NEVER SAY DIE: Mark Cole Takes On the Yakuza in His Most Thrilling Adventure Yet! Read online

  NEVER SAY DIE

  J.T. Brannan

  © J.T. Brannan 2015

  For Justyna, Jakub and Mia;

  and my parents, for their help and support

  Author’s Note

  The Japanese names in this novel are presented in the Japanese fashion,

  with the family name first and the given name second

  “It is Japan’s mission to be supreme in Asia, the South Seas and eventually the four corners of the world”

  - Baron Sadao Araki (1877-1966), General of the Imperial Japanese Army

  PROLOGUE

  1

  The breeze was cool, offering relief from the stifling summer humidity of Kobe, a port town on the southern coast of the Japanese mainland.

  But for the man who lay hidden within the dark shadows of the acacia trees, there was no relief, for the humidity had never bothered him in the first place. Indeed, no physical discomfort bothered him; he was beyond the petty complaints of the ordinary people, immune to hardship in all its forms.

  He was aware of the breeze though, just as he was aware of everything around him in acute, exquisite detail – the feel of the earth beneath his body, the fine soil and the evening-damp leaves; the movement of the sparrows above him as they flew in and out of the trees’ branches; the sounds of the crickets and cicadas all around him; the footsteps of the armed men who patrolled the grounds, the swish of suit fabric as they walked, the sound of their conversation, the smell of their cigarettes, their body odor. He could tell which brand of cigarette each man smoked, could even guess what they’d been eating earlier in the day from the smell of the sweat which poured out of them on this hot summer evening.

  He was a man who processed everything, yet felt nothing. A sensation was just information, nothing more. And he took in all the information offered to him by his environment and analyzed each and every bit of it – some consciously, some subconsciously – until he was aware of every element around him at any given moment.

  He had lain here, in this garden, since the night before – silently watching, observing, analyzing. He hadn’t eaten and he hadn’t had anything to drink in that time, nor had he performed any ablutions; he hadn’t needed to. He had been trained not to. And what was more, he knew his performance wouldn’t suffer as a result; when he finally moved, he would do so without any negative effects from his self-imposed immobility.

  He hadn’t been born this way; he’d been made this way, formed and molded since birth into what he now was. That knowledge didn’t upset him in the same way it might others; for it, too, was just information.

  The man hidden within the trees sensed two of the guards coming close to the stand of trees, but he didn’t tense, didn’t get excited; his heart rate was barely over thirty beats per minute. He could tell from the tread of the feet, the inclination of their bodies, that they would turn off along the path to the right before they reached the trees; and moments later they did, their conversation floating away on the breeze. Not that they would have seen him anyway; covered by earth and leaves, his face blackened, he was as good as invisible, especially now night was moving in, the sun finally descending behind the high stone walls of the compound.

  It would be time to move soon, he knew, but not yet; not quite yet. He would let the night settle in fully, wrap the city in a blanket of complete darkness, before he left his position.

  And then he would finally do what he was trained to do; the act that defined his life beyond all else, that gave meaning to his very existence.

  He would kill.

  2

  Yamamoto Tsuji looked across the low, lacquered satinwood table at Watanabe Haruto and nodded his head.

  At the signal, Watanabe pushed across the folded napkin, made of thick white linen and bound with a white silk ribbon.

  Yamamoto reached forward to accept the small parcel, pulling at the ribbon to unwrap the napkin. He opened the linen square and stared at what he found inside.

  It was a finger, severed cleanly. Half of the small finger from a man’s left hand. It had been cleaned, although blood still stained the inside of the white cloth in which it had been wrapped.

  ‘Explain,’ Yamamoto ordered, and he could sense the other men around the table shift uncomfortably on their seat cushions, uncertain of their boss’s mood.

  ‘It is from Ryota,’ Watanabe explained, and Yamamoto grunted in acknowledgment.

  Hasegawa Ryota was a young man employed by Yamamoto’s organization in Kobe, and one who had been found wanting. Despite strict instructions for active members to never engage directly in the drugs trade, Hasegawa had been discovered selling methamphetamine to high school students. Disobeying direct orders always led to severe consequences, and so Hasegawa had taken matters into his own hands and cut off his own finger to send to Yamamoto in penance for his crime.

  Yubitsume, or ‘finger shortening’, was an act often used within the gangland circles of the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Stemming from a time when swords were commonly used, the act of contrition was based on the fact that the grip of a Japanese sword is made strongly with the lower three fingers of each hand. By severing the little finger to the middle knuckle, it makes holding a sword harder, and therefore the person becomes more reliant on others – in this case, the yakuza gang and it’s boss, or oyabun.

  Yamamoto Tsuji was the seventh oyabun of the Yamaguchi-gumi, a man also known as kumicho, the supreme godfather. Responsible for nearly fifty thousand members across Japan, men who made up the largest criminal organization in the country – indeed, in the whole world. Yamamoto was a man loved and loathed in equal measure. But he was feared by all, without question.

  He looked down at the offering before him, then pushed it away.

  ‘That is all?’ he asked calmly. He had been away in Tokyo on business for a few days, and Watanabe had been monitoring things from the Yamaguchi compound in Kobe. The man owed him an explanation.

  Watanabe was the wakagashira, the number two man in the organization. Reliable, highly organized and quite ruthless, Watanabe had been chosen by Yamamoto as his first lieutenant chiefly due to his lack of further ambition. The man was happy to serve as wakagashira, and that suited Yamamoto just fine; he had only risen to kumicho himself because – as wakagashira to the sixth godfather – he had killed his boss and usurped his position. As a result, Yamamoto was always very careful of the people he kept around him; in his line of work, you could never be too careful.

  This was why his own bodyguards were monitored by another team of guards – if anything happened to the kumicho, the families of the first group would all be killed by the second. This knowledge made honest men out of his protectors, and ensured that they would defend him to the last.

  As kumicho of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Yamamoto had to keep constantly ahead of everyone else, second guess his competitors, be on the lookout for those who would stab him in the back and steal his power. Part of his protection was his reputation, one based on violence and retribution.

  The finger from Hasegawa Ryota was a case in point.

  ‘He has performed yubitsume as an act of contrition,’ Watanabe explained. ‘If you require more, please tell me and I will see it done.’

  ‘Watanabe,’ Yamamoto said kindly, ‘did you see the act yourself?’

  ‘No,’ Watanabe admitted, ‘he brought me the finger this morning, before you returned from Tokyo. I believe he did it at home.’

  ‘So he may have used alcohol, drugs, some sort of pain relief, yes? The man did not even have the
respect to do it in front of his superiors, as required. And you accepted it?’

  Yamamoto kept his voice level; he knew he didn’t have to shout, nor even raise his voice. The message was clear.

  Watanabe immediately turned to Yamamoto and bowed low, head close to the straw-matted floor. ‘I beg your forgiveness, Kumicho,’ he said. ‘You are right, of course. What would you have me do?’

  ‘My friend,’ Yamamoto said soothingly, ‘it is okay. It is okay. Raise your head.’ Watanabe did so, body still inclined, and looked at his boss. Yamamoto was aware of the other men looking on, men who made up the highest leadership of the Yamaguchi-gumi, and knew everything he did was always watched, always observed, always monitored for weakness. There was respect, yes – in the yakuza, there was always respect. But there was always ambition too, and Yamamoto knew very well how to keep it in check.

  ‘What do you think we should do about Ryota?’ Yamamoto asked his wakagashira.

  ‘I will get him to come here immediately,’ Watanabe said quickly, ‘and apologize for his lack of respect by taking the rest of the finger in front of us.’

  ‘Yes,’ Yamamoto said, ‘that is good. But you can tell him that I require the rest of the finger, and one more besides. And if he doesn’t come, we will take the fingers from his wife and parents instead.’ Hasegawa Ryota didn’t have children, or else they would have been threatened too. Lucky for him.

  ‘Yes, Kumicho,’ Watanabe whispered. ‘I will see to it immediately.’

  ‘But we are not barbarians,’ Yamamoto added with a smile. ‘It is late. I can wait for his gift until the morning. Have him arrive here at nine o’clock tomorrow.’

  The wait would only make things harder for Hasegawa, he knew; but that was the price of disobeying orders.

  And as Yamamoto looked around the low table, he saw that everybody understood.

  Yamamoto was tired; it was time to go to bed.

  His exhaustion troubled him, having been so healthy – so fit, so virile – for most of his sixty-one years. But, he had to admit to himself, he wasn’t getting any younger, and his job was only getting harder.

  Not that the Yamaguchi-gumi was suffering; on the contrary, things were finally picking up after years of years of struggle. A faltering economy and a series of repressive laws had made things harder for his ninkyo dantai, his beloved ‘chivalrous organization’, in the years before he had taken over, but since becoming kumicho he had spearheaded a renaissance of the group which was admired across Japan.

  The organization now pulled in an estimated eighty billion dollars a year, far in excess of most major multinational corporations. But any future downturn would reflect a weakness on the part of Yamamoto, and could not be tolerated. In this business, weakness meant death; retirement was rarely an option.

  And so Yamamoto’s time was spent meeting other family heads, doing deals, working out ways of incorporating other gangs into the Yamaguchi. A lot of the time, violence was the method of choice when making these ‘deals’; but that still took effort, organization, planning, strategizing. Yamamoto was keen that any killing be kept among the families, all too aware that civilian deaths would hurt his cause rather than benefit it.

  It was the same with drugs, too; he allowed none of his members to deal drugs, or to use them. They were beneath the Yamaguchi, a dishonorable way of conducting business. The fact that the thousands of ‘associated’ members were involved in the trade didn’t bother Yamamoto unduly, however; they paid their dues, and the ‘honorable’ Yamaguchi could keep their hands clean.

  But the recent incident with China proved that things could change in moments, and Yamamoto had to be prepared to deal with such changes. Japan had almost been invaded by her much larger neighbor, controlled as she was by a madman installed by a military coup. The communist party was now back in power, but the situation had made Japan sit up and think; moves were afoot by the nationalists to take power and remilitarize the nation, and Yamamoto could feel the winds of change about to sweep through the country.

  What effects would such a change have on his business? It was a problem that plagued him day in and day out, causing a variety of stress-related gastrointestinal disorders that a range of special medications and a plain diet only just managed to keep in check.

  But as Yamamoto strolled through the pine-walled corridors of his palatial home, escorted – even inside his own house – by two armed bodyguards, he decided that life really wasn’t all that bad.

  He passed an alcove with a priceless original woodblock print by Hokusai, stopping momentarily to admire its beauty. It depicted an ancient samurai warrior, his back to a raging sea as he confronted the enemy with a look of implacable determination across his bloodied face. Yamamoto had the same image imprinted on his own body, just one part of the tattooed full-body suit that covered his skin, hidden beneath his red and gold silk kimono.

  He looked away, enjoying the sensation of the warm wood beneath his feet. He’d been in meetings in Tokyo for the past three days, keen to enhance the Yamaguchi’s presence there. Agreements had already been made with the Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai syndicates there, but Yamamoto was eager to press for more. There had also been the meetings with the Omoto-gumi, a clan that was already very much part of the Yamaguchi but one which was causing Yamamoto no end of difficulties. It was that old problem – unbridled ambition – yet again.

  But the Omoto-gumi might also provide a way for huge increases in revenue to be met without recourse to wide scale violence, and so Yamamoto had been especially interested in those particular meetings.

  The results from the trip had been promising, but the arduous and stressful back-to-back meetings had left Yamamoto tired. He had received a first-rate massage from his live-in masseur, a government-certified blind grandmaster who had served Yamamoto for years, and he was now ready to be escorted to his private quarters.

  The men reached the sliding shoji door which led to Yamamoto’s bedroom, and the bodyguards moved in, one man opening the door while the other entered and checked it before Yamamoto stepped across the threshold.

  He came back out and bowed to his boss, who stepped into his room, hearing the door slide shut behind him.

  There was someone in his room.

  Reclined naked on his futon, her smooth skin reflecting the candlelight which illuminated the wood-paneled room, Yamamoto was delighted to see that it was Tanaka Fumiko, one of his many mistresses. Since his wife passed away from cancer ten years ago, Yamamoto had never remarried; the pain of her loss had been too great to bear, and he knew that he was incapable of loving anyone else as powerfully as he had loved her.

  And so instead, he entertained himself with a never-ending string of young women. Twenty years old and impossibly beautiful, Fumiko was one of Yamamoto’s favorites, and he found her irresistible despite his fatigue.

  She rose from the futon and Yamamoto watched in mounting excitement as she glided across the straw-matted floor towards him, her naked body half in the shadow, half in the light, her black hair cascading down her shoulders, her arms reaching out for him; and then she was pulling him back to the futon, hands drawing the kimono from his body.

  And suddenly Yamamoto thought that perhaps he wasn’t so weary after all; and as he allowed Fumiko to pull him down to the futon, her hands and lips already going to work, he decided that he could get all the sleep he needed when he was dead.

  3

  Toshikatsu Endo, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Prime Minister of Japan, put down the telephone receiver and breathed out slowly.

  Resting back into his chair, he looked at the carriage clock on his desk – just after midnight. His hands rubbed across his face, feeling the stubble, then went higher to knead the temples.

  The hours were slowly killing him, he knew. But what choice did he have? Ever since Japan had almost been invaded by China just a few short weeks before, he had been on firefighting duty. The far right, never too far below the surface of Japanese polit
ics, was raising its ugly head again, buoyed by a sudden – perhaps understandable – increase in public support.

  Not that the LDP was especially liberal, despite its name. Indeed, Toshikatsu would have been the first to admit that it was one of the world’s foremost conservative political parties, having dominated the Japanese government ever since it first rose to power more than seventy years before.

  Toshikatsu shivered, and turned abruptly in his chair, scanning the room with nervous eyes. He was not a superstitious man by nature, and had once scoffed at the notion that the Sori Kotei, the Prime Minister’s residential quarters in Tokyo’s Nagata-cho district, was haunted. Shinzo Abe, one of his LDP predecessors, had even refused to live here, allegedly due to fears of its ghosts – a fact that Toshikatsu had thought laughable.

  But now, he had to admit, he was not so sure. The building had been built in 1929, and had originally been used as the Kantei, the prime minister’s official workplace; and as such, it had seen its fair share of murders and attempted coups. The red-brick Art Deco building – thought to have been inspired by the famous works of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright – still displayed signs of its troubled past. A coup attempt in 1932 had left the prime minister dead, and only four years later the house was surrounded by a radical faction of the Imperial Japanese Army. Four policemen were later killed by rebel soldiers there, and another prime minister’s brother was assassinated in a case of mistaken identity. Bullet holes and gunfire marks still adorned the entrance to the house, and rumors of ghosts had circulated for decades.

  Toshikatsu knew that the Japanese were a superstitious people by nature – thousands of years of ghost stories and tales of the forest demons had ensured that – but he had always prided himself on his own level-headedness.

  But working so late at night, recently he could have sworn that he’d seen things; things that couldn’t rationally be explained.