Korean Intercept by Mertz Stephen

Author:Mertz, Stephen [Mertz, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense & Thrillers
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2012-12-23T03:55:10+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

He drove west out of Tokyo, taking the elevated Tomei Expressway toward the mountains beyond the city. Traffic was heavy, as it was twenty-four hours a day. Also, as usual, motorists in Tokyo maintained a constant bumper-to-bumper speed that seemed more like orchestrated activity than the vehicular madness of similar population-dense places like Rome or Mexico City.

Night cloaked the world. Before long, the ocean of neon passing by beneath the freeway gave way to mile after mile of dismal gray, drab factories and danchi, whole square miles of tightly-packed, bleak apartment buildings. Eventually, this too dwindled to longer, uninterrupted stretches of darkness as the freeway reached beyond the suburbs.

Following the directions written by Mrs. Kurita's chauffeur, he took the final exit just before the Masahino Mountains, and found himself quite suddenly traveling through remote countryside, on a two-lane rural blacktop highway that ran between foothills to the west, steep slopes covered with thick forests of cedar and pine in the moonlight, and, to the east, tiers of water-filled rice fields. The road took him past an occasional thatched-roof farmhouse, and then the agricultural homesteads gave way to a more exclusive environment of upscale, in many cases walled, residential estates. Privacy, a cherished commodity in Japan, is most often the domain of the very rich.

He found the Kurita address easily enough. He assessed what he could of the security here as he up-shifted the Toyota along a gravel driveway lined with chestnut trees. Conifer trees and bamboo grew in abundance across the expansive grounds. To his left was a grove of katsura and birch, with flagstones leading to a six-foot-high bronze statue of Buddha, beyond which was a massive garden.

The main house was a traditional home beneath a gray-green slate roof that curved upward at each corner, high-lighted by the moonlight and by some artfully-placed lighting.

Galt parked in front of the main entrance. His was the only vehicle in sight. He left the car and approached the house, habitually wary of new surroundings, his peripheral senses probing the darkness around him beyond the light, processing no real danger lurking out there at this time. To Galt, a peaceful neighborhood was as dangerous as a jungle trail in Chiapas or a walk to the corner store for a pack of gum in Beirut. Things might seem tranquil enough on the surface, and perhaps they were, but paranoia was the only sane course. Your best bet was to expect trouble from any direction at any time. There were places that were like that, and Galt recognized that his whole life had become "like that" now that he had dropped out of sight as completely as only a man with his background, experience and connections possibly could.

He expected that the gate guard had called ahead, that a servant or maid would greet him and show him into the house, to Mrs. Kurita and Meiko. And so he was mildly surprised when, as he stepped onto the front step and raised an index finger to press the doorbell, the front door was opened inward not by a maid or a servant.

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