Her face was down on the desk, dark hair tousled across her cheeks. She looked up and rubbed her eyes, obviously knocked out too. Strange.
"What . . . ?" Her voice was slurred.
"Something's gone crazy," I yelled. "Where's Henderson?"
Then I remembered he wasn't there. However, I did locate Jim Bob easily enough. He was in Noda's corner office, wideawake and still carrying our Uzi. Only now there were two of those long black automatics present, the other lying atop the wide teakwood desk.
One more thing. Seated behind that desk, his silver hair framed by the sunlight streaming through the wide back windows, was . . . Matsuo Noda.
The Shogun had arrived.
And with him came the dawn of a new, powerful reality. My drugged mind was flooded with the ramifications. Matsuo Noda, I now realized, had been on to us from the start. Once again he had used us. He had been the one who had emptied the office, the better to lure us in.
But the guards . . .
Noda-san, I bow to a true samurai. A swordsman's swordsman. Of course, it was as simple as it was elegant. You were testing us, allowing us a plausible opening, just difficult enough to force us to reveal our true strategy. The dictum of the masters: "If you want to strike your enemy, let him try to strike you first. The moment he strikes you, you have already succeeded in striking him." Pure bushido.
Everything up till now had only been feints. What I assumed was the battle turned out to have merely been staking out terrain, jockeying for position. At last, though, we were ready for the real engagement. Trouble was, Matsuo Noda had just secured the high ground.