Free Kusanagi by Clem Chambers Page A

them.
    â€˜ Ambaransu, ’ he said. ‘ Hyu, kuyu, dayo .’
    The old man was breathing OK. Reece loosened his belt and put the embroidered cushion from the chair under his head. The old lady was still gazing mournfully at her husband.
    â€˜Ambulance – ambaransu ?’ he asked.
    She nodded.
    â€˜ Asupirin ?’ he said. ‘ Mizu! ’
    She disappeared and came back with a glass of fizzing water. He sipped it quickly – it tasted of Disprin. He fed it to the old man, who was mumbling as he drank it, his eyes closed, his lips quivering. Aspirin would help a little.
    Reece monitored the old man’s pulse as he fed him the last of the drink. He seemed to be stable. He looked up at the old lady. ‘He’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘ Yoroshii .’ There were sirens.
    He stood up, vaulted the counter and put the slab back into the duffel bag. He ran to the door and let the paramedics in, then led them to the old man behind the counter. He put his hand over his own heart. ‘Heart attack,’ he said. ‘ Tokkan .’
    The paramedics smiled in acknowledgement and went to work.
    Reece grabbed the duffel bag. Time to scoot.

  16  
    Jim looked at his email. He was waiting for a message from Jane. It didn’t matter how much he hoped or waited, it never arrived early enough to keep him happy. It was like food to a starving man. She doled out scraps to just below the required calorie count needed to keep him healthy. Didn’t she know he was waiting on every little word from her? Did she do it on purpose? Was she just too busy for him? Was some hunky super-agent lavishing attention on her?
    When he got seriously frustrated by it, he would beat up on a stock or currency. He could spot the weak ones, like a lion could spot a calf separated from the herd. He would dive at it and drag it down. A few hundred million thrown against a weak financial instrument would cave it in under his claws. Flawed currencies, bonds or stocks were too lame to survive, and he would push them fast to the edge of extinction. Yet he would pull back from his attacks just before he drove them beyond the point of no return. While he could pile up yet greater profit if he traded them to their logical destruction, he couldn’t help but imagine the faces behind the numbers.
    A company might be doomed to bankruptcy from bad management but there were real people behind the stock chart of the dying company, normal folk who had to make their mortgage payment or cover their next credit card bill, thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands, and, like the company, they, too, were clinging on. When he reached the point at which he knew he could tilt the lot of them off the cliff, a point they were doomed to reach some time anyway, he would stop and sigh.
    Then he would buy back his stock to cover and consequentially push the price up again. He would make a few millions and roll a few numbers up at the end of his trading account and maybe, just maybe, there would be an email from Jane by the time he had finished.
    If he could go back a few years, he would be energised by the fear of failure, motivated by the fight to hold onto his tenuous position. Now that was gone and he was floating in a void of wealth, a shallow but dense pool of anaesthetic.
    Stafford brought him a round of toasted Marmite slices and a cup of sugary tea. Why couldn’t she just SMS him ‘Hello’?

  17  
    The little Japanese bar had become their personal haunt. Reece looked at his men. ‘There’s no way we can fence this in Tokyo. This slab is worth way more than the coins, and those antiques stores can’t write that sort of cheque.’ He could see the old man’s eyes rolling back in his head and his complexion turning from healthy red to a deathly pallor. ‘On top of that, we don’t know the laws here, and fishing up a valuable antiquity might just get us sunk.