Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Sure. There’s a new type of rapture going around. Longer effects, more addictive. When I search you, I’m not going to find any, am I?’

  ‘No.’ He sounded almost affronted. ‘I heard there’s something new. No idea who’s selling it.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ Tatsu reached for his nearest pocket. ‘Let’s see what I’ll be booking you on.’

  Truthfully, locking Walt up for distributing was a waste of time. When it came to illegal drugs, the sentences were retributive. People could have access to a range of legal drugs to help them get through the day, so the courts punished those in possession of illegal ones harshly. But putting Walt away would just see him replaced by another Walt. Maybe the replacement would not be an even slower runner.

  ~~~

  Checking out the local mafia was simply common sense. It turned out to be not quite as easy as Tatsu had expected, but she persevered.

  The recent hits had, it seemed, really thrown the Funabashi gang off their game. Vasilev was trying to hold things together, but he lacked Zima’s charisma and organisational talent. Without Nikolaev, the mafia group had lost too many of its most talented leaders and it was starting to tell. Semen Naoumov, leader of the gang’s drug-dealing operational group, was running between locations in the docks, fighting fires. He was not exactly pleased to see Tatsu striding toward him in one of his warehouses.

  ‘Fuck! What are you doing here, cop?’ Of course, he spoke Russian. A lot of the mafia refused to speak anything else to the police because it annoyed the ones who only spoke Japanese.

  ‘I’m looking for whoever is supplying the new rapture recipe so I can tell them to stop,’ Tatsu replied.

  ‘Well, it isn’t us. Shouldn’t you be out looking for the people who killed Zima?’

  ‘Probably, but here I am, hunting drug distributors and, oh look, I wonder what’s in these crates.’

  ‘Got a warrant?’

  ‘I can get one in two minutes. Do you know who is selling the new stuff?’

  Naoumov’s eyes narrowed, then he sagged a little and went for glowering. ‘Someone new. We’ve been looking for them too, or we would be if our intelligence people could get their act together without Nikolaev. I told them it was cutting into business. Vasilev just tells me we need to make up the losses.’

  ‘New management, new management style: incompetent. I never thought Vasilev could handle being the boss. Maybe that’s why Zima was killed.’

  ‘You think whoever killed Zima wants the entire organisation gone?’

  Tatsu raised an eyebrow. ‘Tell me the thought hasn’t crossed your mind. I’m going to ignore these crates for now because I have got other things to take care of. I’ll be back, though…’

  ‘Shit.’

  Tatsu turned on her heel and started back the way she had come. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

  13th August.

  There was smoke rising above various tables in The Hole. It was not tobacco being smoked, largely because there was no tobacco to be smoked. It was not grown in Japan and while there were probably wild plantations of the stuff still growing, no one was harvesting it for export. The tobacco trade had died along with a lot of other trades in the wake of the Cyberwar.

  Technically, it was not smoke; this was vapour from electronic cigarettes. The vapour likely consisted of a base carrying one of a number of legal drugs available over the counter at most pharmacies. Society had decided that life was too stressful to do without a little chemical enhancement. There was high, a euphoric, and low, a mild sedative. Mellow was the same as low but with a lemon aftertaste many people preferred. Bright was a stimulant favoured by people with office jobs to keep them going through the boredom. Glow was a sex enhancer and prolong had exactly the effect on a man as you would expect. There were others. Anyone could shift their mood on a whim so long as they had the money, but none of them took you to the extremes that the illegals did.

  The Hole had a strict policy regarding drugs: legals only. Anyone caught dealing on the premises was handed straight to the police. Anyone using was expelled for good. Of course, that did not stop it happening.

  Tatsu watched Lorelle Bancroft exchanging a small packet of something for money in a shadowy corner of the club and started forward. It was enough to make a search. The disappointing thing about what Bancroft was doing was that she was a member of the Denshitoakuma. There was now little to distinguish the group from any other street-level gang, but they had started out as a self-protection organisation among the Japanese sex workers in Chiba. As they grew in number, taking on people of any nationality, they had diversified for the worst. Now they dealt drugs and extorted money from non-members. They had a bad habit of hooking new girls on rapture, and the new rapture had a better hook…

  ‘You’ve got nothing on me, Yamada,’ Bancroft said as Tatsu approached her table.

  ‘I have video of you exchanging money for product,’ Tatsu replied. ‘That’s probable cause.’

  ‘There’s no way you could see–’

  ‘Cybernetic eyes. I can see in anything short of total darkness, and anything I see is recorded. On your feet.’ Scowling, Bancroft got up and raised her arms for a pat-down. ‘If I find any of the new rapture on you, I’ll personally see to it that they throw the key away.’

  ‘That stuff! Hell, no! That stuff’s bad news. No way we’d peddle it to any of our people.’

  ‘You just hook them on the normal stuff to keep them in line.’ Tatsu extracted several packets of something powdery and blue from an inner pocket and sighed. ‘The Denshitoakuma started out as something I could get behind.’

  ‘Rapture takes the edge off life and you can give it up any time.’

  ‘Sure you can. If it’s so easy to shake, I’m sure you use it. You can give it up so easily.’ There was silence. ‘That’s what I thought. Any idea who is selling the new stuff?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone does. From what we heard, it looks no different. Anyone could be selling it if they happen to have got a supply from someone new. I haven’t.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you won’t be getting any new supplies from anyone for a while. Move.’

  14th August.

  It was the labs which finally cracked the case. When they did, Tatsu stormed into an interview room in the Chiba HQ to see Walt Bonham cowering behind the table. Good. Cowering was good. On the other hand…

  ‘W-what?’ Walt said. ‘What’ve I done?’

  Tatsu pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down. She was scowling. ‘You know damn well what you’ve done. Not only are you selling the new stuff, but you lied to me about it.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Which? Lie or sell poison?’

  ‘Both! Either! I don’t know. If I was selling– I didn’t know!’

  Tatsu stared at him, and he tried to escape her glare by folding himself in as though he could collapse into a singularity. He was telling the truth. But the lab had found that more than half of the drugs confiscated from him were the new type. ‘Let’s say I believe you. You are selling the new stuff, Walt. The lab confirmed it. It’s lethal, Walt. Trying to get off the stuff is just about impossible. It’ll kill you without medical intervention. When you eventually get into court, they’re going to lock you away until you die of old age.’

  ‘What? No! I didn’t–’

  ‘You have to have a new supplier. You tell me where you got the stuff, I put in a word with the judge, and then you only spend twenty years inside. If you’re good, you could be out in half that.’

  ‘Ten years? You think that’s a good deal?’

  ‘I think I have you on distributing a drug which imprisons its users in purgatory for the rest of their lives. I think I also have you on distributing a potentially lethal version of that drug. And I think you’re a ketō about to face a Japanese judge who won’t like you anyway. Ten years is the best deal you’re going to get. Who did you get it from?’

  ~~~

  Tatsu checked the fe
ed from the assault team’s tactical network. Ten suitably equipped officers were readying to raid the building in Nagasakudai where Walt had said he got the new rapture. Tatsu was not in command of the troops, but she was in overall command of the operation. There had been some mutterings about her waiting in the command vehicle – which was hidden in an alley a block away – while the building was made secure, but the tactical teams at Chiba HQ knew her, and they knew that she was as tough or tougher than any of them.

  Instead, Tatsu was scouting. Wearing a tatty overcoat to conceal her weapon, she was moving through the corridors of a largely disused apartment building, seeing what could be seen. The ground floor was shops and storage space, and she had already located the actual distribution centre down there. Calling it that was probably a bit of an exaggeration. That was where a few men were sitting around dealing out packets of blue powder to the street dealers who came in to buy. It had seemed a logical place for production, but there was no sign of that. She was going over the rest of the five-storey building for signs of a factory.

  The interesting thing was that the suppliers were Japanese. Their outfits were about right for a street gang in Chiba until you took a close look. Everything was a bit too good. The quality was fairly high and the outfits were a little too new. These were outsiders pretending to be locals. The area they had set up in was part of an unclaimed region of the refugee zone. The only people who really owned this part of Chiba were the Denshitoakuma. The Yankees and the Hispanic gangs stayed out, for the most part, and the major criminal groups viewed it as contested territory. If outsiders were making their home there, it likely represented another attempt by some yakuza group to push into the zone.

  There were others in the building. Locals destitute enough to need somewhere to squat had taken some of the apartments. Unless the place got a new owner with the means to clear them out, they were likely to keep a roof over their heads. They had no power and nothing but the municipal wireless network, but they had shelter from the wind and rain. Of course, since the rainy season had finally broken, they were less well-off without air conditioning, but you took the rough with the smooth.

  The outsiders had brought in portable generators to give them power where they needed it. That turned out to be the top floor, though it was not for producing the drug. They had set up the top floor as housing and storage. This was where they lived while in Chiba. They had also taken the precaution of keeping their main supply away from the distribution point.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’

  Her luck had run out. Tatsu turned to see a man in dirty jeans and an expensive leather jacket staring at her down the main corridor. He had, apparently, not seen her leaving the storage room they had made by knocking through a few walls to link several apartments, otherwise he would have known exactly why she was there.

  ‘You know you people aren’t allowed on this floor,’ the man continued. ‘If we have to, we’ll clear all of you out… Wait a minute, you’re Japanese.’

  Tatsu tripped the go signal on the TacNet system. ‘It’s worse than that,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean? What’s worse?’

  ‘I’m Japanese, and I’m a cop.’

  He looked at her for about a second and a half, not really taking in what she was saying. Probably about then he realised his communications were down because the jammer a drone had carried up onto the roof was now operational. There were a number of holes in the radio noise to let the tactical network operate, but none of them were in the ranges used in Wi-Fi. The criminals were effectively isolated from one another, unless they could talk directly. With no calling out to warn anyone and a cop before him, he went for whatever weapon he had under his jacket.

  Tatsu was faster. A rocket-propelled projectile punched through the man’s right bicep, tearing the muscle apart as it went, and he let out a shriek of pain which had to have woken up his friends. ‘Sit down and shut up,’ she ordered, ‘and I won’t shoot you in the eye.’ She raised her voice. ‘This is the police. Everyone on this floor is under arrest. The building is surrounded. Lay down your weapons and–’

  Someone carrying a submachine gun of some sort emerged from one of the apartments, looking around for the source of the voice. Spotting Tatsu, his eyes lit up for about a millisecond, and then the slug she fired hit him between the eyes. Blood, brains, and bone fragments exploded from the back of his skull and he dropped like a stone onto the worn carpet. Down the corridor, someone else opened fire. He had more luck hitting the man Tatsu had wounded, but two rounds smacked into Tatsu’s torso where they had absolutely no luck getting through the armoured plate that was her ribcage. The wounded man was now, probably, a dead man; Tatsu had no MedStat data to check but being shot was not usually a good thing. Tatsu fired back, blood sprayed across the corridor wall, and the gunman fell backward.

  There was a second or two where no one else emerged from any of the doors, and Tatsu took the time to check TacNet. The team were split: five of them moving in across the ground floor while the others hit the stairwell. Rooms on the floorplan map were being marked off in green as they were cleared. Ammo indicators for the officers suggested they had not had to fire on anyone so far. ‘Just me who’s lucky then,’ she muttered.

  There was a clatter as another submachine gun was tossed out into the corridor. ‘Don’t shoot! We’re coming out.’

  ‘Hands above your heads,’ Tatsu called back. Two men came out of one of the doors, hands above their heads. These two were not even pretending; they looked like a couple of businessmen. They looked around in horror at the three bodies who had been their compatriots. Tatsu smiled and started toward them. ‘I’m glad you decided to give up. We have so much to talk about.’

  Yokohama, 16th August.

  It took a couple of days to crack one of the captured men and track several of the others, and then get permission from Sakurada Gate to mount a fairly large operation in Yokohama. They were hitting two locations and Tatsu could only be at one of them, so she had elected to go in with the assault team at the organisation’s headquarters rather than the site where the drugs were being manufactured. The lab was way down in Yokosuka, practically outside the Tokyo–Yokohama urban area. The HQ was right in the middle of Yokohama.

  There was still signage up on the building to say it had once been a happening bar named Nichibotsu. Tatsu had never felt the need to visit a sex club. Even if the love hotels in Chiba, and other places, served a purpose in the cramped conditions a lot of people now lived in, the idea of going out to a club where the specific purpose was to find a stranger to fuck did not appeal. This one was shut and did not count.

  The building was still owned by a company called Nichibotsu Holdings which also owned the disused factory where the drugs were being made. That was a bad sign. The fact that a closed-down club had a significant power bill each month was another indication that something was up. Frankly, someone should have checked the place out already but there was no record of such an inspection having been carried out.

  ‘You really think this is the headquarters of some drug-dealing cartel?’ The speaker was Hideyoshi Ono, a sergeant with the TYMPD based in Yokohama. Yokohama HQ had insisted on a local being involved and the assault teams were locals too.

  ‘That’s the information I have,’ Tatsu replied. ‘However, it doesn’t entirely make sense. Nichibotsu Holdings has owned this place since the club closed in twenty-eighty-five. The new drug only turned up recently and the old factory they’re using down south was only bought last year. They have to have been doing something before they started making rapture.’

  ‘Are you sure your information is accurate?’

  ‘Yes, but possibly not complete. Plus, it took too long to get these raids organised. They may have closed down and relocated in the time it’s taken to set this up. They have to know we got their people in Chiba.’

  ‘So, we could be wasting a lot of time and money.’

  Ono looked like the kind of detective
who backed sure things. His suit was pristine, even under a ballistic vest. His hair was styled in a manner which made you suspect an expensive stylist had been involved. He had even had a bit of work done on his face to make himself look attractively rugged, though genetics had given him a good start. He dyed his hair to make it darker. His physique was good, but it probably came from a gym and a personal trainer. Of course, Tatsu’s physique had come via a designer and an engineer, so she could not really talk. Whatever, Ono’s career was probably based around closing cases he was sure he could close. If this turned out to be a wash, he would dump all the blame on Tatsu, and not entirely without cause.

  ‘Any operation could be a total waste of time,’ Tatsu said. ‘If we close down their rapture plant, I’ll call this a success. Give the order. Let’s go in.’

  Unlike in Chiba, here the special operations people did not know Tatsu. So, the assault team went in with a battering ram before Tatsu and Ono were allowed to enter. They had allowed Tatsu to link into their tactical server, so she was able to see all the interior rooms on the map marked off as green before she walked in. The place was, according to the team, empty.

  ‘Nothing,’ Ono said, disgust in his tone.

  ‘Nothing,’ Tatsu agreed. She continued walking through the club, Ono trailing behind her with a scowl on his face.

  It was a happening bar, now disused. There was an open room on the ground floor with a bar in the corner. Upstairs there were rooms which basically consisted of a bed and a shower. The colour scheme was late-period brothel: lots of reds and blacks. There was no light, so they were operating by flashlight, but there was nothing to see. Downstairs, beyond the bar, there were storage rooms and offices with no indications that they had been used in years.

  ‘Like I said,’ Ono said, ‘there’s nothing here. This was–’

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Tatsu agreed again. ‘No electrical equipment and no dust.’

  There was a pause. ‘But they have a power bill. Maybe someone comes in and cleans the place. Unlikely, but possible. We could have just missed their big quarterly clean.’