Spiral

Stop it. Jake focused on the situation, sorting it through, click, clack. Jake knew it, the soldier in him knew it. You do what you have to do. And what he had to do was stop this woman.

He laid Cindy down among the leaves. He looked around. He was far enough away. He could make a run for it, might make it or at least get noticed. The other side of the woods led to a major road. He glanced back toward the van. Dylan was crying, Maggie trying to console him. Orchid stood, watching Jake. She had the gun pointed at Maggie’s head. She spoke, just loud enough to be heard: “Let’s go.”

30

“HE’S BEEN SITTING LIKE THAT FOR ALMOST TWO HOURS,” said Stan Robbins, the man in charge of Kitano’s surveillance. Robbins and Dunne were in a secure National Security Council conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the six-hundred-thousand-square-foot monstrosity across the street from the West Wing. On the screen before them was an overhead view of Hitoshi Kitano’s cell, a real-time feed from the surveillance cameras at the United States Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia, a maximum-security facility.

DUNNE HAD FIRST MET HITOSHI KITANO MORE THAN TWO decades ago, when Dunne was still a relatively unknown professor at Yale. Dunne’s Ph.D. treatise, then still speculation, on the downfall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of China had caught the old man’s attention. Kitano was by then one of the richest men in Japan. Their relationship had ended twenty-two months before, when, at eighty-three years old, Hitoshi Kitano had been imprisoned at Hazelton. The previous sixty years had been a circular journey for Kitano, starting and ending in an American jail. Dunne had insisted that the FBI closely monitor Kitano since his imprisonment. It had been a mess of paperwork, not to mention demanding the more or less full-time attention of Robbins. But the FBI had more than twelve thousand agents-they could spare one. Where Kitano and the Uzumaki were concerned, Dunne took no chances.

The camera shot of Kitano’s cell was from a light fixture in the ceiling. Kitano sat stock-still, staring into space. The time stamp said four-forty-one p.m. What the hell was wrong with him? Dunne wanted to crack open his skull and peer inside.

Dunne scanned the rest of the cell. On a small shelf on the wall were three books. “What’s he reading?”

“One’s a book on pigeon racing.”

“He’s a fanatic,” Dunne said. “Specializing in long-distance races. Two years ago, right before he was put in, one of his pigeons won the twelfth Sun City Million Dollar in South Africa, the most prestigious pigeon race in the world.”

“Good for him. Book number two: Institutions, Industrial Upgrading, and Economic Performance in Japan: The ‘Flying Geese’ Paradigm of Catch-up Growth by Terutomo Ozawa. I read it: the author advocates something called gankou keitai.”

“Kaname Akamatsu’s ‘flying geese’ model of Asian cooperation,” Dunne said. “The economies of Asia would develop in the mythical pattern of flying geese, with Japan at the lead and the other nations-China, Korea, Malaysia, and the like-following behind.”

“And book number three?”

“Yukio Mishima. Sun and Steel: art, action, and ritual death.”

Dunne nodded. “Kitano idolized Mishima.”

“Why would he idolize a Japanese novelist?”

“Because of how he died. Mishima killed himself in 1970. He was only forty-five and a huge cultural figure. He took the commandant of the Japan Self-Defense Forces hostage, then gave a speech from a balcony in Tokyo, demanding a return to rule by the emperor. He was trying to incite the Japanese military. Then he went inside and disemboweled himself.”

“Why?”

“He thought Japan had been emasculated at the end of the war. He was a fanatical believer in Bushido-the way of the warrior. Kitano bought the sword that was used by Mishima’s second to cut off his head. Kept it hung on his wall of his study.” Dunne watched the old man. Kitano had fought for a victorious Japan but over the years he had come to believe in wealth as much as in force. He helped rebuild the Japanese industrial base and pushed for an expanded role of the military in Japanese society. The way to a reemergent Japan was through both the yen and the sword. But Japan had slipped beneath the waves of history. China was the new dragon.