“Look, I’ve told you before, I’m a sailor onboard a godamn ship. Enlisted for Christ sake. I don’t even have a security clearance worth a shit anymore. Why me? Why the fuck me?”

  The ambassador shifting to Father Confessor now.

  “My boy, now, now, please. The booze may be getting to you a bit. Ease off on that Tennessee shit. You need to drink the good stuff. The nectar of the fairies.”

  Pausing to let the shaken American take this all in and then, “I just want a meeting with your friend, Mr. Bender. We have mutual business associates, that’s all. You won’t be involved. I promise you.”

  Adam mind’s eye flashing to the picture that O’Mara had shown him. The “BJ pic” as the ambassador gleefully referred to the compromising photo that O’Mara had taken of Adam while he was drugged and drunk. Slipped him a Mickey. Adam had actually found some bizarre humor in the fact that “A Mick” had “slipped him a Mickey.”

  O’Mara’s voice bringing Adam back from his latest excursion.

  “All right, all right. Look, give him this. You will see him soon?”

  Handing Adam the business size envelope. Adam grasped the parcel. Maybe one sheet of paper in it.

  “Ship gets underway tomorrow. I’ll see that he gets it. I’m supposed to meet him before we go to sea and anchor. Of course he thinks that I’m at an A.A. meeting now.”

  “Yes, damn things would be much simpler if you would be going to those meetings on a regular basis.”

  “Sea and Anchor” referring to Sea and Anchor detail. This evolution took place at least two hours before the ship actually got underway. Preparations had to be made such as manning the lines and starting and testing the weapons and navigation systems. A U.S. Navy warship could not just be backed out of its parking space and set on its way as it were. Adam would be part of the evolution. It was approaching 8 PM or 2000 in military terms. He would have to be back at the ship and conscious in less than eight hours. He knew this yet ordered another one. The alcoholic way.

  I’ll worry about it tomorrow.

  Adam took another belt as he placed the envelope in his pocket.

  2

  The seventy empty containers sat motionless in the bleak, sanitized fortress. Aum Cult storage facility #1 was located in the entertainment district of Roppongi. An area that consisted of restaurants and clubs all open most of the day and night. A land where all types of desires could be satisfied providing one had some yen. Gas Panic a bar within walking distance of Roppongi Station. Packed this Friday evening with a cosmopolitan crowd. There were American sailors, French computer programmers, Japanese, Chinese, Filipina. The Japanese office ladies or“OL’s” eager for a good time. Take away the strain of the long six day, sixty hour work week. Demure and humble to a fault one would scarcely recognize these ladies now as they were transformed into modern geishas. These Bathsheba’s of the East on the prowl now with their cigarettes and condoms part of the standard hunting attire.

  The music blasting to a crescendo not experienced anywhere except perhaps in the wheel well of a 747 on take-off. The Cult soldiers worked two floors above Gas Panic oblivious both to the din and the irony of the aptly named bar where just above a factory of death would soon be in full operation.

  “The Leader will be here tonight.”

  “That is ridiculous. Too risky.”

  “I heard it I’m telling you. One of the others mentioned it, thinking no one was listening.”

  “Move along now you two. There is much to do.”

  One of the Aum lieutenants barking at the workers. No time to waste. The Event drawing close. History would be forever changed. The Truth of Creation ingrained in everyone’s mind that survived. A new world would begin. Shoko Asahara himself would be here at Gas Panic this very night. Arrangements had been made. The catastrophic Event would take place but first a precursor to the apocalypse. A message would be sent soon. A lesson taught through a horrible death. A microscopic foreshadowing of what was to come.

  Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, like so many insane zealots before him, had a flare for the dramatic. The Hindu god Siva, presiding over death and destruction. What better deity to worship for Shoko. Destruction after all no different from Creation. A kind of creation in itself in fact. From death springs life. Life to death. Death to life. Aum was doing what nature had intended all along. The sarin gas replacing the aging process that nature usually used in the birth to death cycle. A minor detail. The Science and Technology Agency, with scientists recruited from every major university in Japan, broken up into teams for the Cult. Specializing in chemistry, biology, physics and medicine. Quite similar in fact to what another fanatic had done decades before.

  The little boy sat quietly watching, The dark brooding figure sang softly, rocking in the chair. The boy was terrified. Nine years on this planet and terror and guilt his primary feelings. His only feelings. Mother not here. He hadn’t seen her for months in fact. Only the boy and the figure. Tall, dark, menacing, in a curious way. Getting up now. Moving towards him as he sang softly. An old Japanese nursery rhyme perhaps? Opening his robe now.

  Sweat poured out of The One. The dream/nightmare again. The father dead years ago. Hacked to death as he slept. The protruding enemy inside the robe turned to mincemeat first. The beast butchered and buried by 17 year old Shoko. When the police came, the boy singing a nursery rhyme. Almost unintelligible but yes, a nursery rhyme. Years at the hospital. Shock treatments. Probing. Always probing. They would never know though. He would never tell of the nightmare. It was gone forever. Banished along with the beast they called his father.

  Released after four years, quietly slipping back into a society that had decided he was safe now. Staying with his aunt while attending university. A good student. Quiet. Serene, yet something lurking below the surface.

  Don’t get close to me. Stay away.

  No women. No friends at all until he met Atashi. In the park they talked of Siva, God of destruction and creation. Creation out of destruction. This made sense to Shoko. How could it not? He had killed his father and the thing that had tormented him for all of his young life. Shoko had been reborn when he had destroyed his father.

  Wasn’t this world just like father? Everyone out to torment me. Especially the women. All of them whores.

  They had made his body experience unmentionable things. He had wanted to cut it off at times. Like he had done to the beast that lurked in the robe of his father. He would destroy all of them. The women and their American soldiers who paid them and made them cheap and disgusting.

  Everything would change. Shoko knew this with the utmost of certainty after that first meeting with Atashi. A new world. One free from tormentors. The whores would be cleansed. The ones that still lived that is. Atashi had told him of the sarin. Goro Atashi, the disgraced lawyer. Brilliant with a beautiful family. Long gone now. His distant and strange behavior too much for his young wife and child. The wife now remarried to an American sailor.

  At first progress was slow. A few scientists, fringe types. No focus. The breakthrough happened when Atashi came to them with the news on the gas. Saddam Hussein had used it with great effect during his war against the Kurds. The fact that these were his own people, a minor detail to Aum. Sacrifices had to made. Certain collateral damage a necessity. The twisted, grotesque forms of the dead, women and children seen all over CNN.

  A simple gas to manufacture and transport, it was nonetheless, once weaponized, lethal. Lethal to the extent where seventy containers of a relatively small size could wipe out over half the population of Tokyo. An act of horror that would be blamed on America herself. This was the brilliant addition to Aum’s plan. Launch the world into a war that would eventually reap total destruction. The Aum Cult waiting to rebuild civilization in their image from the wasteland.

  They had left the coffeehouse with a feeling of demonic euphoria that night after realizing that this dream could indeed become reality. No more chants against the American dominators, the rapists of the Japanese women. No. Time now for action. A real statement. Destruction and then the Creation. A new world with Shoko at the helm. The torment would end with the last gasp of the last martyr. Yes there would have to be martyrs. Not enough to merely destroy the evil West. No the Japanese would die as well. After all, they, particularly the women had been soiled forever by the American semen.

  . . . . .

  The nondescript Japanese man walks through the cacophony of the Gas Panic bar. Most of the occupants if they noticed him at all would take him for a beer vendor there to replenish a keg or two. No matter. He walks to the back of the bar almost stumbling over a body. American. Drunk of course, fondling the Japanese female. Soon this would end, Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Cult, thought as he walked through the back door and up the stairs to the sarin gas factory.

  3

  She walked through the archway of cherry blossoms, oblivious. The petals like so many miniature Kabuki players dancing gaily in the light breeze. The figure is small, fragile yet somehow ominous. She stepped on the fallen petals, staring straight ahead. Eyes black. A young man approached and smiled. No response. He flinched at the abyss lurking in those eyes. Still, she is beautiful.

  Twilight. A mother pushed her stroller with infant past the figure, and their eyes meet ever so briefly. A touch perhaps of a smile? Gone in an instant as the brooding, broken, beautiful shell continued on. Now at the front of the house, she took out her keys, opened the door and entered.

  Keiko Watanabe stood inside the non-descript building on the outskirts of Tokyo. A petite beauty on the downhill side of her twenties. Not showing it though. Beautiful almond eyes, Cheshire cat in black skirt, stooping like an old woman but not pulling off the disguise at all. A beauty for the ages. A tragic beauty that Shakespeare would have cast in some Globe Theater east if he had made it this far. Alas, she would have to be satisfied with playing a real-life cross between Lady Macbeth and Juliet opposite an American Romeo and a Japanese Richard III.

  Keiko Watanabe, the lover/victim of Adam Welsh, had attended university in Ebisu and was the product of a wealthy Tokyo family. Her father owned a well-established trucking company, and her mother had never wanted for the finer things in life. It was in fact rumored that Keiko’s maternal grandfather had made his fortune through some “creative” weapons contracts with the occupational government of Douglas Macarthur just as the war had ended. An ebullient girl for most of her life, it was just recently that friends had noticed a change. Some would say that a darkness had seemed to fall over this lovely, vulnerable creature. Those who did not know of the botched abortion, of the heart that had not been merely broken but shattered into an infinitesimal amount of jagged pieces, never to be repaired, would not understand. They would find the scene here at this Aum Cult house all the more surreal and ironic gazing upon the image of this small, placid-looking Japanese woman here in this factory of horror.

  In a different world, one removed from contradiction, deceit and utter insanity, Keiko would be strolling with her lover in the Harajuku Park. Instead, here at this Aum Shinrikyo staging area, she was a participant in the planning of an attack on humanity so devastating in its potential for slaughter that its successful completion would dwarf both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  “Keiko San, so good to see you.”

  It was Daiki meaning “bright one” as his mother had called him. Before this insanity had begun. Years ago when he was loved and he himself was capable of the emotion. Finished now. A pawn of the Aum. No return ticket available. A young, wide-eyed, former university student turned soldier for Aum. Recruited right out of university. Once a promising law student till he came under the spell. Working with the ardor of the possessed now. The Cult would be in the courts again this week. Time was of the essence. Briefs would be needed. Motions filed.

  “Is there tea?”

  She spoke in that inanimate way she had. Daiki, accustomed to it now. After working with this woman for only a short time, he had come to realize that she was driven in a far different way than the others. The otherworldly way she had about her could be quite disconcerting in fact.

  Thoughts of Adam came to her. Just recently he had been visiting inside her head. Unannounced. Thinking back to one of her last meetings with him.

  “It’s going to be fine, baby. I’m going to get sober. This is it. I feel it. Things will be different this time, baby. Jack is really helping me.”

  Adam had been visibly shaken. The booze coming out of his pores. She wanted to believe him with every bit of faith she had in her being. She forced herself to. Against all logic. Adam had said these words in one form or another so many times before. The alcoholic’s mantra. I’ll quit tomorrow. The problem was that quitting was not Adam’s problem. Living sober was. There was the rub as Dan Bronsan might have said on more than one occasion. In the end, Keiko forced herself to believe.

  So long ago when he had spoken these words. A park bench on a beautiful sunny day under a cherry blossom tree in Hiroo. She had looked at him with a look, which was at once loving yet also one of fear.

  Dread.

  So strange now to think that she had once been capable of any human feeling at all. She would be an accomplice, albeit unwittingly, in the annihilation of a third of Tokyo in a very short time if all went as planned. Probably a couple on that same park bench would be part of the carnage.

  “Keiko Chan?”

  Daiki again. Back to her senses now.

  “Your tea, Keiko. You were away there for a few moments. Are you okay?”

  A slight smile on the lips of Keiko Watanabe now. The thought of anyone ever being “okay” again in this cold world that she now inhabited, devoid of anything or anyone making any sense or semblance of logic. There was no feeling here. Not even a hint of compassion. The suggestion that Daiki would have any empathy for her almost insulting to Keiko now. She took the tea without acknowledging the young lemming. Daiki not bothered by this. At one time he might have been. No time now for personal feelings. There was paperwork to file. He left Keiko to her private Gulag, sitting at the sparse desk which had been her place of toil for the last weeks. No idea or concept of time dwelling inside this tormented woman. She gazed across the barren floor towards the windows, closed despite the spring heat. Rumors of a shipment coming within the next weeks. No need for any prying eyes. The lawyer, Shoko Asahara’s right hand man and chief confidante had said as much to the soldiers here during the last Cult meeting. A kind of pep talk. A phrase that Adam had taught her. A slight turn to her lip as this fragment of her lost love flooded through her. Just for an instant though. Gone as quickly as it came. Mercifully.

  4

  Jack Bender fumbled with the crumbled piece of paper, oblivious to the din of the early afternoon bar crowd. Staring at the words neatly typed on the paper now.

  The contents seemingly innocuous to the casual observer, but Jack Bender, Supervisor of the Toxic Waste Facility, Yokosuka Naval Base knew that the people that would be looking though the waste in his classified material-only disposal receptacle would not be doing so in a casual way. Jack had spent enough time around “spook types,” as Adam Welsh had referred to them, to know that anything put in a burn bag was subject to investigation before being incinerated. True, the message he held in his hand now from Peter O’Mara was innocent in and of itself. But placed with other parts of an intelligence puzzle by someone with a trained eye, it could be devastating to the crusade of Jack Bender which was nothing less than total retribution for the injustice done to his beloved Yumiko.

  “FINGAL O’FLAHERTIE PER USUAL”

  The paper spread out on the back booth here at the Roppongi bar. Jack foregoing his normal lunch at the base enlisted club. The ritual of coffee, pecan pie, chicken sandwich on white bread (in that order) would have to be missed today. The other diners at the club would no doubt be thankful for this as they would not be subjected to the inevitable culmination which included a spirited dental flossing right there at Jack Bender’s table for all to see. Adam, his usual dining partner still at sea. The paper in front of Jack Bender now the only content from the envelope Adam had given him before he got underway. The message from Peter O’Mara. A code of course. The Irishman with an unabashed affinity for Oscar Wilde. The middle name of the Irish, alcoholic, gay bard agreed upon as the signal for a meeting at Paddy Foley’s Irish Pub in Roppongi. The time always 2PM.

  “A drink, Jack? How about a nice Jameson? Take the edge off, don’t you know?”

  The ambassador had arrived discreetly as usual.

  Peter O’Mara slithered into the seat across from Bender. The man knew that Jack was a sober alcoholic in recovery. Very aware of it. Still asked if he wanted a drink. A game. Bender never having a problem with this. He knew that O’Mara was in essence a weak, grandiose human being. The hate that he did have for the man spawned from what he had done to Adam Welsh. Adam a surrogate son in many ways. Jack Bender had heard of the pictures. He knew that the blackmail was O’Mara’s way of insuring that he could communicate with Bender indirectly by using the unwitting Welsh. Jack understood this but still knew that in a different time, a different world , he would have not hesitated to kill O’Mara, Irish Ambassador to Japan or not.

  “No, Mr. Ambassador, just a Diet Coke. As always. I do admire your tenacity though. We have business to discuss?”

  “I’ll have a Jameson and a Diet Coke for my friend please.”

  The Irishman never taking his gaze from Bender as he placed the order. The young Japanese waitress appearing on cue. The bar full even at this early hour. Some kind of Rugby Match had just finished. Jack noticing the multicolored shirts worn by the gaijin and Japanese players. Sony and Guinness both well-represented. As if they needed any more advertising, thought Jack. O’Mara noticing the slight smile.

  “Something amusing, Mr. Bender?”

  “Oh, not really. Just ironic. A bit of irony, yes. Nothing important. One thing though, before we start. You saw Adam Welsh the other night of course. In the future, please contact me directly by cell phone using the usual phrases. There is no need to cause Adam any more pain. Are we understood?”