In front of me is an old guard in a peaked cap, the black-suited guys are dealing with Uncle Kentaro. I approach a metal-detector. On the other side are the lifts and the sick room. I have no idea if my pass is up to date or if I have to give a password. All I know is that if I don’t make it in, the whole thing is over.
The old guy stares at me. I just know he can see that I’m not 100% Japanese. I can’t convince him that I belong. You either have it or you don’t, and I don’t have it. He says something to me in Japanese. I guess that he means to see my pass. I give it to him. He looks surprised, like I should have handed it to him on a cushion or something, but he holds it as if it were a sample and scans it under a barcode reader. Then he looks at me intently. He sucks air between his teeth like Uncle Kentaro does when he’s bet on the Yomiuri Giants winning, but the Hanshin Tigers have just caught the whole team out. A bead of sweat runs down the side of my face and I know this isn’t going well. But I daren’t wipe the sweat from my face. Any show of fear and it’s over. He looks me square in the face and I just know he has seen me sweating. He knows something doesn’t add up.
“Chotto matte,” he says. Just a minute.
He walks away toward the security room. For a moment there’s no one on the door. I know when he returns, he’ll have another guard with him and I will be booted off the premises, and that will be it for me. And for Aoi. And maybe for everybody else.
I look around. There are other women in the same uniform as me. If I can look the part and just get though here, who’s to stop me? The old security guard is halfway across the carpeted lobby. He has his back to me. I think about running full pelt through the security station, but if I run everyone will see something is wrong.
No. I do belong here. Act like it and nobody will be the wiser. I grab my pass from under the scanner and stride over to the first aid room.
I pass by the double lift-doors and a door that opens onto the central shaft. That is the way to the first aid office. I try to open it. But it’s locked. There is a key pad and a magnetic strip. I swipe my cleaner’s pass and it flashes an instruction to me in Japanese. Perhaps it wants a PIN? I have no idea what to type. I stare at the keypad and the door. If I could get through to Firefly, maybe we could make a run for the lifts?
I hear a raised voice right behind me. It’s the guard. I can’t understand the words but the meaning is clear. It’s the voice of authority. I want to push him away. But I don’t. I’m a cleaner. This is how people talk to cleaners. I turn and face him and bow my head in apology. I’m careful not to make eye contact, but judging from his chin and the sound of his voice, he’s either about to have a heart attack, or hit someone. He barks at me several times and then falls silent. Perhaps he wants a response? I remember advice from Aunt Tanaka: always say yes at the first opportunity. You can always say no later. Say no at first, and you can never say yes again. At least, I think it’s that way round.
“Hai.” Yes.
This seems to work. He calms down a little and talks to me like I’m a naughty child. Which I suppose I am really. He pauses again.
“Hai,” I say.
He nods to a door I hadn’t noticed before. I hurry over there in a slow-run-quick-walk that people in Tokyo do when they are trying to show polite hurry. I turn the handle and it’s a broom cupboard. There’s a cleaning trolley with mops, dusters and plastic gloves and bags. I pull it out and follow the guard. He swipes his card and enters his PIN code and nods for me to go in. I make sure the door closes behind me. And to remember the keystrokes he made — 0522. I think about it. It’s not much of a code, it’s today’s date, May 22.
But there is no Firefly. Maybe they have moved him to a hospital or he has been found out. Think, Hana, think. It doesn’t matter, either way I’m on my own. We are two hours away from the grand opening. I must get to the top of the Skytree and figure out what the masked man has planned and stop him. Myself.
I take a few deep breaths. I tell myself I can do this. Then I open the door and wheel my trolley to the bank of lifts. There are four, each named for a season, each staffed by a woman in the same uniform. The queues outside the glass entrance doors to the lobby are getting deeper, but still they haven’t let anyone in. The old guard is hurrying over. I must get into the lift before he reaches me. If I start speaking bad Japanese, he’ll know something is up. I dash into the lift, but the lift girl doesn’t get out. She reaches for a walkie talkie. Behind her, back in the main entrance hall, the guard is leading two secret-service-looking men to the lift. My lift. The lift woman reaches for a key in a control panel on the lift. I watch as she turns the key and the lift lights flicker. I have to act. This is my last second of freedom. I can’t let this person shut me down. I lunge forward, smack both palms into her back and propel her out of the lift. She goes flying forwards and crumples to the ground. There is a shout. From the old guard? I don’t have time to look. I reach the key, turn it anti-clockwise back to its original position and press the button to go up.
The doors close. I keep my fingers on the up button and I make it. I can feel movement.
I’m alone in a lift hurtling up the 350 metres to the observation deck. There’s no sense of speed though, except for a red digital display that shows the metres ticking up from 10, 15, then into the hundreds. Then my ears pop and I try to swallow to stop the humming. Why hasn’t the guard stopped the lift from the ground? He must know I’m up to no good. Unless there are guards waiting for me at the lift’s destination?
Now I’m a third of the way up the tower, according to the numbers flipping by in red. My eyes dart over to the height counter. 100 metres. Just 250 metres to go. I try to slow my breathing. Try not to think about how high I am above the city. The red display skips past 300.
Security must be on to me by now. I’m running out of metres and in a moment I’ll surely be facing guards when the lift gets to 350.
The display reads 320.
The meter numbers are slowing now, I’ll be at the top in seconds. And then the lift doors will open. And then it will be all over. I hit the red button marked emergency stop. The lift shudders to a stop. The display reads 347. I try to stop my hyperventilating by focusing on what I have to do. I need a new plan. Some way I can get onto the floor, some way I can buy enough time so that I can stop the masked man. Maybe there is a way to do it. If security is after me, maybe I can lead them to him. But I know there’s just as good a chance that I’ll fail.
I take out Detective Watanabe’s business card and type in his email. I send him a copy of the plan I wrote out while I was in Uncle Kentaro’s Mini, everything I’ve found out and everything I think the general has in store and how I was only trying to find Aoi. If something happens to me, at least someone in authority will know what I was trying to do, even if they think I’m crazy.
I unpress the emergency stop and the lift continues. But it doesn’t stop at the 350-metre floor. It goes on. At the 445-metre mark it comes to a sudden halt and the doors swish open.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
There’s no one there. In front of me is a narrow brightly-lit corridor. For one horrible moment I think I’m back at the hospital. I trundle the cleaning trolley out in front of me. The lift doors shut behind me. Maybe pressing the emergency button reset the lift? I’m at the highest point in Tokyo on the upper observation deck, almost half a kilometre up in the air. The corridor in front of me skirts around in a spiral and I can feel the floor descend as I walk further along the spiral. Around the corridor is a continuous bubble window, looking out at the sky and far below — if you look. I don’t dare. The less I think about that, the better. At the end of the corridor is a double set of doors with a bar to press to open them. A cctv camera is pointed at the door. There could be an alarm if I open the door, but I don’t have much choice. There’s no one in this corridor, and so there would be no point in releasing the bacteria here. I have to go on.
I lean on the bar just enough to open the door. I don’t hear any sirens. I
back myself and my trolley through. The door clicks shut behind me. I pull at the door. On this side of the door is a keycard and PIN swipe card.
There’s no way back. I’m on the first floor of the two-deck observatory. I think there isn’t supposed to be anyone here yet, but people are all around. They look familiar. I recognise a few from the TV. They must be important. But I see no one with a mask. Which makes sense. Celebrities wouldn’t want to hide their faces. So that means the masked man probably isn’t wandering around in plain view. He has to release the toxin in such a way as to not to be noticed and to give it a chance to be ingested by everyone on the floor. But how?
I walk once around the floor. I don’t dare look out the windows. Knowing I’m 350 metres above ground is more than enough to make my legs buckle. I don’t need the full effect of looking out of the ceiling-to-floor glass windows to know I’d be a quivering wreck on the carpet.
The floor is like a circular airport departure lounge, only we’ve already taken off. The natural light streaming in through the windows is grey and overcast. At least that way I won’t be reminded about how impossibly high I am off the ground. I’m not scared of heights. I’m just scared of falling from a great height. I don’t understand why more people aren’t. A toddler pushes his face against the glass to get a better view of the ground. He doesn’t know that bad things can happen in life. If someone can be pushed onto the tracks of an oncoming train just as they’re waiting to go to work, why do people assume that the same couldn’t happen to them? Why invite disaster by sticking your nose into the danger? And yet here I am doing exactly the same as the toddler. As my Dad. As Steve?
I have to find the masked man. It seems likely that he will be wherever most people are. So I head for a crowd, wheeling my trolley in front of me like a battering ram. I’m worried that security will stop me, so I hurry on. The observation deck is circular. The bank of four lifts is in the centre and all around are men and women with cocktail glasses in their hands. I see a mask, but it’s a woman in fancy dress. Something is bothering me, though, some memory that I can’t quite grasp. I know it’s there. It’s here, everywhere. The smell. Coming from the restaurant. It’s curry, but not the Japanese kind exactly. And I’ve smelt it before. It’s a particularly spicy curry. They must be expecting all the 2,000 to be dying for Japanese curry, typically sweet and just a little spicy. But this curry smells good. Really good. Too good. Too spicy. The kind of spiciness you’d make if you were used to eating spicy food every day. It’s the smell of the restaurant at Liberty Pachinko.
I push my trolley over to the cafeteria. The soft, square-cushioned seats are arranged side on to the great plate-glass windows so that everyone has a great view of the sprawl of Tokyo as far as the eye can see. But I’m not looking. A waitress is on duty, standing to attention, but she doesn’t see me. Funny how a lime-green uniform with yellow triangles on it makes you invisible, but it does.
There’s only one customer in the cafeteria with his back to me. I can’t make out the people in the kitchen. But since it is a kitchen, I know they’ll be wearing masks. If I was a masked man, this is the cover I would need. Get a job as a chef at the cafeteria and you’re in.
The kitchen is built into the central supporting column and there is another door carved into the curve of the column. There’s a swipe and a key pad. I swipe my pass and key in the code I’d seen the old guard use. 0522.
A red light flickers, but doesn’t turn to green.
“Not so fast, Hana. We’re not ready for business just yet.”
I spin round. The lone customer. It’s the masked man.
“Have a seat.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
He has a bowl of curry and rice with yellow pickles in front of him. He laughs.
“You made it here. How very smart of you, Hana. But not so smart after all. There’s no upside for you here. None at all. You have none of the cards and I have all of them. It’s over. Why are you here? To beg me for your life? To beg for forgiveness?”
I sigh. I haven’t thought this through, but it’s worth a try. I have to be smart. Be smart, Hana.
“To beg you to let Aoi go. It’s over. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping Aoi.”
He nods his head and drums his fingers on the table in quick motion.
“True, Hana, true. After today it will be over for a great many people, but for me great things will just be starting.”
I take a deep breath. “See, that’s what I knew you would say. You don’t care about those kinds of things, do you? You don’t really care about great things, about the future, not even the future of your own country. You are cruel, crueller than me, and I can be mean if people deserve it. But most people don’t deserve it. There is one difference between you and me though.”
“Go on.”
“You don’t want to hear it, and you certainly wouldn’t understand.”
“What wouldn’t I understand?”
“You are just a bully. You’re not desperate to do anything for your country, you are just desperate to cause pain and misery, misery for Aoi, misery for Dr Ishihara and misery for anyone who comes into contact with you because you don’t have any ideals at all. You are just a bully. And like all bullies, you’re just scared. Let Aoi go, and show that you don’t have to be a monster.”
He laughs. “Oh, stop. You’re such a loser.”
But I don’t stop. “Please. Turn yourself in. The police know all about your plot, so it’s over. And there’s one more thing. Your bacteria weapon, it doesn’t work like you think. It will kill white people but it will kill Koreans as well.”
“That’s not true. I can understand that you don’t want your descendants on your father’s side to die, but…”
“It’s nothing to do with that. Once the disease hits critical numbers and spreads, there will be no way to stop its mutations and it will wipe out Asia as surely as it wipes out America.”
“Ah, you’ve been listening to Dr Ishihara. He’s a great scientist, but he’s a perfectionist. Always theorising, never doing. There is a chance that he’s right, of course, and you’re right, the situation is bad for North Korea. Very bad, but not in the way you think. I’m going to make North Korea great again. We are being starved by the blockade against us. We have very few friends left in the world. But that’s OK. We are winners. We are the best. You can’t talk me out of my life’s ambition. You’re just a sore loser. You’re a little girl. Go back home and play with your dollies.”
I suck air through my teeth faster than Uncle Kentaro. “Just don’t release the weapon. It isn’t too late to stop. If you do, it will kill everyone infected, Asians, too.”
“That’s not possible. Thanks to you, we were able to perfect the final batch. You’re a half-breed, an unnatural beast.Your blood is tainted. But maybe you have the powers of one over the powers of another. It would make sense that your Asian side is in the ascendant.”
“Race doesn’t exist.”
“Any child could dispute that. I know it. I can see it. When I look in the mirror I can see my ancestors were from Korea. Look at my nose.”
He takes his mask off and turns his face in profile to me. I’m beginning to think I won’t be able to convince him of anything.
“This is the nose of my grandfather, and in fact this nose goes all the way back to the foundation of Korea.”
I have to think of a way to stop him. “Your plan is evil. You are the one plotting to kill millions.”
“We are the true inheritors of the Earth and we shall conquer what is rightfully ours. Enough of your melting pot. You even mix in blacks into the melting pot. No wonder that pot is a toxic stew. It kills all distinctions, all meaning to human life. Where races are mixed, there can be no morality because there is no purity. That stops from now on. We will bring back purity, we will bring back black and white.”
“What about blue? Aoi? Can you bring her back, or did you kill her now that she’s no longer useful to you?”
&nbs
p; “I’m not at liberty to say.”
He smiles smugly. Like he has made a clever joke. And I know a hunch I had is true. That Aoi was the source of the sobbing I heard behind a locked door at Liberty Pachinko. That’s the kind of thing he finds funny. But if he’s telling the truth, it means she’s still alive. I have no plays to make. All I can do is beg.
“Please don’t go through with your plans. Please. For the sake of innocent lives, I beg you, please stop this, there is a better way to solve your problems than causing misery for others.”
“It’s either this way, or we continue the way of the democracies and just talk all the time. Talk, talk, talk like a baby. Jabber, jabber, jabber. And do nothing. That way lies the end for all of us. But this way,” he dips his spoon into the curry, “lies the solution.”
“What do you mean?”
He laughs. “I mean, dearest Hana, that the bacteria is in the curry. It’s in the very food that the half-breed holds dear.”
“You’re insane. But also you’re wrong. It will kill us all because we are all half-breeds. We are all the same. Please stop this now. I beg you.”
“Beg me? Like your artist boyfriend begging for his pathetic life?”
“What?”
“Oh, come now, you must have put two and two together by now. Your boyfriend stumbled on my secret. Collateral damage, you call it in the West.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “I want to know what happened to Steve.”
“Let’s just say he stumbled on an inconvenient fact, and so he stumbled to his death.”
“You killed him?”
“Technically, it was not me, it was an overdose, and a gentle shove from behind. I had to make sure. It was unfortunate that Aoi had escaped and even more unfortunate that she met him on the night before I caught up with her. If she hadn’t, then he would still be alive and you would be carrying on your lives none the wiser.”
Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) Page 18
