by Steve Bein
“Occam’s razor and sheer optimism, sir.” Mariko swallowed. “We released a terrorist mastermind from prison this morning. A few hours later, the bombs went off. So either this is Joko Daishi’s work or else we’ve got two mad bombers running around Tokyo, and no leads on either one of them.”
“It’s a little too convenient, isn’t it? You’re obsessed with this man. You are by your own assessment our best expert on him.”
“Not just me, sir. Me and Han. Um, Watanabe, sir.”
“Just so. And lo and behold, you and Officer Watanabe come to me looking to get off my shit list by claiming it was your guy who orchestrated this attack. That doesn’t sound contrived to you?”
“Sir, we let him go. Against my advisement. Because I knew something like this would happen. If it’s contrived, it sure as hell wasn’t contrived by me.”
“That’s enough!” Kusama’s cigarette breath hit her in the face. “Is respect a foreign concept to you? Do you even listen to the words coming out of your mouth? I’ve got to hand it to you, Detective: I never thought I’d demote one of my sergeants twice in twenty-four hours.”
He presented her sergeant’s pin to her between his thumb and forefinger, gave her a good last look at it, then dropped it on the floor and mashed it with his shoe. “Lieutenant Sakakibara, you’re authorized to restore Officer Watanabe to his status as a detective. Detective Oshiro, on the other hand, will not retake the sergeant’s exam for three years. Moreover, she’s not to be reassigned from Narcotics.”
He snorted at Mariko. “Have no doubt, Oshiro-san: Haneda will prove to be the most important case in the history of Tokyo law enforcement. You will have no part in it. Policemen will define their careers on this case, and you will stand off to the side, with nothing but the occasional petty pot bust to feed your massive ego.”
He pulled an about-face and walked off in a huff. Mariko watched him go in shock. Three years. She’d graduated from police academy at the top of her class, and professionally speaking, she’d stayed there. That would never be true again. By the time she could take the sergeant’s exam again, even the most incompetent candidates would have passed her by.
She couldn’t care less about how prestigious the Haneda case would be. Not that Kusama was wrong. If anything, he’d understated the case. Haneda wouldn’t define a career; it would define a generation. Ten years from now, twenty years, fifty, you could ask someone where they were when they heard about Haneda and they’d be able to tell you. It was one of those moments. And Mariko knew who had plotted it. She knew more about him than anyone else in the country, and she couldn’t put that to use.
Sakakibara and Han had reached the same conclusion. Han tried to shrink into himself, to pretend he hadn’t heard, to be anything other than a mirror of Mariko’s shame. Their lieutenant looked like a disappointed father, more disgusted than angry. “I’ve got to hand it to you,” he said. “You got his attention, all right. So congratulations, Frodo. I didn’t think it was possible, but you’re actually more annoying than terrorism.”
6
Mariko borrowed Han’s phone before she left. Lines were tied up all over the city, so it took her nine tries to get through to her mom and her sister. Mariko kept the call short, partly out of respect for all the others who were on their ninth or tenth attempt to complete a call, but mostly because she wasn’t in the mood for conversation. Her demotion had crushed her like a freight train. Just thinking of it made it hard to breathe.
So she checked in, told her family she was all right, and arranged to meet them at her mother’s apartment around lunchtime. Normally the subway could get her there in less than an hour, but Mariko had no way of guessing how many trains would be running on time in the wake of the bombing. The National Police Agency might well have shut down half the city.
But they hadn’t. In fact, even the monorail to Haneda was still up and running; it just stopped at Terminal 1 instead of at the terminus underneath what was now Ground Zero. When Mariko got to the train, she found it was even departing on schedule, which, she was certain, could only have happened in Japan. Only Japan Railways was fastidious enough to guarantee on-time departures even in the wake of a terrorist attack.
The train roared as it barreled through the underground tunnels, then rose out of Tokyo Bay like a Bond villain’s personal monorail. Its single track skimmed over the water on broad concrete trestles, their blocky silhouettes totally at odds with the sleek, streamlined angles of the train cars. The morning sun glittered on the bay, leaving dazzling spots in Mariko’s eyes.
She caught a transfer to Tokyo Station, and almost rode right past it on her way to her mother’s apartment. Then she remembered she was still carrying her service weapon, which she needed to check back in to post. Not for the first time, she envied the cops on all of those American police dramas who could just carry their weapons home with them. It wasn’t that she felt unsafe without a firearm. This was Tokyo, not Detroit; her little stun gun was enough. That said, she felt an overwhelming need to crash on a couch and fall asleep. Stopping in to post was one more obstacle between her and that couch.
Tokyo Station was an anachronism. From the outside it looked like a large Victorian train depot, one that would have been more at home in Trafalgar Square in the 1800s. Surrounded by state-of-the art skyscrapers, the station seemed ill at ease, as if its modern neighbors had invaded its personal space. The grand lobby was also Victorian, capped with an enormous cupola ringed with windows. Their verdigris sashes were set into frames of white, which in turn were set into butter yellow walls and bracketed by arches and relief sculptures and other flourishes Mariko didn’t know the names for. But buried underneath all of this was the most advanced mass transit technology in the world. It was the birthplace of the bullet train, and to this day it remained the hub of the fastest rail network on the planet. An underground mall provided every service a passenger could ask for, including cell phone technologies that would have drawn incredulous stares even in the 1990s, and in the 1800s might have gotten the seller burned at the stake for witchcraft.
Mariko had always thought of the station as being somehow dislocated in time, occupying three centuries at once, but yesterday’s attack seemed to herald a new age. Tokyo Station served nearly four hundred thousand passengers a day, so Mariko, arriving at seven thirty in the morning, should have faced crushing rush hour congestion. Instead, she could actually see the stairs straight ahead of her. It was weird to see so few children, weirder still that so few were in uniform. All the schools must have closed for the day.
Mariko’s thighs burned in protest as she started climbing the stairs to street level. At the top of the stairs she saw a man putting his hands on a woman who clearly wanted no part of it. Mariko would have noticed her even without the obnoxious asshole drawing attention. The woman was barefoot. She wore jeans that were obviously too long for her, rolled up several times to make fat, heavy cuffs around the ankles. She had a man’s suit jacket clutched around her skinny frame and she held a shoulder bag to her chest. When the guy who was groping her pulled the bag away, Mariko could see the woman’s breasts. The woman wore a diaphanous white blouse—no, a dress, Mariko thought. It was bulky around her hips, as if she’d stuffed quite a bit of fabric into the jeans. Whatever it was, it was see-through, and the asshole grabbing her wanted a better look.
Exhausted as she was, Mariko had trouble summoning the little hit of adrenaline she needed to charge up the stairs. When she was halfway there she put her cop face on, and in her cop voice she yelled, “Hey, shithead, keep your hands to yourself.”
The guy looked down at her and smirked. Clearly he wasn’t threatened by a woman of Mariko’s size, especially not when that woman looked like she’d just crawled out of a vacuum cleaner bag. Usually Mariko’s uniform earned her instant credibility, but after a whole night of slinging rubble, her Class A’s were hardly recognizable. Not that it mattered; the fact that he wasn’t running yet meant Mariko had a good shot at catching him
, and the fact that she’d distracted him meant he wasn’t hurting the woman he’d accosted.
What was her story? A stripper, Mariko guessed, one who had gotten herself into trouble somehow. Maybe she’d worn that gossamer dress on stage, and maybe she’d gone home with some guy who wanted her to wear it in the bedroom. If things went sour, she could have stolen his jeans before making her escape, and since strippers weren’t known for wearing practical shoes, maybe in her hurry she’d chosen to leave hers behind. Some chivalrous fellow could have lent her his jacket. Or maybe none of that was true. It was all conjecture, story-building, because detective’s instinct automatically had Mariko looking for possible explanations.
Whatever her story was, a woman dressed like that would have drawn funny looks even without her tits hanging out. Now, embroiled in a tug-of-war over her shoulder bag, she drew looks from everyone. “Police!” Mariko shouted, and she unholstered her little stun gun.
Now she had the man’s attention. The woman seized the opportunity, ripped the bag from his grasp, and swung it at him like a tennis racket. There was something damn heavy in there, because when it hit him in the knee it buckled his leg. Then Mariko was on him. She didn’t need the stun gun to control him; he dropped of his own accord when Mariko reaped his leg out from under him.
She snapped a wristlock on him and used it to roll him facedown. He struggled, but her wristlock kept his arm as stiff as a crowbar. As long as she kept a little pressure on it, he was pinned to the floor as surely as if he’d been bolted down.
“Ma’am,” Mariko said, turning to face the woman he’d assaulted, “are you—?”
She looked up just in time to see the shoulder bag flying at her head.
Fortunately, Mariko was used to people swinging weapons at her face. She trained in kenjutsu as many nights a week as she could manage, and her current sword master, Hosokawa-sensei, was a big believer in the most traditional aspects of the art. Most modern kenjutsu schools had relegated sparring to their sportier cousin, kendo, but Hosokawa kept the old ways alive. That was awfully handy at the moment, because sword sparring involved lots of strikes to the face mask.
Mariko didn’t have a blade to parry with, so she bobbed her head backward, allowing the heavy bag to swing just past her nose. The woman in white began to run. That left Mariko with a choice: she could arrest the guy she was already holding or she could pursue the woman who had just attempted to deck her.
Back in her days as a beat cop, when an assault and battery case devolved into petty he-said, she-said stuff, Mariko tended to side with the woman. Maybe that was wrong in this case. Mariko hadn’t seen the encounter between these two from the beginning. Maybe he wasn’t trying to get a look at her tits; maybe she’d attacked him first. Maybe he’d grabbed her bag just to keep her from hitting him.
Mariko wanted to side with her anyway, but that was before the woman took a swing at her. Legally speaking, assaulting an officer was a far more serious charge than assaulting a civilian. And now the woman was running from the law. Mariko let go of her wristlock and headed after her.
The bitch was fast. Mariko was a triathlete, and a damn good one at that. Then again, she’d also been up for twenty-five hours straight, and spent more than half that time doing hard labor. She was running on fumes and her shoes weren’t made for sprinting. Even so, it wasn’t often that a perp could outrun her. A barefoot perp shouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell.
But this woman bounded up the next flight of stairs like a gazelle. Mariko hurtled after her, ignoring the burning pain in her legs. The woman gave her the slip, vanishing from view at the top of the stairs.
Mariko ran up there anyway, and saw two people lying on the floor, maybe ten meters apart from each other. It was a sure bet that the woman with the shoulder bag had pushed them down, leaving a simple connect-the-dots problem in her wake. Mariko dashed past the two on the floor and kept on in that direction.
She heard a cry of protest somewhere ahead. Another dot. She made for the sound and saw her quarry barreling through a herd of high schoolers. The woman sprinted up the nearest flight of stairs and Mariko gave chase.
They were on the mall level now. None of the stores were open yet, so the barefoot woman had nothing but wide-open space to increase her lead. But she was approaching the end of her endurance. Her pace was flagging. She looked over her shoulder, saw Mariko, and ducked around the nearest corner.
Mariko rounded the corner at top speed. The woman’s shoulder bag hit her right in the face.
It laid Mariko out flat. The floor cracked her in the back of the head. Her stun gun skittered across the floor like an oversized cockroach. She saw stars, and through them she could just make out her assailant. Mariko curled into a ball, not out of fear but just to shield her vitals. She reached for her pistol with her left hand, and held her right in a kickboxer’s high guard, hoping to ward off the next blow to the head.
The woman reared back for another swing. Mariko lashed out with her foot as hard as she could.
Her kick landed first, blasting the woman’s leg out from under her. The shoulder bag missed its target, landing with a heavy metallic clang right next to Mariko’s ear. She grabbed the bag with both hands and cradled it to her chest. This thing was not going to hit her again.
The woman stood over her, got a grip on the bag, and pulled like her life depended on it. Mariko let fly with a kick and hit her square in the crotch. It was a better target on a man, but not a bad shot on a woman either. Her assailant grunted and doubled over. Mariko had a shot at grabbing her hair, her clothes, anything to bring her down, but she knew she couldn’t afford to let go of the bag. Another shot to the head would be the end of her.
Mariko rolled on top of the bag, pinning it with her bodyweight and freeing her left hand to reach for her sidearm. The woman let go of the bag and ran like hell. Mariko tried to get up and pursue, but made it only as far as her knees. Dizziness and nausea sat her right back down. Her vision was full of glowing squiggles. When she pressed her palms to her eyes to clear them, her right hand came away bloody. She probed her fingertips through her short, choppy hair and found a wide gash in her scalp.
Still nauseous, she crawled to the wall and pushed herself up to a seated position. Giving up wasn’t her forte, but she was too dizzy to stand and she had no way to call for backup. She had to count herself lucky that her assailant had fled instead of fighting for the bag—or worse, for the pistol at Mariko’s hip. Mariko was lucky to be alive.
Once she caught her breath, the squiggles started to subside. She found herself looking at the shoulder bag in her lap. One corner was stained with blood—Mariko’s—with something pointy poking up from within the fabric. Mariko opened the bag to see what it was.
A familiar mask looked up at her. It had stubby horns and sharp teeth, and someone had sliced the tip off of one of the fangs. Its iron skin was pitted with rust and age. Whoever first crafted it had a gift, for it was astonishingly expressive, its scowl as livid as any human’s.
Mariko had seen this mask before, most recently on the face of Joko Daishi. The only difference was that it now had a ragged, gleaming, rust-free dent in its forehead, almost as if someone had ricocheted a bullet off the mask.
It was impossible—or if not impossible, then downright creepy at the very least. Not twenty-four hours ago, Mariko had asked Captain Kusama to seize the mask as evidence, to keep it out of Joko Daishi’s hands. Mariko had no doubt that Joko Daishi had taken his inspiration from it in bombing the airport. And no sooner had it fallen into Joko Daishi’s possession than he lost it again. It could have gone to anyone, yet somehow it found its way to Mariko.
In her gut Mariko didn’t believe in destiny, but intellectually, she had to acknowledge that this was more than coincidence. She didn’t have a name for the forces that could have put the mask in her hands. She was certain the woman she’d taken it from hadn’t intended for Mariko to steal it. Mariko had a grade two concussion to prove it. But
she was equally certain that she couldn’t have crossed paths with the woman by accident. There were thirty-five million people in greater Tokyo, and thirty-five-million-to-one odds against this woman losing the mask only to Mariko.
No, this was no coincidence. Someone had orchestrated their encounter. The only question was who, and why.
BOOK TWO
AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA PERIOD, THE YEAR 21
(1588 CE)
7
Shichio sat in the shade of the sedan chair, stroking his iron mask as if it were a cat.
Sedan chairs were supposed to be cool. That was why the upper classes hired them: to sit at ease, out of the sun. Or out of the rain, if the fickle dragon-god Kura-okami would visit a little rain on this forsaken land. Even a few clouds would be an improvement. Let them be as miserly as an old crone’s teats; at least they would bring some shade.
But no. This was Izu, and that meant hot and miserable.
As if it were not bad enough to listen to his bearers’ grunting, he could also smell them. Their sweat mingled with the dust of the road—and there was no shortage of dust, that was sure. Not a month past, a typhoon had lashed the entire eastern coast, from the Kansai all the way up to Totomi and Suruga, but it had stopped just shy of Izu. It was as if the clouds themselves had the good sense to avoid this place. The only water was the ocean, whose relentless droning filled Shichio’s nose with a salty tang—which, sadly, did little to mitigate the stink of the bearers.
The mask’s call distracted him from all of that. Though he would have thought any distraction would be welcome, in truth the mask frightened him. Its iron brow would never sweat, though hundreds of tiny pits suggested that salt and water had been at work over the years. Its features were so lifelike that sometimes Shichio thought it might well close its eyes to sleep. How many times had he wished it would? A little respite from the mask, just one peaceful night, was that so much to ask? Even an hour would bring him greater relief than the coolest monsoon.