2 cobra 18

 firat of 2 cliffies, will post as soon as alerted you are ready

Chapter 18 Perfect Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance

 

Of course, there was still Hikaru.

This was a situation where I was going to have to kill him before he killed me; even if he had not been on Tarquin’s list.

Which he was.

He was the leader of the Black Rose gumi, and as he had not been prepared to come to the table, the government wanted him invited onward to meet his ancestors. Not that they would have put it like that, being neither familiar with, nor interested in, the Japanese idiom.

I have always felt that being a killer for hire is a bit like being an actor. My two years of playing General Custer [whose shade can go to hell] taught me a lot.  To kill someone you have to know them. To know them, you have to understand their culture, their interests, their sense of self. In a way, for a while, you have to be them in your own mind, to know how they will react. It has made me return a fee on a couple of occasions, and warn the target that he has a hit out on him. Because when you know someone that well, you know if they really don’t deserve it.

I think I said that I almost could like Kenichi.

But that was ‘almost.’ There was much about him that was far too disturbing to contemplate being a part of.

 I vanished into my normal persona.

We celebrated our first married Christmas, and fed Tarquin as usual. Auntie wanted to help with Christmas dinner, which was fine by me. We had honey glazed pork with the most beautifully crunchy crackling which was succulent on the inside, apple and onion and herb stuffing, sausage meat stuffing, apple ‘n’ onion rings fried, roast potatoes and parsnip, honey and mustard glazed carrots, and cabbage steamed to just the right amount.  Afterwards we had orange gateau with dark chocolate.

I would have to keep working out or I’d lose my waistline.

I spent Boxing Day at the Dojo.

And then I immersed myself in research.

Hikaru never left his mansion.

I had played the card of becoming a close associate. There was no way Hikaru would have anything to do with a new member of staff. In fact, he was likely to be very suspicious of anyone new, and might have anyone new killed on principle.  That meant, I had to infiltrate the hard way, and find a way into what was probably as much of a fortress as our house on Queen Anne heights. The advantage being that the staff was probably large enough that an unknown face might even not be taken much notice of by the menials at least.

But I had to get in first; and have a plan of retreat.

First thing to do was to get the drone to survey.

This let us know that there were no areas uncovered where the drone could overfly without being shot down.

I had good satellite pictures, of course; Tarquin provided me state-of-the art ones, but it doesn’t cover all the angles, or show what’s at ground level.

It was a start.

One of Hikaru’s weaknesses seemed to be Japanese sweet rice confections.

No, I wasn’t thinking about poison. The sweet shop was probably owned – one way or another – by the Yakuza, and wouldn’t dare; moreover, there were probably tasters. Besides, poison is sloppy. You can’t guarantee the right person gets it; because other people turn greedy and help themselves.  It only takes one maidservant to sneak one, and have enough poison to be ill, and the secret is out.

What interested me more was that a car was sent to pick up a twice-monthly order of sweeties. I watched it twice, and Willow checked their accounts online.

What interested me was that the car parked out back of the sweetshop, and the flunkey got out, collected the boxes, and got back in the car, which the chauffeur never left. And where the car parked, there in a little yard common to three other shops, was some kind of manhole or inspection panel.

If it was an inspection panel for domestic drains, we were going to have to work harder.

If it was a manhole, life was relatively easy.

 

We could have checked it out by night. Probably security at the back, other than close to the doors, was negligible. But we might be caught on CCTV or we might be seen.

So we decided to be invisible.

We turned up outside in a van marked ‘Corporation Pest Control,’ and Willow, in a suit which had seen better days and which was not quite the best material, carrying a clipboard, went in, followed by a shambling fellow with red whiskers in a boiler suit.

“I’ve come about your rats,” said Willow, without preamble.

“Rats! We no have rats,” said the woman at the counter. “You, you bad person, get out of here, and take away your van! You bad for business!”

Willow regarded her.

“We have received a complaint that rats have been seen here,” she said.

The woman called a man out the back.

He lifted a big knife.

“You not tell lies about rats, no rats here,” he said.

“You need not think you can intimidate me; my schedule is known,” said Willow. “I suppose we could park at the back.”

He lowered the knife.

“You do that,” he said.

Willow stared about. The place was lush.

“It would mean extra trouble,” she said. “Time is money.”

He thrust a cred stick into her hand. She looked at it, and passed it to me.

Yes, I was the shambling guy in red whiskers.

“Enough for his share,” she said.

She got another with a higher colour.

If we’d been agreeable, it would have been suspicious; but it was just blamed genius of Willow to hint that a bribe would make us less troublesome.

We went out, and drove round the back.

I had a few rats that Puss had kindly gone and got for us. She was getting a healthy weight now on real food, but she liked hunting, and her offerings surely were helpful.

We took up the lid, and Willow gave a little shriek. I hit down with a crow bar and then held up a dead rat.

The sweetie-merchant was watching out of the back window; and he retreated hastily and let us get on with it.

We were in luck; it was a storm drain.

We put up screens. We knew the size of the cover, having photographed it by drone which had dropped a sweetie wrapper of precisely known proportions on it.  So, we replaced it with a new one which had a central double door which dropped down, and could be released remotely.

In place, you couldn’t tell the difference.

I held up four rats by their tails, and Willow went and knocked on the back door.

“Not your problem; someone flushed a dead baby. I’ve alerted the right authorities, they’ll come up the drain the other way,” she said. “We’ve dealt with the immediate threat of rodents.”

She was thanked profusely and given a box of sweeties.

Japanese sweeties are a bit too sweet, but they go down well enough with plain tea biscuits and a glass of plum brandy.

Next time a collection was due, I was waiting in the drain with a drone. Willow, with another drone, alerted me when the car stopped. I prayed briefly that the driver hadn’t parked a wheel on the cover, and pressed the button to release the doors. Then it was up the shaft, turn on the electromagnet on the drone – Willow could turn it off remotely – and stick it to the underside of the car. Then duck down, close the doors, fasten them, and away to the site where three men with a van were laconically observing a drain inside one of those little tent things people who go down drains use.  They were random unemployed men happy to take cred for a couple of hours doing nothing. The van said ‘Trideo’ and if they assumed I was tapping someone’s trid feed, well, if they told anyone, what I was doing had nothing to do with the Trid, so nobody likely to twig if they were loose lipped.

Especially as I did not have red whiskers for this job.

 

That now meant that the drone was going inside the compound of Hikaru Fukuhama. It could not fly in; it could not fly out. But it could potter about inside the no-fly-zone, taking and transmitting photos.  There wasn’t likely to be electronic exclusion; it would play merry hell with electronic garage doors, the trideo, telephones, the internet, and the internal security systems.

Willow had lovingly built the drone by hand, and it was made out of plastic and cardboard, to reduce its signature, even including plastic camera lenses. Not as good as glass, but good enough with enhancement software. The rotors were visually concealed by a cardboard spread that looked enough like a bat to fool anyone who saw it high in the sky. And bats are good luck creatures to the Japanese.

So, Willow followed the car back to the compound. She had to get the drone out from under the car at some point between it going through the gates and being locked away in a garage. She had a motion sensor on it to tell when the car was stopped – or rather, on the gubbins which held it and which held the magnet to the car.

Fortunately, the car stopped out front of the house, and Willow dropped the electromagnet and scooted the drone into some ornamental bushes whilst the flunkey was getting out. Its attachment rig remained on the car; they would find it sooner or later and would probably think it was a failed attempt to bomb someone. But as they did not always use the same car to go to the sweetie shop, it would not necessarily be connected.

 

Now it was a question of scooting around carefully when nobody was looking – and make a note of all the security cameras. Taking out one camera with simulated seagull crap was not difficult, but any others had to be dealt with more subtly.  Now, the average security array covers the perimeter and the approach to the front, with overlapping fields of view. Few are paranoid enough to look inside as well; but we had to assume that Hikaru was paranoid. And had a different team on inside security to outside.

If you are thinking we were taking our own sweet time killing Hikaru, then you try to get inside a security-stiff hideout of a Yakuza boss without being cut down before you even complete your mission. Tarquin understood; and there was still some pretence at being a diplomatic parley with the government, something Hikaru swallowed, assuming himself to be too well protected to kill.

Besides, I was holding in reserve the possibility of using a visit from a government delegation to infiltrate me; or, conversely, timed to be there after I did the deed, to exfiltrate me.

Patriotism is one thing, but being filleted by crazy men with katanas was not on the agenda of an expectant father and daddy of two kittens and one mog whose idea of a good sleeping position was inside the duvet, in the crook of my knees and her paws on my bum to keep them warm.  Not, I suspect, a luxury she had been permitted on the farm; and I was willing to indulge her to make up for that.

I had also had her fixed so she would not have to put up with the extremely painful approaches of tom cats and the wear of having kittens. If she seemed to pine when Orville and Amy grew up, I’d find her a couple of orphan street kittens.

Yes, unbearably domesticated these days, aren’t I?

Live with it.

And yes, I had also talked to Dr. Elizabeth Barnard, who had innoculated Puss against the cancer of womb and breast which is common in cats who have had one or more Seasons, and she and the kittens were having experimental post-foetal brain boosting with viral gene-writing, as well as lifespan boosters.

So maybe I’m soppy.

I never had a pet before. I can afford it; and Dr Barnard gets data.

I swear I could see Puss’s eyes glow with understanding over how well she had chosen a new family; the kittens were kittens, and either playing hard or flat out sleeping.

I must ask Algy to read their thoughts.

“I’m going to be away for a few days, Puss,” I said. “You’ll have to keep Willow company.”

She put one velvet paw on my face, gazed into my eyes, and licked my nose.

I swear she was telling me to be careful.

Liz Barnard did not think it would take as well on an adult as a kitten, but Puss already knew what was what.

Meanwhile, we were getting photos of everything, including through windows. Willow was using the data to build a virtual model of the place.  It had started as a 19^th century house for someone very rich; there was actually a ballroom. It wasn’t that far from where I lived, ironically. It now also included the property next door, and there had been building works joining the two.  And that was worth looking into as a weak point; Willow could Gurf her way into the city records to look at drains.

I didn’t suppose it would be that easy, and it wasn’t.

The drains stopped being big enough for a man to go through at street level.

Worth checking, though.

I have a tunnel into the drains, with a locking door, as a bolt hole.

What, however, Willow did discover was that there was a hole in the defences.

Because of that join of two houses, the circular defence was leaving a small window directly above, right in the middle.

Oh fuck.

I hate parachuting.

It’s always seemed to me to be a bad idea to jump out of a perfectly good aeroplane.

I would be using one of those steerable ones, so I could come straight down through the hole and hopefully veer at the last moment to land on the roof.

If I missed, the guards in the grounds would be all over me like a plague and about as fatal.

I would have to do my best not to miss. And make sure my best was good enough.

I owed it to Willow and Auntie Fee. Not to mention Puss, Orville, and Amy.

I spent a long time in the virtual model of Hikaru’s house, studying it and learning every way in and out. I studied wind speed and direction, and put in an order to Tarquin for a high level plane to jump out of.

He got me military data on winds at various levels, too.

So, I suited up, with my gear packed, and made my way to SeaTac airport, where I was let in by a private back entrance and made my way to a plane which was blacker than black.

“I’ll make a circle round to give you the best windage,” said the pilot, who looked about the same age as my delinquents in the special group when I was teaching. And they were thirteen.

“Thanks,” I said.

We got airborn, and I squatted by the back door for the light to go green.

And when it did, the door slid back and I hurled myself out into the night.