Disciple of the Wind (6 page)

When she saw the boxes marked
CORONER GRADE VINYL BAGS
, she knew where they had to go. The image of all those red and blue
blankets had never fully escaped her. She rolled up in one of those electric airport carts, ready to tell the guys carrying the boxes to hop aboard, and had to brake before running smack into another vehicle. She was surprised to see she recognized the driver.

“Han?”

Mariko hardly recognized her former partner. The electric cart wasn’t his style, but more jarring was the regulation haircut he’d been subjected to when he was reassigned from Narcotics to general patrol. Working undercover had been the only reason he was allowed to grow his hair out and keep his sideburns in the seventies. And of course his hair wasn’t just shorter; it was white now, too, as was Mariko’s—as were their shoulders, the tops of their shoes, and every other horizontal surface in the blown-out terminal. Gypsum, pulverized cement, fire extinguisher propellant, cigarette ashes from the scores of relief workers, all stirred up in a bitter, chalky concatenation that billowed up with every footstep. Mariko couldn’t see it in the air, but it coagulated on her skin as soon as she worked up a sweat. She’d given up trying to wash it off.

Han was wearing the same gritty mask, with a powdered wig to match. Even so, she could see how tired he was. Like hers, his mask was cracked in places. Every time he’d pinched his eyes shut to rub at them, every time he’d frowned or winced, wrinkles had formed, channeling away the sweat and dust and leaving little flesh-colored creases behind. Mariko knew she looked the same: weary and ready to crumble.

“Women drivers,” he said, shaking his head in mock disgust. “Who lost his mind long enough to give you the keys to that thing?”

Mariko couldn’t help but smile. Her white mask crackled in new places, and she realized this was the first time she’d smiled since arriving at Haneda. Not that there had been much cause for mirth.

“You look like hell,” he said. “Wild guess: you haven’t taken a break since you’ve been here, have you?”

“No.”

“You want to grab something to eat? I hear they set up a breakfast buffet in the food court.”

“Breakfast . . . ?” That didn’t add up. “Han, what time is it?”

“About six.”

“Six in the
morning
?” Mariko sagged in her seat. “No wonder I’m tired.”

“Come on, let’s eat. Someone else can get these body bags where they need to be. I’ve been avoiding the north end anyway.”

Mariko nodded. She and Han had always thought along similar lines. That was one of the things she liked best about him.

He insisted on driving, not because he had to be the man in their relationship but because she was teetering on the brink of exhaustion. There weren’t many guys in the department who treated her like just another cop, guys who could be friends without also thinking of her as a little sister or a nice piece of ass. Mariko slumped in her padded seat, grateful that she’d crossed paths with him and no one else.

At the food court, Mariko gorged herself on greasy American food, a childhood staple. Prior to that moment, she’d never fully grasped what the Americans meant by “comfort food.” Then the first salty McDonald’s French fry broke crisply between her teeth and something deep inside of her got permission to relax. She gobbled down an entire packet of fries before turning to anything remotely healthy. Han waited until she had a bowlful of rice in her belly before he offered the real delight: a little glass bottle of Chivas Regal. Mariko could have kissed him. “Where’d you get that?”

“Are you kidding? All the airport cops are on disaster detail. Those duty-free shops are wide open for looting.”

“Seriously?” She punched him in the arm. “You could lose your badge for that!”

“Ow!” He laughed at her and rubbed where she’d punched him. “You make it too easy. I got it from a manager of one of the shops. She was just giving them away. Said it was the least she could do.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“And that manager deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. She’s a
humanitarian if ever there was one.” Mariko took a swig. It was heaven. “When did you get out here?”

“I came as soon as I heard. Took me three hours. The whole city’s on lockdown.”

“You heard a death toll?”

Han closed his eyes and nodded. “By the time I got here they were saying eighty. Then ninety. Last I heard, maybe an hour ago, it was a hundred and twelve.”

The number hit her like a punch in the mouth. She couldn’t speak. Han’s eyes pinched tight and he pressed a fist to his lips. Mariko could see he was trying not to cry. Apropos of nothing, he said, “Your mom called me.”

“Huh?”

“I’ve still got her in my phone. From when we were partners, just in case—well, you know.”

“Yeah.” Mariko fished her phone out of her pocket. It was a mangled mess, probably crushed when she put her thigh into moving something heavy. She didn’t even remember it happening. “She okay?”

“I guess. Worried sick. Said she heard from you around midnight but not since. I told her you were all right.”

“How about you?”

“Me?” Han sniffled. “Yeah, sure, I’m fine.”

He was lying. Both of them knew it, and both of them knew why. No one was fine. The whole damn city was turned upside down and Mariko felt like she was hanging on by her fingernails. The only way to hold on was to not think about what she was feeling. Han was the same way.

So he changed the subject. “They’re saying two bombs.”

“I know. The second one went off in my face.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at her probingly, as if he could diagnose wounds on sight. “I’m okay,” she said. “I mean, not
okay
okay. I’m beat to shit and
my ears are still ringing, but that’s the worst of it. I don’t suppose you happened to overhear anything from the bomb squad.”

“Nope. But I know what you’re thinking. Hexamine.”

Mariko’s skin went cold. She and Han shared the same suspicion: if the Divine Wind was responsible for this attack, they’d likely have used the same explosives used by Joko Daishi’s lieutenant, Akahata. One of the key ingredients in Akahata’s bomb was a chemical known as hexamine. If analysts found traces of it in the blast residue here, it would go a long way to corroborating Mariko and Han’s theory. But what Mariko had never thought of before, and what now had her heart racing, was that if Akahata had managed to detonate his bomb—if Mariko hadn’t stopped him a split second before he hit the trigger—that subway platform would have looked a lot like this terminal. So would Mariko. There wouldn’t have been enough left of her even to identify her through dental records.

The thought that she’d come so close to death—and a death as violent as this—gave her goose bumps and made her stomach lurch. Now just sitting here made her feel guilty. It was a stupid reason to cry, but only now did she find herself crying. She’d made it. A hundred and twelve people hadn’t, and she had. She’d never been at serious risk here. She’d faced a far greater risk facing Akahata. That was when she should have cried. But she hadn’t, and now she was, and she felt like a little girl but she couldn’t help herself.

No. As soon as the thought struck her, she refused to accept it. She turned off the waterworks. “Goddamn it,” she said, accidentally reverting to English. “I’m just tired. Give me another—” She switched back to Japanese. “Give me another swig of that Chivas.”

It wasn’t healthy, medicating herself like this, but she needed to put a little fire in her belly to keep herself from total collapse. As long as she kept working, she’d been able to suppress her exhaustion, but now that she’d stopped, she wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. If her mother had been there, she’d have said it was perfectly natural; if fourteen hours of hard labor wasn’t a good excuse for a nap, nothing was. But Yamada-sensei, her late
kenjutsu
instructor, would have told
her exhaustion of the body leads to clarity of the mind. He’d have reminded her that it was only when her arms were so tired she could hardly hold her sword that she learned her best technique. This was no coincidence; it was
because
she couldn’t use physical strength that her technique had to be perfect.

Similarly, it was because she’d been working her ass off for fourteen hours straight that she could now sit in a Zen-like state of calm. Six o’clock in the morning, she thought. On a Wednesday. The bomb went off on a Tuesday afternoon, and notably
not
on a Sunday, the busiest flying day of the week. This attack wasn’t meant to run up a body count; it was meant to deliver a message.

Akahata’s attempt at bombing the subway was supposed to send the same message. And Mariko realized that if Kusama buried the Divine Wind’s involvement in the Haneda bombing the same way he covered up their connection to Akahata, he’d be playing right into Joko Daishi’s hands. Mariko couldn’t stand aside and let that happen.

“Han, have you seen Captain Kusama?”

“Hell, everyone’s seen him. He made himself the media point man on this thing.”

“Damn.”

“Don’t write him off. He’s doing a good job. You should hear him play those reporters. For hours he had all of them saying ‘explosion,’ not ‘bombing’—”

“Because explosions aren’t necessarily attacks,” Mariko said. “They can be accidental.”

“Smart,
neh
? Controlling public perception from the get-go. Now he’s saying ‘bombing’ and so are they.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet you ten thousand yen he’s not telling the whole truth. Has he mentioned Joko Daishi by name?”

“No. But we’ve got a lot of evidence to collect before we jump to that conclusion.”

Mariko gave him a stern look. “Come on. You’re sure too.”

“Yeah. I guess I am.” One hand scratched his cheek where his
sideburn used to be. “But I don’t get how he could have ordered this from prison.”

“He didn’t have to. We let him go this morning.” She told him all about her meeting with Captain Kusama, and about Joko Daishi’s release along with his mask. “Han, I think I know how he picked his targets. I need to talk to the captain—and I could use your help in explaining things to him. Every time I open my mouth around him, I just piss him off.”

“You? Piss off a CO? No way.”

He chuckled and offered her a hand. She didn’t mind letting him help her to her feet; she was more tired than she’d ever been. So much the better, she thought. If she didn’t have the emotional energy to explode at Kusama, she couldn’t get herself suspended.

5

F
inding Captain Kusama was easy; they just had to look for the reporters. Mariko spotted CNN and BBC in the herd now, and Deutsche Welle, and a host of other
gaijin
correspondents as well. They and their Japanese counterparts formed a tight semicircle around Kusama, out on the sidewalk just outside what used to be the main entrance to Terminal 2—Ground Zero, everyone was calling it now. There really wasn’t a better name for it. Kusama had chosen his backdrop well, and not because the dramatic background would emphasize his own importance. The floodlights from the cameras killed all the shadows and made everything around him seem unnaturally white. There would be no lurid, high-contrast images of Ground Zero beaming back to all those foreign news networks. Even under attack, Japan would appear neat and orderly.

Mariko found Lieutenant Sakakibara not far from where she found Kusama, and though he and the captain had arrived in the same car, they looked like they’d come from different planets. Kusama was energetic in front of the cameras. Somehow he’d even kept his uniform immaculate. Sakakibara was as pale as a ghost, dusted head to toe just like Han and Mariko. He’d rolled up his sleeves, and red teardrops stood out all up and down his forearms. Mariko didn’t ask how he’d spent the night, but whatever he’d been up to, he’d sustained dozens of tiny lacerations doing it.

He sat in the lee of a disaster management truck the National Police Agency had parked where the terminal doors used to be, a giant Mercedes Unimog painted in stripes of blue and white. Sakakibara sat on one of the big, knobby tires, elbows on his knees, his head and hands dangling toward the floor like heavy fruit from thin branches. “A little pick-me-up, sir?” Han said. He proffered a little bottle of vodka he’d stowed in his pocket.

Sakakibara unfolded himself and stood up to his full height, which was considerable. “Bribing a peace officer is a serious crime, Buzz Cut. I’m confiscating this as evidence.”

Sakakibara rarely called anyone by their real names. He assigned nicknames on the fly and never bothered to explain them. The name Han was a Sakakibara creation; Han’s real name was Watanabe, but just as his Han Solo hairstyle had earned him one nickname, his new regulation haircut now earned him another. Mariko wondered what Sakakibara called himself. Sonny Chiba, for his thick black hair that sat on his head like a helmet? Yao Ming, for his height? Mariko would put a vote in for Grumpy Hardass if she had a say. It was probably a good thing that she didn’t.

“Hell, Frodo, you look about as good as I do,” he said. It had taken Mariko a while to figure out her own moniker. The hobbit part was easy—she was short—but the nickname really turned on Mariko’s missing finger.

“Thank you, sir. You sure know how to make a gal feel good about herself.”

“Don’t get cute. In fact, turn around and go back where you came from. I know why you’re here.”

“Sir?”

“You’ve got a pet theory about who staged this attack. You’re thinking it’s only a matter of time before the boys in the bomb squad come back with chemical signatures for hexamine. When they do, it’ll prove you were right all along. And for some reason you got it in your
little hobbit head that if His Eminence hears all of this, he’ll be oh so
very
proud of you and he’ll give you your sergeant’s tags back.”

Mariko blinked. She tried to rebut but had some trouble opening her mouth. In fact, her reaction would have been exactly the same if she were a cartoon character and a stick of cartoon dynamite blew up in her face.