I got whimsical last night and finished the chapter I had started of this; as Cobra is fairly episodic, even though this one is tied by a theme, I thought I'd post it in lieu of much else being complete. I've probably got half a book worth of first to fourth chapters of things started and not got far yet; I need to settle to something.
Chapter 1
Tarquin Smith delicately sniffed, and appreciated the bouquet of the rather decent brandy I had acquired. Don’t ask; I do the odd pro bono case, and one had provided benefits as well as the data I was lifting for Dr. Elizabeth Barnard.
“I hear that Harry Schenk is running for senator,” he said, mildly.
Harry Schenk, that’s our mayor, no contacts with organised crime, merely married to a yakuza boss’s daughter. So sorry, honourable Japanese biznessman’s daughter. The sort of Japanese businessman father who has tattoos on his back, and likes the numbers ‘eight-nine-three.’ A worthless hand in a Japanese game, and a suitable name. In Japanese? Ya-ku-sa.
“Yes, I heard that, too,” I said, neutrally.
Our politics got some reforms along with the education last time we had more than half of congress who couldn’t count their braincells on the fingers of one hand. It was considered that senators voted in by their own states had too much chance of local shenanigans, which is of course true; so now every three states, or so, is arranged into a Senatorium, and returns five senators, which is supposed to do away with those local pressures. Of course, where you have a powerful lot of backers cross states, it doesn’t work, but the theory is good. Our Senatorium was called West Coast, and was the whole rotten ribbon, Washington, Oregon, and California.
Tarquin smiled.
“The Black Rose Yakuza gumi has ties in California and a toe hold in Oregon,” he said.
“What do you want, the whole ruddy clan taken down?” I asked, facetiously. He was still smiling. “You can’t be serious!”
“We feel that there are half a dozen key men. And though killing them is the main thing, we want the rest of the clan to know that their untouchable top echelon is very touchable indeed.”
“It had better pay well,” I said.
“Ten per cent of all their assets seized as a result of their criminal activities being revealed,” said Tarquin.
“And ten per cent of any assets seized from others which comes out in relation to that,” I said. I wouldn’t be able to show all their criminal activities, after all.
“Deal,” said Tarquin, crisply.
Ever had a feeling you’ve been played?
It’s lucky for Tarquin that I actually like him.
I don’t normally like explosives; too indiscriminate. But sometimes the medium is the message, and Tarquin, who is as close to a buddy of mine as any G-man might be, wanted the message loud and clear.
I bet you’re thinking that I went out to get some C8 to make a shaped charge to deliver via some kind of cleaning bot, or broke in to wire it up in the mark’s apartment. Either one suits someone for whom loud bangs are the execution method of choice. Me, I figure that such things are too full of the modus operandi of the assassin, and I like to keep enough distance not to leave my operational finger prints all over a job.
Tarquin wanted Akira Fukuhama-san as the start. A nephew of our mayor’s father-in-law, and operating out of Los Angeles. Working upwards, I was to head for Kenichi Fukuhama, the said father-in-law, and see if the guvmint could cut a deal with him before I sanctioned him. A risky game, but Tarquin wanted the message to go home. There was, after all, no point in electoral reform if organised crime made a mockery of it. I told Tarquin he’d been watching too many flat-screen black and white movies again and thought he was Elliott Ness. He told me he had no idea what I meant.
Like hell he had no idea what I meant.
Well, we share a taste for old books and flat screen shows as well as for Gilbert and Sullivan, so I was pretty sure he knew what I meant. But a guy is entitled to hold out, I suppose.
I suppose I should be flattered.
Elliott Ness had a whole team of Untouchables. Tarquin had given me a list of the half dozen or or so that he wanted wiped out, and their spheres of influence taken down; and I got to do it alone. Well, with the aid of my wife.
Willow had become an accomplished Gurfer, Guerilla Surfer, and had the street name ‘Neon Flower.’ It’s a tribute to an old music group called ‘Beast in Black.’ She can access pretty much any surveillance device you can imagine, as well as slipping through the internet like an Olympic skiier down a nursery slope. We worked well together, and she’d do her research thoroughly via the net whilst I looked over every apartment occupied by the quarry, every habit, every lifestyle, every hobby.
But this first one, Tarquin wanted to get their attention.
And for that, I wanted explosives.
And I decided that low tech would do the job very nicely, thank you, as well as being less easy to trace.
I went to Portland on the elevated bullet train to buy a shotgun. I was a bit gormless in the shop, and mentioned a problem I had with bears. This got me a nice big-bore shotgun. I bought some cartridges and a box of 45 calibre.
Why?
Well, you can’t buy bullets singly, and I needed a detonator.
Back home, in Seattle, I found a hardware store, where I bought a broom, and a couple of bits of pipe. They’ve gone back to metal ones these days to reduce the microplastics.
So, the pipes welded together made the body of the bomb; the 45 in the end to detonate on impact, and a piece of the broom handle at the other end of the bomb which would both act as a stabiliser, like the stick in a firework, and to fit down the smoothbore barrel as the firing mechanism for my home-made grenade launcher.
Real low tech; back to the 20th century.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The mark-one human skull still cracks when assaulted by the mark-one big rock. Of course, nowadays the mark-one human skull may well have upgrades, like sub-dermal armour. However, the mark-one human skull is a delicate thing, and too much armour can cause more problems than it solves... since the mark-one human skull attaches to the mark-one human spine, which is distressingly easily damaged. And there’s a little process on one vertebra which, if broken, means death if not treated. Anyone who has done parachute training should know about this, as it’s the most common way this bone is broken. And brain-dead paratroops who are tough men who can ignore a little headache tend to end up dead-dead.
Which may seem irrelevant, but my point is, reliance on high technology can be as much of a liability as it is a solver of problems. And sometimes, simple is best.
And Akira Fukuhama was about to be hit with a slight upgrade on the proverbial blunt instrument. With added explosives.
However, I am jumping in to the middle, indeed, almost the end.
Those of you who know me are well aware that I consider causing collateral damage to be amateurish. I pride myself on taking down my target and only my target. And that means that I tend to take longer than some trigger-happy button man.
But button men are a dime a dozen. If you want a job done properly, get an expert, pay for his expertise at a fair rate, and expect excellence over speed.
I had Willow run me a superficial internet search on Akira, and discover what his interests were. Akira was an acknowledged expert on puppetry; not just Japanese puppetry, but western marionettes as well. That he also ran a number of bunraku brothels, puppet brothels, where the poor girls were controlled by headware implants into fulfilling their customers’ dreams, was probably inevitable.
It would almost have been too easy to have reprogrammed one of the girls to kill him, and perhaps poetic as well; but then, she would have been collateral.
Equally, I might have sent him a puppet, with a query, as if from a collector, and detonated a bomb inside; but I’d have to guarantee he was alone, because leaving it with him too long would have him find any explosives. If, that is, he didn’t have a chem sniffer for all his mail, as anyone sensible does.
Yes, of course Willow and I have such things. Also monofilament net curtains to bounce back missiles. The only house on Queen Anne heights to have net curtains outside the windows. I claim it’s mosquito bar, and everyone nods, wisely. It works against mosquitoes too. The windows are armoured glass.
What? Do you think I am not going to protect all that is dear to me? You’ll be saying next that it’s paranoia to have a pop-up minigun in the gate posts.
And just in case, we have a whole network of tunnels to other places.
That, however, is incidental.
We jandered into Los Angeles off the elevated railway, which joins up with the BART, or Bay-Area Rapid Transit, which was revamped about the time the El was conceived, and wonder of wonders, the linkage actually worked. Sometimes having an uplifted ape for a mayor is an advantage; less political interference in public projects, and the mayor can be distracted with a banana, making him much cheaper than our mayor, who only takes bribes big enough to make the bulge in his pocket resemble a priapic whale. I had to agree with Tarquin; Harry Schenk would not be a good senator.
The itinerant shadow-puppet operator and the series of lenses to project his art had cost a small fortune. Worth every penny, mind you. I was taking an idea from an old Chinese story where the shadow of a man walking behind a screen was nothing more than the cardboard cuttout of some celebrated immortal projected by a lamp, blowing in the wind. I wanted that damned Yakusa to sent his wife and children out of the room; and the shadow of a figure on the outer shoji screen of his garden should achieve that objective.
I had picked a tea-house as my headquarters for the hit; it leased rooms upstairs by the hour, and I turned up with my wife, heavily muffled, and my ‘servant.’ That was the puppeteer. And a bunraku puppet to bring in? I had carried that in, dressed in women’s outer clothing, as if I had an unconscious second partner for my assignation; the tea-house owner did not turn a hair.
I might just set fire to the place a little bit on my way out.
I had scouted the place well before picking it. Akira Fukuhama had his house covered from guzzle to zorch, as the saying goes; a stone wall around his garden, with razor wire on top of it, electrified lines as well, and a series of infra-red sensors attached to pop-up miniguns. The teahouse overlooked it, to be sure, but anyone putting any kind of ladder over the wall was doomed to be filled fuller of holes than a Swiss cheese. But there was an operational flaw in his defences with regards to passing over the wall, which I tested by flying a drone over. There was a gap between those sensors guarding against flying over the wall, and those protecting from flying objects. If carefully set up, I could do all I wanted. Why not fly in a drone full of explosives? Because drones are numbered, in case of this very use of them. And yes, I could build my own, but the other solution was good to go.
First, to fire a heavy dart into a beautiful almond tree in the garden, attached to a loose line. A heavier line would make a zip line.
Down that zipline descended a human-sized bunraku puppet. He was attached by a noose round his neck at one end, and by his feet at the other end, on a piece of guncotton which should burn away after he passed through the narrow corridor above the wall, making his feet fall.
So, Hanged Harigata slid down on the noose to his neck, which was more securely attached than usual. Harigata means ‘Man emulator.’ It’s what the Japanese call a dildo. It tickled my sense of humour, anyway. He fetched up against the dart, looking for all the world as if he dangled from the branch where it was lodged.
If Akira Fukuhama ran true to type, he would almost certainly turn out his own lights when he had shooed out his family after he saw the shadow, and step out into the garden, ready to confront an assassin. You couldn’t fault his personal courage.
The hanged bunraku puppet resembling him should then get his attention; and he would wonder, briefly, if it was this which had looked like a figure projected onto the screen.
He would have to be remarkable not to at least take a step towards the hanged puppet. But he might take only a step. So filling the thing with explosives might not work. Hence the brute-force, but aimed method. One step would bring him to a point where I could bring the side wall down on him. And it was high, thick, and very solid.
And it should produce plenty of shrapnel in terms of broken stone and concrete fragments. If he survived the blast, which was doubtful, he would likely bleed out from wounds.
Of course, things can go wrong, and I had a sniper’s rifle in case he showed signs of being distressingly alive.
My puppet-master set up his lamp, trembling as he did so. I had done all the math on the optics, to work out how big his puppet needed to be in order to project at human size on the shoji screen; I was moderately pleased with myself for this level of mathematical expertise. I thought that perhaps I did deserve that emeritus degree after all. I am good when I have a practical purpose; it’s just the application of academe which makes me shaky.
And that wasn’t all that was shaky.
“Keep it steady, man, your shadow has the shakes,” I snarled at my little puppeteer. I had had enough problems with him wanting to make the figure fanciful, and with coloured cellophane to make fantastical clothes. I could do without him getting creative, and I could do without him getting cold feet as well. He gave a little whinny of fear.
“You’ll be leaving before it gets noisy,” I said. I only needed him to make the movements realistic; once the shadow had passed across the screen, he could go.
He seemed to pull himself together, and manipulated his cardboard figure.
The shadow slunk onto the shoji, exactly as it was supposed to do. It was about twenty seconds before the light inside went off; and the shadow froze.
This was actually my puppeteer freezing in fright, and then the shadowy figure dropped, as he dropped the sticks.
“You can get the hell out, now,” I said.
He fled without needing a second invitation. Willow thoughtfully stowed the puppet, turned of the lamp, and stowed that, too. One never knew if we might need it again. And Willow had been watching how he did it.
A darker shadow slid out of the now dark house; ambient light flashed on the katana he carried. He was looking cautiously for the fellow who had realised his shadow had given him away and who must have dropped below the level of the veranda. Really, our puppeteer’s panic had worked out rather well.
I heard the hiss of breath as Akira Fukuhama saw the hanged man, his own features painted on the mask-like face, the red makeup indicating a villain.
He took an involuntary step nearer the tree.
I fired.
I could hardly miss: I was aiming at a wall.
The explosion was actually quite impressive; I had not expected it to be quite so extensive. The wall disintegrated.
I waited for the dust to settle, and scoped out the body with my infra-red rifle sight.
It was starting to cool measurably, if not visibly yet; my scope told me it was below 37⁰C, which meant that Akira Fukuhama had probably come down with a very nasty case of death.
Willow and I slipped out of a back door. It might take the proprietor a while to notice that his establishment was on fire; but there was nobody left upstairs. Going to each room and whispering, ‘Police raid!’ had taken care of that.
We returned to our rooming house and were seen at dinner, if anyone cared.
The gumi would be watching every way out of the city, of course; but only an amateur leaves in a hurried manner.
My wife and I would spend a day or two sight-seeing, and then return the way we had came.
