Victor O'Reilly - Rules of The Hunt

Kilmara hit the emergency button, conscious that even medical help would be delayed for precious seconds by the security he had put in position. To die because of your own security, what an irony. Hugo would certainly appreciate that.

He looked at his friend. Fitzduane had sunk back against his pillows. He was now more green than pale. "Apologies," he muttered. His eyes closed and he slid to one side, unconscious. Some color came back into his cheeks.

The door burst open and white-clad bodies filled the room. Fortunately, they seemed to know what they were doing.

It's not nice being shot, thought Kilmara; it's not nice at all. And it's about basic things we don't like to think about – like the spilling of blood and the discharge of mucus, and splintered bone and traumatized flesh and time and pain.

The room smelled of vomit and things medical. But there wasn't the faintest trace of the smell that accompanies the passing of a life, the reminder of each and every human's mortality. The air was clean of the smell of fear.

Kilmara, sitting in the visitor's armchair, temporarily ignored by the focused emergency team, felt immensely relieved. He knew at that moment that Fitzduane was really going to make it. Hope became certainty. He felt curiously weak, as the reaction to endless days of tension set in. He wanted to laugh or cry or shout out loud, or just lie down and sleep. His face showed no change of expression.

An intern turned around to get something from a nurse and noticed Kilmara. The intern had been on duty for some ridiculous length of time and was tired, unshaven, irritable, and short on words. "Out," he ordered. "You there – get out of here."

"Get out of here, General," said Kilmara agreeably.

He exited. Fitzduane was clearly back in the ballgame, but it was going to take a little time before he became a serious player. But, knowing his friend, not too long.

Tokyo, Japan

January 24

Wearing fatigues to avoid the distinctive smell of propellant clinging to her street clothes, Chifune shot for forty-five minutes on the Koancho Number Three internal range, working mostly under low-light conditions.

She fired at least a hundred rounds a day five days a week to keep her edge.

The work demanded total concentration. The scenarios she had selected to be projected on the target screen covered hostage-taking and similar complex situations where, apart from shooting accurately, only brief seconds – and sometimes even less – were allowed in which to determine who were the targets and who were the victims. The poor light made the work even harder, but she was practicing this way because it was the nearest thing to the environment where she was going next.

She practiced both with and without an optical sight. The EPC subminiature optical sight, of British design – the U.K. had considerable expertise in the manufacture of counterterrorist equipment – allowed her to keep both eyes open, and replaced the conventional sight with a prismatically induced red dot which automatically adjusted to the infrared level of ambient light. The sight was passive – it did not project a line of red light like a laser sight – so it was ideal for covert operation. It was proving to be particularly effective under low-light conditions. The optics gathered the light like a pair of high-quality binoculars, and where the large red dot was placed, so went the rounds.

Using the EPC optical sight on her Beretta, Chifune found she could aim and fire accurately – hitting a nine-inch plate at twenty meters – in one third of a second. The qualifying standard was double that time.

Chifune Tanabu was an exceptional shooter.

Adachi was going through the standard checklists that were used for a murder investigation and then updating his personal operational plan on his word processor.

The investigation of the last few weeks seemed to indicate that Hodama had met everyone and been everywhere. And he had lived too damn long. The classic routines of interviewing all friends and acquaintances and cross-checking their stories was taking forever. And as for trying to work out who had a motive to kill him, well, who didn't? Hodama had schemed and manipulated and bribed and double-crossed all his life. His list of enemies must be endless.

Somewhere, Hodama must have records. The house was clean and, more important, there was no indication that any volume of papers had been removed. There were no empty shelves or open filing cabinets or safes with doors open. No, Adachi was of the opinion that he had kept his goodies elsewhere. He was a devious, cautious son of a bitch, and that would be in character. Alternatively, the place had been sanitized by a true professional; and that in itself was food for thought.

They had discovered the security video – the recorder had taped all the comings and goings at Hodama's house – but could not read it. Evidently, Hodama liked to keep a permanent record of his visitors, but in such a way that it was secure. The video recording was scrambled and needed a decoder to work. Right now, the technical boys were trying to decode the thing. It was bloody frustrating; they might have a complete recording of the killers, but they could not view it. But why had the killers not removed the tapes? Elsewhere, their preparation had been so meticulous. Would they slip up on a visual record? For some reasons of their own, did they deliberately want to leave a record?

"Boss!" shouted Fujiwara.

Adachi looked up.

Inspector Fujiwara was waving his telephone handset around and grinning. "Progress. We turned over the homes of all of Hodama's people, and we've hit pay dirt at Morinaga's."

"Who the fuck is Morinaga?" said Adachi. He was tired and felt drowned in paper. Reports written on the heat-sensitive paper used by the built-in printers of the little word processors used throughout Japanese officialdom seemed to be curled up everywhere, interspersed with even curlier faxes. Adachi longed for good, old-fashioned plain paper. Apart from being horrible to handle, heat-sensitive paper had an annoying habit of fading when exposed to direct sunlight. He could just see the crucial report. "And the murderer is…" fading as he looked.

"Harumi Morinaga was one of the Hodama bodyguards shot inside the house," said Fujiwara. "He took a burst in the torso and a couple in the neck. Kind of a slight physique for his line of work. Aged mid-twenties."

Adachi flipped through the file. He knew most of the victims through the photos taken as they lay dead. They were the ones that left the most vivid impressions. Somehow, the pictures collected afterward of a victim while still alive seemed to have an air of unreality. The real thing, the most memorable image – the most recent picture – was that of the corpse. He nodded at Fujiwara as he found the bloody mess that had been Morinaga.

"Morinaga's father," said Fujiwara, "was with Hodama for many years. Father and son, it appears, were estranged for a while. Father wanted son to work for Hodama and carry on the family tradition, and son wanted to go his own way. He went to work for one of the big corporations. Then, unexpectedly, he left the corporation, acceded to his father's wishes, and went to work for Hodama."

Adachi nodded. They had expected an inside man. It was common in such killings, and there was the detail that the front gate had not been forced. Someone had given the intruders the combination – or they already knew the code.

"We found young Morinaga's financial records," said Fujiwara. "He's been buying more on the stock market than he could ever afford from a bodyguard's salary – and there was over a million yen in cash in his apartment."

Fujiwara was still grinning.

"There's more?" said Adachi.