Part 10 (1/2)

Here she was questioning her own judgment. Not good.

She got off the bed and walked to the desk. The laptop sprang to life, and the screen saver vanished and left the search engine flas.h.i.+ng at her. Annja sat down and poised her fingers over the keyboard. What am I looking for? she wondered.

She put her hands down and sighed. ”This is ridiculous.”

Instead of typing, she put the computer back to sleep, turned out the lights and crawled back into the bed. She needed sleep. A good sleep that would help her get up tomorrow and start the hunt with a rested mind.

There'd be plenty of time to discuss the wacky occurrences of the night with Ken en route to wherever he was taking her.

She settled her head on the pillow and took three deep breaths.

”It appears you weren't lying.”

Annja's eyes snapped open. She tried to sit up, but a firm hand held her down. She could make out a set of eyes staring at her, surrounded by black cloth and face paint.

”Don't. You will only succeed in making me angry if you do that.”

Annja stayed lying down. ”I told you I didn't have it.”

”We needed to see you weren't lying. But if you had been, the first thing you would have gone for was the dorje dorje. You didn't do that. So, I believe you don't have it. That's good.”

”So, you'll leave now?”

”Not quite. We want to propose a simple business arrangement.”

Annja shook her head. ”Forget it. I don't make business deals with people I don't know.”

The man hovering above her paused. ”Ask yourself if you really want to know who we are, Annja. Ask yourself truthfully. Are you prepared-really prepared-to know that kind of thing?”

Annja sighed. ”What's the deal?”

”We know he's taking you west tomorrow. If you find the dorje dorje, we want it. It's that simple.”

Annja looked at the blackened face. ”What do I get out of it?”

He appeared to smile. ”Your life.”

”That's not much of a deal.”

”I could kill you now, if you'd prefer.”

The way he said it was so matter-of-fact, Annja didn't doubt for a moment he could do it easily. She s.h.i.+fted slightly. ”Fine.”

”We'll be watching you. Don't renege on our deal, Annja. We'll know where you are, wherever you are. And if you betray us, there will be no escape from our vengeance. It doesn't matter where you go, we'll hunt you down. Remember that.”

”All right.”

”It's time for you to sleep now.”

Annja felt a soft pressure on the side of her neck.

And then felt nothing.

Nothing at all.

11.

Nezuma Hidetaki watched from the back of the black BMW M3 through heavily tinted windows as Annja Creed and Kennichi Ogawa walked into the train station near Ueno Park. He'd been tailing them since they'd left the hotel earlier that morning, using a network of low-grade idiots to do the grunt work while he stayed in his car and monitored their efforts.

But Ogawa was proving himself quite adept at nonchalant countersurveillance skills, purposefully backtracking several times, nearly catching one of Nezuma's men as he tailed too close by a video store in Kanda. A last-minute break spared the entire team from being burned, but one careless mistake had almost ruined the entire surveillance effort.

That man now lay in the foot well next to Nezuma. He was sweating tremendously and Nezuma sighed once before looking at him.

”You should have antic.i.p.ated that he would backtrack. You were told to expect such tactics. This man is not a fool.” He sighed. ”I wish I could say the same for you.”

The man's eyes widened. ”Master, forgive me. It will not happen again. Please, I beg you!”

Nezuma shook his head. The problem with the youth of today was their rampant sense of self-ent.i.tlement. Not one understood the need to work and work hard for what they got in life. Youngsters these days deemed themselves worthy without having to prove their worth. As a result, they were sloppy and inefficient.

Not to mention wholly annoying, Nezuma concluded.

Nezuma blamed the plague of idiocy on a politically correct generation of parents who rewarded failure as if it were success lest they damage a child's self-esteem. He sniffed. What bulls.h.i.+t. Nezuma knew that the only way to build self-esteem was to challenge oneself on the anvil of life. Only by failing and then trying again, failing more and then eventually succeeding did you prove yourself worthy of victory and all the spoils that went with it.

During his time in America, Nezuma had grown nauseous at the sight of parents coddling their children and never letting them discover the nature of risk. He had also seen an almost complete lack of parenting-no discipline instilled in a misbehaving child.

G.o.d forbid they use the word no no, he thought.

All of this left Nezuma with a pool of talent that would have perhaps been better if he poured bleach into the mix. His young guns were fools who thought a new Ducati motorcycle made them impervious to seasoned veterans of battle. They imagined their bravado alone would grant them respect.

And when they failed, they still expected to be rewarded.

Ridiculous.

All of his employees were like this, except one. In the front seat behind the steering wheel sat the only person Nezuma trusted with his life-Shuko.

Her ebony hair hung in a tasteful bob, unmarred by the trendy tea-brown staining so common to others of her generation. At twenty-five, Shuko was Nezuma's finest pupil and most loyal servant. Adept with her hands and feet as she was with firearms and explosives, not to mention an almost superhuman ability to face risk and danger and overcome both, Nezuma valued no one as he did Shuko.

Her voice cut through the whimpering of the man in the foot well. ”We should go soon if we hope to stay with them.”

Nezuma nodded. ”I would very much hate to miss my train.”

”Master...” The young man in the foot well couldn't have been any older than twenty. He was weeping now. Mixed with the tears and sweat, the BMW would no doubt reek if Nezuma had cared enough about it.

He calmly withdrew the silenced Beretta .22-caliber pistol and aimed at the man's head. ”Failure is not to be tolerated.”

When he fired, the subsonic bullets barely made a sound. But they penetrated the skull and bounced about inside, tearing open the brain cavity and killing the man.