Hideo Sato stood inside a heavily-vandalized Teleplex booth not far from The Puzzle in London』s Dods area. The transparent enclosure of the booth had been surreptitiously decorated with small advertising postcards of modified males and females promising to deliver perverted fantasies for a price that would not break the bank. Just like Tokyo, the Yakuza thought to himself, the flesh pits of Shinjuku ing alive in his mind. Half of the booth had been splashed with a liquid that had turned brown with time. Hideo didn』t want to hazard a guess as to what the liquid was. He was still too queasy from the bizarre effects of the sound gun to stomach such speculation. A chilly Union breeze wafted up below the Perspex wall of the booth.
Outside, the Japanese goon with the disfigured face, stared droopy-eyed into the foggy distance as though mentally keeping track of the official-looking black limo that had spirited their quarry away like something out of a Mafia movie. Hideo khe story of his disfigurement well. A rival gang had used his head as the first pin in a special game of Yakuza bowling. Yet throughout the horrendous ordeal Juniiyagi had not talked. That piece of urban legend had bought Miyagi respect among the Yakuza ranks and tolerance for the sorry state of his mashed-up face.
Sato used the tips of his fio hold the grimy headset as close to his ear as possible without actually making tact. These Union states, especially the Brits, were so unhygienid so backwards. In Japan iive public telephones with hands-free features, video cameras and life-size holographiditions of the other party, if they were so equipped, were all the rage. The only reason people still used these public boxes was because of these few extra features which were still not possible on a mobile phone. Unfortunately, his and the goon』s satellite-enabled mobiles had somehow beeroyed by those two idiots from the limo.
Sato listeo the ph oher end of the line and absent-mindedly scratched at caked blood in his right ear. Several hours after the fact, he still hadn』t stopped bleeding but the flow had slowed to a trickle. He had tried to put off this phone call as much as possible but it was iable that he would have to report their failure to retrieve the sole from the hacker.
「Yes,」 a female voiswered in Japanese.
「Hirayama-san,」 Sato anded gruffly. He cocked his head to get a closer look at a girl on one of the cards who had had lizard scales surgically painted all over her body. From the photo, her black fingernails had been sharpened, her tongue elongated and a cleft carved out of the middle. Everything in her pose suggested the reptile she loo be, arms splayed in a croug posture, legs flat against the floor like she was in the middle of some exotiove. Lizard Girl: Man or beast I』ll show you a good time. There was a cell phone number, e-mail, cyberpager and some generietbase, the kind you got for free with a bottle of washing-up liquid. Hideo felt himself go hard.
「Iing,」 he said to nobody in particular as he itted the e-mail address to memory. He was thinking that he might return a favor in Tokyo by having the girl shipped there for an evening of kinky distras with his Yakuza ies. He imagined her shipped out in a cage by her handler and held up by s in Tokyo to be quarantined. He was jolted from his daydream by the voice of a stressed out Hirayama.
「Good news I hope, for your sake and mihe oyabun is in no mood for bad news,」 Hi