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First, he had to move, close with his enemies and take them down before the racket they were making drew police to swarm the block.
Bolan had only two rules in the field. He would not harm or threaten innocents, and he would not use deadly force against police—even though some of them were far from innocent themselves. It was a short list of restrictions, but he rarely deviated from those basic principles.
And he was not about to do so this day.
He made his move while they were trying to get organized, recovering from having seen their driver killed before their eyes. One of the three surviving Yakuzas saw Bolan moving, shouted something to his comrades and squeezed off an autorifle burst that missed its moving target by at least ten feet.
Bolan returned fire, did a better job of it and saw the shooter drop his rifle as three Parabellum shockers ripped into his gun arm, taking out the shoulder. In the movies, shoulder wounds were treated lightly, on par with paper cuts, but in the real world they were serious, often disabling, sometimes fatal if projectiles nipped the brachial or subclavian arteries.
Whatever, Bolan pegged the odds at two-to-one against him now, and focused on reducing those.
Bolan reached the nearest sidewalk, ducked behind a bulky standing mailbox, then proceeded with his charge. Another Yakuza shooter was firing at him—and he had been right, that was an Arsenal AR-SF—until the next burst out of Bolan’s SMG nearly beheaded him.
Three down, and now the last Yakuza on his feet sprang out from cover, brandishing a stubby shotgun with a pistol grip. He pumped the slide, ejecting brass and plastic, screaming something Bolan couldn’t understand without his smartphone translator. Before the screamer had a chance to loose another buckshot cloud, Bolan zipped him across the chest and slammed him back against the crumpled wreckage of his car’s front end.
One left, and he was still alive, sitting in blood, his eyes half-closed, lips moving silently, when Bolan walked around the car. Bolan considered him, knew they were running out of time to talk, even if they possessed a common language, and he fired a single mercy round into the man’s forehead.
All done.
He got the Honda started and was rolling out of there, already thinking downrange toward the best and quickest place to find another car.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sunrise Enterprises
“No, Detective. I have no idea who might desire to vandalize our offices. Do you?”
The bald, fat officer stared at Noboru Machii, his suspicion thinly veiled, and said, “No, sir. But I’ll be looking into it.”
“Perhaps you’ll trace the smoke grenades,” Machii said. A firefighter had found them in the air-conditioning duct, while seeking a source for the smoke that still hung around them in the lobby.
“I couldn’t rule it out,” the detective said. Was his name Davis? Dawkins? No matter. All Machii wanted was for him to leave the premises. “These things are mass-produced, you understand.”
“Of course.”
“Your ordinary public’s not supposed to have them, but does that mean anything these days? Between the internet and dealers on the street, forget about it.”
“So, it’s hopeless then?” Machii asked.
“Oh, nothing’s hopeless,” the detective answered. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up, if you follow me.”
“I understand. Now, if there’s nothing else…”
The plainclothes officer was rummaging inside his rumpled jacket, pulling out a dog-eared business card and offering it to Machii, who accepted it and held it gingerly, between his thumb and index finger, checking it for sweat stains.
“Call me if you think of anything that might be helpful, eh? You got my office number on there, and my cell. Work cell, that is. Nobody gets the home number, know what I mean?”
“Indeed,” Machii said.
“Okay, then. If I find out anything, I’ll be in touch. You’ll still be doing business here?”
“I will. Power should be restored within the hour, once your people clear the scene.”
The fat detective nodded, turned and waddled toward the exit, glancing at the team of electricians as he passed them, no doubt wondering how much a rush job after hours would be costing.
And the answer, as Americans would say, was plenty: triple time for labor, plus materials. Restoring power to the building was about to cost Machii three grand, with another thousand minimum on top of that, to fix and flush the air-conditioning. He had that much and more in petty cash, but he was seething over the audacity of the assault.
And he was worried that no suspects sprang to mind.
Of course, Machii had his share of enemies, but most of those were in Japan. The few he’d made so far, around Atlantic City, had been dealt with swiftly and decisively. Unless he started to believe in zombies, they no longer posed a threat.
But someone clearly did.
He nodded curtly to the electricians and the air-conditioning technicians standing with them. “It is clear now,” he informed them. “Get to work.”
A couple of them didn’t seem to like his tone, but that meant nothing to Machii. When they were as rich as he was, when they’d killed as many men and when they had a family of twenty thousand oath-bound brothers standing at their back, supporting them, he would consider their opinion.
In the meantime, they were nothing more than servants.
Machii climbed the stairs, hating the smoke taint in the air be breathed, and found his office as he’d left it. As expected, the police had asked about the bloodstain on the hallway carpet, and he’d trotted out his underling to lisp the fable of his accident. The fat detective had refrained from asking any questions on that score, being more interested in the smoke bombs from the AC duct.
Thank heaven for small minds.
Back in his office now, Machii started a more thorough search than he’d had time for while he’d waited for emergency responders to arrive. First thing, he checked his desk, found nothing out of place, and then repeated the inspection with his files. Needless to say, he kept nothing at the office that might incriminate him, guarding against situations such as this, but if he found some normal business papers disarranged or missing, it might point him toward enemies behind the raid.
When Machii found nothing to direct him in the filing cabinets, he stood back and surveyed the room, inhaling its polluted scent as if the latent fumes might hold a clue. If not to steal from him or kill him, why would anyone attack Sunrise? No other possibility immediately came to mind, and since the power blackout had deactivated all of the building’s security cameras, no answers awaited him on videotape.
What next?
He had two calls to make. The first, to Jiro Shinoda in Las Vegas, would be a deliberately vague inquiry, trying to determine whether he had experienced any disturbances of late, without alerting him to what had happened in Atlantic City. After that—and there was no escaping it—Machii had to report the raid to Tokyo. His oyabun had to be informed within the hour, or suspicion might begin to ripen in his mind. And that, above all things, was something that Machii wanted to avoid.
His hand was on the telephone when Tetsuya Watanabe knocked, then entered without waiting for a summons. “Excuse me, sir,” he said.
“You are excused. What is it?”
“Endo and his team…”
“They’ve captured the intruder?” Sudden hope flared in Machii’s chest.
“No, sir,” Watanabe said. “They’re dead.”
* * *
Tropicana Casino and Resort, Atlantic Avenue
FINDING ANOTHER CAR had not been difficult as night fell on Atlantic City. Bolan had left his shot-up Honda Civic in a multilevel parking garage at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, swapping it for a Toyota RAV4 whose owner played it “safe” by hiding a spare key in one of those magnetic holders, tucked under the right-front fender. Bolan switched the license plates, transferred his mobile arsenal and cleared hospital grounds within ten minutes, flat.
The Sunrise Enterprises bug went live as he was driving along Atlantic Avenue, so he’d pulled into the casino’s parking lot to listen and to read the captioned messages on his smartphone. He’d missed the number that Machii dialed, but soon worked out from the conversation that the call was placed to Vegas. That meant Jiro Shinoda, since Machii—as a kyodai—would not seek input from inferiors.
Staying alert to his surroundings, ready to depart immediately if security rolled up on him, Bolan surveyed the boxed translations on his phone’s screen.
“You have surprised me,” Shinoda said.
“There is something I must ask you.”
“Yes?”
“Please, do not question me.”
“Very mysterious.” A hint of mirth entered Shinoda’s tone. “Proceed.”
“Are you experiencing…difficulties, where you are?”
Shinoda thought about that for a moment, then replied, “Aside from the Internal Revenue, nothing to speak of. Why? Are you?”
“Something has happened, but I cannot speak about it now.”
“That’s even more mysterious,” Shinoda said. “Are you suggesting I should be concerned?”
It was Machii’s turn to pause and think. At last, he answered, “No. I’m sure it has nothing to do with you. Strictly a local matter, but I must report it to our godfather.”
“Ah. In that case, I’m afraid that I cannot advise you further. Do what must be done, of course.”
“If you hear anything…”
“I, too, shall do what must be done,” Shinoda said.
Sly as a fox, that one. The threat of squealing to their oyabun was left unspoken, but Machii had to have known Shinoda would turn any given circumstance to personal advantage, if he could.
All mobsters were alike that way, Bolan knew, regardless of their nationality, skin pigment or the oaths they’d sworn on joining their respective rotten “families.” For all the vows of fealty, defense of brothers and the rest of it, the bottom line was always each man for himself. “Honor” was highly touted in the underworld, enforcing codes of silence and the like, but it was stained and tattered like an old dust rag, each rip another captain who had overthrown his boss, or one more witness who had squealed to save himself from prison.
Bolan listened while the two kyodai traded pleasantries, Machii clearly anxious to be off the line and on to some more pressing task. Bolan’s infinity device would transmit any conversation from Machii’s office, not just phone calls, and he hoped there would be more to hear before he had to leave the Tropicana’s parking lot.
As if in answer to that wish, a voice he didn’t recognize chimed in, asking, “Will you call our godfather now?”
“It cannot be avoided. If I do not, he will learn by other means. Delay might have been possible, if we had caught the prowler, but with four more dead…”
He left it dangling, no response from his companion in the office. Bolan pictured them, the search they had to have executed prior to calling Vegas, their reactions when they had found nothing out of place. Machii knew he had been targeted, but didn’t know by whom, or why. Uncertainty would give his nerves a workout and might prod him into reckless action.
“I will leave you to it,” said the kyodai’s anonymous subordinate.
“Tetsuya, wait. I will be sleeping at the other house tonight,” Machii said.
“Yes, sir. I’ll make all the arrangements.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
A door closed. If Machii had more men inside his office, they stayed silent. He delayed another minute, almost two, before he dialed another number. Bolan read it from his smartphone’s screen: “0011” was the international code used for dialing outside the States; “81” was Japan’s international code; “3” was Tokyo’s area code; and the last ten digits represented someone’s private line.
The oyabun’s, presumably.
Bolan saved the number to his phone and sat back to listen in.
* * *
Sunrise Enterprises
NOBORU MACHII DREADED his next call but could not postpone it. Timing was not a problem, with Tokyo thirteen hours ahead of Atlantic City. It was breakfast time tomorrow in Japan, and the oyabun of the Sumiyoshi-kai had always been an early riser. Even in his sixties, fabulously wealthy, he maintained an active schedule, sleeping no more than five or six hours per night.
Kazuo Takumi would be awake, and probably at work, but was he ready for the news Machii had to share?
Quit stalling. Time to get on with it, said the stern voice in Noboru’s head. And he was stalling, there could be no doubt of it. Whatever happened in the next few minutes could decide his fate.
He sat in his favorite recliner, in the private office bedroom, put his feet up in a futile effort to relax, and dialed his master’s number, tapping out seventeen digits, then listening to empty air before a telephone halfway around the world began to ring.
As usual, the first ring passed, then it was answered midway through the second. Machii pictured the oyabun’s houseman and chief bodyguard, Kato Ando, scowling as he answered.
“Who is calling, please?”
Machii gave his name and said, “I need to speak with him.”
Ando grunted, a disapproving sound, then said, “Just a minute, please.”
Machii waited, as instructed, switching hands with the telephone because his palm was sweating, even with the air-conditioning back on and blowing cool, clean air. When Kazuo Takumi took the phone, his voice was deceptively soft.
“Noboru. I’ve been expecting you.”
“You have, sir?”
“Jiro called ahead. He fears you have encountered difficulties.”
Rotten sneak! Machii ground his teeth and made a mighty effort to control his tenor.
“It is true, sir. Difficulties have arisen.”
“Tell me.”
So he did, in outline, leaving out only the price his men had paid in blood. With the scrambler on his own phone, and the oyabun’s private security measures in place, Machii had no fear of law enforcement snatching his words from the air. Still, there was no reason to link himself with any killings, just in case. Police already knew about the raid on Sunrise Enterprises. There was nothing to be lost by mentioning the smoke grenades or the prowler’s escape.
Takumi heard him out, then told him, “You were fortunate to have no injuries.”
Machii bit the bullet, said, “A few employees have departed over the affair.”
“Oh, yes? How many?”
“Seven, sir.”
