Disciple of the Wind

by Steve Bein

  “Don’t think it didn’t occur to us.” Furukawa re-racked the balls as he spoke. “But Professor Yamada assured us that your heist movie antics weren’t necessary. He said he had a new protégé. He said you would do what he could not.”

  “What? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Is it? He was a deadly swordsman. You are a deadly marksman. Both of you have had occasion to prove it. And both of you accept that killing one to save ten is undoubtedly the right thing to do.”

  “It’s not—”

  Mariko didn’t even know how to complete that sentence. She killed Fuchida to save her sister; that was one for one. Why not one for ten? It seemed simple. She killed Akahata to save herself and fifty-two others. Given the chance to do it again, the only thing she’d do differently would be to shoot sooner. It seemed simple, and yet it wasn’t. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done. She still had nightmares about it. So killing one to save ten? Maybe it was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t undoubtedly so. It was still a hard choice.

  There was one choice before her that wasn’t hard. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “So I’ll kill Joko Daishi for you? Well, guess what? I’m not doing it. Shoji’s my friend. Even if she weren’t …” Mariko threw up her hands. “I don’t even know how to get this through your head. I took an oath to uphold the constitution. You’re asking me to commit premeditated murder. Those two things don’t go together. End of story.”

  “And yet you will kill him. Shoji-san has already seen it. The only question is how many must die between now and then.”

  “No. You trained him. You deal with him. If you’re so convinced that I’m the only one who can kill him, here’s an idea: maybe you could try not assassinating him. Tase him, cuff him, and give him to us.”

  “Oh? And then what? Watch your people let him slip away again?”

  “I don’t know.” This conversation was giving her a headache. “What happened to your stupid magic phone calls? There is no evidence the Wind cannot fabricate, neh? Give us something solid enough to hold him without bail.”

  “To what end, Detective Oshiro? So he can find another lawyer? Tie up the system in endless appeals? The Divine Wind will live on. You are the only one who can behead it.”

  “No.” Mariko wanted to wring his scrawny neck. “You’re looking for a hit man. I’m a cop. That’s all there is to it.”

  Furukawa sighed. “You’re worse than Dr. Yamada. I hadn’t expected such intransigence from you.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  She left without another word. Her headache lingered, but a surge of self-confidence put a spring in her step. She’d never been so proud to be Yamada-sensei’s student.

  32

  As she went to sleep in Shoji’s spare bedroom, wearing the camouflage Bape sweatpants Endo Naomoto had purchased for her, Mariko thought the best thing about being suspended was that she’d be able to sleep in as late as she wanted.

  She awoke to a living nightmare.

  A lance of sunlight poked through the gingko tree outside, angling deftly between the leaves to stab Mariko right in the eyes. This woke her up just enough to hear the low, soft sobs coming from the next room. It could only be Shoji. Mariko rousted herself out of bed, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and shuffled down the hall to knock on Shoji’s bedroom door.

  The door was open. Shoji sat on the end of her big, Western-style bed. She wore a long, frumpy, comfortable-looking nightgown and her face was streaked with tears. Mariko had never seen her eyes before—had never seen her without her big black sunglasses, in fact—and was surprised by the scars she saw there. She knew Shoji had lost her sight as a child, and she knew Shoji was a little girl during the war, but somehow it had never occurred to Mariko that Shoji might have been blinded by violence.

  “Are you okay, Shoji-san?”

  Shoji shook her head mutely and pointed at the radio.

  “—confirms thirteen kidnapped from Sumida ward elementary schools,” the news anchor was saying. “That’s thirteen from thirteen different schools. We’re told all of them are from the first grade—”

  Mariko sank to the floor. She felt like she’d been punched out cold. The radio kept going, but she hardly heard it. “Thirteen oh four,” she whispered. “Is this the thirteen?”

  “It’s worse,” Shoji said. “So much worse.”

  Mariko focused on the announcer’s voice. “—one child each from all sixteen schools in Chuo ward, and seventeen more abductees from the nineteen schools in Minato ward. The two remaining Minato schools have not yet confirmed—”

  Another knockout punch. Mariko needed him to read the whole list again before she could make sense of it. Finally the awful truth sunk in: one first-grade child from each school in Tokyo. That was the plan. Not dozens of children but hundreds. In fact, even that was an understatement. If the kidnappers wanted a hundred kids, they only needed to hijack a couple of buses at the aquarium. This wasn’t two or three guys with pistols; this was a citywide effort. But most terrifying of all was its surgical precision. Precisely one child per school. If the kidnappers could do that, they could take anyone, anywhere, at any time.

  Only Joko Daishi would think to attempt it. His mission was to unsettle people, to rip them out of their comfortable, complacent lives. To him, feeling secure was a spiritual crutch. He intended to kick it away, to show society that it could stand on its own two feet. That was the message in bombing Terminal 2: what you think of as security does not make you secure. Family was another crutch, and now he’d kicked that one out as well. He wasn’t just threatening children; he threatened all hope for the future.

  And he was doing a damn good job of it too. The radio anchor’s voice cracked, and a producer somewhere switched over to a station identification before the anchor could break down crying.

  “My child or all the others,” Shoji said. “I see it now. This is what it meant—what it was always destined to mean, all those years ago. My child or all the others.” She broke down sobbing.

  Mariko couldn’t blame her. Hundreds of kidnappings—1,304 of them, to be precise. That was what the radio would say soon enough, when they finally got a call through to some shell-shocked spokesman from the Ministry of Education. Mariko couldn’t claim to know how many elementary schools there were in Tokyo, but she was sure of the number all the same. Shoji was sure. She’d seen it.

  One thousand three hundred and four first graders kidnapped, and every parent in the city more frightened than they’d ever been. Mariko couldn’t even imagine their fear. She could imagine what today would have been like if she hadn’t lost her badge. She’d only hear about one abduction at first—maybe a request from another detective, to run down a plate or something, because a missing kid was more important than Mariko’s pissant buy-bust. Then she’d run across a weird coincidence. Maybe Han would tell her he got pulled onto a kidnapping case too. It would be three or four coincidences before any one person could see a pattern—maybe twenty cases citywide, with more than a hundred cops roped in. Detectives. Patrol response. Air support. Maybe even SWAT, if anyone had a decent lead on a location.

  Only then would someone see the horror for what it was. It would be someone up top, someone in a position to start drafting an official statement. Rumors would trickle down cop to cop before the announcement went public. One child per school. The largest mass kidnapping in history. Had Mariko been on duty, she’d have witnessed the story evolve minute by minute, one awful blow at a time. But today—the one time she’d ever slept in on a workday—she woke up to a full-blown terrorist attack.

  She could have prevented it. With a single bullet. Or maybe by thinking of something smarter than a temper tantrum to persuade Captain Kusama. Or by signing on with Furukawa. There was no telling what might have happened if she’d joined the Wind. With their resources, maybe she could have—

  No. There was no point in thinking that way. This was Joko Daishi’s fault. No
t Mariko’s, though in theory she could have changed what happened. Not Shoji’s either, though she could have changed it too. Mariko understood that as an intellectual principle. But in her gut the guilt had such a crushing grip that she could hardly speak.

  *

  It was an hour before she could pull herself together—or if not together together, then at least together enough to manage a phone call. Furukawa picked up on the first ring.

  “Here’s how this works,” Mariko said. “I team up with you long enough to bring down Joko Daishi. Not kill; I said bring down. As in arrest and arraign. Once he’s behind bars, we’re through. Understand?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “Then let’s start with you telling me how this goes. I’ve never worked in organized crime before.”

  BOOK EIGHT

  AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA PERIOD, THE YEAR 21

  (1588 CE)

  33

  Fat, cold raindrops assaulted Katsushima Goemon like a thousand tiny arrows. The whistling wind gave them speed enough to sting.

  They rattled against the oilcloth tarpaulin that he had draped over the top of his stolen wheelbarrow. It had been some time since he’d looked underneath, into the belly of the barrow. It was too dark, and even if it were not, he could not bear the sight of his friend’s sleeping face. He knew Daigoro wasn’t asleep.

  Lightning flashed, illuminating his path. It was not much farther now. That was good; Goemon had lost so much blood that he was hardly able to stand. The barrow seemed to push back against him. When he left Daimatsu shrine, he’d headed first for the horses, but the mere sight of them was enough to dissuade him from riding. He was in no state to properly tack up a horse, much less to hoist himself into the saddle. Nor was he willing to simply heave Daigoro’s limp body over the back as if it were nothing more than a sack of rice. At least he could pretend his friend was a little more comfortable in the barrow, sheltered from the pelting rain.

  Horseshoes clopped behind him, splashing in the puddles. He could not ride, but neither would he abandon his mount to be stolen. The horse deserved better than that, and so did Daigoro’s mare. He’d hitched one to the other, and he’d walk them all the way back to Izu if it came down to that. In truth Goemon’s horse didn’t even belong to him; he’d borrowed it from the Okuma stable, and he would see it returned home. If he lived that long.

  At last he reached the gate of Oda Tomonosuke, who could hardly be called a friend. Closer to say Lord Oda owed a debt, one so deep that it was not wrong for Goemon to rouse the man from sleep on such a foul night.

  He smashed his fist on the gate. It left trickles of blood in its wake. Goemon was no healer. He’d bound his many wounds as best he could, but the knots had loosened on his long walk, and now his bandages wept with red-tinged rainwater. That was why he’d come to call on the Odas. Their kenjutsu was the best in Ayuchi, and of necessity the best martial schools always employed skilled healers.

  Goemon pounded the gate again and heard an irritated shout on the other side. The rain drowned out the words, but it was clear that someone was coming. When the gate opened, Goemon was surprised to see not a door warden, not a servant, but Oda Tomonosuke himself. He was not much older than Goemon, with stern, sunken eyes and the scraggly beginnings of a beard. His hair was a matted mess and his clothes were soaked through.

  A quizzical frown wrinkled his face as he laid eyes on his visitor. “Do I know you?”

  “You do, though it’s been a while,” Goemon said. “Twenty and thirty years ago we used to face each other in duels. Right over there, in your own dojo.”

  “I fought many men in those days.”

  “Your students will remember if you do not. I bested you every time. And three or four years ago, I fought your son to a standstill on the same ground.”

  Oda’s owlish eyebrows drew together as he searched his memory. “Katsushima Goemon.”

  “Yes.”

  Oda’s face grew as dark and sullen as the storm clouds. “Why have you come? My son is gone. There is no one else here to fight you.”

  “I have not come to duel. I come to heal.”

  “I’m in no need of healing—”

  Oda cut himself short. For the first time he noticed Goemon’s seeping bandages. Then, aided by a flash of lightning, he saw the mix of blood and rain dribbling out of a leaky corner of the wheelbarrow.

  He took hold of the tarpaulin, pulled it aside, and looked in horror at the bloody form it sheltered. He would have no reason to recognize Daigoro in his current state, but the massive Inazuma blade was familiar enough. He had seen it before, about a year ago, when he and his son Yoshitomo rode all the way to Izu. They had come to test House Okuma’s kenjutsu against their own. Since then, Oda must have seen the blade ten thousand times in his mind. Yoshitomo had died on its edge.

  Goemon had not been there to see the duels, but by all accounts they were shameful, childish affairs. Daigoro’s brother Ichiro was as obnoxious and belligerent as only an eighteen-year-old can be. He provoked Yoshitomo so sorely that he’d forced an escalation from bokken to live steel. It very nearly cost him his head. A few months after that they fought again, a loud, ugly affair in the middle of the Tokaido. Ichiro died at Yoshitomo’s hand, but then Yoshitomo made his fatal mistake. Like Ichiro, he was a braggart, and when he sang his own praises and insulted his fallen foe, Daigoro had no choice but to avenge his elder brother.

  Now Lord Oda looked down at his son’s killer awash in blood. The weapon that took Yoshitomo’s life lay across his lifeless form. “Have you come looking for a bounty?” asked Oda. “I never put a price on this boy’s head. Even if I had, I could not pay it. You can see for yourself: mine is a ruined house.”

  Goemon peered past him and was shocked by what he saw. The Oda compound was overrun with its own detritus. Creeping vines threatened to pull down the walls. Dead leaves mounded in every corner. Where there was paint, it was peeling. There was standing water everywhere.

  “What … ? What happened?”

  “This boy. These Okumas. They are ‘what happened.’” Oda sneered, and for a moment he looked like he might spit in the wheelbarrow. If he did that, Goemon would have to kill him.

  But the father showed more restraint than his loudmouthed son. “You’re a swordsman,” he said. “You should understand. My Yoshitomo was our clan’s champion. His Hawk and Phoenix style was indomitable. Had he lost a duel here, out of the public eye, we might someday have recovered. Not in my lifetime, but someday.”

  Goemon nodded. He would not make a bereaved father say the rest. His son’s arrogance not only cost him his life; it ensured that everyone would remember the Hawk and Phoenix of House Oda—and remember how they’d failed, to fatal effect. Yoshitomo had nailed the doors shut on the Oda dojo for ever after.

  But his father blamed the wrong man. “This boy cost me everything,” Lord Oda said. “Everything. Go bury him somewhere else. I won’t do him the honor of a decent funeral.”

  “He did as much for your son,” Goemon said. “And you will do more for him. He is not dead. Not yet. You will muster your healers, and you will do everything you can to keep him alive.”

  Oda backed away from the wheelbarrow as if he saw a ghost in it. “No. Never. This boy is the ruin of me.”

  No, that honor goes to your idiotic son, Goemon thought. It was so tempting to say it. But he needed this man to step aside. “You owe House Okuma a blood debt.”

  “No! An Okuma died. An Oda died. The ledgers are balanced.”

  “Wrong. They were balanced when your son won his duel and walked away. Then he provoked a defeated foe, murdered him, and boasted about it to anyone who would listen.”

  There was much more to be said. Because Ichiro died, Daigoro’s mother lost her wits. She’d lost a husband and a son in less than a year, and in her madness she nearly lost everything else. She’d spoiled delicate negotiations, which then forced Daigoro’s hand in marriage. That had distracted Daigoro from dealing with his belo
ved abbot, whose bald head Goemon should have put in a box ages ago. Then came all the trouble with Shichio, another son of a pox-riddled bitch whose head Goemon should have separated from his shoulders. And now came all the trouble with that money-grubbing lout Yasuda Kenbei. All because of one woman. It was as if some evil spirit possessed her—and if so, Goemon should have cut it out of her. He knew that now. Honor and friendship had stayed his hand, but if he’d ever wanted to be a true friend to Daigoro, he should have put that madwoman out of her misery.

  No. If he’d done that, he and Daigoro would have come to blows. Goemon could not abide that thought. Better to ride with him and help him weather his many storms than to draw steel against him. But how many more storms would come? In Daigoro’s life they seemed to be endless.

  “The Okumas have fared little better than the Odas,” Goemon said, omitting the rest. “All because your son could not be satisfied with a decisive victory in a fair duel. Now you will stand aside and we will enter. Do I make myself clear?”

  Oda looked angry enough to draw his sword. He studied Daigoro, whose only sign of life was the blood trickling out of his many wounds. Then he shook his head in disbelief. Reluctantly he stepped aside. His derision had not subsided in the least, but now he directed it at himself.

  Goemon rolled Daigoro through the open doorway before Oda had a chance to change his mind. “Show me to the cleanest room you have,” he said, pushing the wheelbarrow over a carpet of wet brown leaves. “And summon your healers, if you did not dismiss them along with your gardeners.”

  34

  Daigoro awoke to the nauseating sensation of a knife sliding out of his body.

  “Hold him, hold him, he’s awake,” someone said. Daigoro did not recognize the voice. Through blurred eyes he saw an old grandmother hunched over him, gnawing her lower lip with crooked yellow teeth. He could not see her hands, but it felt like she was stabbing his shoulder with needles. Whatever she was doing, it demanded all of her concentration.