A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

It was several minutes before he finished, and when he came out of his zone of concentration there was another interruption, as Mama-san brought the plate of skewered chicken parts and another Coke, asked Susan what she wanted, and received only a drink order, then scurried away.

  “You shouldn’t be anywhere near us tomorrow night, in case it goes bad. But I wanted you to see what I was doing; I told you I’d keep you in the loop.”

  Then, finally, he looked at her and knew instantly that something was wrong.

  “All right,” he said, “what’s up? You haven’t said a thing.”

  “You remember I once told you I wasn’t a bullshitter?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not going to start now. I’ll be honest and blunt, all right. So no matter what, you can never say, She misled me.”

  “Oh, Christ, Susan. I don’t like where this is going.”

  “I’m closing you down, Swagger. It’s over. It’s finished. Time to go home.”

  He didn’t feel anger or rage or betrayal. She had never exactly pretended to be his pal in this and had always told him she’d do what was best by the rules of her duty, not her feelings. And she’d never quite bought into it, the whole warrior thing. On the way back from the fight at the polisher’s, with the blood soaking his pants and spattered on his face, she’d said nothing except:

  “Did you hurt anybody?”

  “No, but I killed five men.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “It wasn’t no movie. It was like a pie fight in a sausage factory. I didn’t like one goddamn thing about it, but they would have cut me deep as I cut them, so I did what I had to. The old man is fine and has left. I have the sword, so that’s fine. The yaks will clean up, once they find out, because they don’t want no cops nosing into their business. It’ll be fine, no mess.”

  She had only said, “No mess this time.”

  Now she said, “This can go one of three ways. I hope you see that it is best if it goes the first way.”

  “And that would be?”

  “You give me your false passport. You go out with me to a government van and you are driven to a U.S. Air Force base not far from here. I have arranged, or rather with some dickering and string pulling the ambassador has arranged, for you to be flown home, gratis, by the United States Air Force, outside all channels. You will be landed in California, escorted to the gate, and permitted to exit. That’s the end of your involvement. What has happened over the past few weeks here in Japan ceases to exist. There was no—I can’t even remember what your passport says.”

  “Thomas Lee.”

  “There was no Thomas Lee. He’s gone, you’re gone, it’s over. You go back to Arkansas.”

  “Idaho.”

  “Whatever. Meanwhile, the ambassador finds a way to slip a report on your findings that I have written to certain sympathetic Japanese Ministry of the Interior officials. It will give them some guidance. I hope they act on it, and I feel certain that within the Ministry of the Interior, there is a clique that will want very hard to proceed. It may take some time and there will be no illusion of progress for a long time. But eventually, as the Japanese sort this out, they will proceed and the thing will be done, and those who killed Philip Yano will be punished. In any event, since we now have the sword, the immediate plan of the man who styles himself a shogun has been disrupted. He will not win reelection to AJVS, he will be undercut and destroyed. So that’s something. And in the end, we will achieve justice.”

  “You know that won’t happen.”

  “Way number two. Exactly the same outcome, except that you make some sort of ruckus or act irresponsibly. Four large gentlemen enter the restaurant. They happen to be former South Korean Special Forces guys who handle contract work for certain embassy departments when needed. They are very tough. Something like seventeen black belts among them. Lots of combat. They subdue you. It hurts. Then you are taken to the van, only you are wearing handcuffs and are severely bruised. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Swagger, don’t do that. Don’t put yourself and me and them and everybody through that. It would be such a waste, so foolish, so pointless. It would break my heart.”

  “Okada-san, possibly at this moment I ain’t too worried about your heart.”

  “Way number three. You bolt. There’s probably a rear entrance to this joint, and you are, as we know, an extremely capable, resilient, creative man, particularly in dark arts like escape and evasion. You break out, you get away, and try and finish on your own. Then we snitch you out to the Japanese authorities. A tall gaijin with no Japanese language skills, I don’t like his odds. Maybe it takes two days, maybe it takes three. But they catch you, divine that your passport is fake, read our signals and see we are not interested in helping, and off you go, before the judges. No juries in Japan. Second offense, off you go to prison. Five, maybe ten years. What a waste. What a foolish, sad, absurd ending. What a way for a great hero to end his days. No wife, no daughter. I will come visit you until I get bored, and then I won’t anymore.”

  “What about way number four?” he said.

  “There is no way number four.”

  “Way number four: You send the big boys back to their cages. We proceed. I only need two days more. I meet Kondo Isami on the street at Asakusa at midnight. Your four ROK Special Forces guys handle security, so there ain’t no interruption. Kondo and I fight.”

  “That is one of the things I am trying to prevent. He will kill you.”

  “Maybe. Or I will kill him. If the first happens, you go ahead with your plans. On the other hand, if the second happens, you go ahead with your plans. Maybe the Japanese eventually bring down Yuichi Miwa, maybe not. The point is, the man who killed Philip Yano and his family is dead. Justice has been served. Or someone has died trying to do that justice. He failed, but at least he tried. Somebody called it ‘the nobility of failure.’ That’s the world I’d rather live or die in.”

  “No. It’s not going to happen. It has been decided. We cannot have a dangerous, violent American citizen in this country illegally mixing it up with Japanese criminal elements, in ways that can’t be controlled and could explode into scandal, damage, death, anarchy, humiliation at any moment. We need the Japanese, we need their cooperation in a lot of bigger battles. There’s a war going on, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Philip Yano noticed. He lost an eye and a career in that war.”

  “What happened to Phil Yano and his family was a tragedy and an atrocity. But the wicked, wicked world is full of tragedies and atrocities, and they can’t all be avenged. Other things may matter more, like national security, like smooth relations between allies, like truth in dealing with allies, like any number of things that will be decided by people who see the big picture and live with responsibilities you and I can’t imagine.”

  “What is Okada-san’s attitude in all this? I hear the State Department, I don’t hear Okada-san.”

  “Okada-san is samurai. She works for a daimyo. She lives to serve him. It defines her. She obeys her daimyo. She made peace with that decision years ago. Her feelings are her business and nobody else’s. Duty is the only thing that counts. Now, Swagger, please, finish your motherfucking chicken skewers and leave quietly with me. It’s the best way. It’s the only way.”

  “You are a tough one, Okada-san. I give you that. Nothing gets in the way. Professional to the core. You sure you weren’t a marine?”

  “If it matters, I hate to see this end. What you’ve done—well, I’ve never seen anything like it. But that’s neither here nor there. I am samurai. I obey my daimyo. Now it’s time to—”

  A strange noise came between them.

  “Shit,” she said.

  She bent, picked her green Kate Spade bag off the floor, and fished out her cellular. It buzzed irritatingly.

  “Your daimyo wants an update.”

  “It’s not my daimyo’s number.”

  She popped the thing open.

  “Yes. I see. No, no, that was the right t
hing to do. And when? All right, thanks. I don’t know. I—I just don’t know. No, don’t call them. I don’t know, I have to think. If you call them, it makes even more problems.”

  She closed the phone and put it back in her purse.

  “So,” he said. “Let’s go to the van. Let’s get this over with.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s all changed.”

  He saw now something in her eyes that could have been the beginning of tears. Even her tough warrior’s face and its self-willed impassivity, a signal mark of her beauty, seemed slightly affected. Gravity somehow had altered it into something darker, sadder, and more tragic.

  “That was Sister Caroline at the hospital. Armed men just broke in and kidnapped Miko Yano.”

  34

  THE TAKING

  It still made no sense to the little girl. She had been at her friend Beanie’s house and they had a party and played with Pretty Ponies and watched a movie about a funny strange green man in a forest and giggled the night away and the next day two strange men and a strange lady took her away to this place full of nuns and nurses and hurrying and scurrying. She didn’t belong here, but there was no other place for her.

  She understood, of course, that something had happened. A sister led her in prayer and finally told her about a fire and that Mama and Dada and Raymond and John and Tomoe were now with God. That was fine, but she had to know. “When can I see them?”

  “My dear, I’m afraid you don’t understand. Let us pray again.”

  The days passed, then the weeks. Every time someone came in the room, she looked up, felt a surge of joy and hope, and thought, Mama? Dada?

  But it was only a nurse.

  They dressed her in strange clothes. The toys were dour and limp, many broken. The other children stayed away from her as if she were infected. She was so alone.

  “Mama?”

  “My dear, no. You have to understand. Mama and Dada have gone to be with God. He called them. He wants them.”

  In her mind, she could see only one face that comforted her. It was from the TV, a fabulous story she loved so much about a little girl and her three friends who went off to fight a witch. One of the friends was a tall, almost silver man with a great cutting tool. He was the Tin Man. She loved the Tin Man. He was in her life somehow. She associated him with her father, for she’d first seen him with her father. The man was kind, she could tell. She remembered him in her own house, and she saw that in some way her father loved this man and the man loved her father, something she saw in their bodies, in the way they related and joked and listened to each other. If Daddy and Mommy and her sister and brothers were gone, she wondered about the Tin Man. She dreamed about him. Maybe he would save her from all this.

  But the bed-wetting started and it annoyed the sisters and the nurses. They tried to hide their anger, but a child is sensitive to nuances of face and tone and body, and she realized that she was letting them down horribly. It made her sad. She could not help it. It humiliated her, because hygiene (she didn’t know that word but thought only of her mother’s term for it, “being fresh”) meant so much and she had been coached in it so powerfully by Mama and now she couldn’t control her dirtiness. Voices weren’t raised, punishments weren’t threatened, blows weren’t unleashed; still, she felt the nuns’ disappointment like a powerful weight.

  She didn’t know when the screaming started. But after a while, it seemed that there had always been screaming. She had no idea where it came from, but some nights, when she was alone in the dark and sometimes asleep, and sometimes not, she began to hear the screaming.

  Mama? Dada? Raymond? John? Tomoe?

  It wasn’t them, but it was. She missed them so. Why had they left? Why did God want them so badly? It seemed unfair.

  “You must be strong,” the nuns told her.

  But what was this strong? Her brothers, especially Raymond, the ballplayer, were strong. They lifted weights and their muscles bulged and shone in the light. They laughed and teased and needled each other about school and girls and homework and other things, and it had been so wonderful, though of course at the time she didn’t know how wonderful, and that it would soon end forever.

  But that seemed not to be the strong the nurses wanted. It wasn’t muscles, but some other thing that she could not understand and could never do. It had nothing to do with each morning’s wet bed and every other night’s screams.

  “It’s you that’s screaming,” one of the nurses said. “Not anyone else. Please, darling, you have nothing to fear. You are among friends who will take care of you. You must be”—that word again—“strong.”

  And then one afternoon the screaming was so loud it woke her. But then she noticed she hadn’t been sleeping. It was daylight. There were no shadows. It occurred to her that it was not, this time, her own screams or the screams of Mama and Dada and John and Raymond and Tomoe but of Sister Maria.

  At that point the door to her room exploded open, and a giant monster crashed in. He was a very bad giant monster, she could tell. One side of his head was swollen and yellowish, he had a bandage over the lower half of his face, and blood spots stood out against the white. He looked her over and she was so scared she peed.

  He grabbed her.

  “Little girl,” he said, “you will do exactly what I say or I will hit you hard. Do you understand?”

  She felt the full force of adult will against her and if she wanted to scream, she couldn’t, for she was too scared.

  Holding her roughly, he proceeded to the hall. She saw Sister Maria on the ground, her face bloody, and Nurse Aoki kneeling over her trying to help, afraid to look up, shaking with fright. She thought of the Tin Man. The Tin Man could save her. But the Tin Man was not there.

  As the giant monster roared along the hall, two other giant monsters joined him, in the same black suits.

  In seconds they were outside. Nobody had bothered to get her a coat or anything.

  A sleek black car pulled up, and the giant monster shoved Miko into it and sat next to her, his bulk dominating.

  “You,” he said. “No noise, no screaming, do what you are told, or it will be hard on you. Squat down so nobody can see you.”

  He forced the child to the floor and threw a blanket over her as the car pulled away with a screech.

  35

  FACE-TO-FACE

  Exactly as Bob had planned, an ad keyed to The Nobility of Failure appeared in the Japan Times’ Personals section. The difference was that it was not sent from him to Kondo Isami but from Kondo to him. It deciphered neatly enough to “Yasukuni gate, 10 a.m. Tuesday.”

  “They’ll kill you,” said Susan Okada.

  “No. Not if I don’t have the sword. What he’ll do is set up a second meet. That’s when they’ll kill me.”

  “Oh. That’s so much better. Look, we have to call the police.”

  “No. You know that Kondo, or his boss, Miwa, have sources and influences in the police. If you tell them, in ten seconds Kondo knows. And what does that get? It gets Miko killed, it gets me killed. I will go to this meeting, I will set up the next meeting, the exchange, and we’ll go from there.”

  “But he’s holding all the cards and he knows it. You can’t negotiate with someone who has an advantage. He will get you to some deserted place, kill you, take the sword, kill Miko, and go ahead with his plan. They’ll win.”

  “Maybe I can—”

  “No! You’ll get her killed. You’ll get yourself killed. Miwa will win. And then what?”

  “Okada-san, I will go to this meeting and come back. And then we’ll see.”

  “If something I did gets that child killed—”

  “You did nothing but your duty. This is not about any failing of yours. It’s about guys who will do anything to get what they want. That’s what it’s always about. And you and I are lucky that we have the privilege to fight them. And we will fight them. And we will stop them. They think they’re samurai. They’re not. We’ll show them what samurai means
.”

  But Susan wasn’t convinced; Bob left her in a state of despair.

  It had turned cold. The greenness of Japan had vanished. A cold wind blew, scattering dead leaves across the pavement of Yasukuni Shrine. On either side of the concrete esplanade, some trees stood tangled and severe; they looked like rusted barbed wire.

  Bob stood under the steel gate. It towered above him, two steel shafts rising fifty feet to two steel crossbars, one mundane for stability, the other the great soaring wing that was the universal symbol of Japan, the torii gate with its architectural communication of the glory, the breadth, the scope, the power, the beauty, the immensity of Asia. Bob looked up into a blue sky at the top bar and saw immensity.

  He shuddered. He was wearing a black suit and a raincoat, slightly underdressed for the weather. Outside the shrine parklands, Tokyo’s business hustled along its avenues, the honking and screeching of cars, the bustle of the endless parade of pedestrians. Here a few salarymen, a few tourists, a few visitors traversed the grounds in small knots, headed either to the shrine at the end of the walk or the samurai museum to the right of the grounds.

  Bob checked his watch: 10:15 a.m. Of course, somewhere they were checking him out with binoculars, making certain he really was alone.

  But then, from a knot of nondescript businessmen, one separated and ambled over to Bob.

  Bob watched him approach. Was he expecting something special, someone whose demonic charisma seemed to carry its own internal light? He just saw a guy in a suit and a topcoat, with sunglasses, a broad but unimpressive face, dark hair cut into a bristly crew cut. As the figure approached, possibly he picked up vibrations of physical vitality, as if the man, under his dreary outerwear, possessed surprising strengths and agility. Or possibly it was his imagination.

  “Greetings, I am the assassin Kondo Isami,” said the man in clear, accentless English, well polished, well schooled. “Who are you working for?”

  Now that he faced him, Swagger felt a weird sense of familiarity. It was peculiar. What was so familiar? He spoke. “Philip Yano.”