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  "No, he wouldn't have. And when he found out what we had done, his wrath seemed to know no bounds toward me, yet he was forgiving of you. You have a very secure place, brother. You're the first son and you've promoted yourself to a very solid third position in the proposed consortium. Your future seems assured."

  Yemon gazed at his brother in surprise.

  "Oh, yes. I've been keeping informed of how things are developing there." Saburo lifted the bottle. "To your successes. May they be many." He drank.

  "Now is not the time to be taking action against the Americans in general," Yemon said. "You must wait until we see what develops. What you have been doing may hurt trade relations."

  "Do you think it will hurt them worse than what has been done to us? Action and reaction, Yemon. Remember the lessons you ingrained in my mind when you taught me to play chess? Remember how you and old Kiyosha Ogata worked to teach me the way of the sword? I have learned, brother, and learned well. Things that work for me might not work for anyone else, but they do their job well for me."

  "This isn't about you. This is about Father and about Japanese business."

  "You say." Saburo knotted up a scarred fist. "I had six million dollars' worth of cocaine go up in those publishing offices in L.A. when they were bombed."

  Yemon returned his brother's gaze. "So much?"

  "Yes. It took me a long time to get together that kind of money. The coffers of my businesses aren't nearly as deep as those of Hosaka Industries. It will take me many months to begin accumulating that kind of cash flow again." Saburo glared at the darkened ceiling. "And I don't believe that it was just circumstances that my cocaine was blasted along with that building. Father's consortium has a spy within its ranks, and if you and he don't do something about it soon, there will be nothing left for you to inherit."

  Saburo dropped the wine bottle into the pool and swam across. He came out of the water in one lithe bound and picked up a towel. After patting his face dry, he wrapped the towel around his waist. He stared at Yemon intently. "Work with me." He held his hand out. "Work with me as I worked with you. Help me find out who's been striking against the Japanese people in America."

  Knowing his brother was more interested in discovering who had cost him the six million dollars in cocaine, Yemon said, "We'll talk later."

  Saburo let his hand fall to his side. The friendliness left his features. "You're still a fool, still afraid to seize the day for yourself. I wonder, if you hadn't had me with you to help you track down your wife's killers and slay them, would you have done it yourself?"

  "Yes." Yemon's answer was flat and uncompromising.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway. One of the guards came into view, gripping a small Uzi, followed by Joji Hosaka. Two more guards trailed behind.

  Yemon bowed instantly, watching the intent look on his father's face. The elder Hosaka returned the bow curtly, his eyes focused on his unbowing younger son.

  Joji Hosaka was at least seven inches shorter than Saburo, but Yemon never ceased to marvel at the way the older man seemed to tower over him. Silver hair glinted in the darkness. He reached out, faster than Yemon would have believed, and slapped Saburo's face. The sound reverberated in the enclosed space.

  The prostitutes, their faces devoid of the enthusiasm that had been there earlier, clambered from the pool and picked up towels to wrap around their nude bodies.

  "You show no respect for your father?" Hosaka stated in his gravelly voice. His eyes were cold and hard.

  Saburo bowed slowly, his angry gaze locked on his father's face.

  "You brought these women here?" Hosaka asked.

  Saburo nodded.

  Hosaka spoke to Yemon without looking at him. "What have they heard?"

  "Enough, Father."

  The women stood close together at the pool's edge, unsure of what to do or say.

  Hosaka nodded and looked away from them. He pointed at the guard carrying the Uzi. "Kill them now."

  The women screamed and tried to run, but the guard stepped forward and cut a blazing figure eight that stopped the screaming. The sound of the autofire was deafening in the enclosed space. Nine-millimeter bullets sliced through soft flesh and punched the crumpled bodies into the pool. A dark cloud of blood spread outward from the floating corpses.

  "Saburo, I want you to clean this mess up with your own hands," Hosaka said in a soft voice. "I want you to touch the mortality of yourself with this penance, and be glad I still love you enough at this point that I don't want to see your body join theirs. When you're finished, I'll see you out in my car. We have much to speak about."

  Saburo bowed. "As you wish, Father."

  "Yemon, please accompany me."

  "Yes, Father." Yemon followed, seeing the naked hatred blazing in his brother's eyes. Something would have to be done about Saburo soon before all their plans went awry.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "Whose bright idea was it for us to wear these fucking white jackets?" Justice Agent Darrel Wilson asked in disgust.

  "Mine," Bolan answered without hesitation. He wore a white dinner jacket, too. All of the garments had been secured through the American embassy and had been tailored to cover the shoulder rigs the Justice team wore. The Beretta 93-R was tucked under Bolan's left arm. The Desert Eagle had been left at the embassy's temporary Justice office. He let his gaze rove over the immense floor space where the consortium meeting reception was taking place. Dozens of men in black business suits clustered in little I groups and around tables covered with catered food.

  "Why white, for God's sake?" Wilson continued to grumble. "We stick out in this crowd."

  "Exactly," Bolan replied. It was the most basic military maneuver and, in this crowd, one of the most effective. The microsized walkie-talkies Brognola had requisitioned for the meet had been all but useless inside the building. Between other radio networks that the various divisions of security the Japanese police had set up, and systems that had been designed to limit such transmissions, the radio bands were filled with garbage. "This way we'll be able to locate one another instantly."

  "Doesn't matter," Wilson said. "There's so much goddamn hardware floating across this floor that it's going to be a massacre anyway if somebody decides to pull their piece."

  "We're here to do a job, Wilson," Bolan said in a graveyard voice. "You want in, that's fine. You want out, get out now and don't let the door hit you in the ass."

  A nerve twitched at the side of the agent's face. "No, sir." His back straightened. "I'm in."

  Bolan nodded and walked away. He hadn't liked being hard on the man, but he'd be damned if he'd entrust the lives of the rest of the team to someone who had already given up. True, security on the consortium meeting would have been ridiculous if it depended entirely on the American sector. But it didn't. There were a lot of good Japanese cops here, too. And Bolan counted on that even though the relationships between the groups were strained.

  Brognola and Tucker, who was dressed in a white jacket as well, stood in one corner. Bolan had noticed the CIA man mumbling into the lapel of his jacket often enough to be assured the Agency had access to a communications system that was operable even through the static. Where exactly Tucker's secret group was deployed was a mystery.

  Bolan filled a porcelain coffee cup. The Justice people had been up late helping Fujitsu and the Metropolitan Police fill out reports on the attack at the hotel. Hours later they'd installed themselves in another hotel and set up watch shifts. Bolan had gotten several hours of sleep between the excitement of last night and planning tonight's security detail.

  There hadn't been a lot of planning. With their already small numbers reduced by two, with their negative relationships with the Japanese officials, their status was no more than that of a color guard. They were gathered here, watching to see if the pot boiled over, and if it did, to see if there was anything they could do about it afterward.

  He circulated through the crowd, his combat senses fully alert. He'd com
mitted photographs of the top officials of the consortium to memory in the wee hours of the morning. Kokan, looking younger than his sixty-plus years of age, held court in one corner of the room around an ice sculpture of a rearing dragon.

  Bolan sipped his coffee and moved into position beside Ron Roberts. The agent looked almost relaxed as he sipped Coors Gold from a can. Bolan didn't say anything about having alcohol while on the job because he'd learned snap, polish and regulations didn't always measure up with the soldier in the jungle. And this was definitely a jungle.

  Roberts tilted the can in Bolan's direction and smiled. "Roberts's revenge," he said, displaying the brand name. "With all this free beer, I'm going to help boost the American economy. Want to pull a tab and help offset the trade deficit?"

  Bolan held up his coffee cup and shook his head. "Are you on Hosaka?"

  Roberts nodded and pointed with his chin. "There. The whole Hosaka clan. Papa, big brother and baby brother."

  One of the women Justice agents excused herself from an elderly Japanese man and joined them. She wore a bright smile and a long evening dress. The handbag drooped heavily from the weight of the Delta 10 mm pistol and extra clips that it carried.

  Bolan studied the Hosaka family over his coffee cup as he took another drink. Joji Hosaka held at least two dozen younger men in obvious thrall with whatever statements he was making. Yemon Hosaka looked thin and immaculate stuck between his heavyset father and hulking younger brother. The expression on Saburo's face was anything but contented, and a bruise peeked from beneath the skin of his left cheek.

  The woman agent reached out to pull on the lapel of Roberts's jacket with easy familiarity. "These should be made standard, Ron. It gives you that dashing Roger Moore look."

  Roberts captured her fingers in one hand. "Thank you, Janet, but you might drift down there to tell Darrel Wilson your view on these things. He isn't too enamored of his at the moment. He thinks it makes us look like servants. I tried telling him that's what we are, but it didn't seem to help any."

  "It's his Southern breeding," the woman said with a smile. She shifted her gaze to Bolan and dropped her voice to a near whisper. "I don't know what's going on, but while I was evading that old goat's horns, I overheard a conversation between Saburo Hosaka and one of the news people that sounded decidedly unfriendly. I thought you should know."

  "What news person?" Bolan asked.

  "A woman named Michi Ransom." She looked over her shoulder. "She was just behind them a few minutes ago. I don't know where she is now."

  Bolan nodded. "I'll check into it."

  The woman moved back into the crowd.

  Bolan glanced uneasily at the large windows overlooking the Tokyo skyline as he moved around the crowd. The back of his neck prickled. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was only a little after 7:00 p.m. He had a definite problem with the windows and the exposure they offered, but Fujitsu and others were supposed to have secured the area.

  Still the Executioner knew there was no security net that could be set up to keep out assassins. The only true safety lay in taking out the person controlling the attempts, but that wasn't possible until that person's identity was known.

  The silent feel of someone's eyes on him caused Bolan to pause and glance back at the Hosaka assembly. He locked gazes with the old man standing slightly behind and to Joji Hosaka's left. The man wore a black business suit like the people around him, but his mannerisms set him apart. And there was an aloofness about him, the kind Bolan was sure he would see in himself if he looked into a mirror. The man was a part of the assembly, but serving a different function, just as Bolan was.

  The warrior's trained eye noted the alterations that had been made in the suit, and realized that it could hide handfuls of deadly objects. He mentally summoned up the file that had been put together covering Hosaka's security crews, but drew a blank.

  After spotting the other members of his team, he joined Brognola and Tucker in their corner. He confronted the CIA man directly, noting the small wireless receiver in one ear. "Who's the old man with Joji Hosaka? I make him as a guard, but he's not on file."

  Tucker's smile was thin and brittle. "His name is Kiyosha Ogata, and his title is something like a family retainer. The Agency maintains an open file on the guy. No one's been able to uncover the history between him and the Hosaka, though there's a story that Joji helped Ogata's wife after the war and Ogata became a servant to Hosaka to work out his debt of obligation."

  "What does he do?"

  Tucker shrugged. "Pretty much whatever Hosaka tells him to. Ogata maintains a small home west of Tokyo and seldom goes to Hosaka's estates unless called for. During the seventies, he trained both Yemon and Saburo in martial arts." He paused. "There's a myth in the Japanese section that Ogata's a trained assassin, but people who could substantiate that don't. Or they disappear. From what I hear, in Hosaka's black market days, Ogata sometimes took out people who leaned on Joji, or stood in the way of the empire Joji wanted to build."

  "They'll start dinner before long," Brognola said. "If anything's going to go down tonight, it's going to go down soon."

  Bolan nodded in agreement. He took up a place next to the big Fed and surveyed the crowd again. Saburo was talking to a young woman who evidently wasn't interested in what he had to say. She stood with her back to him, her profile vaguely familiar. The woman's hair was neatly piled on top of her head, and lights shimmered from the green dress she wore. "Are you familiar with any of the media people present?" he asked Brognola.

  "I've turned down interviews with three people I know who cover the Washington beat," Brognola replied, "and I've seen a few others from the national news mags. I don't know them all. The attacks in the States have sharpened interests on this thing, from the financial people to the world news reporters looking to make a mark for themselves. Why?"

  "Do you know a woman reporter named Michi Ransom? From the name, she could be affiliated with either an American or a Japanese network." Bolan watched Saburo put his hand on the woman's arm. She tried to shrug it away. The woman left the crowd, with Saburo trailing after her.

  Brognola shook his head.

  "There she is," Tucker said. "The woman there, in the green dress. The one Saburo is following."

  Bolan watched as the woman halted at one of the catering tables. Saburo grabbed her elbow.

  "Guy must have a lot of confidence," Brognola commented dryly. "He's not taking no for an answer."

  "They know each other," Tucker told him. "Michi Ransom is a free-lance reporter, writer and photographer who works out of the States. She's also Kiyosha Ogata's granddaughter. She grew up around the Hosaka family."

  Michi Ransom turned to Saburo, her face vivid with repressed fury. Bolan recognized her at once as the ninja woman. He moved into the crowd, intending to get some answers.

  * * *

  "Thanks," Ross Tuley said as he accepted the cup of coffee Vardeman handed him. He straightened up from his slumped position over the scope of the Weatherby Mark V hunting rifle.

  Vardeman picked up a pair of binoculars and studied the drama in progress across the street. "How does it look?"

  "Like shooting fish in a barrel," Tuley replied. He sipped the coffee and found it too hot. Setting it to one side to cool, he returned his attention to the Weatherby's scope. He scanned dozens of people in the room. The cross hairs of the scope briefly touched on each of the Hosaka clan, then settled on the old man, who promptly stepped to one side as if he had felt the whisper-touch of the magnification.

  "Have you found Kokan?"

  "Not yet." Tuley moved the barrel of the big rifle on, making its weight a part of him. He still felt uneasy from the unexpected save in the alley the previous night. So far he hadn't had the opportunity to contact Sacker to find out if their rescue had been arranged, or if someone else was taking an active part in the game.

  "Doesn't make sense to take out the number two guy in this little business empire Hosaka and his chums are tr
ying to build," Vardeman commented. "Not when you can just as easily take out father and son Hosaka and probably do more damage in that respect."

  "Sacker has his reasons. Somewhere in that little black puzzle book of his everything we do is written down and charted out as close to perfection as he thinks it needs to be. We're going to dismantle this thing piece by piece, and he picks the pieces."

  Vardeman grunted. "Wonder what his playbook has to say about this Belasko guy now?"

  "Whatever it is, I don't think it's nearly enough." Tuley continued to squint through the scope. "That guy's dangerous. He's not operational on this the way the other Justice people are. If he had been, he would have waited for the police and cleared things up instead of avoiding them. And it was only a few hours before Belasko got to the guy who fixed one set of passports for us."

  "Did you ever find out who fielded the team that took Shigeru out?"

  "No." Tuley brought the cross hairs to a halt on Kokan. "I haven't talked to Sacker lately. I just found our pigeon."

  "I got him, too. And a bonus. Take a look at nine o'clock from Kokan."

  Tuley raised the rifle. Belasko, dressed in a white jacket, stood beside two men who were already known to him through Sacker's briefing. "Brognola and Tucker are with him."

  "I see that."

  Tuley's finger curled around the trigger of the high-powered hunting rifle. The cross hairs were centered on Belasko's right temple, then the target was gone. He blinked open his other eye and caught sight of Belasko moving toward Saburo Hosaka and a woman who was turning away from him.

  The groups of men started to break up as they took their seats at the tables covered with silverware and white linen.

  "Ross."

  Tuley ignored the man as he trailed the Weatherby along with Belasko. "If I had any sense," he said in a soft voice, "I'd take Belasko out now and try to make the score on Kokan before everything turned to shit."