Dragon Dance Read online

  It was time to go. Ichiro had already gone to his room. Martine bade a formal good-bye to the old lady—this was absolutely essential—then they walked along the corridor to the elevator, Makoto’s wooden sandals going clop-clop on the tiled floor.

  Makoto’s home was a modest apartment in a modest eight-story block in a modest suburb that had so far withstood the crisis without too much damage. There was no high-tech security system, but the neighbors kept their eyes open and made sure nothing unusual was happening. They kept their ears open too, since the walls were extremely thin.

  Once upon a time Makoto had lived in rather more luxury, as befitted an elite executive of one of Japan’s largest trading houses. Martine had seen photos of the house in the Bay Area, with the swimming pool and tennis court. But when the trading house collapsed and the family moved back to Japan, he had decided to plow all his personal wealth into his brother’s micro-brewery. That had been a costly move, but she had never heard him utter a single word of regret.

  It was a hot summer’s night. In the trees below, the screeching of cicadas drowned out the voices of passersby. Neither of them spoke. Makoto was flying to America the next morning, and Martine had deadline pressure on a twelve-page “infomercial” supplement, one of the pet projects of the new management. It would be weeks before they saw each other again, which was a miserable thought.

  Just as the elevator doors were opening, Martine glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye, a flash and an explosion of color.

  “Fireworks,” said Makoto. “There’s a big display down by the river, the last one this summer.”

  “Shall we go and look?”

  Makoto glanced at his watch, a garish Swatch that Ichiro had given him as a birthday present. “It’s almost over.”

  “What a shame!” said Martine emphatically. She was feeling quite lightheaded now. Makoto gave her an odd look. They got in the elevator, and he [58] pressed the button. It took her a few seconds to realize that the elevator was going up, not down.

  “What’s happening?” she asked blankly.

  “Come on,” said Makoto. “We’ll have a good view of the last few fireworks from the roof.”

  They got out at the eighth floor and went up a flight of concrete steps that led out onto the roof terrace. It was a small area, half the size of a tennis court, strung with washing lines and enclosed by a shoulder-high railing. They picked their way between the flapping shirts and undulating bed sheets.

  “I hope it isn’t over.”

  “Look, here they come.”

  Elbows against the rail, they watched the slow-motion explosions in purple, silver, emerald. They were standing close together, and Martine could feel his heat on her arms, his dark energy drawing her in.

  “Hurry up, will you?” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “You are going to kiss me, aren’t you?”

  Then his lips were on the back of her neck, making tingly little shapes, and his fingers were caressing her hair. She turned to face him, and he pulled her in. His mouth was warm and rough, his chest as hard as a cherry-wood board. She savored the saltiness of his taste, as fresh and strange as the first time.

  “It’s been so long,” she whispered.

  “Too long.”

  She fumbled at the belt of his kimono and it fell open. She knelt down and captured him in her mouth, just long enough to confirm the delicate weave of his skin, the urgent thrust of his blood. Then she stood up for him to unzip her skirt. There was no pretense, they knew each other too well for that.

  His breath was hot in her ear. “Are you sure?”

  “I need you.”

  They moved purposefully, each knowing what the other intended. Makoto lifted her off the ground as easily as if she were a child, and she arched backward, gripped the rail in both hands, and let out her breath in a long, surging sigh. He was harder than usual, stretching her, going deep into the core of her being.

  Martine relaxed totally, letting her head fall back until her hair was brushing the ground. Above her, Makoto was silhouetted against the mauve sky, his heavy shoulders glistening in the flare of the fireworks. He was holding her so lightly, moving so smoothly, that she felt as if she were floating in the air. Martine matched herself to the rhythm of his breathing, responded to his responses. They could do this exactly together, all it needed was trust and care.

  [59] Through half-closed eyes she watched the giant blooms of color opening with a crump, dissolving into cascades of glittering rain, fading and dying.

  The last fireworks of summer—they were the ones that stayed with you forever.

  On the other side of Tokyo Bay, in the midst of a bone-white citadel of towers and storage drums, a man in spotlessly clean overalls sat in a bubble of toughened plastic. In front of him was a bank of twitching dials and endlessly scrolling screens. The control panel hummed and bleeped and winked, confirming that Japan’s largest, most up-to-date chemical complex was operating smoothly and efficiently.

  Koji Murata had been seated in the plastic bubble since four o’clock, hardly moving except to adjust a dial or to tap an instruction into the keyboard. Some might think this was a boring job, spending an entire eight-hour shift alone, but Koji Murata didn’t think so. To him, process monitoring was more than being a kind of high-tech security man, a mere passive observer sitting there in case of some unlikely emergency. It meant knowing every step of the process, absorbing yourself in it, becoming one with it. When Murata sat at the control panel, he didn’t just see dials and charts and columns of numbers. He saw gases swirling, dark oceans churning and frothing, violent chain reactions such as had marked the creation of the planet earth. This plant contained six thousand miles of piping, and Murata still found it as strangely thrilling as when he first joined the company. Six thousand miles—it was enough to stretch from Tokyo to Moscow!

  Murata felt a twinge of regret as he noted that the hands of the big luminescent clock were indicating the end of his shift. Soon he would have to discard his clean-smelling overalls and put on ordinary shabby clothes. Then he would get on his scooter and ride back to the company housing, where he would quietly suck down a bowl of instant noodles before crawling into the futon laid out beside his wife’s sleeping body. Early the next morning, when she left for work in the convenience store, it would be his turn to lie prone and unconscious. Sometimes days went by without them having their eyes open at the same time, but Murata didn’t mind that at all. He didn’t miss the conversation.

  It was twelve o’clock now. Endo was standing outside the changing room, fitting his peaked cap onto his balding head. Murata stood up and waved at him. Then he froze. Something was wrong with the screen in the middle of the control panel. It flickered wildly, then went blank. Suddenly a new image appeared, one that Murata had heard about, but hoped that he would never [60] actually see in his life. It was a cartoon figure of a smiley face wearing a cowboy hat.

  “It can’t be,” he gasped. “There must be a mistake!”

  But the cartoon figure shook its head, and the smiley face inverted into a frown. Underneath appeared a line of wavy Japanese script—“Time To Die, You Yellow Bastards.”

  Murata yanked open the door of the plastic bubble.

  “Endo-kun,” he screamed. “Get over here quick. It’s Hiroshima!”

  Endo’s grin froze on his face, and he dashed toward the door. On the screen, the smiley face morphed into a mushroom cloud. “BOOM” said the text.

  Murata punched the emergency button and tapped in the backup instructions, but he knew it was already too late. Hiroshima was the most advanced and adaptable virus ever created. Originally lodged in the Japanese language version of Doorway, the world’s leading operating system, it had a polymorphic ability to customize itself to new environments, to fragment and regroup, to combine with harmless graphics codes and lie dormant for months, maybe years. When it manifested itself like this, the damage was already done. It had disabled the backups and infil
trated logic bombs into all the main command areas.

  “Look at No. 3,” yelled Endo. The needle on one of the dials was spinning crazily. Above it a red light was flashing.

  “Too much fluid is going in there. The tank’s already at capacity.”

  “You’d better shut down the pump.”

  “I can’t. There’s no response.”

  “Get the emergency team down there. Somebody’s got to shut that thing off or the tank will burst.”

  “Don’t be stupid. It’s made of reinforced concrete, six feet thick.”

  “Well, something’s going to burst.”

  The two men gazed at each other, panic-stricken. Outside a siren had started whooping.

  “The pipes! There’ll be backflow.”

  “Try closing the valves.”

  “No response!”

  Six thousand miles of metal piping, thought Murata dully, enough to stretch from Tokyo to Moscow. Somewhere in that maze of metal there would [?] a weak spot, a place where the pressure would be too much. And with the mapping system down, there was no way they could identify it until it was too late.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Endo tersely.

  “What?”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  [61] “We can’t just walk away.”

  “You’re crazy. If the pipes go, can you imagine what it’ll be like? The whole place will be a fireball. If you don’t get fried, the fumes will burn out your lungs.”

  “That’s nonsense. This place was built with the workers’ safety in mind.”

  Endo shook his head angrily. “You actually believe that?”

  Murata said nothing. He wasn’t sure if he believed it or not. All he knew was that if the white citadel no longer existed, if there were to be no more nights in the glass bubble monitoring the mysterious beauty of its processes, if his life was to be just a matter of eating, sleeping, defecating, quarreling with his wife, scrabbling for money—then there really wasn’t any point in enduring it.

  Endo got up and left the glass bubble. Murata didn’t even turn around.

  SIX

  Warwick Fletcher gazed out of the helicopter at the concrete fortress nestling in the bend of the gleaming Thames River. It was from this distance that you could most appreciate the sheer scale of it, the bold purposefulness of its twin tower design. In comparison, the Tower of London looked hokey, a mere whimsy there to please the tourists.

  It was twenty years since the InfoCorp head office had been opened, but even now the sight of it filled Fletcher with satisfaction. It symbolized all that he had achieved despite the overwhelming odds against him. He remembered the pompous blathering of the bankers, the nervousness of his advisers, the angry threats of the trade union leaders when they realized how many jobs were going to be cut.

  Nobody had wanted him to succeed, and nobody had believed he would. But Fletcher had believed, and that had been enough. History had been created. By combining newspapers, TV channels, and online financial information, he had opened the way to global media convergence. By withstanding eighteen months of violent picketing, he had broken the British trade union movement. And by pitching his center of operations miles away from any other corporate headquarters, he had shifted the entire center of the city eastward, creating a thriving new commercial district where previously there had been nothing but slums and wasteland.

  The world had changed since then, and InfoCorp with it. There had been bids and counterbids, mergers and demergers, spin-offs, asset swaps, acquisitions in countries that hadn’t even existed when InfoCorp was born. Movie studios, music labels, cable TV companies, shopping channels, internet portals, radio stations, basketball teams, soccer clubs, lifestyle magazines—Warwick had snapped them up, sure in his instinct that people would hunger for more and more information, more and more entertainment, more and more [63] images to fill their minds and help them forget the tedium of their sad little lives. All that activity had built InfoCorp into a gigantic global enterprise, one of the top ten companies in the world by market capitalization. But in terms of excitement, nothing could match the sense of being ahead of a curve that no one else had even seen. Even now, as Warwick contemplated the masterstroke that would turn InfoCorp into the IBM of the twenty-first century, those concrete towers gleaming in the sunshine gave him more pride than anything else.

  The helicopter circled the complex twice, then landed on the roof of the main building. Sandy, the ex-SAS man Fletcher used as his bodyguard on this side of the Atlantic, was the first to get out. He stood arms akimbo, cigarette jutting from his lips, his aquiline features expressionless as he scanned the landing area. This was completely unnecessary of course, but Fletcher always let him do things his own way. Sandy was a professional, with an impressive track record that stretched from Belfast to Belgrade.

  Sandy gave a nod, and Fletcher gingerly negotiated his way onto the concrete. His knees and ankles felt stiff and tender, and his prostate had been playing up. Jenny had been telling him not to fly so much, but that was like telling a fish not to swim so much. He needed to fly in order to make deals. He needed to make deals in order to live. Jenny should have worked that out by now.

  Warwick walked to the edge of the roof and rested his hands on the aluminum railing. He took a deep breath and looked down at the street below, where tiny figures were pouring from the entrance of the new subway station. Sandy and the others watched in silence. They had seen him do this many times before.

  With his right hand Warwick unzipped himself and craned forward slightly. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to watch the golden parabola rising into the air in front of him. He gave a grunt of satisfaction as the parabola danced in the breeze, broke into droplets, and dissolved into a fine mist that descended on the heads of the men and women hurrying to work hundreds of feet below.

  Mark Fletcher watched from the other tower as his father walked toward the elevator. The limp was more pronounced than the last time they had met, the face darker and more heavily lined, but he was in impressive shape for a man in his mid-seventies. His immense physical strength was still evident in the bulk of his shoulders and his barrel-like chest.

  Mark himself was a hefty six foot two. He had won a blue in rugby as a crash-tackling center three-quarter, and he kept himself ferociously fit with squash, judo, and daily weight training. Nonetheless, in his father’s presence he felt like a skinny sixteen-year-old. Everything about the man seemed larger [64] than life, from his thick forearms matted with black hair to his huge head, lantern jaw, and jutting lip. Even in the old days—before Warwick Fletcher had become the Warwick Fletcher, when he was just another entrepreneur with wild ideas and a disastrous balance sheet—the impact of his physical presence had been overwhelming.

  Mark remembered how rooms would go quiet when his father appeared, how important men smiled in his presence and how he never smiled back. He remembered the incident in Las Vegas, he had been seven or eight at the time, when they found two men waiting for them outside the men’s room at the restaurant. One of them had put a hand on his father’s shoulder and ordered him to go with them. His father had merely made a sudden movement with his elbow and carried on walking. Looking back over his shoulder, Mark had been astonished to see the man sitting slumped against the wall, spitting blood and pieces of tooth onto the carpet. Then his father had turned to him and made him promise not [to] say anything to his mother. “We wouldn’t want to spoil her evening,” he said with an enormous wink.

  Mark himself had come across some hard men in his time. There had been the Russian oligarch who had backed up a takeover bid for their joint venture with two car bombs. There had been the South African international rugby prop who had chewed off the bottom third of his ear while he lay helpless at the bottom of a ruck. There had been political heavyweights threatening new regulations, high-tech billionaires eager to carve chunks out of the InfoCorp empire, drug barons and arms dealers bringing multimillion-dollar libel suits.
But all these people had been pushovers compared to the bearlike figure striding purposefully toward him.

  “Good to see you, Dad,” Mark said, stepping forward with outstretched hand. “How was the Caribbean?”

  His father enclosed his hand in a crushing grip. Not much sign of poor health there, thought Mark.

  “It’s bloody boring,” growled Warwick Fletcher. “If you’ve seen one island, you’ve seen ’em all. Same thing everywhere—blue skies, coconut trees, black boys grinning at you. What’s there to grin about, for chrissake! No wonder the whole place is in such a mess.”

  That was typical too. Mark couldn’t imagine his father actually enjoying a holiday. Not even Jenny Leung had been able to change that.

  “I hear you’ve been doing some scuba diving?”

  Warwick frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “Well, we do have the largest news-gathering operation in the world here, Dad. There’s not much that goes on that we don’t know.”

  The frown got heavier, the stare narrower. “What the fuck are you talking about? My private life is not news. I thought you understood that.”

  [65] Mark winced. His father only used obscenities when he was really fuming about something. It was a reaction against his own father, the semiliterate brawler from the Australian outback who had founded the family fortune.

  “Of course, Dad. Nobody would dream of putting it in print. It’s just that we hear things sometimes, all sorts of things.”

  Mark knew that he was sounding feeble, no different from the gangling sixteen-year-old quailing in the blast of his father’s disapproval. That wouldn’t do, not this time. He was going to make his case head-on, no matter how furious the reaction.

  “Just remember this—our private life is absolutely off-limits. Anyone who sticks their nose in is going to get it chopped off.”