by Steve Bein
Mariko could hardly sit still. Her rage writhed like an animal trapped inside her skin. “Sir,” she said, keeping her voice as quiet and cold as Kusama’s, “if the drunk kid deliberately aimed the car at me, I think we’d keep him locked up for as long as we could hold him.”
“Yes. And we kept Koji-san as long as we possibly could, and then some. I’m told the bail was astronomical, but as you said, he has people willing to make extraordinary sacrifices on his behalf. He was released this morning, and his mask with him.”
“Then something awful is going to happen,” Mariko said, “and I hope to hell I don’t have to say I told you so.”
Kusama glared at her, inhaling like he was about to breathe fire. But just at that moment, his phone rang. “Please excuse me,” he said. He donned a smile the way Mariko put on lipstick: it wasn’t a part of him, just something he wore to make the right impression. He wore the smile in his voice too, and transformed seamlessly from pissed-off CO to genteel public relations rep. Whoever was on the other end of the phone could never guess that he was ready to eat Mariko alive.
But whatever he heard over the phone made his face go green. His eyes turned to those big, beautiful windows, as if he might catch sight of whatever it was that made him sick to his stomach.
He hung up the phone without a word. Looking at Mariko and Sakakibara, he said, “There’s been an incident. Haneda Airport. We need to go.”
2
At long last, Koji Makoto was reunited with his father. This time they would not easily be parted.
They sat together at a writing desk in the home of Makoto’s lawyer, friend, and worshipper, Hamaya Jiro. It was a tidy desk in a tidy two-floor condominium in a high-rise Meguro apartment complex. The second floor of the condo was not supposed to exist. There was only one entrance, a stairway from below, though on the upper floor there was a false door. There were also neighbors up there who, had they been ordinary tenants, would have wondered why no one ever came or went from the apartment between them. But they were not ordinary neighbors; they were Makoto’s worshippers and concubines, nuns of the Divine Wind. Neither was Hamaya’s apartment ordinary. It concealed the hidden staircase that led upstairs to Makoto’s sanctum sanctorum. None of this was in the building’s floor plan.
The sanctuary upstairs was for worship. Since listening to his father was not worship, Makoto sat at the writing desk in the study downstairs, hunched over his notebook and scribbling furiously. His father looked at him, mute because they did not speak in words.
Makoto didn’t take his time with his father for granted. Sooner or later the law would separate them, perhaps permanently. Before that happened Makoto wanted to record every last drop of wisdom. His father never commanded him, never prescribed what to do. Rather, he dared Makoto to go further, to think on a grander scale, to express the truth in ways Makoto hadn’t dreamed possible. That was why they would be separated: because his father’s vision was so grand. That was also why the condominium was not leased in Hamaya’s name, and why it was not the only one of its kind, and why Makoto and his father never stayed at one address for more than a couple of nights: because otherwise it would be far too easy for law enforcement to track them.
There was no doubting that the law would come, for Makoto’s sermon at the airport would unsettle them beyond words. Of course that was the object of the sermon. Being settled was an obstacle to their enlightenment, and Makoto’s calling was to enlighten all beings. But Makoto had many more sermons to deliver before his time was up, and that meant he had to stay clear of the police, at least for a little while.
News of his sermon at the airport had already reached the television. Makoto could not watch it with the sound on, for without exception the reporters only reacted with delusion and fear. Even the wordless cameramen were deluded. They chose to film all the tear-streaked, fear-stricken faces, not the smoke rising from the hollowed terminal. Why could they not see the truth? Fright was the reaction of the undisciplined mind, the mind that wanted reality to be other than what it was. Why broadcast such a senseless emotion when they could film something like smoke? Evanescence was truth; fear of it was sickness.
Makoto had learned that long before he was reunited with his father, but he could talk about the truth with his father in a way that no one else could comprehend. Even now he wrote with all the urgency of a medic performing CPR, trying to record everything his father was telling him before it was too late. “One thousand,” Makoto said. “Three hundred. Four.” He scribbled the numbers in kanji, drew them in big numerals, repeated them aloud. He did not yet know what they meant.
He and his father were so dissimilar. Makoto had long, flowing hair; his father was bald. Makoto had a thick black beard; his father had no lower jaw from which to grow a beard. Makoto was a man of flesh; his father had iron skin, iron horns, iron fangs. Yet their commonalities were uncanny. Makoto was possessed of second sight; his father was clairvoyant. Makoto was the only one who could hear his father, and his father would speak to no one but Makoto.
“One thousand three hundred four,” his father told him. Makoto wrote it down again. Was it an address? A date? A code? He didn’t know, but he knew his father could not be rushed. Makoto would have to be patient—no easy thing, given the success of his sermon at the airport. He wanted to do more, to say more, to deliver the light and the truth to as many as could hear it. It broke his heart to see so many people in fetters. But his father spoke only when he had a mind to, so Makoto had to wait.
He heard a knock behind him, but then his father was speaking again and Makoto could not answer the door. “Rope,” his father said. “Razor. Children.”
“Yes, children,” Makoto said, and proceeded to sketch them in his notebook.
“Daishi-sama,” Hamaya Jiro said softly. “Your disciples have come to call.”
“Not disciples,” Makoto said. He’d seen these men before their arrival. His father had too.
He picked up his father and pressed him to his face. They were a perfect fit for each other. His father’s rust-brown fangs nestled into Makoto’s wiry beard; the interior curves of his iron cranium were precisely the size and shape of Makoto’s forehead. The two of them perceived the world through the very same eyes.
Footfalls and creaking floorboards tracked the passage of a small group through the apartment. They followed Hamaya upstairs, through the meditation room, and into the small audience chamber behind it. Makoto bound his father to his face with leather thongs, then ascended the stairs, meditating on every step and every breath. He smelled warm candle wax and incense, and enjoyed the reflection of flickering flames on the serene white walls. From a closet he retrieved his vestments: a heavy yellow mantle to don over the thin white robes he already wore; a long, thick stole crosshatched yellow over white; eight beaded bracelets on his wrists. With these, Koji Makoto became Joko Daishi, Great Teacher of the Purging Fire.
When he entered the audience chamber, he found four men waiting on their knees. As soon as Makoto stepped into view, they immediately prostrated themselves. “Praise be to Joko Daishi,” they all said.
“And may the light shine upon you. Tell me why you have come.”
“We saw what you did at the airport,” said one.
“It was so … profound,” said another.
“We came because we want to be a part of whatever comes next,” said a third.
“You are all liars,” Makoto said. “Better to cut out your tongue than to lie to one who hears the voices of demons.”
He stepped closer to them, his hands at heart center, his eyes downcast. He noticed an ink stain on the cuff of his white robe, and made a mental note to scrub it out before it set. His father told him all four men were armed, and showed him where they wore their pistols. “You have no faith,” he told them. “Your paymasters decided I have crossed a line I ought not to have crossed. They lack vision. Now they have decided to remind me there is no place the Wind cannot reach. But who knows that better than I?�
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The false acolytes exchanged glances, perhaps hoping for a cue to act. “Ah,” Makoto said. “You were not told I am of the Wind? You were told, perhaps, that I do not know the Wind exists? Rest easy, my sons. I know the breast from which you suckle. I was once a cub like you. And those of the same family should not fight among themselves.”
They shifted on their knees. One of them seemed relieved. The others were harder to read, but Makoto’s father could read their minds. They were ready now to hear the truth.
“I have transcended the Wind,” Makoto told them. “I am become the light, the brightest fire. Behold, now, the teaching of Joko Daishi.”
He kicked the first man in the face, snapping his spine, killing him instantly.
The other three reacted with the speed and assurance of pack hunters. The closest of them dove straight in, attempting a takedown, as the other two jumped to their feet. Makoto simply hopped over the man shooting the takedown, using him as a stepping-stone. With his left palm Makoto trapped the third gunman’s elbow against his chest before he could completely draw his pistol.
The fourth gunman was smarter, and tried to increase the distance between his target and himself. But the audience chamber was small; there was nowhere to go. Makoto pushed the third man into the fourth, driving them into the corner.
The third gunman’s right arm was still stuck in a cross-body draw, and pinned across his centerline as it was, he could not move it until Makoto let it go. The fourth gunman was trapped behind him, face mashed against the wall, unable to bring his weapon to bear.
The second gunman, the one who had attempted the takedown, looked up to see Makoto immobilizing two trained Wind assassins with only his left hand. Perhaps the man also noted Makoto’s adamantine stance, perfected through decades of kung fu, tai chi, aikijujutsu … but no. These were young men, no older than thirty. Young men no longer had the taste for martial art. That required discipline, and that was sadly lacking in this generation. They would just as soon assassinate through one of their video games.
The second gunman gaped at him, then scrambled for his pistol. “Draw that weapon and you shall die on your knees,” said Makoto. “I would rather have you sit and listen.”
The two pinned men struggled, but Makoto’s stance was strong and his ki was stronger; their combined efforts only managed to make the beads of his bracelets rattle a bit. “Your paymasters lack vision,” Makoto said, “or else they would see the wisdom in my sermon this afternoon. They lack vision, or else they would have known they cannot kill me. It is not yet my time.”
He reached into the third gunman’s jacket—the one who was caught in mid-draw—and relieved him of a sleek automatic pistol fitted with a long, matte black silencer. “Weapons such as this are of no use against me,” he said. “I have foreseen the manner of my death. I shall die by the sword.”
He buried the silencer’s muzzle in the belly of the third gunman and fired three times. The assassins trapped against the wall twitched and grew still. He removed his left palm and both of them slumped to the floor.
“Do not feel ashamed,” he told the only remaining gunman. “An assassin does not come into his prime until his fortieth birthday. You still have so much to learn.”
His father glimpsed movement in the other room, a faint presence glowing through the very walls. Makoto’s face broke out in a smile. “Oh, very good. You’re not bunglers after all; you’re a distraction.”
He put a bullet in the young man’s eye, and bent down to retrieve a second pistol from one of the dead assassins. A fusillade of bullets ripped through the wall where his head had been just a millisecond before.
“I told your companions already,” he called. “Your weapons are of no use against me.”
The newcomer was professional enough not to answer. He was also professional enough to stop shooting. He’d probably fired his first shots only as counterfire to Makoto’s, and now that Makoto had stopped shooting, so had he. This one was better trained than the last four.
Makoto looked into the next room, heedless for his safety because he knew he could not die. His father would protect him. His destiny would protect him. In the mouth of the stairwell, on the far side of the meditation room, a nondescript man in nondescript clothes aimed a silenced automatic pistol at Makoto’s center body mass. He did not fire—nor did he need to, or so he must have thought. There was but one way out of this room, and Makoto was three or four strides away, more than far enough for the assassin to gun him down.
“What have you done to Hamaya-san?” Makoto asked.
“He’ll live,” said the assassin.
“So that you can question him later?”
“Yes.”
“How did you find me here?”
“There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”
Makoto smiled and took a step forward. “Your bullets cannot harm me.”
“We’ll see.”
The muzzle flashed. A sledgehammer struck Makoto in the chest, slamming him backward. He put a crater in the drywall behind him. His body wanted to fold in on itself, to fall to the ground, but Makoto would not indulge it. Pain and death were insignificant. Fear of them was powerful, but in and of themselves they were just states of being. He pressed his shoulder blades against the wall to stabilize himself, then stood up to his full height.
The assassin cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “Body armor? You?” He smirked. “O ye of little faith.” He took aim at Makoto’s throat and pulled the trigger.
The shot went wide, but only because something grabbed the assassin’s ankle and pulled. Hamaya. He’d recovered from whatever the assassin had done to him. It was a feeble effort—the assassin kicked his foot free almost instantly—but an instant was all Makoto needed.
The assassin fired a third round and a fourth, but Makoto got his shot off first. His assailant grunted and dropped to the floor with a bullet in his hip. The double-tap meant for Makoto’s skull cracked two holes in the crown molding instead.
Makoto strode forward, firing alternately from each pistol. One shot obliterated the assassin’s right hand. The next shattered his shin, where to his credit the man was reaching for a little double-barreled derringer in an ankle holster. Makoto allowed the assassin to draw his derringer, take aim, and fire.
The first bullet hit him in the belly, well off center. It felt like a white-hot knife in his gut. Makoto staggered back, then resumed his forward stride. “I told you before,” he said. “I have foreseen the hour of my death. It is not yet at hand.”
The assassin’s eyes widened. Blood bloomed like a red poppy blossom across the belly of Makoto’s white robes. It joined the first wound, which seeped through the stole and the over-robe just over his heart. “No,” he grunted through gritted teeth. “No armor—”
“None. I have no need of it. You cannot kill me, for I am the light. What use are bullets against a being of light?”
The man pointed the gun at Makoto’s face—at his father—and pulled desperately at the trigger.
The derringer’s second shot was a misfire.
Makoto laid down his weapons, knelt beside the man who tried to kill him, and took him by the hand. With a sympathetic smile he raised the double-barreled mouth of the derringer to his lips. He kissed the muzzle as if he were planting a kiss on a baby’s forehead, then laid the weapon back on its owner’s chest.
The assassin stared at him in awe. One tear rolled down his cheek. Makoto nodded and smiled. The man had seen the truth.
A misfire was a dangerous thing. Sometimes they never went off. Sometimes they did, and there was no telling when. It might well have fired just as Makoto was kissing it. The bullet might still go off, but now it was resting on the assassin’s chest, aimed at the underside of his chin. More to the point, the kiss was a tiny testament to the power of Joko Daishi. Two bullets had struck him. Both should have been fatal. Their combined effect was to slow him a little. A third round should have killed him but simply refused to
fire.
“You are rationalizing,” said Makoto. “You are thinking about the caliber of your little palm pistol. You are wondering whether my priestly vestments are thick enough to serve as a bulletproof vest of sorts. Neh, my child? You seek reasons. Answers. These are the fetters of rationality.”
The assassin shook his head. “You’re insane.”
“Ah. Perhaps as insane as your paymasters insist, neh? Perhaps I am so deranged that in my delusions I can fail to perceive even my own pain. How, you are asking yourself, how does he still live? But I have told you already: your bullets cannot kill me. This is not my appointed hour.”
He pressed the derringer to the assassin’s chest and willed heat into his hand. Ki began to flow. “Fear not,” he said. “It comes soon, my son.”
When the misfired bullet went off, it filled the narrow stairwell with thunder.
Makoto reclaimed the two silenced automatics, handed one of them to Hamaya, and helped his lawyer and worshipper descend the stairs. “We must go,” he said.
Even as he said it, the condo’s front door flew open. This time it was not assassins; it was the concubine-nuns of Joko Daishi, eight of them, all dressed in diaphanous white. They flooded the room in a panic, except for one. One of them was calm.
“Daishi-sama, Daishi-sama,” the women wailed, paling at the sight of his blood. They cloyed to him like iron filings to a magnet. Except for one.
She had a derringer exactly like the assassin’s upstairs. The.22 Magnum round popped like a firecracker when she fired it into Hamaya’s shoulder. His pistol cartwheeled across the floor. As he fell, the concubines flew into a panic. Some ran. Some shrieked and froze stiff. Some threw themselves over Makoto’s body to shield him.
The traitorous woman took aim at Makoto’s father.
“Your weapon cannot harm me,” he said.
“I believe you,” she said, and she pulled the trigger.
Makoto’s world went dark. He could not hear his father’s voice anymore.
3