They put him alone in the backseat of the Toyota, which was isolated from the front by a heavy steel mesh. There were no inside door handles.
The city was very quiet and dark, all the shops and offices closed for the night. There was very little traffic, and as they headed away from the station, the cop riding shotgun looked back at McGarvey with a neutral expression on his face.
“Where are you taking me?” McGarvey asked politely.
The cop said something to the driver, who laughed, then he turned back. “You should not have come here.”
“My government ordered me to Japan. And I think that you should tell that to Mr. Lee. We know all about the launch.”
The cop said nothing.
McGarvey looked out the window. Ichinobe was not a large city, and within minutes they were away from the downtown section and into what looked like an industrial area of warehouses and buildings that could have been small factories. These gave way quickly to open countryside of farm fields dotted with stands of trees silhouetted in the night. In the distance McGarvey spotted moving lights along what was probably a major highway.
At any moment they would pull over to the side of the road and simply fire through the steel mesh, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He was a rat caught in a cage waiting to be executed.
If he waited, which is exactly what they were counting on.
The cop looked away momentarily. McGarvey let out a cry, clutched his chest and threw himself on the floor behind the driver. He curled up in a fetal position, his feet against the driveshift hump, his legs cocked like springs. They could not shoot him from that angle.
The cop shouted something, and the Toyota immediately slowed down and pulled to a stop off the road. “Get up! Get up!” the cop screamed through the mesh.
McGarvey groaned and pretended to try to rise, but then he slumped back. “Help me,” he cried weakly.
He heard both front doors open, and then the rear door on his side was pulled open and hands were grabbing him. It was all he needed, but he knew that he would only get this one chance.
He suddenly uncoiled, driving upward and forward with every ounce of his strength. His head and right shoulder connected with the driver’s midsection, bowling the much slighter man backward onto the macadam. McGarvey landed on top of him and yanked the pistol out of his hand.
The second cop came around the front of the car, his pistol drawn. He stepped left and dropped into a crouch as he brought his gun hand up.
McGarvey rolled the momentarily stunned driver over on cop of him and fired three shots, the first missing the cop, but the next two hitting the man in the right thigh and his chest, flinging him backward.
The driver smashed a karate blow into the side of McGarvey’s neck and shoved him aside.
The blow knocked McGarvey on his back, and he dropped the gun. The driver scrambled for his pistol. McGarvey recovered, rolled up on his left hip and swung a roundhouse ight cross that connected with the driver’s chin, breaking it. Fhe man wasn’t expecting the blow, and his head snapped to the side as if he had been hit by a pile driver. He fell on his back, his head bouncing limply on the roadway.
McGarvey grabbed the pistol and covered the driver. But the man lay absolutely still, his head lolling at an impossible angle. His neck was broken.
The second cop lay on his side in front of the car, his eyes open and already glazed. His jacket was open, and there was a thin splotch of blood over his heart. He too was dead.
They had picked him up not to place him under arrest, but to kill him and dump his body somewhere out here in the countryside. So killing them had been a matter of self-defense. But it didn’t make it any easier for him, and bile rose up at he back of his throat. He looked at his hands in the darkness, certain he could see blood dripping from them. A river of blood. Wherever he went, whatever he started out to do, seemed always to end in bloodshed.
He didn’t want this. He knew it was inevitable, but he didn’t want it.
He glanced both ways up the road. No traffic was coming. [n that, at least, his luck was holding. He dragged the bodies back to the car and stuffed them on the floor in the back, covering them as best he could with their jackets. Someone casually looking through the window tonight might not be able to make out what was lying there. At least not with a cursory glance.
He recovered his own gun and spare magazine, then got behind the wheel and checked his watch. It was nearly mid-hight. If the countdown had not been delayed, the launch would take place in a little over sixteen hours.
He considered his options. They knew that he’d entered Japan at Misawa, and they were already coming after him. But they might not expect these two to call in for a while longer yet, which gave him a little time.
He unfolded a highway map and figured out where he was. The road to his right was one of the main north-south toll roads. Although it would be the fastest way to travel, the toll roads were highly regulated. It wouldn’t take long for this car to be spotted once the alert was raised.
His only real chance, he figured, was making it to Tokyo, or some other large city, where he could ditch this car and find another means of transportation to Kyushu’s south coast. But the south island was one thousand miles away. He was a foreigner in a stolen car with the bodies of two men he had killed, the authorities were looking for him and he was running out of time.
He pulled out and headed south. Driving on the left felt odd, but that was the least of his troubles. The fact of the matter was, he had no other choice and he no longer gave a damn. The blood lust was rising in him. They had hurt his family and it was payback time. He was going to have to find an airfield or a shinkansen station and start taking chances he didn’t want to take.
By four in the morning, Hirota knew that he had lost control of the operation to neutralize McGarvey. He had waited with mounting anxiety for his people in Ichinobe to telephone. They were to have met the train shortly after eleven last night, arrest McGarvey, drive him out into the countryside, kill him and then dispose of his body. But something had gone wrong, and he wasn’t ready to tell Joseph Lee that he had failed. Not until he was sure of his facts, though in his heart of hearts he knew that he was in trouble.
He got up from behind his desk in his office and went to a sideboard, where he poured another cup of tea. He turned back and looked at the photograph of his wife and daughter. His father had been too young to fight in the war, but his grandfather had been killed on Okinawa in some of the bloodiest fighting against the Americans. He wondered if his grandfather had taken out a photograph of his wife and son, who were back home in Kobe, before that final battle to reassure himself, as Hirota was doing now, that he was following the correct path, that what he was doing was not only for the emperor and Nippon, but for his family.
He glanced at the clock for the third time in the past ten minutes as the telephone rang. He rushed to his desk and picked it up. The caller was his contact on the Aomori Prefecture Police.
“Have they called yet?”
Hirota’s grip tightened on the phone. “No. Have you heard anything?”
“Nothing,” the police lieutenant said. “Something must have gone wrong.”
Hirota bit off a sharp reply. “Begin a search within thirty kilometers of Ichinobe.”
“There should be no problem finding the car—”
“You’re not looking for the car,” Hirota said, cutting him short. “You’re looking for two bodies.”
“Hai.”