by Steve Bein
In short, Joko Daishi had hobbled Tokyo’s entire health care system.
Mariko’s phone was in her hand before she knew it. She punched in Lieutenant Sakakibara’s number and started rehearsing what she wanted to say.
“What do you want, Frodo?”
“Sir, have you seen—”
“St. Luke’s. Yeah. What about it?”
“Sir, we know Joko Daishi has expertise in chemistry. If he can cook meth and build high explosives, he can make ricin.”
Sakakibara muttered something gruff, but Mariko didn’t catch it. She muted the TV. “What’s that, sir?”
“I said I don’t care if the man knows how to make a nuclear bomb. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Sir, I know this man—”
“Yeah? Well, I know another man, and he outranks both of us. If His Eminence says you’re stuck working bullshit buy-busts, then that’s what you’re doing.”
“Isn’t there someone else you could talk to? Someone higher up the chain of command?”
“I tried talking to you, to tell you to keep your damn mouth shut. How far did that get me?”
Mariko felt her face flush. She wasn’t sure if it was out of shame or anger. “I know, sir. I’m really sorry—”
“I’ll bet. Learn to live with what you’ve got, Frodo. Have you talked to that ex-partner of yours?”
“About what, sir?”
“About his case work. I got him assigned to Haneda.”
Finally a piece of good news. Apart from improving Han’s standing in the department, it also gave Mariko a personal contact inside the investigation she’d rather be working. “Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t call me again. Call Han next time.”
“Sorry, sir. I only wanted to—”
“Just do your damn job, Frodo. Right now that means bullshit buy-busts, even if I could make better use of you elsewhere.”
He hung up and Mariko had a dead phone in her hand.
Lee Jin Bao’s perpetual frown curled into a smile. “Tough day at work?”
“Shut up.”
12
The pounding in Makoto’s head made it so hard to think.
He did not care for the way his concubines winced at him. It was in their nature, he supposed; they were trained to worship him. Nevertheless, their concern for their injured god strayed all too close to motherly despair. In their minds they would never infantilize him, but in their cringing faces he could see their need to reach out to him, to perform their ministrations on his body. If he could see it, others could see it too, and that threatened Joko Daishi’s godhood.
His fingertips ventured lightly, softly, painfully over the bruised flesh where his father had been. Even the slightest touch was a rasp on sunburned skin. His very skull felt as fragile as an eggshell. Contusions traced the bridge of his nose and the lines of his cheekbones. Small cuts ringed his eyes. His forehead was red fading into purple, darkest on the left side where the harlot’s bullet had taken him. But for his father, Makoto would be dead. Not for the first time, Joko Daishi had rescued Koji Makoto.
Makoto would happily submit to a thousand cuts and bruises such as these, a thousand times a thousand, if only they would restore his father to him. But his father was gone, stolen by the harlot whose name would never again be uttered in his presence. As soon as he’d regained consciousness, Makoto declared her dead to the church. Hamaya Jiro had already dispatched brothers and sisters to deliver the harlot to the afterlife. All men were in need of purification, but the divine flames would burn hungrily for that one.
Instead of his father’s voice, Makoto heard a ringing, piercing pain. It lanced him through from temple to temple, when what he wanted most was clarity of mind to see his father’s vision. “Thirteen-oh-four,” he said. “One thousand. Three hundred. Four.”
He ran the tip of his forefinger along a raised crease in the map unfolded before him. The map represented the city of Tokyo, and since it was very large, it showed the diseased metropolis in fine detail. With a blue pen he drew a long, straight line connecting a highway on-ramp to … to … to where? The closer he got to realizing his father’s dream, the harder it became to remember the final details. A lesser man would see nothing but blinding white pain. But Makoto was not an ordinary man. His was a higher calling. He centered his concentration on his breath, then directed his ki to the acupressure points in his temples.
His father’s dream became clear again. “Yes, I see,” he said. “So beautiful.” His blue line resumed its zigzagging course through the city.
His journal held down one corner of the map, filled with scribblings that only his father could help him decipher. Holding down the far side of the map was the L-shape of an automatic pistol fitted with a sound suppressor. It was not within reach, but it did not need to be. No one would harm him here. No one would find him here. He was constantly on the move, vanishing for hours at a time, resurfacing only in safe houses and never in the same one twice.
This one was a construction company whose storage building was large enough to serve as a sanctum of the Divine Wind. Makoto sat in the project manager’s office, a cold, windowless space with only a small desk lamp for illumination. Brighter light would have sharpened Makoto’s headaches. Hamaya Jiro stood in attendance, and eleven others as well, all of them nervously silent. Hamaya wore an arm sling and a pained expression. Both were due to the bullet he’d taken through the shoulder in defense of Joko Daishi. No god could ask for greater devotion.
Makoto studied the map, then connected one last path of green to the blue one he’d just drawn. Then he released a great sighing breath and set down his pen. At last the work was done.
Green signified the second phase, blue the third. The first phase was red, the most intricate, the most demanding. The green lines were few and the blue ones fewer, but slashes of red ink crisscrossed the entire city. From Makoto’s perspective it looked like he’d sliced Tokyo’s face with ten thousand razor blades. It pained him to think that Tokyo herself would feel that way before the end. But incisions were a part of surgery. A physician’s hands sometimes had to harm before they healed.
“Behold,” he told the twelve disciples gathered before him. “Behold the vision of Joko Daishi. This next teaching shall be my most profound. One thousand three hundred and four. It is a great number, and a heavy burden on our fold. Many hundreds of your brothers and sisters are called to action. We must be organized. We must strike without warning. And you, oh my brethren, you must do this without me.”
That drew a gasp from the assembly. “Daishi-sama, no,” said one of his disciples. The man was short but powerfully built, a foreman in the construction company Makoto now used as his sanctuary. “Do you still mean to go to the police?”
“I do.”
The foreman came to Makoto’s side and went to one knee. The muscles stood out in his forearms when he pressed his palms together in supplication. “Please, Daishi-sama, let me take your place. Once they have you, they’ll never let you go.”
Makoto smiled and clasped the man’s hands in his own. “Do not doubt the vision of Joko Daishi. I am the light, and I will not have my children wander in darkness. I have already illuminated your path. It is yours to walk, just as I must walk my own path. Alone.”
“Please, Daishi-sama, please don’t let them take you.”
“How can they contain a being of light? I choose the hour of my coming and going. Their laws mean nothing. Their walls mean nothing. Their prisons are but shadows before me. Let them think their justice system makes them safer; I will show them the truth.”
He released the foreman and stood to address the entire congregation. The act of standing sent splitting pain through his temples. He bore it stoically. “I go to reveal my wisdom to these defenders of delusion. Since they have misunderstood all that I taught at Terminal 2, I shall make them the subject of my next sermon. They call themselves ‘law enforcement.’ I will show them the true law,
using their own bodies and minds as the vehicles for my revelation.”
“But, Daishi-sama—”
Makoto fixed the foreman with a demonic glare. “Doubt deserves no place in your heart. Now which one would you have me cut out, your doubt or your heart?”
The foreman bowed to the floor and prostrated himself. “Forgive me, Daishi-sama.”
Makoto looked down at him. With one stomp of his foot he could snap the man’s neck. But Joko Daishi was a loving god. He was not here now—he could not return until Makoto was reunited with his father—but in his absence Makoto had to embody his virtues as best he could. He chose not to crush the life out of this man.
Instead, he held his arms wide as if to embrace everyone in the room. “I foresaw this trial long ago. But I shall return to you very soon. I have gone once before to these officers of the law. I go to them now a second time, and there shall not be a third. This I have seen. But while I am gone, my children, the Church of the Divine Wind has much to accomplish. Only four days remain until my greatest sermon, the sermon of the one thousand three hundred and four. You must do your part, as I will do mine.”
All twelve of his disciples nodded, even the foreman who still prostrated himself on the floor. “Go, then, and prepare your brothers and sisters for what is to come. And may the Purging Fire burn away all that is impure in you. May you feel only the peace of those who have already given themselves up for dead.”
13
It took three hours for Mariko and her team to close down the scene at the Sour Plum. At last her sergeant dismissed her, which still felt weird; she was used to being the one who dismissed people. Those days were gone. Now she needed permission just to step outside and get some fresh air.
The rain-slicked streets offered no relief. Kabuki-cho was supposed to be Tokyo on an ecstasy and nicotine binge, but now the whole city was on lithium. The neon still reflected in the puddles, the LEDs still flashed in their millions, but for whom? Hardly anyone was there.
If there was one thing Mariko had come to understand from her formative years in rural Illinois, it was that small-town people cooked at home and big-city people ate out. Her mom’s love of cooking was very much the exception, while Mariko herself proved the rule: if she couldn’t make it in a microwave, it was too much hassle. Let someone else do the cooking and cleanup. Tokyoites had places to be.
So Kabuki-cho’s restaurants should have been filled to bursting. The streets should have been wall-to-wall sarariman, teetering drunkenly out of the bars on their way to penthouse hostess clubs or bargain basement blow job salons. There should have been teenagers with fake IDs, nervous and titillated as they ventured into the strip clubs. It was Friday night, for God’s sake. But instead those places had perhaps a tenth of their customary clientele.
Mariko noticed the same desolation in the Web cafés, the pachinko parlors, the boutique shops selling Pokémon smartphone cases. The city wasn’t dead. It wasn’t like some postapocalyptic movie where the remaining survivors were afraid to leave their homes. It was just that events like a terrorist attack made people reassess the importance of staying at home, and many of them found a new love for the comforts they’d rediscovered there. Mariko wondered how overworked the delivery rooms would be nine months from now, or whether New York and DC had seen a similar baby boom nine months after 9/11.
Mariko saw the city’s desolation mirrored in her own life. Her demotion still weighed on her like a yoke, heavy enough to physically change her posture. Old aches and pains niggled at her. She felt a gaping hole where her sergeant’s bars used to be, a mutilation just like her missing finger. She hadn’t gotten used to that nothingness yet; when she looked at her right hand, she saw the hand of a cripple. Her American upbringing told her there was no disgrace in having a handicap, but Japanese tradition held otherwise. The potency of that tradition suffused every pore of her being with shame. If losing the finger was disgraceful, losing her sergeant’s rank was cause for seppuku. Police officers and samurai were alike: for them, honor was paramount, and Mariko’s honor was indelibly marred. She had lost face and there was no getting it back.
If the empty streets were a mirror, then Mariko didn’t care to look in it anymore. She had turned to head back up to the Sour Plum when she noticed a love hotel across the road. It rented rooms by the hour, with themed rooms catering to different fantasies and fetishes. In most neighborhoods, love hotels catered to ordinary civilians—trysts, one-night stands, spouses looking to spice things up—but in Kabuki-cho it would be johns and prostitutes more often than not. Usually such places prided themselves on secrecy and discretion, but here, where the typical client came for criminal activities, safety would be the greater concern.
Mariko hoped that might entail a security camera, preferably pointing straight out the door toward the blind spot.
She jogged across the street and into the lobby, where she was greeted by a loud and inevitable “Irasshaimase!” Ignoring the desk clerk who had just greeted her, Mariko scanned the perimeter of the ceiling, and indulged herself with a little fist-pump when she saw the lobby camera was facing the double glass doors that opened onto the sidewalk. She flashed her badge at the clerk—a skinny boy, easily intimidated—and said she’d like to review the security footage.
The kid didn’t know how to operate the CCTV system, but by now Mariko had spent enough time around these things that this one wasn’t too hard to figure out. She successfully cued up the morning of her assault, but her efforts were immediately rewarded with disappointment. The camera was aimed in the right direction, but it was mounted too high, angled too steeply. The little black-and-white screen showed her the lobby, the double doors, and even the legs and feet of a group of schoolgirls walking by. But the blind spot was still blinded.
Strange, she thought, to be able to identify high school girls solely by their legs. These girls had all decided on the same trendy shoes. They all wore scrunchy white socks, all of them pulled up to cover the calf. Mariko glanced at the time stamp again and wondered why these girls weren’t in school at eight forty on a Wednesday morning. Then she remembered: this was the morning after the Haneda bombing. All the city schools were closed.
Then came the next question: why were any of these girls out of bed? They could have slept in, yet here they were, all dolled up at eight forty in the morning. As soon as Mariko asked herself the question, she intuited the answer: they weren’t about to waste a day off of school by spending it with their parents. Better to stick to the routine, get out of the house, find the same group of friends they saw every day. Their city was under attack; they needed someone to talk to, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t do the trick.
Mariko wondered whom she might have turned to if she were their age. By high school her sister, Saori, was already using; she’d have sought consolation in getting wasted. That had never been Mariko’s style. In all likelihood she wouldn’t have had a boyfriend either. Mariko had never been able to keep them very long. Maybe some of the girls on the track team?
She knew the man she wished she could have talked to: Yamada-sensei. He had been so much more than a teacher to her. In some ways he’d been a grandfather, in some ways even a father. He knew exactly what it was like to have your hometown destroyed. He’d been in Tokyo the day the first bombs fell; in fact, some of those bombs were direct hits on the building he was stationed in. He remembered the firebombing in ’forty-five and he’d seen the city rebuild itself from the ashes. He’d have known what to say in times like this.
But he was dead, and Mariko had never fully forgiven herself for her part in that. She should have been at his side and she wasn’t, and maybe if she’d been there she could have stopped his killer. Maybe. That question would never be answered.
Now that whole drama was coming back around. She’d had her chance to put a bullet in Joko Daishi’s brain. Had she done so, a hundred and twelve people would have gone about their business on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Instead, all those people lay dead. A da
rk cloud of dread hung over her city, all because Mariko had frozen up when she could have pulled the trigger.
Tonight she had the opposite problem. Instead of having an obvious solution but not enough guts to follow through, she had the will to find this woman in white but she’d run out of options. She had half a mind to find herself a ladder and a drill; if she reset the angle of the camera, maybe next time it could do her some good. There was no solving her problem retroactively, but she wanted to busy herself doing something.
She shot the camera an irritated glare on her way out the door, and what she saw stopped her dead. Someone else had exactly the same idea about the ladder and the drill. Four empty holes described a rectangle in the wall, maybe ten or fifteen centimeters lower than the camera’s current perch. Someone had elevated it.
Following a hunch, she went outside and looked around for her least favorite traffic camera, the one obstructed by the pigeon’s nest. She spotted it, but not the nest. Only remnants of the nest remained, almost as if they’d been glued to the camera just to obstruct its view of the blind spot.
Just like that, the blind spot became the Blind Spot. It wasn’t bad luck or poor timing or anything else. It was a creation, not an accident. Someone was hiding something here, someone connected to the woman in white. Whoever these people were, they’d taken extraordinary measures not to be found. Deliberately blinding a police surveillance cam was one thing, but it took a new level of paranoia to search the surrounding businesses for additional cameras to reposition.
Wait, Mariko thought. Paranoia? How far down that road had she gone herself?
What lengths would someone have to go to in order to move the hotel camera? Mariko’s earlier fantasy was totally untenable; no business would allow a stranger to barge in toting a ladder and a drill. It would have to be the love hotel’s handyman, or else a technician from the contractor that installed the security system in the first place. And contrary to the trope in so many movies, a person couldn’t just show up with a toolbox and coveralls and expect to be given free rein to start drilling away. There would be bids, work orders, invoices, signatures, entries on the hotel manager’s calendar. Faking all of that would take considerable resources. All so that just in case some bullheaded cop decided to look for one particular taxi stopping along one particular fifty-meter stretch of roadway, she wouldn’t find anything.
