The Last Assassin

'I hope it's a harpoon. I doubt anything else could reach a vital organ.'

'Well, how about if…'

'Look, it's not that I don't want to sit around figuring out how to kill a sumo,' I said, 'but if it's clear now, maybe you could duck out and put the transmitter in place on their car. I'll stay here and warn you if anyone's coming.'

'Roger that.'

Two minutes later he called me back. 'It's done. Anywhere they go, we can tail 'em from a distance and we'll know where they stop. And if they walk, we can just follow the sounds of the earth shaking beneath their feet.'

'Right,' I said. I pictured the four darts we had. Kanezaki had said they were good for anything up to a rhino. I hoped he meant it literally. Otherwise, we were going to be in trouble.

18

The next thirty hours were mostly watching and waiting. The inn's kaiseki — Japanese haute cuisine — was excellent, and its onsen hot spring baths were wonderful. I availed myself of both lest my reticence be remarked on, and felt a little bad amid the luxurious surroundings about having to leave Dox in the van. Twice on our second day at the inn I drove us out to more remote areas so he could stretch and get some air. He was never anything other than cheerful and I thought some distant Marine gods must be proud.

The clouds of the previous day coalesced into a storm that broke just after midnight. I sat in the alcove of my room, the lights off, my gaze alternating between the GPS monitor, which indicated the Cadillac hadn't moved, and the dark sea without. At a little after two, my cell phone buzzed. It was Dox.

'Our friends are getting in the car,' he said. 'Wonder who they could be going to meet at this hour and in this weather.'

'We're going to find out,' I said. I got up, pulled on the waterproof pants and jacket I had bought for this very occasion, and headed for the door.

The lobby of the inn was deserted. I was prepared with a story, of course, about wanting to walk in the rain, but that would have been thin and I was glad not to have to employ it.

We followed the Cadillac from a half-kilometer back. Dox, in a black nylon-lined fleece, monitored the transmitter from the passenger seat. The Cadillac showed up as a blinking red light on the mapping software and we had no trouble tracking it. So far, so good.

We passed no cars on the coastal road. After a few minutes, the red light started moving around erratically — figure eights and zigzags.

'They're looking for problems,' Dox observed.

I nodded. 'That's why we're hanging back.'

After another few minutes, the red light turned right, into the park I had reconnoitered earlier, then stopped.

'What did I tell you,' I said, smiling.

He chuckled. 'Like I said, devious minds think alike.'

I cut the lights and we drove the rest of the way with the night-vision goggles on. Everything showed up fine. A hundred meters past the park, we pulled off the road and stopped. The rain played a drumbeat on the van's steel top while we geared up inside.

'Remember, the neck,' I said, wrapping tape around my pant legs to make sure the material from the left wouldn't make noise rubbing against the right. 'The farther away from the neck you hit, the longer it's going to take the tranquilizer to kick in. And I don't want to have to dance in the dark with two half-drugged, pissed-off sumo wrestlers.'

'You sure? I'd pay good money to see it.'

In the green glow of the night-vision equipment I saw he was grinning below his goggles. 'Start with one dart each,' I said. 'See if that does the trick. We'll only need them down for a minute, but with the size of these guys I don't know. So if the first shot doesn't work right away, hit them again. Don't take chances. If we wind up having to shoot them, it's not going to look like they ripped off the Chinese. And that's the whole point here.'

'Roger that.'

I double-checked the HK to make sure a round was chambered. 'You ready?'

'Never readier, son.'

'Let's go.'

I had already made sure to shut off the interior dome light, and the van stayed dark as we exited. We closed the doors softly, but the rain was really coming down now and I doubted anyone would have heard regardless.

We crept along the sodden ground to the Cadillac, heads and guns tracking left and right as we moved. Everything was illuminated beautifully in the goggles. The car was empty. We paused alongside it and looked down the gently sloping ground to the water.

There they were, ten meters away, standing at the edge of the surf like a pair of boulders overlooking the sea. They were wearing trench coats and held umbrellas that looked like little parasols hovering above their bulk.

'Man,' Dox whispered. 'If you stuck bulbs in their mouths, you'd have yourself a pair of damn lighthouses.'

One of the sumos had a phone to his ear but I couldn't hear him over the steady downpour. The other guy was looking at a small LCD monitor, and I realized they were using their own GPS equipment to link up with the boat that was bringing in their shipment. A black cargo bag was on the ground between them, presumably payment for