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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
A single leap and Miyoko Takagi was over the electrified fence. She landed, silent as a flake of snow falling on water, behind a patrolling security guard who had just turned his back.
Her gloved hand covered his mouth as her kusari-gama found his heart. He twitched in her lethal embrace for a moment, then his body went limp. She pulled her blade from his chest, wiped it clean on his leg, and lowered his corpse into the shadows.
Ahead of her, two more of her fellow ninjas neutralized two more perimeter guards -- one with a poison blow dart, the other with a throwing star. Both guards fell without a sound in the darkness, out of view of the security cameras that ringed the exterior of Tanaka Biotechnology's world headquarters.
Miyoko plucked three shaken from inside her black uniform and hurled them all with a single flick of her wrist. The throwing stars sailed apart on precise but subtle angles. Each one severed the data line of a different security camera. The path to the rear loading dock was now clear for the second team to move up. The loss of video signal would be certain to provoke an alert inside the building's security center, but if all was proceeding as planned, two of her ninjas were already there.
She traversed the underside of the loading dock's overhang in an inverted climb and stopped above the door to the building's main shipping office. Through the slats of the door's top ventilation grating, she saw inside the main freight-handling area. Its workers and managers lay unconscious on the floor. Good, she thought. Sumotomo released the gas already. That should take care of all but the secured floors upstairs.
Two more security guards turned the far corner and walked toward her. Pressed against the ceiling overhang, Miyoko remained absolutely still. Another trio of shaken was ready in the fingers of her right hand. This part of the dock was well lit and monitored by the cameras; she would have to wait until the security cameras deactivated before neutralizing the two men below. Killing them now could compromise the entire mission.
All this effort for the benefit of fools. Miyoko resented the daimyo for burdening her with two gaijin on this mission. My ninjas could have acquired the daimyo's prize without help from these amateurs. Maybe not tonight, but eventually.
Unfortunately, for some reason, the daimyo was not willing to be patient this time. She blamed Alexei Pritikin, the Russian to whom the daimyo had given her as a consort. Though the daimyo had told her that her assignment was to defend Pritikin, she'd understood that her presence had been requested by the Russian for a purpose entirely different from protection.
The fact that Pritikin was undeniably in love with her only slightly ameliorated her contempt at having been offered up like a geisha. Quiet fury coiled her muscles as the guards walked closer. If they glanced up even for a moment, she would be revealed. Like so many full-time security personnel, however, they had grown bored and performed their tasks by rote.
Above the main door to the freight area, the security cameras' red power indicators dimmed. Her ninjas inside the skyscraper had prevailed; its security system was offline.
Miyoko unleashed two of her shaken at the guards, struck each in the carotid artery. They fell dead before they had time to know that they'd been killed. Then she flung her third throwing star toward the main gate along the rear alley, cutting its lock in a flash of sparks.
Now we get to see what the gaijin can do, she mused darkly.
Surge and Slake -- a.k.a. Gregor and Oskar Golovanov -- waited in the shadows near the T-shaped intersection of two narrow alleys.
"Chort vozmi, juice me up," Gregor said. "I can fry the grid and frag the fence, and we can walk in."
"No," said his twin brother, a fellow mutant. "The daimyo said to let the ninjas clear the way."
"Whatever," Gregor said, shaking his head in disgust. He could unleash enough different types of energy to burn, disrupt, disintegrate, stun, or kill just about anything on earth -- but only if his brother first drained the power from something else and transferred it to him. A "symbiotic link" -- that's what it had been called by the Soviet researchers who had poked and prodded and measured and tested the brothers since they were old enough to remember . . . and until they became old enough -- and powerful enough -- to escape.
He looked at Oskar and brooded. Same blond hair, same blue eyes, same cleft chin -- and not a damned thing in common. "This is ridiculous, Oskar," he said in an irritated whisper. "We could be inside by now. Charge me!"
"From what, Gregor? The electric fence?" Oskar rolled his eyes. "There's not enough amperage to get us inside, never mind take out the security grid. . . . Just wait for the signal."
Several dozen meters beyond the electric fence, past a perimeter patrolled by armed guards and ferocious dogs, the imposing glass-and-steel faÇade of the Tanaka Biotechnology Corporation's world headquarters loomed high and mighty into the night, a new fixture on the skyline of Osaka, Japan. Somewhere inside this tightly defended fortress of science was the prize that the brothers had been sent to acquire and deliver.
They were near the building's rear loading docks, which were secured by a fifteen-foot-tall electric fence topped with barbed wire. Every fourth fence post was topped by a slowly swiveling video camera, of a kind that Gregor knew had been made to detect everything from infrared radiation to tachyon interactions, a feature that revealed most "invisible" interlopers. Whoever had designed this building's security systems had done so with mutants in mind. Gregor wasn't sure he wanted to know what was waiting for them inside the building, but he knew that if it relied on energy to work, then it would be no match for his brother's power-siphoning touch.
He looked at his watch. "We've been standing here for over an hour," he grumbled.
Oskar arched one eyebrow, an expression of his contempt for Gregor's impatience. "What, are you in a hurry? Got a hot date?"
"Maybe I do," Gregor said, trying not to sound defensive.
"No, you don't," Oskar said, just a touch too confident in his tone for Gregor's liking.
"And how would you know?"
"We won't be here long enough," Oskar said, his eyes fixed on the building across the alley. "And Miyoko would kill you."
"Mm-hm," Gregor mumbled dismissively. "I can handle her."
"Sure you can," Oskar said.
"Give me enough juice, I can fry anybody."
"You have to see them to fry them, Gregor. She's a fucking ninja. You'd be dead before you knew what hit you."
Gregor looked at his watch again and sighed. "What'd she say the signal would be?"
"That we'll know it when we see it."
No sooner had he said it when, on the other side of the electric fence, two security guards stopped in the middle of their rounds and collapsed silently to the ground. At the same moment, the cameras on the fence posts halted in mid-swivel, and their red indicator lights dimmed and went dark. An evanescent flurry of sparks spat from the gate's lock as it was bifurcated by a shaken moving faster than the human eye could see. With a long, whining creak of dry hinges, the rear gates of the Tanaka Biotechnology Corporation's headquarters lolled open.
"I guess that's our signal," Gregor said.
Oskar grimaced with disdain. "You think?"
The brothers moved quickly across the dark alley, toward the loading docks. They passed two unconscious dogs and approached a door that was sandwiched between two of the platform's tall metal-slat gates. Before they were halfway there, the door opened, spilling dim light onto the dock outside.
Gregor still found it odd to observe the effects of the ninjas' actions without ever seeing the hooded assassins themselves. Oskar moved ahead of him and preceded him up a short but steep flight of stairs and then through the door.
Half a dozen TBC workers in gray coveralls lay sprawled on the concrete floor. Inside a nearby office, their balding, slightly overweight night-shift supervisor was splayed across his own desk, facedown on a pile of papers. There was no blood in sight anywhere, just the faintly medicinal odor of expired chloroform gas. True to form, the ninjas had chosen the path of least resistance and least effort; the workers had been unarmed and had posed no threat, so it had been deemed sufficient simply to knock them unconscious. Gregor knew that the guards waiting upstairs would not receive such mercy. At least, not from me, he promised himself, unable to suppress a sadistic smirk of anticipation.
On the left was a door that led to a fireproofed stairwell; on the right was an open freight elevator.
The brothers faced each other and shook hands.
"Good luck," Gregor said to his twin.
"Good hunting," Oskar replied. He jogged away from Gregor and opened the door to the stairwell, then bounded down the steps toward the subbasement.
Gregor walked briskly into the freight elevator and shut its safety cage, which closed from the top and bottom, like a set of metal-mesh jaws. Seemingly of its own volition, the elevator jerked and lurched into motion, then rattled upward on steel cables that vibrated with an almost musical resonance.
If their accomplices had done their jobs properly, Gregor knew, Oskar would have an unimpeded path to the building's primary power center. From there, he could drain the building's dedicated generators and tap into an almost limitless supply of raw power from its connection to the municipal electrical grid. With all the unbridled electromagnetic forces that Oskar's efforts would unleash in the subbasement, there had been no point in equipping him with any kind of radio-frequency transmitter; the signal would be garbled by all the EM interference, and it likely would be unable to penetr...
