Red Shark

Tokugawa considered. At length he clapped his hands, and another shoji screen slid open. A wiry man in a powder-blue suit entered the room and bowed. Tokugawa spoke to him in Japanese, then turned to Scott and said, “Ojima will bring her.”

McCoy Jefferson left the Daewoo SUV parked in a deep drainage ditch a short distance from the villa. He found Scott’s rental car and looked it over and saw that it was empty. In shadow, Jefferson dug out black cammies, black balaclava, and gloves from his bag, put them on, and jammed the silenced pistol into a thigh holster.

Ready to go, he checked his watch, then unclipped a miniature transmitter from his belt and pressed a button to send a burst signal, to activate the transmitter’s built-in homing beacon. As he did this, a digital timer on the transmitter started counting down from thirty minutes. All he was missing, Jefferson lamented, was a mini MAV, like the ones they’d used on Matsu Shan, to probe Tokugawa’s villa to find Scott.

Moments later he had a small grapnel and line laid over the wall. He tested it with his weight and vaulted over the top in one fluid motion. On the other side he used a magno-discriminator to locate and avoid hidden laser beams and motion pads, then he tucked himself into a shadow cast by the short roof that overhung the gallery surrounding one of the villa’s wings. Set, he eased onto the gallery’s deck and duckwalked to one of the low windows. Inside he saw a large, modern kitchen and an elderly Japanese couple busy cleaning up.

Jefferson noticed a bamboo and cedar trash storage crib next to the kitchen door. He ran a pencil light over the crib’s simple guillotine latch, which held the crib’s double doors shut. He lifted the latch, opened the doors, and looked inside at four large, open metal trash cans awaiting the thrice-weekly trash pickup. Neatly packed inside the cans were the requisite transparent plastic bags of sorted paper, glass, aluminum, and organics. He rocked a can back and forth to test its weight.

Perfect.

He tugged and kicked, and a can crashed onto the cobblestones from the crib and rolled across the courtyard, disgorging its contents. Jefferson sprang to the kitchen door and got ready.

A spotlight came on, then the old man, armed with a broom, stuck his head out the door and shouted, “Shoo, shoo, shoo!” He stepped outside and waved the broom to scare away the pesky sika deer he thought had raided the trash.

Jefferson clamped a gloved hand over the man’s mouth and dug the silencer into his neck. “Don’t make a sound or I’ll kill you,” he warned in Japanese. “Understand?”

The old man’s jaw stuttered, but no words came from his mouth. “Understand?”

He nodded, and Jefferson lifted his hand away. “How many inside?”

“Don’t kill me.”

“How many?”

“Five. The gaijin — he is an American. And a woman.” He hesitated, but the silencer’s cold steel made him speak again. “Master Tokugawa and two bodyguards.”

“The gaijin, where is he?”

“With Master Tokugawa.”

“The woman?”

The old man pointed to the second floor.

“The bodyguards?”

“Ito is with Master Tokugawa and the gaijin. Ojima — I don’t know.”

Jefferson pressed the muzzle against the man’s cheek.

“Please, I don’t know.”

Jefferson believed him. “Call your wife. Tell her you need help.”

The old woman almost fainted in Jefferson’s arms. He herded the couple back inside the kitchen at gun-point and stood them in a corner facing the wall. The old man tried to calm his wife by patting her back.

Jefferson found a container of rice flour, dumped it on a counter, and spread it out in a thin layer.

“Draw a layout of the house,” he ordered the old man.

With a finger the old man drew a crude sketch in the flour. It placed the main room of the villa at the end of a dogleg off a long corridor from the kitchen. The old man also made marks in the flour to show the locations of the villa’s half-dozen entrances, and he drew a box in the adjoining wing that represented the upstairs room where he said the girl was being held.

Jefferson scattered the rice flour. “Okay,” he said, “face the wall.”

He taped their mouths with Plastex and bound their hands and feet with nylon wire ties. The timer said he had twenty minutes left.

41

Villa Tokugawa