Year of the Demon

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.

She heard Sakakibara’s voice over the radio just as she was approaching her final turn. She ripped the steering wheel over, her tires shrieking in protest, and as soon as she could free a hand she snatched up the mic. “Sir?”

“We reached Transportation. They’ve got the stations closed. That game let out ten minutes ago, Frodo. You’re going to have a crowd.”

“I see them.” Her tires screeched again as she stomped on the brakes.

“Backup’s on the way, but you’re the—”

Mariko didn’t stop to hear the rest. “On the way” wasn’t good enough news to wait for the details. She brought the car to a halt just a few meters from the mob that had gathered outside Korakuen Station.

Just as Sakakibara had said, someone in TMPD had reached the Bureau of Transportation and ordered them to close the station. They’d done it wisely too, posting an OUT OF SERVICE notice at the entryway. Mariko hoped that might turn some of the crowd away, because a good-sized blast down on the platform would send a shock wave up the stairs too. Anyone up top was standing in the muzzle of a flamethrower.

Fighting her way through the crowd, she wanted to shout at the top of her lungs, telling them there was a great big goddamn bomb right below their feet and they ought to get the hell out of her way. But panicked mobs were dangerous, and her next best plan—firing her SIG P230 in the air like a sheriff in a cowboy movie—would panic them too. So all she could do was lead with her elbows and knees and shout, “TMPD! Make way!”

She knew it was only seconds but it felt like it took forever to burrow a tunnel through the mass of fans. When she finally reached the turnstile, she planted a palm on it and got overeager on her jump, almost pulling a one-handed cartwheel as she cleared it. It cost her a stutter step when she hit the ground. She came close to rolling her ankle but didn’t. Then her SIG was in her left hand and she was racing toward the stairs.

There were two flights, one for the eastbound tracks, one for the westbound. Which one would Akahata choose? The one with the greater promise for passengers, Mariko supposed. But she didn’t know where the most Giants fans lived. She didn’t know where people went after ball games. Han would have known. She wanted to call him but she didn’t want to take the time. She wanted to pause for a few seconds, to mentally locate herself on the city map, to reason it out, but she didn’t have time for that either. Paralysis through analysis. Overthinking was the enemy. Sometimes you just had to act.

She took the closest flight of stairs and didn’t even bother to look whether it led her to the eastbound or westbound trains. When she got to the bottom, she found the platform occupied. There were forty or fifty people down there—hardly crowded by Tokyo’s standards, but Mariko was surprised to see anyone at all. Mentally she kicked herself for being so stupid: the station might have been closed at street level, but nothing could prevent people from disembarking trains they’d already boarded elsewhere.

It was the kind of platform with two sets of parallel tracks between it and the opposite platform. Every surface seemed to shimmer: the steel tops of the rails, buffed hundreds of times a day by the wheels of train cars; the pillars wearing their ceramic tiles like snakeskin; more ceramic tiles on the walls, still more lining the floor; the ceiling panels, flat and smooth as mirrors. Commuters ambled about in a kind of human Brownian motion, fiddling with book bags or sending texts.

Mariko spotted Akahata in their midst, loitering, dressed as a sanitation worker. He stood four or five paces away from a wheeled caddy that held a big blue trash can and a bunch of cleaning supplies. People were keeping their distance, predictably scared of the guy who looked like he’d just limped away from a knock-down, drag-out bar brawl. His face was still a ruin, a spatter pattern of purple and red. Mariko watched a girl, walking idly and texting, come close enough to catch him in her peripheral vision. The girl started, blanched, and backed away. Mariko wondered how many others had done the same.

Akahata looked at the girl, and looking past her, he saw Mariko.

His bloodshot eyes flicked to the trash can. It was big, heavy, but sitting on its stout plastic casters it would be easy for one guy to move. Perfect for housing a great big bomb.

Mariko put her front sight on him. Civilians crowded her backdrop; doubts about her aim infected her mind. A moment’s hesitation was all Akahata needed. He grabbed a high school boy in uniform and held him like a human shield. One bruised forearm snaked around the kid’s throat, tight as a python.

“Let him go!” Mariko shouted.

Akahata responded by chanting his mantra and taking one step toward the trash can on his caddy.

For a fleeting second Mariko wondered why she was still alive. Why hadn’t Akahata unleashed his bomb? Then she understood: he didn’t have a remote detonator. There was no need for one. He’d been waiting for masses of baseball fans to crowd the platform; the trigger was on the bomb itself, and he wouldn’t trigger it until his victims had walled him in. As he took one more step toward the caddy, Mariko was surer than ever that his trash can was an enormous IED.

Mariko moved to flank him, trying to cut an angle around the kid so she’d have a clean shot at center body mass. But the kid was struggling, jerking Akahata this way and that. He wasn’t strong enough to break Akahata’s lunatic strength, but his tugging and twisting gave Mariko a constantly moving target.

She shifted targets, aiming at Akahata’s head. Her backdrop still wasn’t clear. Some of the commuters had the sense to flee, but too many panicked, frozen like so many deer caught in the glow of an oncoming light. Mariko kept moving to flank, yelling at Akahata to let the kid go, sidestepping until her backdrop was the empty black tunnel above the train tracks. It hardly mattered. A head shot behind a struggling human shield was damn near impossible even for an expert marksman. Cops went to sniper school to make shots like that—and they didn’t do it southpaw either.

Akahata took another step toward the trash can. His eyes were wide and wild, his head lurching this way and that as his hostage tried in vain to break his grip. The kid seemed more scared of Mariko’s pistol than of Akahata, flinching at the sight of it, squirming whenever it moved. Stupid, Mariko thought; if you’d just stay still for a second, this pistol will save your life.

“Last warning,” she said, not at all sure she meant it, “let the kid go.”

Akahata broke off from his mantra and said, “What difference does it make? He will die. We all die in the end. Don’t you see that’s what we’re trying to teach you?”

Mariko had no time for the religious bullshit, but she saw a different truth in Akahata’s words. If he reached that bomb, everyone on the platform would die. Just as well to start shooting, and if she killed the kid, so be it, so long as she brought down Akahata too.

Maybe Han would have pulled the trigger, but Mariko couldn’t cross that line. If the kid was bound to die anyway, better for it to be at the hands of a mass murderer than a cop. Even so, she wished the kid was the type to freeze up and piss his pants. She had plenty of training hitting stationary targets. By now she could have slowed her breath, taken her bead, made that slow squeeze on the trigger.

And now she was overthinking it. She knew it. Paralysis through analysis. She tried to keep her front sight zeroed on Akahata’s face, but the more she concentrated on keeping it steady, the more it wavered. Yamada-sensei would have told her to holster her pistol. She could almost hear him say it: the good swordsman would rather drop his blade than squeeze it tighter with the wrong grip. Drop it and pick it up again. That was the better course. But Mariko was too scared to drop her weapon.

Akahata switched the kid from his right arm to his left. Freeing his right hand to reach the detonator, Mariko thought. He was close to the bomb now. One more step and he’d have it.

Han would have shot him by now. To hell with the psychological games and moral dilemmas. That’s what he would have said. And now Mariko was so entangled in her conscious thought that she’d spoiled any chance for her subconscious to do what needed to be done.

There was no way she could make the shot now, not against such a small target, a moving target, not with all the self-doubt. Yamada was right. There was no room for thinking, only for doing. And she couldn’t—not while she was stuck so deep in her own head. Better to drop her sword and pick it up again. It was the only solution.

She had no choice. She lowered her weapon.

Akahata’s eyes went wider still, glowing with triumph. He roared out his mantra and reached for the detonator.

Mariko’s pistol snapped up and she put a bullet in the center of his forehead.

61

Mass panic erupted all around her. People were running for the stairs even as her gunshot’s echo reverberated in the tunnels. Passengers on the opposite platform stood slack-jawed, frozen. Mariko watched as the high school boy fell, seemingly in slow motion, resisting the pull of Akahata’s deadweight as best he could until finally he lost his balance. At first Mariko wondered whether she’d shot him, whether she’d somehow double-tapped Akahata without knowing it, whether her second shot had pulled left and hit the kid. She didn’t remember firing two shots, but it was only when the kid rolled away from Akahata’s body, shrieking and crying, that Mariko was certain she hadn’t hit him.

She ignored the fleeing crowd for the moment, trusting that the transit authorities upstairs would know what to do with them. Her focus remained on Akahata, his weapon, and his erstwhile hostage. Akahata wasn’t moving. The bullet hole was a neat, perfectly circular thing, just like in the movies.

That surprised her somehow. It was morbid of them, wasn’t it, getting a detail like that just right? Of all the things a person could obsess over, some special effects artist had chosen to perfect the fatal gunshot wound to the head. Maybe there had been a pay raise in it for him, or a patent, or at least a pat on the back for a job well done. Maybe his mother boasted to her friends about how far he’d come.

The instant that struck her, Mariko wondered what her own mother would say about what she’d done. A man was dead and it was Mariko’s fault. Mariko had just killed a human being.

She knew she’d have to make a moral assessment of what she’d done, and she knew it had to come soon, but for now she had civilians to tend to. That high school boy was hunched on all fours, stupefied and shuddering. His face was red; his mouth hung open; tears flowed openly and a string of drool lolled from his lower lip. For all of that he seemed stable enough for the moment, not a threat to himself or others, so Mariko took a few cautious steps toward the massive IED.

She wasn’t on the Bomb Squad and they hadn’t taught her a thing about explosives in academy, but the big steel canister barely hidden inside Akahata’s trash can didn’t look like garbage. Neither did the gutted flashlight sitting on top. It was no more than a simple on/off switch now, with wires trailing from it into a little hole in the canister. To Mariko it looked a whole hell of a lot like a homemade detonator.

Part of her was thankful not to see a countdown timer. Another part of her said it was stupid to think Hollywood got that detail right too, and that prompted a sudden need to inspect the device all over, looking for a hidden timer clicking down toward zero. But that little voice was silenced by her common sense, which screamed at her not to get any closer to the really dangerous object that hadn’t gone boom yet but very well could if she decided to poke at it. She decided to return her attention to the traumatized teenager who had been a hostage a few moments before.

“Hey, kid,” Mariko said, holstering her weapon. She put herself directly in his line of sight, between the boy and Akahata’s corpse. “Look at me, okay? You’re going to be all right. Just look at me. Please?”

He was scarcely able to speak. His voice was harsh and squeaking, like a missed note on a violin, but at last he managed to say, “You shot at me.”

“Not at you. Never at you.”

“You could have shot me. You could have killed me.” He still hadn’t managed to meet Mariko’s gaze; his eyes were locked on Akahata’s ruined face.

And he wasn’t wrong. Mariko heard herself say the words anyway: “I shot at your assailant. Not at you. At him. I promise you that. I never would have pulled the trigger if I thought I might hit you.” She hoped the words were true.

“You shot at me,” was all he could say.

“I want you to sit down, okay?” She did what she could to herd him away from the body, but though he consented to sit against one of the tile-faced pillars, she couldn’t get him to pull his gaze away from Akahata’s face, much less look her in the eye.

“I want you to know I’ll be speaking to your commanding officer,” said a voice from behind her.

It took her by surprise; she’d honestly forgotten anyone else existed apart from her, the kid, and Akahata. She turned to see a tall, blond gaijin with a little mustache and wispy beard. Only upon seeing him did it occur to her that he’d spoken in English. Now she heard the Japanese voices too: hurried whispers from the opposite platform, distant panicked chattering echoing all the way down from street level, just as her pistol’s report must have echoed all the way up.

Mariko stood from her crouch beside the high school boy and assessed the gaijin. He seemed the graduate student type to her: he had a computer bag slung over his shoulder, and despite his Midwestern accent his shoes were European, vaguely hippieish. His face was grave, the sort of expression she’d seen before in people who had narrowly escaped what should have been a fatal car crash, or a house fire. She had a good guess of what he intended to tell her CO, and she wasn’t in the mood at the moment. “There’s no need to thank me, sir—”

She could tell she’d taken him aback, as happened all too often when she responded to gaijin in fluid, unaccented English. She assumed this was another case like that, but then she saw his expression shift from solemnity to outrage. “Thank you? Are you joking? You just shot an unarmed man!”

“Excuse me?”

“You just shot a civilian in cold blood. I’m going to stand right here until your commanding officer arrives, and I’m going to tell him exactly what I saw. You endangered that boy’s life to shoot an unarmed janitor. In my country we call that reckless endangerment and excessive force.”

We’re not in your country, Mariko wanted to say. She could also have gone with Are you fucking kidding me? I just saved your life. She was still wired from her standoff with Akahata and now this skinny, self-righteous prick had her adrenaline spiking yet again. Politeness was beyond her, but she managed to resist face-planting him on the floor to slap handcuffs on him. She stood chest to chest with him and said, “Sir, I don’t think you have the slightest goddamn clue what just went down here.”

“I know exactly what ‘went down’ here, Officer. I study law at the University of—”

“Mariko!”

It was Han’s voice, and hearing it made Mariko’s mind do back flips. She was relieved and elated and discombobulated at once. How had he gotten here? Was all of this some sort of post-traumatic hallucination? But no, there he was, racing down the stairs. “You all right?” he said, his words tumbling out in one unbroken torrent. “Did you find him? Is he—?”

The gaijin law student was still talking, but Mariko ignored him. “I’m fine,” she said, reverting to Japanese. “Akahata’s down. We’ve got a kid who’s pretty roughed up, but he’ll pull through sooner or later. Akahata used him as a shield.”

Han looked past her shoulder, and looking at no more than his face Mariko could tell the instant he saw Akahata’s body. “You—?”

“Yeah.”

His eyes flicked back to hers. “You okay?” He wasn’t asking whether she was hurt.

Mariko hadn’t had time to conduct her moral assessment yet. The high school boy wasn’t far wrong: Mariko hadn’t shot at him, but she’d sure as hell shot near him. And it seemed the kid and the prattling gaijin were thinking along the same lines: Mariko shouldn’t have pulled the trigger.

The decision seemed right at the time. Or rather, trying to decide had fractured her composure, so she derailed the decision process and let her instincts do the driving. But her gut instinct seemed right at the time, and it seemed right with the benefit of hindsight too. So why were those two so pissed off?

At last the truth finally struck her: neither of them knew about the bomb.

They’d seen her shoot an assailant she could have talked down. She could have stalled, placated, waited for backup, pepper-sprayed. She could have done anything, but as they saw it, her response to an unarmed man with a hostage in a simple choke hold was to shoot to kill.

Mariko turned from Han to the gaijin, ready to explain the misunderstanding. Then she caught herself short. Should she tell him the truth? Let him know how close he’d come to dying? Show him Akahata’s detonator? The guy was being a royal prick; did he even deserve an explanation?

More to the point, what were the ramifications of letting it slip that someone had managed to get thirty or forty kilos of high explosives into the Tokyo subway system? Mariko was perfectly happy for that decision to stay well above her pay grade.

“Mariko, who is this asshole?” Han pointed at the gaijin.

“He was just leaving,” Mariko said. Switching back to English, she said, “Sir, I’ll be more than happy to discuss the ins and outs of the Japanese legal system some other time, but for now I’m going to have to ask you to get the hell away from my crime scene.”

“Do you think I’m going to stand for this?” the guy said. “I’m going to—”

“Fuck off,” said Han.

The law student reacted as if Han had slapped him in the face. Perhaps he hadn’t expected to hear a second Japanese cop speaking English. More likely, it was the first time he’d ever heard a Japanese person drop the F-bomb. Either way, it made him go stand somewhere else to wait for a lieutenant to complain to.

“Why, Detective Watanabe!” Mariko said, reverting to Japanese again. “I had no idea you spoke such fluent English.”

“And I had no idea anyone in this department remembered it doesn’t actually say ‘Han’ on my business card. No wonder you made sergeant. You’ve got a mind made for paperwork.”

“Now that’s low.”

“So you’re okay, then?”

Mariko felt her pulse quicken. Even while he was joking, his attention had never wavered from how she was coping with shooting Akahata. Now that things had calmed down a little, Mariko found herself feeling more conflicted than she’d realized at first. She knew she’d fired in self-defense, and in defense of the lives of everyone else on that platform. But there he was, staring blankly at the ceiling, a puppet snipped from its strings. And there was Mariko, with a second death on her hands. After Fuchida, that made two this year. More than the rest of Narcotics combined. And yet she didn’t know what else she could have done. She’d given Akahata the option of submitting peacefully and he hadn’t taken her up on the invitation. A bullet in the brainpan didn’t seem out of line.

At least not to Mariko. A few dozen onlookers still lingered on the opposite platform, and by now one of them had probably recognized her. Her fame after the Fuchida affair might have been short-lived, but her missing finger was memorable and it only took one eyewitness to spot it. Reflexively she stuck her right hand in her pocket, knowing it was far too late to start any attempt at damage control. Even as she tabled her own moral assessment for later, even as she told her partner she was okay, she wondered what the consequences would be for killing a man that every last bystander would describe as being unarmed.

Whatever the consequences might be, there wasn’t a thing she could do about them at this point. Even if there were, she could hear a platoon of cops coming down the stairs, and when they reached her they would need orders. She had a shell-shocked teenager to deal with, a body to zip up and roll away, a bomb to quarantine, a major subway station to restore to working order, and if she really got cracking she might get it done by midnight. “Seriously,” she told Han, “I think I’m all right. Ask me again in a couple of days, maybe. For now, let’s get this crime scene locked down.”

62

“Tell me again why you don’t want me to call the papers,” Mariko’s mother said.

She sat with her two daughters around her living room coffee table, all of them sitting on the floor and playing rummy. Mariko had been appraising both of them without saying a word. Her mom was wearing a polo shirt with a logo embroidered on it that Mariko didn’t recognize, probably from the manufacturer of something related to her beloved sport of Ping-Pong. She seemed radiant, not careworn, as she’d so often been of late. Of course she’d panicked after she found out her eldest daughter had been in the same room as thirty-odd kilos of high explosives, but that was after the fact, after she knew Mariko was safely at home. More important, Mariko guessed, was that her second daughter was also safely at home.

Saori was looking good. She’d regained some of the weight she’d lost. Her hair didn’t seem so brittle and her skin had regained its luster. The scabs she’d accumulated from when she was using, the bruises, the pallor, had vanished. Her teeth would never recover from the years of meth abuse, but otherwise she was back to being her contented, girlish self.

“Yeah,” Saori said, “you’re a hero, Miko. Didn’t you save, like, fifty people?”

“Fifty-two,” Mariko said. And killed one, she could have added. Akahata’s death had a completely different character than Fuchida’s. With Fuchida it was a simple quid pro quo: he gutted her, Mariko stabbed him back. But Akahata hadn’t actually done anything violent; he’d only threatened to. Mariko shot him preemptively. With a couple of days’ hindsight she’d expected to feel some guilt over it, but still none had come. She didn’t feel good about it, either. If anything, she was just apprehensive about what would come next.

A psychologist might have been able to explain the scientific reasons why she preferred to look ahead rather than back. Mariko knew she might seek out a psychologist someday. Every sensible cop in Narcotics had asked her how she was doing, and all the thoughtless ones had asked her what it felt like to shoot somebody. Sooner or later that would wear on her. And she hadn’t been in the field since the incident. Sakakibara benched Han and ordered Mariko to take two days of vacation time, which meant Mariko hadn’t so much as looked at her pistol since she’d checked out of post that night. Maybe she’d get the jitters when she came back to work, but for the moment she was thankful to be with her family, and that was all she needed.

Not for Saori, though. “Fifty-two,” she said, gripping Mariko’s wrist insistently. “Shouldn’t you get a headline for that? Shouldn’t I get a headline for that? My big sister in the news again—and not for what they’re saying now. Come on, Miko, you deserve better than this.”

“I can’t,” Mariko said. “For one thing, the department’s already given its statement. For another, you might have noticed they didn’t mention the bomb in that statement. You have to understand how important it is to keep that secret. I told you two because I think you have a right to know, but if the bomb scare gets out, it gives Joko Daishi exactly what he wants: mass panic.”

It didn’t feel good to say that out loud. It might be that fifty-two onlookers saw a cop shoot an unarmed janitor, but Mariko knew the truth. She knew how close they’d come. A dozen different theories were circulating on talk radio, doing the same kind of postgame could’ve-would’ve-should’ve analysis that followed every baseball game, and Mariko had the power to disperse all of their blissful ignorance with a simple phone call. So did her bosses. But TMPD couldn’t exonerate her without explaining about the bomb, and that they could not do. The mere mention of it would cause a rash of panic, plus God knew what else on talk radio.

No, better for Tokyo’s hero lady cop to take the momentary hit to her reputation. Everyone in Narcotics knew the score, the top brass did too, and if rumors of the truth managed to slip out here or there, at least there was no one to recognize them officially. Even Joko Daishi couldn’t do it. For one thing, he was more Tyler Durden than Osama bin Laden: not the type to claim credit for his political cause, most certainly not when his agent had failed. For another, inmates didn’t have the right to call press conferences. So the department quashed his cause and considered Mariko collateral damage.

“You two have to understand,” Mariko said. “Seriously, you can’t talk about this. To anyone. Okay?”

“But what if—?” Saori began.

“If anyone asks you about it, tell them your sister thought the assailant was a direct threat to his hostage’s life. You don’t have to have a knife or a baseball bat to kill somebody. Crushing the guy’s windpipe does the job just fine.”

She flapped her cards on the table. “Oh,” she added, “and I’m out.”

Again Mariko found herself receiving a punishment she didn’t deserve—a round of boos this time, though she supposed this was a whole lot better than the thrashing she was taking in the press. Those stories would lose their shine before the week was out, passing out of public memory just as quickly, though for the moment they really did sting. And unlike the press corps and the radio harpies, Mariko’s mom followed up with another round of dessert.

“Okay, girls,” she said after they finished their cherry cobbler, “one more game and then this old woman has to get to bed.”

“Sorry, I can’t,” Mariko said. “I’ve got someone I still have to meet tonight.”

“Oooh,” Saori said. “A date! Is he hot?”

“No. Most definitely not.”

“Who, then?” Saori said. At the same moment, their mom frowned and said, “It’s someone from work, isn’t it?”

“Sort of.” The whole truth was complicated. She was looking forward to ending her professional relationship with this man, but she didn’t particularly look forward to being in the same room with him.

• • •

She spent most of her train ride thinking about Han, about what to do with him, about where the moral lines lay. One way or another, her partner was going to stand before Internal Affairs. Her gut told her to stick up for him. Ten seconds of reflection on that told her she had a stronger obligation to stick up for the law. If a citizen broke the rules and got away with it, that was just a fact of life, but if a cop broke the rules and got away with it, that chipped away at the rules themselves. Law enforcement without accountability was a police state, not a police department.

What if Sakakibara decided to back Han’s play? What if he found a way to wriggle around the fact that one of his officers ignored a suspect’s civil liberties? Did it matter that the very next day the same suspect tried to murder Mariko and fifty-two other people? No. In civilian life it would matter, but legally, rights were rights.

The Americans had a good word for them: inalienable. A right that could be stripped depending on the situation wasn’t a right at all. Sakakibara respected that. He was good police, and he was a real hard-ass when it came to playing it by the book. But he always said it was to protect his unit’s conviction rate. What if, just this one time, he could boost Joko Daishi’s prison time by covering for a detective who strayed outside the lines and then came right back in? If he defended Han, Mariko would be left with the choice of crossing her CO and betraying her partner, or else looking the other way on a moral question that just wasn’t up for negotiation.

With all of that on her mind, she walked up to the building she didn’t want to walk up to and rang the doorbell she didn’t want to ring.

When the steel doors slid open, Bullet was waiting for her inside, taking up half the elevator. Ever his chatty self, he said nothing on their ride up to Kamaguchi Hanzo’s apartment.

“There she is,” the Bulldog said with a sharp-toothed grin, “my hot little gokudo cop.” He got up from his sofa, a huge Western-style block of black leather, tossed his TV remote aside and picked up a sweating bottle of beer. “Get your tight little ass in here and tell me what you got for me.”

“Everything you want,” Mariko said. She remained just outside the elevator, standing her ground just to show the Bulldog she wouldn’t follow his orders. “We claimed your mask as evidence.”

“So? Where is it?”

“A phone call away.” She pulled a smartphone from her pocket and held it out as if to offer it to him. “If I deliver your mask, you’ll call off the bounty on my head?”

“That’s the deal, honey.”

“And your dad? I’m square with him too?”

“He gave the contract to me. I’m the only guy you have to worry about.”

“Then I’ve got you on record admitting to conspiracy to commit homicide.” She came closer, showing him the phone’s little screen.

Bullet took a menacing step forward. “Taking this phone from me won’t do you any good,” she told him, never taking her eyes off the Bulldog. “I’m not the one recording this. My department is. You getting all this, sir?”

“Loud and clear,” Sakakibara said. He sounded gruff and authoritative even through the tiny speaker.

“Have a good night, sir.” She dropped the phone back in her pocket. “So here’s the deal: I’ll give your mask back anyway, since it’s yours, but you’re going to call off the hit on me one way or the other. You do understand how this works, neh? We don’t just come after you, we come after your dad. And yeah, I can’t touch him, and yeah, there’ll be blowback to cops in this city for a while to come, but at the end of the day cops and yakuzas are going to settle back into their old ways, and the only thing different is going to be you, implicating your old man on record. How well do you see that working out for you at the next family function?”

Kamaguchi rose from the couch, switching his grip on the beer bottle as if to use it as a weapon. He fixed her with a glare that said he might just chuck her phone off the balcony anyway, and her with it. Then his gaze flicked down to her left hand, which without her knowing it was resting on the heel of her SIG Sauer.

“You’re not afraid to use that, are you?” he said. His tone was almost congratulatory.

“Nope.”

“Heh. I heard about that. You and the guy in the subway. He’s the one who stole my mask?”

“One of them, yeah.”

“And the other one?” His grip on the bottle hadn’t changed yet. There was still a tension in his knees and shoulders, harnessed there but ready to explode, like a dog pulling at an invisible chain.

“In custody. He’ll see some serious time.”

Kamaguchi snorted a laugh and set down the bottle. “Then we’re square, sugar. Hell, I couldn’t’ve killed you anyway. You’re too much fun to fight. Come on, sit, have a beer.”

Mariko shook her head and took as step back toward the elevator. “About your mask—”

“Don’t worry about it. Get it to me when you get it to me. I know you’re good for it.” He snorted again and settled back into place on the huge black sofa.

“I am,” Mariko said, “but that’s not what I’m getting at. This guy, Joko Daishi, he thinks the mask gives him divine power. He’s a terrorist, plain and simple, and if he gets the mask back he’s going to cause all kinds of harm.”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Kamaguchi flapped the back of his hand at her, as if shooing a fly away from his food. “It’s my property, neh? I’ll do what I want with it.”

“That’s just it,” Mariko said. “He stole it from you once. He can do it again. I can’t force you to melt it down, but I’m telling you, unless you want people on the street to think you can’t protect your own property, you need to keep that thing under lock and key—”

“Already sold it.” Kamaguchi flipped the channel.

“You what?”

“I already sold it to him. It’s done.”

“You sold it to Joko Daishi?”

“Was that his name?” He settled on some sports channel covering a motorcycle race. “Yeah, I figured he wants it that bad, he’ll pay a good price for it.”

Mariko’s balled her hands into fists. She heard her breath coming loud and angry and she had half a mind to reach for her pistol again. “Do you have the slightest idea what this man intends to do with that mask?”

“Honey,” he said, twisting around to look at her, “I’m a gangster. This is what I do.” Then the TV reclaimed his attention.

“Mass murder,” Mariko said. “Mass destruction. Maybe killing your own people. Definitely hitting your own hometown. He thinks he needs the mask to make it happen. You want that?”

“Honey, I’m a gangster. I see a chance to make money, I take it. Shit happens to my people, I deal with it. Shit happens to other people, I let you deal with it.”

Mariko couldn’t believe her ears. All the work she’d put in, all the man-hours allocated by her department, all the fear, the tension, the worry, to say nothing of the quagmire Han had sunk himself into—all of it for nothing. For the second time in as many days, she’d surprised herself with her loyalty to a city that so often made her feel alien. Joko Daishi wasn’t just another criminal. His bombs weren’t just a menace to the general public. He’d threatened Tokyo, damn it, Mariko’s city, Kamaguchi’s city, and Kamaguchi couldn’t even be bothered to turn down the volume to hear her out.

All she could think of to say was “You selfish son of a bitch.” There was nothing left to do but walk away.

63

Joko Daishi’s indictment was the following Friday. His legal name was Koji Makoto. Age fifty-one, though he looked a lot younger. A history of petty crimes in his youth, all linked to mental illness, resulting in some court-ordered psychiatric care but not a day of incarceration. No known residence, no known relatives. If he had a source of income, the National Tax Agency didn’t know about it. As far as the bureaucracy was concerned, he’d stepped out of a psychiatric ward on the morning of his eighteenth birthday and simply ceased to exist.

The indictment was supposed to be at ten o’clock, on the first floor of a district courthouse around the corner from TMPD headquarters in the heart of Kasumigaseki, a neighborhood as schizophrenic as they come. The Metropolitan Police HQ was an enormous postmodern thing with a tower coming out the top that was striped like a candy cane. Across the street was the Ministry of Justice, Italianate, only three stories tall. Both of those fronted a moat of the Muromachi era, on the other side of which was the five-hundred-year-old sloping stone foundation of an Imperial Palace still decades shy of its one-hundredth birthday. Firebombing had eradicated the old palace, but the foundation had endured the bombers and worse—earthquakes, floods, erosion, an economy that valued downtown real estate over obsolete political heirlooms—emerging with a little more moss but otherwise hardly the worse for wear. Now that foundation was surrounded by brand-new skyscrapers, cell phone towers, hybrid electric vehicles, invisible waves of Wi-Fi. It stood stoically in their midst, unchanged.

Mariko wished she could say the same, caught in the midst of her swirling emotions. From the moment she woke up that morning, Mariko didn’t know where she needed to be. Her friend and partner had a hearing before Internal Affairs. It was scheduled for ten o’clock, the same time Joko Daishi’s indictment was supposed to take place. Part of her wanted the decision to be as easy as supporting a friend, doing the right thing, letting the job come second. It was the same part of her that wished she thought of Joko Daishi as Koji Makoto, not the religious title he’d given himself. It was the more charitable way to identify him—innocent until proven guilty and all that—but in her mind he remained the heartless cult leader, not the psychiatric case with a troubled childhood.

Her more cynical side doubted that Koji Makoto was even his real name at all. Most of her colleagues would have said she was grasping at straws, but they only thought in Japanese. Mariko read kanji characters as a native and as a gaijin, and the English-speaking part of her mind saw that, literally translated, Koji Makoto meant Short Path to the Truth. Too poetic to be coincidental, Mariko thought.

She wasn’t all that fond of her propensity to find reasonable suspicion even in the most innocent of details, like names in the blanks of standard governmental paperwork. The sad truth was that her capacity to see the worst in people made her a better cop. Today it made her unsure about her partner. Despite that idealistic voice in her head, this had never been as simple as standing by a friend. He worked with her and he’d jeopardized their investigation. He reported to her and he’d undermined her authority. And now, at ten minutes to ten, she knew exactly where she needed to be but she didn’t want to go.

It wasn’t her lingering mistrust that told her to find another place to be at ten o’clock. If anything, her cynicism and pessimism would lead her straight to Han’s hearing. But trumping those, overriding her feelings of betrayal, she was torn between wanting to be a source of support for her partner and dreading being there to see his verdict handed down. She wanted to spare him that shame. The tension between those two desires had been building all morning, and now she had to walk it off, pacing up and down from the courthouse to the police headquarters. She’d seen Han pace like this, cigarette smoke trailing him. She’d never had much interest in smoking, but maybe today was the day to start.

Sakakibara caught up with her halfway down the block. “There you are,” he said, walking fast on stilt-straight legs. Obviously he knew where he wanted to be. He hooked her by the crook of the elbow, spinning her on her heel and dragging her toward the courthouse. “Come on. Do you want to see this prick indicted or not?”

A simple indictment wasn’t usually the sort of thing that drew a lieutenant’s attention, or even a sergeant’s for that matter, but Joko Daishi had masterminded a plot to terrorize the city and run up a hell of a body count while he was at it—not fifty-two but hundreds. That train platform would have been packed if he’d had his way. If Mariko hadn’t shot him. If Han hadn’t put her where she needed to be. It had been a fifty-fifty shot as to which one of them would get to Akahata. Han had raced off the same as she did—had volunteered to be on a train platform with a madman and a bomb, the same as she did. It was blind luck that made her the hero instead of him. Again Mariko wondered what Han’s fate should be.

“Sir, it’s over.”

“What?”

“Joko Daishi’s lawyer, Hamaya. He had the case pushed up an hour. Nine o’clock.”

Sakakibara stopped cold. “And?”

“I saw it,” Mariko said. It was sheer luck that she’d been there. She showed up early for Han because she couldn’t sleep, and she happened to see Hamaya Jiro hurrying toward the courthouse. She nearly caught up with him, thought better of it, slipped in the courtroom behind him, and watched the whole proceedings.

Hamaya hadn’t noticed her until afterward. “Sergeant Oshiro,” he’d said. “A fine morning for a trial, wouldn’t you say?”

He’d dropped the word trial on purpose. Joko Daishi wasn’t on trial yet. But Han was. “Do thank your partner for me when you see him,” Hamaya had said. “If it weren’t for him, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to mount my client’s defense.”

“That’s because your client is guilty.”

“Only of what you can prove in court, Sergeant. I’m afraid the district attorney will have a tough time of it, once it becomes clear how much evidence is inadmissible. If I’m not mistaken, your entire investigation would have fallen flat if your partner hadn’t illegally tailed Akahata-san.”

He had her on that one. The district attorney chose not to press charges on anything connected to the Kamakura house. The heroin, the cyanide, even Shino’s murder. None of it would stick.

But Mariko wouldn’t let him see the cracks in her resolve. “Too bad you won’t be drawing a paycheck from him anymore. That breaks my heart.”

“I’m sure. No doubt you’re equally heartbroken that Akahata-san is not alive for cross-examination. If not for you and your partner, the case against Joko Daishi would be ironclad.”

Mariko felt herself fuming but refused to rise to Hamaya’s bait. “You’ll wriggle out of a charge here or there, but we’ve got your client dead to rights on the bomb-making factory. We got that from a search warrant on phone records, not from anything Han did. That means we’ve got your client on unlawful use of weapons, and believe me, the DA’s office can turn that into five or six different counts by itself. Then there’s conspiracy, furtherance, public endangerment—and after all that, your client gets to go to federal court, where we’re going to smack him with every last terrorism charge we’ve got a law for. I hope your little cult believes in reincarnation, because Joko Daishi’s looking at back-to-back life sentences from here to eternity. Best of luck with that.”

“The best of luck, indeed,” Hamaya had said, giving her a little bow by way of a farewell. “I have no doubt of it.”

That was nine thirty. Now, at nine fifty-one, Mariko’s frustration hadn’t cooled in the slightest. “He’s going to walk on almost all of it,” she told Sakakibara. “How many charges should we have nailed him on just for the dope? Precursor chemicals, manufacturing, intent to distribute, you name it. Plus the two homicides, plus all the prohibited substances charges . . . I don’t know what you charge someone with for having a gas chamber in his bedroom, but I sure as hell hope we’ve got a law against it.”

“We probably do.”

“And what does it matter?” Mariko clenched her fists, wishing she had a bokken in her hands and something to smash with it. “None of it’s going to stick. I was thinking we had a lock on terrorism and conspiracy, but that cocky bastard Hamaya seems to think otherwise. He’s a slippery little fucker. He’s looking for ways out already.”

“That’s his job,” said Sakakibara. “You know that.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and she told him about what else was on her mind. Kamaguchi Hanzo. The mask. How Hamaya might already be on his way to file some paperwork Mariko had never heard of, something that would release the mask from police custody so he could hand-deliver it to Joko Daishi.

It ended up becoming more of a tirade than an explanation, and at the end of it she felt deflated. She slumped against the side of the HQ building and threw up her hands. “What the hell have we accomplished, sir? Joko Daishi will see some time—I hope. But after that, he’s still got his mask and his cult, and we didn’t even seize all of the explosives. He’s got more people out there. We have no guesses about who they are. He’ll have more targets. We have no idea where. And for all of this, I get my name dragged through the muck and maybe Han loses his badge. So what the hell was the point?”

Sakakibara grimaced at her, his thick Sonny Chiba eyebrows scrunching toward each other like hairy black caterpillars. “We’re cops, Frodo. Not lawyers; not judges; cops. That makes us goalkeepers, and the simple truth is that sometimes the bad guys get one through.”

He took her by the chin—an astonishingly gentle gesture coming from him, almost fatherly—and raised her eyes to meet his. “What did you think when you took this job? That we were going to stop every crime in the city? We stop the ones we can, but some of them are going to get by us. If you can’t live with that, just hand me your badge right now. I’ll fill out the paperwork for you.”

“Sir, you know I can’t—”

“Can’t what? Take a cushy desk job for the same pay? Get off the streets, rest your feet for a minute? Sure you can. You don’t need to be in the dirty little corners where the lines get blurry, where it’s hard to tell right from wrong. Go take a job in a police box in the suburbs, where the worst problem you’ll have for the rest of your career is not knowing the answer when someone stops in to ask for directions. How many COs have you served under who told you to do exactly that?”

Mariko couldn’t help smiling a little. “Actually, sir, the last one told me he’d have me working the precinct coffeemaker.”

Somehow he’d made the shift from concerned father to stern father and back to bitter, grumpy commanding officer. “Fine. Go take his advice. Or stop pitying yourself and recognize you did something magnificent. You saved fifty-two lives. You put a very bad man in the ground and you put another one in a cell. The day that’s not good enough for you, just hand me your badge and I’ll fill out the paperwork.”

Mariko looked back down for a minute, then found his gaze again. “Thank you, sir.”

“You know what happens now?”

“Sir?”

“The same thing that happens in any other sport with a goalkeeper. The other team gets the ball back and they try to score again. Now, are you ready to do your damn job?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Let’s go to your partner’s hearing.”

Mariko glanced at Sakakibara’s huge black diver’s watch. “We’re running late for that, sir. Do you think they’ll let us in after—”

“They haven’t started yet. I told them to hold off until I got there.”

Mariko was glad he’d already started walking so he couldn’t see her jaw drop. She knew her lieutenant had some swat, but she didn’t know his arm reached that far. It made her wonder if IAD would allow him to get involved in their decision too, made her wonder whether Sakakibara would push to get Han off or see him hang.

True to his word, it was Sakakibara who unofficially began the hearing when he walked through the door. Mariko found it embarrassing, seeing Han being deposed, and she could only imagine what he was feeling. She thought of Saori, who, somewhere along the way of her Twelve Step program, had to make a list of everyone she’d every wronged while she was using, and then had to go out and apologize for each offense. It was no easy thing, admitting you were wrong. It took a kind of strength not a lot of people had. Saori didn’t have it; she’d had to build it from scratch. It made Mariko proud to see Han push ahead, explaining everything he’d done and leaving nothing out. He held no one else to blame, nor did he shield anyone else from blame. If IAD found reason to investigate Mariko as well, it would start with Han telling them the truth as plainly as he could.

For an event that would see Han’s whole career hang in the balance, the hearing was surprisingly brief. The review board adjourned after only an hour, sequestering themselves to make their judgment. Mariko found herself sagging back into her seat, and until then she hadn’t even noticed she’d been sitting forward, hands gripping her knees, waiting for the board’s ruling. Now she wanted to know how long review boards generally took to make their decisions—or, more precisely, how long she’d have to be waiting on the edge of her seat, tense as the skin of a drum.

And since she lacked anything even approximating the proper sense of decorum for a woman of her rank and station, she asked. The chair of the review board, a commander she hadn’t met before, gave her the same kind of frown he’d have given a Tokyo Disney mascot walking into the room, a blend of puzzlement and offense. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, making it clear that he was doing her a great honor even in recognizing her existence, and closed the door behind him.

Mariko found herself immediately at Han’s side, which surprised her. The part of her that was still pissed off at him still had a loud voice, but it had lost its majority. “Fifteen minutes?” she said. “You’d think they’d take longer than that for something this important.”

“Yeah,” said Han. “You’d think your partner wouldn’t say anything to ruffle their feathers before they made their ruling, too.”

She blushed for a second, but he winked at her and even gave her a little grin. “You look awfully relaxed,” she said.

“What’s there to be nervous about? The worst part’s over.”

Mariko hadn’t realized that was true, but now that she thought about it, it was almost self-evident. Working up the courage to make a full confession was agonizing work. After that, taking your licks was easy. Han had just looked his own guilt full in the face; he knew he deserved punishment and he’d already resigned himself to accept it, however harsh it might be.

A few minutes later the review board returned to render its verdict, and again, paradoxically, Mariko found herself more nervous about it than Han. The chairman sat down with what looked like a sheet of prepared notes that he didn’t bother looking at, making Mariko so curious she wanted to jump out of her seat to see what it said.

His ruling was short and to the point: Han had violated Akahata’s right to freedom from unlawful search and seizure; he had transgressed the boundaries of probable cause, though not the boundaries of reasonable suspicion; he had placed his CI, Shino, in a situation that might have become dangerous. All of that was clear. But there was no indubitable proof that he had directly endangered Shino’s life. He would not be charged criminally, and that meant he’d get to keep his badge. But the board found him guilty of violating eight general orders regarding the proper handling of covert informants, and that meant his life in Narcotics was over. The review board busted him back down to general patrol, where every time he walked into a roomful of cops it would be like showing up to a black tie affair with a nice tuxedo and his pants around his ankles. Sooner or later things would get back to business as usual, but for years to come there would be stares and whispers everywhere he went.

As the members of the review board packed up their things, Sakakibara offered Han his stern congratulations; Mariko thought he seemed grimly pleased with the ruling. Afterward he offered to buy Mariko and Han a cup of coffee—or rather, he ordered them to sit down to coffee with him; lieutenants did not offer invitations to their subordinates. All the same, sitting down to coffee outside of their post felt like Mariko’s father taking her out for ice cream after she’d run hard in a track meet and still finished second. That marked it as another fatherly gesture from Sakakibara, both the second Mariko had seen from him this morning and the second one she’d seen from him, period.

They sat down and Mariko and Han waited for Sakakibara to speak. Coffee shop or not, this wasn’t exactly a social call. “Han, I don’t want you coming in to clear out your desk until second shift. Wait until the unit’s down to a skeleton crew. Save yourself that embarrassment, all right? Hell, save me the embarrassment.”

Han swallowed. Mariko gave him an “it’s okay” sort of nod, the kind no one really meant, the kind oncologists everywhere gave their patients when the news wasn’t good but the prognosis wasn’t terminal. “I worked general patrol for a long time, Han. It’s a good job. An important job.”

“And it’s not Narcotics.” He sighed and gave a defeated shrug. “At least one of us still has a spot in the lineup, neh? I’m really, really glad they didn’t drag you down with me.”

“I am too,” said Sakakibara. “I’m shorthanded enough as it is. But you two need to learn a lesson from this whole fiasco. When you do the right thing and you break the rules, sometimes you need to ask yourself what that says about the rules.”

“Sir?” said Han.

“Sometimes you admit you’re in the wrong. Like your hearing today. You did your job. You did the right thing. But sometimes the rules aren’t what they should be.”

Han’s eyes flicked between Sakakibara and Mariko, and Mariko felt her face go sour when she met his gaze. “What?” Han said. “Oh, hell. You went to Joko Daishi’s indictment, didn’t you?”

Mariko had a decent poker face, but not for Han. She tried to hold his stare but couldn’t. “No,” he said, and in that incredulous, angry tone it came out as a curse word. “He’s going to walk?”

“On most of it,” Mariko said. “They didn’t even bother to charge him with Shino’s murder.”

“Because he murdered the only eyewitness who can put him on the scene.”

“Yep.”

Han was crestfallen. “So the same circumstantial shit that lets me keep my badge—”

“Gets Joko Daishi off the hook, yeah,” said Mariko. She broke down the rest of the details for him. “In the end, we’re thinking—hoping—the terrorism charges will stick, but that’ll be a federal thing, out of our reach.”

Mariko hadn’t thought it possible for Han to deflate any further. His color drained from him; he seemed to diminish in his chair.

Mariko knew the feeling.

Somehow, through heroic effort, Han mustered the energy to speak. “So what the hell did we accomplish?”

“A lot,” Sakakibara said, “and don’t you dare lose sight of it. You’ve both been at this far too long not to have figured this out by now: we don’t have the luxury of total victories in this profession. You think we’re in Narcotics so we can put a stop to illegal drugs? No. We stop one dealer. Then we go stop another one. If the first guy’s out on the streets already, we go back and get him again. This is the game, boys and girls—the game you signed up to play. And you know what happens next?”

Han’s gaze shifted from Sakakibara to Mariko and back, wavering, just as unstable as his own resolve. But Mariko felt steadier. She’d lost her composure when she couldn’t pull the trigger on Joko Daishi, felt it crumble, shot through with a million fractures. Even her victory over Akahata wasn’t enough to restore it. But Sakakibara’s words were like glue, seeping into the cracks, bleeding deeper into them, finding more, binding it all together, making her stronger.

“I do,” she said. “I know what happens next. Their team gets the ball back. They try to get one by us again. And we block it, again and again.” She looked at her partner. “Narcs, patrolmen, paper pushers, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same job. We’re goalkeepers, Han. This is what we do.”

Han slumped. “And I was always a baseball guy. I guess I’m not cut out for soccer.”

“Han,” Mariko said, “you know that’s not what I mean. I’m trying to say—”

“I get what you’re saying. But the truth is, this goalie got benched, and now he’s getting reassigned to direct traffic in the parking lot. It’s fine. Seriously. It’s no more than I deserve.”

“Han—”

“No, Mariko. I’m out of the game for a little while. But I guess there are traffic violations in the parking lot too. I don’t know how important they are, but someone’s got to crack down on them.”

“Take the rest of the morning off,” Sakakibara said, as abrupt as ever. He stood up to leave. “Get your heads clear. Then put all this crap behind you. Get it out of your mind so you can do your damn jobs. Frodo, I’ll see you at noon. Han, I guess I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Yes, sir,” Han said. He stood up and gave the lieutenant a deep bow. “Thank you, sir. You taught me everything worth knowing about being a cop.”

“Don’t get weepy on me.”

“Sorry.” Han gathered himself and bowed again. “It’s been an honor, Lieutenant.”

Sakakibara gave him a curt nod and walked out.

Mariko finished her coffee and set it on the table with a loud clack. “Let’s go to my place,” she said. “I have something I want to show you.”

• • •

Han prodded Glorious Victory’s pommel with a single cautious finger. “Whoa. Are you sure you should keep this thing hanging over your bed?”

“What’s the big deal? You’ve been here before. You saw my sword rack.”

“Yeah, but not with the sword in it. I mean, look at the size of that thing.”

Mariko rolled her eyes at him. “That’s not really what I invited you over to see.”

He craned his head under the rack like a plumber peeking under a kitchen sink. “You’re sure these screws can take the weight?”

“What are you, a carpenter now? Just read this, okay?”

She handed him one of Yamada-sensei’s notebooks, with her thumb marking a page referring to Joko Daishi’s iron mask. He reached for it blindly, his eyes still on Glorious Victory Unsought. “Aren’t you afraid it . . . I mean, earthquakes and all . . . seriously, Mariko, hang it somewhere else.”

“Where? Look around this great big penthouse of an apartment and show me another wall long enough to mount that sword.”

Han didn’t have to be a detective to see her point. “Well, I don’t know . . . prop it up in a closet or something.”

“Just look at the notes, will you?”

She explained who Yamada was—who he was to her, who he was to the study of history—and then explained about his notebooks. “See, none of this stuff ever makes it as far as the public eye,” she said, “but I’m telling you, that mask is important.”

“Even though I won’t see a word about it in any history book?”

“Especially because you won’t see it in any history book. I think Yamada-sensei’s Wind and Joko Daishi’s Divine Wind are the same thing, and if I’m right, then they’ve been around for a long, long time. We haven’t seen the last of them, and we haven’t seen the last of that mask.”

Han leafed through the notebook. “Are you for real? A five-hundred-year-old ninja clan in Tokyo?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

Han’s face lit up. “That is so cool.”

“Men,” she said, accidentally reverting to English. “It doesn’t matter how old you get; you’re all just eight-year-old boys.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Exasperation clung to her like a wet cloth. At least he was studying the notebook a little more closely now. Not much progress, but it was progress. “Help me look through all these boxes,” she said. There was no need to point at them; they were stacked four and five high along the back wall of her bedroom, taking up a lot of valuable floor space. “I need another pair of eyes on this stuff.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you get it? I should have seen the connection to Glorious Victory. I should have remembered it the second I saw the mask. If my memory was a little better, maybe they never would have stolen my sword in the first place.”

Han looked up from the notebook. “You can’t beat yourself up over this kind of thing. If your crackpot ninja theory is right, then there was nothing you could do to keep them from breaking in.”

He stopped himself for a second—maybe to think of something more comforting to say. Mariko could have used it. But no. “I mean, can you imagine what kind of totally badass tools they must have invented over the last five hundred years? Relocking a door chain from the outside would be, like, the tenth coolest thing they could do.”

Great. The eight-year-old boy was back.

“In case you haven’t noticed, Han, I’m feeling pretty fallible right now. I can’t afford to overlook details like this anymore. We’ve got a cult running around our city with high explosives. If these notes can help us find them, then I need someone else reading them, someone to help me connect the dots—”

“And now that I’m not working as a detective, my workweek is about to get a whole lot shorter, neh?”

Mariko sighed with relief. She felt the tension seep out of her shoulders. They were thinking along the same lines again, and that was a blessed thing. “I figured maybe a couple of nights a week?”

Han flipped through Yamada’s notes again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Looks like pretty dry reading.”

“Maybe over a few beers?”

“Getting better.”

“I’ll give you the play-by-play of my goaltending duties.”

“Ow! Just kick me in the nuts and get it over with.” Han made a show of wincing. “First I get taken out of the game, and now you’re going to rub it in?”

Mariko laughed. “Come on. You have to admit you’re interested, neh?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Me too.”