I giggled, embarrassed that Kei would just throw it out there like that, even though that had been years ago. "You took one of so many virginities, yeah. Some of the others I owe to some very generous teachers in Sendai."
Kei's smile was genuine and wide.
I continued. "It was all mostly just talking, but sometimes we'd walk over to a love hotel and just cuddle for the night, since everyone knew that I was interested in gaining experience for someone else. I spent time with gay men, even lesbians, bisexual people of different genders, trans girls and trans boys, an intersex person who had undergone a transition to be more androgynous physically. After months of that, I knew that no matter what body or gender you were coming from, that I really did love you and was genuinely attracted to you. That's how I was able to approach our dating with such faith."
Kei curled up a little bit, thin arms wrapped around lean legs, a small, private smile playing out on those kissable lips. "That's cool, Taka. I'm glad you did that for me."
Now was the chance. I had to go for it. "That's why I was thinking we'd get a marriage license in the US from one of the states that recognizes gender-neutral people. Which ones are they again?"
"There's a handful now, but I got my ID from the first one, in Oregon."
"Oregon it is, then," I said. "Might as well give our registration money to a government that is willing to recognize who you are. Then we'll have a marriage certificate with me as a man and you as a gender-neutral person on it. I can take that to an attorney in Tokyo and see what I can do to get us some legal protections from it."
Kei was looking at me with a thousand layered meanings I wished I could read behind those eyes.
"I want rings," Kei said. "Simple ones that don't look expensive, so we'll never have to deal with a mugging in any of the places we may go for work. But I do want rings, so cute boy-bitches don't hit on you in bars."
"I'll buy them," I said. Too late—they were in my bag across the room.
"A proposal," Kei said then. "Promises read to each other privately, somewhere beautiful. Our own vows. Maybe a small ceremony if we can get our moms in from opposite sides of the country. We have to forget this conversation happened so the proposal is still a surprise."
I would never forget this conversation in all of my life. "Okay. All of that can be done."
Kei downed the glass of soju and poured us another. "Remember the first time we slept together?"
I clinked Kei's glass and took a sip. "Hell yeah."
Kei smirked and drank too. "The archery team went up to Hokkaido for regionals, and as we were packing up to leave, you so nonchalantly informed everyone that you had booked a room in an onsen hotel for just you and me for three more nights. All the senpai were so mad!"
I grinned into my glass. "I'd wanted to surprise you, but realized at the last minute that if you weren't as interested as I was, that it would all come out as creepy and I panicked."
Kei chuckled. "I was down with it."
I closed my eyes, remembering those four days like they were a dream. "We only left the hotel for like, an hour or two each night to walk around."
Kei jumped in with our story. "The fall leaves, the private bath just outside our room, the traditional meals brought up to our room, sleeping in futon on tatami, the yukata."
"The yukata," I seconded, and from the glow in Kei's eyes I knew we were both thinking about the same memories.
"God, Kei," I exclaimed. "You blew my mind that weekend! I never knew my body could be so electrified!"
Kei laughed. "You gained a dozen or so notches on your bedpost then, huh? I was just helping you out with that."
I locked eyes with Kei. "I want thousands more."
Not breaking my gaze, Kei slid off the window sill and crossed over to me, running a hand up my thigh, the entreaty as loud and clear as any words could ever manage.
"Aren't you tired from earlier?" I asked.
"Maybe just one round then," Kei said playfully.
I jumped off the sill, swooped Kei into my arms and carried my precious burden to the bed.
*~*~*
The next morning, Kei and I found a traditional tea house bordering the centrally-located Cheonggye stream. The tea house had been relocated after World War II with most of it restored. Although the structure now was not at risk of flooding as it had been when it had been next to the Han River, raised walkways led from one room to another, where different stages of the tea-making process were on display, along with various show rooms and shops. I marveled at the large wooden beams, ornately carved and painted. This had once been a compound that housed low-level politicians who served the emperor in the castle.
Kei and I sat on one of the verandas sipping tea, watching the koi swim in one of the ponds by the stream, and a couple of mothers with their children. Across the edge of the park, you could see the shopping district through the trees. Young women strolled the lane in ridiculously high heels, carrying fancy bags with high-brand names I couldn't make out from this distance. It was the same as if I were strolling down the Ginza strip in Tokyo. There were a couple of street stalls sprinkled around the border of the park, people eating skewers of spicy meat and chatting.
Kei pointed out the old man surreptitiously trying to fish the koi in the little pond, barefoot on the muddy bank with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. Inevitably different, with millennia of history separated from each other, I somehow felt a strong semblance of home, of Japan, in this place. It was like I could close my eyes and reopen them to Ueno Park, where Kei and I would always go to have a private conversation about our investigations away from any listening ears at headquarters.
Kei and I had decided to walk instead of getting on the subway. We both agreed that knowing the neighborhood itself was more important than knowing the trains that wouldn't be operating at a time that we might need to run away from something. We had considered renting a moped, but Kei hated driving, and I couldn't get used to traffic being on the right, so we reasoned that it would be more dangerous than just getting places on foot.
After hanging out at that beautiful park, with all the people walking their dogs and the children playing and couples chatting, I was hesitant to follow Kei down the streets. They slowly got narrower and narrower, the buildings of the still-sleeping red-light district closing in on us and making the alleys darker and darker. My heart told me that there were children here that were exactly like the children playing at the park, and that I was venturing into this darkness in order to look for them, but I was still reluctant to leave the light behind.
My GPS led us to a closed bibimbap restaurant. Kei and I looked around, keeping our sunglasses on despite how shaded it was. Kei was completely concealed behind the ball cap and the mask, although the mask itself could be identifying if there were cameras. Despite all the cars in Seoul, no one here bothered with anything more than a paper mask on the bad pollution days. I had on a ball cap and hoped that was enough to conceal me.
An older woman opened the door to the restaurant and cocked her head back in. We followed and stood quietly inside the dark dining room. The woman locked the door and motioned us to follow her downstairs behind the kitchen. Kei went down first. Even though my bodyguard was here, I was on high alert, my heart pounding. We could so easily become surrounded in here.
The basement was tiny, with storage around the entire perimeter so that it served as a pantry. There was a card table with an ash tray in the middle that overflowed. Three chairs around the table.
Kei yanked me down the last of the stairs and stepped in front of me, gun drawn.
A man stood at the base of the stairs where I had just been, hands raised.
He said something and Kei responded.
"What was the code word Chief Kim gave you?" Kei asked me.
"Purple squid ink," I said in Japanese.
Kei nodded. "That's what he just told me in Korean."
"It must be him."
The man pulled something out from in
side his shirt and showed us. It was a police badge. The woman tsk-ed at him and shook her head.
I pulled out a chair and sat down. Kei translated once the three of us got settled. The woman returned upstairs.
"There are a lot of adult filmmakers who operate out of Seoul," the agent codenamed Sparrow told us. "None of them use Japanese names, so I can't guarantee the filmmaker you're talking about is the one who goes by Mikabe."
I pulled out my phone and loaded the sample video. I showed it to him and Sparrow leaned forward to see.
"That's a high-quality video," he remarked.
"It was shot in a professional film studio," I said.
He heaved a breath, deep in thought. "There are a couple of buildings in this area that probably have studio space. Although the mafia operates a lot of the businesses in the building, there are other non-mafia enterprises there as well, even tech firms. Fuck, she's way too young."
I stopped the video when Sparrow leaned back in his chair. He hastily pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it, inhaling sharply as if that would purge the troubling images from his memory. I told myself to calm down when the smoke wafted over us. Kei's mask had several hours on it still. Sparrow's reaction seemed genuine.
"He's a Japanese national," I confirmed. "We've already apprehended him before in Tokyo, but he chose Seoul to go underground."
Sparrow shook his head and fished a receipt out of his pocket. I supplied a pen and he wrote several lines in Korean. Sparrow first handed the paper to me, then realized what he was doing and gave it to Kei.
Kei read the paper and the two conversed for several minutes.
"We have two different Hangul names that might be Mikabe," Kei told me in Japanese. "That and several buildings we can look into for that studio."
I reached out and shook Sparrow's hand. "I'll be in touch with you through headquarters if we have any other questions. We'll keep to ourselves otherwise."
"Talk to the Chief about the kind of work that you do," Sparrow told me. "I've been undercover for six years and could use more people on my side around here. Tell Chief to send Koreans to do what you're doing. There shouldn't be cops going after just one of these guys because he randomly happens to be Japanese. This is too pervasive on every front, from porn to the brothels up the street."
I agreed to talk about it with Chief Kim.
Kei's jaw clenched. A hard nod. "Let's catch this fucker."
I smiled. That's my knight.
*~*~*
The next week we spent our time meeting contacts, then returning to the hotel for me to continue researching the buildings. I discovered another one of Mikabe's aliases, which led me to a film studio in central Seoul where he might be currently producing. One afternoon I decided we were ready. We rested well, then prepared to infiltrate that night.
The subway stop we used was just a block down from the Gyeongju Tower in downtown Seoul. The sun was beginning to set, but since it cleared the sky scrapers only for a couple of hours each day, we'd been roaming in shadows for some time.
Kei and I walked right in through the main entrance. There was no security at the door, despite it being a downtown building. I located the stairwell for a fast escape if we needed it, then punched the button for the elevator.
We got on and Kei hit the button for the forty-seventh floor. I watched Kei tighten the mask, then adjust it some more, the whole way up the building. When we were on assignment, I missed seeing Kei's face, catching the subtlety of expression that communicated so much more than my love would ever be able to put in words for me.
I still only wore a paper mask on my nose and mouth in South Korea, despite Kei's insistence I needed to be on the introductory mask. I wore nothing indoors. My doctor liked to describe pollution exposure in terms of cigarettes: Beijing was a cigarette a week, lesser areas just one a month, et cetera. I currently felt that that level of "smoking" from the air was something I could take, reasoning that radiation would take me out long before pollution would. In our line of work, a bullet was more likely than anything else. It was a strange sense of freedom, not masochism, that entitled me to breathe the open air—even though it hurt me—because I saw my partner so enslaved to the technology of masks and tanks.
I reviewed my mental map. I didn't like that this had to be a citizen's arrest of our suspect, but such were the conditions of the South Korean police when they had allowed us to use firearms within their jurisdiction.
The door pinged open. Kei checked the entryway and motioned it was okay. I led the way down the right-hand hallway. Everything was so… legitimate. This could have been another corridor in any commercial building. I touched eyes with Kei and turned the doorknob of the door numbered 4709, a room that my research said should be Mikabe's film studio.
Kei checked all over the hallway for cameras.
"I'm concerned," Kei rasped through the mask. "If they have all their employees chipped, then the cameras would pick up our heat signatures that aren't. I'm also checking for drones."
I growled under my breath. Indoor drones were really expensive. Surely, Mikabe wasn't that well connected. My research showed him as supplying the Seoul underground with porn, not running any other enterprises. He had to be renting the studio, not owning this building with a fleet of drones. Surely.
It was a white film studio with an editing room attached. I exhaled and entered the room. Three computers and three screens, a half dozen stands with lights. There wasn't currently a bed in the room. If this wasn't where we could find Mikabe, at least I could find some evidence to lead us to him. I scanned the technology in the editing room. We had permission from Seoul HQ to enter and confiscate evidence. That did not include infiltrating a server, or just taking it, but there might have been information on the editing computers that could lead me to Mikabe. While Kei's Korean was good, it was not on a level to interpret encryption on a server, though Kei could translate the paperwork for HQ to do that for me. Then I saw a small label on one of the drawers and realized for once I could read it. All it said was "cuts", probably of film or something else, but it was written in Japanese. This had to be him.
"I want to submit a request to have someone from HQ search the server in here," I said.
As I turned to Kei, something flicked out of sight. Kei's eyes widened at the look on my face. Kei whipped around, dashed down the hallway and scanned it a dozen times. I rushed to the doorway.
"Maybe I thought I saw movement out of the corner of my eye because I was turning toward you," I said, my heart pounding and fear pushing my confidence through my feet and into the floor.
"That was a drone," Kei's voice growled out through the mask filter. "It was camouflaged, but I saw it too. I felt it. We'd better go."
I shut the door behind me. If Kei wanted to leave, then I did too.
"It wasn't a combat drone," Kei said, trying to give me an out.
I didn't take it. "They might be coming. They'll know we'd take the stairwell. We're forty-seven floors up and I'd rather be closer to the ground."
"We're just as trapped in the elevator," Kei said.
I heard the unsaid words as we jogged down the hallway. Any kind of response had all the time in the world to prepare for us. We were too high up. I paged Seoul HQ a distress signal.
I picked up speed when Kei did, my breath coming in shorter gasps from adrenaline rather than the cardio. Kei slammed through the exit to the stairwell.
There were cameras everywhere.
"Hurry, Taka!" Kei shouted back to me and zipped down the stairs. "If we're confronted, we'll be sitting ducks."
"OK!" I said, though I dreaded what Kei would say next.
We wrapped around the stairwell three more floors. Kei paused and said, "If anyone shows up, you go through the nearest door. I'll hold them off. If you get surrounded, lock yourself inside a room. I'll deal with them and find you on my tracker."
"Understood." I didn't like the plan, but I couldn't think of a better one, and we both kne
w in cramped quarters I was more of a hindrance if my shots were to ricochet off the walls. Kei was in charge when it came to our protection, and the best thing I could do was remove myself from the situation and let Kei deal with it.
We continued down. My legs burned from tumbling down flight after flight, but my chest ached in fear of being separated from Kei. I was a cop—I could defend myself—but I had only just qualified for graduation from the police academy in the shooting category, Kei was a sharp shooter.
At twenty floors down, I began to wonder if they were simply watching us wage our war of attrition with the stairwell. Three floors up from the surface, Kei burst through the door and pounded down the hallway and I struggled to follow, my legs complete jelly.
"We'll hit the emergency exit!" Kei shouted. "Might as well set off the alarm and not come down the way they're expecting."
We sprinted down the long corridor and into the far stairwell. I slammed into Kei's back.
The stairs were filled with men in civilian clothes underneath bullet-proof vests, all packing heat. Either gangsters or hired help.
"Go!" Kei shoved me back through the door and slammed it shut. I heard the stairwell erupt in gunfire.
I sprinted back to the main stairwell. I got to the door and heard heavy boots clomping up the stairs on the other side of the door. The elevator dinged.
I slipped into a room and shut the door, throwing the lock. I cursed myself for running back down the hallway in hopes of still getting downstairs. In the moment, I'd felt like barricading myself in a room would make me too easy of a target. Now, I was an easy target in the last room Kei would think to check for me if there weren't time to use the tracker. I looked around. I was in a small conference room of sorts. No other doors, thank the sky.
I checked my phone. Kei's tracker was still in the emergency stairwell. I could hear boots jogging back and forth in the hallway, but no one was stopping in front of my door. I backed away so they couldn't see the shadow of my boots at the bottom.
I messaged Kei. In the last room before the far stairwell. Conference room. I sent another SOS to Seoul HQ, then one to inform our chief back in Tokyo.
Sharp Shooter Seoul Page 3