Disciple of the Wind (26 page)

Mariko was too tired to think about what that meant. She ambled into the elevator, thumbed the button for the eighteenth floor, and leaned in the back corner for the briefest of naps.

“Detective Oshiro to see Captain Kusama,” she told the secretary.

“Go right in.”

Uh-oh, Mariko thought. Having a captain lie in wait for her could not be good. She felt like the goat in
Jurassic Park
, chained to a post and waiting for the T. Rex.

Kusama was on the phone, but he surprised her with a polite smile and motioned her toward one of the chairs in front of his desk. It was
the same one she’d sat in when he’d held her maimed hand, the same one she’d fallen back into after he stripped her of her rank.

Mariko sat in the other chair and waited for him to finish his call. She’d forgotten how handsome he was. Of course, it wasn’t easy to remember the good things about the man who had taken a hatchet to her career.

“Detective Oshiro,” he said, nesting the phone back in its cradle. “You look tired, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. Let me get you a drink. Coffee? Tea?”

“Thank you, sir, but no.”

“Nonsense. Here, I’ll have one myself.” He rang his secretary, who materialized as if by magic with two coffees. Mariko’s was black, one sugar, just how she liked it. She knew Kusama kept tabs on her, and even on her sister’s progress in rehab, but she hadn’t guessed his notes went all the way down to how she took her morning coffee.

“All right, Detective. Let’s get down to business. I’d like to know which reporters you’ve been talking to, and why you thought it was a good idea to start doing my job as well as your own.”

“Sir?”

“Forgive me. You look so tired; perhaps you didn’t notice this on your way in.” He slid a copy of the
Daily Yomiuri
across the broad, polished surface of his desk.

It was clear that he was trying to keep Mariko off-balance. Forcing her to accept the cup of coffee was old-school alpha male bullshit. Switching between the nice guy stuff and the personal attacks was a newer tactic, but it wasn’t new to Mariko. She used it herself in questioning a suspect. She knew the right way to respond, too: don’t get flustered. Pick a point on the table and stare at it. Talk to it, not to the person asking the questions. Stay distant.

She knew that was what she was supposed to do, but even so, she blanched when she saw the headline.
TMPD INSIDER: JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH CONNECTION “TOTALLY BASELESS.”

“I seem to remember a certain conversation,” Kusama said. He spoke in that tone parents took in public with their misbehaving kids:
quiet, clipped, each word boiling over with anger. “A private conversation with a very small audience. Only four of us. Back in a dark, secluded corner of Terminal 2. Do you remember it?”

“Yes, sir.” It was a hard one to forget; she’d regained her sergeant’s bars, only to lose them again a few minutes later.

“We discussed Jemaah Islamiyah. I told you I had dropped that name to the reporters. Do you remember what you told me?”

Mariko swallowed. “I, uh . . .”

“Go ahead.” His voice seethed with anger. “Say it.”

“I . . . I told you that if you tried to pin this on Islamic extremists, Joko Daishi would use that to destroy our credibility. I said you should take everything else off the table and accuse the Divine Wind outright.”

“So you did. Would you like to tell me ‘I told you so’?”

“No, sir.”

“But you did,
neh
? You did tell me so.”

There was no safe way to answer that. Fortunately, if there was one thing she’d learned from him, it was that if she didn’t say anything, she wouldn’t have to wait long for him to fill the silence.

He stood up and walked to his enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. With his hands folded behind his back, posed against the dramatic backdrop of the cityscape, he looked more like a prime minister than a police captain. “It’s not yet seven o’clock, and so far this morning I have spoken with the editors in chief of two newspapers and four television news programs. I know these men personally. I’ve been playing golf with one of them for over thirty years. All six of them called to give me fair warning that they would be running exposés on the police cover-up of the Haneda bombing and the false accusation against Islamic extremists. All because someone talked.”

Mariko said nothing.

“There were four of us in that conversation,” said Kusama. “Only four people could have leaked this information about Jemaah Islamiyah to the
Yomiuri
. Was it you?”

“No, sir.”

“I remind you, these editors are friends of mine. If they press their reporters for sources, someone
will
talk. If I should find incontrovertible evidence that you were the one who spoke of Jemaah Islamiyah to the press, I will see to it that you’ll never find a job as a policewoman ever again. Or you can tell me the truth right now and I won’t fire you, because I’ll be too busy carrying out my normal duties—namely, protecting the good name of the TMPD. So with that in mind, do you have anything to tell me?”

“No, sir.”

“It was not you who spoke to the press about Jemaah Islamiyah? You’re quite sure?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Lieutenant Sakakibara, then.”

“I doubt it, sir. I doubt that very much.”

“As do I. That leaves me and your erstwhile partner—a man who is known for ethical improprieties, as I recall. Which one of us is the leak, Detective?”

There was no safe answer to that one, either. If she accused Han, Kusama would eat him alive. If she accused Kusama, she could expect the same fate herself.

But to Mariko’s mind, he’d offered a false dilemma. “There’s someone else who knows the Divine Wind carried out the attack.”

“Oh? Who, pray tell?”

“Joko Daishi, sir. He also knows what Akahata Daisuke was doing in Korakuen station with a giant barrel of high explosives. He could have leaked everything in these stories himself.”

Kusama began to pace in front of the windows that afforded him his magnificent view of the city. “I see. Once again, the man you accuse is the one you happen to know more about than anyone else in the department. Convenient, isn’t it?”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I wouldn’t describe four traffic fatalities, twenty-three ricin fatalities, and the hundred and twelve at Haneda as ‘convenient.’”

“But you do want to work the Joko Daishi case,
neh
?”

“Damn right, sir.”

Kusama grunted and winced. “Perhaps it is your . . . oh, let’s call it
enthusiasm
for this case that makes you speak to me this way, as if we are teammates on a softball team and not officers of the law. Look at my uniform, Detective Oshiro, and look at yours. You will note there are no jersey numbers.”

Mariko quickly found a knot on his cherrywood desk and resolved to speak to it, not to Kusama. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“
Enthusiasm
is too forgiving a word to describe your antics. You ignored my orders and you have tied up valuable department resources that could have been used to aid in the Haneda investigation.”

“Sir?”

“Do not be coy with me, Detective. I am well aware of your extracurricular activities. I know all about the hours you’ve wasted watching traffic camera footage.”

Mariko was surprised to feel a great swell of relief. Only now did she realize that she had spent the last few days waiting for the hammer to fall. She knew exactly how Captain Kusama had come to learn of her efforts to track the woman in white. Someone had tipped him off. The same someone had been stalking her electronically for almost a week. Two days ago her stalker had tipped his hand. Deliberately. When she discovered the underground command center below the Blind Spot, she found a step-by-step report of her search for the woman in white. Dates, times, camera locations, informant files accessed, warrants requested, incident reports in various stages of completion. All of it.

Now her stalker must have delivered that report to Captain Kusama. Mariko had foreseen that possibility from the moment she and Han discovered the report. Since that day, she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep. But now the hammer was finally falling—right on her head, but at least the waiting was over. Kusama would do his worst,
and then Mariko wouldn’t have to imagine what the worst might look like.

“I assigned a few officers from Internal Affairs to study your traffic camera feed. They could find no connection to any of the narcotics cases you’re supposed to be working.”

“We nailed Lee Jin Bao on a buy-bust at the Sour Plum—”

“Unless you want to lose your detective assignment and spend the rest of your career as a meter maid, you will not interrupt me again. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” she told the knot of cherry wood.

“No connection. That’s what they told me. And since I assigned you specifically to work only narcotics cases, I now have no choice but to reprimand you.”

That was bullshit and Mariko knew it. A captain in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had enormous power over the system. He could do more or less whatever he wanted. But Mariko chose to keep this to herself.

“As of this moment you are relieved of duty,” Kusama said. “I think two weeks without pay is a good start. I may extend that if Internal Affairs requests more time to investigate your indiscretions. Any questions?”

Just one, Mariko thought. Who gave you that list? It was that person, not Kusama, who had forced the issue of her suspension. Kusama was jerking around at the end of someone else’s string.

Ever since she got mugged, Mariko had been trying to figure out who the puppet master was. The woman in white had been her best lead—her only lead, in fact, and she’d already followed it as far as it would go. Getting suspended was almost a blessing; if she couldn’t continue the investigation, she couldn’t fail at it day after day.

“Good,” the captain said, misinterpreting her silence. “You have one hour to make all the necessary arrangements. After that, you will have no further access to departmental resources.”

Fine, Mariko thought. I haven’t accomplished anything with them anyway.

She left Kusama’s office as gracefully as she could. The “necessary arrangements” he’d spoken of were few. She had to check in her badge and she had to inform Lieutenant Sakakibara just how far the captain had kicked his boot up her ass. Her service weapon was already locked up, leaving Mariko to wonder what she’d do if she suddenly found she needed a gun. If her electronic stalker decided to do some physical stalking, she could only hope he preferred a sword fight to a drive-by.

Sakakibara wasn’t in, which was the first stroke of luck she’d had all week. She’d send him the news via e-mail and avoid the verbal curb-stomping he’d have dished out if she’d told him face-to-face. Agonizing over just how to phrase it took about seven minutes. Aborting that plan and just blurting everything that needed to be said took less than two minutes. Kusama had given her an hour to leave the building, of which she had fifty-one minutes left to find the Wind.

But how? She had Google and her own two feet, and beyond that her search capabilities were limited. The department had many more tools at its disposal, but Mariko had exhausted them already. She’d identified the man who owned the strip club that sat atop the underground command center. He paid weekly protection money to the local
boryokudan
strongman, but that was his only illegal activity. According to public records, the command center didn’t even exist. Mariko had gone so far as to track down which electrical cables supplied the strip club and which supplied the command center, and followed up on who was paying the command center’s bills. She learned that the bills were extraordinarily high, they were paid directly from an online checking account, and the bank of record had no idea who held the account. When Mariko tried the same trick with the Internet service, she found more or less the same thing: a big empty hole where its electronic footprint was supposed to be. The place had the bandwidth and computing power of the whole TMPD, yet somehow it was entirely off the books.

The worst part was that she’d done all of that legwork fully
expecting it to fail. These people had created a blind spot in a citywide surveillance system; they weren’t going to pay their electric bill by personal check. She’d dug up all the leads she could find, and she’d followed them as far as they would go. Every last one of them fizzled out.

Fifty-one minutes to do something meaningful, when the last five days hadn’t been enough to make a single step forward.

“Fuck it,” she said, and she opened her departmental e-mail one last time.

To Whom It May Concern:

If you found this message, then you are who I think you are. I know it was you who gave me the iron demon mask. I know it was you who tracked me tracking you. Your printout was a cute trick, but I don’t believe you left it there in order to scare me off. I think you left it to tell me that you know I’m onto you. I hear your message loud and clear: you’ll let me find you, but only on your own terms.

Now hear my message: I don’t care about your terms. If you want to talk to me, you know where I live. Ring the doorbell. I’m not playing your stupid game anymore.

She saved the message in her Drafts folder without specifying a sender. Then she closed everything down and went to the pistol range. Forty-nine minutes. Plenty of time to unload a bunch of rounds and pretend the target was Captain Kusama’s pretty office furniture.

22

M
ariko didn’t have to wait long for someone to ring her doorbell.

After the pistol range she went straight to the dojo, where Hosokawa-sensei begrudgingly admitted her into the morning class, which wasn’t a part of her monthly membership and which she hadn’t registered for in advance. He routinely allowed male students to drop in like this, but he was of the old-school belief that women had no place in
kenjutsu
. He didn’t understand why Mariko, already twenty-seven years old, wasn’t at home minding her children. A woman who was more interested in martial arts than marital arts made no more sense to him than a fish riding a bicycle.