Drone Command

Troy threw the cue ball hard. It thudded into the skinny man’s chest right above the heart. He cried out. The pool cue in his gnarled hand clattered to the floor. He clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack and doubled over.

Troy was on him in an instant. Grabbed the man by his greasy hair and smashed his face with an iron-hard fist. The cartilage in the man’s nose cracked like a snapped pencil, gushing blood all over Troy’s shirt before he collapsed in a heap, howling and clutching his broken face.

Troy turned to his dad. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Troy marched over and grabbed at his father but, he got shoved back hard.

“Touch me again and I’ll put you down, you little son of a bitch.”

“You tell him!” the big woman shouted, laughing again.

“Get him out of here, Troy. I mean it!” The bartender held an old police billy club in his hands now, still hiding behind the bar as a shield.

“Dad, please.”

The man who had crawled under a table to escape his beating earlier suddenly leaped up behind Troy’s dad and wrapped his arms around him. Before Troy’s dad could break the armlock, JoJo lunged with a beer bottle from his blind side, swinging it like a hammer. It smashed against his dad’s skull with a sickening thud. The rock-hard bottle didn’t break.

His dad moaned and fell to his knees, reaching for his bleeding scalp.

JoJo turned and charged Troy, bottle held high in the air. He swung down just as he reached Troy, but Troy stepped into him, throwing a perfect punch into the lunging man’s face, doubling the strength of the blow. JoJo’s head snapped back like a Pez candy dispenser as his feet swept out from under him. He crashed to the floor, knocked out cold.

Troy turned just in time to see his dad collapse to the ground, his unblinking eyes staring straight back at him.

THIRTY

PORT OF TOKYO

TOKYO, JAPAN

13 MAY 2017

The freighter was nearly forty years old and looked every year of it on the outside with its peeling paint and rusted hull, but that was a convenient disguise. The old freighter’s cargo hold had been lavishly refurbished for an entirely new purpose, fit for princes and champions.

Tanaka sat next to Kobayashi-san, the most powerful yakuza boss in Tokyo, in the premium seats with the best view, high up, like a caesar at the coliseum. Half of Japan’s eighty thousand yakuza pledged allegiance to the Kobayashi-gumi, the most vicious and well-funded crime syndicate in the country.

Tanaka had known Kobayashi for years and owed much of his political career to the wise old yakuza. But Kobayashi had never invited Tanaka to one of these fabled events before, which, until tonight, Tanaka believed were only an urban legend.

Kobayashi had founded his gumi the old-fashioned way back in the ’70s, through extortion, gambling, and prostitution. But his organization entered the ranks of the superwealthy by securing bank loans from Japan’s most respectable institutions back in the bubbling heyday of the ’80s, when banking regulations were lax and property values were soaring.

But when the great Japanese miracle bubble burst and the economy crashed, Kobayashi’s unsecured bank loans were nowhere to be found, having been made by shell companies with no traceable records connected to the wily boss. When the dust finally settled on the real estate crash, Kobayashi bought up prime Tokyo real estate in the early 2000s for pennies on the dollar, becoming one of Japan’s largest legitimate commercial landlords. He was known in police circles by the code name the Realtor.

The yakuza organizations were not unlike the keiretsu conglomerates that dominated Japan’s domestic economy, the powerful interlocking corporate relationships that forged the crony-capitalist system known as Japan, Inc. The yakuza organizations became natural allies with several of the largest Japanese keiretsu conglomerates and, in turn, with their political connections. The yakuza achieved in Japan what the American mafia could only dream of by several orders of magnitude. The Chicago mob connection to the Kennedys paled in comparison.

In recent years, tough laws cracking down on yakuza activities and their associations with political and corporate elites had significantly curtailed the smaller gumis. But Kobayashi’s organization flourished behind its gilded corporate doors and secure political connections.