Collector of Secrets (42 page)

“What do you regret, Tomoko?”

“I . . . uh . . .” She felt unsure whether to answer. He’d never actually spoken her name before. She turned to look at his hawkish face, at the bandage she’d so carefully applied. The words rushed out before she could stop. “My girlfriends all said that dating a
Gaijin
was a mistake. They said I would only get hurt. And I listened to them and never told my parents—my father is so very traditional. We were always sneaking around so they wouldn’t find out, and I know that bothered Max. Then, a month ago, he confessed that he loved me, but I didn’t . . . say it back. We never discussed it, but I know he was hurt.” A feeling of embarrassment swept over her. “I’m sorry. You can’t possibly be interested in all this.”

“Don’t apologize—I asked.” Hiro glanced at her. His thin lips edged upward and his yellow teeth showed through, but it was a true smile nonetheless. “Do you love him?”

“Yes.” Tomoko felt warm and slightly relaxed, and an unconscious blush painted her cheeks. “I must sound like an immature school girl. We’re in a terrible position, and I’m whining about my relationship—or former relationship. I’m not sure.” Her eyes felt paralyzed, staring at a single spot on the floor. She recalled leaving the note on the pillow. It felt like a lifetime ago.

The truck rumbled on for a few miles before Hiro spoke again. “I did try to leave once.”

“When?”

“I was twenty-five, and my father had just died. It seemed a good time to break free, but I was captured and brought back. Oto was as cruel then as he is now. My whole family suffered. I lost my first finger and also my status. It took more then a decade to regain some trust. I could never put my mother and sisters through that again.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t escape.” Tomoko let out a sigh. Her head was growing heavier, and the cargo bed appeared to flutter. Glancing over at Hiro, she noticed he was fighting to stay awake.

The truck came to a halt, and they heard the driver’s door slam shut.

His words were slurring. “You should live the way you want to, not how tradition forces you.”

She was moved by the unexpected moment, but it was short-lived. The truck’s back door swung open. Morning light poured into the box.

The familiar voices of Oto’s two bodyguards echoed simultaneously in the chamber. “Get out.”

Tomoko crawled out from beneath the blanket toward the open door. She wavered as her feet touched the ground. They were at an airstrip of some kind. A service crew was attending to a nearby plane. A Mercedes was parked next to it, and she could see the backs of two men climbing on board. The surrounding city was pressing in from all sides, but the buildings were still a long way off.

Oto’s bodyguard tugged her away from the truck. His face was swimming in her vision, but she could see a sweeping bruise on his throat. He was evidently the one she’d hit.

The second bodyguard opened his jacket, revealing a gun tucked into his belt. “Just move toward the plane.”

Hiro stumbled so close to the guard that he seemed to be laying his head on the bigger man’s chest. “You tell me where we’re going, and I’ll walk quietly onto that plane.”

The guard shrugged indifferent agreement. “The cops let Father know about her boyfriend’s recent trip to Okinawa. So we’re all heading off on a tropical vacation.”

Tomoko’s legs felt as if they were turning to jelly. “Why is he . . . in Okinawa?” She felt the bodyguard’s arms slid beneath her as she spoke. “That bottle. There was something in the water.” The vision in front of her warped and twisted. She saw Hiro stumble and drop to his knees. Her head lolled backward.
Why is this happening?

The last thing she recalled was seeing a wide blue sky.

HIS BODY felt weightless as he drifted up the cave-like stairwell into the familiar corridor. The only open route led to the office, directly in front of him. He entered and crossed to the far wall. Framed photographs of all shapes and sizes hung between the waist-high cabinets and the ceiling. The slipstream of time reversed as he drifted toward the back of the office. Decades of faces floated past. Near the room’s rear wall, his eyes focused on a modest copper-framed picture. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. A voice directly behind him whispered in his ear, “Ask President Kennedy.”

Max bolted upright. He was shaking, and his bruised ribs cried out.

The curtains on the bedroom’s ocean-side windows were flung wide open. Sunlight poured into the room. He collapsed back onto the mattress, Mr. M’s parting words still ringing in his head.

It was just a dream. Just a stupid dream.

A
s Max shuffled into the living room, he was greeted with a picture of Jeff sprawled out on the sofa. The two diaries lay on the coffee table, nested in a field of empty beer bottles. Lunging forward, he grabbed the diaries from their resting place. Bottles fell like bowling pins, and he used his legs and elbows to stop them from rolling off the table.

Jeff stirred. “Morning, bro—what’s going on?”

Max checked over the yellow and blue coverings. “Nothing— I just didn’t want the diaries to get beer-stained.”

Jeff closed his eyes. “Hey, I’ll make some coffee in a minute.” He was asleep again, mouth half open, as soon as he finished the sentence.

The clock on the wall displayed 9:15. Max dropped into a nearby armchair. He flipped to the center of the blue diary. Page after page of entries, dated from 1948 through 1990, documented the transfer and disbursement of billions of dollars among dozens of private bank accounts. The currency values grew increasingly large as the entries described in detail a string of backroom arms deals, political buyouts, vote tampering, covert operations, death squads, and assassinations. Most names were unfamiliar, the participants probably long dead along with Prince Takeda.

This is unbelievable.
The wealth of information in his hands was staggering.
If the media ever get ahold of this . . . bloody hell! No wonder people have died for this book.

O
ne familiar name did catch his eye: President Richard M. Nixon, the thirty-seventh president of the United States. In entries dated during the 1960s, the diary told of Nixon’s deal to return a massive pool of money to Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party in exchange for supporting his bid for the U.S. presidency. The M-Fund was valued at over thirty-five billion when its control was transferred. Nixon narrowly won a 1968 election victory.

It would be worth at least ten times that much now!

Max leafed through the pages. It was riveting material, but would take months to read and comprehend. The clock now read 10:30 a.m. It was time he clearly didn’t have.

Pulling out the loose “bookmark” page, he opened it.

A series of blackened squares were marked in the previously empty grids. Max kicked the sofa. “Hey, did you do this?”

Jeff started. “What?”

Max jumped to his feet. He waved the paper and his voice grew demanding. “Did you do this?”

“Yeah, bro,
Hanjie
puzzles are my thing.” Jeff sat up and vigorously rubbed his nose between the knuckles of both hands. “You want some coffee?”

“What’s a
Hanjie
puzzle?”

“You remember paint-by-numbers?” Jeff yawned as he took the paper.

“Kind of.”

“Well, it’s similar, except what you do is fill in the squares based on the numbers beside the horizontal and vertical axis. You see, this row has the number one beside it. That means only one square in this row is black. This one here has a combination of one, four, and one. There are three sections in the row to be filled in— the first is a single square, the second has four squares, and the third section has one square. The brutal part is that you have to simultaneously solve both the horizontal and vertical numbers.” He hesitated before continuing. “This puzzle is truly weird.”

“Meaning?”

“I need to make coffee.” Jeff shuffled around the sofa and into the open kitchen. “Once you’re finished, it’s supposed to form a picture. Like an apple with a worm or a dragon breathing fire.”

Max was pacing. “You still haven’t answered why this one is weird.”

“Look at it, bro. It’s three things that don’t make any sense together. A sailboat, a Buddhist tomb, and . . . I don’t know, maybe a Christian cross? Usually there’s a common theme. This doesn’t make a cohesive picture.” He shrugged.

Max pointed at the paper. “Did you see the markings on the back of the page?”

“No.” Jeff flipped the coffeemaker’s switch, sending it gurgling to life.

“They look like coordinates. Maybe . . . maybe it could be a guide to one of the Golden Lily burial sites in the Philippines. If I can figure it out, possibly I can use this to barter with Oto Kodama.”

“You mean one of the 176 burial sites from the first diary?” The sound of Jeff’s voice was muffled by the open refrigerator door.

“You can read Japanese?”

Jeff lifted his head and stared smugly. “I hope so, since it was my major in university.”

Max continued to pace. “Right, I forgot. But no—wait, you’re wrong.”

“Bro, I think I should know my own major.”

“Not that. There were only 175 burial places, not 176. Ben told me himself.”

“Well, then, his mind is getting old, cause I counted them myself last night—and there are definitely 176.”

Jeff dropped a cereal box on the counter. “Come on, eat something. Then we’ll check out those coordinates on the Internet.” He grabbed a carton of milk and closed the refrigerator with his foot. “You can’t save the world on an empty stomach.”

M
ax was cinching up his belt when he walked into the undersized home office. “Your clothes fit me pretty well.”

“And they give you some much needed style.”

“Yeah, yeah!” He chuckled. “No bias in that opinion.”

Jeff shifted a surfboard to an adjacent wall. “Grab a chair from the kitchen.”

The vivid blue Google Earth image defied gravity, hanging suspended in the monitor’s center. It spun on its north-south axis. The U.S. rotated away to the right as the image flew along the equator. Jeff stopped it just over Indonesia and zoomed in before turning on the grid function. A matrix of lines leaped onto the globe. “Let’s start with longitude first.”

“All right.” Max sat down and rotated the
Hanjie
paper in his hands. “E 127° 40′ 30″ and E 127° 40′ 36″.”

Jeff entered the digits, then stared perplexed at the screen. “Well, it’s close to the Philippines, but in the middle of the ocean, off the east coast. Maybe there are small islands. You sure that’s right?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Give me the latitude.”

“N 26° 11′ 13″ and N 26° 11′ 9″.”

The image followed the increasing numbers northward. It zoomed in closer, revealing the terrain of hills, rivers and cities. Jeff spoke in a flat voice, as though he didn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. “Bro, those coordinates are for
here
 . . . for Okinawa.”

Max nodded, amazed. “I guess Ben did have a reason for sending me here.” He leaned in closer. “But where exactly?”

“South of here—fairly close.”