The Last Assassin

apologetic bow of all, where the offender drops to his knees, his palms wide in front of him and his forehead to the ground.

'Yes, your responsibility!' Yamaoto exploded. 'Yours! But now I'm left with the burden of cleaning it up! All because you failed to do what I entrusted you with! And then you compounded your mistake with this shameful lack of confidence in your oyabun!'

As one, the men cried out, 'Moushiwake gozaimasen!' and dropped down into chinsha.

Yamaoto grasped the hilt of Kuro's daitou and snatched it clear of the stand. In an instant he had reached the two prostrate men, his fingers naturally and automatically tightening around the hilt in a two-handed grip as he moved. Barely slowing, he pivoted to his right, hips leading the way, elbows and wrists following like the trailing edge of a whip, creating the optimal combination of chopping and cutting that had been drilled into him in long hours of battoujutsu training.

Kito started to come up, perhaps sensing in some primitive way that something was amiss, but too late. The sword sliced through his massive neck and was blurring skyward again even before the man's cleanly severed head had fallen to the floor. Blood sprayed onto Sanada's face, but before the startled man could react the sword had completed its second lightning arc and his head, too, was on its way to the ground.

Yamaoto stepped to the side, away from the spray. Without thinking, he wiped down the blade on one of the men's wide backs, reversed the sword in his hand, and prepared to resheath it in a scabbard he suddenly remembered wasn't there. He walked over and handed it hilt first to Kuro, who took it with trembling hands without even rising from his seat.

Yamaoto looked for a moment at the fallen men. Their bodies had remained in chinsha, the heads on the floor beside them. Blood pumped vigorously from their severed necks. Lost your heads, indeed, he thought.

He turned to Kuro. 'I assume you have ample cleaning supplies in this establishment?' he asked.

Kuro, his skin pasty white, nodded wordlessly.

'Good. Have someone bring them and take care of this mess. And call the Taiwanese who can identify these men. Have him come here immediately.'

24

A half-hour later, two of Kuro's people escorted a nervous-looking Taiwanese man into Kuro's office. Kuro's staff had already mopped up the remarkable quantities of blood the sumos had lost and laid out the enormous bodies on plastic tarps. The next step would be to take them to a food preparation establishment friendly with Yamaoto's organization, an establishment with heavy equipment used in more ordinary circumstances for grinding fish into fishcake.

The Taiwanese saw the bodies and flinched. When he looked over at Kuro's desk and noticed the actual heads propped up there, he turned and tried to flee. Kuro's men blocked the door.

'Do you recognize these men?' Yamaoto asked in English.

The man struggled for another moment, to no avail. He turned and looked at Yamaoto, his eyes wide, but didn't answer.

'Do you recognize these men!' Yamaoto shouted, but still the man was mute.

Kuro repeated the question in Chinese. After a moment, the man stammered, 'Y-Yes. I recognize.'

Yamaoto nodded to Kuro. Kuro took out his mobile phone and input Big Liu's number. He handed the phone to the Taiwanese.

For someone who had been reluctant to speak a moment earlier, the man was suddenly garrulous. He let loose a torrent of agitated Chinese, his eyes darting from the heads to the bodies to Yamaoto and back again.

After about a minute, he returned the phone to Kuro with a trembling hand. Kuro gave it to Yamaoto, who raised the unit to his ear and said in English, 'This is Yamaoto Toshi.'

'Okay, very good,' Big Liu said. 'You kill bad men. Big Liu happy. But still missing money. And Big Liu men still dead.'

'Yes,' Yamaoto said. 'And we should talk about all of that.'

'Okay, talk.'

Yamaoto didn't like to be issued commands, but decided it was better to attribute the construction to a faulty command of English and let it go for now.

'I killed those men because there was no other way to avert a war,' he said. 'But I don't believe they were responsible for what happened at Wajima. They claimed there were two men there who shot them with tranquilizers. And if they really were the perpetrators, they never would have come in. They would have had escape plans in place and they would have used them. So there is a leak in one or both of our organizations, or worse, a collaborator. We need to discuss this and try to figure out who.'

'Tran… tran…' Big Liu said, and Yamaoto realized the man hadn't followed anything after the word tranquilizer. He handed the phone to Kuro and said, 'Translate what I just told him.'

Kuro complied, then gave the phone back. Yamaoto said, 'You see? We really should talk about this face-to- face. May I suggest my associate Mr Kuro's club in Minami Aoyama in Tokyo? Whispers, you may remember it's called. I think it would provide the right setting.'

Whispers was Kuro's most lucrative and high-class establishment, staffed by stunning women from all over the world. It was the very club where they had sealed the current supply arrangement, and Big Liu had been so overwhelmed by the beauty of the hostesses that he had stayed in Tokyo two extra days and taken a different blonde back to his hotel every night. Yamaoto sensed that the allure of another all-expenses-paid trip to the club would be enough to bring Big Liu around.

'Big Liu still missing money,' the man said, holding out. 'And Big Liu's men still dead.'