THE SIEGE

    It was going to be a long, nasty seige.  Well, he'd told them so.  And now
there was nothing to do but wait.  Even though it was out if his jurisdiction,
taken out of his hands, Juzo Hasegawa was going to bloody well wait with them,
until the thing was resolved one way or another.  The demented gunman out in
the subway was a minor princeling, of a little-known family.  To Hasegawa, what
mattered was that he was as mad as a cut snake and that he had a machine pistol
and a slew of hostages.  What mattered to the Imperial officers who had marched
in and imposed the clampdown, was that he was Royalty.  With a great big
capital fucking "R".
    Their appearance three hours ago in his office had been a terrifying shock:
he'd immediately been convinced that they'd come to arrest him, that somehow
they'd found out about his best-hidden fears and that he was no longer
considered worthy of his position.  The very pounding of his heart had drowned out the commanding officer's voice.  He'd stayed frozen at his desk until he
managed to grasp the words "Prince Riuchi" and had recognised the photo they'd
flashed at him.  Royalty can pick and choose the most gorgeous partners and can
inbreed with them for centuries.  Riuchi's face displayed a beauty that was
almost inhuman, and hinted at thought processes that definitely were.
Hasegawa's only consolation was in calling Sengoku and telling him the Cyber
Police were off the case.  That fuckwit - he'd seen all the news cameras and
he'd spent so long primping his hair that he'd never had a chance to make his
grand entrance.
    Now, Hasegawa stood by the glass wall behind his desk, staring out.  He was
sure his heart rate stiff hadn't returned to normal.  It was cold and wet, a
miserable late Autumn night, rain pattering down the window and blurring the
city fights.  Narrowing his eyes, he focussed on the glass, seeing his own
reflection against the backdrop of the night.  The wild wind outside howled for him, wanted him, but he was safe and warm, inside.  He could not suppress a
shiver.  The glowing tip of his cigarette wavered as his lips tightened, and he
half-closed his eyes, forcing himself to exhale slowly, to relax.  No-one had
noticed, he assured himself He was safe and warm, inside.  Safe inside his
own office, his position of power.  This was a temporary usurpation.
    The psychologists were still watching him.  They'd had to let him return to
duty, had to accept his story that he'd had no memory of what had happened to
him, that he must have been drugged the whole time.  God knows there'd been
enough chemicals lacing his blood to back up what he claimed.  But they were
watching.  They didn't accept that anyone would go to so much trouble to kidnap
a police officer of his rank without getting something back.  There'd been no
ransom demands.  So why else? They'd looked very hard for evidence of
brainwashing, of planted hypnotic suggestion.  The looking had nearly broken
him.  Oh god...  He closed his eyes, lowered his chin, on the verge of tears,
almost shuddering with the effort of staying still, giving nothing away.  Oh
god, let no-one come near the window.  Let no-one look this way.  But he was
ignored, forgotten in the babble of the radios and the flickering fights of the
operations map.
    Slowly, Hasegawa mastered himself, a tall, lonely figure in the darkness by
the glass wall.  The coloured lights of the city glowed faintly around him,
outlining the broad shoulders and narrow hips, gleaming gently in his long,
shining, black hair.  His face looked like that of a carven idol, the once-broken nose left defiantly hooked, the sensual lips tight.  Relax, damn you.
He blew cigarette smoke slowly out, letting the tension out with it, or trying
to.  He wasn't fooling himself, but that didn't matter as much as being certain
he was fooling everyone else.

    Four officers of the Imperial Security Corps clustered around the
operations map.  Its surface represented the city in coloured lights, a
simplified and less beautiful version of the real thing that glowed, ignored by
them, outside.  They spoke in quiet voices during breaks in the radio traffic
with the troops they were directing around the besieged tunnel a few miles
away.  One of them glanced at the figure by the window, remembering the
insolent way the man had glared at them when they'd arrived, refusing even to
rise from his chair.
    "Hasegawa? Wasn't he the one who married one of NEtsushiba!s daughters?"
    "Yes, that's him.  Sachiko.  She got herself killed a few months ago.  Very
nasty."
    "But, surely, he could have taken care of this then? I mean, he'd know..."
    "No! He doesn't know, that's why we're here.  You couldnl have asked for a
worse person to handle this.  He has no idea whatsoever of propriety, of
respect.  He divorced his wife about a year ago.  Understand that: he divorced
her.  No consideration at all for her family or for her name."
    "Oh, I see.  Not what you could call a safe pair of hands, then."
    "Not remotely."
    "So why's he still hanging around?"
    "It's his office, I can hardly ask him to leave.  Oh, I think I know his
game, though.  The bastard is going to stand there all night, if he has to,
pretending to ignore us. Waiting for us to screw up..."
    "Well, he's going to be there a while, isn't he?"

    He was going to be here all night, he thought.  He couldn't hear what they
were saying but he caught the furtive glances in his direction.  His forbidding
figure and the fog of stale smoke around him kept them away, but there was no
way was he leaving his office to these four goons.  Most of his staff had left
although he was fairly sure Miss Junuchi was stiff in the outer office, finding
excuses to potter around even though it was nearly eleven o'clock.  And he'd
better start looking like he had something to do rather than giving them the
satisfaction of seeing him just standing idle, waiting for them to finish.  He
took a last drag of the cigarette, and his eye was drawn to the bright, hot
tip.  No.  Find an ashtray.
    He walked back to his desk, angling his chair so his whole upper body would
be in shadow, and accessed some files.  He had to find a replacement for
Benten, if nothing else.  How had the bastard done it?  Hasegawa worried at
this like a dog at a bone, not because he thought he could work out the answer
but because it was one of the few questions that had the power to distract
him.  Yanagawa had got out of the highest-security jail on the planet's
surface, where he was being held until the next shuttle flight to take him out
to the orbiting prison.  Hasegawa's best theory was that somehow he had hacked into the jail's security system a long time ago and put some sort of hidden
programme in place against a day when he might... need...
    Hidden programme.  Without realising he was doing it, Juzo Hasegawa folded
his arms tightly across his chest.  A hidden programme, some sort of hidden
conditioning that was waiting only for the fight trigger to activate it.  That
was the unspoken belief of the police psychologists.  They hadn't let him read
their report but he wasn't stupid.  He remembered more than they realised but
it wasn't coherent.  Images, emotions.  Sensation.  And most of all, terror.
He would admit that fear to no-one but he'd have been a fool to deny it to
himself.  Even when the sensations had been pleasant - or he'd been having the
wet dream of his life - the terror was still there.  Hasegawa knew better than
most the fine line between pleasure and pain, as the old song put it.  The
connection between sex and fear was like the need for salt on food, for him.
Or had been.  And his damned captor had understood it too.  His guts churned at
the thought of someone who had known him so very well.  At some of the
memories, a mellow wave of lust hardened his cock and he crossed his legs,
infinitely grateful that he had come back to sit at his desk.  Could it have
been Mitsushiba?  If Sachiko had gone home and told Daddy all about him... At
that thought his erection softened, disappeared, thank god.  And who had been
the intermediary?  Who had actually been the one touching him? He might never
know, and for some reason tears prickled in his eyes and he wanted to howl with
rage at his loss.
    Weeks had passed and he was still like a helpless puppet to emotions he
could neither control or understand, jerked between mindless lust, heartbreak
and undirected loathing within minutes of each other.  What had happened to
him, what had they done to him? It took every skiff he had learned at aikido
to keep from showing anything this time.  Hasegawa was better than he admitted
to himself - someone watching would have seen nothing in the stony expression,
heard only a drawn-out sigh.
    He came back to himself realising that his arms were so tense across his
chest that they ached.  This, too, was new.  Gently, he relaxed.  It was not a
gesture he had ever used before but now he often felt the need to touch
himself, hug himself, he needed the comfort in a way he never had before.  He
found himself craving the touch of a warm human body with an intensity that
frightened him.  On the rare occasions that anyone came near him, all his nerve
endings seemed to tingle and it was all he could do to keep his hands to
himself, to keep his distance.  He felt an overwhelming longing to touch and to
be touched, to be stroked, held, to feel soft, warm flesh against his, oh god!
Why do I do this to myself? Stop it, please, stop it!  His thoughts turned in
weary circles.  He had to stop doing this to himself. Why was he so obsessed,
what had they done to him?
    For a moment, he closed his eyes, to try and break the cycle, then
concentrated on the file open on his screen.  He was reading through the charge
sheet when he became aware that someone was pinging him.  He tapped the chat
icon and Miss Junuchi's face appeared in the comer of the screen.
    Her eyes widened as she looked at him and Hasegawa inunediately tensed:
what had she noticed?
    'Captain?" she said hesitantly, "Is there anything I can do for you?"
Raucous possibilities tumbled through his mind but he quelled them viciously
and kept his voice calm.  "Miss Junuchi, what are you doing still here at
this hour?  Go home.  Your parents will be worried."
    She lifted her chin in a small gesture of defiance.  "Sir, you're still
here.  Anyway, I've called my mother and told her I'd be late."
    "Miss Junuchi.  Go home.  There's nothing I need, so one of us might as
well get some sleep."  He smiled slightly.  "After all, I'll probably need you
to keep me awake tomorrow."
    Her eyes lit up and she laughed at the feeble joke.  Schoolgirl crush, he
had long suspected.  If she were more mature, looked more like a woman than a
child, he would have more trouble resisting her.
    "Sir, can I bring you some coffee?  Then I'll go home."  The eagerness in
her voice, as well as the blatant bribe, made him smile again.  "Thank you." He
cut the connection and went back to the file.  He couldn't concentrate: this
had to be the file of the most boring criminal in Oedo.
    A half-hint of memory teased him, floating just below the surface of
recollection.  What was it?  Something about Okio, Okio being solicitous, Okio
gazing down at him, reaching no no no no no.  His hands started to shake and he
grabbed frantically at the arms of his chair, turning to stare at the intrusive
security officers, straining to hear what they were saying, remembering where
he was and the need for control, anything to push that memory under again he
had hit her.  No.  He can't have.  She'd just spoken to him, had looked most
adoringly at him, was about to bring him coffee, how could she if he had hit
her?  He dared not try to remember, not here, not anywhere except later when he
was alone at the house.  He'd stopped breathing, was gasping for air now and
took several deep breaths, trying not to make a sound.  The four officers were
engrossed in something, updating the ops map with the newest input, ignoring
him.  He craved a cigarette and fumbled for one with shaking hands, lit it and
dragged heavily on it while he clasped the armrests of  his  chair  again.  How
could he have?  Hit her?  Was it a real memory or a false one?  So many half-remembered dreams plucked at his consciousness since, since they'd let him out
of the hospital.  This was a lie too, it couldn't have been real.
    None of them were real, pigs in suits, people he had known trailing gore
from bloody wounds, red clawed hands.  It was all rubbish, from deep within
him - no.  False, lies, implanted memories.  He'd felt someone shove a knife
into his arse, gut him, but there hadn't been a mark on him.  They were trying
to drive him mad.  A lesser man would have given in but Juzo Hasegawa knew from
personal experience that madness was not such a simple thing.  By some
measures, he was mad already, had been since childhood.  Childhood, memories of
childhood - no, lies.  He shook his head.  It had been aching for some time, he
realised.  He drew deeply on the cigarette then reached up slowly and took it
from his lips, forcing his right hand to be steady.  Gently, he tapped the end
into the ashtray and raised it again.  One of the officers glanced over at that
moment and saw only a man gazing at a cigarette as if it were the most
fascinating thing in the world.  Sarcastic bastard, he thought, and turned back
to the map.
    The door opened and a beam of light slid over the floor.  A shadow moved
and Okio walked in, turning and carefully balancing a small tray as she closed
the door again.  She walked slowly across the room, not looking at the men
around the ops map.  But they looked at her, my god, they did. Hasegawa stubbed
out the cigarette, pressing the palm of that hand hard against the desk, his
other hand still clenched on the arm of his chair.  Okio smiled and put the
tray down and he had to smile as well.  She hadn't just gone by the coffee
machine, she had made a proper pot and brought it in with cream, sugar and one,
solitary, cup and saucer.  In that moment he thought he loved her, and had to
turn away briefly to hide the glimmer in his eyes.
    "Thank you, Miss Junuchi," he whispered.  "Now, go home."  Okio's face lit
up in a delighted grin.  I'm still the only person he ever smiles at, she
thought.  Impulsively, she reached down and patted his hand then turned and walked briskly from the room.  Her heels tapped and her narrow hips swung and
the security officers practically drooled.
    Hasegawa remained frozen in his chair.  His hand burned from her touch.
Slowly, he folded his arms across his chest, hugging his hand tightly against
his ribs.  He blinked quickly, several times, but in the shadows behind his
desk, no-one could see it.
    Oh, it would be a very long siege.
    Nearly a mile away, nearly a mile high: a small figure enjoyed a view from
a luxurious apartment.  The reason it was such a pleasant view was that it
afforded a direct line-of-sight into that office.
    Hm. Not coming back to the window for a while.  A cover was drawn over the
powerful electronic telescope, and the figure leaned on the glass beside it,
musing.
    Oh, dear.  What have I done?  My hard man, my diamond, have I shattered
you?  It was not, it was never my intention.  I wanted to polish you, to see
how you glittered.  I did not see the flaws, the stress fractures.  Are you
badly broken, koha? Or just a little... cracked?
    And what shall I do now?