by Steve Bein
Self-confidence didn’t come easily to Mariko. She knew she was good at her job, but the job was relentless. Tiny errors could have major ramifications, and overshadowing that was the constant threat of being seen as incompetent just because she was a woman. Losing her right forefinger had set her at least a year behind on the pistol range, a fact that wouldn’t have mattered much in any other outfit in the country. Most beat cops went from academy to retirement without ever drawing a weapon, because most police work was reactive. Apart from traffic violations, most cops rarely witnessed a crime; the calls always came after the fact. But Narcotics didn’t just react; it initiated action too, and that meant Mariko was might have to draw down on people now and again. How was she going to do that if she couldn’t trust her aim?
She should have taken the shot. Joko Daishi had come within a millisecond of killing her. She could have changed her angle; even crouching down and firing upward would have been enough to take C-team out of harm’s way. That should have been her instinctual response, but instead she’d committed an egregious mistake: she thought about it.
She remembered Yamada-sensei’s term for that. Paralysis through analysis. Han would say the same thing about baseball that Yamada said of swordsmanship: hitting a moving target had to be done automatically or not at all. Deliberate concentration could only screw it up. Marksmanship was no different. Yamada-sensei once told her it was better to drop the weapon than to get tangled up in thinking. At least that way no one would get hurt.
That meant the next best alternative was to quit Narcotics and start working a beat instead. Go the rest of her career without any real risk of shooting or being shot at. Her mother would have loved it. And Mariko would have given up everything she’d worked so hard for, for so many years.
She could have missed with her irimi-nage. She could have broken every bone in her arm. She could have killed Joko Daishi, just the same as if she’d shot him, but with a lot more risk to herself and her fellow officers. So much had been at stake, and Mariko’s nerve had failed. Paralysis through analysis. She wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive herself.
“Hey,” said Han, “you okay?”
“What?” Mariko paid only enough attention to know he was there. “Yeah,” she said distantly, “I’m fine.”
Han clapped her on the shoulder. “This was a win, Mariko. Come on, we’ve got a crazy-ass cult leader to interrogate.”
That snapped her out of her reverie. “He’s conscious?”
“Conscious? Hell, he’s walking around.”
It was impossible. Joko Daishi must have hit a hundred kilometers an hour by the time she ripped him off the bike. So when she saw him walking, a cop pushing him by his handcuffed wrists, the demon mask pushed up onto the top of his head, all she could say was, “You should be dead.”
He laughed—a good-natured laugh, amiable, not forced. “You cannot kill me. It is not yet my time.”
Han aped his laugh right back at him. “If you’d have landed on your head instead of your shoulders, it would have been your time, all right. We’ve got a couple of murders to pin on you—a kid named Shino and the little old lady whose house you killed him in—but when it comes time to charge you, I’ll make sure riding without a helmet makes the list.”
“I have seen the hour of my death,” said Joko Daishi, “and also the manner. I shall die by the sword.”
Mariko didn’t care if that was a biblical reference, a deliberate jab at her famed samurai showdown, or just the ramblings of a grade-one concussion. One way or the other, the guy was a nutcase.
He was smaller than she’d thought. He’d been downright terrifying on that motorcycle, his beard and hair streaming from his devil’s face as if his head were ablaze and trailing black smoke. He did not look at them when he spoke, but rather stared off into the distance, his tone reverent, as if there were a god in the room for him to talk to. Again Mariko reached the same conclusion: nutcase.
Something about him was familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on it until they’d walked him all the way to the wall. They put his shoulder blades against the dusty cinder blocks and made him sit, hands cuffed behind his back, and every last movement should have hurt like hell. He was lucky to be alive. He wore white clothes, loose but otherwise nondescript, certainly not padded like motorcycle leathers. Given how he’d landed off the bike, his entire back should have been in spasms.
Mariko could explain that away easily enough: his cult gave him easy access to kilos upon kilos of speed. He’d feel pain when he came down off his high, but not until. Yet he limped, an odd, rolling gait that couldn’t have come from Mariko’s high-speed takedown. If it wasn’t from pain, it must have been from a pre-existing injury, and Mariko would have sworn she’d seen that limp before.
Sudden insight flashed. She had seen it before, only a grainy image of it, on a low-fidelity security camera feed. “You’re the one who stole the mask,” she said.
“He is?” Han blurted.
“I saw him on the Bulldog’s security camera tape. He walked right past us to steal that mask from Kamaguchi Hanzo. Dressed head to toe in SWAT armor, remember?” She rounded on Joko Daishi. “That was a nice touch.”
“There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” he said.
“And I’m guessing you’re the same son of a bitch who broke into my apartment and stole my sword.”
He responded with an eerie, peeping-through-the-window kind of smile that gave Mariko the creeps. She’d been eyed up and down like a piece of meat before. Guys did that all the time, responding with an “I’d hit that” smile when they liked what they saw. This wasn’t like that. This was the smile of a serial rapist, one who was willing to kidnap and batter and bury alive because he didn’t really understand that other human beings were real. The “I’d hit that” guys viewed women as sex toys; Joko Daishi saw people as children’s toys: fascinating in their own way, but hollow, incapable of pain or fear, worth only as much as he valued them. And he had watched Mariko in her sleep.
Chills washed over Mariko like an icy wave, raising goose bumps all over her body. A vision flashed in her mind: Joko Daishi looming over her bed, silent, ghostly, masked behind the iron face of a demon. He had the sinister patience of a stalker, an invisible, disquieting, perpetual presence. It was every woman’s deepest dread: the ex-boyfriend who would never relent, never disappear, never let her go.
“Is that true?” Han demanded, snapping Mariko out of her nightmare. “Did you break into my partner’s apartment?”
There was that smile again. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”
“The same goes for the Kamaguchi-gumi,” Mariko said, feigning a cocksure confidence she did not feel. “Remember that sword you saw yourself dying on? The Bulldog’s going to be the one who rams it through your chest.”
“Kamaguchi did not respond quickly enough for our needs. The New Year approaches. The appointed hour is at hand. Securing the mask was necessary to usher in the Year of the Demon.”
Mariko and Han shared a glance. He could see in her what she saw in him: this man scared the hell out of both of them. But rather than revealing that fact, Han said, “Is this dude turning you on?”
“Big-time.”
Turning to their suspect, Han said, “See how that big loading dock door is open and we’re not freezing our balls off? That’s because it’s summer out there. We’ve got a few months until New Year’s, buddy.”
Mariko remembered the calendars in the basement where they found Shino. She wasn’t able to make much sense of them at the time, but she did remember that they seemed to be based on planetary cycles, not the Chinese or Western calendars. Not that it mattered. For all she cared, he could hang his pretty calendars in his rubber room in the asylum. In any case, she had bigger fish to fry. “I want you to tell me where the MDA is,” she said.
He blinked. Frowning, confused, he said, “I cannot help you.”
“MDA,” Han said. “Psychedelic amphetamines. You know h
ow to cook them—or your people do anyway. Maybe your boy Akahata, neh?”
“Akahata-san is a servant of the Purging Fire,” said Joko Daishi. “He carries out his divine duty.”
“Right now?” Mariko felt something cramp up in her as she said it. Had she executed her sting more professionally, Akahata wouldn’t have escaped. C-team hadn’t been in position. Mariko wondered if she should have waited for SWAT after all.
“You cannot stop him,” Joko Daishi said. “He is bound on his holy errand.”
“And what might that be?” said Mariko.
“Purging society of its impurities.”
His serenity gave Mariko chills. “With MDA or with cyanide?” she said. “It’s both, isn’t it? How many people worship the great Joko Daishi? How many did you talk into following your path?”
“Do you even have the stones to follow it yourself?” said Han. “No. When we came, you tried to run. You’re not the type to go down with the ship, are you? You’re going to let all your people kill themselves and then you’re going to go recruit another batch.”
Joko Daishi cackled, not like a cartoon evil genius but like a little boy watching the cartoon. “You understand nothing. But soon you will. The Wind is coming. There is no place it cannot reach.”
Mariko inspected the table next to him. She saw nuts, bolts, rubber bands, all in little piles; sheets of foil, boxes of stainless steel BBs; duct tape, wire strippers, lengths of copper pipe. None of it was standard fare for making speed or Ecstasy. All in all it seemed less like a meth lab and more like the back room of a small appliance repair shop. And above it all, hanging on the wall, was another copy of that weird planetary calendar, just like the one from the house where they found Shino’s body. The calendar was all off—twenty-four months instead of twelve, ellipsoid instead of linear, festooned with astrological markers—but only one day was circled on it, and Mariko had a good guess about what that day might be: New Year’s Day of the Year of the Demon.
You understand nothing. That’s what Joko Daishi had said. It made Mariko think of the knowing laugh she’d heard from the lawyer, Hamaya Jiro, right before Han stormed out of that hospital room, right before Akahata slipped out of the TMPD’s grasp. She remembered with perfect clarity how that laugh had chilled her. That was the moment she realized the Divine Wind were dangerous. The cyanide cinched it. Coupled with her MDA theory, everything pointed to poisoned pills. A Jim Jones–style mass homicide, masked as a mass suicide. But Joko Daishi seemed sure that she and Han had it all wrong.
Mariko looked at the table again, then at the madman sitting beside it, then at the barrels of hazardous chemicals arrayed at the end of the line of tables. That motor oil smell permeated her nostrils and seeped into her mouth. She remembered what Joko Daishi said about his lieutenant, Akahata: he is bound on his holy errand. She remembered what Yamada-sensei had written about the mask too, and about the weapon fetish attached to it.
“Han,” she said, “take a walk with me.” When they were well out of their suspect’s hearing, she said, “What do we know about hexamine?”
“Big barrels like those ones make a whole lot of MDA.”
“No, I mean what do we know? What if we don’t assume he’s cooking?”
Han shook his head. “We know he cooks. How else do you explain Akahata carrying fifty kilos of speed?”
“They could be unrelated, neh?”
“What about the Daishi? The drug, not the dude. Word on the street says it’s outselling cigarettes. And we never heard of it until we heard of this idiot.”
“I know,” said Mariko. “Just bear with me. I’m not saying he’s not cooking; I’m just saying he’s not cooking here. Does this place feel like a meth lab to you?”
Han looked around. “Honestly? No.”
“Neh? That’s been bugging me since the minute we kicked down the door.”
“So what are you getting at?”
“Han, what if he’s using the hexamine for something else? What else is it good for?”
He shrugged. “What am I, a pharmacist? I barely passed high school chemistry.”
“But you’ve got a smartphone, neh?”
Han nodded and opened his Web browser, and Mariko headed back toward their suspect. “Joko Daishi,” she said. “Great Teacher of the Purging Fire. Teach me. Tell me what needs cleansing.”
“The mind is in fetters,” he said. Even now he looked past her, up into the distance. “Property. Family. Hope for the future. The people cling to them as if they are lifelines, but in fact they are shackles. The mind is bound by them, constricted, weighed down. You are bound too, drowning, but I can set you free.”
It was clear he’d given this little homily before. Mariko wasn’t interested. “Swell. You do that.”
“You belittle because you do not understand. You dream of stability, order, immortality. It is in the nature of what you do, who you are, but you are living a lie.”
“So enlighten me. Tell me how you rescue all these drowning minds. And don’t waste my time on the pretty speeches; that crap might work on your little Wind cult, but not on me.”
“Divine Wind,” he said. “Born of the Wind and yet not of the Wind.” He seemed to find this funny; it made him giggle like a little boy. “And I am divine,” he said. “My mother is the future and my father is the past. I am come to shatter the fetters, to burst the bonds, to explode the barriers. I am the light, the brightest fire. Stability, permanence, order, belonging, harmony, they are but shadows. Before my light shall they disperse, never to return.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Mariko said. She could see the excitement rising in him, swelling his chest, raising his gaze higher. It got her heart racing as well, but not out of some twisted sympathy inspired by his charisma. She was afraid. He was a zealot, all right, and he was dangerous. “Tell me,” she said. “You want to do away with order and harmony? Tell me how.”
“Still you cling to your fetters. You shy away from the light when in truth the light will set you free. Nothing you can do will stop the Purging Fire.”
“Then you might as well tell me your plan. Your deadline’s coming right up, neh? What did you call it? The hour of the demon?”
“The Year of the Demon,” Joko Daishi said ecstatically. “The appointed hour is at hand.”
“Of course it is.” Mariko tried to remember what else he’d said. “Your friend, Akahata-san, he’s out to do some purifying right now, is he?”
“Soon. Very soon.”
“Right. Because the wind is coming.”
“There is no place the Wind cannot reach.” He said it as if singing a hymn.
“Mariko!” Han shouted. She turned to see him running toward her with his phone outstretched. She ignored the phone, her attention captured by the look on his face. He was terrified.
He forced the phone into her hand and see saw the screen. “Holy shit,” she said.
“Bombs,” Han said, panting. “The hexamine. You can use it to make high explosives.”
“There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” Joko Daishi said joyfully. “The appointed hour is at hand.”
Mariko grabbed him by the beard and jerked him to his feet. “Where’s Akahata? Where are the bombs, you crazy son of a bitch?”
As she lifted him up, the demon mask slid down over his face. He locked eyes with her, his nose not a millimeter away from hers, looking at her from behind the crazed iron visage of the mask. “The Year of the Demon,” he whispered. “The appointed hour is at hand.”
BOOK EIGHT
MUROMACHI ERA, THE YEAR 198
(1533 CE)
44
The waves roared so loud that Kaida could hardly hear the thunder.
Lightning ripped another gaping rent through the dark gray underbelly of the sky. It was just after midday, and yet the lightning’s claws stood out clearly against the clouds. Kaida had never seen a storm so angry.
If anything, the sea was angrier still. Another huge, rolling wav
e tossed the rowboat as easily as Kaida could skip a stone. Her mother held her close with both arms, her knees and feet pressed hard into the sidewalls of the boat to keep herself and Kaida stable. She sang in Kaida’s ear, and though Kaida could scarcely hear her she knew which song it was. No other girls’ mothers ever sang this one. It was the song about the Kaida-fish, a little lullaby about a make-believe creature, which she’d been singing for as long as Kaida could remember.
Her father was the very opposite of calm. He clenched his teeth so hard that the tendons in his neck stood out. He back-paddled like mad, trying to keep their bow pointed into the waves. The muscles of his arms stood out like braided cords. He snarled and cursed and battled with the sea, a samurai armed with twin oars.
The boat lurched again, and for a fleeting moment Kaida was atop a mountain of water instead of falling down into a valley. She looked toward Ama-machi and saw nothing but flinders. Her mother told her the village would be destroyed and that they’d build it anew, but Kaida hadn’t understood what that meant until now. There was no home. Nothing to re-build, nothing there to repair. Just a beach and the rolling walls of water that pounded it, grinding down what little remained of Ama-machi.
This was the way, her had mother said. The ama had always lived like this. Kaida had taken comfort in it when the storm was still on the horizon, but now she saw it as an empty promise. She could not see a future for her village, for her family.
Kaida’s stomach dropped, the boat falling with it. For an instant she could see Ryujin’s Claw. It ripped the guts out of a rogue breaker and then vanished, swallowed by the water. The teeth of the Maw were always visible above the waterline, but the Claw was in deeper water. Kaida realized these waves were far bigger than she’d suspected if the troughs were so deep as to expose the Claw.
