by Steve Bein
His commanders looked at him, all of them sober-faced, some of them a little scared. Only Shichio knew the answer. “The world!” he shouted.
“The world!” Hideyoshi echoed, laughing maniacally. Up went the sake flask, like a sword thrust triumphantly at the moon. “Start learning Chinese, gentlemen, because by this time next year we’ll be marching on the Forbidden City!”
The generals all laughed again, and some started shouting toasts and cheers. “Banzai! Banzai!”
Banzai indeed, Nene thought. The word meant “ten thousand years.” She joined in the cheering, thinking, if only he had a hundred years, he could bring the whole world to heel.
In a flash she had the answer to her riddle: Streaming Dawn. If Glorious Victory was real, then why not Streaming Dawn? It too was said to be an Inazuma blade, and it was said to abide in these parts. How many spies had she sent in search of it over the years? Not one of them had so much as laid eyes on the blade. The best they could manage was to tell her it had been seen in Izu—not by one, but by many. Daigoro will have heard of it, she thought. That is what I can ask of him. If he does not believe in the blade, then let him think me naive, and be happy that I am selling Shichio’s lifeblood for so small a price. If he believes, then he will understand why I want it for my honored husband—and by the buddhas, if the legends of Streaming Dawn are true, then that little tanto is far more powerful than the Bear Cub’s great odachi.
Let the legends be true, Nene prayed silently, and give my husband his hundred years. Give me a path to the Bear Cub, and cloud his sight enough that he will not see the trap I mean to lay for him.
BOOK THREE
HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22
(2010 CE)
11
The man known as Sour Plum reached into his black leather jacket and pulled out his cell. He could have drawn the serrated Spyderco combat knife he kept in the same pocket, but as Mariko saw it, the phone was more dangerous than the knife.
She had a bright pink cast on her right forearm, a jagged line of stitches in her scalp, and bruises covering half of her face. The two bodyguards flanking her would make her look a lot worse if Sour Plum heard the wrong words come out of that phone. Thus far they’d been perfect gentlemen—or as gentlemanly as a black marketeer’s heavies were ever likely to be. They hadn’t broken her arm. In fact, no one had; the cast was a fake. They weren’t the ones who bashed her face in, either. Those bruises were two days old, still lingering after the woman in the diaphanous white dress walloped Mariko right in the face during their foot chase through Tokyo Station. Mariko had lost track of the woman then and hadn’t found her since.
She knew it was a million-to-one shot, but she had hoped to find the woman in a fancy second-story shot bar called the Sour Plum. The place was named for its owner, a big round man whose name in his Narcotics dossier was Lee Jin Bao. Since Japanese people couldn’t pronounce the name Lee, he’d acquired the nickname Plum, the meaning of the kanji character for Lee. The Sour part was easy enough to understand: he wore a permanent Robert De Niro frown and he had a reputation for knifing people at the slightest provocation. Sour Plum was Chinese in a country that had no love for the Chinese, but being an enterprising sort, he’d used that fact to establish a niche for himself in the criminal ecosystem. Since no yakuza family would have him, he was the ultimate neutral party, the Switzerland of the Tokyo underworld. When rivals and enemies had no choice but to do business together, they met at the Plum.
As such, he was long overdue for a covert sting operation—or so Mariko had argued, anyway. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn’t the whole truth. Sour Plum was on Narcotics Division’s radar, but what Mariko really wanted was free rein to question him about his criminal associates. She was hoping a certain scantily clad, fleet-footed, shoulder-bag-swinging hellcat was on the list.
So that morning she’d talked her new shift sergeant into making a play. She went right out and arrested a midlevel dealer named Yuki Kisho who carried out most of his deals at the Plum. Yuki didn’t always pay attention to the subtle details of the trade—nuances like not pissing off your girlfriend if she knows you sell meth for a living. Scorned girlfriends made for terrific covert informants, and in Yuki’s case, he’d pissed off both his girlfriend and his mistress. Mariko’s ex-partner, Han, already had contracts with both of Yuki’s ladyloves; from there it was only a matter of waiting for the right time to burn down their cheating boyfriend.
Not long ago, Mariko and Han would have brought him down together. But that was before Han got himself busted back to general patrol. Since fate had a wicked sense of irony, it was his misconduct that freed him up to pursue Joko Daishi. Mariko should have been working the same case, but instead she was stuck in Narcotics working penny-ante buy-busts. Given the choice between being ladylike and doing her damn job, Captain Kusama wanted Mariko to be a lady.
She wondered what Kusama would think of her now, working her first undercover job instead of sitting behind a desk with her pinky sticking out as she sipped her tea.
“Still ringing,” Sour Plum told her.
“He’ll pick up,” Mariko said. “For you he’ll pick up.”
“He better.”
Mariko winced at that. She could hardly tell him the truth: that she was only pretending to be Yuki’s girlfriend, and that maybe Yuki hadn’t answered the call because she’d tossed him into an interrogation room that got crappy reception.
Sour Plum narrowed his eyes at her, looking her up and down. Mariko wasn’t sure if he was interested in her figure or in the plaster cast on her right forearm. Could he tell it was a fake? If so, then things were about to go south.
The only thing more conspicuous than her cast would have been the four-fingered hand it concealed. Losing that finger in a sword fight made her a media sensation for a week. She’d made the news again by fatally shooting a man on a populated subway platform. Captain Kusama had allowed the public to believe that Akahata Daisuke was unarmed when she shot him, and that made Mariko the most infamous cop in Tokyo. She was utterly useless for undercover work.
Until someone tried to bash her brains in with an iron mask. Now everyone would focus on the bruises, not the face that bore them. Truth to tell, she hardly looked like Oshiro Mariko anymore. The real giveaway was her missing trigger finger, which the cast concealed completely. The cast also went nicely with the bruises, and together they anchored Mariko’s cover story—a story Lee was soon to confirm if Yuki would just pick up his goddamn phone.
“Don’t make sense,” Sour Plum said, his gaze roving from her cast to her tits. “What’s a nice piece of ass like you want with a dumbshit like him?”
“Maybe I don’t want anything from him anymore. Maybe you’ve got what I need.” She pulled a thin stack of folded, sweat-slicked 10,000-yen bills from her bra. “Just sell me enough to pay off this yakuza asshole. Then maybe you and me can talk about what we want to do later.”
“You got money. Why not pay him yourself?”
“Says he wants product, not cash.”
Sour Plum took her money, held it up to his nose, and sniffed it like he was sniffing her panties. “Double,” he said.
“Huh?”
He leered at her and smelled the money again. “You’ll pay me double, ’cause most days you’d pay me in pussy. But I don’t hit no woman, and I don’t want nobody saying I do, neither. So double, or else walk your skinny ass out of here.”
“Done.” A thrill of adrenaline ran through Mariko’s veins like bubbling champagne. Her first undercover job, and it was going off without a hitch.
And then Yuki answered his phone.
“It’s me,” Lee said. Mariko wanted to snatch the phone and toss it down the stairs. She already had Lee where she wanted him. There was nothing Yuki could say to make matters better, and ten thousand things he could say to make everything go right to hell.
“Shut up and listen,” said the man called Sour Plum. “You tell some skinny bitch to come around
here?”
Mariko hoped Yuki said, Yes and not, Yes, but she’s a cop.
“How I’m supposed to know you ain’t setting me up?” Lee grimaced as he listened. “Hey, you got yakuzas on your ass, that’s your problem, not mine—and the next time you get in deep with one of those fuckers, you tell ’em to kick your ass instead of your woman’s, you chickenshit. Now tell me where you’re at.”
Mariko’s stomach fluttered like a bird trapped in a mason jar. Please, she thought, please don’t tell him.
“I don’t like surprises,” Lee said. “You pull this crap again, you gonna look like your girlfriend.”
He clicked off the phone, and when he returned it to his jacket pocket Mariko got another glimpse of the Spyderco. “Says he didn’t rough you up. Says a yakuza did it.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Mariko said.
“I know. I’m saying your bullshit matches his bullshit. So maybe it ain’t bullshit.”
“Then we have a deal?”
“We got a deal.”
He took the money, Mariko left with a little baggie of meth, and half a minute later she took point on the raid. It went as smoothly as could be expected, given the tight quarters and the sheer mass of cops trying to make their way up the narrow staircase. Sour Plum’s bodyguards let her by, thinking she was trying to flee from the police. That trapped Mariko upstairs with Lee Jin Bao while his heavies dealt with the rest of the squad.
Mariko had been entertaining a pet theory that a plaster cast could do lots of things a sword could do. Lee put that theory to the test. He was twice her size and damn quick with his knife. She parried the first slash with her cast, then snapped a kote-uchi strike to the wrist. His knife hit the floor. When he started throwing punches, she let him bloody his knuckles on the fiberglass for a while. Then a shomenuchi to the forehead dropped him right on his ass. Her cast was in tatters by the time she was done, but apart from that, she decided she’d logged some good kenjutsu practice tonight.
While the rest of the team searched the Plum for contraband, Mariko hopped onto a stool next to Lee Jin Bao. He sat at his own bar, looking profoundly uncomfortable with his thumbs zip-tied behind him. His breath came loud and angry through his nose. She pulled a couple of hastily folded pages from her back pocket and smoothed them on the spotless countertop. “You ever see this chick before?”
The first page was a grainy black-and-white image captured from a Japan Railways closed-circuit camera, centered on the woman who had kicked Mariko’s ass with the demon mask.
“Couldn’t say.”
Mariko slid the next sheet in front of him: three more pictures of the woman in white, captured from three other security cameras. None of them were high quality, and none of them were head-on. Mariko had a sneaking suspicion that the woman had done that on purpose—that she’d deliberately faced this way or that so the cops couldn’t get a good data set to run facial recognition software.
“How about now?” Mariko said. “Recognize her yet?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Here, let’s get some of this crap out of your eyes.” She scrubbed Lee’s face with one hand, and not as gently as she could have. Pink flecks of broken cast rained down on the counter. The trickle of blood snaking down from his hairline was now a smear across his forehead. It wasn’t right, taking her frustration out on him, but she’d gone to a lot of work pulling these images and she wanted to see some results.
After getting her ass kicked by the woman in white, Mariko’s first stop wasn’t the ER, but rather the Tokyo Station security office. She knew the station would have dozens of cameras, and she planned to use them to track her assailant out of the building and into the streets. From there she’d hoped to track the woman via traffic camera feed, but by the time she’d climbed the stairs to the security office she felt woozy. After that, her next clear memory was coming to in the back of an ambulance.
No one would have blamed her for taking the rest of the day off. Even if she wasn’t sporting a grade two concussion, the relief work at Haneda had driven her to the brink of exhaustion. But Mariko knew she couldn’t afford to rest. Most security cameras recorded over their own feed, running a perpetual loop to save on data storage, and the length of the loop varied from one camera to the next. As far as she was concerned, the clock was ticking.
So the moment the ER doc had her stitched up, Mariko rushed straight back to the station security office. A flash of her badge gave her an all-access backstage pass. The Haneda bombing had people scared. They would give a cop anything she asked for, and the thought of a warrant never entered their minds.
The first thing she had to search for was the footage of herself, turtling up while getting beaten half to death. Even watching it from the cold remove of recorded video was enough to make her heart race. From there, with the help of the security staff, she’d jumped from one monitor to the next, finally tracking her perpetrator out of the train station and into a taxicab. Then it was back home for Mariko, where a shower and a change of clothes made her look not quite so much like an exsanguinated corpse. From there she’d run off to post.
Tracking that taxi would have been easy enough for any cop with a smidgen of talent when it came to computers, which was to say anyone on the force except for Mariko. Accessing surveillance camera feed was a simple matter of logging in; she didn’t even need a warrant. But after that Mariko was at sea. She could click through one camera at a time, but there were over a hundred surveillance cameras in greater Tokyo—and that was to say nothing of the traffic cams, weather cams, and privately owned Webcams whose owners streamed their feed online for all the world to see. Mariko’s first instinct was to pull rank and order someone from Evidence Division to run the search for her. Then she remembered: she’d lost her sergeant’s stripes. Pulling rank wasn’t an option anymore.
So she’d spent two laborious days screening all the footage herself. Fortunately, she’d never had much patience for paperwork, which meant she had a perpetual backlog, which gave her an airtight excuse to ride a desk for two days straight. At last she’d tracked the woman in white to a blind spot between two cameras in Kabuki-cho, Tokyo’s red-light district. A third camera was pointing right where she needed it, but karma must have been feeling pissy that morning, because a pigeon had made its nest right in front of the lens. Instead of a visual on where her target went to ground, Mariko had a close-up shot of twigs and molted feathers.
Not to be daunted, Mariko played the last trick in her book. Narcotics kept meticulous records: arrests, convictions, seizures, and—of particular importance for Mariko—addresses. Mariko had only to draw a half-kilometer radius around the blind spot, then check the files for violent crime busts or suspicious person calls within that circle. If the woman in white had priors, maybe she also had criminal friends she could hide out with after assaulting a cop.
The most promising hit had been the Sour Plum, and so here she was, sitting next to the proprietor and poking at the printed screen shots she’d pulled from the various camera feeds. “Does she come here often?” Mariko said. “Did she come here Wednesday morning?”
Lee shrugged. “Couldn’t say.”
Mariko sighed. “And suppose I were to ask you how many fingers and toes you have?”
“Couldn’t say.”
She got the idea. Lee would clam up until he saw a lawyer, and even then he wouldn’t say much. But Mariko had a keen sense for lies. In her line of work, it was an indispensable skill. And that sense of hers said Lee wasn’t lying. He honestly hadn’t seen the woman before.
Mariko could feel her frustration mounting. It stiffened the muscles of her skull, like a giant hand clamping down on her head. She wanted nothing more than to jump behind the bar and pour herself a shot and a beer, but general orders prohibited drinking on duty. She considered violating orders anyway, but then the flat-panel TV mounted over the bar distracted her. Mariko went behind the bar, found the remote control, and turned up the volume.
She instantly wished she hadn’t.
“—eighteen deaths and counting,” the reporter was saying. “Police say the only common thread between them is that all eighteen were employed at St. Luke’s or were patients there.”
Behind him was a towering wall of blue glass that Mariko recognized immediately. The mere sight of it made her shiver like she’d seen a ghost. It was in the operating room of St. Luke’s International Hospital that surgeons had removed a meter of razor-sharp Inazuma steel from her gut. She was almost pronounced dead after Fuchida Shuzo ran her through with Beautiful Singer. Her sole piece of good fortune that day was that he’d gutted her right across the street from a top-notch surgical unit.
Now there were eighteen more ghosts to associate with St. Luke’s. “The cause of death is thought to be ricin poisoning,” the reporter went on. “Because the poison can take as long as five days to kill once it enters a person’s system, it is not known how many others have already been exposed. Hospital authorities and the National Police Agency urge everyone who is experiencing the following symptoms to go to the emergency room immediately—”
The reporter went on, but Mariko wasn’t listening. She was wondering how she could show a connection between the ricin deaths and the Divine Wind. There was no doubt in her mind that Joko Daishi was responsible. He didn’t have his mask anymore, so in all likelihood he believed he’d lost his divine guidance, but he may well have ordered the attack before the mask was stolen. For that matter, he might have authorized high-ranking lackeys to execute such attacks independently. Only one thing was certain: attacking a hospital fit perfectly with Joko Daishi’s modus operandi.
His goal was to enlighten the people, and his method was to disrupt their faith in all of the things that kept life stable and harmonious. That included medical facilities. St. Luke’s was supposed to be a place you went to get better; now going there could kill you. If ricin took days to kill, then everyone who had gone to St. Luke’s this week had to wonder if they had also been poisoned. Everyone who felt even a hint of the symptoms would flood the nearest ER. Hundreds more would avoid going to any hospital, for fear that whoever had infiltrated St. Luke’s would attack other facilities as well.
