Page 60 of The Atlas Maneuver

For them all.

“I have to get back those private keys,” she said.

“Why would she return them to you? If she planned to do that she would have never secured them.”

She disagreed. “You taught me long ago.Find what your adversary wants most of all, acquire it, then bargain it away.”

Her mother started rocking again, the unfathomable eyes turning away. “You know what Kelly Austin wants most of all?”

“I do.”

And she explained it all to her mother.

CHAPTER 33

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER4

6:40A.M.

AIKO SAT IN THE SECOND FLOOR OFFICE AT THE CONSULATE, NO LIGHTSon, waiting for dawn, her mind draining away yesterday’s unsatisfying events.

She’d groped for sleep all night but only found a welter of disturbing thoughts. She’d come a long way from a junior PSIA investigator after a murderous cult. Now she was working directly for the imperial family on a mission that stretched back to the last great war, an opportunity that few, if any, in Japan were ever afforded. Two years ago she knew little to nothing about Golden Lily. But she’d been granted unprecedented access to information and documents that had long been held in secret. Unfortunately, none of the actual participants remained alive. Only their stories had survived. Some true. Others false. The rest a combination of the two extremes. It was important that she deliver on what the emperor emeritus wanted. Not only for the gratitude of the imperial family, but for herself. The rewards would be immeasurable. And not monetary. More abstract.

Giri.

That sense of duty, honor, obligation, justice, courtesy, and gratitude. A concept hard for Westerners to accept. But a person flush withGiricould always be relied upon.

Like her father.

He enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army at age eighteen. In December 1944 he was sent to the Philippines to destroy an enemy airstrip and ordered not to surrender, under any circumstances. Unfortunately, all but her father and three other soldiers died during the operation. The four survivors fled to the hills and kept fighting, even after the war ended in 1945. Leaflets were repeatedly dropped from the sky informing them, and other Japanese holdouts, that the war was over. One, printed with a message from General Tomoyuki Yamashita of the Fourteenth Area Army, ordered them all to surrender. Most did. But her father, and his three compatriots, were not persuaded, thinking it all a trick.

Seven years they kept up a terrorist campaign.

In 1952 letters and family pictures were dropped from planes urging them to surrender, but the four warriors again concluded that was another trick. One of them was killed during a shoot-out with local fishermen in 1953. Another died in 1954 from a shot fired by a search party. A third died in 1972 from two rounds delivered by local police.

Which left her father as the last man standing.

Then fate intervened.

In 1974, her father, by then forty-eight, met a Japanese national who’d come to the Philippines and ventured up into the mountains looking for him. They became friends but her father still refused to surrender, saying that he was waiting for orders from his immediate superior. The man returned to Japan and found her father’s former commanding officer, who traveled back to Lubang Island and fulfilled a promise he’d made in 1944 thatwhatever happens, we’ll come back for you.

And her father finally surrendered, overflowing withGiri.

He returned to Japan and reunited with his wife. Aiko was born a year later. The Japanese government offered him a huge amount in back pay, which he refused.

More of thatGiri.

He lived forty more years, always unhappy with receiving anyattention and troubled by what he saw as the withering of traditional Japanese values.

You are the daughter of a great warrior. Who served faithfully, with honor and dignity. We met your father once and told him how proud we were for what he’d done.

The emperor emeritus’ own words. To her. Just yesterday.

That legacy was now hers.

And she’d failed. Losing Kelly Austin.

A fact that she’d not reported, as yet.