[Thomas Caine #1] Tokyo Black by Andrew Warren Page B

available. Then the door slammed shut. Even under the glare of the buzzing lightbulb, the room seemed lost to impenetrable darkness.
    They were the damned. He realized how close he had come to joining them. How childish his earlier refusal had been.
    Twenty minutes later, he sat on metal chair in a stark, empty room. A small metal desk was bolted to the floor, and an ancient rotary phone hung from the wall. As he flipped through the pages of the file, a strange sensation flowed over him. He felt neither awake nor asleep. Alive nor dead. The place in his nightmare, where the pain lasted forever … he knew he was not there. But neither had he truly escaped. Not yet.
    Rebecca had given him the rundown on Arinori Kusaka, but Caine suspected there were details being withheld from him.
    Details … there were always details, hiding in the shadows. And knowing Bernatto, he would not have told Rebecca everything.
    The criminal underworld and the intelligence community both operated in a never-ending sea of intel and data. The movements of high-level players like Bernatto and Kusaka left ripples and eddies…. If you looked hard enough, you could just barely see them or, rather, the absence of information they left behind. Caine felt himself sinking into those dark currents now.
    He flipped another page in the file to find a beautiful girl staring back at him. The photo was black and white, but he could tell her hair was lighter than most Japanese girls, an auburn brown. Her skin was starkly pale, almost pure white on the glossy photo paper.
    She was reclining on her side, propped up on her arms on a small bed. The details of the room were blurry, but Caine guessed it was a flat or apartment, perhaps a friend’s or boyfriend’s. But her eyes … Caine could not imagine anyone looking at a lover with such haunted intensity.
    Hitomi Kusaka.
    Or so he assumed. The pictures were simply labeled “Hitomi.” There was no other information about her in the file.
    He leaned back in his chair. That’s wrong. Rich bastard like Kusaka, with enough juice to pull favors from the goddamn CIA, but no birth certificate for his daughter? No family pictures or outrageously expensive birthday parties or vacations abroad? No paparazzi photos of her cavorting at nightclubs or stumbling out of limousines?   He supposed they could be paranoid, privacy conscious. But it still felt off.
    He sighed and looked around the empty, dingy room. This was probably the most pleasant thirty minutes he’d experienced since arriving at this prison.
    Hell with it.
    There was a business card taped to the front of the file folder with Rebecca’s name and phone number on it. Nothing else. Caine picked up the ancient phone and listened to the dial tone for a moment, turning the dark possibilities over and over in his mind. With a shrug and a sigh, he dialed the number on the card.
    “Hello?”
    “It’s me.”
    Rebecca paused. “Change your mind?”
    “Maybe. Does Bernatto know about this? Does he know I’m involved?”
    “No. He doesn’t know I approached you. He doesn’t want to know. He wants a deniable asset in case this blows up in our face.”
    “All right. Fine. I’m in. Fifty thousand. Half up front. In cash.”
    Rebecca was quiet for a moment. He could hear her soft breathing through the phone.
    “Why didn’t you come back?” she asked. “If you didn’t do it, if Bernatto sold you out, why didn’t you come back to prove it?”
    He thought for a moment, unsure how much to reveal to her. She was tenacious, he knew, and that could be dangerous. “I did come back,” he said. “It didn’t work out. And if I stayed, someone would have gotten hurt.”
    “You mean me? Did Allan threaten me?”
    “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters; it was all bullshit. I killed people, and I thought I was making the world safer, better. But all I was doing was making people like Bernatto richer.”
    “This matters, Tom. If Kusaka’s intel is real, lives are