Dead Sea (26 page)

Sittart favoured the Grand Hotel in Shinagawa and had taken a suite on its top floor facing east from which he could look over the bustling docks. The doorway from the corridor opened into a reception room with coffee table and soft chairs, a flat-screen TV that doubled as a mirror and a writing desk with Wi-Fi access. The silent air smelt faintly of lotus blossom and a vase of flowers stood on an occasional table by the window. A bathroom opened off one side and a bedroom off the other. A third door led through to an intimate little dining room whose corner windows allowed diners to overlook both the docks to the east and the lights of Takanawa District with the Sengaku-ji Temple beyond them to the north. The east-facing windows stood along one wall of the central reception room and then continued along the bedroom wall on the far side of the huge bed. Sittart walked straight to the reception room window and stood there, framed against the stormy sky, like a Rajah considering his domain.

The sun was setting away behind him and its rays pierced the ragged overcast strongly enough to send the hotel's long shadow creeping relentlessly out over the water and the myriad vessels working or waiting upon it. Sittart felt that was a pleasing symbol of his own spreading power and influence. He came as close as he ever came to smiling. He continued to stand, lost in thought, as the bellboy unpacked his case and put its contents in wardrobes, drawers and cupboards.

When the boy was finished, he looked across at the back of the hotel's latest guest, framed against the darkening sky with the strange boxes on either side of his head giving him an almost alien look. The bell boy decided against trying for his usual ten dollars. Certainly, the elegance of the luggage and the perfection of the tailoring – let alone the glimpse of the top-of-the-range Patek Philippe – would normally have promised ten dollars and maybe more. But there was something about the strange, silent guest that seemed to forbid even the fleeting intimacy of a tip.

Oddly for such a powerful man, Sittart added nothing to the pristine perfection of the accommodation. No character or personality. Once his personal effects were packed away, the room seemed almost to be empty again except for the slim laptop sitting in its kid-skin case on the coffee table. And, when the black-suited Sittart stepped into a shadow behind a massive silk curtain and apparently disappeared into the darkness there, the room seemed for an instant to be completely untenanted. Except that, the moment the door whispered closed behind the departing bellboy, his cell phone began to ring.

Sittart stepped back out into the middle of the room as he pulled the phone out of his pocket. He glanced at the screen before he pressed ‘connect' and held the instrument close to his face, watching the display. The phone was cutting edge and top of the range, but Sittart used few of its more advanced functions. He had chosen it because it had a powerful internal speaker which was always set to maximum volume. The voice he heard matched the identification portrait he was watching. Both belonged to Nanaka Oda, one of the Tokyo port officials he kept on a secret retainer from one of Luzon Logging's many slush funds.

‘Yes?' His Japanese was harsh – his natural tone in any language held something of a snarl.

‘There are several matters which we need to discuss.' Her voice was steady. Unusually so. Most people talking to the professor tended to sound a little nervous.

‘Go on.'

‘Not on the phone. We need to meet.'

‘You know where I am. Come here.'

She did not hesitate, which was, again, unusual, especially in a woman, the professor noted. ‘My shift has just finished. Shall I come now?'

‘At once.'

‘Ten minutes.'

He broke connection and continued to stare at the woman's ID photograph for a moment longer. Then he looked around the room with something of a start, as though he was seeing it for the first time. Which, in a way, he was. His mind, which had been distant since he had glanced at the coffee-coloured curve of the air hostess's breast, seemed to become aware of immediate sensations once again. And he realized that he was hungry.

Automatically, he glanced at the courtesy folder beside his laptop. Then he looked across to the old-fashioned telephone handset. He crossed to it and looked down, frowning. It was not the hands-free speaker phone he had ordered. He hated using old-fashioned handsets because he had to press the receiver to his boxlike hearing aid. He scrutinized the phone more closely, trying to work out how a hands-free function might be engaged. This consideration brought the subject of his almost dreamlike concentration back to mind again, but he dismissed all further thoughts of Robin and Richard Mariner for the time being. Nanaka Oda would be here soon. He would make her order food. Perhaps even allow her to share it with him while they talked. The idea appealed to him. She seemed to have some interesting potential. He picked up the red leather folder and opened it at the room service menu. After a moment of more silent consideration, he put it down again and crossed to the bathroom.

By the time the phone he hated so much began to ring, he had washed his hands and moved his laptop to the Wi-Fi-enabled desk. As the phone rang, so a red button flashed. He pressed it and so discovered that the phone did have a speaker facility not unlike his cell and he pressed it without raising the handset after all. ‘Yes?'

‘It is reception, Professor. There is a lady here. She says you are expecting her.' The voice was distant and tinny. He could only just make out the words. The phone was not really efficient enough for his requirements.

‘I am!' he shouted, overcompensating. ‘Tell her to come up at once.'

Sittart, angered by the business with the phone and piqued by her unflappable behaviour so far, chose to test Nanaka Oda a little further by opening the door wide on her first firm knock. He stepped forward almost threateningly as he did so, filling the door frame so that she was confronted with him suddenly and at unexpectedly close quarters. They had never met. As far as he knew she had seen no pictures of him. Yet she did not flinch at the sudden confrontation.

Their eyes met, almost on a level. And hers did not flicker at the sight of his lean face, his high cheekbones, his hawkbeak nose, his shark-thin mouth, his long dark eyes or the square black boxes clamped over his ruined ears, as the air hostess's had done. She was exactly like her ID picture on his cell phone. Round-faced but with a determined set to her mouth and chin. Dark hair, dyed to keep any grey at bay. Incongruous button nose. Dark eyes with a steady, almost calculating gaze. She smelt of perspiration but her breath smelt of mints as his smelt of the Parma Violet lozenges he liked to suck. A square woman one size too big for her clothes, but who wore them tightly zipped and buttoned anyway. Very different to the sort of woman he usually dealt with. Or the sort of pretty, vulnerable creature that filled his darker fantasies.

‘Nanaka Oda,' she introduced herself, and tensed her body to bow but then she stopped, realizing that she would head-butt him if she did so.

He stepped back. ‘Come in,' he ordered.

Again, she did not hesitate. She marched straight past him and crossed to the coffee table, then turned to face him as he closed the door and leaned back against it for a moment, eyes and mind busy.

He considered her for a moment longer in silence. Although they had never met, he knew all about her. He did not employ – even clandestinely – anyone with whose secrets he was not intimately familiar. Such knowledge was just another aspect of the power he liked to exercise over others. He knew she was single. That she lived out in Fuchu and commuted in and out on the Keio Line – of which Luzon Logging was a shareholder. But not under that name.

A couple of years ago, aged forty, she had withdrawn from the lonely hearts circle through which she had hoped to find a husband. The competition from slim and pretty young executive rivals had become too fierce. She consoled herself nowadays with Western films of a romantic nature and chocolate, which was why her clothes didn't fit well any longer. And, in spite of the reasonable wage she earned, she couldn't afford new ones in the larger sizes she really needed.

She had fallen into Luzon Logging's clutches in her late thirties five years ago when a last desperate attempt at matrimony with a much younger man had merely led to an unwanted pregnancy and an expensive abortion which the child's father was too busy getting out of the affair to pay for. The failure of the relationship had turned out to be lucky for her. The fleeing lover had been involved in a hit-and-run car accident and would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his days. A particularly bitter irony because he – and, briefly, she – had been involved in the illegal drifting craze down on the Tokyo docks. According to the professor's sources, she had been a promising drifter – while he had been a rising star. There was a potent question on her secret Luzon Logging file as to whether she had been at the wheel of the car that had hit him and then run into anonymity.

Such matters would be broached later, Sittart decided; and he could be certain of the fact. One of his many accomplishments was that he had the ability to control conversations with uncanny precision. ‘We have much to discuss,' he stated, speaking too loudly and with a snarl in his tone as usual. ‘But I am hungry. You will order food first and we will talk while we eat.' It did not occur to him to ask if she was hungry or whether this arrangement suited her.

‘As you wish,' she answered equably.

He picked up the room service folder and gestured at the telephone handset.

Another man might have said, ‘The tempura vegetables are particularly good here . . .' as a way of explaining his choices; of negotiating an expression of her thoughts. Sittart never even thought of such irrelevancies. He glanced up to ensure she was holding the handset ready and he barked a series of staccato phrases at her, which she repeated to room service. Twenty minutes later they were in the private dining room with a selection of meat and fish karaage, tempura vegatables, tonkatsu pork, gyoza potsticker dumplings and fried yaki udon steaming on the table between them. The professor picked up the short, sharp Japanese chopsticks, moved his choice of the food on to his plate, Western style, and began to eat. She sat with her hands in her lap and watched him until he glanced at her and ordered, ‘Eat!'

Then, while they consumed the food, they began to talk.

Two hours later, Nanaka Oda was sitting in a black Toyota Corolla AE86 without number plates, tapping the throttle gently. In her mind she was five years back in time, in a top-flight drifting car, hopped up to the max on adrenaline and ready for action. The Toyota was sitting invisibly with its lights off on the rain-slick roadway just along from the pierside bar called Rage. Had she turned off the motor, wound down the window and listened carefully, she would have heard the distant snarl of her erstwhile lover's friends, drifting down on the docks.

But Nanaka Oda had better things to do.

Beside her, on the front passenger seat lay the untraceable mobile the professor had given her, with which she had contacted the same number she had called from her office three days earlier to warn Richard Mariner about the mysterious death of the too-talkative pilot. Something she had done on the professor's orders. An act calculated to win a little trust from the foreign giant. Just enough to make him take a risk and agree to meet her in the hope of getting a little more information.

Unknown to the too-trusting Englishman, the professor had also supplied the taxi to bring him here – the Keio Line was by no means the only transport system in which Luzon Logging had a stake. As agreed, the taxi stopped a little way back from the bar, under the flare of a street light. Two unmistakable figures climbed out of the back, paid, and began to hurry forward.

Nanaka Oda was in action at once. Her black Toyota, lights out, as invisible in the night-time downpour as Professor Sittart had been in the shadows behind the curtain in his room, reared forward. The hunting roar of its motor masked by the relentless drumming of the rain. The ruthless woman, reliving the ecstatic moment of revenge against her faithless lover, span the wheel as the car leaped onward, sending the black wall of its side drifting up on to the pavement, leaping high over the unexpectedly substantial kerb, where the two tall figures were suddenly diving sideways and away.

Too late, she thought, contentedly, far too late, my dear.

And the rear of the car connected with a most satisfying double thud.

S
oon after the debris from the Japanese earthquake sank below the northern horizon the wind swung round towards the west and gathered force. Liberty was forced to tack
Flint
across a choppy and increasingly restless ocean that began to run against them up through force six of the Beaufort scale towards full gale force seven with a sea state to match. It was very different sailing to what they had experienced at first where they had just given up and run before the wind down past Portland towards San Francisco.

This time the weather was clear, the sky a hard, dark cobalt all day, as though it was made of polished blue steel. The sea gathered itself in long corrugations, pushed relentlessly towards them by the hot, strong wind. White-topped, steep-sided walls of green water that would have been acceptable – at a stretch – if they could have met them head-on. But the only way of making the progress they so keenly desired was to cross the increasingly powerful near-gale in huge sawtooth tacks, which meant they mostly met the onrushing waves on the port or starboard quarter. The white tops exploded against them, over them, making the whole hull shudder as they spewed across
Flint
's foredeck and hissed up to the cabin like serpents. Every now and then, while she butted grimly on, green water swamped in from the poop and only the straining wall of washboards kept the insides anything like dry. But with the increasingly weary women running up and down to change tack a couple of times each watch, it was never really anything like dry in actual fact.