Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ~~~

  Tatsu marched across the public foyer of the ViraShield building trailed by no fewer than three security officials. She had her badge hung in her cleavage, but they were still following along, complaining and trying to slow her down.

  ‘We understand the seriousness of the situation, Sergeant,’ the nearest was saying, ‘but we really can’t have someone, uh…’

  ‘Dressed like a prostitute?’ Tatsu suggested.

  ‘I would never suggest–’

  ‘I did for you. Also, my badge says I can be here dressed in whatever manner I wish. Where’s this coffee shop?’

  ‘If you would just follow–’

  ‘Tell me where the incident is or be arrested for obstruction. Your choice.’

  ‘You wouldn’t d–’

  ‘I assure you that I would. Where?’

  And so, Tatsu arrived at the company mall on the second floor which looked like someone was filming a bioterror video. There were bodies everywhere and it was pretty obvious that the cause was the same as the incident at The Hole. Thankfully, the security personnel were not equipped to get inside the exclusion area that had already been set up by the bioterrorism team which had arrived fifteen minutes before Tatsu.

  ‘Hey, you can’t be in here without– Oh, it’s you, Sergeant Yamada.’ The speaker was largely invisible inside a biohazard suit but was probably male. Anything else about him was a guess.

  ‘Good afternoon, Yasuda. Yes, it’s little impenetrable me. No danger of me catching anything. That said, I don’t think you’re going to find anything infectious anyway.’

  ‘If it turns out to be the same agent as the Chiba incident, you’re probably right. We got to this one faster. A couple of them were still alive. I think they lost the last one about five minutes ago. Maybe we’ll find something.’

  ‘Somehow, I’m not inclined to hold my breath.’

  ‘Do you even breathe?’

  ‘Of course. I can hold my breath for over an hour while walking around, but I do have to breathe.’

  ‘You learn something new every day. Best thing you can do currently is keep the ViraShield security and execs off us.’

  Tatsu scowled at the man in the whole-body condom. ‘Thanks a lot, Yasuda. That’s just what I need.’

  ~~~

  As was the case with many corporate buildings, the ViraShield building was effectively an arcology. Most of the company’s four and a half thousand employees lived in ViraShield Tower and were provided with necessary workspaces, recreation facilities, and shops by the company working with franchise partners. You never had to leave the building if you did not want to, and many did not.

  Hideki Fukui was not one of those. The company’s CEO had a house in the country and travelled for business meetings. He got out and about. However, he also had an apartment and office complex on the top floor of the tower, and that was where Tatsu was taken to meet him. She had a feeling that this was meant to intimidate her and was not sure why.

  Certainly, the stylish interior of Fukui’s apartment was intimidating in the sense that it suggested he had vast amounts of money and enjoyed using it to create a world he enjoyed living in. The styling was a mix of ultramodern and European baroque. There was a lot of extravagant ornamentation, often in modern materials. Sculptures decorated the entrance area accessible via a secure, dedicated elevator, and the room had a mural painted on the ceiling. Tatsu was led into an office which might have swallowed her apartment building, complete with statuary, wall murals, neon-highlighted ceiling mouldings, and a solid, dark-wood desk that was the size of Tatsu’s apartment floor. As Tatsu headed for the desk, she began to notice details in the paintings. Many were scenes out of Greek and Roman myth, but you could spot the same face on a number of the heroes: Fukui’s face. The man had an ego.

  The man himself was exhibiting his superiority by sitting behind his desk and not rising as Tatsu approached. His attention was divided across multiple displays which Tatsu could not see, and he studiously ignored the detective striding toward him. A little too studiously. He was, according to his records, fifty-seven and looked younger, a mid-height man with a fit build in an expensive suit. Dark hair and eyes, the hair cut by someone who charged an arm and a leg for the service. He continued to ignore Tatsu for several minutes, so she waited; if he did not care about his dead employees, why should she?

  ‘Sergeant Yamada, is it?’ His voice matched his environment, cultured with a hint of crass.

  ‘That’s correct,’ Tatsu replied.

  ‘And you’re the one they’ve put in charge of this act of bioterrorism perpetrated upon ViraShield?’ As he spoke, his gaze travelled over Tatsu’s body, oozing disapproval the whole way up.

  ‘This is the second such incident. The first took place in a club in Chiba, which is my district.’

  Fukui’s expression and tone were mocking. ‘I hardly think something happening in Chiba has any bearing on an attack on a prominent nanotechnology company in Tokyo. A few ketō dying–’

  ‘Most of the victims in the club were Japanese. From Tokyo. Only one was a local. And one was a programmer in your employ, Ayane Arima. Now you have fifteen dead employees in your building. Do you have any idea why someone might be targeting your company, Mister Fukui? Or who it might be?’

  ‘There’s no evidence that this attack was targeted.’ There was an instant of a pause before he spoke, which Tatsu found interesting.

  ‘You made the implication yourself. An “act of bioterrorism perpetrated upon ViraShield.” Your employees have been at both locations. Has anyone been fired recently under unusual or controversial circumstances?’

  ‘Of course not. ViraShield is a progressive company with happy employees. They are universally loyal to the company.’

  That seemed pretty unlikely. No company was that universally loved. ‘Well, I can assure you that every effort will be made to uncover the perpetrator of this crime, Mister Fukui. As part of the investigation, I’d like to see the company records on all your deceased employees. There may be a connection between two or more of them indicating a reason for the attacks.’

  Fukui’s eyes narrowed. ‘That would require a warrant which–’

  ‘Has been obtained and sent to your legal department. I’m sending you a copy now. I’d hope that your zeal to see justice for your employees will move you to expedite the matter.’

  He glanced to his right and paused, presumably reading the warrant document. ‘You’ll have your information as soon as possible. Act quickly, Sergeant. If this matter is not resolved in a timely manner, I’ll see to it that a more senior officer is assigned to this case.’

  He had a mean glare. Tatsu turned off her blink reflex and waited for him to look away. ‘With the full cooperation of ViraShield, I’m sure we’ll have this wrapped up in no time,’ she said.

  ~~~

  ‘It’s the same as Chiba,’ Yasuda said. He had removed his headgear to reveal a young Japanese man with mid-brown hair and brown eyes. ‘No biological agents. No chemical agents. No indications of nanotechnology. That’s aside from PIN, obviously. This is ViraShield, they all had ViraShield PIN. Version fourteen in every case, but you’d expect that.’

  Tatsu frowned. The lack of evidence was more than a little annoying. Lack of evidence seemed to be becoming a thing. When she got the company data, maybe the victims would reveal something. ‘What did version fourteen do? I don’t really keep up with PIN products.’

  ‘Ha! No, well, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘There are some medical nanomachines floating around in my cerebral fluid, but I don’t really need PIN. If a virus can get to my brain, everyone has something to worry about.’

  ‘Yeah. Fourteen… Well, it was a catch-up exercise really. Kamiya Medical Systems came up with a home subscription system on a monthly update cycle. The other providers have been rushing to give their customers the same. ViraShield came out with theirs before anyone else and their market share ticked back up nicely.’

&
nbsp; ‘A monthly update? That seems like overkill.’

  ‘It’s the home aspect that really sold it, but there are people still paranoid enough about unknown viruses that monthly updates will sell. Normally, you have to go into a clinic to have the software updates installed. Kamiya came up with a way of doing it securely via your home system or even your implant. It’s more convenient.’

  ‘You use Kamiya PIN?’

  Yasuda grinned. ‘Sure do.’

  Chiba, 23rd July.

  ViraShield were not exactly prompt about sending over the employee data. Their building had been targeted on Tuesday at lunchtime and it took them until lunchtime on Wednesday to provide the files.

  Several of the victims had worked on ViraShield 14.0. Arima had been on the security systems. A guy named Hasegawa had been a general nanomachine programmer. Others had worked on a few other parts of the system, including the update application. One Tarou Mizushima had been responsible for part of the authentication system on the nanomachines and he had been among the fifteen dead in ViraShield Tower. Then again, 14.0 was the latest product and a lot of the workforce had probably had their hands in it.

  There was the possibility of corporate sabotage, so Tatsu had taken a look at Kamiya Medical Systems. Maybe they were taking out the opposition by killing off key employees. Maybe, but it seemed unlikely. ViraShield was a one-product company. They had been set up to manufacture a PIN product and had never diversified. They claimed their focus gave them an edge over the competition, but it had been Kamiya that had come up with the innovative new version. Kamiya produced more than just PIN. They were a big player in the medical technology market, even producing medical robots and nanodrugs. While ViraShield had bitten into their share of the PIN market with 14.0, the PIN market represented only a percentage of their portfolio, and not an especially large percentage. There was little point in them risking something like this to increase their market share.

  So, Tatsu went back to the employee data, hunting for anything significant which might connect the victims, and she was still working on it at seven p.m. on Thursday when her internal radio announced that Scoop was on the air.

  Pretty much all forms of broadcast media had moved onto the internet by the time the Cyberwar had started. It was all regulated, monitored by the government for content. Things had only got more controlled after the war. You needed a licence to multicast, supposedly to ensure that bandwidth controls were enforced and that ‘misinformation’ was not spread. The Nippon News Service was the official multicast service for Japan, but that was only viewed when you wanted to know what the government thought about something. Even then, the presentation was generally dry and uninformative, turning viewers off and over to something like TNM. Tokyo Network Media was probably the largest service provider in the country with viewers outside the Tokyo–Yokohama region it technically served. It did entertainment programming as well as news and documentary output, but even there the citizenry knew that the content was approved by the government and TNM had something of an anti-refugee bias.

  And so people had turned to older means of broadcasting to satisfy their needs. AM radio had made something of a comeback since the technology to broadcast was fairly simple and cheap to build. Similarly, with a small app on your implant, you could tune in without much expenditure; a few yen and you could listen to something uncontrolled by anyone.

  It had started in Chiba, spread to the other refugee zones, and then even the younger Japanese outside the refugee zones had picked it up as a way of broadcasting their own brand of entertainment. Not all the stations were news-based. In fact, a lot of them were music stations. Bands would set up a station to publicise their music, a few getting into the mainstream even if they came out of Chiba.

  The music stations were generally ignored by the TYMPD. They were illegal, but no one thought them worth the time to break up. Many of them lasted only a month, or even less, though Chiba Electronic Dance had been going for years and was still popular with its odd mix of EDM, Nightcore, and disco. The news stations were another matter, and Scoop was at the top of the pile.

  Begun in twenty-ninety-five, Scoop was responsible for leaking government and corporate documents, exposing scandals, and generally messing with the establishment. If they had a motto, which they did not, it was ‘Stick it to the Man!’ Their star reporter, responsible for the burning of a number of corporate and political reputations, was Dexter Burrell, and it was his voice Tatsu heard when she tuned in to the station.

  ‘… is a buggy piece of shit. That’s right, this reporter has received information that ViraShield fourteen’s update authentication protocols were rushed and contain more than a few bugs. It’s far from difficult to bypass the security of those nanomachines floating around in your blood and make them do anything you want. If I were the kind of person who used ViraShield, which I’m not, I’d be thinking about having them swapped out for any other PIN product.’

  A bug in ViraShield’s latest version. Big news. If true, it was bad news for ViraShield and something they would likely kill to prevent coming out. How that translated into the deaths of ViraShield employees, however, was not obvious. Unless someone had found out…

  ‘Worse,’ Burrell went on, ‘ViraShield knows about this bug and isn’t doing a damn thing to patch it. They know, people. Once again, the corporations are shitting on their customers and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it… Except for spreading the word. This is Dexter Burrell, signing off for now, but I have more on this tale of corporate greed, and I’ll be bringing it to you when the government dogs aren’t breathing down our necks. Goodnight.’

  So, the question was, how much did Burrell really have? Also, where had he got it? Well, there was only one way to find out…

  Tatsu got to her feet and headed for the door of her apartment. It was time to go hunting for a guy who liked to call himself an investigative reporter.

  ~~~

  When he was not in the back of Scoop’s broadcast van doing on-air reporting, Burrell tended to spend his time with the Yankees. The problem was that which group of Yankees he was with tended to change on a weekly, or even daily, basis, so Tatsu was going to have to go through several of them to find out where the reporter was currently squatting.

  First stop, mainly because it was closest, were the Funabashi 1 Chome Yankees. The Yankees were street gangs in the classical sense of the word: punks with attitude who staked out turf to defend from other gangs. Each was named for the area they held and the Funabashi 1 Chome gang were the ones who owned the area Tatsu’s apartment building was in. Tatsu knew exactly where they spent their time, so finding them was simple enough. Due largely to the fact that they were terrified of her, getting information from them was not too hard either.

  Then again, niceties had to be observed. They held a disused hotel a few blocks from Tatsu’s apartment. The doors were always open ‘because the Funabashi 1 Chome Yankees ain’t afraid of no one,’ so Tatsu marched into the lobby and immediately got a resounding welcome.

  ‘Who ordered the hooker?’

  ‘Hey, babe. Nice ass.’

  ‘Look at the oppai on that!’

  ‘Hang on, guys, it’s a pig.’

  ‘Get lost, little piggie, or we’re gonna carve you a new one!’

  All of it was in English, and Tatsu ignored them as she continued walking toward the back where the employee-only rooms had been when the place had had guests. Despite the shouts, no one got up from the stolen sofas they were lounging on to stop her.

  Ducking behind the reception desk, she went through a door, down a corridor, and then opened a door marked ‘Manager’ without knocking. ‘Evening, Horace,’ she said, in English. ‘How are things in the useless, waste-of-space business?’

  Horace Strong, the man behind the worn laminate desk, grimaced. There was a fairly attractive blonde with huge breasts sitting on the desk and Strong had probably been negotiating the removal of her T-shirt before Tatsu burst in. ‘Jeez,
Tatsu, don’t you ever knock? And it’s Strongman, remember? Everyone calls me–’

  ‘I don’t. Horace.’

  Strong actually lived up to his nickname, within reason. He was not the biggest muscleman in the zone, but he did have a lot of corded muscle and a six-pack he was very proud of. Better, he knew how to use those muscles. The man could fight, which was why he led the local gang, though the fact that he was not stupid helped. He was moderately good-looking. No film star, sure, but no one was going to kick him out of bed once he got in. His hair was a dirty shade of blonde and he had blue eyes and a solid jawline which tended to carry a not-so-subtle hint of stubble most of the time. He seemed to have an endless supply of leather slacks which hugged his thighs and pert behind, but absolutely no shirts.

  He shook his head and looked up at the blonde. ‘Sorry, babe, I need to take this meeting. I’ll see you later.’

  The blonde slipped off the desk without worrying too much about where her microskirt ended up. ‘Sure. Maybe.’ She ducked past Tatsu, looking bored.

  ‘I’m looking for Dexter Burrell,’ Tatsu said once the door was closed behind her.

  ‘Dex hasn’t been here for a few weeks. I heard he might be up with the Yachiyo Eight Chome crowd. Been in the north for the last week or two is what I heard.’

  ‘Yachiyo Eight? You’re sure?’

  ‘Hell, no! That’s where I heard he might be. You after him about that ViraShield thing?’

  Tatsu nodded. ‘You heard the broadcast? If he’s got real information, I want it. I might even pay something to someone who could give me a definite location.’

  Strong sighed. ‘If I hear anything, I’ll drop you a message. Not for money. Yankees don’t snitch.’

  ‘Whatever. Thanks for the vague direction.’

  ‘Yeah, right. If you see Branda outside, would you send her back in?’

  Tatsu shook her head as she opened the door. ‘She’s long gone, Horace. Get yourself a nice brunette.’