by KJ Charles
“How hard would it be to look into arrests and hospitalisations that night?” I wondered aloud.
“Across the whole of central Tokyo?” Yoshi rolled his eyes. “The police could do it. Does anyone on the force owe you a really huge favour, Taka?”
Taka made a noncommittal face. “Not that huge. Maybe I can talk to someone, but… What are you thinking, big man?”
Chanko was wearing a scowl that indicated serious cogitation. He paused before answering, then spoke slowly, thinking aloud.
“Dunno. Not an expert, but— Okay, so their plan was to fly out, right? By plane?”
“She’d hardly have left by bike,” Yoshi sniped.
“Or by Shinkansen, with five suitcases,” I added, glaring at him. “No, surely they’d have wanted to get out of Japan as fast as possible. First stop Narita International.”
“Yeah. So, did they plan to go to the airport, get the first flight to anywhere, or did they buy a seat in advance?”
“Advantages to both,” Taka mused. “You wouldn’t want to wait hours for a flight.”
“I’d buy a business-class flight to a very popular destination on a major airline in advance,” I offered. “So I could take another flight without waiting too long if I missed mine. But I’m not a tightwad like Kelly was. Is.”
“Yeah, and you’re pretty loaded,” Chanko pointed out. “You rob a yakuza boss because you need money.”
“That’s really helpful. Is this leading anywhere?” Yoshi gave an irritable shrug. Chanko exhaled heavily through his nose, reaching for patience, and I narrowed my eyes at Yoshi, who ignored me.
“Look, I don’t know shit about how this works, but when you buy a ticket, you have it in your name, and they put it on a computer. Right?”
“‘Put it on a computer.’ Yes, that’s exactly what they do.”
“And they keep track of people who don’t come. My sister’s flight to New York got delayed like six hours because some guy with an Arab name didn’t turn up and they got worried.”
“Oh, have you really got a sister?” I found myself asking.
“What I mean is, they have a list of passengers with tickets, and a list of the ones who don’t turn up, and they check they got the right number of people on the plane, count the bags, that sort of thing. So if Kelly and Boyfriend bought tickets, they’re going to be on a list of passengers and a list of people not arriving. Right? So how many flights were there that night that two people with American names didn’t go on?”
The grammar was all over the place. The idea was inspired.
“Clever. Oh, clever, big guy,” said Taka softly.
“Yes, but…” Yoshi was searching for an argument. “Lots of people miss flights—”
“How many Kelly Hollisters missed flights that night?” I snapped.
“Yes, well, okay. Maybe. Except that even if they bought tickets leaving from Narita, do you know how many planes fly out of there every day?”
“But not at that time of night.” Taka’s eyes danced. “They had to get there, that’s an hour at least, and do a two-hour check-in if they were going to the States. Even if they left at eight—I’ll check the schedules, but there won’t be that many possibilities.”
“If we can assume they were going to America,” Yoshi said. “Which we can’t.”
“But Kelly was only here for the money. She never talked about wanting to travel.” I wished I could stop talking about her in the past tense. “So you’d definitely start with flights to the States, and then the other late flights…but can you get these passenger lists? Is it even possible to find out?”
“We’d have to get into a lot of systems.” Taka was grinning like a demon.
“Yes, very secure systems,” Yoshi protested. “Illegally. It’s all very well expecting us to do magic—”
“What’s your problem?” Taka demanded. “This is a great idea! What, we can’t do this? What about when we did the tax stuff, remember?”
“Yes, I remember!” Yoshi shouted. “And I didn’t want to do that then, and I don’t want to get arrested now, or spend hours going nowhere following up some stupid idea from a moron who doesn’t understand what he’s talking about!”
I really didn’t need this. “For God’s sake, Yoshi. Look, we’re all stressed—”
“You’re stressed,” Chanko said. “This guy, on the other hand, is an asshole.”
Yoshi spun round in his chair, eyes snapping with fury, his cheeks scarlet-patched. “I don’t have to take this. I know all about you, you fat swine, and I don’t trust you—”
“You don’t know shit about me.”
“I know what you did. I know your sort. What I don’t know is whose side you’re on now.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth.” Chanko’s tone was lethal. “Or I’ll shut it for you.”
Yoshi was shouting then, leaping off his chair, and Chanko was moving, and Taka started to yell something over the noise, and my mug hit the wall over Taka’s computer and exploded with a spray of cold coffee and china shards that showered down over the monitor and keyboard in a clinking rain.
It cut the row dead.
They all looked at the wet stain on the wall. Then they all looked at me.
“We’ve got forty-eight hours left before the yakuza target Noriko again,” I said into the ringing silence. “Forty-eight hours. And this is how you’re spending them.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’m going to go and get some stuff in Ikebukero, some clothes,” I said. “I’ll be back in two hours. By then, Yoshi and Taka will have tracked down the boyfriend, and Chanko will have worked out what we do when we get him. Is that understood? Because if you can’t work together for forty-eight hours for Noriko’s sake…”
I swallowed hard, started again.
“I’ll do it alone if I have to. I’ll hand myself in to the yakuza if it’s all I can do for Noriko. But I did think you three would help me before I had to do that.” I looked round at each of them. “Was I wrong?”
Yoshi was completely scarlet now, his eyes squeezed shut. Chanko’s jaw was set.
Taka wiped coffee off his cheek. “Actually, I know someone at Narita. Chick. Nice tits. Must have at least medium-level access.”
“Good,” I said. “Can I just say, if I see you putting yā bā up your nose at any point in the next two days, I’m going to ask Chanko to break your legs. Because when this is over, you, Taka, can kill yourself, and you, Yoshi and Chanko, can kill each other, and I’ll send flowers to the services. But until then, you all three behave yourselves or you get out of my sight, because I don’t need this. And nor does Noriko.”
I left that hanging in the air and stalked out, slamming the door behind me. Taka’s low whistle was still audible through it. “What the hell did I do?” he was asking.
You ran off at the mouth, Billy Whizz, I thought. You blabbed to terrified, nervy, puritanical Yoshi, and if I played that wrong in there, if it comes down to a choice between staying with Yoshi and keeping Chanko around…
I was on the genkan, pulling on my boots and wishing I had trainers, when Chanko came down.
“You sure you should be walking on that foot?”
I gave him a sideways glare and concentrated on my shoes.
He held up both hands, palms out. “Okay, goddammit. Okay.”
“If that’s an apology, it sucks.” I pressed my lips together so they didn’t wobble. “And if you hit him, I’ll never forgive you.”
“C’mon. Guy’s a foot shorter than me.”
It wouldn’t have stopped me if I were him. I stood up, testing my weight on my foot. It hurt. “Chanko, I know you don’t have to put up with this mess—”
“I told you. I’m with you.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He was leaning a shoulder against the wall, head on one side, hooded eyes locked on mine.
“Yes. You can tell, because if I thought you were going to leave me here with Taka, I’d be weeping and cli
nging to your knees right now.”
He gave his deep chuckle, and we stood looking at each other for a few seconds before he shoved himself upright. “Ah, hell, Butterfly. You be careful on that foot. And take your phone. Problems, it starts hurting, whatever, you call me. I’ll come get you.”
I hardly noticed my surroundings as I walked to the station. Ekoda is a nice neighbourhood, with old-fashioned, wooden-fronted rice and tea wholesalers jostling for space with yakitori stands, and crowded, dusty electronics shops, open-fronted stalls selling ethnic jewellery and granny coats, ramen shacks and tendon restaurants with windows full of plastic food. It wasn’t nearly interesting enough to drive the circling thoughts out of my head: Yoshi’s words overlaying pictures of fresh blood and plaster, a broken arm, Chanko’s savage serenity in the middle of it all.
Did I think he was capable of what Yoshi had implied?
Hell, yes. I’d seen his temper, his constant, simmering anger, his explosive violence, the strength that made all of that so dangerous. He was undeniably a guy who worked for people. I remembered my dream image of Chanko as samurai, an armed retainer fighting under someone else’s orders.
But I had no doubt at all that if somebody told him to go beat up a lone girl, somebody would be taking his teeth home in his pocket. And he was sticking with me, with Yoshi’s sniping and the claustrophobic house, because he’d said he would—
And for his other reasons.
Yoshi might be all raw nerves, but he was rarely stupid, and he’d clearly come to the conclusion I’d reached, which was that Chanko had an ulterior motive, and it wasn’t my blue eyes, let alone Taka’s brown ones.
In my line of work, if you can’t trust your instincts, you’re liable to walk into trouble. My instincts told me Chanko was telling the truth about sticking around. He wasn’t playing me or double-crossing, but he wasn’t telling me his reasons either. The more time I spent with him, the less I wanted to know what they were.
Taka likes to have all the information. I think ignorance is bliss.
The train was a stop away from Ikebukero. I put the whole mess into the place in my head where I stored all the things I didn’t think about, and concentrated on planning my shopping trip. New looks. New outfits. Wigs, contact lenses, street chic and high fashion. Clothes for disappearing into the crowd. Clothes for being someone other than myself.
I wished it was that easy.
Chanko answered the door when I limped back, three hours later. He had that assessing expression on as he contemplated me.
“How’s it going here?” I dumped my bags.
“Fine. Pretty good. Guys have made progress. Nobody fighting. Everyone working hard, making nice.”
“Great.”
“Yeah. Fact, it was pretty lucky you freaked like that earlier. You know, so everyone felt like shit, so we all did what you wanted. Pretty lucky.”
“And we’ve achieved something as a result,” I said. “Marvellous. Is there a problem?”
He shook his head, eyes hooding unreadably. “Come on, let’s see what the geeks are doing. It makes sense to you, explain it to me.”
The geeks were in the frowsty study, which had sprouted coffee mugs, bottles of energy drink and half-consumed cup noodles. Nobody had cleared up the broken shards of the mug I’d thrown, and Taka still had dried rivulets of coffee on his neck. They didn’t appear to be doing anything except watching a black screen with a litter of white numbers on it. Taka had his long legs angled up, knees bent, feet propped higher than his head against the wall. With his arms dangling, he looked like the world’s largest daddy-long-legs. Yoshi was doing ergonomic stretches in his chair.
“Tadaima,” I sang out.
“Kechan!” Yoshi spun round. “Hey. Hi.” He gave me an awkward, embarrassed half smile. I smiled back.
“How’s it going?”
“Pretty good,” he said. “Um. Listen, about before…” His face was twisted with all the agony of a young Japanese male discussing feelings.
“How long is it since you had any sleep?” I interrupted, taking pity.
He shrugged. “I guess…Tuesday.”
“As I thought. Come on, cleverclogs, do your computer thing. Show me what you’ve got.”
He grinned at me with relief and apology, and spun back to the desk. “Come see.”
Chanko and I came to stand behind them. Letters were flickering up on the screen now, but it still didn’t make any sense, and neither of the experts was doing anything at all.
“So what is this, hacking?” I asked. “I thought it might be more, you know, dynamic.”
“Nah,” Taka said. “Airlines don’t mess about these days. Very secure systems. You’d spend a long time getting in with a sneak attack. But if you have somebody’s password, you can waltz right in the front door. Better to have the key than pick the lock, right? So we used—social engineering.” He pronounced the words in English, with care and some smugness.
“Social engineering,” Chanko repeated. “Which is…”
“Well, remember that girl with the tits?”
“Oh, wait a second, don’t tell me,” I said. “The girl you know at the airport. You, what, call her up, explain how you didn’t call her after last time because your whole family got quarantined for bird flu—”
“In a legal battle with my bitch ex-wife, actually.” Taka had never been married. “But I like the bird flu.”
“And then, what, you ask for a date, you’re going to take her to a show, you happen to have some of the latest perfume—something like that?”
“Dinner in Ginza and a fox-fur jacket.” Taka was grinning like a fox himself.
“For that she gives you her password?” said Chanko incredulously.
“No,” said Yoshi. “She just agrees provisionally to forgive him for not calling, and to look up if Fat Jimmy left on one particular flight last week. She was pretty cross about that.”
“What does Fat Jimmy have to do with anything?”
Taka gave Chanko a patient smile. “He doesn’t. But it made her think that was what I was calling about. The point was, she had to choose what jacket she wanted, I said there’s three kinds in the shipment I got, so she had to pick one. So I sent her an email with jpegs—”
“He even told her not to open the attachments in her work email, to log off first.” Guilty mischief was written across Yoshi’s face. “So as not to compromise security.”
“You put a thingy in the email,” I guessed. “A trojan, was it?”
“A keylogger program that tells us, right here, everything she types. A Toyoda special, none of your run-of-the-mill crap.” Yoshi blushed. “So she logged back in like a lamb, and now we have her password and login ID, and that means we have the run of the system. How about that?” Taka leaned back and smirked.
“So why aren’t you doing anything?” asked Chanko.
“Because the silly cow is still logged in as herself. Can’t go in till she’s off.”
“When does her shift end?”
“No idea. But she’s got about an hour before I call in and tell her her mother’s been hit by a truck.”
Chanko and I went downstairs, seeing as there was nothing interesting going on upstairs. He offered to make lunch. I sat on a stool and supervised.
“Been thinking,” he said, slicing onions razor-thin with practised skill.
“About?”
“If this doesn’t work.” He jerked his head upward to indicate he meant the social engineering. “What we do.”
“Yeah. I was wondering about that. Have you got a backup plan?” I asked hopefully.
“No.”
“Oh. Me neither.”
“We got till the day after tomorrow, if they mean this seventy-two-hour shit, and we gotta assume they do. Can’t move Noriko-san. That means protection. Taka’s got his freeters, guys he can hire, but they ain’t gonna stay forever, and the yaks got time on their side.”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought it m
yself, but hearing it articulated was chilling. “So what do we do?”
“Think up a diversion. Hope Kelly talks. Get you a weapon.”
“Me?” I squeaked.
“We need to protect two of you, it’s divided resources. You need something to carry.”
“I really don’t think I can use a gun,” I said. “I’m not very good at, you know, physical stuff. I nearly shot you.”
“You’re not getting a gun. On the table.”
I looked down. There was indeed something on the table. It was black matte rubber, about eight inches long, in a cylindrical shape, with a rounded tip.
“If this is what I think it is—”
“It’s not,” he said, grinning. “God, you bar girls.”
“You’d better be right about that. Because if it is and it belongs to Taka, I’m not touching it.”
He came over and picked up the device, weighing it in his hand, then struck hard downward. The end snapped out faster than I could see, and suddenly it was about a foot and a half of black metal whipping through the air.
I leapt away. “Whoa! What is that?”
“Expanding spring-coil baton. Seventeen inches fully extended. Three parts, see: handle, main spring, end spring, with a loaded metal tip. Flick your wrist—” he demonstrated; I shuddered back, “—and the springs give you a lot of striking power.”
“It looks weird.” I stared at the rubber and black metal, still flexing gently in his hand. “Like an evil executive toy.”
“It’s a weapon. You can break a guy’s arm with this. Here.”
I’d have preferred to touch the sex toy, but I took it, and he showed me how to retract and expand it (a kind of sharp turn of the wrist was all it took), and made me do a few practice strikes.
“Pathetic,” he said.
“I don’t hit things!”
“You do now. Okay, remember this: when you’re striking, don’t aim at what you want to hit. Aim beyond the target. If you want to hit this now—” he hoisted up a cushion and held it out, “—make like you’re aiming like a foot beyond it, at the wall, even.”
“Why?”
“Momentum. You ever go down a staircase and try and go one step too many? Like you step off the last one but you think there’s another? And it jars all the way up your spine, because there’s a hell of a lot of force when you move, but you won’t feel it till you hit something unexpected.”