He can’t stop himself from smiling.
“Hana?”
I smooth my fingers together and slip my left hand free of the binding and grasp the syringe. He jumps up, afraid I will jab him with it. What’s in it that he’s so scared of? But the angle is all wrong. The needle is pointing toward me. Which was what I had in mind all along. I jab the needle into my right calf muscle and slam my leg against the metal. The weight of my leg falls on the plunger.
The pain of the needle piercing my skin is nothing to the sense of something solid and cold entering my body. I don’t scream. I’m beyond screaming. It’s ice. If it kills me, at least I’ve done it to myself, not at the hands of the masked man. That seems important to me. But even more important, he’s scared of me.
I feel a surge of adrenaline and with the spread of the chemical through my veins a belief that I’m going to be all right. In fact, better than all right, I can do anything. Even if it kills me. Win-win, baby.
I clench my teeth and make fists with my hands. I take a deep breath and pull my hands free of their bounds as if they were not really there.
I sit up, just as he slams the meat cleaver down where my neck would have been. The blade clatters on the steel table.
He’s shouting: "Kyung Sung! Kyung Sung!" He runs out of the door.
I grab my phone and turn my whole body around. I have both legs free now and am off the table ready to rush after him. But I’m not done here. All my fear has gone, and I feel on top of the world. Somewhere in my brain a warning voice is shouting that this is an illusion, that this can’t last, but I shut the voice up in a tiny box. I can’t listen to that voice right now.
The masked man is standing in the doorway now. He reaches for his stick. I want to give the man in the mask a taste of his own medicine. I don’t care what’s going through my veins, I have to know what’s behind his mask.
I run at him and swipe the mask away before he can pull the blade from his stick.
It’s his turn to scream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I grab the mask and try to look at the man behind it, but he covers his face with both hands. The knife clatters to the ground. He fumbles for it with one hand covering his mouth, the other raking the ground for his stick. I put my foot on the handle. In a moment I’m the strong one and he’s the weak one. And in that moment I feel something I’d never felt for him before: pity. I hold out my hand to give the mask back to him, but he runs away. This is a first. Him running away from me. But it can’t last. He could come back at any time. I have to think what to do, fast.
I run after him through the door and I find myself in a familiar corridor, but it’s not the hospital or the mysterious fourth floor. I know this place. I hear metal balls rolling and computers bleeping, and something else, a strange rhythmic humming. The air conditioning or a girl sobbing? Maybe I should pick up the sword and pursue him, but I have another idea. I follow the sound of the sobbing to the corridor. There is a door with a lock on it just like in the hospital. I turn the handle, but it doesn’t give and the sobbing abruptly stops. “Aoi?” I shout. Footsteps, two or more people coming from behind me.
I run down the corridor in the opposite direction and crash into the bar of double doors at the end of the corridor. The doors give way and I’m in Liberty Pachinko. I’m through the bright main parlour and out of the doors and into the backstreets of Shibuya, but don’t see a soul. I run along a back alley of food shops and warehouses. The streets are brightly lit, but shops are all closed and no one is walking around in a part of Tokyo that’s usually heaving with out-of-towners, business people and shoppers. After a time, I’m no longer sure where I am.
I need somewhere to calm down and figure all this out. Where can I go in the state I’m in without attracting attention? And I can’t go where white people go for fear of infecting them with bacteria. Baths. Hot baths. A sento. But that costs money. Fragments of the conversation with the masked man come back to me as I hurry down the gradually filling-up streets. That I was ground zero, that I was infected with a virus that would kill all white people I come into contact with. Am I a white person? I look pretty white, but my mother was Japanese. Will I only get half sick? It doesn’t make any sense. If you are a pale-skinned Japanese person from Hokkaido would you be in danger, but a tanned Japanese from Kyushu would not? And why was the masked man so scared of me that he fled from the room and left me to wander the streets? I stumble along, glad no tourists have woken up. If I brush against one white person, the disease will spread, if the masked man was telling the truth, I don’t have long. I hope long enough to figure out what is going on before it’s too late. But there must be an antidote. I’m really not the smartest person. But as far as my mind can work out, I need to keep myself to myself, not pass whatever I have on to anyone else, because then they have won. And I can’t let that happen.
Everyone I’ve passed so far has been Japanese. I think. I can’t afford to slip up. I can’t touch a single foreigner. So I slow my pace if I see anyone approaching until I can be reasonably sure what race they are.
I reach a corner and see a man on a bike. He looks suspiciously white. He isn’t a businessman, I don’t think, because although he’s wearing a starched white short-sleeve shirt with a collar and a tie, there’s something that doesn’t fit. As he gets closer, I realise it’s little things that add to a greater problem. He’s young, maybe just a bit older than me, but he has a backpack, not a briefcase and he’s wearing a small bicycle helmet. No one outside of junior high school students with oversized white bicycle helmets wear them on the streets. But this guy is wearing a black skeletal one. He’s smiling at me. I get it. A Mormon. A missionary.
For a horrible moment I think he’s going to stop and talk to me, perhaps enrol me in a language school where the first words I learn are “God” and “sin.” I turn and run as fast as I can. The danger of him stopping me and inviting me to a party showing a video called “Jesus of Nazareth” is far too great to risk. I find a bench and collapse onto it. My heart is beating faster than it has ever done in my life, and I’m scared.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I’m in a brown room. Everything is brown. Makes a change, I think, from all that magnolia I’m used to. Terrible things happen to me in magnolia rooms. Brown ones are not so bad. The grooves of a tatami mat are sticking into my shoulder blades. The crumbling walls of a traditional Japanese room. The polished wood of the kotatsu heated table and the grey of the raw wood of the windowsill that has faded with the years so gradually that I don’t remember when it turned from young pine, still soft and waxy to the touch to the hardened greying husk before I left home for good, never to see the family room where I had slept in my parents’ futon staring up at the wooden ceiling with six slats of wood to match the six tatami mats, taking in the smells of sausage and bacon cooking under the fish grill.
“Hey, no sleeping on the job. I need you focused.”
“Uncle Kentaro. Am I dreaming?”
“You might be, but it’s been a real nightmare finding you and bringing you back home.”
“How did I get here?”
“I picked you up in the Mini. But it was Firefly’s doing. He found you by tracking your phone. You were in a bad way, passed out on the street. You weren’t making much sense. You really shouldn’t go out alone, and whatever you had to drink did not agree with you. I’m beginning to think I can’t trust you.”
I groan. “I don’t remember what happened. I’m not dying?”
“No more than the rest of us. But perhaps you’d like to tell your uncle what the hell you’ve been up to? I think I deserve an explanation, don’t you? What is going on? What do you know, I mean, really know about what’s going on. It’s time to tell me the truth, young lady.”
“The truth? It’s all I’ve ever been saying. Why won’t you listen to me for once and try to believe me? A masked man killed Steve and maybe killed a Korean waitress and abducted a girl and injected me with bacteria and lo
ts of people are going to die and it will be my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it. And I didn’t ask for any of this. I just wanted to go to England and have a life, not be stuck here with no future and nothing to look forward to.”
I peer through Uncle Kentaro’s dusty front window onto the grounds of his shrine. The whole place is gravel and dirt and rotting wooden buildings and a boxy red shrine building. Hardly anyone comes here any more. The knots of tree roots that trip you up if you don’t look where you’re going, the stone foxes that guard the entrance gate and this shack, all are like something from a forgotten world.
Uncle Kentaro sucks on his teeth and follows my gaze out to the overgrown stone path that runs from the rickety wooden entrance gate. “I know what you’re thinking. That this place looks timeless, but that’s a lie concealed by rotting wood.”
Oh great. Another lesson, I think.
“Wood goes rotten in a year. In three it looks the same as twenty. Don’t let the evidence fool you. Start with your eyes, but remember they tell you only what you can see on the surface. What is hidden may remain hidden if you only use your eyes. But that’s a start. Tell me only what you have seen.”
I prop myself up on my elbows.
“A man in a mask tied me to a table and filled me with some sickness that is harmless to Asians but will kill white people, and there is no cure.”
“Hold on. How do you know that? How do you know that what he gave you was anything more than a shot of adrenaline?”
“Because he told me. He told me that it will kill whites and leave Koreans unharmed. I escaped from him, but he wanted me to escape. He wanted me to infect the people I know.”
Uncle Kentaro frowns.
“Let’s say I believe you—although it sounds like madness to me--but if I did, what you say could be a North Korean ploy. They have a network of sympathisers who’ve been living in Japan since the end of the war. Japan could be a testing ground for a weapon. I suppose they could be on to it. But they can’t want to kill all whites. That kind of talk is only for the peasants back home. If the masked man has any support from his higher-ups then this can’t be their true plan. There’s no advantage in winning so completely that your enemy is destroyed and riven with such hatred that any survivors will never do anything but seek revenge. Nobody wins that way. Even crazy people know that. And North Koreans are not crazy. Poor, stubborn, arrogant, but not poor strategic thinkers. What is it the masked man really wants?”
“I don’t know. He kind of loves himself.”
“Hey, are you hungry?”
“What? Well, I guess I could do with a…”
“Natto rice ball. Yeah, I figured. Here.”
He pitches a rice ball at me from his pocket, overarm like a baseball. I catch it with my left hand. He whistles.
“Not bad reflexes for a white girl with the weight of the world on her shoulders.”
“I can’t be a white girl. My mother was Japanese.”
“But you carry your father’s DNA, too, and yet here you are, catching fast balls from your Uncle Kentaro. Whatever the North Koreans jabbed you with doesn’t cut the mustard. Their weapon is fear. But we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“Buddha?”
“Roosevelt. Imagine North Korea’s fear that their big payout is going to be lost. The fear of losing a big payout may be more than fear itself. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t really matter, not to you. What they can or can’t do with their chemicals is out of your hands. What you should be doing is focusing on what you can do. Why don’t you forget about this nonsense? You could just walk away from all this, couldn’t you?”
I close my eyes and think about it. My head is full of images of falling and men in masks. A falling man in a mask. And I’m falling, too, then jumping up and down on a trampoline made of a giant flu mask. I know what Uncle Kentaro is trying to do. Trying to keep me out of harm’s way. But I can’t quit now. I’m close to finding out what happened to Steve. I’m close to discovering what the masked man is up to and if I can find all that out, I can start to understand what happened to Aoi. If I quit now, apart from never knowing what happened, I might as well be dead, either by being stabbed by the masked man or by giving up on Steve. If I find Aoi, I find the connection to Steve and the chemical weapon. And there is one person who links them all. Firefly was right.
“Jesus, Hana, open your eyes. I don’t think I can take your goofy expression any longer. What you need is proof, otherwise what you say is just in your head.”
“There’s someone I need to see.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I adjust my flu mask, and check my clothes in the reflection of the glass door entrance to St Christopher’s. I look plain, uninteresting and ready to work. I wait for the right moment to go in.
I walk across the entrance floor, ignoring the lines of old folks surrounding the entrance desk. I walk straight to the unmarked door next to the lifts just like they have on every floor, and hope that inside they have what they have on every floor: a cleaning trolley.
They do. I pull it out and throw in the long bag I’ve been carrying over my shoulder. An underage, over-made-up girl looks over at me from behind the entrance desk, but even without any ID badge on me, the cleaning trolley is proof enough. I’m just some Filipino cleaner tidying up. I go to the elevator and press the button for the third floor. The woman is walking over to me from the desk saying “Chotto, chotto…” but she’s stopped by an old woman asking her questions.
“Ato de, ato de,” I say.
The doors open and the lift is moving before the woman can stop me. The lift is empty and I unfasten the bag inside the cleaning trolley. From the side you can’t see what’s in it, just some bulky rubbish. I walk calmly past the hospital wards and nurse stations to a suite of offices at the end of the floor. There’s a secretary at a desk at the end of the corridor, but she’s on the telephone and doesn’t look twice at me. I only need a few seconds and I’ll have everything I need.
I find the door I want and go straight in without knocking.
Dr Ishihara is behind his desk but doesn’t see me. He’s staring out of the window. I shut the door behind me, turning the handle at the last moment so the latch does not click. I silently press the lock on the handle. I reach into the trolley and pull out from my concealed bag the thing I had sneaked in: Uncle Kentaro’s championship sword. I grasp it with my right hand and give the cleaning trolley a tremendous kick. It smashes into his desk, knocking books and a coffee cup to the floor. The cup breaks, oozing black onto the grey carpet.
“Got your attention, Ishihara?”
He jumps up and reaches for the telephone, but I’m too fast for him. I slice the sword down in a two-handed arc and jab the phone from his hand. I return the sword to first position.
He’s speechless.
“I want answers. You’ve been running me around like an idiot, and I’ve been stupid, but I know you are the key to this. I want to know what’s going on. Who killed Steve?”
He looks down at the ground, but doesn’t answer.
“I’m serious. I won’t leave until I have the answer.”
I raise the sword above my head
He makes no attempt to defend himself. I sweep his desk clear with the sword, everything clatters to the floor.
“Who killed Steve?”
There’s a knock at the door. A frantic woman’s voice calling in Japanese. Ishihara answers. She rattles the door handle to open it, but can’t. She says something else. Ishihara says, “Daijoubu, daijoubu,” and she asks a question, but then leaves us.
He steps away from the desk and kneels on the floor with his head down.
“I don’t know. Maybe the general, maybe accident. Really, don’t know. But doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“You not understanding, it really not matter now. Single death, so much more at risk now. So many lives, so many deaths. Mine and yours, my daughter, no matter. On my hands.
On your hands.”
“What are you talking about?”
“On your hands. Death is for you as much as me. You can put the sword down now, there’s no need, we are both dead. The general is no scientist. You have nothing worse than the bubonic plague, Black Death. No danger with right antibiotics. But the days of individual test subjects are over. The general has something much worse.”
“The general? You mean the masked man?”
He nods. I lower Uncle Kentaro’s sword.
“Much worse. I couldn’t control deception. This project kept growing. I couldn’t keep fooling others. Before long, my science was perverted by rest of team and they have begun working on something far more deadly. They have taken my amateurish mutation and weaponised it, added it to a delivery device. All they need to do is launch it and we are in trouble. They have developed an anthrax spore, that if it reaches critical mass, say infecting 2,000 people or so, the cross mutations will become unstoppable and we will have pandemic on our hands. Then no stopping the disease until it’s too late.”
“Wait, I don’t understand. The virus really works? It really does target white people?”
“Yes and no. It’s not a virus. It’s strain of bacteria. It does not target only white people. How can it? There is no scientific basis for race. We are all subsets of same species, genetic differences between people are negligible. You might as well divide populations by how tall people are or what their favourite colour is. Scientifically, it’s meaningless.”
“So that’s good news, that races are not real?”
“No, in this case it’s very bad news. It means the bacterium I developed has no limit. Once released, the mutations will spread to all people regardless of skin colour. Japanese, Korean, black, white and everything in between.”
Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) Page 16
