Her mouth tightened but she didn’t protest. In light of what had happened, she was forced to silently admit that Klein might have a small point. “He doesn’t look good.”

“Understood. I have a jet with a medical team waiting not far away. For now our priorities have shifted. We need to get Jon out of harm’s way and stabilized. We’ll talk about the rest later.”

14

14

Outside Tokyo
Japan

General Masao Takahashi stood on the broad deck of his home watching the sun set over meticulously tended gardens that seemed to extend to the horizon. The pain in his shoulder throbbed in time with his heartbeat but other than that his injuries had turned out to be trivial. Nothing more than a few deep bruises and four stitches above his right knee.

His enemies had made a great error in failing to kill him. Takahashi had always drawn strength from adversity, and this event was already an example of that. It demonstrated to him that he had become careless with his own life—something a man in his position could not afford.

The unavoidable weakness in the elaborate operation beginning to unfold across the world stage was its dependence on a single man. No one else had the combination of history, knowledge, and authority necessary to carry out his plan. No one else had the resolve it would take to change the world order at its very foundation.

If he had been killed, everything he and so many others had spent their lives working toward would collapse. His great country and its people would be doomed to continue their descent into irrelevance.

He had doubled his security detail and would from now on take varied routes and modes of transportation when he was forced to travel. The men allowed close to him had been whittled down to those whose loyalty was entirely beyond question. Even his food was now being purchased from randomly selected suppliers by a man who had been with his family for the last thirty-five years.

Momentum was building at an exponential rate, and soon it would be beyond anyone’s ability to control. Until then he needed to keep his hand firmly on the rudder.

Takahashi descended the time-worn steps to a gravel pathway, limping along it as he admired the perfect order of the landscape. The property had originally belonged to his father and he’d changed nothing since the man’s death. In many ways he saw it as a shrine not that different from Yasukuni—a place to honor not the soldiers, but the industrialists who had transformed a defeated island nation into a power that would once again challenge the entire world.