Huge in Japan

by Matt Lincoln

  My entire body tensed as I heard a knock at the door, even though I knew it was Junior and Charlie. They’d just called me a few minutes ago to let me know that they were downstairs and that they would be up in just a minute. I stood and walked over to the door, pausing to glance through the peephole before I opened it. As soon as I confirmed that it was Junior and Charlie on the other side, I quickly unlocked the door and threw it open.

  “Thank goodness you’re both alright,” I smiled, stepping aside to let them in. “Wallace told me that you’d been shot, Junior. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Junior insisted as he placed his laptop bag on the floor in front of one of the other beds. “What about you? We heard you got attacked back at the first hotel.”

  “I did,” I frowned as I remembered everything that had happened that morning. “But I’m fine. Not a scratch on me.” Now that I thought about it, I really had been lucky. First, I’d managed to escape the explosion, and then I’d managed to escape unharmed during the raid at the hotel.

  “That’s good,” Charlie chuckled. “There’s no reason all three of us need to be working with injuries.”

  “Speaking of which, shouldn’t you go clean and change your bandages?” Junior asked, turning to look at Charlie. “You were rolling around on the train tracks when you were apprehending Ueda. Your bandage is really dirty. It could get infected.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Charlie sighed, waving Junior off dismissively. “I’ll go clean myself up in a minute. Laptop first.”

  “Oh, right,” Junior started as he unzipped his laptop bag. “We found the guy who made the bomb. He told us that this laptop might have important information on it since it’s the one he used to communicate with the person who hired him. Daichi killed him to stop him from speaking, so whatever’s on it must be important.”

  “Wait, he’s dead?” I asked as Junior handed me the laptop. “The man who made the bomb that blew up the office. He’s dead?” It was a surreal thought. He’d caused so much pain and destruction, and how he was gone.

  “Yeah, he is,” Charlie confirmed. “Daichi shot him right in front of us and then smiled about it.”

  I shuddered at the image. We’d known the people we were after were powerful and dangerous, but to kill someone so easily like that was horrifying.

  “Okay,” I responded resolutely as I carried the laptop over to the spot in front of my bed where I’d set up all of my equipment. “I’ll get to work on it right away. In the meantime, you two should go shower and get something to eat. Not to be rude or anything, but you both look pretty rough.”

  I wrung my hands as I finished speaking. Somehow that had come out much more rudely than I’d intended it to. I only meant that I wanted them to take a break after being out in the field for over twelve hours, not that I thought they looked worn out.

  “Great,” Charlie replied as he moved toward the bathroom. “The officer from the NCB will be back tomorrow morning, so see what you can find out before then.”

  “Okay,” I responded before he disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.

  “Do you think it would be safer to go get food or to order some?” Junior asked. “If we order, we won’t have to go anywhere. And honestly, even if we weren’t actively in danger right now, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere after the day we’ve had. On the other hand, that would require giving out our location. Leaving the hotel to get something would be a security issue, though.”

  “I think there were some vending machines in a room down the hall,” I pursed my lips as I tried to remember where I’d seen them. “I went out earlier to buy some stuff to replace everything that got destroyed or stolen during the attack, and I’m pretty sure I saw some vending machines as I was leaving. They might just have drinks, but we wouldn’t have to leave the hotel.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Junior shrugged. He knocked on the bathroom door and told Charlie that we were going to go look for some food and that we’d be right back.

  “Okay,” Charlie called through the door.

  We left the hotel room, and I retraced the steps I’d taken earlier. We finally found a small room at the end of the hallway, opposite the stairs.

  “Here it is,” I announced as I stepped inside. The room was only a little larger than the average storage closet, and the machines inside took up most of the space.

  “Is that alcohol?” Junior asked as he sidled into the room next to me.

  I looked at the machine he was pointing at, and sure enough, it appeared to be filled with cans of beer and Japanese alcohol.

  “I think it is,” I nodded, taking a step closer to examine the labels. On the side of the machine, alongside several other written notices, was a small sticker warning people under the age of eighteen not to use the machine. “Is that legal? I mean, can they really monitor who’s using the machine?”

  “It must be,” Junior answered, squeezing past me to look at the machine furthest from the door. “I guess they assume that if you’re old enough to be renting a hotel room, you must be old enough to drink. This one over here has food in it, I think.”

  I walked away from the alcohol vending machine and toward the one Junior was standing in front of.

  “Oh, it’s a cup noodle machine,” I said as I took a look at the vending machine. A clear plastic window on the front of the machine allowed us to see all the different flavors the machine offered. “I think it cooks them right in the machine. Look, there’s a little dispenser here. And there’s a sign that says ‘hot.’” I pointed at the little flame sticker on the corner of the dispensing area.

  “That’s pretty cool.” Junior smiled. “I’ll use the translating app on my phone to see what flavors they have.” I watched as he reached into his pocket for his phone. He spent a few seconds scanning each of the flavors before moving on to the next.

  “Well, it looks like a lot of them are sold out,” Junior lamented as he re-pocketed his phone. “They only have seafood, curry, and cheese.”

  “Cheese?” I asked, making no effort to hide my distaste at the idea of cheese-flavored noodles.

  “That’s what it says,” Junior shrugged. “It’s even written on the cup in English.”

  “I think I’ll pass on that one,” I giggled, mulling over my other two options. “I think I’ll go with seafood. Which one do you think Charlie would like? Is he picky with food?”

  “Not really,” Junior replied. “Whenever we go on stakeouts, if I ask him if he wants to get something to eat while we’re waiting, he just tells me to get him ‘whatever.’ I also spent Thanksgiving with him, and he ate everything, including some more questionable dishes.”

  “You spent Thanksgiving with Charlie?” I asked. That was surprising to hear. Even though they were partners, Charlie seemed like the kind of guy that didn’t like socializing outside of work.

  “Oh, yeah, his mentor, Harry, invited me when he found out I’d be spending it alone,” Junior responded, and I noticed he sounded a little uncomfortable as he spoke.

  “His mentor?” I prompted as I reached past him to insert my credit card into the machine and made my selection.

  “Yeah,” Junior explained, stepping to the side so I could reach the machine better. “I thought he was his dad at first, but then I found out they aren’t actually related. Harry took him in when he was a teenager. He told me a little about it, but Charlie doesn’t seem like he likes talking about it. It’s not my place to pry, so I don’t really know much about their relationship. But yeah, right after our first mission, Charlie and I were both feeling a little down about not having caught the original supplier. He invited me over to have some beers with his mentor, and when he found out I’d be spending Thanksgiving alone, he insisted I join them instead.”

  “Wow,” I hummed. The machine had dispensed an uncooked cup of noodles, and a light flashing above the dispenser indicated that I should place it there. I opened the plastic door covering the dispenser and placed the cup inside. As soon as
I closed the door, boiling water began to pour into the cup. “That’s kind of nice to hear. Honestly, I was sort of intimidated by Charlie when I first met him. He just seems so standoffish and serious. It’s nice to know that he does stuff like celebrate holidays with family.”

  “Well, I can’t really decide either, so I’ll just get one of each,” Junior decided. “I’ll ask Charlie which one he wants when we get back, and I’ll just eat whichever one he doesn’t pick.”

  The light over the hot water dispenser clicked off, which I assumed meant the noodles had finished cooking. I opened the plastic door, and warm steam spilled out of the small compartment. I reached inside and pulled the cup out, careful not to spill any of the hot soup.

  “Your turn,” I said to Junior.

  Once he’d gotten one of each flavor, we moved over to the non-alcoholic drink machine on the other end of the room. This one had far more choices than the noodle machine, and in the end, we decided to just stick with a familiar brand of soda instead of trying to figure out what everything was. It was a little nerve-wracking carrying a cup of boiling hot soup in one hand while balancing two bottles of soda in another. Fortunately, we both made it back to the room intact, though not before Junior spilled a bit of soup on his hand.

  I used my elbow to turn the door handle, then pushed the door open and allowed Junior to walk inside first. He rushed past me and set the two cups he was carrying down on one of the small nightstands. Once his hands were free, he started rubbing the hand he’d burned.

  “You okay?” Charlie asked from where he was sitting on one of the beds. His hair was wet, and he had changed out of his work clothes.

  “Yeah, I just spilled some broth on my hand,” Junior hissed, turning his hand to inspect the damage. “It’s just a little red. We have noodles for dinner, by the way. Which flavor do you want? I have curry and seafood.”

  “I’ll take the curry,” Charlie replied, swinging his legs over the side of the bed to stand. He walked over to where Junior was standing and took one of the cups that Junior was holding out to him.

  The three of us sat down to eat. This hotel had the same English language channel that I’d been watching in the previous hotel. Instead of a horror movie, it was currently playing a cheesy comedy from the early nineties. As we ate, it was almost possible to forget that someone had been actively trying to track us down and kill us just earlier that day.

  Charlie and Junior went to bed soon after we’d finished eating. By then, it was past midnight, and they would have to get up early the next day to meet with the NCB officer. After we turned out the lights in the room, I rearranged my equipment to make sure that the light from my laptop screen wouldn’t bother them. I needed to get to work cracking open the information in the laptop so they’d have something to investigate tomorrow. Even if we hadn’t been on a time crunch, though, I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. Even though my first day in the field had been hectic and stressful, instead of feeling tired, I actually felt more awake.

  My first obstacle appeared the moment I opened the laptop and it prompted me to enter the password.

  “Easy enough to circumvent,” I mumbled to myself as I plugged the laptop into my own computer. I ran a program designed to either find the password or brute force the computer open in the event that it couldn’t figure out what the password was. As I waited for the program to finish running, I turned to glance out the window beside me. The city was illuminated in bright colors, and even this late, I could see people walking around on the street below.

  I turned back to my computer and was pleased to find that the program had already managed to unlock the laptop. Now that I had the laptop open, the first thing I did was to install a translation program that would automatically translate everything on the computer into English. It probably wouldn’t be perfect, but it would save me from having to translate every single file I wanted to look through.

  I started rooting around the files and documents on the laptop, brushing aside anything that didn’t pertain to our case. It was a lot to sift through, and it was evident that Ueda had been involved in a lot of different crimes. After we finished with it, we’d have to remember to turn the laptop over to the Japanese police. There were records in here documenting the sale of hundreds of illegal firearms and explosives. I shivered as I thought about how we’d all almost become victims of this person.

  The amount of data on the laptop was massive, and after the first half-hour of looking through it, I finally came across something promising. On the surface, it seemed to be an ordinary program used for chatting online. However, a diagnostic search revealed a secret command that could be inputted in order to unlock a hidden part of the program. I entered the code and watched as a new window appeared to reveal an online forum. The website was similar to the one Charlie, Junior, and I had used to get in touch with the hacker. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again, though. Before I did anything else, I made sure to hide my identity by bouncing the location of my IP address to a different server every five seconds. I also put up two proxies to ensure that I’d be tipped off with plenty of time to spare in the event that someone did try to hack me.

  Once I felt sure that I had done everything I possibly could to safeguard myself against an attack, I began to look through the website. The access dates on the laptop’s history indicated that Ueda had spoken to someone as recently as this morning, but all the messages had been deleted by now. Fortunately, recovering recently deleted data wasn’t that difficult for me, and I was able to pull up the message in just a few minutes.

  The chat lot stretched back a few days. In the messages, someone going by ‘Saito’ first asked Ueda to construct and ship a bomb to an address in California. The timestamp was dated just a day before our office was attacked. The next time he got in touch was this morning. In this message, Saito was instructing Ueda to go after Junior and Charlie, with a clear warning that he’d be killed if he failed.

  “They made good on that threat,” I muttered quietly to myself.

  I tried to trace where Saito’s messages had come from, but I couldn’t find anything more specific than the general area of Kabukicho. That wasn’t anything we didn’t already know, so it wouldn’t help us. I fired up the same program that I’d used to trawl through the deep web back when I’d first started investigating the Jane Doe case. I wondered how much trouble I’d be in if Wallace or Nelson found out I’d been using an illegal program, but now wasn’t the time to debate the ethics of righteousness versus lawfulness. I was able to do a deeper search using this program, and I got a few results on a black market forum when I searched for Saito’s IP address signature.

  These posts were long since deleted as well, but I was hopeful I’d be able to recover them. I was able to restore all but the oldest one, and my heart dropped as I read through the posts. The translation was rough, but the general message of the post seemed to be that they were advertising the establishment of an upcoming brothel. The main appeal was to be the fact that the women ‘working’ there would include a wide variety of races and ethnicities. Patrons would be able to have their pick of any kind of woman they wanted. I felt revolted reading through the posts, but I made sure to read each one in its entirety. I didn’t want to miss even the smallest detail that might give us a clue as to Saito’s whereabouts. At the bottom of every post was the infamous flower symbol, and by the time I’d finished going through all of them, the image was burned into the back of my mind.

  I flipped my laptop closed, plunging the room into total darkness. Now we knew that the man running the show went by the name Saito, but the posts hadn’t revealed much else. We still didn’t know where he was, or even if that was his real name. I looked at my phone to check the time. It was nearly two in the morning now, and as much as I hated to let down Charlie and Junior, I knew that I had better get some sleep. Tomorrow, I might try getting in touch with Saito. Maybe I could lure him out or have him lead us to the brothel. In any case, my eyelids were starting to
droop, and I wouldn’t be much help if I was running on fumes the next day. I climbed into bed and hoped that we’d be able to find a new lead tomorrow.

  27

  Naomi

  I stared blankly out the window at all the people walking by. Las Vegas was so different during the day than it was at night. After darkness fell, everything somehow seemed brighter than it did when the sun was up. Everywhere you turned, your eyes would be drawn to bright flashes of color on billboards or in the windows of tall buildings. It was impossible to drown out the constant thrum of noise as people laughed, shouted, and reveled until the early hours of the morning. During the day, however, everything seemed so much more tepid. Aside from the bright green palm trees, the entire city was bathed in hues of gray and brown. It wasn’t ugly, per se, just unremarkable.

  That being said, sometimes it was better to be able to sit somewhere quiet and watch the city move around you. Outside of the coffee shop window, where I was currently working our latest case, I could see a group of women out shopping together. Their arms were laden down with bags, and they were laughing over something. On the other side of the street, a man in a dark blue business suit was speed-walking down the sidewalk with his phone held up to his ear. Whatever he was hearing must have been good news because he was grinning from ear to ear as he moved. A few feet behind him was a young woman pushing a stroller, with both a small child and a dog inside of it.

  I smiled as I took a sip of my tea. Honestly, I much preferred this side of Las Vegas. The glitz and glamour that came with the night didn’t come alone. Along with it came the seedy and dangerous underbelly of the city. During the day, it was easier to pretend that the city was full of innocent people going about their business and not killers who would plant bombs without a single ounce of regard for the damage they might cause.

  I set my cup down on the table in front of me. We were still working out of the police station, but Wallace had called me early this morning to let me know that he and Agent Nelson would both be coming in later that day. Apparently, there had been some incidents during the mission in Japan, and both he and Nelson had stayed up half the night doing damage control. Since Miranda was still in the hospital, it would have only been Agent Howard and me at our makeshift office. I’d decided to work out of this cafe instead. People-watching helped settle my nerves, and I’d rather work surrounded by the enticing smell of coffee than in a stuffy police station conference room.