Disciple of the Wind (61 page)

Mariko realized she wasn’t the only one who could see that. Shoji could see it. Somehow she shared a profound connection with her son, something far stronger than blood. She knew his future. At this moment, did she see hours of agony or did she see an end? Mariko could decide that for her. She could decide right now.

I shall die by the sword.
That was what Joko Daishi told her the first time they met. Shoji knew it. Furukawa knew it. If Furukawa could be believed, even Yamada-sensei knew it. He knew it well enough to keep Glorious Victory Unsought for himself, so no one else in the Wind could use it to kill Shoji’s son. And now here it was, the fateful blade in its fateful place, with Mariko’s hand on its grip.

She thought of the
kaishakunin
of old. When a samurai committed seppuku, he had a second to behead him if his suffering became too great. But Mariko was no samurai, and Joko Daishi didn’t deserve a samurai’s death.

Then she remembered what Furukawa had said about Streaming Dawn. Maybe she wouldn’t have to play the
kaishakunin
after all. Maybe she could just pull out the shard that was keeping Joko Daishi
alive. But Furukawa never told her what to look for or where to look. That was probably deliberate; no doubt the Wind planned to steal it from the body once Joko Daishi was in the morgue. Not that it mattered. She wasn’t about to start prodding a pulped, mangled man in hopes of finding the shard. No, there was only one way to end this painlessly.

Pity and resentment came to blows in her mind. She hated destiny, and she hated the fact that it wouldn’t be destiny that killed Joko Daishi. It would be Mariko. She wouldn’t even be able to assuage her guilt by saying fate guided her hand. This was a deliberate, willful, fully conscious choice, and the worst part was that Mariko already knew what it was going to be. Apparently fate did too.

“Goddamn you,” she said. “I don’t want to do this.”

She said it in English, not intending to. Now she couldn’t tell if she meant to say it to herself or to Joko Daishi.

Maybe he deserved his pain. Maybe he deserved hours and hours of it. He’d certainly caused enough pain. But for Mariko that was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that an old woman had suffered enough. Shoji would spend the rest of her life grieving over what her son had done and what she might have done to prevent it. If Mariko could ease her burden even a little, then that was what she ought to do.

She set down the phone. Even that sickened her, deliberately positioning it so she could see what she was doing. Her sensei’s sword had never been so heavy in her hands. She lined up the cut. Joko Daishi closed his eyes.

Mariko raised the sword and let it fall. She wasn’t sure she could ever pick it up again.

54

H
an came for her just before she reached the platform. Paramedics hadn’t arrived yet, or else his right arm would have been in a sling. There was no way his rotator cuff could have survived being dragged by the train. Not having a sling, he just carried his right arm in his left. He had a nasty limp too. In fact, the whole right side of his body must have been bruised to hell. He didn’t need a sling; he needed a stretcher, a neck brace, a backboard, and a quick route to the nearest emergency room. But he came for Mariko instead.

She watched him grit his teeth and groan as he lowered himself down to the tracks. He was backlit by the red taillights of the train, which stood parked and empty at the platform. Behind him, all the passengers were being directed up the stairs. The whole station was a crime scene now. None of them could see Mariko—the red light didn’t penetrate that far into the dark tunnel—and she waited until they were gone.

“Mariko!” Han doubled his pace as soon as he saw her, though it obviously hurt like hell to do it. “I called for them to stop all the trains. I called them as soon as you went in the tunnel. I swear—”

“It’s okay.”

“I called them. I swear I did. I said stop every train, there’s an officer on the tracks. Then I heard that damn thing coming, then I saw it—”

“I’m all right. I wasn’t hit.”

She wanted to hug him, but he was beat to hell and couldn’t use
either arm. She settled for squeezing his good shoulder. She was so happy to see him that she almost cried. Only now did she fully understand how close she’d come to dying. Fear was strange that way, catching up only after the danger had passed. The fight with Joko Daishi had terrified her, but it wasn’t until she saw Han that she understood everything she could have lost.

“What happened?” he said.

“He . . .” Mariko swallowed. “He hit the train. And then I did something I shouldn’t have done.”

Han studied her closely, trying to make sense of the tears welling in her eyes. Then he saw the thin trickle of blood oozing down the length of Glorious Victory Unsought. “Oh,” he said.

Mariko just nodded. She tried to speak but nothing came out.

Han nodded back. He tucked his left lapel into his right hand, which couldn’t do much other than grab onto whatever he put in it. Now that it had a good hold, his right arm could serve as its own sling. With his left hand he ripped off the tattered remains of his torn pants pocket, then reached up and cleaned the blood from Glorious Victory Unsought. He did it carefully and thoroughly. Then, rather than tossing the bloody rag aside for evidence techs to find, he stuffed it in his remaining pocket. “It’ll be all right,” he said.

“Han, I can’t ask you to—”

“You didn’t ask me for anything. You didn’t do anything you shouldn’t have done. And we don’t have to talk about this now. Let’s get you home.”

55

A
week passed and life settled into what could only be called the new normal. The most mundane tasks were a part of Mariko’s life again. This included checking her e-mail, which for her ranked on par with shaving her legs: pointless, time-consuming, never the way she’d prefer to be spending her morning, but necessary because it was just what people expected you to do. This week the chore was much larger than usual. Her in-box had all the usual garbage—officer safety bulletins, policy reminders, a retirement announcement, the day’s menu from the commissary—plus seventy-five messages from individuals in the department, most of whom she’d never met, all offering congratulations.

From this she gathered that word had got out about the commendation she was to receive. The Medal of Honor was the highest award the department had to offer. The thought of it made her sick to her stomach.

Getting praise at work had never been easy for her, in either sense of easy: it was tough to come by, since most of her superiors thought of her not as a cop but as a lady cop, and it was tough to accept, because thanks to her weird self-esteem issues, she found compliments to be a form of embarrassment. She had always been her own worst critic. In this case it was especially hard to accept the accolades because she knew what she’d done to achieve them. She got into bed with the enemy. She broke the law. And now she was a rock star.

Just by virtue of taking place in public, the shootout in Kikuchi Park was automatically on YouTube. A couple of videos showed Mariko hauling ass on her commandeered motorcycle. Inevitably, her sister, Saori, found all of them and sent links to everyone she knew. But the clip that went viral was a ten-second snippet that some brainless little prick at Japan Railways pirated from their security feed. His title:
COP OUTRUNS SPEEDING TRAIN AND CHOPS IMPOSSIBLY SMALL CHAIN IN HALF WITH GIANT SAMURAI SWORD
.

Mariko objected on numerous counts. She didn’t outrun the train, she’d only caught up to it. And it wasn’t speeding either; at best it was speeding up. She had to concede the point about the five-centimeter chain and the
odachi
, but it would have been nice of the guy to call the TMPD and ask for her permission before royally fucking up any chance she’d ever have at working undercover again. That stupid video collected eighty thousand hits on its first day.

After that, Mariko could hardly blame Saori for pinning it to the top of her Facebook page. She begged Saori to change her status, and Saori complied, though not in the way Mariko had hoped. She deleted “My sister is a superhero!” as requested, only to replace it with “My sister is a Jedi Knight!”

Mariko wasn’t in the mood for high fives, though she had to admit she’d played a big part in a big win. Of 1,290 kidnapped children, 1,284 were returned safely to their homes. Six died in their sleep, the result of an overdose of whatever Joko Daishi concocted to put them under. It was a common risk with anesthesia of any kind, which was why people had to go to school for anesthesiology in the first place. The most callous news analysts said six out of thirteen hundred was statistically quite good; the number could have been much worse.

That was no consolation to the six grieving families. In fact it added insult to injury, because while they were left with their pain, the rest of the country actually felt relieved. In any other year, a serial killer overdosing six children would be too horrific for words. The bereft families would find an outpouring of sympathy on a national
level. But in the wake of Joko Daishi, popular consensus could actually make sense of the grotesque phrase “
only
six dead children.”

Tokyo’s Purging Fire, the international media were calling it. Mariko despised them for giving Joko Daishi that much credit, using his term instead of coining one of their own. But these were the same unthinking drones who used the phrase “ethnic cleansing” instead of “genocide,” blithely ignorant of the implied premise that some ethnicities
were
dirty, or else they could not be “cleansed.”

A hundred and twelve dead at Haneda, four in the intentional head-on collisions, twenty-four poisoned at St. Luke’s, a child and a kidnapper dead in a car crash, six more children killed by overdose. SWAT and HRT shot and killed seven cultists in the course of freeing the children held in Terminal 2—perfect justice, some said, for the seven kidnapped kids who never made it back home. Four more cultists died in Kikuchi Park, along with one of the Bulldog’s enforcers, who took a bullet through the liver and died in surgery. A hundred and sixty all told, with three times that many injured. Koji Makoto was consciously left out of the count. Captain Kusama, in his final public address, said the TMPD would not sully the names of the other victims by including Joko Daishi among their number.

Kusama had almost everything he needed to keep his job. He was well connected, graceful under pressure, and demonstrated a unique capacity for turning ugly truths into flattering semitruths. Striking preemptively, he made Mariko’s demotion and suspension public knowledge, but claimed the department had never lost faith in her. He said she had unique knowledge of the Divine Wind, which was true. He said that if she was to accept a special assignment to investigate the cult, she couldn’t afford the distraction of having other officers report to her—also true, though of course he neglected to point out that there was no such assignment. He also failed to mention that he’d formally barred her from the Haneda investigation. On the other hand, he did highlight her central role in the rescue of the three hundred and sixty-five children in the Shinagawa rail yard. This got Han off the hook for his seemingly miraculous “anonymous tips,” and it
absolved Mariko of everything she did while under suspension. She would even be restored to her previous rank. The only cost was that Kusama got to take credit by proxy for everything she’d accomplished.

Yes, Kusama was as slippery as an eel. He even managed to pass off the Jemaah Islamiyah fiasco as a deliberate misinformation campaign, intended to offend Joko Daishi and coax him out of hiding. The only thing he couldn’t overcome was Japanese culture itself. When an organization failed, someone at the head of that organization was expected to fall on his sword. Not so long ago, that was the literal truth. Even today, the top-ranked sumo referees carried a
tanto
in the ring, the knife traditionally used for seppuku. It symbolized their willingness to commit suicide if they should ever make a bad call. No one expected seppuku of them anymore, but they were expected to commit professional suicide: if one of their calls was ever overturned, they had to tender their resignation immediately. Police work was no different. The TMPD had failed Tokyo. A hundred and sixty people were dead because of it. A prominent leader had to take a fall, and no one had cultivated a more prominent profile than Captain Kusama.

This was the new normal. Captains fell and disgraced detectives got their sergeant’s tags back. Mariko was to be decorated for honor too. Hence the seventy-five e-mails. She ignored them. Sooner or later she’d have to write a blanket reply, but she wasn’t up to it at the moment. Instead, she sent a short message to Lieutenant Sakakibara, asking him to delay the medal ceremony another week. She claimed she wanted her bruises to heal before everyone took photos.

*   *   *

Another week passed and she sent another e-mail. Terribly sorry, she said, but I forgot all about my class A’s.

It was sort of true. She hadn’t exactly
forgotten
her dress uniform; it was the most expensive clothing she’d ever owned, and she’d shredded it beyond repair during the relief effort at Terminal 2. That wasn’t a hit her bank account could simply forget. She also hadn’t forgotten
that regulations prescribed class A’s for all ceremonial proceedings. What she did forget—willfully—was to place an order for new class A’s, which was another way of putting off that commendation for one more week.

*   *   *

Six days later she was standing in front of Sakakibara’s desk. “Sir,” she said, “I lost a fistful of hair in that fight. I mean literally a fistful. Look.” She took off the baseball cap she was wearing and bowed her head down so he could see the huge scab in her hairline. “He practically scalped me. Give me a month to grow it out. Otherwise it’ll look like the TMPD hires chimps to do its haircuts.”

Sakakibara frowned. “Seriously, Frodo? Bad hair day? That’s a pretty girly move. Not really your style.”