“The sound stages in that place are plenty big,” Setsura had pointed out. “Where do you figure he’s hiding out?”
After dispatching two of the three assassins who’d attacked him in his safe house and making the third his driver, he’d dropped Yoshiko Toya off along the way.
“I haven’t got a clue either,” Yoshiko said, scratching her three-foot-wide butt. “Yeah, it’s a big place. He’s gotta be somewhere in there. He wouldn’t have gone in otherwise.”
“The critter escaped from the Ichigaya Research Center,” Setsura said. “Are you saying he was already that big?”
“Naw. Word is he camped out in the Kawadacho sewers and SDF warehouses, didn’t resort to the television sound stage until he’d reached a good sixty feet.”
“What about now?”
“A hundred feet at least.”
✦ ✦ ✦
There was a floor map on the wall to his right. Setsura checked his location against that of the sound stage and started off again.
He’d taken note of how uncomfortably hot and humid the air was. Perhaps he even heard the faint reverberations of an air conditioner. At any rate, some mechanical device was purring away somewhere.
He passed down several hallways before coming to a large room with walls of glass on his right. “Public Relations” said the sign on the board. Without breaking stride, he went inside.
And quickly crouched down.
Two beats later came the sound of gunfire. The bullet passed eighteen inches over his head and struck the window of the manager’s office. Right at the height his head had been. The shooter’s timing was off but his aim was true.
Still in a crouch, Setsura waited. The PR office door opened. A man jumped in cradling a rifle. With strangely sluggish movements, the muzzle of the gun drew a bead on Setsura.
Then his body froze. Like a wind-up robot running down, his limbs stiffened and came to a stop. He wouldn’t have understood this was because of the devil wires cast out by Setsura’s right hand.
The man was in his early forties. From his disheveled long hair and beard, gray face covered in grime and ragged clothing revealing a rib showing through his papery skin, he seemed little more than a vagrant. Only his eyes glowed with a ghastly light.
This was clearly a man possessed.
“Renfield, eh,” Setsura remarked, coming to his feet. He meant the character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an inmate at the lunatic asylum attended to by Dr. John Seward. During the day, when the vampire was confined to his casket, Renfield watched over his casket and kept the vampire hunters at bay—when not snatching young girls at his master’s command.
The Renfields of Shinjuku were the hit men who worked for the movers and shakers behind the scenes. Though in the movies that came later, the Renfield of the novel was more often depicted as a slave from the start to Dracula’s intention rather than a mentally ill individual who fell under his influence.
“So tell me, where is this master of yours?”
In response to Setsura’s question, the man only bared his teeth and growled. The reaction of a wild beast devoid of reason. Setsura moved his right hand ever so slightly. The man reared back and roared like a wounded lion as the pain radiated from the marrow of his bones and shook his whole frame.
Setsura furrowed his brows. “The light in your eyes—you’ve lost your command of language as well. Sweet dreams, then.”
Those words had barely disturbed the air when the man crumpled to the floor with an inarticulate grunt.
Drawing the invisible, sub-micron titanium threads back inside his hand, Setsura looked down at the man and pinched the bridge of his nose. The man had on the tattered remains of a white T-shirt and camo trousers. His weapon was a SDF-issue Model 85 assault rifle.
They’d been expecting him, and there were bound to be more on the way. Setsura set off again, his footsteps detectably heavier than before.