CHAPTER 32

迂直の計 Uchoku no Kei

The Strategy of Going Around to Go Straight

The night was not as cold as Takumi expected. He was lying on his stomach, hiding beneath ferns, gazing into the dense fog covering the forest.

His mission should have been over by now. He had given Jet chance after chance, and hadn’t been able to hand her over to Matsumura and extricate himself from the whole thing. Now he was even more enmeshed in Matsumura’s plan, overseeing operations at Harter’s villa. And his feelings for Jet tore at his insides like a claw.

At Kanabe, the men he’d led hadn’t followed his orders. They’d thought he was too young and that they knew better. As a result the old man had taken them out. In the city, Hiro, Jet, and the dog had brought down his best fighters, making it look easy. Still, he felt he could have prevented this. It was inevitable that he would catch her and hand her over, and each day he hesitated to do so further tarnished his reputation.

Just yesterday, he’d stood in front of Matsumura and the American named Harter—that overwrought man with his even more overwrought pet, a panther tethered to a golden chain—and admitted that he’d failed.

“I did suggest more training for the men,” he said.

Harter was furious. “Regardless of the reasons, failure is failure. Even with more men and better equipment, you didn’t capture the girl. There’s no excuse.”

At the show of his master’s displeasure, the panther growled. Harter, enthralled with the animal’s aggression, rewarded the panther’s bloodlust by stroking it between the ears and promising it a steak.

Takumi could barely contain his disgust. He felt disdain for the panther. The sleekest of natural predators, one of the most graceful and powerful rulers of the animal kingdom, had let itself be tamed so thoroughly, and for what—the promise of a few cheap steaks delievered to its golden cage daily? And yet, somehow he recognized himself in the beast’s servitude.

How different am I from that animal?

“Are you with me?” Harter asked, exasperated.

“Yes, sir,” he said dryly.

“I’ve made my best effort to stop the Japanese police from investigating the trouble you made in the north,” Matsumura said between clenched teeth. “And that wasn’t easy. I need you to capture the girl immediately!”

“Yes sir. I’ll take care of it.” Takumi had bowed and left the room.

“You’d better, boy. It’s your last chance,” Harter had called out haughtily.

Takumi grimaced, touching the wound on his right forearm. The Tohoku boy must have had incredibly good training to throw coins like that. Takumi shook his head in admiration. He’d also been trained to throw coins. It was easy to fight with shuriken—throwing stars or spheres—but you had to concentrate the body’s ki into the fingertips to turn a mere coin into a weapon. To learn that, you had to throw coins hundreds, thousands of times at tree trunks as practice. Yes, the boy’s grandfather had taught him well. It was a shame that the old man had to die.

In fact, they could have spared his life, but Takumi’s men didn’t know how to fight in the heat of the moment. He had seen the whole thing from the ridge, watching with disgust. That old man had been worth a thousand of Harter’s footsoldiers. As he’d fallen into the ravine, Takumi had thought he’d heard him chanting Namu Amida Butsu. Did he go to Nirvana? To Heaven? Did one have to leave this world in order to find peace? And was there really another world to go to?

It would be easy to walk away, Takumi had thought. Well, not easy, but not impossible. He could call the whole thing off and take Jet with him. But where would they go, and would she even forgive him? She must hate him with every drop of blood in her body.

He pushed up the sleeve of his black shirt to look at his watch. Twelve-fifteen.

He thought of the men injured in the car chase. He admired Jet and the boy for their ingenuity, throwing that bag of tricks at them. He couldn’t have done better.

Although he’d commanded his warriors to catch them, his main purpose was to make them agitated, tire them out. He knew they would escape, but they would be confused and spent. He’d always been a believer in the principles laid out hundreds of years ago by Sun Tzu in the Art of War, and he’d employed the strategy of uchoku no kei.

U meant the roundabout way, choku meant directness, and kei meant strategy. You couldn’t always win a battle by attack. You had to use a combination of action and inaction, throwing the enemy off-guard psychologically as well as physically.

A real ninja backed his target into a corner using various strategies before even considering drawing a weapon. The true skill was deciding which strategy and scheme to employ, thus avoiding having to do battle at all. Having a back-up plan was also necessary. And a back-up to the back-up.

Jet is an amazing warrior, he thought involuntarily. When Matsumura had approached him about this mission, Takumi hadn’t known the particulars. It was the money that attracted him. Too much to turn down for what he thought would be an easy take.

Then he’d met Jet. She was the only girl he’d ever felt would understand him. They were like the same spirit in two different bodies. He swallowed hard. He knew how to cut off his emotions. That was second nature in his vocation. But he’d never really met anyone who came close to testing him like this. Cutting out his feelings for her was like ripping out his own heart.

He watched as the forest settled into even deeper darkness.

I’m so tired of this, he thought.

He tore off a fern leaf and put it in his mouth. The first time he’d gone to Japan, he’d visited his father’s ancestral village in Aomori. But he hadn’t found the rich land surrounded by nature that his father had told him about. Instead, he’d found a decrepit mountain ghost-village. If the land had been fertile, his father wouldn’t have left for Brazil. Takumi had looked on the village from the top of the cliff: a cluster of wooden houses with the roofs caved in, overgrown with weeds and grass. So this was his promised land.

The bitter taste of the fern leaf spread in his mouth.

He’d often wondered what his life would look like if he’d stayed in the jungle and worked coffee, marrying an Indio woman and having a kid or two. Would he accept that life as his father had, working from sunrise to sunset just for the day’s meal, reminiscing about some ancestral village and believing in a paradise after death that would purify his hardened heart?

More myth. More smoke and mirrors. Everything was ninja, indeed. Even that.

“What are you laughing at?” one of his comrades asked, a tall blond soldier-for-hire named Rossi.

Takumi hadn’t realized he was laughing. “Nothing,” he said.

“Well, stop it. When a guy like you laughs, something bad is going to happen.”

Takumi laughed again, loud enough this time to hear it himself. He swallowed the bitter leaf. An owl cried three times in the forest. Takumi stood and blinked his flashlight rapidly, throwing its code into the forest. A few shadows stood from the darkness and set out with him. He ran so fast he almost flew through the thick white mist. There was no time to think about the past, or the future. He had to be in the moment.

The chase was back on.