Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  As he stood outside the torture building all these weeks later, Patrick was secretly hoping that the rumors were true: that the Rat Catcher who ordered these and other atrocities had indeed survived. Because if he had, Patrick had the perfect sendoff for him from the evil karma he had created in this life. That what he was contemplating doing was evil in its own right never crossed his mind, so unslakeable was his thirst for revenge. Revenge for Yumi, revenge for himself, and maybe most of all, revenge for the children who had been murdered at the Rat Catcher’s hands.

  He drifted slowly through the camp with the axe on his shoulder, not attempting to muffle his footfalls, and hoping that they might flush a certain someone out of wherever he was, if indeed he was still in the camp. As he walked, Patrick heard a churring sound coming from the direction of several large glass jars of honey next to an active hive. The flowers in the area were in full bloom, and the bees looked as though they had been well looked after. He picked up one of the jars and continued walking, sipping the cloying nectar as he rounded the main administration building. The honey was a pleasant change from the steady diet of rice, kimchee, and bits of pork everyone had been living on at the shelter. Then he stopped in his tracks. On the side of one of the buildings was a large portable wire pen holding at least fifty rats. They looked ravenous and screeched in fear as he approached. He dripped some of the honey into the pen and the rats were all over each other trying to lap up every precious drop that hung from the wires.

  A moment later Patrick heard what sounded like a shower running in a barracks-like structure fifty feet away. As he got closer to the barracks, he began to make out the sound of humming. Whoever it was seemed to be enjoying his shower. Patrick racked his brains to remember the sound of the Rat Catcher’s voice, but no doubt owing to the shock of his last encounter with him, couldn’t even recall if the commandant’s voice had been high or low in pitch. He slowly and deliberately ascended the wooden steps of the barracks, allowing the heels of his boots to scrape along the planks of the porch. He tried the door. It was locked. The humming stopped. After another moment the shower was turned off.

  “Who’s there?” a voice called out authoritatively in Korean. The voice of someone in charge. Then it came to Patrick: the Rat Catcher’s voice had been a high baritone that he jammed down into his larynx for an extra layer of resonance, like an adolescent trying to impress a date. But there is only one date awaiting this son of a bitch, thought Patrick: a long overdue date with destiny. After the Rat Catcher called out again, louder this time, Patrick swung his axe several times into the door and kicked it open. A rifle was propped against the opposite wall.

  “Who’s there, dammit?” the now-terrified voice called out. Patrick answered back with a voice uninflected with emotion. “Jiog,” he said. “Hell.” He could hear the Rat Catcher moving quickly, so he kicked in the partially open bathroom door and saw the bag-of-bones sadist who had inspired so much fear in the prisoners cowering in the corner of the shower stall, trying frantically to get his pants on and no doubt regretting the fact that he had left his rifle so far from the shower. Patrick aimed it at him.

  “No!” the Rat Catcher called out.

  “That’s right,” Patrick said with an otherworldly smile. A bullet would be too easy. He was a firm believer in karma, and the Rat Catcher’s payback should and would be hellish. Patrick welcomed the prospect of being the Angel of Death, not realizing, in the heat of vengeance, that he himself was about to go over to the dark side. He set down the rifle and picked up the axe again.

  He ordered the former superintendent out of the barracks and told him to take off the trousers that were half on, half off. The man quickly complied, apparently thinking that he would be shown mercy if he did as he was ordered. Wrong. Gesturing with the axe, Patrick ordered him over to the nearby interrogation room, where Patrick and thousands of others had been tortured.

  Once inside, Patrick tied the Rat Catcher to the same pole where he himself had almost been murdered. His heart beating wildly at the imminent prospect of retribution, Patrick felt as though he had been taken over by an unnatural force that impelled him to his next act. He went outside to the wire pen where the rats were kept and carried it back inside. The rats screeched even louder when they saw their nemesis. Patrick flung down the axe and poured the contents of the honey jar all over the Rat Catcher, whose eyes went wide with terror as he realized what was about to happen. Patrick then recited the words that Yumi had told him the Rat Catcher delivered before the many executions he had ordered: “Traitors who betray their nation and its people will meet the same fate.” Then he opened the wire pen and left the building, walking back to the makeshift orphanage and humming the “Dies irae” from Mozart’s “Requiem.” It wasn’t until he was about a half mile down the road that the screams came to a halt.

  When he got back to the orphanage, Patrick said not a word about what had happened, but slowly a rumor began to circulate about how the Rat Catcher had been eaten alive by rats and that a foreign-looking man with graying hair on one side of his head had been seen walking from the prison, ignoring the screams of the person inside.

  As Patrick was relating his story, Yasuhara Roshi had been leaning closer and closer in. When Patrick finished, he blew out his cheeks, sat back in his chair, and looked out the window at the night sky for a long moment. Then he looked back at Patrick.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like that.”

  Patrick hung his head in shame. His teacher continued.

  “I’m not going to sit in judgement of you. I don’t know what it was like for you and Yumi at that prison. But people have two natures, Patrick. One inclines to do good things and the other inclines to do bad things. Sometimes very bad things. But no matter how bad a person appears to be, that other side almost never dies. It just lies dormant, waiting to wake up.”

  “Are you talking about him or me?”

  “Both. Everyone. I’ll tell you this: If we take a person’s life, we take his future, his potential, away from him. And also from the world. We never know when someone will change and realize their mistakes and do wonderful things for others, but if we take their lives away, we take away that possibility.” He paused and held Patrick’s eyes.

  “Now. There are also people whose karma is such that nothing will change them for the better in this life. And sometimes it becomes necessary to send such people into their next life before they can destroy others.” He cocked his head to one side. “But maybe not so dramatically,” he said in a low voice as he poured them tea from the pump thermos on the low table.

  “You once wanted to become a monk, and I told you no. You were very upset. Do you remember?”

  “Yes. Of course I remember.”

  Yasuhara Roshi nodded his head. “The life of a monk is not for you. But you have found your true calling with Yumi, correct?”

  Patrick nodded and again felt a wash of guilt come over him. “Yes, even though I don’t deserve her.”

  “Everyone feels that way at some time. But your duty now is to protect Yumi, the boy, and all of those people who are in danger at the Olympics.” The old man began to smile. “You should be glad you’re not a monk like me. All I do is meditate and lead sutra services. If I were your age, I would welcome the chance to be in your shoes.” His face turned serious again.

  “Now you need to go and do your duty.”

  He rose from the table, and Patrick rose to join him. The old Zen teacher and his favorite student embraced for several long moments. Then Patrick was on his way.

  CHAPTER 26

  August 1

  In a typically Japanese blending of tradition and continuity, the planners of the 2021 Olympics went to great lengths to establish a tie-in to the 1964 Games by creating the Heritage Zone, where most of the events of the earlier Olympics had taken place. One reason for this was to show off the lasting beauty of the architecture from
the earlier Games, as opposed to venues in other countries that often fell into decrepitude after a few years. One of the signature venues from the 1964 Games was the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, a Tokyo landmark famous for the striking design of its suspension roof. It was a natural for the image shown between programs on the NHK national broadcasting system located directly next door. The thirteen-thousand-seat gymnasium was scheduled to be used for the 2021 handball competition. But only if it stayed standing long enough.

  With a twinkle in his cobalt-blue eyes and a ready smile for all he came in contact with, Lionel Moreau was what some in the town of Shibata in Niigata Prefecture called “a good gaijin” to distinguish him from the shady Middle Eastern characters on the edge of town who were said to traffic in stolen cars and drugs. How the Middle Easterners had even made it past Japan’s draconian immigration checkpoints at every port of entry was beyond anyone, and the citizenry all had what came to be known as “the talk” with their children. It had nothing to do with the birds and bees. Rather, it was a firm admonishment that every kid heard from kindergarten age on up that they were never to walk alone and to always run to the nearest koban (neighborhood police box) if any of the “dark people,” as the Middle Easterners were called, spoke even a single word to them.

  Although Moreau had chestnut-brown hair, he was not a “dark person” in skin color. The former Catholic schoolboy had grown up in the upper-middle-class Paris suburb of Montreuil. As a journalism student at the Sorbonne, he quickly earned the nickname “Moreau le montant” or “Moreau the stud,” for the number of women, young and old, he had seduced with his smooth manner and tender charms. What he kept under wraps, even in permissive France, was that he also played for the other team, and his string of male conquests was as long as that of his female ones. He was particularly attracted to the passive late-teen catamite type.

  Moreau was drafted into the French army with a specialty in high explosives owing to the fact that he had earned a blasting license at age sixteen and worked for a construction company in high school, demolishing old buildings in the fourteenth arrondissement to make way for underground garages. Stationed in Kosovo as part of a UN peacekeeping force, he witnessed firsthand the carnage that had befallen the Muslims of the populace at the hands of a Serbian paramilitary group known as the Scorpions. His stomach turned at the sight of a Scorpion killing field his unit came across in the forest outside the town of Podujevo, and he wondered far into the night how the ostensibly Christian Serbs could have perpetrated such atrocities on a group of fellow human beings solely on the basis of their religious beliefs.

  Upon his return to France after a year in the Balkans, Moreau became depressed by what he saw every night on the television, especially a documentary on the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon told from a viewpoint that was sympathetic to the Arabs. For the most part, though, attack after attack on Arab countries was rationalized by the talking heads, with the Islamist retaliatory attacks condemned as terrorism. In the small room he rented in Paris, Moreau cheered the underdog in these TV battles while drinking Bordeaux from the bottle and exercising his old habits of seducing any and all willing women and young men.

  But after a while he grew disgusted with his life and began to read the Koran as part of a search for meaning that included quitting drinking and completely abstaining from non-halal food items. Sometime later he decided to formally convert to Islam, so he took the Metro to a mosque located in one of Paris’s banlieus where the imam regularly urged the faithful to wage holy war on the infidel. Moreau’s point of radicalization took place on 9/11, when he cheered in front of a TV with his fellow believers as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. They took particular mirth in the sight of people jumping from windows on the upper floors.

  “It’s your turn now!” they screamed at the TV screen over and over as they high-fived each other.

  Soon thereafter Moreau joined an al-Qaeda cell that was active in the banlieu near the mosque and cut off all contact with his infidel family. His leader in the cell was Mohammed al-Tikriti, one of the original followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq. After a rigorous vetting process to make sure he wasn’t a plant of the jahili nonbelievers, al-Tikriti gave Moreau the fighting name of “Dergham.”

  “It means a tough and fearless lion with magnificent sharp teeth,” explained Tikriti at Moreau’s initiation. Moreau beamed with pride in front of his fellow initiates. “But you mustn’t bare your teeth until you are ready to strike,” al-Tikriti added. He told Moreau that he would eventually be sent undercover to various locations around the world as one of the terrorist group’s “striking lions.”

  Caucasian converts are prized by radical Islamic groups for the ability their skin color gives them to operate freely in Europe, North America, and Asia without arousing the suspicion that Middle Easterners draw. But converts are not just tools to get past security. They are a way for the terror groups to become a global movement. For their part, many of these same converts are eager to prove their devotion to jihad by volunteering for the most dangerous assignments around the world, as Moreau did soon after his initiation.

  “That will come in time,” al-Tikriti assured his young convert. He could see great potential in this “Dergham,” possibly even rising to be a leader who would command a cell of his own, plot strategy, and launch attacks. First, though, he would cut those magnificent sharp teeth by raising money and organizing cells in Asia, which is how he ended up in the town of Shibata, Niigata Prefecture. Despite lacking any kind of background in restaurant work, Moreau somehow wangled his way into a job at a sushi restaurant, where he bused tables and washed dishes.

  What al-Tikriti couldn’t see from Paris was the change taking place in Moreau’s brain during his initial time in Asia as the result of a head injury he had sustained in Kosovo. A newly inducted squad mate had instinctively swung the rifle he was cleaning at a mosquito, of all things, and had caught Moreau in the side of the head, causing what seemed at first a slight concussion. But over time the injury got worse and was now manifesting itself as psychotic symptoms that began with sudden episodes of agitation and hostility.

  After moving to Tokyo, Dergham Moreau took up residence at one of the local mosques without letting anyone know of his al-Qaeda affiliation. After he began talking to himself and lashing out at the other worshippers, they began to wonder if this brother was possessed by some jinn, or evil spirit, and they purposely began going out of their way to avoid him. Officials at the mosque were required by custom and religious tradition to continue to offer him hospitality, but everyone desperately hoped that the man would become tired of living in a country whose language he didn’t understand and which was riddled with haram, or unclean things prohibited by Islam.

  Moreau was a daily avid reader of Milestones, an inflammatory screed by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamic radical who was executed in 1966 for conspiracy to assassinate the Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser. Qutb was also one of Osama bin Laden’s main guiding lights, and his call for “true” Muslims to destroy anything or anyone deemed haram spurred Dergham to action. But he could not completely shake his own haram instincts, and in order to make these forbidden urges less conspicuous, he moved out of the mosque and took up informal residence at one of Tokyo’s many internet cafes, not an uncommon way for people of straitened circumstances to find lodging. He then created a website from which he exhorted fellow believers to wreak apocalyptic retribution on this ungodly culture, where alcohol and pig’s meat were freely consumed, and where, beneath a veneer of quiet respectability, so many vile reprobates freely indulged in shockingly repugnant vices. Meanwhile, he trawled the back streets of Shinjuku’s 2- chome area for the young male pickups he favored above all others.

  Meanwhile, back at the Yokohama corpse hotel, Dreamboy stared for hours at the photo he was given of the man with the cobalt-blue eyes and began to write daily poems to him. “My heart
burns with sublime incandescence,” one poem began, and he counted the hours until they would meet. Pung had given him detailed instructions on how to establish contact.

  CHAPTER 27

  August 1

  Choy worked best alone. It was a habit he developed as a member of the Inmin Boanseong, North Korean State Police. Back in 2012, he had worked with two high-ranking inspectors who were now languishing in a kwaliso, or concentration camp, because an underling turned them in for sharing a single beer during the official mourning period for Kim Jong-il. The two inspectors’ relatively low rank kept them from the fate of Kim Jong-un’s defense minister, who was strapped to the barrel of an antiaircraft gun. What was left of his body was then fed to pigs. So if nothing else, self-preservation dictated that Choy spend as much time alone as possible during the Kim regime. During his long hours of solitude he had elevated his cyber expertise to the equivalent of a Level 10 Google senior fellow, a prowess he put to use in siphoning off $4 billion from Bureau 39 into Patrick’s offshore bank accounts before he defected.

  Now, four years later, he sat in a small room adjoining Patrick’s office with his hands behind his head, wondering what on earth the pixel-embedded Sky Heart characters could mean. And who had sent the email containing the characters? He set out to find an answer by disguising himself behind a virtual private network as the original sender and simply reversing the characters in a follow-up email. His email also included a backdoor virus embedded in the image of the characters. One click on the attachment by someone on the other end and Choy would be in the Bureau 39 recipient’s system. He would then be one step closer to finding out who was communicating with the Bureau he once worked for.

  He had now been waiting over a day for the person at the Bureau to be curious enough about the reversal of the two characters to open the attachment and respond. As he sat looking out the window at Hibiya Park, he let his mind wander through other strategies he might consider next. This one was looking like a bust.