He had broached the question of downloading a video picture of the scene from the airship's observation cameras, but Fitzduane had looked straight at him and shaken his head. Silently, with only the slightest movement, the Spider had nodded his agreement.
There were some things he, the Deputy Superintendent-General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, should not be officially aware of.
Fumio Namaka sat in the back of his long, black armored limousine and rechecked his arrangements. What he had planned would, perhaps, not have been so unusual in a country such as the U.S., but in tightly controlled Tokyo, it was unorthodox in the extreme.
He thought it possible that he would not need his full reinforcements. The irony was that the gaijin Fitzduane would quite likely be there as arranged, seriously thinking he could arrange a truce after all that had happened. Actually, a truce would make sense. This kind of endless war was a gross distraction from the more productive business of ever expanding the Namaka organization. Further, given that the feud with Katsuda was unresolved, it was not very wise to be fighting on two fronts.
Still, Kei's death had to be avenged. It was the overarching imperative and had to be accomplished whatever the price. And in a fundamental way, the ultimate price had already been paid.
From the moment Fumio had seen his brother's bullet-ridden corpse in the chill surroundings of the mortuary, and the last vestige of hope that somehow he had been misinformed had vanished, Fumio had died inside.
He no longer had a life. He only had obligations.
' Sensei, it is time,' said his driver.
'Very well,' said Fumio. The limousine slid forward out of the private parking space and turned into the street. Since timing was critical, they had waited in a safe house only three minutes from the Hodama residence. Within five minutes, ten at most, this accursed gaijin Fitzduane, this murderer of his beloved Kei, would be dead.
Deep inside, Fumio knew that even this vengeance would make no real difference, and inside he despaired. Whatever he did or tried to do, his splendid big brother was no more.
His mind went back to the ruins of postwar Tokyo and those earlier poverty-stricken joyful days when all they had was each other and every day was a new adventure. He was smiling to himself when they arrived at Hodama's gates.
All inside the airship were now linked with head-mounted headsets equipped with miniature boom microphones. The airship was, in fact, quiet enough for normal voice communication, but the use of an intercom meant that you did not have to move your head and look at your audience to be heard with perfect clarity.
Such a detail was important. The watchers were focused with total intensity on the scene below. They knew that whatever was going to happen was likely to be unexpected, sudden, and lethal, and they would have to react immediately. A tenth of a second could make the difference between living and dying. They were dealing with some very dangerous people.
Fitzduane was acting as a spotter and fire commander. He was observing the scene below through gyroscopically stabilized, twenty-power, range-finding field glasses.
The diagonal to the garden below as they circled was almost exactly five hundred yards, and this range appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of his vision, together with other targeting details. The picture quality was outstanding. In visual terms, he was a mere twenty-five yards away. There were night-vision options, but he did not need them. Within its fifteen-foot-high walls, as agreed, the Hodama gardens were brightly illuminated. The benefit of this level of brightness was not just that everything in the garden could be clearly seen, but also that looking up meant looking into glare. The airship could not be detected.
The gondola was now in darkness. This was something of a relief to Fitzduane, since the slaughter surrounding him could no longer be seen. His own hands and clothing were covered in blood, and though the observation windows were open he could still detect the acrid smell. A split-second picture of Mike Bergin's body flashed before him, and he thrust it from his mind.
That was then and this was now. Focus, focus, focus on the scene below.
Fortunately, the copilot was turning out to be damn good. After the initial shock of seeing his superior's face half blown away and deposited on the Plexiglas, Inspector- san had rallied and now was flying superbly. There was the occasional very slight vibration in height and distance due to variations in the night breeze, but mostly the airship held its circular course as if tied to the Hodama garden by some invisible line. Thrust vectoring of its two duct-mounted propellers, the ability to swivel the complete drive units in flight, was supposed to give an unusual degree of control – and it showed.
Fitzduane was also linked to the Spider on ground control. Now he watched Fumio drive into the Hodama grounds, leave his limousine, and take up position as arranged.
Fitzduane took care making his identification. Bearing in mind what he had planned, he was acutely conscious that Fumio could attempt a switch. His instinct told him it was unlikely. Fumio would want to be there personally to see his brother's killer destroyed.
Still, it was best to be certain. Fitzduane examined Fumio's distinctive crippled walk, his build, and his features with great care and quickly switched to infrared mode to detect any mask or similar anomaly. There was little doubt.
'Fumio has entered and is in position,' said Fitzduane on the open net. 'No surprises so far.'
The Spider's people were watching all approaches, leaving Fitzduane and his team to concentrate on the garden. 'Katsuda's limousine should arrive in about thirty seconds,' said the Spider.
'Any sign of a backup for either of them?' said Fitzduane.
Surely there would be car- or vanloads of reinforcements ready to rush in. Both men were always heavily guarded and were devious in the extreme. He found it hard to believe that neither of them would be planning anything. It would be downright unnatural. And yet the Spider's men, who had the area saturated, had reported nothing so far.
Very weird.
Where were Yaibo? What was Katsuda really up to? Probably Schwanberg had known, but he was not going to tell anyone anything now.
'Still nothing,' said the Spider. He, too, was unsettled.
Katsuda's truly repulsive appearance severely limited his public appearances.
He lived in the seclusion of his own world, in the darkness and shadows of his own creations. This behavior limited neither his work nor his ambition, but regularly he felt a need for release. Apart from his women and the ambivalence he felt toward them because of his burn-distorted features, his relaxation and his window to the outside world were the movies.
He watched them to the point of obsession. The movies were not inwardly disgusted by how he looked. They were pleasure, pure and simple.
Film fulfilled his need for escape, stimulated his imagination, and appealed to his sense of the dramatic. Privately, Katsuda considered that if events had not taken the direction they had, he would have made an outstanding actor. He had a fine voice and projected it well, and his movements were well-coordinated. All that was missing were looks.
From the movies, Katsuda had followed the extraordinary developments of special effects and, of even more interest, specialized makeup. Sometimes, the results on the screen were so good that it seemed to him he could apply them to his own situation and appear, albeit for a limited time, normal.
He had cultivated one of the leading makeup artists in Japan and had even sent him to Hollywood to advance his craft to state of the art. The results were encouraging, brilliant even, if he was seen from a short distance away,
