Free Death By Degrees by Harrison Drake

considered to be the primary capital of the nation; Cape Town was the legislative capital; and judicial aspects fell to the city of Bloemfontein.
    From Pretoria they would head south to Lesotho, a small country completely within South Africa. Only two other countries in the world were completely landlocked by a single country: the Italian enclaves of San Marino and Vatican City.
    Eddie and I would liaise with agents at the INTERPOL office in Helsinki, and meet up with Najat, before making our way to the burial site. I pulled the dossier out of the envelope and looked at the details. From Helsinki we would travel north to the island of - I was going to have a hard time in Finland – Judinsalo. That one I hoped was pronounced as it looked. It was the next part that I was more concerned with: the island of Judinsalo in Lake Päijänne. I had seen umlauts over the letter ‘e’ before, but never over an ‘a’. With any luck, there would be an agent fluent in English who could translate. I didn’t think a phrasebook would be enough for me to get by.
    Once we were done in Finland, we would fly from Helsinki to Tokyo then take another flight west to the south island of Kyushu. From there… it would’ve been nice for Cho to have explained this to me. We were heading to Japan because there were two sites, and by the looks of the GPS coordinates and marks on the printed maps, they were extremely close to one another.
    I leafed through the other pages. They were crudely translated missing persons reports, probably pages that had been fed through some internet translation program. The gist was there, but they were a bit difficult to read. From the reports a man and a woman with no known connections to each other went missing on the same day. Japan wasn’t the only country to have more than one killing, but it was the only one I knew of with two killings that had occurred at, for all intents and purposes, the same time.
    Something had changed in Japan, something had made Crawford behave differently. Our job was to figure out what that was.
    I stopped off at the receptionist and let her know who would be traveling where.
    “ Merci , I will call to the airports now.” The plane tickets were open, something I wasn’t used to, but that probably had to do with the fact that they had been booked by INTERPOL. It wouldn’t take long before the young girl with the thick French accent had all of our names attached to the tickets.
    Our next stop was the armory. While we went to get our sidearms, Eddie went to check out where he would be spending much of his time. When we arrived in the armory, it was obvious that we had been expected.
    “Detectives Munroe, Jameson and Chen,” a man said from behind a locked cage. “I’ve been expecting the three of you.” He was an older man, probably in his mid-sixties, slightly overweight with a youthful look to his face in spite of his age. Between that and the thick glasses, he reminded me of a clean-shaven Santa. A French, clean-shaven Santa, that is; although with less of an accent than the receptionist.
    “I hope we live up to your expectations,” I said, a smile on my face.
    “If you don’t, these will.” He slid three cases toward the small hole in the cage. “Never fired a P226 before, not until today.” He pointed back at a silhouette target he had pinned up on the wall. For a man with such thick lenses, he sure as hell could shoot.
    “Nicely done,” I said. “So these aren’t standard issue here?”
    “Not at all. I had to fight with Cho to get her to allow this. She wanted you to use what all of the other agents use. I said that was ridiculous, you should use whatever you are comfortable with.”
    “You have a point. I’ve used one of these for over a decade. There’s no way I’d be able to erase all that muscle memory. Thanks for fighting for us…”
    “Quentin Chevalier,” he said, introducing himself without remotely trying to hide his accent. The words rolled off