The guard laughed and then asked the routine question. “Taking any classified work home tonight?”
“Nothing. I left my attache case in the office.”
The guard stepped on a switch to lower the barrier and gestured down the double drive leading to the street. “Swish a shot of gin around your mouth when you get home. That’ll deaden the pain.”
“Not a bad idea,” said Furukawa, shifting the six-speed transmission into first. “Thank you.”
Situated in a tall glass building hidden from the street by a grove of eucalyptus trees, Vincent Labs was a research and design center owned by a consortium of space and aviation companies. The work was highly classified and the results carefully guarded, since much of the funding came from government contracts for military programs. Futuristic advances in aerospace technology were conceived and studied, the projects with the highest potential going on to design and production, while the failures were put aside for future study.
Furukawa was what is known in intelligence circles as a sleeper. His parents were two of the many thousands of Japanese who immigrated to the United States shortly after the war. They quickly melted in with the Japanese-Americans who were picking up the pieces of their interrupted lives upon release from the internment camps. The Furukawas did not come across the Pacific because they’d lost their love of Japan. Far from it. They hated America and its multicultures.
They came as solid, hardworking citizens for the express purpose of raising their only son to become a leader of American business. No expense was spared to give their child the finest education the nation could offer, the money arriving mysteriously through Japanese banks into family accounts. Incredible patience and long years of maintaining the facade paid off when son George received a Ph.D. in aerodynamic physics and eventually achieved a position of power with Vincent Labs. Highly respected among aviation designers, Furukawa was now able to amass enormous quantities of information on America’s finest aerospace technology, which he secretly passed to Suma Industries.
The classified data Furukawa had stolen for a country he had yet to visit saved Japan billions of dollars in research and development costs. Almost single-handedly, his traitorous activities had given Japan a five-year shortcut to becoming a world leader in the aerospace market.
Furukawa had also been recruited for the Kaiten Project during a meeting with Hideki Suma in Hawaii. He was honored to be chosen by one of the most influential leaders of Japan for a sacred mission. His orders were to discreetly arrange for specially colored cars to be collected at the dock and transported to undisclosed destinations. Furukawa did not ask questions. His ignorance of the operation failed to bother him. He could not be deeply involved for fear of compromising his own mission of stealing U.S. technology.
The traffic had thinned between rush hours as he made his way onto Santa Monica Boulevard. Several kilometers later he swung south on the San Diego Freeway. With a bare touch of his shoe on the accelerator, the Murmoto wove through the slower stream of cars. His detector beeped, and Furukawa slowed to the speed limit three hundred meters before entering the range of a parked police radar unit. He cracked a rare smile as he speeded up again.
Furukawa worked into the right-hand lane and curled around the off-ramp down onto the Harbor Freeway. Ten minutes later he reached the shipping terminal area and cut into an alley, where he passed a huge truck and semitrailer parked behind an empty warehouse. The doors of the cab and the sides of the trailer were painted with the logo of a well-known moving and storage company. He hit his horn twice. The driver of the big rig tooted his air horn three times in reply and pulled behind Furukawa’s sports car.
After dodging a heavy crowd of trucks backing in and out of the loading docks, Furukawa finally stopped at one of the gates to a holding yard for cars imported from foreign manufacturers. Other nearby yards were filled with Toyotas, Hondas, and Mazdas that had already come off ships before being loaded on twodeck auto transporters that would haul them to dealer showrooms.
While the guard checked the receiving documents from the envelope, Furukawa gazed at the sea of cars already driven off the Divine Water. Over one-third had been off-loaded and were sitting in the California sun. He idly counted the flow, as an army of drivers drove them through several gaping hatches and down ramps into the yard, and came up with a rate of eighteen a minute.
The guard handed him the envelope. “Okay, sir, three SP-Five Hundred sport sedans. Please give your papers to the dispatcher down the road. He’ll fix you up.”
Furukawa thanked him and motioned for the truck to follow him.
The ruddy cigar-smoking dispatcher recognized Furukawa. “Back for more of those putrid brown cars?” he asked cheerfully.
Furukawa shrugged. “I have a customer who buys them for his sales fleet. Believe it or not, that’s his company’s color.”
“What does he sell, Kyoto lizard crap’?”
“No, imported coffee.”
“Don’t tell me the label. I don’t want to know.”
Furukawa slipped the dispatcher a hundred-dollar bill. “How soon before I can take delivery?”
The dispatcher grinned. “Your cars are easy to find in the cargo holds. I’ll have them for you in twenty minutes.”
An hour had passed before the three brown automobiles were safely tied down inside the enclosed trailer and released from the holding yard. Not once did the driver and Furukawa exchange words. Even eye contact was avoided.
Outside the gate, Furukawa pulled his car to the side of the road and lit a cigarette. He watched in stony curiosity as the truck and semitrailer turned and headed for the Harbor Freeway. The license on the trailer was California, but he knew it would be switched at some desert truck stop before crossing the state line.
Despite his practiced detachment, Furukawa unconsciously found himself wondering what was so special about the brown cars. And why was their final destination so secret?
20
“FIRST WE’LL BODY SURF under the sunrise at Makapuu Point,” said Pitt, holding Stacy’s hand. “Later, it’s snorkeling around Hanauma Bay before you rub suntan oil all over my body, and we spend a lazy afternoon dozing on a warm white sand beach. Then we’ll soak up the sunset while sipping rum collins on the lanai of the Halekalani Hotel, and afterward it’s off to this intimate little restaurant I know in the Manoa Valley.”
Stacy looked at him in amusement. “Have you ever thought of forming an escort service?”
“I don’t have it in me to charge a woman,” said Pitt amicably. “That’s why I’m always broke.”
He paused and looked out the window of the big twin-engine Air Force helicopter as it drummed through the night. In the early evening of Pitt and Plunkett’s rescue, the big bird had appeared and plucked the entire Soggy Acres mining team and the crew of
The sea below shimmered under a bright three-quarter moon as the pilot flew almost directly over a cruise ship. Ahead to the southeast, Pitt caught sight of the lights on the island of Oahu. He should have been sound asleep like Sandecker, Giordino, and the others, but the exhilaration of escaping the bony character with the scythe kept his blood stirred up. That and the fact Stacy stayed awake to keep him company.
“See anything?” she asked between yawns.
“Oahu on the horizon. We should be passing over Honolulu in fifteen minutes.”
She looked at him teasingly. “Tell me more about tomorrow, especially the after-dinner part.”
“I didn’t come to that.”
“Well?”
“Okay, there are these two palm trees—”
“Palm trees?”
“Of course,” said Pitt, looking surprised that she asked. “And between them is this carnal hammock built for two.”
