State of Emergency Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the unseasonably mild winter.
    Quinn bit his bottom lip. Drake was heading for the river.
    Letting Drake make it ahead for a five-count, Quinn motored his GS into the same parking lot, across the street from the old torpedo factory turned art mall.
    He dismounted, peeling off his helmet and kangaroo-hide riding gloves in time to watch Drake pass behind a hedgerow, then through a gap in a wooden privacy fence. Quinn’s cell phone began to vibrate in the inner pocket of his Transit jacket. He unzipped the jacket to give him quicker access to his weapons, but ignored the call, tapping the butt of the Kimber over his kidney, just to make certain it was there. The suppressed Beretta 21A hung in an elastic holster under his left arm. Yawaraka-Te rested upside down along his spine.
    Gripping the helmet by the chin guard in his left hand, Quinn strode quickly across the lot, skirting a line of sports cars belonging to the boat owners at the marina beyond the wooden fence. So far, he had the entire parking lot to himself, but a rustle behind the shrubs told him that wouldn’t be the case for very long.
    Though Quinn had loved a good scrap for as long as he could remember, he’d learned early on that there was a serious difference between squaring off with someone in a contest and the dynamic, kill-or-be-killed world of close-quarters battle. In simplest terms, combat was nothing more than brutal assault, with one party trying to crush the other.
    A certain amount of posturing might precede the actual conflict, but when violence came, it came lightning fast on fist or blade or bullet. If the attacker knew what he was doing, it came from every direction and all at once. Fairness, rules, and linear time flew out the window.
    When Quinn was still ten meters from the gap in the hedge where Drake had disappeared, an Asian man in his late teens stepped into view. His shaven eyebrows and short, Chia Pet–style punch perms identified him as a bosozoku —literally violent running tribe —the youthful street gangs who often acted as acolytes to the Japanese mafia. Along with a sullen sneer, he wore baggy red slacks and a white tokko-fuku, the knee-length Special Attack jacket worn by kamikaze pilots of World War II. Boldly embroidered Japanese kanji covered the coat and proclaimed ridiculous statements like: Mother, I have to Die! and Speed and Death are my Life !
    The bosozoku planted his feet firmly in the center of the path, blocking the gap, and folded his arms across a thick chest. A six-inch knife blade glistened in his right fist.
    Japanese youth gangs were relatively rare in the U.S., and Quinn was surprised to see one in northern Virginia.
    Quinn slowed his advance slightly but did not stop, preferring to press the advantage of momentum and psychological force. Knowing Tokko-fuku couldn’t be alone, he whispered his familiar mantra to himself as he walked. “See one, think two.”
    As if on cue, two more bosozoku filed through the gap behind their apparent leader. Each of the newcomers carried a wooden baseball bat and wore jeans and white T-shirts as if they hadn’t quite earned the right to wear a Special Attack coat. The last one in line stepped tentatively to Quinn’s right. The boy’s eyes flitted back and forth, shifting just enough to show he wasn’t fully committed to the attack.
    Quinn would start with him.

C HAPTER 2
    Vitebsk Station
St. Petersburg, Russia
7:12 PM Moscow time
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    K atya Orlov was in love enough to let herself be dragged through uneven drifts of grimy snow along Zagorodny Prospekt. Her boyfriend, Wasyl, had suggested she borrow her mother’s Sberbank card. It wouldn’t be stealing, he’d assured her, merely a loan they would pay back after he got work aboard the fishing boat.
    The columned entries of Vitebsk Station loomed before her, bathed in brightness against the dark night. Slush soaked through her tattered leather boots. She wore