Payback

He had been gone no more than a minute before a young Japanese-American youth emerged from the water, went to the open showers, and quickly toweled himself down as he walked casually to the rock, retrieved the Coke can, and then mounted a mountain bike for the steep, hot ride up to Kalanianaole Highway.

The mountain biker, in his early twenties, rode to the post office a couple of miles away at Hawaii Kai, where he was arrested in the process of mailing a canister of film from the fake piggy-bank Coke can to a post-office box on the island of Kauai. Yudah Ulama was arrested as he was about to board the Waikiki-bound Beach Bus.

Johnny Suzuki and Jenny Osaka identified themselves to the postmaster at Hawaii Kai, and a quick computer search told them that the post-office box in Kauai was rented by a Tayama Omura, who, a concomitant computer search revealed, was now nearly ninety, living in an apartment block down above Brennecke’s Beach near Poipu on the southeastern end of the Garden Isle.

Jenny Osaka told Johnny Suzuki that it was kind of sad to have to arrest such an old man, but Johnny would have none of it. “Just like a woman,” he said, knowing it was clearly a blatant sexist remark. “I remember my grandma saying that they shouldn’t have hanged Tojo after the war because he was ‘getting on in years.’ You think those Nazis, those child torturers like Mengele, hiding down there in South America, shouldn’t have been taken out by the Israelis just because they were ‘getting on in years’?”

“I just think it’s sad,” responded Jenny. “I just think of a woman holding a baby in her arms. What happens?”

In a moment of unpleasant revelation, Johnny replied, “Look, my great-uncle was in Navy Intel here during the war, but he stepped over the line. When they were interning the Nisei after Pearl Harbor, he and an older black guy raped a young woman in the camp. He was demoted, and they put him in the stockade. This Omura, whoever he is, is old, but he’s probably been working against the U.S. for North Korea — and who knows who else? — for years. Probably cost a lot of our guys their lives.” Johnny pointed to the computer screen. “Says here he was interned during World War Two. And now we’ve got him as the owner of the post-office box in Kauai that would have received that dead drop at Hanauma Bay. He’s a ninety-year-old spy, Jenny.”

“I know,” she said.

When Tayama Omura, after doing his midday Tai Chi stretches, called his two stringer agents, twice, between the contact time of 3:00 and 4:00 P.M. and didn’t get a response, he assumed both had been arrested. One of the stringers, the mountain biker, might have been in a traffic accident — it was gridlock in Honolulu these days, which was why Tayama had moved to Kauai — but neither of them responding was a bad sign.

En route on the twenty-six-minute Aloha flight from Oahu to Kauai, Johnny Suzuki received a call on his cell from Honolulu headquarters. “Johnny, those two jokers we have in cells have both received calls on their home phones from the same number. We traced the calls back to the P.O. box guy in Kauai. Be careful.”

“Thanks,” said Johnny, then informed Jenny Osaka, who was now tying her shoulder-length black hair into a ponytail so that it wouldn’t interfere with her firing if she had to.

“Hope he comes quietly,’ she said.

“Listen,” Johnny warned her. “This guy’s a pro, right? A ninety-year-old can pull a trigger same as a nine- year-old, only with better aim. So when we get there, have your weapon drawn before we get anywhere near his apartment. I’ll enter first.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” she said.

“I know.”

Tayama Omura’s face had none of the serenity that long life sometimes brings those who have endured and have peacefully turned their backs on the mad rush of humanity in the congested places of the earth. His countenance was more like that of an angry mask from one of the early Tahitian warriors. The effect of a mask, however, ironically caused many a warrior to assume the personality of the mask, frightening their owners more than their enemies.

As Omura had aged, his life force had been kept strong by the ever-increasing need for revenge against a generation, most of whom were now dead. He hated what he had become, and knew deep beneath the mask of the spy against America that the spirit of Yoko would be saddened by his decline into hatred. In using it to kill so many Americans by giving secret information to the North Koreans from the Korean War on, his hatred had overwhelmed the power of her love — in avenging her he had undone himself. So that when he knew they were coming for him, his habit of revenge was so powerful that he viewed their approach as nothing less than an unwarranted attack on him and Yoko that must be repulsed.

He already had the .45 that he had taken from the Intelligence policeman, Suzuki, who’d been a party to the rape of his beloved and whose throat he had cut one night in Honolulu after the internment had ended in 1945. The .45 was an old weapon, but he had routinely cleaned and oiled it, and he had no reason to expect any of the big .45 bullets would fail, having kept them in an airtight urn next to the urn of her ashes.

His apartment was in a cream and brown-trimmed block built high on the rocky cliff just east of Poipu’s Brennecke’s Beach, whose body-surfing waves were among the world’s best and most dangerous, waves that, like allied intelligence, Tayama Omura had never turned his back on.

As he saw the unfamiliar sedan pull up outside the apartment, and the man and woman get out, he noted how there’d been no flashing lights, no sirens. No doubt they didn’t want to alarm any of the tourists, not so soon after his North Korean paymasters had killed so many Americans and when everyone holidaying on the islands had to catch a plane back home. Some tourists in the apartment block had canceled their return flights and signed on for another week in the complex or elsewhere on the island until, they said, they’d feel confident that all airports in U.S. territory had been secured against missile attacks. All the lead articles in the Honolulu Advertiser, Omura recalled, had been about the growing demand by consumer groups for expensive cutting-edge technology to be mounted on all passenger planes, like the Israelis did, and also on FedEx and other major airline courier planes that carried so much of the nation’s business.

Omura took down a hollow gourd helmet/mask from his collection on the wall. As a spy, he had a predilection for masks, the hollowed-out gourd one that had been worn by warriors long before Queen Liliuokalani’s reign. The hardened, sun-baked gourd helmet had only two hockey-puck-sized holes for the eyes and seven hide tapers dangling from it like a segmented beard. If he didn’t get the first shot in, the gourd would offer some protection.

He unlatched the door then walked back to the sofa by the window through which he had watched a thousand sunsets. Lying down on the sofa, he drew the Advertiser up over his masked face as if he’d dozed off while reading, the gun in his right hand, by his side between his right thigh and the sofa’s back. He wasn’t going to go meekly. He’d take at least one of them with him. To add authenticity to his dozing-off pretense, he let his left leg slide off the sofa, its black rubber sandal resting idly on the carpet.

He heard the knock and didn’t stir, but breathed deeply so they’d see the rise and fall of the old man’s chest as he slept.

“Mr. Omura?”

No answer.

“Maybe he’s deaf,” Jenny, her gun drawn, whispered.

“Maybe he isn’t,” said Johnny softly. “Mr. O—?”

Omura fired, the force of the impact punching Jenny back through the doorway, the second shot, from Suzuki, hitting the old man as he fired his second. Suzuki’s body flung back, like Jenny’s, but against the wall. And it was over, Omura’s throat, though he was dead, gurgling like one of the tiny, man-made streams said to have been dug by the Menehunes, another kind of outcast in Hawaii, who had also been conquered. “You okay?” a winded Suzuki asked Jenny Osaka, who, after being hit by the .45 slug and slammed back rudely against the hallway wall, had slid down, her breath knocked out of her. “I think I’m—” She paused, looking about for her sidearm. She was still holding it. “I think I’m okay. You? Oh, Lord—” She’d just seen the gruesome gourd helmet, the blood gushing from beneath it.

Suzuki walked unsteadily toward the grotesque mask and, after checking for a pulse and getting none, gingerly removed the hollowed-out gourd. He frowned, unconsciously creating a transitory image in his face of the old man’s, its wizened-up skin so cleft with anger that it reminded Suzuki of a small papier-mache map of deep, dry desert coulees devoid of any suggestion of life. It was as if Suzuki’s bullet hadn’t killed him but that he’d died years ago.

“Well,” said Jenny, picking herself up, already feeling the bruise on her left breast from where the .45, fired by