nightgown and her face was streaked with tears. Mariko had never seen her eyes before—had never seen her without her big black sunglasses, in fact—and was surprised by the scars she saw there. She knew Shoji had lost her sight as a child, and she knew Shoji was a little girl during the war, but somehow it had never occurred to Mariko that Shoji might have been blinded by violence.
“Are you okay, Shoji-san?”
Shoji shook her head mutely and pointed at the radio.
“—confirms thirteen kidnapped from Sumida ward elementary schools,” the news anchor was saying. “That’s thirteen from thirteen different schools. We’re told all of them are from the first grade—”
Mariko sank to the floor. She felt like she’d been punched out cold. The radio kept going, but she hardly heard it. “Thirteen oh four,” she whispered. “Is this the thirteen?”
“It’s worse,” Shoji said. “So much worse.”
Mariko focused on the announcer’s voice. “—one child each from all sixteen schools in Chuo ward, and seventeen more abductees from the nineteen schools in Minato ward. The two remaining Minato schools have not yet confirmed—”
Another knockout punch. Mariko needed him to read the whole list again before she could make sense of it. Finally the awful truth sunk in: one first-grade child from each school in Tokyo. That was the plan. Not dozens of children but hundreds. In fact, even that was an understatement. If the kidnappers wanted a hundred kids, they only needed to hijack a couple of buses at the aquarium. This wasn’t two or three guys with pistols; this was a citywide effort. But most terrifying of all was its surgical precision. Precisely one child per school. If the kidnappers could do that, they could take anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Only Joko Daishi would think to attempt it. His mission was to unsettle people, to rip them out of their comfortable, complacent lives. To him, feeling secure was a spiritual crutch. He intended to kick it away, to show society that it could stand on its own two feet. That was the message in bombing Terminal 2: what you think of as security does not make you secure. Family was another crutch, and now he’d kicked that one out as well. He wasn’t just threatening children; he threatened all hope for the future.
And he was doing a damn good job of it too. The radio anchor’s voice cracked, and a producer somewhere switched over to a station identification before the anchor could break down crying.
“My child or all the others,” Shoji said. “I see it now. This is what it meant—what it was always destined to mean, all those years ago. My child or all the others.” She broke down sobbing.
Mariko couldn’t blame her. Hundreds of kidnappings—1,304 of them, to be precise. That was what the radio would say soon enough, when they finally got a call through to some shell-shocked spokesman from the Ministry of Education. Mariko couldn’t claim to know how many elementary schools there were in Tokyo, but she was sure of the number all the same. Shoji was sure. She’d seen it.
One thousand three hundred and four first graders kidnapped, and every parent in the city more frightened than they’d ever been. Mariko couldn’t even imagine their fear. She could imagine what today would have been like if she hadn’t lost her badge. She’d only hear about one abduction at first—maybe a request from another detective, to run down a plate or something, because a missing kid was more important than Mariko’s pissant buy-bust. Then she’d run across a weird coincidence. Maybe Han would tell her he got pulled onto a kidnapping case too. It would be three or four coincidences before any one person could see a pattern—maybe twenty cases citywide, with more than a hundred cops roped in. Detectives. Patrol response. Air support. Maybe even SWAT, if anyone had a decent lead on a location.
Only then would someone see the horror for what it was. It would be someone up top, someone in a position to start drafting an official statement. Rumors would trickle down cop to cop before the announcement went public. One child per school. The largest mass kidnapping in history. Had Mariko been on duty, she’d have witnessed the story evolve minute by minute, one awful blow at a time. But today—the one time she’d ever slept in on a workday—she woke up to a full-blown terrorist attack.
She could have prevented it. With a single bullet. Or maybe by thinking of something