Non-Stop Till Tokyo (40 page)

His eyes went up to Chanko behind me, then back to my face. “You have something of ours.”

“My friends have it,” I said. “They aren’t here. If you kill us, they’ll release it.”

“No,” he said calmly. “You will give me their names and addresses.”

He didn’t add any threats. He didn’t really need to.

I swallowed. “It’s a bit—”

“No. You will give me the names. Don’t waste any more of my time.” He jerked his head at one of his goons. “Perhaps one of my men should make the situation clear. You, shoot her. In the knee.”

I shrieked something, Sonja gave a strangled squawk, and Chanko snarled, “
Don’t
.” But it was the second boss who slapped out at the yakuza’s gun, smacking the muzzle downward before the man could fire. I stared at them, barely able to breathe, feeling the sweat running through my hair.

“Excuse me, Ii-san,” said the Korean boss in accented but very fluent Japanese. “Let’s not rush into anything.”

His words were polite, and the tone wasn’t rude, but it was undeniably commanding. The
kanbu
, Ii, looked at the younger man, his face darkening, then he gave a brief nod. “Excuse me, Park-san.”

“After all,” the Korean continued, looking at me, “it’s your big friend who’s bleeding. Rather badly. Whereas we’re in no hurry at all. We can stay here as long as we need to.”

I straightened my posture as much as I could, head up and still, and met his eyes. “Excuse me, but it’s a bit different.”
Keep your voice level. No wobbling now.
“Please allow me to remind you, there are others of us, and they have the information. And we have already made arrangements—if we don’t contact them soon, they will be sending it out to the police and the gangs and—and everyone. A lot of people.”
Come on, Kerry, not good enough. Stop panicking. Sound calm.
“I’m afraid you don’t have very much time left, and if we don’t contact our friends, if the information is released, you’re out of time for good.”

“I spoke to Oguya,” said Ii with a cold smile. “He destroyed the computers. He has the disc and the copy. You have nothing.”

He snapped his fingers, and one of the yakuza soldiers knelt down by Oguya’s body, checking his jacket pockets. “Still breathing,” he muttered with some surprise, and then, “Shit.”

He held up half of a silver disc, catching rainbows from the air. There was blood on the broken edge.

“Snapped, sir.”

“Oops,” I said. “I guess that was our fault. So we smashed the disc and Oguya smashed the computers.” I smiled up at the
kanbu
. “How are you planning to smash the internet?”

“What?”

“Why would we put anything on a disc? We uploaded the lot to a remote server. My friends can pick it up from anywhere in the world. An internet cafe in Shibuya or an office in Sydney or a laptop in San Francisco. It’s the information that counts, not the hardware, and we’ve still got it.”

Ii’s lips drew back with anger, and he was going to move at me, but the Korean boss stepped forward first, holding out a hand, staring down at me.

“So. You think you can bargain with me, using the information—”

“Blackmail,” I said. “Not bargain. We can spread it in seconds. We can take you down with it.”

“I see.” He nodded, turned to his soldier, Song, and remarked, in his own language, his tone quite casual, “What the fuck is this?”

“I don’t know,
hyongnim
, but look at the asshole. He’s sweating,” said Song equally calmly, and both of them glanced at Ii, who was looking distinctly uncomfortable. I was watching Song. His speech was relaxed, informal; he sounded like a fairly authoritative guy, but he was using an honorific that meant Park was seriously important.

“You are not in a position to make threats—” began Ii to me, his tone a bit too forceful. Blustering.

“You know that I am. The information we have could take down your family. Ruin you both.” I looked at Park as I spoke. His eyes were intently on the
kanbu
.

“You both know what’s on the disc,” I went on, pushing. “How could either of you afford to let it out when it would destroy your plans?”

“That does
not
sound like the old guy’s home sex tapes,” Song said in Korean. “No matter how kinky he is.”

“I think someone has been lying to me,” Park said in his own language, then switched to Japanese. “Ii-san, perhaps we could have a quiet word.”

“Excuse me, Park-san. There’s no need.”

“Let’s talk,” said the Korean, his voice still pleasant, and the
kanbu
’s eyes flickered away and back.

I could feel myself almost trembling in my chair. Not with fear, for the first time in a while, but with something close to ecstasy. The awareness was blinding, blooming, expanding like a mushroom cloud.

It had all snapped into place in far less time than it takes to tell it. After a couple of years in a hostess bar you learn to read situations fast, and the whole thing was spread out before me like a butterflied fish.

The lost disc incriminated the other players in the merger, the Korean mafia group, but nobody had told the very senior Mr. Park that it had been lost, and they’d lied about what the missing disc contained. So if the Koreans were here now on the retrieval mission, the Mitsuyoshi-kai hadn’t invited them: they’d invited themselves to find out what was going on. And Park was higher status than his Japanese opposite number. He didn’t know why the Mitsuyoshi-kai were after me, but he wasn’t pleased with them.

He’d be even less pleased in about two minutes.

Chanko was breathing heavily behind me, and I felt a slight sway before he righted himself. He had a bullet in his chest. I had to get him out of here.

I had never been the prettiest hostess in the bar, not by a long shot, barely noticeable by the side of stunners like Kelly and Keiko. But nine weeks out of ten I was the highest earner. It was a bad week if I pulled in less than fifteen hundred dollars in tips, and I’d broken five thousand once. Because Keiko’s attention wandered, Kelly was a poor fake, Sonja could be caught looking openly bored and Minachan openly acquisitive, but when the men spoke to me, I listened with fascination. I was genuinely interested, charmed by their company, amused at their jokes. When they were with me, they could believe they were funny, interesting, wonderful guys, because they could see I thought so. They could read my sincere pleasure at their company in my smile and eyes, and you simply can’t fake sincerity.

Well, maybe
you can’t. I can.

The yakuza was saying something quietly to Park, presumably assuring him that I was talking rubbish, and I raised my voice and interrupted him with absolute confidence.

“Excuse me! In a very short time, if our friends don’t hear from us, they will send the information to the police, to the Yamaguchi-gumi and
the Kantō Hatsuka-kai. To the
bōtaihō
people, and journalists, and politicians. I think your
kumi-chō
might be upset if that happened. But perhaps I’m wrong,” I added, ducking my head in sarcastic mock humility. “Perhaps your honoured boss is more interested in screwing bar girls, like his brother was?”

Sonja gave a shrill gasp. Ii took an angry stride forward, and Chanko brought his gun up. The Japanese goons stirred threateningly.

Park just looked at me.

“You’re lying,” the
kanbu
snarled. “You have nothing.”

“Well, shoot me and find out,” I said contemptuously. “How do you think these people knew I was here?” I jerked my head at Chanko and Sonja, as if I had any idea how they’d turned up. “You know we have the information. If you kill us, it will go out, and make your life—and your boss’s life, and the lives of your allies here—very significantly worse.”

“Oh, we can make your life worse too.” He turned his gaze on Sonja with clear menace. “I think you wanted to protect your friend before—”

“Shut up, you creep.”

I don’t suppose he was used to women talking to him like that. He raised a furious hand, ready to hit me, and the Korean boss caught his arm before he swung, and said, “I told you no.”

They stared at each other for a long second, then Ii gave a tiny but perceptible bow, and let his hand drop. In front of his men.

I said to Park, in Korean, “So they lied to you about the disc?”

Ii’s mouth dropped open. Then he was snarling an order for me to use Japanese, while the Korean boss tilted his head to one side, looking at me with a fractional eyebrow lift.

“Why don’t you tell me,” he said. He was a good fifteen or twenty years younger than his opposite number, thin-featured, with very heavy brows over narrow, deep-set eyes, and a quirky mouth. It was an appealing, even an attractive face, if you didn’t have any instincts at all.

“The disc contained a very large amount of information about the alliance between your group and the Mitsuyoshi-kai. The proposed structure for your expansion into Tokyo. The plans for your alliance to undermine the Yamaguchi-gumi’s grip on illegal labour and the Kabuki-ch
ō cocaine trade. The funding, from your North Korean drug routes and various other sources, including a money-laundering scheme via a large pet
-food chain. There’s huge amounts of detail, pages of it, with names and financial projections, copies of emails with IP addresses, a whole dossier. It’s like the basis for a company merger, which I suppose is what it was. There’s everything except a Powerpoint presentation.”

Park’s face was absolutely still.

“It’s hundreds of years of jail time if the police get it. It’s a war if the Yamaguchi-gumi or any other syndicates get it. And one of the Brothers put it all on disc to take to a meeting, and he stopped off to meet a hostess in a love hotel, and her boyfriend hit him on the head and stole the briefcase it was in. Could you make him be quiet?” I added, jerking my head at the
kanbu
. He’d understood the names, if nothing else, and he was screaming at me to be silent, the gun swinging urgently to point at each of us in turn. Over my shoulder, Chanko’s knuckles were white as he gripped his own gun, but his arm wasn’t steady any more.

The Korean’s eyes were reptile-cold as he turned on Ii. “Shut the fuck up, I’m listening to her,” he said in Japanese. “I said,
shut up
. Kim, shoot anyone who tries anything. Anyone. You, woman, go on.”

“In Japanese or Korean?”

“Korean.”

“The man who killed the Brother had a girlfriend who was a hostess at the bar where I work, and she made it look like I was the guilty one, set me up to confuse things. It was just supposed to be a distraction, but because she stole the briefcase, the Mitsuyoshi-kai panicked. They took in the guilty hostess, and they tried to find me too, and they sent that pervert over there, Oguya, to threaten my flatmate Katori Noriko into revealing where I was, and he and his friend attacked her. I had nothing to do with the murder, but they raped and beat Noriko anyway. To scare me, or just for fun. And they said they’d kill her if we didn’t find the briefcase.”

“They told you to go out and look for it,” he said.

“Yes. So I did. And we found it.”

“If you’re lying to me—”

“I’m not.” Yet. “Noriko is in a coma because of what they did to her. And they planned to kill us, her and me and my friends, even if we gave them the disc. We found that out. And then they kidnapped Sonja, the woman behind me, and—well, look at her. They did all that to my friends, and I had their disc. What would you do if you were me?”

He nodded like I was speaking pure reason.

“We took the disc, and read it, and copied it,” I said. “My friends have access to all the information—not these people, others, the Mitsuyoshi-kai don’t know who they are or where they are. And if they don’t hear from us by a set time, they’re releasing it to all the people we can think of who might want to have it.”

“What set time?”

“Soon.”

“I could of course make you call your friends,” he said.

“I’m sure you could,” I said frankly. “It wouldn’t do you much good, though, unless any of your men speak Swedish.”

“Swedish?”

“One of my friends is Swedish. If I don’t talk to him in Swedish when I call, he’ll assume I’ve got a gun to my head. If I do, you won’t know what I’m saying. Sorry.”

“You speak Swedish. As well as Japanese and Korean—”

“And English and German and Cantonese. And some others.”

“So what am I saying now?” he snapped at me in rapid, heavily accented Cantonese.

“You’re saying you don’t believe me,” I responded, my accent much better and my speech even faster. “What can I tell you, I’m good at languages.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” roared the
kanbu
. “Speak Japanese! Sir, I request you tell this woman to speak Japanese!”

“Shut up, you idiot,” said the Korean boss. “You deceitful, incompetent, disrespectful, lying turd, you’ll tell me all about this shitfest right now, or I’m going to fillet you like a fucking mackerel!”

Ii blenched. “I don’t have the authority—”

“If you don’t tell me, first I will shoot you in the hands, and then I will kill both of your men,” said Park. “And if your account differs from hers, if one of you is lying, one of you is going to die.”