Smith started going over the story he’d concocted, trying to imprint it into his mind with enough force to make it real. He was a drug addict. An American military doctor from the base in Okinawa who had written one too many bogus prescriptions for himself and had the army’s investigators breathing down his neck. He’d been trying to find another supplier when the man he’d been there to meet was killed. Smith was just in the wrong place at the wrong time—an innocent bystander in a war between his new dealer and the Japanese mafia.

The woman moved soundlessly to the foot of his bed and looked down at him. Her face was still shadowed by the hat, so he looked for hints in her body language about what was to come. Even in his situation, it was hard to ignore the perfection of her outline beneath the utilitarian dress. With a little luck she’d start by trying to use her beauty to play his emotions.

When she lifted her hand and he saw the matte-black blade, though, it was clear that Lady Luck had once again turned her back on him.

9

9

Yasukuni Shrine
Tokyo
Japan

General Masao Takahashi looked up from the classified documents he was reviewing when his limousine began to slow. Outside, the street was filled with demonstrators numerous enough to force his driver to come almost to a stop in order to pick his way through. To the right, the crowd was dominated by older men carrying the Rising Sun flag, some in deteriorating Imperial Japanese uniforms. Takahashi nodded respectfully toward them, though he knew he was invisible behind the tinted windows. Patriots who still remembered the meaning of courage and service.

Their opposition, fittingly on his left, consisted mostly of college-age representatives of an entitled and self-absorbed generation who had never experienced the slightest hardship. Despite that, all they did was complain about an economy that allowed them to live at a standard he could have never even imagined as a child. Not a single one of these cowards would have survived a week of his youth. The hunger. The cold. The fear and confusion of being a defeated people in a country under occupation.

His driver glided to a stop and Takahashi looked away from the protesters in disgust. Their obscene placards dishonored the men who had fought and died for the country that they now believed owed them so much.

He ignored the chants penetrating his vehicle and looked out over the well-tended grounds of Yasukuni. The leaves had taken on a reddish-gold color, contrasting the unbroken blue sky. The shrine lay just beyond, adding the deep-green sweep of its traditional roof and the graceful white of the banner guarding the entrance. It had originally been built by Emperor Meiji in 1869, and it now honored the almost 2.5 million men who had served and died for Japan.