Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  He was standing where he had been, at the table he had been addressing his gang from, but now he was holding a shotgun. It was a modern weapon designed for close combat, an electromagnetic launcher with a high rate of fire and significant impact potential. It was going to do him no good. As Tatsu spotted Viktorov, she also spotted the ghostly shape coming up behind him. Viktorov seemed to sense something too since he began to turn, but it was far too late. There was a flash of movement, something being swung down with considerable force, and Viktorov’s back was slashed open from his left shoulder to his right hip. Blood flew, the newly elected boss fell, and Tatsu fired the grenade launcher slung under her carbine. It was a baton round which slammed into the swordswoman’s chest, and it tossed her three metres across the restaurant to hit a table and fall out of sight.

  Tatsu started in that direction, but there was no hope. The room was full of shouting and gunfire as men tried to nail the remaining little flying robot. And Tatsu. They could not see the woman who had killed their boss. Half of them did not even know he was down. They could see the cop who had burst into their party along with the two robots. She pulled a grenade from her belt, activated it, and dropped it at her feet just as she turned off her own hearing. Now the room was filled with a strobing screech of multifrequency sound. Hardened criminals clutched their ears and reeled back from the sound, which was better than them trying to shoot Tatsu. Unfortunately, it did not cover the entire room, and it did not stop people outside the main area of effect from attacking. She pulled another grenade and tossed it ahead of her, and a path cleared as men stumbled and crawled to get out of the shrieking sound, deafened and in pain.

  The killer was gone. Again. The robot had stopped firing and fled, or someone had got lucky and shot it. There was fitful gunfire aimed in Tatsu’s direction, but even the few bullets which hit her did not cause so much as a flinch. She called in reinforcements as she gave chase through the kitchen entrance at the back of the room, but she had little hope of actually catching up to her quarry. The Funabashi gang was leaderless again, and the killer had, once again, got away.

  10th September.

  Viktorov had been declared dead at the scene along with eight of his colleagues. Another fifteen had been taken to hospital, six of those in critical condition. These were all men in the upper ranks of the Funabashi mafia, and the lower ranks were now in disarray, easy targets. The Shiroi mafia and the Huádōng tong were hitting Funabashi territory from two sides, though the Shiroi were not doing as well because the Císhàn tong were using the confusion to hit their flank. It was now a large-scale, multi-sided war and the police were having trouble keeping up with it.

  It was not helping that the Shiratori-rengō were pushing across the border into Funabashi territory. That was confirmed because Tatsu was watching a group of them involved in a three-way battle in the docks. The Shiroi gang had almost free rein to hit any Funabashi target they wished at this point, and they had chosen a warehouse being used for drug storage. They had already been engaged when the Japanese contingent had moved in to take out both sides.

  ‘We’re going to need crowd control here,’ Tatsu said over comms. ‘There are too many of them. The best we can reasonably hope for is to break up the fight and maybe grab a few as they run.’

  ‘Our aim should be to arrest as many as possible.’ That was Superintendent Hiroko Hisakawa, the boss of Chiba’s TYMPD contingent. Chiba HQ should have had an assistant commissioner at the top, but it was Chiba.

  ‘I don’t disagree, Superintendent, but we need to stop this before we end up with too many body bags. Please order the drones in.’

  There was a short pause and then, ‘Four are coming in from central Funabashi. You’re sure that the yakuza are now involved?’

  ‘I’ve just got confirmed identification of Yū Koizumi. His records confirm membership. Apparently, his day job is selling insurance, but he seems to be alarmingly good with a coilgun.’

  There was a sound which might have been a sigh. ‘That’s going to cause problems with Sakurada Gate.’

  ‘Especially if there’s pushback. Maybe you should talk to them and see if they can get Shiratori to pull in her horns.’

  ‘That is never going to happen.’

  It was Tatsu’s turn to sigh. ‘No, probably not.’

  ~~~

  It had been light for five hours and Tatsu had not been to bed yet. The driving factor seemed to be the yakuza who were still hitting various Funabashi mafia locations and stirring things up. It looked like today was going to be the worst day of the week. Unless tomorrow was worse.

  If anyone had spoken to HQ about reining in the Shiratori-rengō, and if HQ had spoken to anyone in the yakuza, it had had no effect. Monitoring the police tactical network for the zone was showing signs of growing conflict across the western side of Chiba, especially in the Funabashi gang’s territory. The Denshitoakuma had become involved when their western territory had heated up just before dawn. They overlapped with the Funabashi gang there and, it seemed, some of the attacking forces were not distinguishing their targets too well.

  ‘There are people outside shooting at each other on the street,’ Sachiko said over the call she had put through to Tatsu. ‘Russians and Denshitoakuma, I think.’

  ‘They’ll be down from Shiroi,’ Tatsu replied. ‘The Russians. Stay away from the window.’

  ‘I’m sitting in my shower cubicle. I figure it’s not likely a stray bullet can get to me through the window and the cubicle screens.’

  ‘Probably true. That fight’s been noticed. You’ll probably hear drones flying past soon.’

  ‘You sound tired.’

  ‘I am tired,’ Tatsu replied. ‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’ll get much rest today. Stay inside and keep safe. Don’t answer the door to anyone.’

  ‘You’re scaring me, Tatsu.’

  ‘If it keeps you away from what’s going on outside, I’m fine with that. On the plus side, I don’t think they can keep this up for too long.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘That, my dear Sachiko, is the billion-yen question.’

  ‘Right. Oh, the drones are here. I can hear the engines and… missile launchers?’

  ‘Riot gas. We’ve been using it all night.’

  ‘Okay,’ Sachiko said, ‘you’ve convinced me. I won’t go out even if I had anywhere to go.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ~~~

  Someone had decided that handing out gas masks would be a good idea. It had probably been a matter of time, but that time had come, and it seemed that it was just the yakuza who had them.

  Tatsu could not really blame them. Riot gas induced nausea and was very unpleasant to be caught in. The drones had been throwing it around like party favours for hours. Breathe too much of the stuff and you could be left puking your guts up and unable to get out of the cloud. Very rarely, someone choked to death before they could escape the effects. The problem was that masks made the yakuza immune, and they were using that immunity to keep fighting when the others had given up and fled.

  In this particular case, a group of yakuza were holed up in an apartment building previously owned by the Funabashi gang. Across the street, the mafia had taken over some shopfronts in an attempt to retake the apartments which they had been using to run an illegal brothel. The drones had arrived, as directed by the riot squad sent to the scene, and dropped riot gas rockets in through the windows on both sides, but that had only cut the fire from the shops.

  Tatsu watched all this unfold from behind a temporary ballistic barrier the riot team had erected. She was tired and irritated. The sound of coilgun needles hitting the barrier was just making things worse.

  ‘Enough of this,’ she muttered.

  ‘What?’ asked the riot team leader crouched beside her. ‘Sergeant? Did you say something?’

  ‘Not important,’ Tatsu replied as she swapped magazines on her carbine’s grenade launcher. ‘Stay here until I order you in.’

&n
bsp; ‘Sergeant?’

  Ignoring the question in the man’s tone, Tatsu swung out from behind the barrier and started marching toward the apartment building and the yakuza.

  ‘Is she crazy?’ someone asked behind her.

  ‘No,’ the leader replied, ‘she’s bulletproof.’

  Needles hit Tatsu’s vest to no effect. She kept on walking. Someone had the bright idea of aiming at her legs; a good idea if she had been human. Two needles punched through her suit over her left thigh, stopping against the armour under her skin. She kept on walking.

  At ten metres, she stopped and levelled her carbine at the nearest window. A hypervelocity, twenty-five-millimetre projectile left the barrel of her grenade launcher, zipped through the shattered window, hit the ceiling of the room behind it, and exploded. Shifting her aim, she repeated with the next window, and the next. Then she was moving again, walking at a steady pace toward the first room she had hit. There was still fire coming from the window; Tatsu raised her weapon to her shoulder and fired back. A single round hit the gunman in the forehead, punching through his skull and dropping him instantly. A second later, she jumped in through the window and shot a second man as he raised his weapon to fire at her.

  The last man in the room was still shaking off the explosion. He let out a yelp as Tatsu grabbed the front of his suit and lifted him bodily off the ground before slamming him into a wall. ‘Listen up, dickhead,’ she said in a far too cheerful voice, ‘it’s your lucky day.’

  ‘I-It is?’

  ‘Yeah, you’re not getting shot or arrested, and the same cannot be said for the other yakuza pricks in this building. You are going to deliver a message for me.’

  He looked at her as if she was insane, though the effect was somewhat diminished by the blood running into his right eye from a shrapnel wound. He was probably lucky he was still conscious. ‘What message?’

  ‘You go back to Ichikawa and you go see Yukiko Shiratori. You tell her that Tatsu Yamada says hi, and that if she doesn’t pull her troops out of Chiba within the next two hours, I will come over to her house and put a bullet between her eyes.’

  ‘You are police, you–’

  ‘It will be worth the prison sentence just to get some sleep. Are you going to give her the message, or am I going to break your neck and find another idiot to take it?’

  ‘I will take your message. Kaichō will destroy you for–’

  ‘You’re new, I can tell. Shiratori will do precisely nothing to me. Now…’ Tatsu tossed him toward a door at the back of the capsule apartment they had been using as a foxhole. ‘… get out of here before I change my mind.’ Lifting her rifle, she dropped the magazine out of her grenade launcher and slotted a new one in. ‘I have work to do.’

  11th September.

  The fact that Tatsu could not use drugs was something of a design flaw. Obviously, it was not a design flaw most of the time; nothing much could affect her, so she could not suffer from gases, diseases, and anything short of corrosive chemicals. However, it also meant that she could not benefit from modern chemistry either. Right now, she would have done anything for the ability to use stimulants. Pretty much everyone else operating from the Chiba police HQ was taking something to keep them going; Tatsu was staying on her feet thanks to power naps and willpower.

  But it was looking like things were calming down. The tactical network had reported no major outbreaks of fighting for over an hour as one a.m. clicked over. The yakuza appeared to have left the area, though reports indicated that they were watching the border from the Tokyo side. The Funabashi gang was in a state of total chaos, but the Shiroi gang seemed to have stopped trying to press their advantage so strongly. Fatigue was setting in on all sides of the conflict.

  ‘Sergeant Yamada.’ The call from HQ had gone through without Tatsu really noticing and she jerked out of a slight doze at the sound of her name.

  ‘Superintendent?’

  Koizumi’s face swam a little in its call window. Not a good sign. ‘We’re instituting rolling shifts for the next forty-eight hours. Intelligence believes the worst of the fighting is over, so we want our people to rest. I’m aware that you’re uniquely subject to fatigue in this case. You’re to go off-watch now. Get some rest, Sergeant.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue. My body could keep fighting for weeks, but my brain is fading fast.’

  ‘If I’m honest, same here. I intend to catch some sleep as soon as my last dose wears off, but…’

  ‘The perils of command,’ Tatsu replied. ‘You have to be seen to be in charge as much as you have to be in charge.’

  ‘Huh. My boss at Sakurada Gate has been asleep for hours.’

  ‘I’ll make no comment. My temper is a bit short at the moment.’

  ‘Mine too. Goodnight, Sergeant.’

  ‘I certainly hope it will be, Superintendent.’

  ~~~

  Tatsu had been awake for two hours and there had been no call to get back into battledress. It was dark outside and there was fighting, but it was all small skirmishes and random gang violence. Nothing needed Tatsu’s talent for targeted destruction. She was not at all unhappy about that.

  She was still watching the tactical feeds, however, when a call came through from Nakano. She accepted it because it was looking like she could get back to normal policing now. ‘Nakano? Are you on duty?’

  ‘Just got a call from forensics. Looks like I’m back on duty for a few hours. How are things doing over there? The reports are… looking better.’

  ‘I got fifteen hours’ sleep today. My body clock is screwed. However, it seems like things are trailing off here. I’m not absolutely sure it’ll go totally quiet after tonight, but we’re through the worst of it. What did forensics have to say?’

  ‘They lifted a partial print off a circuit board from that robot you shot down. Apparently, they had to go to Izanami to get an identification.’

  Tatsu raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t need that for the main police database.’

  ‘No, it came up among the elimination prints from a decade-old murder case. A cold case. It was never solved satisfactorily, though there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence in the case file indicating that the Funabashi gang were involved.’

  ‘And our killer has been targeting the Funabashi gang. Mostly. You haven’t given me a name.’

  ‘Getting to that. The two victims were Yoshiro and Kohaku Morimoto. He was a data manager at a banking centre and the gang seem to have wanted him for his access. More or less a standard bank heist. They had a daughter who–’

  ‘Kaede Shiratori,’ Tatsu said. ‘She was Kaede Morimoto before Yukiko Shiratori adopted her.’

  ‘You spoiled the big reveal.’

  ‘You were taking too long. Okay. I’ll meet you at their residence. We’ll do this quietly, if possible, because the last thing we need right now is news that we’ve arrested Shiratori’s daughter going around. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. You bring a car.’

  Tokyo.

  Nakano was leaning against an unmarked, high-end sedan when Tatsu exited the conveyor which had brought her over from Chiba. Her little self-driving bubble car looked cheap beside the sleek lines of the cop car. Under-protected too; the sedan had no windows to weaken its armour and you saw out through an array of cameras which gave you all-round vision. This had the added benefit when transporting prisoners that no one could see in.

  ‘HQ is pulling out all the stops, I see,’ Tatsu commented as her transport set off on its own for Chiba. ‘VIP transport for our princess.’

  Nakano gave a shrug. ‘It came out of the pool. If I have to drive, I figure it should be in style. We have authorisation to proceed with the arrest and a search of her private rooms.’

  ‘And I bet it makes it clear that only Kaede’s rooms are to be searched.’

  ‘You would not be wrong. Shall we?’

  Together, they walked up to the front gate of the Shiratori residence across the street. Tatsu hit the intercom button and was greete
d by a voice which was neither Yukiko nor Kaede Shiratori. ‘Good evening, officers. What business do you have here tonight?’

  ‘We’re here to see Kaede Shiratori,’ Tatsu replied. ‘We have authorisation to take her into custody for questioning regarding multiple charges of homicide.’

  There was a pause. Not a long one, but enough to make it obvious that the assistant, or whatever she was, was surprised. ‘Please wait.’

  ‘Sure, but not for long.’ It took about a minute before the gates swung open on smooth, quiet motors. ‘And in we go,’ Tatsu said, starting in.

  They were met in the entrance of the house by a pretty Japanese woman in a business skirt-suit who turned out to be the owner of the voice at the gate. Definitely some sort of assistant or secretary. ‘Miss Shiratori wishes to speak with you before you talk to her daughter,’ the woman explained while Tatsu and Nakano removed their shoes and put on the slippers provided for visitors.

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ Tatsu replied. ‘I’m sure she’s aware that I’d love to take her in for aiding and abetting a fugitive if she’s delaying us to let Kaede escape.’

  The assistant’s cheeks coloured. Embarrassment or indignation. Could have been either. All she said was, ‘Please follow me.’

  They were led to a reception room of some sort with painted screens for walls. The decoration was a classically styled view of Mount Fuji, a bit clichéd for Tatsu’s tastes. The only occupant of the room before Tatsu and Nakano entered was Yukiko Shiratori, on her feet and wearing a yukata. It was still pretty hot outside and the heavier material of a kimono would have been stifling, but it still seemed odd to see a modern woman wearing such a garment at home on a Friday evening.

  ‘We’re here for Kaede, Shiratori,’ Tatsu said. ‘We have no business with you. We have authorisation to search her rooms, but that has been rather carefully phrased to stop us looking wider afield.’