A huge irregular crater lay where a large portion of the street had been just seconds before. Bodies lay everywhere, some moving, some not. Sirens wailed. Johnny’s eyes searched for and found the president’s limousine. Rubble had compressed much of its top and carved huge dents in as many places as not. It had escaped the major brunt of the blast, though, and Johnny could tell from the congestion of Secret Service agents around its perimeter that the president was safe inside.
Johnny might have let himself feel triumphant if the scent of blood hadn’t burned into his nostrils. It caused him to swing around even before he heard the wheezing sound Abraham made as he regained his feet on the nearby girder, his insides spilling out. The warning gave Wareagle the instant he needed to grasp the steel support rod that was now beneath him and swing it around, trying to knock the raging Wakinyan aside.
Abraham’s lunge had brought him too close to Johnny for the Indian to reach him with a sweeping blow, so he changed the motion to a savage jab. The collective force drove the heavy steel through the Wakinyan’s already gaping wound, shredding more flesh and bones before emerging through Abraham’s back. His wail became a gurgle. Johnny let go of the rod and shrank back from the bitter stink of blood and oozing innards.
Abraham dropped downward off the girder, the steel rod looking like a spike driven through his body. The rod caught on a pair of neighboring girders, halting his fall and driving the steel straight up against his sternum. His feet twitched and spasmed and Johnny watched death take him at last.
The Indian heard the approach of another elevator coming up from the building’s rear and took one last look at the glaze-eyed Abraham.
“We’re up!” announced the head of the Secret Service unit that poured tentatively onto the high steel girders.
“Shoot to kill!” ordered Arnold Triesman from his position next to the battered limousine, a deep ringing still cursing his ears.
“Nothing to shoot at,” the team leader replied after a pause.
“What?”
“I got one target already big-time dead and nothing else.”
“Say again?”
“No Indian, Alley Cat. He gave us the slip again.”
McCracken saw the rope at the beginning of his drop. By the time he could grasp it, he was already even with what remained of the shot-to-hell dummy that had preceded him down the shaft.
“Blaine!” he heard Tunnel yell through the communicator in his helmet.
McCracken felt his shoulders strain and pull from the sudden pressure. His neck snapped backward in whiplash effect. He slammed forward and struck the ladder with enough force to jiggle it and crack his faceplate. But he had managed to hold fast to the rope supporting the radiation suit that was leaking stuffing through the dozens of bullet holes pierced through it.
“Hold on, you son of a bitch!” Tunnel shouted.
“Get the fuck out of here!”
“Not until we pull you up. We fry, friend, we fry together.”
McCracken felt himself being hoisted upward, powerless now to help in the slightest. All he could do was keep squeezing the rope that had become his lifeline. The rungs of the ladder passed by him in slow, surreal fashion, in an almost dreamlike way. And a dream it might well have been, based on the words that reached him as he came within a grasp of the hatch:
“Critical stage warning is canceled. Critical stage warning is canceled.”
Patty gawked disbelievingly at Shimada, the loving Hunsecker house servant for twenty years. “You’re the leader! You’re the one Takahashi couldn’t identify!”
Shimada stared around her. “My legacy to inherit and now to lose, Hana-shan.”
“Don’t call me that. Don’t ever call me that.”
“It is what you still are, just as I am what I have always been.”
Patty gazed back briefly at the front of the conference room. “You spoke through that mannequin so no one would know it was you.”
“Traditionally, women are not highly regarded in our culture. Accordingly, the illusion was necessary.”
“Dad—”
“You’ve got to leave, Patty,” Phillip Hunsecker interrupted.
“Not without you.”
He shook his head serenely. “No.”
“The boys! Think of the boys!”
“I am.” He looked toward Shimada. “That’s why we’re letting you leave. You must go. Your friends are drawing closer.”
“They’re not my friends! I came alone! For you!”
“Would you have joined us, Patty? Is that what you came for?”
“I…don’t know.”
“Our vision was pure, direct. No one will ever understand.”
“You were going to destroy the country, murder millions!”
Shimada stepped forward. “The deaths would occur, yes, because fitting revenge could be achieved only by reducing America’s great cities to what Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been reduced to. But enough of America would have been left to serve as foundation for a new America, Hana-shan. Our America…Japan’s America. A new society would have been chartered, rebuilt, and controlled by us. A new and different order that would look to the Rising Sun for direction.”
“Madness!”
“Truth, Patty,” said her father. “We were placed here for a purpose, and now that purpose has failed. Our lives were dedicated to the secrecy of our existence. Without that secrecy we cannot live.”
“Stop it!”
Shimada drew close enough to touch her but didn’t. “The decisions are irreversible now. Our fate was chosen for us long ago. Leave now or you join us in it.”
“For the boys,” her father said. “You’re all they’ve got.”
“No!” Patty wailed. “There’s got to be another answer!”
Shimada and her father backed away, toward the mannequin. She made no motion to follow.
“Please,” she pleaded.
“Go, Patty,” her father said just before the shadows swallowed him. “This is your last chance.”
Patty turned and ran, heart thundering in her chest, eyes clouded with tears. She lost her bearings briefly, then recovered them, finding her way back to the elevator that had brought her down.
The elevator her father had left operational for her, she realized now.
Her tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks as the compartment hurtled upward. Her body felt heavy and used up. When the elevator stopped, she had to drag herself out into the shell of the cover building.
Outside, a rumbling in the ground underfoot shook her senses alert. She bolted into a run toward her waiting helicopter, realizing it had been joined by several others, all packed with armed men.
Patty spotted Sal Belamo standing twenty yards in front of his eager troops, rifle slung over his shoulder. As she ran into his arms, another rumble shook the ground. A blast followed, muffled by the blanket of covering earth. She turned back long enough to see the wooden shack crumble into the ground that had become a mass grave for the Children of the Black Rain.
Epilogue
“Why did they do it?” Patty asked Blaine as she sat by his hospital bed.
“Honor,” he replied. “They were following the samurai code. That was what this whole mission was about — and once they failed, there was only one recourse.”
“They could have waited, could have tried again another time.”
Blaine shook his head. “Samurai thinking doesn’t work that way.”
“It makes no sense.” She sighed. “They’re willing to wait almost fifty years for revenge, but not try it a second time.”