“And you want me to speak to him?” June listened, trying to make sense of what was going on downstairs. It sounded like there was a scuffle, followed by Jerome’s phone being dropped, and a struggle with a lot of grunting.
“Only three more minutes!” a woman’s voice called out.
“Jerome?” June shouted down the phone. “You there?”
Leopold’s voice came on the line. “Sorry about that,” he said. “We’re having to resort to a little physical persuasion.”
“Leopold, rip that guy’s shirt off. Are there cherry blossom tattoos on his shoulder or down his arm?”
“Yeah. That’s Yakuza, right?” Leopold said.
“Yeah. Put the phone up to his ear. I want to talk to him.”
Leopold obliged. There was another howl of pain from a fourth voice. A scuffling noise and she heard breathing on the line.
“Ne, pansuke ka?” a male voice said. Is this the little whore? The words were filled with hatred, the speaker almost spitting them down the phone.
June gritted her teeth. “You’re Oguchi Clan?” she asked, in Japanese.
“Go to hell.” There was another noise and the man screamed out.
“Why are you doing this?” June said. “You came for me? You’re here to kill me?”
The man laughed hoarsely. “You can’t run from Oguchi this time.”
“You came for me? All this is to kill me? You put a bomb in my room to kill me, put toxic gas in the ventilation system, knowing others would die too?”
“Two minutes!” The woman’s voice again.
“Those damn bombs in your room are nothing,” the man continued. “Just a distraction, something for the police to obsess about. Once the gas is released, nobody’s getting out of here alive. The whole world will think the North Koreans had something to do with it, trying to take out your President. The Yakuza and Oguchi won’t even come up in conversation, and the only people who know the truth are going to die in this room.”
June gripped the phone tighter. “You’re insane.”
“Nobody will ever suspect you were the one that was meant to die. Nobody else matters to us, as long as you’re dead.” He laughed again, a high-pitched squeal. “You should’ve died a couple years ago when you had the chance.”
“I almost did.”
“Now you get a second chance to do it right, yariman.” Another scuffling noise and the man howled again.
June could still hear him breathing on the phone. “The detonator for the sarin bomb is down there with you?” she asked.
“Yeah, and in two more minutes, the convention center and hotel will fill with gas. What do you think of that, Miss Go-run-do Rei-shoo?”
June sucked in a deep lungful of air, her brain whirring. She knew she was missing something. “What’s the combination to the detonator?” she asked. “Save your life and tell me.”
“Well, the burnt ratio woman’s body is disagreeable,” he said back, cryptically. “A shame you never got to give your speech.”
June heard him get slugged again, but she was done talking with him. It was pointless to ask for the combination to the safe from him. He’d only give a hundred false numbers before giving the correct one, even if he stopped talking in riddles. She knew the Yakuza’s methods well, especially their fondness of mind games.
Mind games. The thought lingered with her, nagging at the edge of her mind. They must have tracked me here, studied my movements. They knew I was due to give a speech next door. She stood up, phone still in her hand.
“What did he say?” Jerome asked her.
“Just keep quiet for one minute,” she said back.
“We might not have that long.”
June ignored him. Somehow, they figured out who I was. Somebody must have told them about my alias. They followed me to Seattle. But why here? What’s significant about this conference?
June paced the room. She knew the President would make it easy for the authorities to believe the North Korea story. Everyone would assume he was the target. But it wasn’t like the Oguchi family to resist the urge to put their personal stamp on their work. Somehow, there was still something she wasn’t seeing.
The conference, she thought. Something about the conference.
Something tugged at her consciousness, but June just couldn’t hold on.
“One minute!” the woman’s voice again, getting louder.
It was no use. There wasn’t enough time. June collapsed onto the sofa, set the phone down in her lap. The smell of blood and burnt flesh hung heavy in the air. She had a decision to make, and needed to call her sister, possibly for the last time. Even if rescuers made it upstairs in time, she would never get out of the building, especially with a bruised ankle.