Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  CHAPTER 38

  All through his years at Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, Casanova had lived up to his nickname, with at least two scandals involving freshman girls. His father, a Central Court justice, had to bribe one of the girls’ parents, and he forced his priapic son to apologize with a backhand to his face that broke his nose. After it healed imperfectly at the hands of a state doctor, the girls in Casanova’s circle of friends found something ruggedly handsome and slightly dangerous about his new face. He was a natural for the next murderous assignment on the docket.

  From all appearances, Megumi Noguchi, born on the island of Shikoku, would be regarded as Japanese, but she carried within her a stain that no amount of purification at a Shinto shrine could cleanse. Her forebears of centuries past on her father’s side had been butchers and gravediggers, people associated with death, and for this alleged crime against the tenets of Buddhism, they would be called “people of the hamlet” or burakumin. A less euphemistic term was ningai or “outside of humanity.” The Japanese government at one point declared that burakumin were worth one-seventh of an ordinary person, or less than a slave in America at the time of the Dred Scott Decision.

  Megumi Noguchi’s father didn’t help matters any when he married a Palestinian woman, Megumi’s mother, although their daughter’s features were far more Japanese than Middle Eastern. After high school Megumi moved to Tokyo where she hid her ancestry and place of birth from college officials and matriculated at a junior college in the down-at-heel Taito Ward in the northern part of the city. Soon she gravitated to a political action club sponsored by the radical Japanese Red Army, which had as its mission the liberation of the world from the type of oppression she herself had been the victim of. Her college career came to an abrupt end when, in an attempt at ingratiating herself with the handsome leader of the Brigade, she foolhardily self-published a bomb-making manual that she distributed on campus.

  Now Megumi Nonaka was forty-four years old and feeling every second of it. Although blessed with a lovely face, she was single, loveless, and barely scraping by at Fleur, her beauty shop, and despairing of ever finding someone to share her life, especially since her background was so tarnished by her burakumin background and the bomb-making manual she had published in junior college. What customers she had these days were mostly fellow middle-aged women with little future. As she sat in the back of her salon in existential dejection, smoking a cigarette and thumbing through gossip magazines, the glasslike bell of her shop door tinkled.

  “Irasshaimase,” (“Welcome”) she called out half-heartedly, stubbing her cigarette into the ashtray and coming out to greet her customer. How she hated this life and the unfairness of Japanese society, which oppressed so many like her in the name of racial purity. But as she parted the beaded curtain and entered the salon, she saw that this was not one of her regulars. She had no male customers except the transvestites who cruised the nearby red-light district at night. And the one entering her shop looked like something out of a rock band, although there was something vaguely foreign about him.

  “In town for a concert?” she asked him as she readied her chair for him. He stared at her with parted lips for a moment, smiled, and then nodded.

  “My Japanese not good,” he said, revealing dimples she hadn’t noticed when he was just standing there mutely. “I want make style and blonde hair please.”

  Megumi smiled back and indicated the seat. Such a cute accent and good manners. “Of course.” She snapped a nylon cape around his neck and began styling his hair, snipping just a little here and there. He sat in silence watching her in the mirror. She then went to a closet to get the chemicals she would use.

  “What group are you in?” she asked as she brought them back.

  “Doki Doki Dokei,” he said, still looking at her intently in the mirror. She stopped. “Doki Doki Dokei” meant “timebomb” and was the name of the manual she had written in junior college.

  He unsnapped and removed the nylon cape around his neck and took her hand.

  “I hear about you from friend. So beautiful,” he whispered. Megumi’s eyes widened. He held her gaze, and she felt her breathing becoming quick and shallow.

  “You’re so young,” she said shakily, her legs going weak as he continued to hold her gaze. He reached out and ran the back of his hand down each cheek in turn. Her breath turned into short, panicky gasps as he lowered one hand to her breast and drew her face to his with the other. She took his hand off her breast, and for a moment he questioned his charm until she went to the front door, locked it, and led him to the back room where she kept a foldout couch.

  Afterwards, they shared one of her Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes and drifted a finger’s breadth above the earth in luxurious afterglow. She traced his slightly misshapen nose with her finger.

  “You’re a fighter,” she said with a smile. He turned to face her and smiled back.

  “I fight for good things,” he said.

  “Have you always liked older women?” she asked. He nodded with a bashful smile. In truth he preferred his high school freshman conquests, but he’d make an exception if it furthered his agenda.

  “And I fall in love with you from your book,” he said in a confessional tone, as if he needed to apologize for coming to her shop on the false pretense of being a K-pop singer in need of a touchup for his locks. “You are so intelligent. And also so…I don’t know Japanese word. It mean ‘fight for poor people.’”

  “Maybe ‘struggle’?”

  “Yes, that word. I hear it before but could not remember.”

  They talked the rest of the afternoon of the ruling classes’ oppression of the workers of the world, and they agreed that they both wanted to do something about it. Something big that would make the world sit up and pay attention to them for a change. Then they made love four more times over the course of the afternoon. Afterwards, Casanova kissed her gently on the lips and told her he would be back the following day with the next step of the plan they had devised between lovemaking sessions.

  Megumi rejoiced in the fact that she had finally discovered someone in Japan who could fill the empty parts of her soul and body.

  And Casanova rejoiced in the fact that he had finally discovered someone in Japan who was not only a damn good lay for an old bitch, but also a willing dupe in the plan that would restore him and his fellow princelings to their former glory in Pyonghattan.

  As he made his way back to the corpse hotel, he was so absorbed in his conquest that he didn’t realize that he had been followed to the beauty parlor by a man with Italian features who had been waiting outside the whole time. The man cocked his finger like a pistol and aimed it at the murderous boy as he receded into the dwindling twilight.

  CHAPTER 39

  Patrick sat in his office with Kirsten, Phibbs, and Kaga, with Choy in the back room working on his computer. Patrick addressed the group.

  “We don’t know how many of them are going to be involved. It could be one, it could be more. Bozu doesn’t know how many of them are left. One of them recruited a hairdresser who wrote a bomb-making manual in junior college.” Patrick told them. Choy came out to join them when Patrick mentioned this last detail.

  “You gotta be kidding, junior college?” Phibbs said.

  Patrick nodded. “She’s a hardcore radical. Definitely not your typical Japanese office lady.”

  “Do we know when and where they’re planning to do it?” Kirsten asked.

  “Two days from now, probably at the Blue Sluice Gate in Iwabuchi, but that’s really just a guess.”

  “I’ll go.”

  All eyes turned to Kirsten. “Go where?” Patrick asked.

  “I’ll go to the hairdresser and see if I can find out more details.”

  Phibbs looked at her without speaking, but his doubt came through loud and clear.

  “I know some of you are p
robably skeptical,” Kirsten said. “‘What can a desk officer do in the field?’ you’re thinking. But screw you, we all had to do undercover training at Quantico.”

  “Which was not all that long ago,” Phibbs said under his breath.

  “You’re good at that, Phibbs, muttering stuff and being all wiseass about it. Why not just come out and say you think I’m too green?”

  Phibbs looked the other way.

  “I think it might be a good idea,” Choy said. “It’s not as if we have a lot of options.” They all looked at Patrick, who was wondering if Kirsten was at all motivated by the murder of her undercover husband. Bravery or bravado? Maybe the psychological profiler had a profile of her own. After a minute of deliberation, he spoke.

  “I’m willing to give it a shot. The worst that can happen is that you get a bad haircut.”

  “Or a pair of scissors in the throat if she’s made,” said Phibbs.

  “I’m not going to be made, okay? I’m not a total fucking idiot.”

  “I didn’t say you were, it’s just that you haven’t done this before.”

  “Which means I’ll have my eyes open and not think I know everything, unlike some people.” Phibbs opened his mouth but closed it again.

  “Alright,” Patrick said. “You need to come up with a good cover story. Think of all the possible questions she might sound you out on.”

  “Hey, maybe she’s looking for a girlfriend,” Phibbs muttered under his breath.

  “Fuck off, Phibbs, not everyone’s as horny as you.” Kirsten went back to her worktable. Phibbs’s laugh rang loud and tinny, like the peal of a dented bell.

  CHAPTER 40

  “Irasshaimase,” Megumi called out to an incoming customer more energetically than usual. Ever since she had met the Korean boy who called himself Casanova, her step had become lighter and her outlook infinitely brighter than before. He would be coming over again later that night. The customer now walking in was a foreign woman in her thirties with softly alluring features and dark blonde hair. She nodded to Megumi uncertainly, and it was clear that she didn’t speak any Japanese. But she saw that Megumi had been watching Al-Jazeera on the television, and she tentatively asked Megumi if she spoke Arabic after introducing herself as Amira.

  “Na’am!” said Megumi enthusiastically, and the two of them began to converse in Arabic, first in polite generalities, and then about what the woman wanted hairstyle-wise.

  “Just a little trim to get rid of the split ends, nothing drastic. And what do you think about a little color? Can you bring out some highlights?”

  Megumi started in. “So are you in town for the Games, Amira?” she asked as she cut.

  “Yes, I’m here to cover the Olympics for a magazine.”

  “Oh, an Arabic one?”

  “Yes,” the woman said in a softer voice, as if trying to decide whether to say more. She looked at Megumi in the mirror, and said, “It’s called al-Iirjae.”

  Megumi stopped cutting. “I’ve heard of it. It means ‘return,’ yes?”

  The woman nodded. “My father is from Palestine. I was always raised to do what I can for the return of Palestine.”

  Sensing no negative reaction from Megumi, the customer got more specific about exactly what she had done for the cause of wresting Palestinian territory back from Israel, including being a member of an underground group that provided safe houses for fugitives suspected of being terrorists. Suddenly Kirsten/Amira stopped in midsentence. Her head moved forward, and her eyes went to a thin volume on the magazine table. Megumi followed her eyes and became flustered. She hurried to the magazine table and placed the day’s newspaper over what Amira was looking at.

  “Wait,” Amira said. “Can I see that?”

  Megumi hesitated but then removed the newspaper and brought the pamphlet over to Amira. It was an English translation of the bomb-making manual she had written in junior college. She had brought it out for Casanova to look at when he came by later.

  As Kirsten/Amira read, she nodded her head and smiled. “I didn’t realize how committed you are to the cause of justice,” she said to Megumi.

  Megumi looked intently at Kirsten for several moments before continuing. “I’m also a member of an underground group. We’re called the Pan Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.” Kirsten/Amira listened attentively as Megumi spoke and thumbed through the beautician’s bomb-making handbook. She stopped at one of the illustrations, and Megumi said, “Anyone with an intermediate knowledge of chemistry can do that one.” She explained that it made use of sodium chlorite-based herbicides which can be gotten without suspicion in large quantities out in the more rural areas.

  After Megumi had finished explaining, the customer opened her handbag and took out her wallet. She gave Megumi a healthy tip as well as a business card.

  “We should meet again soon, I think,” she said to Megumi pointedly.

  “How about tomorrow?” Megumi said.

  The two women, strangers just a few short hours earlier, embraced like sisters. Sisters in the cause. They would meet again the following day.

  CHAPTER 41

  Unlike the Miyamoto Musashi texts that came in before the earlier attacks, the next one to appear on Patrick’s phone was less cryptic, thanks to Bozu’s tip: “Water is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea.”

  Patrick knew that one of the targets was most likely the Ogouchi Reservoir in the far western part of the metropolis that holds the water supply for most of Tokyo. The immense reservoir holds about 190 million tons, and there was no way Patrick and his little team could be effective there. He had no desire to meet or even talk with Hayashida, so he told Kaga to let his boss know about the possible plot at the reservoir, saying nothing about the Blue Sluice Gate.

  ___________________

  Set on a floodplain of reclaimed swampland on an active earthquake fault line, the harbor city of Tokyo seems as unlikely a location for a world capital as any in the world. Much of the metropolis lies below sea level, and its eight rivers contribute even further to the city’s vulnerability to flooding, as in the Great Kanto Flood of 1910 when the Sumida River broke through its embankments and turned the city into a vast inland sea. One of the government’s responses was to build the Aosuimon, or Blue Sluice Gate, which prevents the Arakawa (literally “wild river”) from overflowing during a hard rain by shunting the excess water into a drainage canal that flows to the sea. In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, the gate had come down so often due to torrential rains that the government had decided to leave it down until at least the end of typhoon season in September.

  Kirsten had gone back to Megumi’s salon the day after her first visit, at which time Megumi had enlisted her for what she called “direct action” against the Islam-hating world. They would set out the following day. She cited the 1972 Munich Olympics and promised her new recruit that what she had planned would make those attacks seem puny and amateurish in comparison.

  The next day, as the train slowed its approach into the Tokyo Metro station a few blocks from the American embassy, Kirsten thumbed back the hair over her right ear and turned her head from side to side to examine her reflection in the windows of the decelerating train. Dressed in a lightweight tracksuit, she wondered for an instant if anyone might be thinking she was an athlete in town for the Olympics but then immediately dismissed the thought. Ten years ago, maybe. Her eyes gave her away, and not because of the crow’s feet that she tried unsuccessfully to hide under a layer of foundation. It wasn’t as if she were stuck in the past, she thought to herself. Landon was dead and wasn’t coming back and that was that. It was more like being stuck in an unchanging present that held no promise of anything more satisfying on a level she desperately missed. In a word, she felt unloved. But as she boarded the train and sat down, she remembered where she was going and why. She touched her ankle to make sure that the 11.5 ounces of metal
she was carrying had no chance of falling off.

  A half hour later, as the train approached Akabane-iwabuchi Station, the end of the line, she began to feel a sense of deepening apprehension, and she ran through a mental checklist of things she needed to be fully aware of: surveil the area to be sure that only the one young Korean was there with Megumi; allow their mission to proceed up to a point where no one would get hurt but would allow enough time for Patrick to neutralize the hostile actors; always have access to the Colt Mustang that was irritating her ankle.

  Exiting the station, she could see the coffee-colored Arakawa River in the distance, and she checked the time on her phone. Megumi would meet her at the riverbank in twenty minutes, and they would maintain their pose as two youthful fitness enthusiasts out for a noontime jog. She’d been told that the temperature would be slightly cooler near the river, but when she considered what she had gotten herself into, it suddenly felt like the sun had traveled a few million miles closer to the earth.

  Waiting at the New Arakawa Bridge, Megumi waved to Kirsten in a hurry-up gesture, and Kirsten began jogging toward her. Unlike her look of excited anticipation at her beauty shop, Megumi’s face was tense.

  “We’re late. I heard from him that he wanted to start early,” she said in Arabic.

  Kirsten’s brow knit, but she didn’t protest. “Alright. Does he have the…”

  “Yes,” Megumi said, holding her hand up and cutting her off. The only people around were a group of visibly drunk men staggering to a recycling truck carrying plastic bags full of empty cans, but Megumi was acting as if they were surrounded by undercover Arabic-speaking JIA agents.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not new to this,” Kirsten said as they began jogging along the Arakawa Greenspace on the bank of the Arakawa River.

  “Sorry, I don’t want to take any chances,” Megumi said. She looked at the digital watch/pedometer on her wrist and squinted into the near distance at the Blue Sluice Gate a quarter mile away. “There it is,” she said, and Kirsten looked to where she was pointing. Three metal barriers, each twenty feet across and sixty feet high, were suspended between four huge concrete stanchions. The barriers had been lowered into the river against a tide that was raging as a result of the torrential rainy season.