by Steve Bein
And for the second time, Akiko heard his silence as if she could read his very thoughts. “Wherever the path leads you, stay close to me, neh? Never leave me again.”
She pressed her back against him like a stretching cat, a kind of reverse hug, and Daigoro held her close. For the first time in what seemed like years, he felt truly at home.
BOOK TEN
HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22
(2010 CE)
59
“Mariko!”
Han had her in a half nelson before she knew it. She still had two fistfuls of long black beard. One of her officers came out of nowhere, holding Joko Daishi by the armpits so that Mariko didn’t have the whole of his body weight hanging from her two hands. Someone else assisted Han and locked down Mariko’s right arm. Mariko was so angry she hardly felt them.
“Easy,” Han said. “Let him go, Mariko. I did enough damage to this case already. We don’t need you drawing police brutality charges to boot.”
That snapped her out of her rage. She released her grip and stepped back, palms outspread in a peacemaking gesture, or at least an I-won’t-press-the-fight gesture. The other two cops lowered Joko Daishi back to a seated position against the wall. Han didn’t loosen his grip. “I’m serious,” he said, whispering in her ear. “That shit I pulled before, ignoring probable cause, it’s going to make it hard enough to land a conviction. You just ripped this dude off a motorcycle, Mariko. If he’s got short-term injuries, okay, he was assaulting you. But if jerking him around like that causes—”
“Long-term injuries. It’ll sink our case. I know, Han. I’m cool.”
Cautiously, he relaxed his hold. She could tell she’d taken him by surprise, pouncing on their suspect like that. In truth, she’d surprised herself. She hadn’t realized the affection she felt for her city—a city that would never run short on garbage to heap on a female police detective. COs who treated her like a girl, subordinates who treated her like an equal, newspapers that hungered to make her an item, slavering for every exploit, spoiling any chance she’d ever have for doing undercover work, all to boost their sales for a couple of hours. How many times had she asked herself why she didn’t go take a job in some Canadian police department, or an American one? Someplace where the pay was better, where the rent wasn’t so high, where she might find a boyfriend who wasn’t intimidated by her profession? And yet the mere mention of a bomb threat in her city was enough to bring her blood to a boil. Joko Daishi had threatened her home. She hadn’t felt at home in a long time, maybe not since she was a little girl. No wonder she’d reacted so violently; no wonder she’d surprised herself.
“Okay,” Han said, and she could see his wariness recede. “Tell me what you got from him.”
“A bunch of crazy cult bullshit.”
“Come on, Mariko. Get your head in the game.”
“Nothing, okay? He says his goal is to destroy order and harmony, whatever the hell that means. The guy’s out of his mind, Han, and that means we’re out of leads.”
“That sounds like quitting,” Han said, “and you don’t quit.” He took her by the elbow and turned her around, leading her on a slow march away from their suspect. He was right to do it; just having Joko Daishi out of her field of vision was enough to slow her pulse a little. “Come on, now. Help me think.”
Mariko frowned, ashamed of herself. Han was right: she needed to get her head together. But it was hard when her whole investigation had just been one frustration after another. First they had an upside-down drug buy. It got even loopier with the introduction of top-quality Daishi. Following up on that led to a pair of thefts that could have been drug related, except for the tiny little detail that the thief had no interest in selling the sword or the mask to buy drugs. Tie in a yakuza connection, a needless murder in the suburbs, and a domestic gas chamber and what did she have? Only the weirdest narcotics case she’d ever heard of—and that was before anyone mentioned the word cult.
In three days they’d uncovered more arcane secrets than Mariko would ever have thought possible, and every last one of them raised more questions than it answered. Mariko didn’t want to give up. She wanted to push harder, but she didn’t have anything solid to push against. Her whole case was made of smoke.
“What if we got everything wrong from the beginning?” she said. “What if the whole crazy cult thing is just a con?”
“Seriously? We’re in midgame here, Mariko. You want to forfeit and go back to batting practice?”
“No, I’m just asking if he’s playing the same game we are. What if we’ve got it all wrong? What if the Divine Wind is just a front operation for the Kamaguchi-gumi?”
Han gave her a quizzical frown. “Where is this coming from?”
“I don’t know. Desperation. Just work with me. Who gained the most from that dumb-ass drug buy with the Kamaguchis?”
“The Kamaguchis.”
“Exactly. They corner the market on the Daishi, and all they have to give up is a stupid mask.”
Han shook his head. “How does that explain everything with the Bulldog? Every speed freak in town wants what he’s selling; what’s he got to be pissed about?”
“I told you, I don’t know. I’m just spitballing—”
“And I’m all in favor, so long as it gets us closer to figuring out where those bombs are going to go off. So? Does it?”
Mariko didn’t have to think about that for long. She didn’t even have to answer; a resigned sigh was enough.
“Look, maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s been throwing us curveballs all along. But maybe you had it right from the start. You profiled him as a whack-job cult leader, neh? So let’s stick with whack-job cult leader. What does that tell us?”
Mariko nodded. Han had a point. “If he’s not playing us—if—then he really believes he’s preaching the truth of the Divine Wind.”
“And that is?”
She put her hands on her hips and looked at the ceiling. “Something about structure and order suffocating the mind. He wants chaos. He wants to shake people up.”
“Finally something that actually makes sense.”
“Huh?”
“The Daishi deal. If you look at it as a narc, the whole thing is a fiasco. World’s dumbest dealer delivers top-quality product and forgets to call ahead to see if anyone wants to pay him for it.”
Mariko nodded. “And walks right into a sting too.”
“Exactly. But what if we look at it like a loony-tune cult leader?”
“Then kicking hornet’s nests is some kind of spiritual exercise. Who cares about giving away a fortune in Daishi if you can flip the whole speed market on its head? It knocks the balance of power out of whack.”
“That’s it,” Han said, giddy with the discovery. “It’s got to be.”
Mariko felt something relax in her mind, the way her body would relax if she peeled herself out of a skirt and slid into some old jeans. She and Han were back to their old repartee, the shooting back and forth, bouncing ideas off each other, the ideas getting clearer, not breaking apart.
“But then what?” she said. “Economic chaos? Collapse the black market and see how many legitimate businesses fall with it?”
“Why not? Let’s face it, yakuzas run a lot more front companies in this city than we like to admit.”
Mariko waved him off. “I don’t buy it. Take one look at that guy and tell me if the words mad bomber economist spring to mind.”
Both of them looked at their perp. They’d been pacing back and forth as they talked, working out nervous energy, but even from a distance Joko Daishi’s mask was creepy as hell—all the more so because the guy wearing it was sitting contentedly on the floor, a childlike grin playing at the corners of his mouth. Somehow Mariko thought he’d look more natural with a bloody ax in his hand.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he looked at her. Locking eyes with him gave Mariko chills; her mind automatically conjured an image of him standing over her bed while she slept, watching her
from behind that mask.
Han noticed it when she flinched. “Okay,” he said, “we’ve got to change things up. All of this speculating isn’t getting us any closer to finding those bombs.”
Mariko noticed he’d changed too. His gait was different. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet. Jittery. She’d seen him like this in the SWAT van too, right before go time.
“Han, don’t even think it.”
“I don’t want to, but we’re desperate. Give me two minutes alone with him and I’m telling you, I can get him to tell us where the bombs are.”
“Two minutes? Two minutes ago you were the one talking me down. What happened to not sinking our case?”
“What happened is this asshole is going to murder hundreds of innocent people. Sakakibara said it himself: who cares if we don’t get a single conviction, so long as we save lives?”
“He wasn’t talking about beating information out of a suspect, Han.”
“Look, I’ll be the one to take that hit, okay? My career is fucked anyway. We need to know where Akahata’s going with those bombs.”
“We’re not crossing that line. Period.”
Han’s eyes were pleading and pained and frightened and angry, all at once. “Mariko, he took off a long time ago. On a fast fucking bike. What makes you think we’re going to find him in time?”
“Because we’ve got his boss, and because I think our speculating actually did us some good. Joko Daishi’s a strategist, not a mental patient. It’s like you said: from his perspective, everything he’s doing makes sense. All that Wind imagery—scattering, randomizing, blowing what’s orderly into disarray—that’s the real mask. He’s not following some divine hallucination. He’s got a plan. He’s got a timeline. He’s got—holy shit.”
“What?”
Mariko punched him in the arm. “The dope deals. Buying his hexamine with speed instead of cash. He was conning us, right from the beginning.”
“Slow down, Mariko. What are you seeing that I’m not?”
“As soon as we got onto the hexamine, what did we assume?”
“MDA. . . .” Mariko could almost see the shift in his thinking, a deft little slide away from desperation and back to their old give-and-take. “No way. You think he decided to cook his bombs with hexamine just to throw us off his scent? To make us think he was just another random speed freak?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“Come on. You’re saying he knew we’d get onto the hexamine before we got onto the cyanide?”
“Yeah.”
“And he knew we’d leap to the conclusion that he was cooking MDA?”
“We didn’t leap, Han; he pushed us. He’s not just making bombs, is he? He’s cooking boutique uppers with rare ingredients, and he knows exactly what any narc who runs across those ingredients is going to assume.”
“And you and I never thought to question that assumption until we saw that.” Han jabbed a finger at the cluttered folding tables lined along the right-hand wall—the explosives assembly line. He shook his head, flabbergasted. He couldn’t even bring himself to look Mariko in the eye; he was too embarrassed by the idea that Joko Daishi had so thoroughly duped them. “This dude is thinking way farther ahead than we are.”
“Yeah.”
“Like, months ahead. Maybe years ahead.” He snorted a self-conscious laugh. “You don’t suppose he writes it all down in a day planner, do you?”
“Years ahead. . . .” Mariko didn’t even mean to say it aloud. She looked at the tables too, and at the hodgepodge collection scattered across them. Nails and screws: shrapnel. SIM cards, rubber-coated wire, outdated cell phones: remote detonators. Right beside them, gutted flashlights: handheld detonators. Any one of those items was totally innocuous. The only way to see them as dangerous was to take a much longer view.
And then she saw it. The Year of the Demon. Right above those tables. “Holy shit, Han, it’s right in front of our faces. He’s got a calendar!”
She turned and broke into a run. The cops watching over Joko Daishi instantly formed a defensive barrier, just in case Mariko was ready for round two. But Mariko was headed for the explosives assembly line, and specifically for the astrological calendar hung above it.
Only one day was circled, smack in the middle. Mariko could make no sense of the rest of it—too many months, too many weird astrological squiggles—but she knew for a fact that Joko Daishi had been hurrying things along lately. Preparing for the Year of the Demon. The appointed hour. It was a good bet that the circled day was today. Tomorrow if she was lucky, but there was no point in assuming her luck would suddenly improve.
No. She didn’t need to be lucky. She’d already seen another calendar with today’s date circled on it. That little wallet-sized copy of the Yomiuri Giants season schedule. She still had it in her pocket.
“Han!” She pulled the schedule out of its Ziploc bag, unfolded it too quickly, nearly tearing it. One game was circled. A home game. Today.
It had started three hours ago.
“His target is the game, the Tokyo Dome,” Mariko said. “We have to go—”
“No,” he said, and she followed his gaze to Joko Daishi. The son of a bitch still looked as giddy as a little boy, but a boy who was anticipating something, not a boy who’d already won. “We haven’t heard anything over the radio. If there was an attack, we’d have gotten the call—or at least heard about it, neh?”
He whipped his phone out of his pocket and pulled up the app that kept him up to date on box scores. “Come on, come on,” he said. Mariko had far too much time to think about how long eight or nine seconds could be. “Okay, the game’s not over yet. Bottom of the eighth, two outs, the Giants are up five to four.”
“Han, I really don’t give a shit about the scores—”
“I’m saying it’s not a blowout. The stands are still full, Mariko. The stands are still full.”
Of targets, Mariko thought. Han didn’t need to say it. But as she saw it, his logic was flawed. “Akahata’s late if he’s trying to set off bombs in the stands. He should have done it midgame. It’s like you said: if this had been a blowout—”
“The stands would be half-empty already. People trying to beat the rush to the trains.”
“The trains!” Mariko’s skin went cold. “Han, he’s going to hit the subway.”
“No. Oh no, no, no.” Han began to quiver. “What if he . . . what if we can’t . . . ?”
Paralysis through analysis, Mariko thought. There wasn’t time to consider worst-case scenarios; she and Han needed to act. “Come on,” she said. “The Giants are your favorite team. You’ve been to a million games. What’s the train station down there?”
“Four stations. One is JR’s, the other three go to the subway.”
Mariko looked back at Joko Daishi, who watched the two of them eagerly. “He wants to cause chaos, right? Remind people of old fears?”
“Then it’s the subway,” Han said. “Like the sarin gas attack when we were kids.”
“Exactly.”
“Then our best bets are Suidobashi Station or Korakuen Station. Kasuga’s nearby, but it’s the other two that are always jam-packed after a game. If he wants a body count, it’s got to be Suidobashi or Korakuen.” His face went white. “Mariko, they’re going to be packed like sardines down there. It’s going to be a massacre.”
Mariko started running for the door, Han a pace or two behind her. She didn’t have time to give orders to the rest of her detail; there was too much to explain, too many loose ends to be tied up on-site before she could even think about a mass redeployment to the subway stations. “You take Suidobashi,” she told Han, “I’m taking Korakuen.”
“Oh, hell,” he said.
She heard him miss a step. Looking back, she saw him slowing, staring at the phone, halfway through the movement of trying to cram the phone back in his pocket. “Top of the ninth,” he said. “Still five-four. We’ve got three outs before all hell breaks loose.”
/> 60
Mariko raced to Korakuen Station, lights running hot, siren as loud as it got and still not loud enough. Even before she became a cop, she remembered thinking people ought to go to prison for not pulling over to give emergency vehicles right of way. How these idiots failed to notice an ambulance or a fire engine riding their bumper had always been a mystery to her. Today she wished not pulling over was a capital offense. Death by strangulation, and Mariko wanted to do the strangling.
She clenched down on the steering wheel instead, thinking about all the mistakes she’d made in the last few minutes. She should have taken side streets, not the main thoroughfares. She should have ordered one of her officers on scene to call the Bureau of Transportation and order them to close Suidobashi and Korakuen stations so that she didn’t have to call it in herself. She’d made the call to Dispatch easily enough, but she’d done it driving one-handed at maximum speed, and plenty of cops had put themselves in the hospital that way.
Most of all, she should have asked Joko Daishi whether Akahata’s target was a subway car or a subway platform. Maybe he wouldn’t have answered. Maybe he would have been delighted to tell her. Now all Mariko could do was wonder which target was worse. Detonating a bomb inside a subway car would contain the blast, all but guaranteeing everyone aboard would die. Detonating it on the platform would let the bomb’s fury disperse, trading guaranteed fatalities for a far greater number of injuries.
It was possible, of course, that Mariko and Han had it wrong altogether, that Akahata was bound for somewhere else, some other target they hadn’t even imagined. But Mariko couldn’t allow herself to think that way. She made the best guess she could on the evidence she had—and following that logic, she committed herself to another hypothesis: Akahata would hit a platform, not a subway car. For one thing, he’d prefer a fixed location, a place he could observe, timing the blast to maximize his body count. For another, there were dozens of train cars to choose from, and only two likely stations. Mariko had to believe he would target one of the stations; the other possibility left her feeling hopeless.