“Arrangements have been made for your travel.” Nakanga held out a large brown envelope. “I have your cover documents ready: passport, driver’s license. All that you will need. Also a sufficient sum of money to allow you to do your job. Memorize the contact plans and procedures. You will leave this evening.”
Nishin stood and took the envelope. He froze when a voice spoke from the shadows.
“You must not allow the secret of Genzai Bakudan to be revealed,” the man in the wheelchair rasped. “Use whatever means necessary.”
Nishin inclined his head, indicating he understood, afraid to say anything. When nothing more was said, he quickly left the deck.
Behind, standing alone, Nakanga looked at the entrance to the room, waiting.
“Leave me,” the Genoysha ordered.
“Yes, Genoysha Kuzumi.”
As soon as Nakanga left, Kuzumi slowly pushed aside the curtain and rolled onto the balcony. It was his favorite place to think. It was also the only place where he was ever out of doors. Nakanga’s words rang in his ears, as did Nishin’s questions. They raised disturbing thoughts like a dust cloud on an old road.
Lies, deception, and double and triple dealing were the way of power, Kuzumi knew, but Nakanga’s answer to Nishin’s question about his location at the end of the war brought forth a double-edged sword of deception that cut deep. I did not die in Hiroshima, Kuzumi bitterly knew. Late at night when he was alone lying on his mat he often wished he had. Sometimes he wondered if memories and nightmares were all he had other than his duty to the Society.
At least everything else Nakanga had told Nishin was true. What bothered Kuzumi as much as anything else was the fact that the part about not knowing the full story was also true. Kuzumi had been high in the Society by the end of the war, but only the Genoysha at the time, Taiyo, had known all that was going on. As only Kuzumi knew all that was presently going on within the many tentacles of the present-day Black Ocean society so Taiyo had ruled and plotted. What concerned Kuzumi was whatever had grown from those unknown past seeds that had been scattered at the end of the war.
Naturally, he was concerned about Genzai Bakudan being found out. More specifically about the Black Ocean’s role in developing Genzai Bakudan. But when he had learned that the North Koreans were heading to San Francisco his blood had run cold and more ghosts had arisen to swirl about his consciousness. There were a few things that Kuzumi knew from that time that Nakanga himself did not know because Kuzumi had not informed him.
But it was years before that desperate time when the war closed in on the homeland that Kuzumi’s mind wandered to now on the balcony. Seven years earlier to be exact, before the entire world had turned black with war.
Unlike his present situation, in the late thirties Kuzumi had traveled the world. He had been in Germany right after fission had been discovered in 1938. He had earned his degree in the fledgling science of atomic physics at the University of Tokyo the previous year, so he had understood the importance of what had just occurred. As a member of the Black Ocean, which had funded his education, Kuzumi had informed his superiors and they had sent him to the Third Reich.
So strange that the Germans, who had first discovered fission, would lag so far behind in their development of an atomic bomb. But Kuzumi knew the main reason for that. Hitler. The crazy man had not trusted discoveries uncovered mainly by Jewish scientists. He had also run away most of his prominent physicists for the same reason. Run them right to his enemy in America. The German program had lagged and then the British had sent a suicide commando mission to destroy the heavy-water plant in Norway in 1942 to dash any possibility of the German scientists achieving success. The raid was something a Japanese would have done.
Leaving Germany in 1939 after learning all he could, Kuzumi had gone to the west coast of the United States. It was at the University of California at Berkeley that he had studied under Professor Ernest O. Lawrence, who won the Nobel Prize in physics that same year for inventing the cyclotron a few years previously.
A circular accelerator capable of generating particle energies, a cyclotron was essential for developing the theoretical groundwork in the growing field of atomic studies. Lawrence had built the first one, four and a half inches in diameter, at UCBerkeley in the early thirties. By the time Kuzumi was in California, the Japanese had one thirty-nine inches in diameter. The Americans had built even larger ones and were beginning to classify much of their work in atomic physics.
But as a young exchange student Kuzumi had learned much about atomics in the relaxed atmosphere of the university. He had also learned something that no amount of schooling could have prepared him for.
Kuzumi looked over the valley and beyond, his eyes soaring through his memory in both time and place. Berkeley, 1939. The campus was in the bloom of spring and Kuzumi’s mind had been on atoms and international intrigue. There was war in Europe and his own country was at war in China. The United States was a tranquil island in the middle of the death raging elsewhere.
Perhaps that was what had lulled him. His old hands strayed up to his neck, feeling the absence of the locket that had hung around his neck for six years. He had passed it on in 1945 and it had been destroyed at Hiroshima along with much else that was precious to him.
San Francisco. Damn those North Koreans. Damn that old cave. What had they uncovered there? Kuzumi shook his head. How had the North Koreans found out about the cave? From the Russians? From someone simply stumbling over it?
There was more at stake than even Nakanga knew. Kuzumi could take no chances. He pressed a button on the side of his wheelchair and waited for the person he had summoned to appear.
CHAPTER 3
“I need a Hush Puppy,” Lake said.
The man across the table from him whistled. “That’ll cost you big. What do you need the Puppy for? You got the High Standard I sold you, right? Or did you resell it?”
“I still have the High Standard,” Lake confirmed. “But I don’t like it, Jonas. Too light. That .22 bullet couldn’t hurt a rabbit.”
“It can kill you if you put the bullet in the right place,” Jonas said. “I remember …”
Lake pretended to listen as Jonas told his war story. The bar they were in was named Chain Drive, but that was a relic from its days when bikers had haunted the imitation leather booths and rickety wooden tables. The bikers were gone now and the Patriots had taken over.
As he leaned back against the back of the booth, it occurred to Lake that he would have preferred dealing with the bikers. He’d been working the Patriots since they’dchanged their name two years ago. Previously they’d been known as Militias, but the Oklahoma bombing had made that name a disadvantage. Some smart guy had come up with the new name, and because the group used the Internet for much of its communications, the name had caught on within two months.
The best estimate the Ranch had was that there were over a quarter million members of various Patriot groups around the country. Contrary to the claims of the media, though, Lake knew that most of those were law-abiding citizens who simply felt that the federal government had overstepped its bounds and they were exercising their freedom of speech. It was the handful of extremists among that quarter million that worried everyone.