He had always envisaged his meeting with Uchida as the final act of his latest enterprise. A moment he had originally planned as the final deathly step, once Takada had systematically removed all the other players in the web of corruption the man had assembled around him. It was to have been an accumulation of violent actions, a process that would have eventually brought him a delectable moment he had intended to savour. That plan had evaporated quickly once he fully understood Uchida’s implication in a far more heinous crime. An evolving development that had made him the starting point of a new venture. In Takada’s doctrine of honour, treason was the most abhorrent of crimes. While it was true that any violation of the code incurred the most severe penalty, the key distinction for him lay in how he responded to each specific offence. He drew power from his actions, each violent act bestowed on him a degree of energising vitality, with the measure of that force increasing in direct proportion to the transgression he punished. The offence of treason was near the pinnacle of that reward system and offered him the chance of a far greater emotional recompense than mere white-collar crime, however insidious it had been.
He would leave the corruption and sleaze to the detectives to unravel, if nothing else they should be able to use the information on the data stick to assist them – if they had managed to decipher it of course. He would follow the trail of treason, gaining substance from eliminating as many of the Japanese and foreign players as he could before the authorities became fully engaged. But this time he would work downwards from the top. He glanced at the short sword as it lay in the footwell of his noodle van on the passenger side and envisaged it cutting down through Uchida’s sternum.
He was about to exit his diminutive vehicle, when something about an individual on the opposite side of the street triggered his tripwire of cautious vigilance. He quietly re-closed the door and began observing the man more intently. He was parked in the business sector in downtown Fukushima. It was midday and busy, the reason why he had planned this time to take down his prey. The man caught his attention, despite the fact he was moving in the sea of people walking to and fro on the sidewalk; he strolled with the practised ability of one trained to merge into any urban environment. To most people, he would have been just another worker taking a lunch break or returning to work in the busy business sector and its numerous cafés and restaurants. An innocuous nobody, floating past in the concealing waters that were the crowds. Mimicking the speed and gait of those around him, ghosting in and around the multitudes as gaps in the throng opened up, moving with just enough urgency to allow him a modest increase in speed without drawing attention to himself.
Now that his quarry had moved far enough away from him, he got out of his own vehicle and began to follow, using similar techniques to move through the crowd. He kept a respectful distance, continuing his observations as he did so. To a master of the human condition, like Takada, not only was it obvious that the man was in a hurry, but also that he was extracting himself from a serious incident. Takada’s senses told him that the man had killed and had done so very recently. To him he may well have been carrying his victim across his shoulders, as he moved out onto the edge of the payment, coming alongside a dark blue Toyota Hi-Ace van. He moved as quickly as he could to the far side of the street, to get a side on view. The name ‘Fukuo Maritime Engineering’ was painted on the side of the vehicle, with a telephone number for inquiries below the company’s name.
The two men in the front of the van now drew his attention. They were mere amateurs in relation to the individual he was watching now. He should have picked them up on his first sweep of the area in his noodle van. He had spotted the van earlier, but the men must have been hiding inside. The passenger looked back as he operated the automatic side door from the cabin. The door smoothly slid open and the man neatly hopped in, the door closing behind him as the engine started. He had to move quickly, the traffic was busy, so it gave him a few precious moments to move across behind the van before it managed to pull out. He quickly targeted a lady who would arrive at the rear of the Toyota at the same time as him, purposely bumping into her, causing her to drop her bag. As he and the woman began to outdo each other in profuse apologies, he stooped to pick up her bag, at the same time placing a magnetic tracker under the rear of the van.
He finally managed to disengage himself from the woman. As the van slowly pulled itself out into the flow of traffic, Takada activated the tracker software on the responder now in his hand. He was rewarded with a flashing red dot highlighted on a road map of their current location as the van drove out of view.
His original plan to apprehend Uchida in his home, from what he had seen he now deduced, was no longer a viable option. Best to check he thought, so he made his way to a payphone booth and placed an anonymous call to the emergency services. He told them he was a resident in the building and had heard screaming coming from Uchida’s apartment and that he could now smell smoke in the area. They asked him for his details, but he said he did not want any trouble he was just a concerned citizen doing his duty and then hung up and returned to his noodle van.
Within ten minutes a police car and then a fire engine drove past him towards Uchida’s apartment block with sirens blaring.
He turned on the emergency radio scanner he had brought with him, onto the local police radio band. He heard them request for the caretaker to come up to the apartment and let them in, seemingly not having any success in gaining entry themselves. The coms went quiet for a while, and then he heard a more frantic call for an ambulance to attend. This was quickly followed by a request to escalate the area to a serious crime scene.
It was obvious that someone had beaten him to Uchida. The fact that they had killed him was unexpected, surely, he was more valuable alive than dead. The man had not been in the building long enough to achieve any meaningful interrogation. He thought they may just have wished to retrieve something physical from the apartment, kill him, and leave.
Feeling terribly cheated by not getting to Uchida sooner, Takada quietly fumed in anger at his loss. Not only had he failed to kill the man, with Uchida now literally a dead end, he had nothing tangible to support the conjecture and supposition on his other leads. Some time spent with a living Uchida had been critical to the next phase of his plan. He took some deep breaths and calmed his mind. Someone was going to compensate him for that loss, that was a given. There were at least three ‘someones’ he needed a word with immediately. He fired up the noodle van and started to pick up the route of the Toyota from his transponder.