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clandestinely formulated their own plan. Their alliance was betrayed; Goldoni was brutally murdered, and Okami, in his headquarters in Venice, had asked for Nicholas’s help. In Venice, Nicholas had met one of Dominic Goldoni’s sisters, Celeste, who was also pledged to help the Kaisho. In the end, Okami had been forced into hiding, one step ahead of his death. Now, while Nicholas was in Vietnam, his longtime friend ex-NYPD homicide detective Lieutenant Lew Croaker was in New York shadowing Goldoni’s other sister, Margarite, in hopes of following Okami’s Nishiki network back to Okami himself. Sooner or later, Margarite, who had inherited the mantle of power from her brother, would make contact with the network, since it was the Nishiki that provided the dirt on both influential politicians and captains of industry that had made the Goldoni family preeminent in power in America’s underworld.
    Nicholas felt compassion for his friend. It could not be easy for him to maintain his distance from the woman he so obviously loved and, at the same time, discreetly spy on her every movement. Nicholas could only guess at the turbulent emotions such actions would bring up. Nevertheless, he and Croaker had determined it had to be done.
    It was Nicholas’s belief that Okami had gone deep to ground. And Okami, it seemed, was leaving clues to direct Nicholas and Croaker toward Avalon Ltd. and the Nishiki network. Why? At first Nicholas believed it was because Tinh had been a supplier of the company. But now he realized Okami was telling them that Tinh was just a small piece of the puzzle. Again, Nicholas found himself wondering who Tinh’s business partners had been.
    Tinh’s body had been picked up by a man posing as his brother. In fact, Tinh had no family, and it was subsequently discovered that the man who had claimed him was Yakuza. Could this man have been a member of one of the families of the Kaisho’s inner council?
    Curiously, he gave as his business Avalon Ltd., a mysterious international arms-trading conglomerate. Embedded within its closely guarded computer system, Nicholas had found reference to something known as Torch 315. The assumption that he and Lew Croaker had made was that Torch was some sort of new weapon and that 315 might be a date—March 15. While they had no direct evidence for this, the fact that Okami had directed them to Avalon Ltd. gave the assumption a good deal of weight.
    Nicholas knew that Okami wanted him to track down and eliminate those responsible for trying to assassinate him. Did the way lead here to Saigon where a Yakuza posing as Vincent Tinh’s brother and an employee of Avalon Ltd. has picked up the corpse of the murdered man? Why give the firm’s name—and particularly that firm? Was Nicholas again being subtly manipulated by the Kaisho? This was another compelling reason for him to come to Saigon himself.
    Nicholas could not surrender the suspicion that Okami, in directing him toward Avalon Ltd., was also directing him toward Torch 315. It was a vital piece of the puzzle the Kaisho meant him to solve.
    Nicholas saw a figure heading across Nguyen Trai Street in a direct line for the entrance of the Anh Dan Hotel. He put down his beer bottle, automatically glancing at his watch as he turned away from the window.
    Midnight.
    “There’s no more time for argument. Get out of here, Shindo. Now.”
    His man was here.
    Naohiro Ushiba, striking a familiar pose, faced the massed lights, cameras, and questions that had become a fixture at his ministry ever since the scandals of 1992 had ripped apart the tightly bound weave of Japan’s political, economic, and bureaucratic infrastructure.
    Ushiba was Daijin, chief minister of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japan’s single most powerful economic-political entity. It had been MITI that had fueled and directed Japan’s postwar economic miracle through its policy of high-speed growth. MITI had targeted which industries it