Death and Dark Money by Seeley James

Author:Seeley James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thriller
ISBN: 9780997230604
Publisher: Machined Media
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

People scurried and bumped and roller bags squeaked and public announcements echoed through the cavernous terminal at Narita International Airport, Tokyo. In the middle of all that humanity, I was lonely. Lost-in-the-desert lonely. All around me people talked and called and shouted and whispered—but not to me.

I was not on my meds and there were no voices in my head.

No strange god pranced around in a toga.

The silence was chilling.

Carlos proved to be a good traveling companion; he hadn’t said a word. He trotted alongside me, his short legs barely able to keep my pace.

A man bounced off me and berated me in Japanese. Carlos stood to the side, watching my passive reaction. The only word I could remember was arigato, thank you. I picked up the handle of his bag and put it in his hand while he continued to shout profanities at me.

I felt disconnected, as if life was an uninteresting movie.

Godless was a terrible state.

But then, so was the god state.

Which is worse: having a trigger-happy divinity whose moral compass hasn’t been updated since gladiators ruled weekend entertainment, or no one at all?

Why did I miss his presence when he wasn’t around? Mercury was nothing more than the god I’d grown used to. He was my comfort god. So comfortable, in fact, that if Jesus walked up to me, I’d tell him I was waiting for a different messiah. One who was easier to live with. Looser rules. Less demanding. None of this give-all-your-money-to-the-poor stuff.

Holy crap. I was starting to think like Mercury.

I walked around without a clue about where to go. Tokyo has just shy of 40 million people flung over 16,000 square miles, close to four times the density of New York City, and somewhere in that tangled mass of humanity one scared lobbyist was hiding from an assassin and hoping I would take a bullet for him.

I love this job.

So far, Zola-the-scared-lobbyist hadn’t returned my calls.

I stopped below a sign and tried to decipher the instructions. There were two trains, an unknown number of buses, fleets of taxis, hundreds of limos, and a few helicopters to boot. With the richest economy of any metro area in the world, Tokyo had every means of transportation known to man. They probably had a submarine if I looked hard enough. The only thing I needed was a destination.

I turned to Carlos with a rhetorical question. “If you were hiding in Tokyo, where would you go?”

“Minami-Senju,” he said without hesitation.

After I did my double take, he shrugged. “The yakuza were good customers, ése. I’ve been here a few times. Mostly by boat, though—at night.”

Since I didn’t have any better idea where to start, we figured out the right train and crowded on. I held an overhead bar facing front and he held a post to my right and the doors pinged shut and we lurched into the unknown. Bodies of strangers pressed against every inch of me.

With an hour to kill, I had to ask Carlos the question my peers at Sabel Security were dying to have answered.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.