“I am not.”
“Good,” Ohnishi said with a thin smile. “I wish to celebrate tonight. Are you in the mood?”
“Yes, of course,” Kenji answered the rhetorical question.
Ohnishi wheeled out from behind the desk and toward his bedroom on the top floor of the glass mansion. Once there, Kenji helped him undress and reclothe himself for bed. Kenji easily lifted his frail form into the wide four-poster, propping several pillows behind his back. Ohnishi laid a withered hand on Kenji’s cheek and thanked him with a smile, his eyes shining as if in fever.
“You are like a son to me, you must know that.”
“I do,” Kenji replied, stroking the old hand gently. “Please allow me a few minutes to prepare.”
As Kenji strode from the room, Ohnishi turned to a control panel near his bed and pressed several buttons in quick succession. The electrochromic panels in the glass ceiling of his bedroom darkened, blocking out the rich tropical moonlight. Throughout the house, the walls and roof also darkened, enclosing the mansion in a blackened cocoon.
On the far wall, past the foot of the bed, heavy velvet drapes parted, revealing a two-way glass wall and a small bedroom beyond. A nude woman lay supine on the bedspread, her small breasts peaked with long erect nipples.
Because of his age, Takahiro Ohnishi could no longer enjoy intercourse, but his sexual drive had diminished little over the years. Rather than give in to his body’s inability to respond, he had devised a method of voyeurism that partly slaked his still healthy urges. He was incapable of erections let alone emission, but he could still enjoy the act in his own way.
He patiently waited for Kenji to make his entrance, enjoying the lithe body of the sleeping girl. When Kenji finally entered the room, his muscled body was bare and his arousal was plainly evident. He crossed to the sleeping woman — girl, really, since she was not yet fifteen — and woke her by rubbing his erection against her parted lips. She had been well schooled in her responses according to the script that Ohnishi had provided.
Pretending to be still asleep, she took Kenji into her mouth and began a gentle fellatio. Ohnishi pressed a button on the console and the sensitive microphones in the other room broadcast the subtle noises of the girl’s lips and mouth. She moved a hand up from her side and began massaging one of her nipples softly, quickly picking up the rhythm as if coming awake.
Ohnishi leaned forward in his bed as the Japanese girl’s eyes fluttered open and she began sucking in earnest. He could feel a slight tightening near his prostate muscles and smiled. Kenji reached down and toyed roughly with her other breast, and the speakers in Ohnishi’s bedroom sounded with her moans of building passion. Ohnishi resisted the temptation to touch himself, knowing he would be disappointed at his body’s lack of response.
Kenji spread the girl’s legs, revealing her still hairless mons. Slipping one thick finger into her body, he thrust through her virginity so that blood slicked his hand and her inner thighs. The girl winced but did not cry out. He crawled onto the bed and positioned her so Ohnishi would have the best possible view before he entered her.
He mounted her roughly, thrusting sharply into her still undeveloped pelvis. Despite the pain she must have felt, the girl writhed and moaned, clenching Kenji’s torso with her coltish legs and lifting her firm buttocks from the bed, arching her back higher and higher. Ohnishi could not resist the temptation; his hand snaked under his blankets to find himself semierect. He grasped it and began pumping in time with Kenji.
His erection lasted only a few moments and there was no emission, but it was more than he’d had in years. As soon as he lost it, he lost all interest in the performance still being played out behind the glass. He pressed the button to close the curtains and lay back on his bed. The sounds of Kenji’s lovemaking still filled the room. He made a mental note, as he settled into sleep, to use this girl again.
She had been in the room for only twenty-four hours, but already Jill felt as if she’d been imprisoned for a year. She had gone through the classic steps taken by nearly every person who is locked up against their will. First she had raged at her captors, screaming and pounding against the solid steel door that kept her from freedom. When she had exhausted herself, she spent the next several hours going over her cell in minute detail, exploring the cement block walls, the ceiling that was too far over her head to reach, the empty pegboard rack with the outlines of tools still painted on its brown glossy surface. The twenty-square-foot room smelled of fertilizer, old gasoline, and oil — Jill assumed it had once been a gardener’s supply shed.
After she’d paced her cell for another hour, Jill had finally settled on the concrete floor next to the dripping spigot. She’d watched dully as the tiny drops pooled, then snaked to the rusted drain in the middle of the room. Eventually she slept, her body overriding her mind’s racing questions.
When she woke a tray of food rested next to the door. There were a couple of oranges, half a loaf of crusty french bread, and a quarter stick of butter, along with a waxed paper cup of cool coffee. Jill noticed immediately that nothing on the tray could provide her with a weapon, no glass or tin cans, no utensils that could be sharpened by scraping them against the floor.
The waste bucket in the far corner of the room had been removed during the night and replaced with a fresh one, much to her relief.
Now Jill sat quietly, stoically, like a twenty-year veteran of prison, taking the time as it came, with neither expectations nor hope. For a while she’d tried to understand why someone had kidnapped her, but she realized that knowing the truth wouldn’t do her any good. She suspected that Takahiro Ohnishi was behind her abduction, but the knowledge was worthless to her in her present circumstances. Her only interests were in survival.
Since Ohnishi had gone through the trouble of snatching her from her home, he must not want to kill her. He wanted something from her, something that only she could give.
It had to be her credibility as a reporter. If she was correct about Ohnishi and Mayor Takamora’s attempt to break Hawaii away from the rest of the Union, then they would need the legitimacy that only the media could give, the soothing voice and face on the television assuring the people that everything was all right and under control. It would be simple to coerce her into giving false reports and no one who’d placed their trust in her as a reporter would ever know that they were being deceived.
It was the same question of ethics and integrity that she’d faced before storming out of the studio, but this time the stakes were much higher. Yesterday it had been a question about her job, her career. Today it was her life at risk. Jill had thought about all of this throughout the long morning, but by late afternoon and into the evening her mind dulled and lost focus. She had settled into a torpor. She was just thinking about falling back asleep, her back was already pressed against the wall, her head held only limply by her slender neck.
The door opened without warning. Jill jerked out of her lethargy, edging along the wall to gain distance between herself and the dark figure that entered her cell. She noted idly that night had fallen once again, though she didn’t know the time since she’d been stripped of her watch and shoes when she’d been left in the cell.
“I did not mean to startle you, Miss Tzu, my apologies.” The man’s voice was flat and lifeless, echoing inside him like a distant whisper.
“I know you, don’t I?” Jill had gotten to her feet.
“We have not formally met, but we have spoken on the phone several times. I am Kenji.”
“I knew Ohnishi was behind this.” There was little triumph in her voice.
Kenji slid further into the room, his feet gliding on the floor with the ease of quicksilver. There was a dangerous elegance about him. It was the charm of the serpent, slow, seductive, evil. He eased himself to the floor, hunching down in the very place where Jill had been a moment earlier.