once upon a time, and lived to tell about it. If he was allowed to tell. If anybody would believe it.
“So?”
“I sent a coded file to your smartphone, when you get a chance to take a look,” Brognola informed him. “Same password as usual.”
“You want to run the basics past me?”
“Abridged version, Wolff had been negotiating with a company in Tokyo to build a Nero’s Far East, matching this one, the joint he’s got—well, had—in Vegas, and the Nero’s San Juan, down in Puerto Rico.”
“There’s no legit casino gambling in Japan,” Bolan stated.
“Say he was hopeful, betting on a sea change.”
“Or he had some other kind of action in the works.”
“Or that.”
“Which was it?”
“All I hear, so far, is that he’d stepped on certain toes in Tokyo. The Sumiyoshi-kai, for starters.”
“Big toes, then.”
“And highly sensitive.”
The Sumiyoshi-kai was Japan’s second-largest Yakuza family, claiming some twenty thousand oath-bound members and at least that many hangers-on. As number two, they tried harder, chasing the larger, stronger Yamaguchi-gumi, while the Inagawa-kai snapped at their heels.
“Still, taking out a guy Wolff’s size, with his high profile…”
“Sends a very public message,” Brognola filled in for him.
“Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a one-off?” Bolan asked.
“Because you know your way around. Six months ago, out in LA, Merv Mendelbaum dropped out of sight. He hasn’t surfaced yet. The family’s been sitting on it, but they’re lawyered up and getting out the carving knives.”
“That’s Mendelbaum of Goldstone Entertainment?”
Brognola nodded. “Owner of casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, one up in New London and another in Biloxi.”
“So, coincidence?”
“Goldstone was also putting feelers out to Tokyo, feeling its way around the National Diet, schmoozing with the prime minister and leaders of his party.”
“More toes bruised,” Bolan surmised.
“The Yakuza likes things the way they are, most forms of gambling banned but readily available through outlets they control. They stand to lose a fortune—not a small one—from another US occupation.”
“What about their operations stateside?”
“They’d love to have a stake in gambling where it’s legal, if they don’t lose anything at home. Right now, they mostly smuggle methamphetamine and heroin into the States, and take guns home.”
Bolan knew that Japan’s gun control laws ranked among the world’s strictest. Police estimated there were 710,000 firearms in civilian hands, scattered among 128 million citizens—or one gun for every 180 Japanese. America, by contrast, had at least 270 million guns floating around the civilian population, one for every 1.2 men, women and children. The upshot was 32,000 gun deaths per year in the States, versus eleven annually in Japan.
Coincidence?
Unlikely.
Bolan brought his mind back to the topic on the table. “So, the Sumiyoshi-kai could benefit from taking out a few top men,” he said. “Keep US gaming corporations out of Tokyo and cause a power vacuum over here.”
“It cuts both ways,” Brognola said. “Just like a sword.”
“Suspects?”
“They’re listed in the file I sent you, but we don’t have any solid evidence. The Sumiyoshi-kai had kyodai—‘big brothers,’ similar to capos in the Mafia—both here and in Las Vegas. If the family killed Wolff and Mendelbaum, they’ll be the place to start.”
Brognola didn’t have to say the rest, but Bolan looked downrange. “What about carrying the fight back home?” he asked.
“It’s not my place to second-guess a soldier on the ground,” the big Fed said. “But obviously, if we have a chance to make the problem go away, at least for now…”
He let the sentence trail off, staring up at the casino. There was no need to explain what both of them already knew from long experience.
The predators would never be eradicated. Some defect within humankind itself produced a new crop every time the old one was cut down. Evil could be beaten down and held at bay, but it could never be extracted from the human genome. There was no cure, no inoculation, for the plague of avarice and cruelty that lurked behind the thin facade of “civilized” society.
No cure, perhaps, but he could fight the symptoms when and where they surfaced.
Starting now.
The file was waiting for him, just as Brognola had said.
Roughly two hundred years older than Sicily’s Mafia, Japan’s homegrown version of organized crime had arisen from a merger of two criminal classes: the bakuto, itinerant gamblers, and the tekiya, peddlers who furnished goods and services proscribed by feudal law. After resisting for a time, the Edo Dynasty had bowed to the realities of daily life, legitimized the syndicates and granted their leaders—known as oyabun, “fathers, or godfathers”—the right to carry short wakizashi swords, while the larger katanas were reserved for full-fledged samurai. The overall syndicate’s name, ya-ku-za, translated as “8-9-3,” a losing hand in Oicho-Kabu, the Japanese version of blackjack.
This day, the Yakuza consisted of some seventy-odd rival clans, fighting for turf in the shadow of Japan’s top three families. Only the Sumiyoshi-kai concerned Bolan as he began to scan Brognola’s file.
The outfit’s oyabun was Kazuo Takumi, based in Tokyo, which kept him near the seat of government and all the major economic action. Sixty-one years old, he’d earned his reputation the old-fashioned way, by wading in the blood of rivals, and had risen to the status of a recognized philanthropist whose generosity to charity was known throughout Japan. He held shares in a score of thriving companies and sat on several of their boards, ensuring that the firms he graced were never short of cheap materials or healthy profit margins.
The oyabun’s only son and heir apparent was Toi Takumi, something of a cipher in the file Brognola had provided. He had earned a playboy’s reputation in his early twenties, but now, approaching thirty, he had dropped out of the social scene and rarely showed his face in public.
Growing into his position as the next boss of the Sumiyoshi-kai, perhaps.
Or was it something else?
Atlantic City’s “big brother” was Noboru Machii, thirty-one, an ex-con who’d done time for smuggling methamphetamine before a key witness recanted and committed
