by Steve Bein
Let’s try down, Mariko thought. She went cautiously to the bar, taking care not to stumble in the dark in this unfamiliar space. Behind the bar she spotted exactly what she’d hoped to find: a door to a staircase, which in turn led down to the stockroom. The door wasn’t locked but the stockroom was. A good, hard kick ripped the hasp right out of the wood.
That was the moment she really wished she had her sidearm. Any bad guys on the other side of that door now knew exactly where she was. Unless they stepped within arm’s reach, the Pikachu would be useless.
Mariko moved through the doorway fast and low, eager to find cover just in case bullets started flying her way. She needn’t have bothered; the storeroom was empty.
Flickering fluorescent tubes automatically sputtered to life, triggered by the opening door. Mariko saw walls of heavy-duty shelving, stocked to the ceiling with cases of booze, boxes of napkins, giant bags of arare. No women in white, nor anyone else to tackle Mariko or put a slug in her.
A refrigerator’s compressor purred contentedly, causing Mariko to look for the source. She found it quickly enough: a pair of tall, stainless steel, industrial-sized units, one a fridge and the other a freezer. Still no women in white, no ninja Secret Santas, no signs of any criminal activity.
Then she heard movement upstairs.
Heels thumped the floor hard and fast. They sped straight for the bar—straight for Mariko. She heard the door upstairs being knocked aside. Mariko dashed for the stockroom door, slipping behind it a fraction of a second before her intruder rushed into the room.
She jabbed him in the nape of the neck with the Pikachu and pulled the trigger.
“Fuck!” Han shouted. He jumped away from the contact studs like a bullet leaving a gun. At the same time, Mariko pulled the stun gun away. Han clutched his neck with one hand and brought his revolver around with the other.
“It’s me! It’s Mariko. Don’t shoot!”
He blinked hard and shot a double take in her direction. His face was as red as a beet. An involuntary convulsion careened through his body. He could hardly stand up straight, but at least he lowered the gun. “What the hell, Mariko?”
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Mariko managed that much without cracking up. Then she let out a guffaw. “You should see your face,” she said, laughing so hard it was tough to get the words out. “I wish we could have filmed that. Best YouTube video ever. I swear, everyone in the department—”
“Ha-ha,” Han said, not the least bit amused. “I come down here to save your life and this is the thanks I get?”
“What can I say? This cop thing is a dangerous profession.”
“Damn right it is.” He rubbed his neck and laughed. “You are such an asshole, you know that?”
Mariko almost forgot they were in enemy territory. “How did you know to look for me down here?”
“I heard a banging noise and I came in. I guess it was you kicking that door open. Anyway, I saw the light coming from downstairs behind the bar and I rushed to your aid. You know, like a superhero. And for that you tased me in the neck.”
“I am so sorry—”
“Don’t be. I’ll just go buy a stun gun and get you back.” He holstered his weapon and for the first time he looked around the storeroom. “What were you doing down here, anyway?”
“I was hoping to find where that ninja bitch’s secret door lets out. Hey, what are you doing?”
Han was reaching for the handle on the refrigerator door. “Looking for something to drink. A little orange juice really hits the spot after getting electrocuted, you know?”
“Han, you can’t.”
“We’re already guilty of breaking and entering; I don’t think they’re going to miss one little can of—”
At first it seemed like the door was a bit stubborn. Han tugged it a bit harder, and suddenly the whole refrigerator pulled away from the wall. It swung out as if one corner was connected by hinges to the wall—which, in fact, was precisely the case. The refrigerator doubled as another hidden door.
Han had the firearm, so he was the first one through. Mariko shadowed him, feeling useless with the Pikachu in her hand, but at least she could offer a second pair of eyes. As it happened, she was the first one to spot the light switch.
She flicked it and two long rows of fluorescent lights came to life. Below them stood at least a dozen desks, the pressboard kind with the thin faux-wood veneer. Each one was home to what looked like a little black octopus: a bundle of cables, zip-tied together and blossoming up through a plastic-rimmed cutout in the desktop. Power cords, Ethernet cables, USB something-or-others; Mariko wasn’t great with computers, but she knew enough to understand there used to be a hell of a lot of them in this room.
Many of the cables ran to a large, blocky, important-looking metal armature on the back wall. Not long ago, this must have stored a number of smaller but equally important-looking gadgets, probably with lots of fans and LED lights. These would have something to do with servers and cloud computing and other networky things that might as well have been magic spells for all Mariko understood about them. Not that it mattered. Someone had absconded with everything a police detective might have used to figure out who had been down here and what they’d been up to.
There were no office chairs. No carpeting. No fabric at all, actually, which was a shame, because DNA evidence was especially clingy to fabric. The only things left behind had hard surfaces, and judging by the chlorinated smell that got stronger with each step into the room, they’d all been wiped down with bleach. Mariko and Han would find no useful evidence here.
“You wanted your ninja Secret Santa,” Mariko said. “I think this is his workshop.”
“And the ninja elves are all long gone.” He whistled. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”
Mariko just shook her head. What was there to say? This place wasn’t Joko Daishi’s style. She remembered his headquarters all too well. That place was just as sterile as this, but here she saw no place to worship. No private sanctum for the cult leader to fuck his acolytes either.
“Don’t worry,” Han said. “Whoever these people are, they’ll have left trace evidence upstairs. We’ll sweep the carpet, the bathrooms, the whole works. No one can keep track of every hair.”
“They don’t need to. Han, how many guys come to that strip club in a given weekend?”
Han shrugged. “I don’t know. A couple hundred, maybe.”
“See? Down here they leave no trace, while up there they leave too much. You want to send evidence techs into that club and tell them to catalog every last hair? You’ll give them all heart attacks.”
Mariko ambled around aimlessly, lost in her thoughts. Who was the woman in white? Who was pulling her strings? Why did they want Mariko to have the mask? Was it to weaken Joko Daishi, to shatter his deluded belief in his own divine power? Or was it a ploy to draw him into attacking Mariko in order to reclaim the mask?
She had so many questions, and so far only one answer: she knew where the woman in white had gone once she’d disappeared through the secret door upstairs. A sturdy steel fire door on the right-hand wall concealed a ladder that climbed back up to street level. Solving that riddle brought her little solace; she had a hundred other questions she’d like to have answered first.
“Uh, Mariko? You’re going to want to take a look at this.”
She turned to see Han standing like a drunkard barely able to keep his feet. A sheaf of paper sagged in one hand, and he could not have looked more flummoxed if he were holding a dead baby alien.
Dumbfounded, he passed the papers to Mariko—ordinary A4 paper, the same as she’d find in any photocopier in the city. Nothing remarkable there. The first line on the first page didn’t knock her socks off either:
10-09-29 CEST 10:11:11 MX10-1-9-1 000807 UC VM PI
The time stamp was easy enough to understand, but the rest was gibberish. Almost gibberish, anyway. That MX number seemed vaguely familiar, but Mariko couldn�
�t place it.
Thus, the rest of the page didn’t do her much good. They were all slight variations on the first line. She could see each one had a different string of numbers, each time a little later in the day, but what were they? Stock trades? Print jobs? Train departures? There was no way to tell. Thirty lines per page, all of them useless.
Halfway down the next page, a line break and then a new list of alphanumerics, these dated 10-09-30—September 30, 2010. Thursday. Apart from that difference, Thursday’s gibberish was as unintelligible as Wednesday’s.
“Han, what am I supposed to be reading here?”
“Skip to the end.”
She shrugged and flipped to the last page. The very last line read,
10-10-02 CEST 08:00:00 LOC UNSPEC Meet Watanabe Masayori
Mariko dropped the paper like it was on fire. “What the hell?”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Han.
No one in Narcotics called Han by his real name. In fact, most of the guys didn’t even know his real name. Sakakibara had nicknamed him Han years ago and the name just stuck. Mariko might have been the only one who knew that his nickname before that was Masu, short for Masayori. Watanabe Masayori. Who met her at oh eight hundred hours this morning, October 2, just like it said on the page.
There it was, staring up at her. She picked it up again, and with each line she read, she felt her gut tighten. The penultimate entry: the previous night, twenty-one hundred hours, commence sting operation against Lee Jin Bao. The entry before that: same day, twelve thirty hours, intake Yuki Kisho on suspicion of trafficking. The entry before that: one day earlier, a string of numbers just like the ones that dominated the previous four pages. Except now she remembered why the MX number seemed familiar.
The city of Tokyo bought its traffic cameras from a company called Mobotix. TMPD sourced the same company for its surveillance cameras. MX10-4-137-29 was the location of one particular Mobotix traffic cam. What Mariko held in her hands was a complete list of every traffic cam and surveillance cam whose feed she’d pulled in tracking the woman in white from Tokyo Station all the way back to the Blind Spot.
This wasn’t a pirated file. Mariko had never typed up a list of all the cameras she’d used. Half of them were duds, and even of the best hits, she’d just printed the clearest images and moved on. So no one had hacked her account back at HQ. Someone had been watching her the whole time. They had monitored all of her computer activity related to the woman in white, and they must have done it in real time. Not just Mariko’s searches for camera feed, either; there were e-mails and memos about the Yuki collar too, and more about the raid on the Sour Plum. Hell, even her phone conversations; she and Han had spoken for all of thirty seconds in setting up this morning’s meet. That was the last entry in the log.
“Han, these people were right here, in this room, less than ten hours ago. They listened to us, they packed up all their shit, and they vanished.”
Han took half a step back, and Mariko realized she’d gotten a little animated with her gesticulations. “Sorry,” she said, crossing her arms. “But you see what I’m saying. Ten hours flat, and they go from fully operational to ghost in the machine. Worse yet, they leave the front door unlocked, just to make sure I’d come down here to see what’s left of their vanishing act.”
“Hm.” He looked at the pages in her hand. “So why’d they leave the log behind? Same reason? Like, just to fuck with your head?”
“Hold on. You don’t think I’m being paranoid, do you? Please tell me you believe me.”
“Are you kidding? Look around.” He stretched his arms out wide, as if to take in the whole room. “Ninja Secret Santa’s workshop. If this wasn’t happening to a good friend of mine, this would be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
That was more than Mariko could take. She sat on the nearest desk and sagged in half. She thought her traffic camera trick was pretty good. She was especially proud of the trick with the high schoolers’ cell phones. All along she’d thought she was flying under the radar, but this printout blew that illusion all to hell. Now, not only had she not found her quarry, but her quarry had only to send this cryptic list to Captain Kusama and that would be the end of Mariko’s career. He’d given her a direct order to work nothing but narcotics cases, and here was a record of all the time she’d spent hunting her assailant instead.
Right from day one, she should have filed an injury report with the department. She should have passed the case to another detective. While she was at it, she could have passed along her idea with the traffic cams too. Cops didn’t take this kind of thing lying down; the woman in white had attacked one of their own, and that meant they’d find her no matter how long it took. Instead she’d passed off her bruises as a kenjutsu injury, she’d disobeyed orders, and now she’d dragged Han into the whole mess. In the last five minutes she had committed breaking and entering, destruction of property, and official misconduct. It was enough to put her in prison.
All for nothing. And now she was out of leads. Her courage leaked out of her like water from a sieve. “Han, what the hell am I going to do?”
“Exactly what you’ve been doing. Look, Mariko, whoever these people are, you’ve got them running scared. That list? It’s like a minefield sign on a field without any mines. They’re trying to frighten you away.”
“Yeah, well, it’s working.”
“No. I’m telling you, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them. They thought they were invisible, but now they know they’re not. Not to you. Not anymore.”
Mariko wished she could find that encouraging. If there really was a Wind, and if they really had been lurking in the shadows for the last five hundred years, it would be quite an honor to be the first one to spot them. But how could she know she was the first one? There might have been a hundred by now but the Wind assassinated the other ninety-nine. For all Mariko knew, she could be next on their list.
BOOK FOUR
AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA PERIOD, THE YEAR 21
(1588 CE)
17
Daigoro cradled his stepfather in his arms. He decided he could get used to the feeling of holding a baby.
Lord Yasuda Gorobei was warm and soft and smelled like comfort. His tiny eyes clamped shut against the sunlight and he snuggled his face into Daigoro’s kimono, bound and determined to sleep.
His father, Yasuda Kenkichi, had died just as he lived: drunk and disgraced. He met his end facedown in a puddle of muddy rainwater after a brutal tavern brawl. Kenkichi’s father, Kenbei, had then taken custody of his grandchild, despite his many winters and his obvious disdain for fatherhood. His wife, Azami, was twenty years his junior but evinced the same indifference to motherhood. To judge by her stout arms and beetled brow, she would be more at home in a smithy than a nursery.
They had surrendered their custody when Gorobei married. Daigoro had arranged his mother’s marriage to little Gorobei to protect her from Shichio, who had designs on her hand and then on House Okuma itself. Once Okuma Yumiko became Lady Yasuda Yumiko, she was out of Shichio’s reach.
Now she was recovering from the many blows she’d suffered over the last year—first her husband’s murder, then the death of her eldest son in a duel. As a younger woman she’d miscarried two pregnancies between Ichiro and Daigoro, and now her only remaining son could be executed simply for coming home to her. Her grief had visibly aged her. Crow’s-feet stretched from the corners of her eyes, lengthening like cracks in ice, and her back had taken a slight but noticeable hunch. Now, after only a few weeks of caring for her newborn husband, she was standing taller. If she grew any new wrinkles, they would be laugh lines.
It helped that she was not alone in raising the child. Akiko was a tremendous help. Also, Yasuda Kenbei and his wife, Azami, had taken residence in the Okuma compound. They occupied the adjoining rooms that had once belonged to Daigoro and his brother, Ichiro. The brothers wouldn’t be needing their rooms any time soon: one was dead and the other was a fugitive ro
nin, legally banned from setting foot on House Okuma’s lands. Shichio had roving patrols enforcing that ban, but they didn’t know the footpaths crisscrossing the estate, while Daigoro had grown up playing hide-and-seek back there.
Thus Daigoro and Katsushima had slipped in unannounced and undetected, using a nigh-invisible postern gate in the orchard. Aki had long since arrived, since she traveled by horse and the main roads were still open to her. Her relief at seeing Daigoro alive was as palpable as the breeze. Daigoro’s mother was delighted to see him too, though her husband was not, since all the fuss made it harder to sleep. The scent of unfamiliar women unsettled him, so he started to cry whenever Aki picked him up. Yet as soon as Daigoro took him, he pinched his eyes shut and nestled in to resume his nap.
“Daigoro, it is so good to have you back,” his mother said. “How are you healing?”
“Better and better by the day.” He curled and opened his fist to prove it. He didn’t mention the stripe of pain in his right thigh. A sword had caught him there at the Green Cliff, and though the wound had healed over, three days of hiking through the backwoods had aggravated the muscle. Before bedding down for the night Daigoro would pay Old Yagyu a visit. His thigh was dreading it already: Yagyu’s massaging fingers would press deeply enough to bring tears to Daigoro’s eyes, but in the morning the leg would feel like new.
“Daigoro-san,” Yasuda Kenbei said. His tone was a little too informal, a little too insistent, almost like a parent chiding his adult child. “We must speak. Alone.”
Kenbei was as grim-faced as his wife. His cold, steely eyes made Daigoro think of storm clouds. He was resplendent in Yasuda green, distinguished and lordly with his graying topknot. In time, perhaps his hair would go as white as his father’s, Lord Yasuda Jinbei. Of all of House Okuma’s allies, Lord Yasuda was Daigoro’s favorite. In truth he was more like an uncle than an ally, though sadly he hadn’t left his sickbed in months. When Daigoro had last seen him, Lord Yasuda’s face seemed as hollow as a skull.
