Warning: Not a NxM Chapter..
But I hope you still read it :)
Chapter 11
Shiki Masachika waited until midnight Paris time for the call from Mochu, who should have arrived in Tokyo yesterday afternoon. Shiki was still in the Parisian city, isolated in a suite of rooms in a seventeenth-century gabled house that had been converted into a very small, very private hotel along picturesque Saint-Martin, one of the finest canals in Paris.
He was surrounded by men he paid well to protect him. He had no other relationship with them. Shiki didn't delude himself. They weren't family, they weren't friends.
Even at his chalet in Switzerland, he was isolated, his fugitive status in Japan hanging over him. His international jet-setter neighbors distrusted him. Swiss natives wanted nothing to do with him. He knew about the dubious origins of the fortunes of some people who snubbed him. Tax evasion was least of their fathers and grandfathers had done.
But it was least of what he'd done, too.
Finally the call came. "Ruka Sakura is improving and should make full recovery," Mochu said. "His sister is on her way back to Kyoto."
"The second agent? Hyuuga?"
There was the slightest hesitation. "He could become a problem."
"But the FBI has their shooter, don't they?"
"Maybe. Maybe not."
Shiki sat forward in his leather chair next to an open window. The low ceiling in the old building made him claustrophobic. The call was secure – the owner of the hotel, who understood his clientele, had the best technical people in Europe regularly sweep for bugs, check with their sources for any attempt to tap the phone lines, legally or otherwise. But, still, Shiki was careful with what he said. "You'll do what needs to be done, won't you?"
"Of course." Mochu had arrived in Tokyo only yesterday but exhibited no sign of jet lag. "I'm in touch with your man here. We're working together on the problem."
"No ties back to me. None." Shiki didn't need to remind Mochu that he had access to his Family – his mother, his wife and his two children. "Is that clear?"
"Very," Mochu said calmly.
"Keep me apprised."
After he hung up, Shiki lit hi pipe and lifted his feet onto a leather ottoman. His dogs, two Rhodesian ridgebacks who always to traveled with him, lay atop a thick Persian carpet. They were his best, most trusted companions. Like him, they had learned discipline, patience.
But they were one of a kind, and they had each other. He had no one.
The wealth he could reveal openly wasn't particularly impressive – it was the wealth concealed that one day he would blend with his legal fortune, which would widen eyes and open doors. Then he could lead the life he'd always imagined for himself. He'd have the woman he wanted, the position, the power, the respect.
By then, Izumi Sakura would have died in his sleep, and Yuka would be free.
She'd need time to mourn, of course, but not that much. She had to know she'd outlive Sakura – she'd had to be preparing herself, even now, for going on without him.
But first, He knew he had to get her help him deal with the fact that he couldn't return to his own country without facing prosecution and the certainty of a prison sentence. Yuka would eventually see that it was unfair. That he'd paid for whatever mistakes he'd made and could offer the world more as a free man.
No, his legal status wasn't first. He tightened his grip on his pipe and controlled a wave of irritation.
Dealing with the situation in Tokyo was first.
He prayed that the Sakura step-siblings hadn't seen him in Paris – that the shooting in Central Park does not involved him and any of his people.
But if they had, if it did, Shiki was prepared to act. Too much was at stake for him not to.
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