Disciple of the Wind

by Steve Bein

  “Detective Oshiro, I assure you—”

  “Shut up. I was there when the second bomb went off. I saw the people you murdered. Some of them …”

  She clenched her jaw and blinked hard against the tears. She’d never experienced grief so violently as this. But she’d be damned if she would let this bastard see her cry. “There was so little left of them that you couldn’t tell where one body ended and the next began. Their families didn’t even have enough to cremate. A hundred and twelve people, all dead, all because of you.”

  “That was Koji-san’s doing.”

  “No.” In two strides she crossed the room to an antique rolltop writing desk with an old-fashioned rotary landline phone. Her pistol sights never left center body mass. “Not Joko Daishi. Not the Divine Wind. You. You trained him. You set him loose. So the only question left to me is, which one do I pick?”

  She swept up the phone in her right hand. “I can call for backup or I can shoot you where you stand. One way or the other, you’re middle management in a terrorist organization and I will see you burn.”

  24

  “What do you mean?” Captain Kusama Shuichi asked his secretary. “He just walked through the front door?”

  “Yessir.” Junko, his secretary, was a joyless golem who nonetheless took great care in doing her job, and was therefore extremely good at it. She was the only person in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department who outshone Kusama in personal grooming. He’d never seen a fleck of lint on her uniform, nor the smallest smudge on her shoes. But whereas Captain Kusama took pleasure in looking his best, with Junko it was as if her operating system didn’t support messiness software.

  “When?” said Kusama.

  “Thirteen minutes ago, sir.” This was one of the longest sentences she’d ever spoken to him. She did not need to consult her watch.

  “Thirteen minutes? Why didn’t you tell me immediately?”

  She blinked at him.

  Damn it all, he thought. Junko was nothing if not punctilious. If he told her to hold his calls, then that was what she would do, even if the cause for the interruption was capturing the most wanted man in the country.

  “All right, Junko-san. That will do. Thank you for alerting me so … scrupulously. Oh, what floor—?”

  “Eleven.”

  Narcotics Division. That was strange. Given the nature of the Divine Wind cult, Organized Crime was the more natural fit. Not that it mattered. In the end, Kusama would put the man wherever he damn well pleased—at the end of a rope, soon enough, but this morning he’d allow Sakakibara’s boys to handle him.

  Captain Kusama donned his jacket and cap, then gave himself a quick inspection in the mirror on the backside of his office door. He knew what the rank and file would have whispered about him if they saw him straightening his tie. Vain. Hungry for the spotlight. Gunning for elected office. Sometimes the rumors stung—Kusama wasn’t immune to the judgment of others—but he found he could take comfort in being so thoroughly misunderstood. His obsession with public image had not the slightest thing to do with vanity.

  Too many cops never grasped the simple truth: effective policing was first and foremost a matter of public perception. If the average man on the street believed the police were corrupt, he would live in fear. If he believed they were incompetent, he would live in fear. And the surest way to inspire belief in a department’s integrity and dependability was consummate professionalism. That was why the squad cars were waxed and the helmets were polished. That was why an officer in a dirty uniform was sent home without pay. Most cops in the rank and file thought all of this had to do with discipline. If they had been soldiers, they would have been right. But this was a police force, not a military unit, and everything they did was done in the name of public safety.

  It was true that being in the spotlight had its perks. Kusama couldn’t deny that. There were days—maybe even most days—when he enjoyed being the department’s point man with the press. When a Tokyo cop did something heroic, something to warrant his picture in the paper, Kusama was happy to be in the background of the photo. But when he spoke at a commendation ceremony, it was because honoring officers with medals and awards reinforced that all-important public perception that the police were an omnipresent force for good. It had nothing to do with one man’s public image. The pictures in the papers were incidental; what mattered was what they symbolized.

  Meeting grounds were symbolic too. Thirteen minutes was enough time for every last cop in the building to hear who was in the interrogation room on the eleventh floor. It would be a madhouse down there. Kusama didn’t like to raise his voice and he certainly didn’t care to elbow his way through a boisterous mob. There would be a lot of high-fiving going on down there; this was a major coup. So instead of joining the circus, he called Junko and ordered the suspect to be brought upstairs.

  “In your office?”

  “He’s a lone man, not an elephant stampede. I’m sure we’ll survive the experience. Oh, and call the press corps next. I’ll issue a statement in thirty minutes.”

  Half an hour wasn’t a lot of time, but Captain Kusama was eager to announce the capture of the nation’s most dangerous felon. Two hours later he would give an update. Every two hours after that, either he or one of his delegates would return to the pressroom. It was de rigueur; Kusama had groomed the reporters to expect this pattern, and through it he controlled the headlines.

  In fact it was not a stampede of elephants who entered his office, but neither was it a lone man. First came Lieutenant Sakakibara, striding in on long legs and looking as stern as ever. Then came the suspect’s lawyer, Hamaya Jiro, whose right arm was in a sling for some reason. Next came two SWAT officers. One had his M4 rifle in hand; the other had his pistol in one hand and the suspect’s handcuff chain in the other. And of course there was the man of the hour, Japan’s Osama bin Laden.

  Koji Makoto, Kusama recalled. Dredging that name up from his memory took some doing. He and everyone else had taken to calling the suspect only by his self-appointed religious appellation, Joko Daishi. Great Teacher of the Purging Fire. Now that was an ominous title if ever there was one.

  Great Teacher or not, someone had beaten the hell out of him. A bruise as dark as an eggplant dominated the left side of his forehead, fading progressively to blood red as it spread across his face. Kusama had seen tire irons leave less dramatic marks. The perp’s clothes were bloodstained, too—only a little bit, but it was fresh blood, as if he’d torn some scabs loose on his chest and the wounds were slowly saturating the fabric. He wore white pants and an airy shirt of simple white linen. Over these he wore a long, sleeveless white robe in a style Captain Kusama wouldn’t have found out of place if this was a 1970s chop-socky movie instead of his office.

  “You’ve got a limp,” Kusama said. “I’d heard that about you.”

  “I was marked from childhood.” There was a hint of pride in his voice. “My mother is the future and my father is the past. The child of destiny comes into this world marked, so that others might know his coming.”

  Kusama shot a startled glance in Sakakibara’s direction. The lieutenant only responded by rolling his eyes. Kusama could appreciate the sarcasm, but he didn’t share it. This Joko Daishi was more unbalanced than anyone had led him to believe. He’d assumed Detective Oshiro’s reports were fanciful—premenstrual hysterics at best—but now he saw she hadn’t exaggerated one bit.

  “Well, do have a seat, Koji-san.”

  The SWAT cop forcibly compressed the cult leader into one of the leather chairs facing Kusama’s polished teak desk. “Officer, have a care,” Kusama told him. “If not for your suspect, then at least for my office furniture. I’ll thank you not to bloody it.”

  The cop mumbled his apologies. For his part, Joko Daishi looked down at his own chest. It was hard to notice, given the sheer volume of his wiry black beard and mustache, but Kusama could just make out that the man was smiling. He seemed pleasantly surprised, as if he hadn’t even
noticed he was bleeding. “My newest stigmata,” he said. “They weep for you.”

  “Oh? How very compassionate of you.”

  “Compassionate. Yes. Even in your cynicism you unwittingly speak the truth. I came here to speak to the woman, and when I came, my wounds were not weeping. I did not come for you, but here we are. I have seen you on the television, spouting false prophecies and distracting the people from my revelation.”

  “Your revelation. Right.”

  Joko Daishi gave him a sad, pitying smile. “You understand nothing of the Haneda sermon. You understand nothing of the sermon at the hospital. And so yes, Kusama Shuichi, I weep for you. My very body weeps for you. You are a drowning man swimming ever deeper into darkness. Come back to the light.”

  Kusama found himself looking to Lieutenant Sakakibara again. Joko Daishi snickered to see it. It was not often that Captain Kusama found himself speechless. He was keenly aware of his silence now. Despite all the talk of sermons and prophecies, he found he’d fixated on only one thing. “Woman? Which woman?”

  Joko Daishi giggled. “The swordswoman. Who else?”

  “Oshiro?” Kusama didn’t mean to sound so offended. With half a second’s hindsight he knew it wasn’t Joko Daishi who had given offense. There was no derision to his laughter; it was childlike, even innocent, if that was something one could say of a mass murderer. No, what offended Kusama was that somehow Detective Oshiro managed to wheedle her way right into the middle of this again. She wasn’t in the room. She wasn’t even in the building. So how the hell had she inserted herself into the conversation?

  He couldn’t help but notice a self-satisfied gleam in Sakakibara’s eye. Oshiro was his pet. They weren’t fucking, so far as Kusama knew; that was the kind of thing he’d have heard about. Closer to say she was his circus dog. It wasn’t natural, making a woman behave like a man, but Oshiro had a gift for it. Clearly Sakakibara enjoyed showing off how well he’d trained her to prance around on her hind legs.

  There was a time when Kusama himself had hoped to use the performing dog to the department’s advantage, but that was before he learned that no one had ever trained her not to bark. Sakakibara must have found her misbehavior endearing, or else he’d have whipped it out of her. His greater offense was that he’d been there when Kusama tried to discipline the bitch himself. The first time Kusama demoted Oshiro, it had been for good cause. The second time—well, he remembered that one only too clearly. He had been at his wit’s end. Exhausted, angry, more than a little scared. The smoke in Terminal 2 was literally rising from the ashes even as he and Oshiro spoke. And then she barked one time too many.

  Captain Kusama knew his reaction was petty. Even in the moment he knew it. If he and Oshiro had been alone, he might have found some way to lift his punishment and still save face. But with Sakakibara there, Kusama had no room to backpedal. Oshiro was popular with the rank and file—more so than she even understood herself—and Kusama had punished her unjustly. If he was honest with himself, he hadn’t stopped punishing her. He still blamed her for putting him in the position to do what he did. It was unfair and he damn well knew it, and so now whenever he thought of that woman, he tasted the bile boiling up in the back of his throat.

  So it sure as hell didn’t help her case when the most dangerous criminal in the whole damn country came knocking on the front door, looking for a disgraced and uppity ex-sergeant and having to content himself with a highly decorated captain instead. The son of a bitch never even noticed the view.

  “Detective Oshiro isn’t here right now,” Kusama said. He managed not to growl. “Not that it matters. Wanted men don’t get to choose which detective interrogates them.”

  “My client hasn’t been accused of anything,” Hamaya said.

  Kusama snapped his head around so fast he could have given himself whiplash. In truth he’d forgotten the lawyer was there. Hamaya stood in the far corner of the room, gazing down at the city, the traffic, the first yellow tinges of autumn. He’d chosen a black pinstriped suit to match the sling of fine black mesh that cradled his right arm. Kusama couldn’t help but admire the fashion choice.

  Sakakibara felt otherwise. He stalked up to stand chest to chest with Hamaya. “You want to say that again?”

  The lawyer shrank away from him, having nowhere to go except to lean against the thick windowpane. The glass was engineered to withstand the shear forces of an earthquake, but even so, Hamaya must have been wondering whether it could support his weight. “You held my client on every charge you could,” he peeped. His mousy, frightened eyes flicked like Ping-Pong balls between Sakakibara and the precipitous drop. “Then you let him go, because you had insufficient evidence to hold him. So unless you have further evidence …”

  Sakakibara leaned in a few centimeters closer. Hamaya shrank back. Kusama imagined he could hear the window flexing under the man’s weight. “Further evidence?” Sakakibara snorted at him like a bull preparing to charge. “How about boasting about his goddamned ‘sermons’? Your client just admitted to twenty-three counts of murder at St. Luke’s alone.”

  “No. He spoke of the sermons, not his sermons.”

  “Says you. Maybe I remember something different.”

  “Then the digital record will prove you wrong.” Hamaya smiled feebly. “I took the precaution of wiring myself for sound.”

  A rumbling like distant thunder welled up from somewhere in Sakakibara’s chest. He looked the cringing man up and down like a K-9 dog sniffing for drugs. His right hand rose high as if to deliver a backhanded slap, but instead of striking Hamaya he brushed his necktie aside to reveal a tiny microphone from one of those spyware/surveillance shops, clipped through one of the buttonholes in his shirt. Kusama immediately shifted his attention to Joko Daishi. If the madman was wired, there was no hope of spotting it in that thicket of a beard.

  “You need a better attorney,” Kusama told the terrorist sitting in front of him. “Any breach of the peace that alarms and disturbs the citizenry constitutes disorderly conduct. I’d say Lieutenant Sakakibara looks alarmed and disturbed, wouldn’t you?”

  Joko Daishi replied with one of his childlike smiles. Hamaya wasn’t quite so cheerful. “He looks that way,” the lawyer said, still cringing. “But legally, police officers cannot be ‘alarmed and disturbed.’ It’s an important check on your abuse of authority, as I’m sure your lieutenant understands. I can quote the case law if you like.”

  “No need,” Kusama said. He knew the law as well as anyone. “At ease, Lieutenant.”

  Sakakibara growled and fumed, but in the end he stood down. He left his feet planted right where they were, though, so Hamaya had to squirm awkwardly around him to find a less compromising place to stand.

  “If you didn’t come to confess,” Kusama asked, “why are you here?”

  “To bring you to the light.” Joko Daishi leaned forward a little in his chair, as if sharing a secret. The truth was that he couldn’t lean back—not with his hands cuffed behind his back—but even so, his posture suggested intimacy, even across the vast expanse of Kusama’s desk.

  “You think you protect your city with your lies,” the lunatic said. “Instead you only help to fan the flames of the Purging Fire. Today those flames illuminate the truth. Today the people will learn the Haneda sermon was not the false teaching of some foreign terrorist. They will see your forked tongue for what it is. When they learn you have deceived them from the beginning, you will lose their trust. I will expose you all as the defenders of delusion—”

  And there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it, Kusama thought. Not legally, anyway. The son of a bitch was right. Worse yet, Oshiro was right. She’d warned him against implicating Jemaah Islamiyah. She told him this day would come. When the public learned the full truth about Joko Daishi, it would be the most scathing scandal the TMPD had ever seen. As soon as it came out that Kusama had a Japanese suspect for Terminal 2, the media would ask how he’d known. That would expose the cover-up of the attempted
Korakuen station bombing. Then it would come out that Joko Daishi was released from custody just hours before the first bomb went off at Haneda. Now the prime suspect would walk again, even as reporters flooded through the front door to attend Kusama’s press conference. Some of them might literally bump into Joko Daishi as he left the building.

  And then, goddamn her, Oshiro would regain her celebrity. The woman didn’t have the patience to fend off a lengthy siege. The reporters would hound her day in and day out, demanding to know why her superiors dragged her name through the mud after Korakuen. Sooner or later she would lose her composure and mention Kusama by name. That would spell the end of his career. He had willingly besmirched the name of a hero. What did it matter that he outranked her? What did it matter that she was legitimately a pain in the ass? Insubordination paled in comparison to a deliberate assault on her honor.

  Kusama wished he believed in the seven gods of good fortune. If he started praying now, maybe they would bring him a miracle.

  Joko Daishi kept bleating his sanctimonious bullshit, but Kusama wasn’t listening. He needed a solution, starting with some excuse—any excuse—to hold Joko Daishi. He would not go down as the police captain who let a terrorist mastermind escape twice.

  Then it came to him: what he really needed was for Joko Daishi to implicate himself. Interrupting the lecture, he said, “I think you’re a psychopath.”

  “No doubt the carcinoma thinks the same of the oncologist,” said Joko Daishi.

  Not close enough, Kusama thought. He didn’t quite threaten to cut me with a scalpel, did he? This would have to be perfect; those little microphones were listening. “Was that the point of the ricin? Chemotherapy? Poisoning all the cancers in our society?”

  “That is impossible. In this patient there are more tumors than healthy tissue. Very difficult to remove.”