10

Tokyo
Japan

Can I get you another cup of coffee?”

Kaito Yoshima—his name when he was in Japan—answered the young waitress with a smile and flawless Japanese. Even if she’d been a student of subtle accents she would have placed him in the northeastern part of the island. Certainly she would never have dreamed that he’d been born and raised outside Dingxi, China.

He admired her as she weaved through the crowded coffee shop, dodging the knots of animated conversation with practiced agility. His preferences leaned more toward the exotic, but even he had to admit that there was something special about this girl. French wasn’t one of his four languages and he strained to remember the phrase. A certain je ne sais quoi.

Yoshima turned back to the massive window, ignoring the crowded street scene beyond and instead focusing on his reflection. In addition to his perfect accent, there would also be no way for the people surrounding him to determine his foreign birth from his features. They were a gift from the Japanese soldier who had raped his grandmother during the war—a strange trick of genetics that had not gone unnoticed by the Chinese government.

He’d been taken from his family just before his fourth birthday under the cover that he’d been identified as deeply gifted and would be educated at an exclusive boarding school. To this day his family had no idea that the school he’d been shipped off to was actually a training facility for spies and assassins.

From before he could even clearly remember, he had been immersed in the Japanese language and culture, the subtle art of espionage, and of course the shining glory of the Communist Party. Upon reaching adolescence, he’d been issued a forged passport and begun traveling to Japan on a regular basis, honing his ability to blend in under the watchful eye of his trainers and classmates.

There had been thirty of them in all, split equally between male and female. Friendships had been a luxury none of them could afford, and the endless competition had been both cruel and brutal. Mistakes, weakness, and even the slightest hint of a lack of patriotism or resolve were all severely punished. If enough of these usually trivial violations were incurred, that student was expelled.

Of course he knew now that this was just a euphemism. The level of secrecy that had to be maintained around a program that stole children and turned them into anti-Japanese weaponry was oppressive, to say the least. No, it was clear that the children born without the necessary intelligence or physical capability—and even the gentle ones whose nature was unsuited to the tasks they would be charged with—now inhabited a series of unmarked graves in the Chinese countryside.

Only nine of the thirty had survived their training, and those nine went on to become China’s top covert operatives. Or at least that’s what he was told. He’d never seen any of them again, and that separation generated a strange emptiness in him that he’d never been able to completely fill. His teachers had in some ways done their jobs too well. Now he straddled two different countries, two different cultures. Which did he really belong to? Certainly his loyalty to Beijing had been beaten into him throughout his childhood, but he was a man now and his allegiance to that country was beginning to feel more like a habit than anything else.

The pretty waitress returned and he smiled at her as she slid the latte onto the table in front of him.

“Do you speak English?” she asked, pointing to the copy of 1984 he’d been rereading to pass the time.

“I try,” Yoshima responded easily. “But I don’t think anyone could really understand me.”

It was a lie, of course. While slightly accented, his English was nearly perfect. Another gift from the Chinese government.

“I’m taking a class,” she said. “It’s really hard. So don’t feel bad. I can’t even understand myself!”

Her laugh was engaging enough to turn his thoughts to using the skills he’d been provided to disappear. Maybe somewhere in Japan. Maybe with this very girl.

She turned and he watched her walk away again, the fantasy fading as the physical distance between them grew. There had been so many women like her, so many daydreams of a normal life where his Japanese features didn’t make him the constant target of hatred by the very people he had been charged with protecting.

A bitter smile crossed his lips. The very people he had been charged with protecting.

In truth, the only people he protected were his country’s politicians. And that task was getting harder and harder as they pushed China further toward the brink. The runaway economic growth was slowing, information was becoming increasingly difficult to control, and his hopelessly corrupt masters were feeling their grip on the population weakening.

With all other avenues exhausted and religion unavailable to them, they had chosen Japan as a focal point for the Chinese people’s anger. They dredged up atrocities that had happened generations ago and skillfully transformed a group of useless islands into a beacon of national pride. All the while arrogantly believing that they could control the carefully cultivated rage of a billion human beings.

He scanned the street out front again, finally letting his gaze settle on a small Honda parked parallel to the curb. It looked almost laughably normal—Japan’s most common car in Japan’s most common color. Neither old nor new, neither clean nor dirty, it might as well have been invisible.

Within that mundane exterior, though, it was really quite remarkable. Six kilos of crudely formulated but still potent plastic explosive were hidden inside the driver’s-side door. The body had been cleverly reinforced with steel plate in order to channel and amplify the power of the blast into a force that its Chinese designer struggled to describe without invoking the frowned-upon concept of God.

No mistakes would be tolerated. No chances taken. General Masao Takahashi wouldn’t be injured or even killed. He would be vaporized.

A text popped up on the phone in front of him and he took a casual sip of his coffee as he looked down at it. Three minutes.

There was no excitement, no dread, and no adrenaline. Those responses had been deemed to dampen logical faculties and had been eradicated from him long ago. He was not to think or feel, and certainly not to question. He was a tool of men far greater than him. Nothing more.

For a long time, he’d believed all of it. Now, though, he saw things much more clearly.

There was no question that Masao Takahashi was an extremely dangerous man. He refused to bend with the wind, to acknowledge that the Chinese government’s saber rattling was just a bit of political showmanship for the benefit of the masses who granted it power. Because of this, Yoshima’s masters had decided that if the general’s influence was removed, the Japanese people would sink back into their mumbled apologies and averted gazes.

Ironically, it was the training he’d been given by these men that made him certain they were wrong. Nationalism was on the rise in Japan, and Takahashi’s death would do nothing but strengthen it. All he would accomplish here today would be to inch the two countries a little closer to the point of no return.

Another text came in warning him that the ETA of the general’s limousine was now one minute. He carefully inserted a set of custom earbuds and plugged the cord into his phone. Anyone looking would think he was listening to music, but the headphones were actually designed for hearing protection.

A drop of sweat ran down his forehead and he wiped it away. His masters had carefully designed the assassination to look like the work of the Japanese Patriotic Front, a left-wing group that had recently set off bombs in Yokohama and Nagoya. The subtle poison he’d suggested had been deemed too exotic and easily traced to a foreign source if discovered. And the sniper bullet that was his backup plan had been deemed too professional looking.

So he was sitting in a coffee shop waiting to unleash hell. Yoshima looked at the faces of the pedestrians walking by the colorful shop windows and at the drivers on their way home from work. How many would be disfigured or carry debilitating injuries for the rest of their lives? How many would die?

He bobbed his head to imaginary music and watched out of the corner of his eye as Takahashi’s opulent personal limousine came into view. Waiting until it was almost even with the Honda, he reached out and pushed the “volume” button on his phone three times in quick succession. A two-second delay had been programmed in, and he used the time to force himself to relax. It was important that he not flinch before the blast. The modern world was riddled with cameras, and every second of footage would be examined by the Japanese authorities.

Even after being briefed by the engineers in Beijing, he was stunned by the power of the blast. People around him screamed and dived to the floor, as did he, covering his head and making sure that panic read clearly on his face. He surreptitiously watched the people around him, not wanting to be the first, or the last, to look up.

When others started to move, he lifted his head and peered through the cracked window in front of him. As promised, the explosion had indeed been tightly concentrated. The entire front of the building across the street was caved in and starting to burn. People who weren’t lying motionless were fleeing desperately in every direction. Mangled cars, one still spinning on its roof, were scattered like a child’s discarded toys.

Yoshima stared into the smoke and dust billowing from the hole in the building across from him and felt his brow furrow involuntarily. The wind was pulling at the cloud, providing brief glimpses of what was behind. It took a moment for his mind to knit together the patchwork but when it did, he forgot the cameras and rose to his feet.

There should have been no more left of Takahashi’s car than a few small pieces of twisted metal and burning rubber. But there it was, lying intact on its side in the rubble.

Impossible.