by Kotaro Isaka
Masaharu Aoyagi
It would be asking for trouble to go back to Kazu's place. That much was obvious. Even a child could figure it out. Like a deer wearing a bull's-eye on its back wandering into a lodge full of hunters. Or maybe a pigeon. He remembered Morita when they were in college telling him about a bird called the passenger pigeon, which once roamed over North America in flocks of two billion or more, but was now extinct due to overhunting. Hunters in those days would catch one of these birds, blind it, then release it and let it flap around. The rest of the flock would see the frantic creature, assume it was feeding, and come to join it—at which point they became a flock of sitting ducks. Morita had seemed to enjoy the grimmer details.
And now, years later, he felt he had become one of these pigeons himself. With Kazu the bait. If he went to see what had happened to his injured friend, they would have him in their sights. He had one dubious advantage
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over the passenger pigeon: he knew it was a trap, but was still dumb enough to be walking into it.
''So this is really stupid," he muttered to himself. Yet his feet set off in the direction of Kazu's apartment, and the further he went the quicker he walked. I'm going to get my friend back, he told himself.
As he got close to Kazu's place, however, he thought of his parents: his father, laying into the molester on the station platform, his mother standing over them looking horrified. He stopped. "You can't just react. You need to take a step back, do things deliberately." He'd heard someone say something like that once. Who? Then he realized he'd said it himself—though he no longer knew when or where or to whom. Probably to Haruko, he guessed. At any rate, the thought of his impetuous father brought him up short now.
What were his chances of doing any good at all if he simply barged into the place? He didn't know how many men were there, but if they'd come to arrest him, they probably had brought reinforcements. He spun on his heels, heading back the way he'd come, and took out his cell phone as he went.
The area around the station was quieter than usual, and the discount electronics store was nearly empty. T he recorded sales pitches and music playing inside seemed louder than ever with no one to hear them. But he found the empty, brightly lit space somehow reassuring, as if the strange and disturbing things that had happened since he'd met Morita that afternoon were all illusions, and these air conditioners and tumbling dryers and vacuum cleaners—and the normal life they promised—were the true reality. He wanted to think so.
But his eyes wandered to the line of wide-screen T Vs in the entertainment section, and a dozen pictures of Kaneda's j)arade pulled him back to his own reality. It was the same footage he'd seen at Inai's apartment, the same car, the same crowds, the same unthinkable explosion over and over.
One T V at the end of the line was tuned to a dilterent channel, and the volume had been turned up. "It's a 90," a white-haired man was saying, while a row ol heads nodded in the background. At times like this, the networks assembled a |)anel ot experts. T his j)aiticular giouj) was all men, though (heir ages and outfits were unusually varied. Aoyagi wondered what they couki have in common, but as he watched, it soon became c lear. T he "90" in ciuc'slion
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was the size of an engine, and the men were all hobbyists who flew remote-controlled helicopters. He had a feeling he'd seen the white-haired man somewhere.
"It's an Ooka Air Hover," he could hear one of the others saying, and his fists clenched as he realized it was the same model he had at home. It was no coincidence that his helicopter was the same as the one used in the assassination; everything had been carefully planned. Including Koume Inohara? He froze there in front of the televisions. It was Koume who had urged him to buy the model, to get involved with the hobby in the first place. Could he trust her?
A shop assistant approached, perhaps finding it odd that anybody should linger so long in front of the TVs, or maybe just hoping for a sale. "Can 1 help you?" he said. But, realizing he couldn't very well ask him about Koume, Aoyagi mumbled an awkward answer and moved on.
He picked up a digital voice recorder and headed for the register. Pulling out his wallet, he was about to hand the clerk a credit card when it occurred to him that they might be tracking his purchases. This kind of paranoia would have seemed ridiculous to him yesterday, but the gunshot at the restaurant and the fear in Kazu's voice forced him to admit that nothing was impossible—that he should expect anything. Just before he handed over some cash, though, he had one more change of heart and used the card. It might be useful to reveal his location at this point.
Pocketing the recorder, he made his way to the video-game section at the back of the store, where he bought a hand-held "Fudebako-dai" game unit. When they first came out, these had been so popular it had been almost impossible to find one; but now that the fad had passed, they seemed to have them in stock.
"You don't need the software?" asked the clerk when he had asked for just the tiny player.
"No. 1 heard it's like a normal TV without the software."
"That's right!" beamed the clerk. "Works like a charm." He seemed so proud of the little gadget you would have thought he had invented it himself. "Wonderful reception. Crystal clear picture indoors, on the road, anywhere at all."
Leaving the store, Aoyagi went into the station and stopped in front of
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a trash bin, where he extracted the recorder and the game unit from tlieir packaging. He installed the batteries, stowed the instruction manuals in his pack, and got rid of the wrappers.
He made a quick test message on the recorder, erased everything and, after checking to be sure no one was near, spoke into the microphone. It was a little embarrassing talking to a machine with so much emotion in his voice, but he willed himself into the part. "I'm getting out of Sendai now," he said as emphatically as he could. As he pressed the stop button, he glanced over at the clock in a game arcade. Please still be there, he thought, and humming the tune to the Beatles' "Help!" he set off again.
Masaharu Aoyagi
When Kazu's building came in sight, Aoyagi hesitated. He gritted his teeth, as if winding up gears in his belly, and forced himself to go on—then noticed that the tune had changed at some point: he was humming "Golden Slumbers" now. "Golden slumbers fill your eyes. Smiles uwuke you when you rise. . . . Once there was a way to get back home.” Paul had been trying to reunite a band that had come apart, trying to imagine a road that led back home. But in the end, there was no way to get back, to be together again, and he had been left to stitch together a medley from the random songs on the second side of the album.
Aoyagi had first heard that story sitting in a hamburger joint, so it was almost certainly Kazu or Morita who had told it. He had pictured Paul, hunched over a tape recorder in a tiny room, desj)erately mixing the eight songs tr) make a wlujle. He felt now that he could understand the feelings behind it. And even if the attempt was futile, he too was going to try to tind a way back to that time and those friends, or at least to help one of them who was in trouble now.
The sh(jrt walkway that led from the street to the door of Ka/u's building was lined with hedges. Beyond them, in the half-light, he could see a small area set aside as a |)layground. Avoiiling the path, he hiil just inside the
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concrete wall that surrounded the grounds of the building. He leaned against the wall, checked his watch, and then went over the conversation he'd had just a few minutes earlier with the man in the Panthers sweat shirt outside the game arcade—the same one who had sold him the magazine earlier in the day.
"You want me to use this to call your friend?" he'd said, holding the phone and confirming Aoyagi's instructions.
"All you have to do is hit 'redial.'" That would be the number for Kazu's cell phone.
"And 1 don't have to say anything?"
"You just play this message and make sure they hear it." Aoyagi held the recorder up to the phone and demons
trated how to work it. The man scratched his beard.
"I'm pretty old for all these gadgets," he said. "Tm an analog man." He muttered to himself as he tested the buttons, but Aoyagi found his bashful smile reassuring—like a curious child with a new toy. It was impossible to tell how old he was.
"Just play back the message," he said. "And I'm sorry to ask you to do this while you're working." The man smiled for a moment, revealing a row of yellowed teeth.
"Happy . . . to . . . help," he said slowly—in English. His pronunciation was perfect.
The plan was simple. If they were tracking his whereabouts through his cell phone and the Security Pods, he would turn their snooping to his advantage. When the magazine man played his voice from the recorder, the people in the apartment should turn their attention to Sendai Station—giving him a chance to get in to help Kazu. He had asked the guy to call Kazu's number at seven o'clock. He could only hope he'd remember—and figure out how to work the recorder and phone.
Pushing himself up on the wall, he tried to figure out which window was Kazu's—far right on the second floor, he decided, furthest from the elevator but right next to the fire escape. Then he heard footsteps and a voice and crouched down again with his back against the wall.
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'The east entrance," a man was saying. He had just come out of the building and was talking to someone on his cell phone. "He called. That's right, definitely Aoyagi's number, and his voice. I'm on my way and 1 want you to meet me there. He said he was leaving town on the bus, 1 think, but 1 don't know if we can trust him."
Feeling like a latter-day ninja, Aoyagi crouched in the bushes and considered his options. The man with the phone, still absorbed in his conversation, passed by and crossed the street. Aoyagi could see he was headed for his car, a large sedan with odd stripes down the side. As he opened the door on the driver's side, he was visible under the streetlight for a moment: frizzy hair, lanky frame, age hard to tell. The car rumbled to life like a waking animal.
T hen another figure appeared out of the dark, almost next to him, and Aoyagi's back pressed hard into the wall. It was him. The powerfully built man from the restaurant with the earphones and the gun. There couldn't be two like him in Sendai, maybe in all of Japan. He, too, passed by and headed across the street. A second door slammed and the car pulled away.
His plan was working. The recording of his voice must have gone out from the station on schedule. "Kazu, Tm not coming back there," he had said into the microphone. "Tm taking the bus, so don't wait for me." They must have traced the call and were headed for the east entrance.
He didn't know how many men had been at Kazu's apartment, but there were at least two fewer now—and one of them had taken his gun with him. If he was lucky, they might all be gone.
"Get going," a voice inside him said—his own but perhaps Morita's as well. "Get going!" Leaving the cover of the wall, he crept through the bushes toward the fire escape.
Masaharu Aoyagi
T he fire escape took him to the jiassage on the second floor; Kii/u's door was the first on the left. A fire extinguisher taught his eye and he |)ulled it off the
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wall. Kazu had told him about an old girlfriend trashing his apartment with one of these—so it seemed an appropriate item to bring to this party.
He tightened the straps on his pack and shifted the fire extinguisher to his left hand, leaving his right free to grip the nozzle on the hose. Then he pulled the pin that released the mechanism and closed his hand over the lever. As he stood outside the door, about to press the button on the intercom with his thumb, he remembered how they had teased him, saying most people used their index fingers for pressing buttons. His hand stopped, and he reached down to try the doorknob instead. There was a chance the two men who had gone out to the car had left it unlocked.
The knob turned, and the door opened with a gentle tug. Easy enough. But should he sneak in or come in with foam blazing, so to speak? After pausing for a moment, he decided on the latter. If you were outflanking your enemy and attacking from the rear—especially when you didn't have much to attack with—then you should at least make a good show of it. Besides, as keyed up as he was, he didn't trust himself to manage the stealth option.
Yanking open the door, he ran through the hall banging the fire extinguisher against the walls and burst into the living room. Kazu was to his left, face up on the couch. He was pale and his eyes were closed. As he called his friend's name, Aoyagi sensed someone coming at him from the right. Without thinking, he swung the fire extinguisher and let go—catching the man in the face and knocking him flat on his back. He lay on the carpet like a stunned frog, arms and legs in the air.
Aoyagi went first to check on Kazu. "Hey!" he shouted, bringing his face close and patting his cheek. He held his hand close to his nose to make sure he was breathing, and then yelled at him again. "Kazu! Wake up! This is no time for a nap!"
Kazu's eyes fluttered opened and he murmured Aoyagi's name, but then drifted off again. Aoyagi could feel his face growing warm and his eyes welling. There was anger and sadness in his tears, but most of all he was crying because he couldn't understand how all this had happened. How had Morita and Kazu got caught up with him in something so terrifying?
The man on the floor began to stir. Aoyagi turned and watched him for a moment. If he tried to get up, he would be forced to deal with him . . . but the only thing he knew how to do was Morita's judo trick. So he fished the
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rope out of his backpack and bound his hands as tightly as he could. As he worked, the man opened his eyes and gave him a dazed look. Aoyagi was glad he hadn't been the one on the receiving end of that fire extinguisher.
He moved back to the couch to check on Kazu again. Then, thinking it would be better to have someone else call the hospital, he went to look for a neighbor. He pressed the buzzer on the intercom next door, but as he stood waiting, he began to worry that someone could be watching him on the monitor. Moving out of range of the camera, he waited a moment more. No answer. He could hear music coming from inside, but whoever it was refused to come to the door. How could people be so callous?
He knocked, lightly at first, then harder and louder. "Open up!" he yelled. "Please open the door!" As his voice died away, he sensed someone behind him.
"Hey, Aoyagi," said a voice. "The deliveryman shouldn't make such a fuss." There was a click, like a round dropping into the chamber, and when he turned he was staring into the muzzle of a gun.
Masaharu Aoyagi
The car they put him in had stripes down the side—almost certainly the same one he had watched pull away earlier. It was roomy inside, with thick carpeting on the floor. The man with the earj)hones was driving; Aoyagi had been thrown in the back. They had not handcuffed or tied him, but another officer had climbed in next to him. T his one identified himself as Ichitaro Sasaki. With his soft face and stylish haircut, he might have been taken for the spoiled son of a rich family; but his manner was tough and down-to-earth. Sasaki had taken the knit cap off Aoyagi's head and stuffed it in his backpack, which he put on the seat beside him.
"Where are you taking me?" Aoyagi asked.
Sasaki ignored the question. "You almost had us," he said. "We thought you were at the station. We traced the call and knew right away that it was coming from the rotary at the east entrance. 'I hat's where we were headed," he said, waving his hand to indude the nKin in the driver's seat. "lUit we got
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a call from headquarters on the way. Apparently there's a Security Pod right where you were supposed to be calling from, but you weren't in the picture— just some man with a cell phone and some other gadget who didn't seem to know what he was doing with either of them."
"A digital voice recorder," Aoyagi murmured, feeling the energy drain out of him.
"CTf course," said Sasaki.
"Are you watching all of us, all the time?" he asked.
"
Like I said on the phone, we're in a state of emergency."
"Those pods were there long before the emergency."
"Do you expect us to wait around for the bombs to fall before we take the necessary precautions?"
Aoyagi realized they might start roughing him up—the way they must have beaten Kazu—but he was almost resigned to it now. After all, this Sasaki seemed to think his "state of emergency" gave him the right to do anything he wanted. Still, he appeared to be calm enough at the moment.
It occurred to him to wonder whether Sasaki was absolutely convinced of his guilt. How could he be so certain that he had killed the prime minister? But his look was cold and objective rather than vindictive, so on the off chance that he was dealing with a rational person, Aoyagi tried again. "I'm being framed," he said. "Can't you see that?" Sasaki looked at him with more intensity. "Can't you see I didn't do this?"
"We went through all this on the phone," Sasaki said. "That's what any guilty man would say. Tomorrow we'll release your name as the prime suspect, along with your picture and all the rest. The press will make a lot of noise—you're not unknown, after all."
"What makes you think that?"
"You were a hero. Rinka's savior."
"I never asked for any of that."
"Whatever you say," Sasaki chuckled.
"What proof do you have that I did this?" Aoyagi demanded.
"Actually, the evidence is pouring in."
"What evidence? From where?"
"Unfortunately for you, from everywhere," Sasaki said, closing his eyes for a moment. He opened them slowly again and looked at him. "The owner
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of a toukatsii place says you had lunch there before you went to do it; the tape from the security camera at the model shop shows you buying the helicopter; and someone caught you on video flying the thing by the river." He sounded as though he was reading from a list.