>The North Korean and his European henchmen sat at the stained wooden table with three Hong Kong Chinese. The seven of them ere the only lunch guests in the deserted House of Eight Plums restaurant. The other customers had either been bought off or threatened off in order to reserve the sunny little dim sum eatery for their exclusive use. Kwon really did not care how the place had been emptied out. Lao the Chinese had handled that. What he really cared about was the fact that his people were getting nowhere with the information search regarding the identity of the night intruder he had observed at the Jaejun International warehouse.

>Kwon seethed in repressed rage over the humiliating irony that had left him looking like a total fool. That kind of thoroughness in tactics was hardly the trademark of the American CIA or Korean Intelligence, and certainly was nothing within the capabilities of Indian Intelligence. The Russian KGB could have no way of even suspecting the plot at this early stage, and would have employed heavier-handed methods anyway.

>Who was left? Could it have been the Japanese industrialists who were being set up? That was highly unlikely as well. How could they even suspect what was in store for their little capitalistic exploitation venture? Besides, the Japanese had willingly provided his cause with hundreds of millions of their yen in the past whenever one of their companies ended up the hostage in a Peoples Liberation extortion action. They had so much money that it was simpler for them to just buy off anyone who threatened their well oiled Japan Incorporated profit machine. Resistance was not a tactic in the handbook of the postwar Japanese.

>The hulking Korean wordlessly lifted the empty teapot into the air and stared impatiently across the deserted restaurant at the proprietor’s wife. The tiny woman, a veritable portrait of fear, leaped from the stool on which she had perched and flew into the kitchen.

>

> “Whoever it was will make another move sometime soon,” reasoned Kwon. “They think that we are still unaware of them, that we’re still in the dark.”

>

>The North Korean knew that he could take no chances at this point. He would grab anyone remotely suspicious and personally beat or drug the information he needed out of them. His nemesis had already demonstrated an annoying knack for unconventionally sly tricks. Kwon assumed the stolen North Korean car and the parking lot escape were intended as some sort of humor. There would be no second chance to laugh at Il Nam Kwon now.

>

>”We have the warehouse under close scrutiny at all times, just as you ordered,” said Chang Man Lao, Kwon’s chief contact for local services in Hong Kong. “Do we do anything to further disguise the shipment?”

>”We leave the crates as they are for now,” replied Kwon slowly, sifting through several possibilities in his mind as he went along, “and watch to see what their next move is. We do have an advantage, since we know that they are on to at least some of the plan, though we do not know how much, or even who ‘they’ are. They probably have no idea how much we know about them.”

>The proprietor burst from the kitchen with two fresh pots of tea and ran to the table to personally pour a cup for Kwon and then Lao. Three of the owner’s children, appearing to range in age from seven through early teens, followed their father to the table with wheeled carts full of steaming bamboo serving boxes loaded with more of the dim sum delicacies. The children covered the table with generous portions of food and then backed away to wait at the outer edges of the white-painted, wooden-walled room.

>Sergei Orosov reached for a pork ball with faltering chopsticks but accidentally ended up with a boiled chicken foot instead. The Bulgarian nervously regarded the pale appendage and then discreetly replaced it on its wicker server, hoping that Kwon would not see the action and take offense.

>Munching on a spring roll, Kwon seemed to come up with an answer. “We leave the crates just as they are, and give our little rats in the attic the impression that we have no idea that they are on to us. We even appear to leave the site unguarded-or, better yet, poorly guarded so that they do not begin to suspect a trap. And then we wait to see their next move and discover who they really are.”

>It would be of no concern if the intruder had been Korean. The crates were now long gone from South Korean soil.

>The American CIA would not be that much of a problem, either. Since the 1970s, the pitiful Americans had become gun-shy when it came to involvement in other nations’ problems, even when those problems threatened to move in right next door to them. The communist powers had carte blanche to shoot down the Westerners’ civilian aircraft, depose the Westerners’ small allies from elected office, even attempt murder of the Western world’s religious leaders without fear of any attempt at punishment or retribution. The CIA would at best brush the crates off as not involving them.

>The Japanese and Indians also were no problem. Even if those nations had hired someone to do the spying for them, it would be of no consequence. They had no way of physically stopping the cylinders from arriving at the energy plant in the dark of night.

>It would be a major problem, however, if the Russians had uncovered the plan.

>Huang Fei had conceived the plan whereby an unwitting Japanese industrial giant would be held accountable for a massive industrial pollution accident in the Ladakh range of the northern Kashmir stretch of the Himalaya Mountains. The region just happened to be the center of a three-way controversy, being legally claimed as territory by India, Pakistan, and the Peoples Republic of China. The region also just happened to be within three hundred miles of the unstable border edging Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

> When the deadly phosgene gas was released to work its skin burning, lung-searing effects, it would be reported in the international media that the Japanese corporation had been guilty of deceiving the locals with their claims that the energy production facility could in no way produce any sort of pollution danger. The local Indian government would claim to have been betrayed and appear to be criminally foolish. They would be subjected immediately to extreme pressure, if not an actual invasion itself, from the contesting Pakistani government. In order to maintain civil stability, prevent wide-scale outbreaks of bloody guerrilla warfare, and assume control to protect the endangered environment of the neighboring Peoples Republic of China, Huang Fei would be compelled to move into the region with Peoples Liberation Army forces from the lower Sinkiang Military Region.

>Huang would then appoint Lin Fuzhi to implement a provisional military government in order to restore order and supervise the cleanup efforts. The contested region adjacent to their Aksai Chin territory would suddenly once again belong under China’s control, Huang Fei would be regarded as a hero to be rewarded in the eyes of Beijing, and the Chinese would have taken complete possession of the Japanese-Indian prototype energy generation system, which was reportedly a completely safe and remarkably efficient facility. As an amusing by-product, there would be entire villages of the nuisance Tibetan refugees wiped out overnight.

>A wood-splintering crash from the windows across the restaurant sent Kwon tumbling to the floor. He executed two bounding sideways rolls and rose to a crouch, the silenced 9mm pistol in his right hand leveled to cover any potential target that appeared. The Bulgarians were moving away from the table in reaction, their eyes turning toward the windows. Cresc and the Hong Kong Chinese remained seated, staring across the table at the source of the disruption.

>

>From beneath the tall stool that had toppled over and taken him with it, the restaurateur’s youngest son stared back at the deadly party that bore down on him. With eyes wide in terror and mouth drawn back in a soundless cry, the young boy remained frozen in place and then began to tremble. The boy’s brother and sister stopped dead in midstoop over the fallen stool that pinned their younger sibling to the floor and glanced sideward at the rising Kwon. The children’s mother and father looked on in horror.

>

>Standing tall once again, the assassin heaved a disgusted sigh and slid the Makarov back into its soft chamois holster. Eyes still boring into the floored child, Kwon picked up his chair and moved back to the table again. Quietly, like shadows moving across the bare wooden floor, Orosov and Karushilev rejoined the others.

>The proprietor of the House of Eight Plums was now alternating between frantic bows of humiliated apology to Kwon’s party and furious slaps to the stubbled scalp of his youngest child. The skinny chef would jerk up and down from the waist with hissing kowtows and then spin on his feet, greasy white apron flapping about him, to batter the shrieking child on the floor, only to suddenly turn back and bow over and over again in shame and fear.

>Kwon ran out of patience. With a single barked order in Korean, he ended the distracting hysteria. Though the Chinese family did not, of course, understand the Korean language, the message was picked up with no uncertainty. The proprietor kicked and elbowed all three children out of the room and back into the kitchen. The three cowering youths made no attempt whatsoever to resist their father’s blows and curses as they all disappeared through the swinging red door.

>That little episode was just one more example of why Kwon grew more and more weary of leaving his personal enclave in North Korea. It amazed him that the chaotic capitalistic societies of the world had not all totally crumbled yet. These people were pathetic. No discipline, no uniformity of ideals, no common social goals, and no authorities to direct and supervise the progress of the community through the curbing of petty personal greeds. These factors were sure to be the downfall of the capitalists eventually.

>How fortunate Kwon had been as a child. Rescued by the State after being abandoned by those in whom he had wrongly placed his trust, he had been guided to manhood and groomed in preparation for a useful role as an agent of the forces of justice and equality among the workers of the world.

>It had been easy to forget the small-hearted, greedy parents who had cared more for the bags of gold they had levered away from their destitute countrymen than for the offspring they had brought into the world. He had thought that he missed them at first, but had been reeducated to see the folly of personal wants that went counter to the greater needs of the people. He had learned to hate the memory of the parents who had discarded him. Il Nam Kwon had grown to feel increasing indebtedness to the communist designers of North Korea’s destiny. How beautiful and systematic was the communal social ideal that had been nurtured and strengthened by their country’s leader, the great II Sung Kim. If Kwon had ever had a father, it had been the spirit of 11 Sung Kim.

> Kwon had been personally selected for training in his eventual specialty after beating to death a fellow fifteen-year-old comrade in the Red Youth Guard. The boy had been caught sneaking into their community pantry to steal food by night. They knew that someone had been pilfering, and lay in wait for him. The apprehended boy had resisted student arrest, claiming that the food was to be taken to his infirm mother and father, who were, he claimed, in fact a part of the greater body of people that they had pledged to serve.

>The young II Nam Kwon had been enraged by the boy’s blatant self-righteousness, his foolish maudlin doting on those wretched old ones who deceived the boy into feeling responsible for their selfish comforts, and his effrontery at refusing to acknowledge his obvious guilt. Kwon had crushed the bigger boy’s larynx with four elbow slam strikes.

>

>The attention was but momentary in duration, however. Doryoku, consistent effort, was the key to a successful planting, and within minutes all had forgotten the peculiar anomaly of the jet over their ageless harvesting pool as backs and arms went on with the work of reeling out and adjusting the seedling nets.

>Toru Kitagawa slowly pressed his face against the coolness of the small window in the side of the Diamond One and looked back at the tiny fleet of broad-hulled boats at float on the mirror surface of the water below. Those harvesters had been there long before his birth almost sixty years ago west of Iga, and would still be there long after his ashes had turned to earth under the base of his family’s burial shrine in Akame. Theirs was a life so different from the one that had been dealt to him, the stony Japanese acknowledged silently to himself. Those sea harvesters worked along in harmony with the seasons to earn their way. Old Toru the battler, more often than not, was expected to rearrange the seasons to earn his way.

> Kitagawa, a compact wiry man with close-cropped salt-and pepper hair and a face tanned and creased like a worn leather armchair, turned his brown eyes away from the window and glanced up at the digital clock. Ten minutes and he’d be back on the ground and then the nasty task of delivering the prints to his cousin, Hitoshi Matsutani. As always, here’s Toru with the bad news.

> Toru Kitagawa looked down at the half-eaten persimmon in his right hand. The edges of the gnawed area had begun to turn brown in the time that he had allowed his mind to drift. Kitagawa lifted the fruit to his mouth and devoured it in two bites. He worked his teeth through the sweet orange flesh of the kaki to separate the large smooth pits, which he dropped into his cupped right hand. His eyes searched the seat area distractedly for a moment and then he finally shoved his right hand into the side pocket of his windbreaker and deposited the persimmon pits there.

> Kitagawa returned his gaze to the autumn reds and golds of the trees far below the Plexiglas window beside his left shoulder. There was the forested peak ofKimbozanMountain, with its Reigendo cave that was the final home of Miyamoto Musashi. The legendary seventeenth-century sword saint had dictated his Gorin no Sho (Book of Five Rings) to his last student in that cave. What a wasted life, grumbled Toru Kitagawa to himself Shinmen Musashi of Miyamoto, lone wandering warrior in the age of enforced peace during the Tokugawa family’s dictatorial rule. How like my karma, eh, Shinmen?

>Emi Kitagawa completed her report and returned the slim gold Cross pen to the inner pocket of her wine-colored blazer. Her comments were written out in the dark-blue, self-locking message tablet that indicated its contents were gokuhi, so confidential that only Teruo Ozawa, the Matsutani Shoji corporate Director of Field Project Operations, was to break its seals.

> It had been Emi Kitagawa’s job to enter the computer codes into the digital radio transmitter that had been used for the remote reprogramming of the jaejun security system. All of their Eigo Keibi Company security system control centers around the world contained that additional chip to permit the off-site emergency rearrangement of any client’s operating system without, of course, the client having any means of determining the rearrangements as being due to anything more than user error.

>Emi could feel the Mitsubishi slow in its descent and she knew that they would be landing atKumamotoInternationalAirportwithin minutes. She looked across the narrow aisle at her uncle. He was sitting with his body turned to the left in his seat, face pressed against the tiny window. She noticed he had pulled his left leg up to where his ankle encountered the back of his right knee in front of the blue upholstery of the seat. He shifted his foot there for a second before returning it to the floor, all in a seemingly unconscious play as he stared out the window.

>A discreet smile played across Emi’s lips as she watched her uncle without his knowing it. She was touched at the significance of the small futile action. She knew that her uncle had grown uncomfortable in his seat on the flight back fromKorea, and had reflexively attempted to fold his legs up into the more familiar traditional Japanese seiza kneeling position without really being aware of it.

>Toru-ojisan, she reflected silently with affection, ever the true Iga-mono, the last of a dying breed of ninja phantom warriors left over from what the current generation referred to as the “old school.”

>With a short smoky chirp, the tires of the small jet hit the sun bleached concrete of theKumamotorunway. jumpsuited ground crews with acoustical sound mufflers over their ears and bright orange directional wands in each hand guided the jet through the maze of taxiways and ramps to rest in the private hangar of the Matsutani Trading Company. The usual black Nissan Century sedan was waiting next to the jet’s parking bay, ready to speed the two travelers into the city and on to their appointment with the chairman of the board of Matsutani Shoji Ltd.

>Saito, the driver, a small reedy man with a toothy smile and a set of mirror sunglasses that concealed half his face, placed Toru’s tight canvas duffel and Emi’s lavender American Tourister set in the cavernous trunk of the Century and came around the massive rubber rear bumper guard to close the elder Kitagawa’s door for him. In the Japanese fashion, Emi pulled her own door closed as Saito took his position behind the wheel on the right-hand side of the gleaming black sedan.

>The senior Kitagawa relaxed into the white linen slipcovers that stretched across the gray fabric of the rear seat and hugged the thick manila envelop to his chest inside the front of his jacket. Toru himself carried the photographs, developed only hours ago by his niece in the chemical baths of Taichi Nakamura’s darkroom in their safehouse on the edge of centralSeoul. Nakamura, Matsutani’s active agent-on-call for the southern portion of the Korean land mass had done his usual flawless work. Fluent in Korean and two dialects of Chinese, in addition to his native Japanese, the dependable operative had been personally trained by Kitagawa in the ninja arts that had been handed down from generation to generation in the Matsutani family for the past eight and a half centuries.

>By the time the chauffeured sedan pulled onto theKyushujukan Doro eastern bypass that would carry them intoKumamoto’s central business district, the morning commuter traffic had thinned. Toru scanned the scenery that flew by outside the heavily tinted passenger window. This new and wildly garish strip of restaurants, cabarets, and pay-by-the-hour “love hotels” still registered as unreal in Toru Kitagawa’s eyes. After the Matsutani family had vanished from their native Iga to reemerge quietly under a new public identity in Kumamoto during the hectic and confusing times following the war, old Takezo Matsutani had taken possession of huge tracts of this deserted Goryo district land that nobody seemed to want. Takezo’s grandson Hitoshi, the current head of the family and now chairman of the board of japan’s seventh largest trading and holding company, had later deftly sold the land in small parcels after the construction of the new Kumamoto International Airport. No one in the family could say how Takezo, in his early eighties at the time, had come to own the land. All that was known was the fact that twenty-five years later Takezo’s grandson had converted the purchase into one more minor fortune in the family’s already impressive treasury.

>We have become a faml’ly of merchants, mused Toru Kitagawa grumpily from his seat in the moving sedan. Such a far cry from the centuries of warrior living that characterized the Matsutani ninja ryu of japan’s south central Iga region. Founded by outcast samurai Masakado Tokuoka of the Matsutani district in the harsh mountain ridges of japan’s northern joshinetsu Plateau, their clandestine family tradition had developed as the only possible means of survival in a seemingly endless era of civil warfare. Because of the circumstances of their ancestor Masakado’s alliance with the unfortunate Taira family during the Minamoto family’s rise to eventual supremacy over all of Japan in the late I 100s, those who later came to take the name of Matsutani were forced to carve out livelihoods in the barely habitable regions of desolate Iga, southeast of the old Heian-kyo capital in Kyoto.

>

>Stripped of honor, title, and family, Masakado became a political refugee and had to wander in despair throughout the pine-covered peaks and lowland marshes of haunted Iga, far from those who would hunt him down for martial vengeance. There in Iga, the forbidden tract said to be inhabited by wandering religious fanatics and the descendants of those who had escaped the chaos following the collapse of the T’ang kingdom in far-off China, he had vowed to extend his life in search of the transcendent knowledge that would free him from enslavement to the insanities of warfare that so ran the lives of others.

>

>Tokuoka had eventually discovered, or had been discovered by, the hermit wizard Yugen Doshi. A sennin wilderness ascetic who dwelled in the mist-shrouded peaks of the upper Kil Peninsula, the doshi possessed the mystical knowledge of the occult arts of cc accomplishing that which is willed by means of invisible action.” Having nothing left to lose and nowhere else to flee, Masakado Tokuoka became apprentice to the powerful hermit sorceror of Kasumigakure Mountain.

>

>As the years passed, the warrior Masakado gradually gained the skills necessary to employ his magical mentor’s methods for exploring the mysterious realms that lay beyond the limits of the physical body. Masakado Tokuoka came to the realization that he had, in reality, long ago given up the restrictions of the conventional combatant’s outlook on the proper attainment of victories. The now-transformed battler had become an enlightened holy warrior, towering over the lesser realities with his feet planted firmly in the rocks below and his eyes gazing out at the cosmos above. The transcendent Masakado had then assumed the new name of Kaisen Matsutani, in commemoration of his roots in the Matsutani region far to the north, and in celebration of his spiritual transformation into a warrior of the diamond scepter will.

>The descendants of Kaisen Matsutani had gone on to establish the Matsutani ryu of ninjutsu, the warrior art of stealth and combat accomplishment, harmonious alliance with the forces of nature, and the ability to transform visualized will into physical reality. As ninja phantom warriors, they had embodied the cultural opposite of the bold samurai warriors’ politically assigned honor. Legally prohibited from engaging in socially acceptable modes of righteous warfare, the Matsutani ninja had relied on subtlety and illusion to accomplish their aims. The rugged and forbidding terrain of Iga had become the Matsutani family’s fortress, and the mountains southeast of holy Nara had eventually come to shelter the bones and ashes left behind by dozens of generations of Matsutani warriors of the twilight.

>

>The chauffeured black Nissan Century joined the congestion of traffic that circled around the imposing white and gray edifice of Kumamoto Castle. Looming high above the central business district of modern Kumamoto, the castle stood as a silent reminder of the past glory of the ruling Hosokawa family that had dominated this side of the Kyushu land mass until the middle of the nineteenth century. As with so many other historical structures in contemporary Japan, the castle that was once a seat of total power had been transformed into a cultural museum filled with schoolchildren peering at pale souvenirs from an age that was now just a distant and meaningless memory.

>The Kitagawas’ driver took them laterally across the city to pass by the pigeon-clustered Hanabata Park with its imposing statue of the sixteenth-century warrior Kiyomasa Kato, the tiger killer who had ruled the area for the Toyotomi family’s military dictatorship. The polished black sedan turned on to Toricho Dori and followed the crowded street all the way to the broad circular drive that arched gracefully up to the glass reception doors of the nine-story Matsutani Shoji headquarters building.

>Emi Kitagawa glanced to her right at her dozing uncle, who slumped with his shoulder against the door in the seat beside her. A gentle smile filled the lower portion of her attractive face, and the large gold-and-maroon-highlighted eyes narrowed with the upturn of her lips. The younger members of the Field Project Operations action squad had nicknamed her father’s brother tengu, “the winged demon,” in honor of the terror he inspired in the hearts of the Matsutani ryu operatives by merely showing up at a training exercise. To Emi, however, her Uncle Toru was someone special, taking the place of the father she had known for such a short time. Though gruff on the outside in other’s eyes, Toru had shown her a softer side in those difficult years of growing up after her parents’ deaths.

>

>The driver had barely gotten his hand on the rear door handle when Toru popped his eyes open and sat up straight. Clutching the large envelope to his chest, he was out of the car, up the steps, and through the door in an instant. Toru Kitagawa had disappeared into the lobby before the startled Saito had even gotten halfway up the stairs in the futile attempt to open the door for the returning Matsutani agent.

>Emi laughed quietly to herself as she stepped out onto the spotless concrete of the driveway and straightened the high ruffled collar at her throat. If there was one person in this world who dearly loved his job no matter how difficult and frustrating the duties could make his life, it was her uncle Toru.

>

>

>DR. ISAO MURATA LEANED over the top of the low bookcase that held the massive collection of his bound research notes, as well as the medical encyclopedias that he rarely consulted anymore. Things moved so fast in the world of medicine, that one season’s state of the art was next season’s antiquity. The fifty-year-old doctor raised his reading glasses above his bushy eyebrows and peered out the third-story office window to silently study the snarled traffic and jostling bodies in the parking lot below him.

>

>The admitting wing of the Matsutani Cancer Research Clinic, a privately funded branch of the Kumamoto University Medical School, was a bustle of fast action and shouted commands. Television news crews from around Japan and southeast Asia had arrived early to work all morning at setting up the electrical cables, lightreflector umbrellas, and camera dollies that would permit them to transmit their touching story across the globe. As the technical crews completed their wiring and camera-testing chores, interviewers and announcers from competing networks and stations took the last few moments to ready themselves for their on-air narratives.

>Chief of research Murata looked down on the dozen close cropped Tibetan heads that seemed to float on a sea of marooncowled shoulders that churned about in the parking lot below. At the fringe of the Tibetan cluster, a circle of shaved heads moved on the black-robed