Gale Force

110

A few days later, and nearly five thousand miles away from McKenna Rhodes and the Gale Force, Hiroki Okura was woken by a knock at his door.

His life had been unpleasant, these last weeks, since his return from Dutch Harbor. As he’d expected, he’d been terminated from his position with the Japanese Overseas Lines. He’d been visited by police detectives, investigators. He faced criminal charges for his role in the Pacific Lion’s near capsize, for Tomio Ishimaru’s presence on the Lion, and subsequent death, for his own, unauthorized disappearance from Dutch Harbor and his attack on the American salvage crew aboard the Lion.

The charges were coming. The Americans had shipped him back to Japan on the promise that justice be served. It was only a matter of time.

And now, a knock on the door, and Okura, in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt, opened the door and stood blinking in the harsh light of day and saw that it wasn’t the police who’d come for him, at last, or his former employer, but a third party, a familiar face.

The man who stood on the other side of Okura’s door wore almost exactly the same uniform as the man who’d visited the sailor in the jail in Dutch Harbor: a black suit, a white shirt, a skinny black tie. An air of menace, barely contained. Okura realized he’d been waiting for this.

He’d heard about a high seas shootout off the Canadian coast while the Pacific Lion was being towed to Seattle. Apparently, the crew of the salvage tug had foiled the attack. Okura took this to mean the briefcase was still at large. He took the thug’s presence at his door to mean that Katsuo Nakadate still required his help.

Okura stared out at the man. Scratched the patchy growth of hair on his unshaved face. “I don’t know how I can help you,” he said, sighing. “I’ve told your boss everything that I know. The briefcase was aboard the Lion. If you still haven’t retrieved it, I don’t—”

The thug raised one hand.

“My employer has regained his stolen property,” the thug told him. “He requires, now, to know how it was taken from him in the first place.”

Okura stared at the thug. “It was Ishimaru, obviously. I was told he murdered his colleagues.”

“You knew him, did you not? Ishimaru? You were schoolmates together?”

“I—” Okura swallowed. “We were, yes. And I—I may have helped him by smuggling aboard my vessel. But that’s all I did, and I’ve paid for that, a heavy price. I’m ruined. You—”

“You were observed meeting with Ishimaru,” the thug said. “In the days and weeks before the theft. Tell me, what did you talk about?”

Okura didn’t answer.

“You had heavy debts, yes? A robbery would have served you just as well as it would have Ishimaru.”

The thug didn’t wait for Okura to answer. He thrust something into the sailor’s hand. A photograph, the same as he’d seen in Dutch Harbor. His sister, his niece.

“My employer would like to meet you,” the thug continued. “He hopes very much that you’ll accept his invitation.”

Okura’s mouth went dry. He felt the same sick, hollow sensation in his stomach as when the Pacific Lion began its off-kilter slide into the sea, the crushing sensation in his chest that had been present ever since.

He’d known there would be consequences for his actions. He’d prepared himself mentally for jail. He had not, he realized, imagined that Katsuo Nakadate would uncover the depth of his involvement in Ishimaru’s robbery.

Okura looked down at the photograph. He studied his niece’s face in the picture. His sister.

“He will not hurt them,” the thug said. “You have his word. So long as you meet with him now.”

He stepped aside from the door, gestured back to a long, black Mercedes sedan that sat waiting at the curb. He smiled, disingenuous, as though neither man knew exactly where that car was headed.

There was nothing to do but surrender. Okura looked back into his house, one last time, the dirty, unkempt living space of a man who’d gambled and lost everything, a man who’d engineered his own ruin.

The thug gestured again. “Come,” he said.

Okura closed his eyes. Then he followed the man to the waiting sedan, and every step he took he felt the pressure in his chest diminish, in his lungs, as though he’d been trying to keep from drowning, and he was finally letting go.