The Last Assassin

'Understood.'

Yamaoto hung up. He called his driver and had the man bring around the armored Mercedes S-Class that he'd taken to traveling in after his last encounter with John Rain.

Twenty minutes later, he walked into a popular 'Fashion Health' massage place Kuro ran in Shinjuku. Kuro had a way of managing these kinds of establishments. The man was a good earner. Reliable.

The doorman recognized Yamaoto and welcomed him with an obsequious bow. Yamaoto ignored the women lounging on red velour couches in the subdued light and headed straight through a door into the back office.

There they were, occupying opposite ends of a gray leather couch, heads hanging and hands twisting in their laps as though they were the world's largest errant schoolboys. It was a wonder the furniture could support their combined bulk. Kuro was off to the side, seated behind a metal desk. Yamaoto knew he kept a gun back there, highly illegal in. Japan, and that if Kito and Sanada had tried to leave, Kuro would have used it.

The men looked up when Yamaoto entered. They both shot to their feet and bowed deeply. 'Moushiwake gozaimasen, kumicho!' they cried in unison. We humbly beg your forgiveness, boss!

Yamaoto stood silently, looking from one to the other. Eventually they straightened and met his eyes.

'What the hell happened in Wajima?' he asked. 'And where the hell have you been?'

The men looked at each other, then back at Yamaoto. They were plainly terrified.

Kito spoke first. 'We… we're not sure, kumicho.''

Sanada added, 'We arrived on schedule. The Chinese signaled from off the coast and came ashore. We walked over to do the exchange, then… something happened.'

Yamaoto said, 'What?'

Kito said, 'We think someone shot us with a drug. Each of us felt a… a slap in the neck. Then we were waking up in the mud. It was dark, but we saw two men. We tried to fight them, but we were groggy and they shot us again. When we woke up the second time, the Chinese were dead and the shipment and payment were gone. Kumicho, we swear to you this is the truth!'

Sanada stuck his chin high and gestured to his neck. 'Kumicho, look, you can see the marks! They shot us with tranquilizers or something.'

Yamaoto looked at Sanada's massive neck. The skin was indeed discolored in two places, and there were red marks in the center of the discolorations, like the result of a hornet's sting. But what did that mean? They could have made the marks themselves.

'And here,' Kito said, lifting his shirt and exposing a planet-sized belly. He had an identical mark there.

'You didn't get a good look at the men?' Yamaoto asked.

'No, kumicho,' Kito said. 'It was dark.'

'Nothing that could help us identify them? Did you hear them talking?'

The men looked at each other. Sanada said, 'I think I did, I remember hearing yelling, but I was confused from the drug.'

'Was it Chinese? Japanese?'

'I think Japanese, but also there were parts I couldn't understand. Maybe some English. At one point…'

'What?'

'At one point, I thought one of them was yelling "I love you" in Chinese. But I… I'm just not sure, kumicho.'

Yamaoto wondered if the man was becoming unhinged. Or perhaps they had indeed been drugged. 'Did you tell anyone beforehand about the meeting in Wajima?' he asked.

'No, kumicho!' Kito exclaimed. 'Not a soul!'

Yamaoto looked from one to the other as though having trouble believing their story. As indeed he was. 'Why did you wait to come in?'

The men looked at each other, then back to Yamaoto. Sanada said, 'Kumicho, we're… we're afraid. We know how this looks. But we were set up. We swear to you.'

Kito added, 'In our fear, we lost our heads. But then we decided, we must leave this matter to our oyabun. He will do whatever is truly best.'

Kito's reference to Yamaoto as their oyabun, their father, was clever. The term invoked the traditional relationship between the yakuza boss and his underlings, and so was designed by implication to cast Kito and Sanada as Yamaoto's kobun, his children. And surely no wise and compassionate father could harm his own child.

Yamaoto began pacing the room as though in frustration. He walked past Kuro's desk, admiring as he always did the beautiful Kamakura era daisho sword set the man kept on a stand beside it. The daitou, or long katana, was displayed on top, blade up, the folded steel polished to a mirror finish, with the shorter wakizashi below. The black lacquer soya scabbards, each adorned with a pair of golden Tokugawa family crests, were on separate stands alongside the blades. The set was of museum quality, and Kuro claimed a dealer had once offered him twenty million yen for it, an offer Kuro refused even to consider. He allowed no one but Yamaoto to touch it, both out of deference to his boss's rank and in recognition of his extensive martial arts background, which included not only unarmed arts like judo, but also battoujutsu, combat sword cutting.

Yamaoto paused before the sword stand and turned to face the two men. 'You "lost your heads"?' he said, his voice rising. 'I pay you to think! You say I'm your oyabun, and yet at the first sign of trouble you insult me with your doubt!'

The men dropped their heads in shame and Yamaoto went on, shouting now. 'Do you have any idea of the trouble you've caused with your incompetence? You say you were set up, and maybe you were. But whose responsibility is it to prevent such things?'

The men, heads still bowed, said in unison, 'Our responsibility, kumicho.'

Despite his outward anger, Yamaoto was calm within. He had already decided how to resolve this, and there was no longer anything to be angry about. But if he showed his inward calm to these men, they would understand what was to happen. Better that they should believe him angry, which would indicate he was still undecided. That would keep them focused on how they could manage his anger and try to lessen the penalty for the situation they had placed him in.

What he needed to do now was shame them just a little more. They would welcome that, believing if Yamaoto were inclined to punish them with shame, he might be willing to forgo something more severe. More important, it might also cause them to bow lower, perhaps even to assume chinsha, the most apologetic bow of all, where the offender drops to his knees, his palms wide in front of him and his forehead to the ground.

'Yes, your responsibility!' Yamaoto exploded. 'Yours! But now I'm left with the burden of cleaning it up! All because you failed to do what I entrusted you with! And then you compounded your mistake with this shameful lack of confidence in your oyabun!'

As one, the men cried out, 'Moushiwake gozaimasen!' and dropped down into chinsha.

Yamaoto grasped the hilt of Kuro's daitou and snatched it clear of the stand. In an instant he had reached the two prostrate men, his fingers naturally and automatically tightening around the hilt in a two-handed grip as he moved. Barely slowing, he pivoted to his right, hips leading the way, elbows and wrists following like the trailing edge of a whip, creating the optimal combination of chopping and cutting that had been drilled into him in long hours of battoujutsu training.

Kito started to come up, perhaps sensing in some primitive way that something was amiss, but too late. The sword sliced through his massive neck and was blurring skyward again even before the man's cleanly severed head had fallen to the floor. Blood sprayed onto Sanada's face, but before the startled man could react the sword had completed its second lightning arc and his head, too, was on its way to the ground.