Headhunters (28 page)

Ziggy was thrown forward. His head bounced off the wheel and then whiplashed back again.

He sat there, woozy, for several seconds. He was roused by the sound of a car horn and realised, belatedly, that it was from the damaged Veyron. The harsh blare brought him back to himself. He saw his laptop perched incongruously on the dashboard, the screen mangled, and then glanced back at the broken rear window and remembered how it had come to be that way.

Oh, shit.

He tried to open the door, saw that it was crumpled and jammed, and shuffled across the cabin to the other side. The door opened and he fell out, his feet scrabbling on the asphalt as he stumbled away.

ZIGGY HEADED to Roppongi subway station. The concourse was busy with people arriving for a night out, and he had to force his way through the throng to the gate. He pressed his ticket to the reader; it bleeped, but did not open. He looked at the display and saw that the card was empty.

Shit.

No time to reload it now.

He heard a shout of indignation, turned, and saw the man with the pistol shoving his way through the crowd.

Ziggy gripped the gate, wedged his foot onto a protruding piece, pushed up and hauled himself over it. The effort caused a flare of pain in his bad leg. The guard was in a booth; he saw him and called out for him to stop.

Ziggy did not.

The shaft to the platform was encircled by two floors of shops and restaurants, the escalator running straight down the centre. It was scrupulously clean, the brushed steel polished to a high sheen and even the tables and chairs in the food court at the lowest level seemingly arranged in perfect order. The passengers rode on the right-hand side, leaving a narrow space for Ziggy to negotiate to their left. He looked back behind him as he stepped off and saw the three men following him, pushing a similar path down the left of the escalator.

The corridor was tiled in a dull municipal green and with a black and white floor. It was slick, and Ziggy nearly lost his footing as he barrelled around a corner. A train was waiting on the platform. It had disgorged its last passengers and must surely be about to depart. He ignored the throbbing in his leg and sprinted as hard as he could. The doors bleeped and there came the hiss of their hydraulics as they started to close. He threw himself inside.

The train jerked as it started to move and then, as Ziggy watched with fearful anticipation, he saw the man who had shot Kazuki smash his fists against the window. Ziggy unconsciously scrambled back until he was pressed up against the opposite door, but the train was moving properly now and it wasn’t going to stop. His heart pounding, he watched the Yakuza’s face recede, twisting with fury, as the train picked up speed.

The carriage was old and in need of a proper clean, the red upholstery of the seating faded in the middle from where hundreds of thousands of passengers had sat. He turned and dropped himself onto one of the empty benches. The carriage was quiet, but the other passengers were looking at him with a mixture of curiosity and alarm. He was sweating heavily and panting from fear and exertion.

The train slowed as it drew into the next station. It was Hiroo. He had ended up on a westbound train. He started to think. He could ride it to Ebisu, then change onto the Yamanote line and head south to Osaki, Shinagawa or Tamachi. He could disembark there, pick up a taxi and then head back to his apartment.

They wouldn’t be able to follow him, but he would do a full surveillance check to be absolutely sure.

HE ALLOWED himself to exhale, closing his eyes and putting his head in his hands.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He only had himself to blame for getting himself into this mess and he had been very lucky that he had been able to extricate himself from it. He chided himself again. It was his own stupid greed. He had been doing perfectly well for himself by restricting himself to the opportunities he could find online. He didn’t have to leave his apartment to sell a list of credit card details. Car theft? What was he thinking? No, no more of that. He would keep to what he knew best, what he was good at, what was safest. That was what he would do from now on. He knew how to be careful, how to avoid detection.

Goodbye, Tokyo.

Goodbye, Shoko.

The train passed through Shinagawa. A handful of people got off, a handful got on. An old woman, a young couple, a man who was very plainly the worse for drink. None of them looked as if they were the sort to be involved with the Yakuza. Ziggy allowed himself to relax a little.

The train reached Tamachi and Ziggy disembarked. The station was configured with two island platforms that allowed for interchange between the Yamanote and Keihin-Tohoku lines. A train was coming in and, in an abundance of caution, he took it. The carriage, this time, was empty, and, when he disembarked at Hamamatsucho, he was as sure as he could be that he had eluded his pursuers.

The station was directly beneath the World Trade Center and, he remembered, a short walk from the Pokémon Center. He flagged down a taxi and told the driver to take him to Yoyogi Park. It was ten kilometres, and the driver took them along a route that was clogged with traffic. It should have taken thirty minutes, but it was nearly an hour later when they finally arrived. Yoyogi was one of the more exclusive places to live in Tokyo. It was close by the large municipal park and in prime position between Shinjuku and Shibuya. The salarymen in those districts often chose to live here so that they could walk between home and work. Ziggy had always pitied them. The bland man in the apartment next to his got up at six every morning. He heard the shower at six ten, and the sound of the door closing at six twenty. Ziggy was usually bringing his own working day to a close then, and, when the man returned at seven, he would be waking from sleep to start working once again.

He told the driver to skirt his apartment block, staring intently out of the window in an attempt to see anything that might have been out of the ordinary. Shoko had never been to his apartment before, but he was too frightened to cut corners.

He had chosen this area carefully. It was homogenous and dull, and there were enough wealthy international students here that his Western looks did not stand out. There was nothing unusual outside tonight. It was quiet, with few people around—just a few cars and buses going about their business. The driver pulled up outside the entrance. Ziggy paid him and stepped outside into the humidity. His block was twenty storeys high with a communal area on the roof that allowed a splendid vista of the city.

Ziggy went into the lobby, nodded to the concierge, and took the elevator to the nineteenth floor. He hobbled to his door and put his ear to it. He couldn’t hear anything, save the quiet hum of the oscillating fans that he always left running. He unlocked the door and went inside. It was just a one-roomed apartment of modest size, with a kitchen-diner, a small square bedroom and a balcony that offered a view out over the park. It was, as usual, stiflingly hot. The banks of laptops and tower PCs that he used for his work were on twenty-four-seven, and they pumped out a lot of heat. He always left the door to the balcony open, but, with the temperature outside just as warm, there was nowhere for the heat to go. The fans were just circulating the hot air.

Ziggy took off his shirt and tossed it over the back of the room’s only chair. He went through into the kitchen-diner. It was furnished with high-end appliances and separated from the dining space by a breakfast bar.

His phone blipped.

He took it out of his pocket. He had been getting a lot of spam SMS messages recently, and he expected to find another one waiting for him.

But it wasn’t spam.

It was a message from a number that he did not recognise. The message, in English, was simple enough.

WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

He stared at the screen in horror, the phone vibrating in his hand as a second message appeared.

GIRL KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE.

Ziggy bent over the kitchen sink and vomited, a long retching stream of it that kept coming until there was nothing left to come. It filled the basin, stinging his throat with its acid dregs, and, for a moment, he thought he was going to faint. He pushed himself away from the counter, unable to remember if he had locked the door, and hobbled across the apartment to it, turning the key and attaching the security chain. The door looked flimsy, and the chain was cosmetic, no real impediment to an angry gangster who decided he wanted to get inside. He went over to the single armchair and, roughly clearing away the PC towers that blocked the way, he hauled it across the room and shoved it so that it was flush with the door.

Maybe that would buy him some time.

He collected the phone from where he had dropped it and looked at the screen again.

Maybe the messages were gone.

Maybe he had imagined them.

No. They were still there. He hadn’t imagined them. They were real.

And then, as he stared with dumb terror at the screen, a third.

WE ARE OUTSIDE.

He went across to the open balcony door. He was about to go outside when he realised that he couldn’t do that. What if they
were
outside? Could they have found him? How? He squeezed his eyes shut and racked his brain. What if Shoko or her brother had followed him home? He had always been careful, but what if he had not been careful enough?

It was possible.

He scurried across the room to his laptop and opened it. He had hacked the apartment’s CCTV cameras long ago. His first destination was the files that stored all the footage that had been backed up. It was over a terabyte, covering a week’s worth of comings and goings, and, undoubtedly, recording him. It would show him in the lobby, in the elevator, which floor he exited on and which apartment he went into. He triggered a subroutine that deleted it and then wrote over the memory so that it was gone for good.

Then, he navigated to the control panel and selected all of the cameras inside the lobby and on the street outside. It took him only three cameras before he found the view he was looking for: there was one on the corner of the building, looking down at an angle that took in the entrance and the street around it. There was a car on the opposite side of the road to the building. It was a Range Rover, big and bulky and with blacked-out windows.

It was the car that had delivered the Yakuza to the underground lot.

He focused on the car and zoomed the camera just as the passenger door opened and a man stepped outside. He was smoking a cigarette and Ziggy watched in fright as he glanced up at the camera, before catching himself, realising that he couldn’t know that he was being observed. The man dropped the butt and ground it underfoot. He went around the car and opened the rear door that faced the hotel and the camera. Ziggy got only a glimpse, but it was long enough for him to recognise the slim figure of the woman in the back seat. It was Shoko. There was no doubt about it. She had led them here.

Ziggy stared at the screen, his mind racing through possibilities. Shoko had followed him one time. That was obvious now. But she couldn’t know which apartment he was in. Ziggy had tried more than once to bring her back, but now he was grateful that he had failed. There were over a hundred apartments inside the building. He had rented this one under a false Japanese name. The concierge would have no way of knowing which one was his, and the footage that would provide the answer was wiped. How would they be able to find out which one was his? What would they do? Try every door?

He slid down to the floor, slumping back so that he was pressed against the cupboard door.

He didn’t know what to do.

THE VOYAGE proceeded without incident. They had waited inside the metal box for twelve hours, sweltering as the sun beat down on it, before they had been craned onto the deck of the freighter. The ship was the MSC
Maris
, a large freighter with a deadweight of 63,500 tons and capacity for more than four thousand containers. It was owned and operated by a German company, and the crew member who had finally opened the container and let in the late afternoon sun was a big, tattooed Austrian. Milton and Matilda had stepped out and gulped in the air tangy with salt and followed the choppy wake to where the port was a fast-disappearing smudge on the horizon.

They had been given a suite on F Deck. It was generously proportioned, over thirty square metres with a double bedroom, a separate sitting room and a functional bathroom. Milton had insisted that Matilda take the bed, choosing the sofa for himself.

The crossing between Melbourne and Auckland was scheduled to take six days, but the sea was as flat as a millpond and they made good time, shaving off a day en route. It was a comfortable voyage, and Milton took the opportunity to decompress. There was a library in the crew quarters and, to his surprise, he found a battered copy of the Big Book. That wasn’t surprising, he concluded when he considered it. There were long periods of inaction to fill during a voyage, and it was no wonder that some crew members might choose to fill their downtime with drink. The previous owner of the book had marked up several passages that Milton also favoured; it was a poor substitute for a meeting, but he felt a connection with the man, whoever he was, the sense of fellowship that was the most powerful benefit of the program.

Milton was the most relaxed he had been for days. There was almost no prospect of threat while they were at sea. And Walter had been as good as his word. The money—plus the threat to his well-being that would have materialised with anything untoward—had served to provide them with safe passage. Milton’s anxiety had increased a touch as the skyline of Auckland hove into view, his worry focusing on the practicality of going ashore without arousing suspicion.

As it turned out, his concern had been misplaced. Their Austrian chaperone had led them back to the same container that had been used to smuggle them aboard. They waited inside it once again, listening to the crashing of metal as cranes hauled the surrounding containers off the deck, and then there came the stomach-churning moment as it was their turn. The container swung to and fro as it was hauled into the air. Milton and Matilda anchored themselves to one another and then braced themselves for the thud of impact as they were positioned onto the back of a tractor trailer. The locking mechanism thumped as the bolts secured the container to the trailer bed and then a big engine growled to life. They were jostled together again as the tractor pulled away; their journey lasted an hour before they heard the hiss of the brakes and felt the deceleration.