Disciple of the Wind (15 page)

While the rest of the team searched the Plum for contraband, Mariko hopped onto a stool next to Lee Jin Bao. He sat at his own bar, looking profoundly uncomfortable with his thumbs zip-tied behind him. His breath came loud and angry through his nose. She pulled a couple of hastily folded pages from her back pocket and smoothed them on the spotless countertop. “You ever see this chick before?”

The first page was a grainy black-and-white image captured from a Japan Railways closed-circuit camera, centered on the woman who had kicked Mariko’s ass with the demon mask.

“Couldn’t say.”

Mariko slid the next sheet in front of him: three more pictures of the woman in white, captured from three other security cameras. None of them were high quality, and none of them were head-on. Mariko had a sneaking suspicion that the woman had done that on
purpose—that she’d deliberately faced this way or that so the cops couldn’t get a good data set to run facial recognition software.

“How about now?” Mariko said. “Recognize her yet?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“Here, let’s get some of this crap out of your eyes.” She scrubbed Lee’s face with one hand, and not as gently as she could have. Pink flecks of broken cast rained down on the counter. The trickle of blood snaking down from his hairline was now a smear across his forehead. It wasn’t right, taking her frustration out on him, but she’d gone to a lot of work pulling these images and she wanted to see some results.

After getting her ass kicked by the woman in white, Mariko’s first stop wasn’t the ER, but rather the Tokyo Station security office. She knew the station would have dozens of cameras, and she planned to use them to track her assailant out of the building and into the streets. From there she’d hoped to track the woman via traffic camera feed, but by the time she’d climbed the stairs to the security office she felt woozy. After that, her next clear memory was coming to in the back of an ambulance.

No one would have blamed her for taking the rest of the day off. Even if she wasn’t sporting a grade two concussion, the relief work at Haneda had driven her to the brink of exhaustion. But Mariko knew she couldn’t afford to rest. Most security cameras recorded over their own feed, running a perpetual loop to save on data storage, and the length of the loop varied from one camera to the next. As far as she was concerned, the clock was ticking.

So the moment the ER doc had her stitched up, Mariko rushed straight back to the station security office. A flash of her badge gave her an all-access backstage pass. The Haneda bombing had people scared. They would give a cop anything she asked for, and the thought of a warrant never entered their minds.

The first thing she had to search for was the footage of herself, turtling up while getting beaten half to death. Even watching it from the cold remove of recorded video was enough to make her heart race. From there, with the help of the security staff, she’d jumped from one
monitor to the next, finally tracking her perpetrator out of the train station and into a taxicab. Then it was back home for Mariko, where a shower and a change of clothes made her look not quite so much like an exsanguinated corpse. From there she’d run off to post.

Tracking that taxi would have been easy enough for any cop with a smidgen of talent when it came to computers, which was to say anyone on the force except for Mariko. Accessing surveillance camera feed was a simple matter of logging in; she didn’t even need a warrant. But after that Mariko was at sea. She could click through one camera at a time, but there were over a hundred surveillance cameras in greater Tokyo—and that was to say nothing of the traffic cams, weather cams, and privately owned Webcams whose owners streamed their feed online for all the world to see. Mariko’s first instinct was to pull rank and order someone from Evidence Division to run the search for her. Then she remembered: she’d lost her sergeant’s stripes. Pulling rank wasn’t an option anymore.

So she’d spent two laborious days screening all the footage herself. Fortunately, she’d never had much patience for paperwork, which meant she had a perpetual backlog, which gave her an airtight excuse to ride a desk for two days straight. At last she’d tracked the woman in white to a blind spot between two cameras in Kabuki-cho, Tokyo’s red-light district. A third camera was pointing right where she needed it, but karma must have been feeling pissy that morning, because a pigeon had made its nest right in front of the lens. Instead of a visual on where her target went to ground, Mariko had a close-up shot of twigs and molted feathers.

Not to be daunted, Mariko played the last trick in her book. Narcotics kept meticulous records: arrests, convictions, seizures, and—of particular importance for Mariko—addresses. Mariko had only to draw a half-kilometer radius around the blind spot, then check the files for violent crime busts or suspicious person calls within that circle. If the woman in white had priors, maybe she also had criminal friends she could hide out with after assaulting a cop.

The most promising hit had been the Sour Plum, and so here she
was, sitting next to the proprietor and poking at the printed screen shots she’d pulled from the various camera feeds. “Does she come here often?” Mariko said. “Did she come here Wednesday morning?”

Lee shrugged. “Couldn’t say.”

Mariko sighed. “And suppose I were to ask you how many fingers and toes you have?”

“Couldn’t say.”

She got the idea. Lee would clam up until he saw a lawyer, and even then he wouldn’t say much. But Mariko had a keen sense for lies. In her line of work, it was an indispensable skill. And that sense of hers said Lee wasn’t lying. He honestly hadn’t seen the woman before.

Mariko could feel her frustration mounting. It stiffened the muscles of her skull, like a giant hand clamping down on her head. She wanted nothing more than to jump behind the bar and pour herself a shot and a beer, but general orders prohibited drinking on duty. She considered violating orders anyway, but then the flat-panel TV mounted over the bar distracted her. Mariko went behind the bar, found the remote control, and turned up the volume.

She instantly wished she hadn’t.

“—eighteen deaths and counting,” the reporter was saying. “Police say the only common thread between them is that all eighteen were employed at St. Luke’s or were patients there.”

Behind him was a towering wall of blue glass that Mariko recognized immediately. The mere sight of it made her shiver like she’d seen a ghost. It was in the operating room of St. Luke’s International Hospital that surgeons had removed a meter of razor-sharp Inazuma steel from her gut. She was almost pronounced dead after Fuchida Shuzo ran her through with Beautiful Singer. Her sole piece of good fortune that day was that he’d gutted her right across the street from a top-notch surgical unit.

Now there were eighteen more ghosts to associate with St. Luke’s. “The cause of death is thought to be ricin poisoning,” the reporter went on. “Because the poison can take as long as five days to kill once it enters a person’s system, it is not known how many others have
already been exposed. Hospital authorities and the National Police Agency urge everyone who is experiencing the following symptoms to go to the emergency room immediately—”

The reporter went on, but Mariko wasn’t listening. She was wondering how she could show a connection between the ricin deaths and the Divine Wind. There was no doubt in her mind that Joko Daishi was responsible. He didn’t have his mask anymore, so in all likelihood he believed he’d lost his divine guidance, but he may well have ordered the attack before the mask was stolen. For that matter, he might have authorized high-ranking lackeys to execute such attacks independently. Only one thing was certain: attacking a hospital fit perfectly with Joko Daishi’s
modus operandi
.

His goal was to enlighten the people, and his method was to disrupt their faith in all of the things that kept life stable and harmonious. That included medical facilities. St. Luke’s was supposed to be a place you went to get better; now going there could kill you. If ricin took days to kill, then everyone who had gone to St. Luke’s this week had to wonder if they had also been poisoned. Everyone who felt even a hint of the symptoms would flood the nearest ER. Hundreds more would avoid going to
any
hospital, for fear that whoever had infiltrated St. Luke’s would attack other facilities as well.

In short, Joko Daishi had hobbled Tokyo’s entire health care system.

Mariko’s phone was in her hand before she knew it. She punched in Lieutenant Sakakibara’s number and started rehearsing what she wanted to say.

“What do you want, Frodo?”

“Sir, have you seen—”

“St. Luke’s. Yeah. What about it?”

“Sir, we know Joko Daishi has expertise in chemistry. If he can cook meth and build high explosives, he can make ricin.”

Sakakibara muttered something gruff, but Mariko didn’t catch it. She muted the TV. “What’s that, sir?”

“I said I don’t care if the man knows how to make a nuclear bomb. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Sir, I know this man—”

“Yeah? Well, I know another man, and he outranks both of us. If His Eminence says you’re stuck working bullshit buy-busts, then that’s what you’re doing.”

“Isn’t there someone else you could talk to? Someone higher up the chain of command?”

“I tried talking to
you
, to tell you to keep your damn mouth shut. How far did that get me?”

Mariko felt her face flush. She wasn’t sure if it was out of shame or anger. “I know, sir. I’m really sorry—”

“I’ll bet. Learn to live with what you’ve got, Frodo. Have you talked to that ex-partner of yours?”

“About what, sir?”

“About his case work. I got him assigned to Haneda.”

Finally a piece of good news. Apart from improving Han’s standing in the department, it also gave Mariko a personal contact inside the investigation she’d rather be working. “Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. Just don’t call me again. Call Han next time.”

“Sorry, sir. I only wanted to—”

“Just do your damn job, Frodo. Right now that means bullshit buy-busts, even if I could make better use of you elsewhere.”

He hung up and Mariko had a dead phone in her hand.

Lee Jin Bao’s perpetual frown curled into a smile. “Tough day at work?”

“Shut up.”

12

T
he pounding in Makoto’s head made it so hard to think.

He did not care for the way his concubines winced at him. It was in their nature, he supposed; they were trained to worship him. Nevertheless, their concern for their injured god strayed all too close to motherly despair. In
their
minds they would never infantilize him, but in their cringing faces he could see their need to reach out to him, to perform their ministrations on his body. If he could see it, others could see it too, and that threatened Joko Daishi’s godhood.

His fingertips ventured lightly, softly, painfully over the bruised flesh where his father had been. Even the slightest touch was a rasp on sunburned skin. His very skull felt as fragile as an eggshell. Contusions traced the bridge of his nose and the lines of his cheekbones. Small cuts ringed his eyes. His forehead was red fading into purple, darkest on the left side where the harlot’s bullet had taken him. But for his father, Makoto would be dead. Not for the first time, Joko Daishi had rescued Koji Makoto.

Makoto would happily submit to a thousand cuts and bruises such as these, a thousand times a thousand, if only they would restore his father to him. But his father was gone, stolen by the harlot whose name would never again be uttered in his presence. As soon as he’d regained consciousness, Makoto declared her dead to the church. Hamaya Jiro had already dispatched brothers and sisters to deliver the
harlot to the afterlife. All men were in need of purification, but the divine flames would burn hungrily for that one.

Instead of his father’s voice, Makoto heard a ringing, piercing pain. It lanced him through from temple to temple, when what he wanted most was clarity of mind to see his father’s vision. “Thirteen-oh-four,” he said. “One thousand. Three hundred. Four.”

He ran the tip of his forefinger along a raised crease in the map unfolded before him. The map represented the city of Tokyo, and since it was very large, it showed the diseased metropolis in fine detail. With a blue pen he drew a long, straight line connecting a highway on-ramp to . . . to . . . to where? The closer he got to realizing his father’s dream, the harder it became to remember the final details. A lesser man would see nothing but blinding white pain. But Makoto was not an ordinary man. His was a higher calling. He centered his concentration on his breath, then directed his
ki
to the acupressure points in his temples.

His father’s dream became clear again. “Yes, I see,” he said. “So beautiful.” His blue line resumed its zigzagging course through the city.

His journal held down one corner of the map, filled with scribblings that only his father could help him decipher. Holding down the far side of the map was the L-shape of an automatic pistol fitted with a sound suppressor. It was not within reach, but it did not need to be. No one would harm him here. No one would find him here. He was constantly on the move, vanishing for hours at a time, resurfacing only in safe houses and never in the same one twice.

This one was a construction company whose storage building was large enough to serve as a sanctum of the Divine Wind. Makoto sat in the project manager’s office, a cold, windowless space with only a small desk lamp for illumination. Brighter light would have sharpened Makoto’s headaches. Hamaya Jiro stood in attendance, and eleven others as well, all of them nervously silent. Hamaya wore an arm sling and a pained expression. Both were due to the bullet he’d taken through the shoulder in defense of Joko Daishi. No god could ask for greater devotion.

Makoto studied the map, then connected one last path of green to the blue one he’d just drawn. Then he released a great sighing breath and set down his pen. At last the work was done.