Hawaii
Takahiro Ohnishi scraped
a Frank Lloyd Wright- designed stainless fork across the Limoges
plate, piling rich Bernaise sauce around a cut of Kobe beef. He
brought the food to his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Honolulu’s
mayor, David Takamora, watched the elderly industrialist with
well-hidden distaste.
Ohnishi chewed for several more seconds, then
leaned over and spit the thick mass of meat into a silver wine
bucket, already a quarter filled with his chewed but indigestible
meal. Ohnishi patted his lips delicately and waved a butler over to
clear the plates.
“Tell the chef that the asparagus was a bit
wilted and the next time it happens, he’ll be fired.” There was no
malice in his withered voice, but a man of his position needed none
to ensure that his orders were carried out. “I can’t believe you
didn’t eat more, David. That beef was flown in this morning from my
farm in Japan.”
“My appetite isn’t what it used to be.” Takamora
shrugged.
“I hope my condition doesn’t upset you.”
“Not at all,” the mayor denied too quickly.
“It’s just the pressure I’m under right now. Planning a silent coup
isn’t all that simple, you know.”
At home, Ohnishi usually used an electric
wheelchair to get around easier. Now he wheeled away from the
mahogany table. Takamora tossed his napkin onto the table and
followed, silently cursing the revolting spectacle of Ohnishi’s
eating practices.
Though still in his fifties, Takamora’s face was
developing the languid cast common to many elderly Japanese men.
His eyes had begun to retreat behind permanent bags. His body, once
slender and toned from years of exercise, had paunched and bowed,
so his trunk now appeared too large for his thin legs to
support.
Warm light glinted off the frames of the
paintings and brought out the beautiful burnish of the cherry wood
paneling of Ohnishi’s private study. Takamora took the leather
winged-back chair as Ohnishi wheeled behind his broad ormolu-topped
desk.
“Smoke if you wish,” Ohnishi invited.
Takamora wasted no time lighting a Marlboro with
a gaily colored disposable lighter.
“What have you to report?”
From behind a blue-gray cloud of smoke, Takamora
spoke slowly to mask the tension he felt whenever he was in
Ohnishi’s presence. “We are nearly ready to send the ultimatum to
the President. I have two full divisions of loyal National Guards
ready to blockade Pearl Harbor and the airport. The governor will
return from the mainland next week; we will detain him as soon as
he lands. Our senators and representatives can be called back from
Washington with only a moment’s notice. If they resist our plans,
they too will be detained—however, Senator Namura has already
expressed an interest in joining us.
“I have full assurances from all the civic
organizations involved that they are prepared to do their part with
the strikes and marches. The press, too, is ready. There will be a
full blackout for forty-eight hours after the start date. The news
will be broadcast as usual, but will make no references to the
coup.
“I have here,” Takamora reached into his jacket
pocket and removed a sheet of paper, “the names of the satellite
technicians on the islands who could broadcast unauthorized
stories. I will have them detained or their equipment destroyed,
whichever is necessary.”
“And the phone service?”
“The main microwave transmission towers and the
mainland cable junction will be taken and controlled by our troops.
It’s inevitable that some news of the coup will escape before we’re
ready for our own broadcasts, but it will be largely
unconfirmable.”
“You have done well, David. All seems to be in
order, but there is a slight problem.”
“What is that?” Takamora asked, leaning forward
in his chair.
The study door opened and the menacing form of
Kenji, Ohnishi’s assistant/bodyguard, moved to stand behind the
mayor’s chair, his steel-hard hands held at his sides.
“And what is that problem?” Takamora repeated, a
bit more nervously, after a glance at the newcomer.
“The letter I had written as an ultimatum to the
President has been removed from my office. I can only assume it has
been sent to Washington.”
Takamora couldn’t hide his surprise. “We still
need more time, why did you send it?”
“I did not say, David, that I sent the letter. I
said that it had been removed from my office. The only person to
know of this letter and to have spent time in my office alone is
you. Therefore, I must ask if you sent the letter to the President
without my authorization?”
“I have only seen that letter once, I swear.”
Takamora quickly realized the danger he was in. “I would never take
it from you.”
“I want to believe you, David. I really do, but
I find that I can’t. I don’t know what you wished to gain from your
action, but I assure you that I know its results.”
“I swear I didn’t take the letter.” Sweat beaded
against Takamora’s waxen skin.
“You are the only person to have any access to
this room and to know the location of my safe. I must congratulate
you on your safecracking abilities. Most impressive.” There was no
admiration in Ohnishi’s voice. “If you think your act will cripple
my efforts in any way, you are very wrong.
“As we speak, arms are being readied for transit
here. I have made arrangements for a highly motivated mercenary
army. Of course, it would be easier to use your National Guard
troops, but I will manage without them.
“David, you could have been the President of the
newest and possibly most wealthy nation on the planet if you hadn’t
become greedy and crossed me.”
“I didn’t.” Desperation edged Takamora’s voice
up an octave.
“I find it admirable that you retain your
innocence even to the end,” Ohnishi said sadly.
With those words, Kenji struck.
He whipped a thin nylon cord around David
Takamora’s neck in a lightning-quick maneuver. With amazing
strength, he torqued the cord into the mayor’s throat. Takamora
clawed at the garrote as it bit deeper and deeper, his tongue
thickening as it thrust between his tobacco-stained teeth. His
chokes came as thin reedy gasps as the life was pulled from
him.
Ohnishi sat neutrally as the grisly murder took
place, his wrinkled fingers laced perfectly on the cool
desktop.
Kenji pulled tighter as Takamora’s struggles
diminished. After a few moments all movement ceased. Mayor David
Takamora was dead.
Kenji slipped the cord from around the corpse’s
neck, revealing a razor-thin line of blood where the skin had
parted under relentless pressure. He cleaned his garrote on
Takamora’s suit coat, coiled the weapon, and slipped it into the
pocket of his baggy black pants.
“I’m relieved that his bowels didn’t void,”
Ohnishi remarked, sniffing delicately. “Feed the body to the dogs
and return to me.”
Kenji returned from his gruesome task after
nearly thirty minutes. Despite a change of clothing, Ohnishi noted
that the stench of death still clung to his assistant, as
always.
“It is done,” Kenji said.
“What is it?” Ohnishi asked, knowing something
was bothering this man whom he considered a son. “Don’t let
Takamora’s ambition upset you.”
“It is not his ambition that upset me. It is
yours.”
“Don’t start that again, Kenji,” Ohnishi warned,
but his assistant continued.
“I have followed your orders concerning this
operation, but I do not agree with them. What you planned with
Takamora was only a sideshow for our true aims, yet you treat it
with your full attention. Our priority lies elsewhere. Takamora’s
betrayal should be a sign to stop this foolish coup, which was
meant as a contingency plan in the first place. It cannot succeed;
you must realize that. And it puts into jeopardy what we are really
working for.”
“Has our Russian friend so intimidated you,
Kenji, that you no longer trust in me?”
“No, Ohnishi-San,” Kenji replied. “But we must
first concentrate on our obligations to him.”
“Let me tell you something about our Russian
ally. He will cross us just as quickly as we do him. We are merely
tools to him. Our first loyalty must be with the people of Hawaii,
not some white taskmaster bent on our control.”
“But we made promises . . .”
“They mean nothing now. Takamora’s ambition has
changed everything. When I first wrote that letter declaring our
independence, I knew that it would be sent whether Kerikov ordered
it or not. What we are doing must proceed. Takamora’s betrayal has
merely pushed up our deadline. I’m certain that the President is
planning some sort of reprisal. That is why we must strike now. The
coup can be successful without Takamora. We can control his
people.”
Kenji was silent for a moment, his dark eyes
downcast. “And the arms you spoke of?”
“I dealt directly with an old friend for those,
an Egyptian named Suleiman el-aziz Suleiman.”
“And the mercenary army?”
“Suleiman is also arranging for them. Hard
currency is a powerful tool in such matters. The mercenaries will
augment Takamora’s National Guard troops—or replace them if they
refuse to follow me.”
“I did not realize,” Kenji said
dejectedly.
“You are like my son, but even a father must do
things without his son’s awareness. It changes nothing between us,
Kenji. Do not be hurt.”
“I am not.”
“Good,” Ohnishi said with a thin smile. “I wish
to celebrate tonight. Are you in the mood?”
“Yes, of course,” Kenji answered the rhetorical
question.
Ohnishi wheeled out from behind the desk and
toward his bedroom on the top floor of the glass mansion. Once
there, Kenji helped him undress and reclothe himself for bed. Kenji
easily lifted his frail form into the wide four-poster, propping
several pillows behind his back. Ohnishi laid a withered hand on
Kenji’s cheek and thanked him with a smile, his eyes shining as if
in fever.
“You are like a son to me, you must know
that.”
“I do,” Kenji replied, stroking the old hand
gently. “Please allow me a few minutes to prepare.”
As Kenji strode from the room, Ohnishi turned to
a control panel near his bed and pressed several buttons in quick
succession. The electrochromic panels in the glass ceiling of his
bedroom darkened, blocking out the rich tropical moonlight.
Throughout the house, the walls and roof also darkened, enclosing
the mansion in a blackened cocoon.
On the far wall, past the foot of the bed, heavy
velvet drapes parted, revealing a two-way glass wall and a small
bedroom beyond. A nude woman lay supine on the bedspread, her small
breasts peaked with long erect nipples.
Because of his age, Takahiro Ohnishi could no
longer enjoy intercourse, but his sexual drive had diminished
little over the years. Rather than give in to his body’s inability
to respond, he had devised a method of voyeurism that partly slaked
his still healthy urges. He was incapable of erections let alone
emission, but he could still enjoy the act in his own way.
He patiently waited for Kenji to make his
entrance, enjoying the lithe body of the sleeping girl. When Kenji
finally entered the room, his muscled body was bare and his arousal
was plainly evident. He crossed to the sleeping woman—girl, really,
since she was not yet fifteen—and woke her by rubbing his erection
against her parted lips. She had been well schooled in her
responses according to the script that Ohnishi had provided.
Pretending to be still asleep, she took Kenji
into her mouth and began a gentle fellatio. Ohnishi pressed a
button on the console and the sensitive microphones in the other
room broadcast the subtle noises of the girl’s lips and mouth. She
moved a hand up from her side and began massaging one of her
nipples softly, quickly picking up the rhythm as if coming
awake.
Ohnishi leaned forward in his bed as the
Japanese girl’s eyes fluttered open and she began sucking in
earnest. He could feel a slight tightening near his prostate
muscles and smiled. Kenji reached down and toyed roughly with her
other breast, and the speakers in Ohnishi’s bedroom sounded with
her moans of building passion. Ohnishi resisted the temptation to
touch himself, knowing he would be disappointed at his body’s lack
of response.
Kenji spread the girl’s legs, revealing her
still hairless mons. Slipping one thick finger into her body, he
thrust through her virginity so that blood slicked his hand and her
inner thighs. The girl winced but did not cry out. He crawled onto
the bed and positioned her so Ohnishi would have the best possible
view before he entered her.
He mounted her roughly, thrusting sharply into
her still undeveloped pelvis. Despite the pain she must have felt,
the girl writhed and moaned, clenching Kenji’s torso with her
coltish legs and lifting her firm buttocks from the bed, arching
her back higher and higher. Ohnishi could not resist the
temptation; his hand snaked under his blankets to find himself
semierect. He grasped it and began pumping in time with
Kenji.
His erection lasted only a few moments and there
was no emission, but it was more than he’d had in years. As soon as
he lost it, he lost all interest in the performance still being
played out behind the glass. He pressed the button to close the
curtains and lay back on his bed. The sounds of Kenji’s lovemaking
still filled the room. He made a mental note, as he settled into
sleep, to use this girl again.
SHE had been in the room for only twenty-four
hours, but already Jill felt as if she’d been imprisoned for a
year. She had gone through the classic steps taken by nearly every
person who is locked up against their will. First she had raged at
her captors, screaming and pounding against the solid steel door
that kept her from freedom. When she had exhausted herself, she
spent the next several hours going over her cell in minute detail,
exploring the cement block walls, the ceiling that was too far over
her head to reach, the empty pegboard rack with the outlines of
tools still painted on its brown glossy surface. The
twenty-square-foot room smelled of fertilizer, old gasoline, and
oil—Jill assumed it had once been a gardener’s supply shed.
After she’d paced her cell for another hour,
Jill had finally settled on the concrete floor next to the dripping
spigot. She’d watched dully as the tiny drops pooled, then snaked
to the rusted drain in the middle of the room. Eventually she
slept, her body overriding her mind’s racing questions.
When she woke a tray of food rested next to the
door. There were a couple of oranges, half a loaf of crusty french
bread, and a quarter stick of butter, along with a waxed paper cup
of cool coffee. Jill noticed immediately that nothing on the tray
could provide her with a weapon, no glass or tin cans, no utensils
that could be sharpened by scraping them against the floor.
The waste bucket in the far corner of the room
had been removed during the night and replaced with a fresh one,
much to her relief.
Now Jill sat quietly, stoically, like a
twenty-year veteran of prison, taking the time as it came, with
neither expectations nor hope. For a while she’d tried to
understand why someone had kidnapped her, but she realized that
knowing the truth wouldn’t do her any good. She suspected that
Takahiro Ohnishi was behind her abduction, but the knowledge was
worthless to her in her present circumstances. Her only interests
were in survival.
Since Ohnishi had gone through the trouble of
snatching her from her home, he must not want to kill her. He
wanted something from her, something that only she could
give.
It had to be her credibility as a reporter. If
she was correct about Ohnishi and Mayor Takamora’s attempt to break
Hawaii away from the rest of the Union, then they would need the
legitimacy that only the media could give, the soothing voice and
face on the television assuring the people that everything was all
right and under control. It would be simple to coerce her into
giving false reports and no one who’d placed their trust in her as
a reporter would ever know that they were being deceived.
It was the same question of ethics and integrity
that she’d faced before storming out of the studio, but this time
the stakes were much higher. Yesterday it had been a question about
her job, her career. Today it was her life at risk. Jill had
thought about all of this throughout the long morning, but by late
afternoon and into the evening her mind dulled and lost focus. She
had settled into a torpor. She was just thinking about falling back
asleep, her back was already pressed against the wall, her head
held only limply by her slender neck.
The door opened without warning. Jill jerked out
of her lethargy, edging along the wall to gain distance between
herself and the dark figure that entered her cell. She noted idly
that night had fallen once again, though she didn’t know the time
since she’d been stripped of her watch and shoes when she’d been
left in the cell.
“I did not mean to startle you, Miss Tzu, my
apologies.” The man’s voice was flat and lifeless, echoing inside
him like a distant whisper.
“I know you, don’t I?” Jill had gotten to her
feet.
“We have not formally met, but we have spoken on
the phone several times. I am Kenji.”
“I knew Ohnishi was behind this.” There was
little triumph in her voice.
Kenji slid further into the room, his feet
gliding on the floor with the ease of quicksilver. There was a
dangerous elegance about him. It was the charm of the serpent,
slow, seductive, evil. He eased himself to the floor, hunching down
in the very place where Jill had been a moment earlier.
“You are a very perceptive woman and an
excellent reporter. I watched your latest piece, and I must say you
made a bold and accurate assessment of my employer and his
involvement with Mayor Takamora. You are correct in assuming that
they both want Hawaii to be an independent nation, albeit one with
strong ties to Japan. However, you are wrong in guessing that
Ohnishi is behind your abduction.”
“You?” Kenji nodded. “Why?”
“You are intelligent enough to know why you were
kidnapped.”
“You want me to report some sort of propaganda,”
Jill said accusingly.
“Correct. In fact, the propaganda, as you call
it, will not be that far from the truth. You can even air that
piece you just finished.”
Jill was startled and confused. “Why would you
want that? It fully exposes your little plot.”
“Not my plot, Miss Tzu, Ohnishi’s plot.”
“I don’t understand.” Despite herself, Jill
couldn’t help slipping back into her comfortable role as a
reporter, digging for facts.
Kenji gazed off into the middle distance for a
moment as if he could see the words he was thinking, watch them
ricochet around like billiard balls after a strong break. “I have
worked for Takahiro Ohnishi almost my entire life. I owe him
everything. He is my master and I am his slave. I have killed for
him and I have raped little girls for him. In fact, I did both
again tonight. There is nothing I would not do if he asked.
“But there is something about me that he does
not know, something that I myself didn’t acknowledge for many
years.” He paused for a moment, then chuckled quietly. “Given his
concept of honor, I actually believe he would understand my
betrayal.
“My parents met only twice in their lives. The
first time was when my father raped my mother, when he was
stationed in Korea during the Second World War. She was a comfort
girl, an unwilling prostitute like so many other young women who
had the misfortune of being poor and attractive during the Japanese
occupation. Her own father had sold her into prostitution so the
family could survive.
“The second time my parents met was six years
later, when my father returned to Korea to buy me from her. An
injury during the war had left him impotent so I was to be his
legacy, his only chance at immortality. Until his death, he worked
for Ohnishi-San. I inherited his position.
“For most of my life, I saw myself as pure
Japanese. I hid my Korean side in shame. But something has happened
in the last few months—something that has given me reason to feel
proud of my Korean heritage. Surely you understand this. You are
half Japanese and half Chinese.”
“I am an American,” Jill stated firmly.
Kenji turned to her, his face both handsome and
cruel. “Let us hope that you can see beyond that, or our
relationship and your life will end very quickly. Very soon it will
become necessary for Ohnishi’s coup attempt to fail. Mayor Takamora
is dead and soon Ohnishi will follow him. When this happens, we
will need you to use your influence to calm the people and put an
end to the violence.”
“I’m a reporter. I report the news, I don’t make
it.” Even as Jill spoke she remembered the words of her former
colleague.
Kenji said, “A journalist can sway more opinion
and change more policies than every politician alive today. You
have a power that most people don’t even recognize they have given
to you. When the time comes, a few days from now, a week at most,
you will divulge everything you know about Ohnishi and Takamora.
Since they will be dead, whatever you say will not be refuted. I
will provide you with many more details. People must be focused on
the coup attempt; it must remain the top story for several weeks.”
At Jill’s questioning look, Kenji shook his head. “The reasons for
this do not concern you. Once this is done, I promise that you will
never be bothered again, and your complicity never revealed.”
“And if I refuse?” Jill asked with more bravery
than she felt.
“Refuse now and I will kill you immediately,”
Kenji said matter of factly. “But I don’t need an answer yet. I
want you to think about it.”
As he left, he added, “I chose you because I
believe you will actually have a hard time making your decision. Do
not disappoint me.”