The room was cold. Just cold. That was the first thing he'd noticed when they shoved him in. It still was. For nine hours he'd been sitting on a hard, canvas-covered Soviet cot, shivering.
The place was no larger than a small cell, with a tile floor, ice gray concrete walls, and two bare fluorescent bulbs for lighting. No heat. There was a slight vibration—it seemed to be part of the room itself—emanating from the walls and floor. He'd tracked it to a large wall duct.
Ventilation system could use adjusting, he'd thought, fan housing's loose somewhere. They also could turn up the damned heat.
He was wearing only what he'd had on in London, and this definitely was not London. Hokkaido was a much colder part of the planet.
The room had the feeling of a quick, slapped-together job. But it also looked like it could withstand a medium-sized nuclear detonation. One thing was sure, though: It wasn't built with comfort in mind. The door was steel, the same dull hue as the rest. It was bolted from the outside, naturally.
But if isolation and cold were Tanzan Mino's idea of how to break his spirit, to see how tough he was, the man was in for some disappointment.
What the Mino Industries CEO had unwittingly accomplished by moving him here, however, was to enlighten him about the layout of the place. As he was being escorted down the crowded facility corridors by the three leather-jacketed kobun, he'd passed a projection video screen suspended over the center of a main intersection. The location seemed to be some sort of central checkpoint, and the screen displayed a schematic of the whole facility.
He'd faked a stumble and used the recovery time to quickly scan its essential features.
He leaned back on the cot and ran through one more time what he'd seen on the screen, trying to imprint it in his memory.
Insight number one: the facility was organized into four main quadrants, with a layout like a large X. Some of the writing was Japanese, but mostly it was Russian Cyrillic characters. He massaged his temples and visualized it again.