by Steve Bein
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 mas
sive 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.
