyed going back after the war, even changed and wrecked as it was then. Even if the Japanese people had been regarded as some kind of enemy.” She seemed to have trouble conceiving of how that could ever be so.

  ***

  The freckle-faced stewardess, looking damnably and inexplicably fresh, began gently waking stubbornly sleeping passengers and making sure their seats were upright and belts fastened. She paused, frowned, then gently shook at the blond man seated across the aisle from Hector.

  Terrence Hunt didn’t respond. She shook him again, then said repeatedly, “Sir? Sir? Are you unwell?”

  The stewardess—“Gwen,” according to the metal tag pinned over her left breast—shook the man’s shoulder a last time, then frowned once more and dared to touch the man’s throat on the right side, just under the chin. She said too loudly, far too unthinkingly, “Oh, my gosh! I do believe he’s dead!” Her shaking hand recoiled from the stranger’s neck.

  Frowning, Hector unfastened his seat belt and reached across the aisle, grabbing hold of Hunt’s wrist. The still man was quite cold to the touch. No pulse at all.

  The little Asian man seated next to the corpse immediately looked rather ill—pushing further toward his other, still-alive neighbor who was also shrinking away from the corpse.

  Hector said softly to the stewardess, “Dead, yes, he is that thing, definitely. And he’s been that way for quite a while, I think.”

  Hector let go of the dead man’s wrist. The man’s body was w
ell on its way to assuming cabin temperature.

  ***

  All of the passengers were at least briefly delayed in their disembarking as a result of Terrence Hunt’s mysterious death. Because they had been the most-recently observed to interact with Hunt before he died, Hector and Haven were questioned last and longest.

  Apart from admitting to offering the man a requested light, Hector had nothing useful to provide. He refrained from sharing the alleged spy’s professed vocation, as well as the warning Hunt had given Hector about Haven.

  Under the best of circumstances, Hector couldn’t imagine that the strangeness of all that—let alone the fact it may all have been crazy talk, in the end—wouldn’t result in anything other than further, longer entanglement with authorities.

  As for Haven, she’d merely been pitched into the man’s lap by the air turbulence, but surely that was hardly of consequence? Unless perhaps—as one of the airport security officials pointed out—the man had died from some communicable illness to which Haven might have been exposed through that robust, if fleeting, tactile contact.

  But the dead man had not been coughing. Hunt had shown no sign of carrying a fever and he hadn’t once reached for a handkerchief. He’d never asked for water to help wash down any pills, as Gwen, the sexy, ginger stewardess, testified.

  Eventually, after leaving authorities information about where they might be reached during the coming hours, Hector and Haven were at last released to collect their luggage.

  ***

  After lunch and a shower, Hector napped a bit in his sumptuous hotel bed, a restorative idyll that soothed the kinks in his back after the long flight spent almost exclusively sitting.

  He showered again, then shaved and dressed for an evening about Westminster with Haven. He even elected to wear a black knit tie for their evening out, figuring any of the better English restaurants might be a bit fussier regarding such formalities than the eateries back home.

  ***

  Hector sat in the hotel lounge, savoring a Perrier and waiting for Haven Branch to come and “collect him”—her phrase. She’d seemed quite pleased by the prospect of playing tour guide.

  After ordering a second bottle of sparkling water—this one with an extra twist of lemon—Hector was startled to find his fleeting, former neighbor on the Pan Am flight from New York suddenly at his side. He caught himself instinctively reaching under his jacket for his Colt before remembering it was stashed in the gun vault in his home back in New Mexico.

  He next considered the Perrier bottle sitting alongside his drinking glass—it might prove weapon enough in a pinch, Hector supposed. In the movies, bottles broke easily upon impact with heads. But that was just cinema hokum. In real life, hefted and swung, such bottles more typically shattered skulls, killing the one on the receiving end.

  And even past sixty, Hector was willing to wager he had deciding height and weight on the little Japanese man if it came to any flavor of fair fight. He said to the stranger, “Please don’t make me hurt you, pal.”

  The man’s dark eyes widened. He was clearly startled by Hector’s threat. “Hurt you?” His English was still rather faltering, but measurably better than on the plane. “No, not to hurt you. That’s not the purpose I have. To protect you—that’s what I’m trying to do, Mr. Lassiter.”

  “Very thoughtful, then,” Hector said. “Who are you, exactly?”

  The man held out a smallish hand in his approximation of a western handshake. “Hiroshi Takahashi.”

  Hector hesitated, bit his lip, then shook. His mitt engulfed Hiroshi’s hand. He found himself throttling back on a natural tendency to apply some real pressure for a handshake that would be remembered, the kind of howdy-do he’d give some publisher or fellow Texan, back home.

  “I’m Hector Lassiter, as you already seem to know.” He flashed his less-than-friendly smile. “I’ll let you know in a few minutes if I’m truly pleased to meet you, Hiroshi. Frankly, some troubling things have already been said about you.”

  “Almost certainly all of them are lies,” the other man said. “The man who was killed, the man on the plane? He said something to you about me, yes?”

  “That’s right. He said you belong to a secret organization of some sort in your homeland. Didn’t get the full fill before the luckless bastard turned tits up, but I gather the name translates into something roughly equivalent to ‘The Black Dragon Club.’”

  An emphatic headshake. “No. There is such a thing. . .we think there is. This Club is newer. It’s a branch you could say, of an older club called the Black Dragon Society. That club was ended by your occupying authorities in 1946. Or it seemed it was ended. It is back now and inspiring other secret groups. All of them, we think, are dedicated to restoring the Emperor’s surrendered status as a living deity—as a leader to be venerated.”

  The stranger’s eyes grew earnest. “I swear to you, I’m not a member of that kind of a group. I am with the National Safety Forces. We are allies, then. And we—my people—are very worried about the Black Dragons. That is also because a writer like you, but one of my countrymen, a very important one, seems to be warming to the movement. But we believe a bigger, darker organization is in back of even that group that we now know as the Black Dragon Club.”

  Hector, palpably skeptical but not particularly concerned if he conveyed any doubt, said, “And who is this bigger, darker organization?”

  “That’s what I and my colleagues are trying to learn. It is something we believe may have come out of post-war Germany, but is now spreading its reach everywhere, and far more successfully than the Reich ever did.”

  “Ominous. . . You said some novelist has been caught up in this—” Hector almost attempted pronunciation of the Japanese version of the Black Dragon Club’s name, but as a high school dropout who spoke several other languages, he told himself he had nothing to prove, and so went with the familiar. Course correcting, Hector said, “This writer you say is being courted by these Black Dragons—I’m trying to imagine myself doing something similar back home and coming up short. Who is this Japanese author, exactly?”

  No hesitation: “A novelist of some renown, but known by his penname of Yukio Mishima.”

  Hector certainly knew that name. Hell, he’d also read in translation much of Mishima’s works. The man was a quietly and stubbornly a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mishima’s recent short story, “Patriotism,” about a young couple making passionate love before committing graphically described ritual suicide together, still haunted Hector, particularly after what Hem’s kid brother had resonantly described as Ernest Hemingway’s equally recent “seppuku by shotgun.” Mix in Ian’s next planned Bond novel, and there seemed to be something decidedly samurai in the wind, presently.

  But there was something else—a lunch with Mishima was already on Hector’s Japanese appointment books. Too much there to be mere coincidence.

  Hector once more hefted his Perrier bottle, again weighed it, but then used it to freshen his glass. “The dead man on the plane, who was he? Do you know?”

  “You talked together by the bathroom door,” the other man said quickly, toying with his inhaler. “Didn’t the man tell you who he was?”

  “Oh, he introduced himself, to be sure,” Hector said carefully, “just the same as you did to me a few moments ago. I have only your word you’re what you claim to be. The same can be said of that sorry son of a bitch who’s headed to an icebox. You were sitting next to him during his last hours, and so you were certainly well-positioned to kill him.” Hector smiled, studying the man. “Please try to see it from my point of view.”

  “But, no. The man on the plane who died was named Sebastian Keene. Mr. Lassiter, we believe Mr. Keene is with that darker organization I have told you about. You were an OSS agent, and working closely with a British spy. We know that. We know you worked with Mr. Ian Lancaster Fleming. You two came to Japan to try and get information regarding a weapon my country’s government worked on as it ra
ced to beat your country’s atom bomb. We know all that.”

  Rubbing his jaw, Hector took a moment to reflect.

  After a time, lighting a cigarette, he said, “You’re saying your country was trying for the A-bomb, too?”

  “No, not quite that,” Hiroshi said. “The imperial government was after something quite different, Mr. Lassiter. Something. . .biological.” He hesitated, looking rather ashamed at what his country had contemplated. “It was their aim to create a thing that could be spread through crop dusters. We—they—planned to have planes fly all over your country, dropping this thing on your farms, your crops. A thing that would have killed your farms, your animals. It would make everything it touched barren. No horse, no cow, pig, goat and chicken would ever make another. Your plants would all die. We—they—meant to starve your country into defeat. Is any of this ringing a bell, Mr. Lassiter?”

  Hector took a deep and cleansing breath, finding his center. He shook his head, firmly. “Not a word of it. Honestly? It all sounds like a fantasy worthy of one of Ian’s wild James Bond novels.” Hector smiled, massaging his brazen lie. “Nah, it doesn’t ring true to me, not one goddamn bit. Sorry.”

  A tepid smile. “Very sorry back, Mr. Lassiter, because I’m not sure I believe you. Not at all.”

  Hector smiled back, all menace. “I’m not sure that I care if you do.” He opted for a change-up. “The woman sitting next to me on the plane—”

  A knowing smile: “Ah, Miss Haven Branch. . . .”

  At least they agreed upon the name. That seemed something to draw at least scant promise from. “Yes, Haven. What’s your take on Miss Branch?”

  “Take? I don’t really have any—if by take you mean an opinion of some kind. I’m told she’s MI5.” A half-smile. “That is to say, she is with British Military Intelligence, Section 5.” A hopeful smile, anticipating understanding. “You know? The British Secret Service?”