"Are you packing?" Scott asked suddenly.

The Seco suddenly felt heavy on my hip. "Yes," I said slowly.

Scott made a tsk sound. "Should have warned you about that. You'll have to leave it in the car when you go in to see Mr. Tokudaiji."

Like frag I will… That's what I wanted to say, but I held my tongue with a sigh. "I'm not sure I like the way this is working out." For a moment the old Scott reappeared in his smile. "Hey, brah, at least you won't have to go through a cavity search."

The highway emerged from the tunnel, and the whole landscape had changed. The north side of the island was much lusher than the south, which implied more rain. (Hadn't I read somewhere that changing wind patterns had really fragged with the weather in the islands over the last half century? Well, whatever.) The highway curved northwest, judging by the position of the sun, then switchbacked to the northeast, descending a hillside. Directly north was a rocky promontory, with something that looked like a military installation at its base. On the west side of the promontory, the coastline opened out into a sweeping bay so beautiful it almost couldn't be real. "Mr. Tokudaiji's got himself a pretty fair view, you ask me," Scott said, again seeming to read my mind.

We pulled off the highway and followed a harshly weathered secondary road that flanked the bay. After a klick or two, Scott took an unmarked turn, and the quality of the road improved drastically. Private road, I guessed… and a glimpse of a surveillance camera tracking the car from a hibiscus bush confirmed it a moment later. I patted my pockets to be sure I hadn't misplaced Barnard's message chip after all this, and, a little grudgingly, undipped the Seco's holster from my waistband. "You can just leave your piece in the back there," Scott suggested. "It'll be safe."

The limo sighed to a stop at a security gate, but not any kind of security gate I was used to. No electrified chain-link fences here, no strands of cutwire, no powered metal gate running on reinforced tracks. Instead, we faced a large palisade-that's about the best word I can find for it-made of finely finished dark wood. A Japanese-style arch topped the gate. I saw the motif worked into that arch and into the double gate itself and felt a faint chill in my gut. A chrysanthemum, that was the key image, replicated everywhere. Just fragging peachy.

As we sat, waiting, I examined the gate and the palisade. Though the whole setup looked like a set from an old Kurosawa flatfilm-Ran, maybe-it didn't take much brains to guess that things were a lot more secure than they seemed. Maybe the facade of the gates and the fence were real wood-if I hadn't noticed the chrysanthemum pattern, I'd have wagered they were cheaper macroplast-but they certainly covered material a lot more resilient. Reinforced ballistic composite at the very least, possibly armored ferrocrete. Though it looked as though those carved gateposts would fall like bowling pins if Scon gunned the Rolls into the gates, I'd have laid a very big bet that even a light panzer would have difficulty taking down Ekei Tokudaiji's first line of defense.

After a minute or so-enough time for security personnel to scan the car with every available frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum, presumably-a small postern gate opened and two figures emerged. They wore expensively tailored suits, not the ancient Nihonese armor I'd half expected, but their faces, their manner, and the general way they carried themselves wouldn't have seemed out of place in a samurai epic.

Neither had any visible weapons, but one of them took up a perfect position for covering fire anyway. The second approached the driver's side. Scott powered down the window and gave the guard a formal nod. "Konichi-wa," the driver said, then went on in Japanese faster than my limited comprehension could match. I heard Tokudaiji-sama once, and my own name-I think-a conple of times, but beyond that I couldn't make any sense of it.

When Scott had run down, the guard nodded again. "Go ahead," he said in unaccented English and stepped aside to join his comrade. The double gates swung silently back, and the Rolls sighed forward.

Outside the compound, the forest had been allowed to run more or less riot. Inside, everything-the position of every tree and shrub, even the proportions of the winding driveway-seemed to be laid out with mathematical precision. I felt like I was cruising through a tropical version of a Japanese formal garden… which is exactly what I was doing, of course.

I gave a heartfelt sigh and shot Scott a sour look. "You could have told me Tokudaiji was a fragging yakuza oyabun," I pointed out.

"Hey, don't give me that stink-eye," he protested. "Not my idea, brah. Just following orders."

"What an original excuse," I muttered.

The oyabun's mansion nestled up against the steep slope of a greenery-clad hill. He'd obviously got himself a good architect, had the yak boss-every line of the house and its outbuildings harmonized perfectly' with me contours of the terrain around it. How many million nuyen would a place like this set you back? I wondered. More than I'd ever see.

As we pulled up, I found myself looking around for more of the suit-clad samurai who'd greeted us at the gate. I couldn't see any, but I could feel their presence. Nothing happened for almost a minute. Scott killed the Rolls's engine, but he didn't open the door, didn't even move. I figured he knew what he was doing, so I concentrated on doing the same kind of nothing. Again, I imagined invisible fingers of electromagnetic energy scanning the car and our clothes, counting rivets and fillings and the like.

Finally, a figure emerged from the front door of the mansion-another suit-clad samurai-and stopped a couple of meters from the front quarter of the car. As if that had been his signal-which it probably was, of course-Scott climbed out, came around, and held my door open for me. As I emerged from the air-conditioned comfort of the car, the heat and humidity-and the unmistakable smell of jungle-was like walking into a door.

"Just take this all chill, okay?" Scott whispered, without moving his lips. I snorted. What the frag did he expect me to do? Go ballistic for no good reason, and try to cack the samurai with my bare hands? Yeah, right. For an instant my left hip felt awfully lonely without the weight of the Seco. Scott took up station to my left and one step back as I walked toward the Armant6-clad samurai.

When I was a couple of strides away, the man turned wordlessly and strode off toward the front of the house, ob¬viously expecting me to follow. With a shrug, 1 did. Through a set of large double doors we went-the chrysanthemum motif was carved into those doors as well, just in case a visitor hadn't gotten the message already-and into the atrium of the house.

And "atrium" is exactly the right word. The place was laid out like a Roman villa with a central open area. I guess I expected something more in the neighborhood of a Japanese rock garden complete with fishpond and hoi. Wrong, chummer. No rocks growing in the sand, no mutant immor¬tal carp. The atrium was paved with marble and sported a couple of benches plus a handful of classical-style statues. (Suddenly I flashed on the formal garden in the background of Barnard's vidcall. Did he and Tokudaiji share the same fragging decorator or what?) In the bright Hawai'ian sunlight, the white marble glared.

Our samurai guide turned left down a… well, if this was a church, I'd call it a cloister-a corridor open on one side, looking out over the atrium. (Weird mixture of styles and symbols in this house. But somehow they seemed to mesh and the amalgam worked.) Two more side-boys materialized out of nowhere flanking me and Scott a couple of paces back. Again, no weapons were visible; but, again, the way they carried themselves convinced me they wouldn't need weapons to take down anything less man a fragging dzoo-noo-qua.