By the Sword

    Without warning the watcher leaped to his feet and turned. Jack ducked back and held his breath. Had he made a sound and given himself away? He snaked his hand back and pulled his Glock. A rooftop fight was the last thing he wanted, but if this guy wanted to rumble…

    But no, he swept on by toward the rooftop entry, yammering on his cell phone as he passed. Light from within bathed him as he opened the door, and Jack got a good look at his face: Japanese.

    One of the faux Naka's cult buddies?

    When he was gone, Jack moved to the roof edge and looked down to see what was so interesting. He recognized Hank talking to a young woman with short brown hair. He wished he had his Leica along. Then he noticed something long and slim in Hank's hand.

    A katana.

    Again, binocs would have come in handy to confirm what Jack had already guessed, but this pretty much clinched it: Hank had the Gaijin Masamune.

    And that was what had put the watcher on the move. He'd seen the sword and had gone ru

    Question was, who was his boss? The suit with the yakuza, or this Order of the Hidden Face Slater had talked about? The answer mattered. One had been ready to kill him and the other had already tried. He knew the location of the yakuzas but not the Hidden Face. If the watcher was one of those crazy, self-mutilating monks, Jack wanted to know where they hung out.

    As he was turning away he saw a flurry of motion from within. The woman was diving toward the window. Hank tackled her and brought her down. After a brief struggle, two men came in and hauled her to her feet. Her mouth was open as if she was screaming, but Jack heard nothing. For an instant her face turned his way, giving him a dead-on look. He stiffened as recognition bolted through him. The long blond hair was gone, replaced by short, choppy brown, but no question about who she was.

    Dawn Pickering.

    All those flyers must have paid off. Someone had spotted her and dropped a dime for the reward.

    He leaned back on his haunches, thinking.

    He'd found Dawn and the katana in the same place. What were the odds of that? High. High enough to make him uncomfortable. He'd come looking for the katana, but that took a backseat now that he'd found Dawn.

    Now he knew why the lower-level Kickers had been kicked out onto the street. Hank and his i

    Despite what Glaeken had said about keeping the katana out of the wrong hands, Jack had made a promise to Christy Pickering to separate her daughter from the man she knew as Jerry Bethlehem.

    Okay, not a promise, but he'd taken her money and said he'd do the job. And he had done it. But now she was in Hank's clutches, and that was pretty much like being in Jerry's. So in a way, the fix-it wasn't finished. He felt a duty to Christy to free her daughter.

    So the katana could wait. He knew where it was and had a feeling it would never be too far from Hank Thompson. A glance back showed him standing near the window, swinging it in flashing loops.

    No, that blade wasn't going anywhere—at least not tonight.

    But what about Dawn? He doubted she'd be going anywhere tonight either. He needed a way to get her out of there without endangering her.

    His first thought was to call the cops. He could tell them that Dawn Pickering, a person of interest in a Forest Hills murder, was hiding in the Lodge. A warrant, a search, Dawn is discovered, tells the cops she'd been kidnapped and held prisoner: hot water for Hank and company.

    Sounded perfect. The only problem he could see was the pervasiveness of Kickers. The most visible members hailed from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, but they existed at all levels. Undoubtedly some were in the criminal justice system. And somewhere along the tortuous course of obtaining a search warrant on a building owned by a group as co

    And then Dawn would disappear and Jack would be back to square one.

    A one-man assault was out of the question. He needed help—willing or unwilling, witting or unwitting—and had an idea where he might find some.

    He peeked over the edge of the roof and saw the watcher step onto the sidewalk below and start toward Allen Street.

    Jack jumped up and ran for the roof door. He blasted through, pounded down six flights of stairs and burst onto the sidewalk at a run. He reached Allen Street in time to see the watcher hop into a cab. He spotted another a dozen feet away discharging a fare. He hopped in.

    "Hate to say it, but follow that cab."

    He expected a remark from the driver, a grizzled fellow with shiny black skin and a curly, gray beard, but he merely turned on the meter and shifted into drive.

    The watcher led them to the southbound FDR all the way down to the ferry docks. There he got out and boarded a waiting ferry. Jack followed. It left promptly at ten thirty.

    Staten Island, he thought. What the hell's on Staten Island?

    The watcher stayed up front, as if urging the boat to go faster, so Jack hung around the stern, watching Lower Manhattan's bright skyline recede in the wake. Two tall, thin structures were missing from the view. Jack had always hated the Twin Towers, considering them irksome, unimaginative, incongruous eyesores. But now that they were gone, he missed them.

    Twenty-five minutes later the ferry was nudging into the Staten Island docks. As soon as the gates opened, the watcher hopped off and trotted to one of the waiting cabs. Jack followed to another, and tried a variation on the dreaded phrase.

    "See that cab? Follow it."

    The driver looked over his shoulder. He was some kind of squat little Asian. His name on the license looked Thai—Prasopchai Narkhirunkanok. No way would Jack try to pronounce it. He'd never heard of anyone dislocating his tongue, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen.

    "Follow that cab?" he said in accented English. "This is true?"

    "That's what I said."

    He laughed. "Okay. We follow that cab."

    The ferry had landed at the northernmost tip of the island. They followed the watcher's cab along Victory Boulevard to the Staten Island Expressway, which was anything but express, even at this hour. They traveled east to the West Shore Expressway and then south to the landfill where the first cab exited.

    The Fresh Kills landfill?

    Jack didn't know much about it except that sometime in the middle of the last century New York City declared a couple of thousand acres of Staten Island its dumping ground. Over the ensuing decades it piled up huge mounds of garbage. The landfill closed around the turn of the century, but reopened long enough to accept World Trade Center debris.

    "Any idea where he's going?"

    The driver nodded. "I saw him. He look Japanese. I fear he is going to bad place."

    "Bad place?"

    "A temple where Kakureta Kao dwell."

    "You've heard of them?"

    Another nod. "They once known all over Asia. My grandmother used to scare me by saying she call the Kakureta Kao in Tokyo and they come and take me back to their temple and cut me up. After the war everyone thought they dead, but then they show up here."

    "In a landfill?"

    "No one want land where they stay. They can be alone there to perform foul rites."

    Foul rites… he had to mean the self-mutilation Slater had mentioned. But why here? Why in the U.S.?

    "There, you see?" he said, pointing ahead. "Kakureta Kao."

    Jack saw the watcher's cab stop outside an oblong, two-story box of a building. Not exactly what he'd had in mind when he'd heard the word temple.