“I warn you, Detective Oshiro, his martial training is considerable. You must not face him unarmed.”
“I’ll take my chances. Good-bye, Furukawa-san.”
She finished getting dressed and headed downstairs, where she found Shoji-san in the kitchen over a little pot of rice. “Some breakfast before you go, dear.”
“I can’t,” Mariko said. “I’ve really got to run. Um . . . listen, I’ve got to ask. Do you know where I can find your son?”
Shoji deflated a little. “No.”
“I promise I won’t hurt him. Furukawa wants me to. He says I’m supposed to kill him. With Yamada-sensei’s sword, no less. So here’s the deal: I’m not going back to my apartment. I won’t even set foot in the same room as the sword. And I’m going to give you the gun that Furukawa left for me on your porch. I swear to you, Shoji-san, I’m not going to do their dirty work for them. I’m not going to hurt your son.”
Shoji’s unseeing eyes gazed blankly at the steam rising off the rice. “I know.”
“I can’t say they won’t. But I promise you this: I will do my best to see your son brought to justice. He’s going to have a judge, a jury, and a defense attorney. From there, I have to tell you I hope he spends the rest of his life in prison. But he’s not going to be executed by some assassin. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“I know, Mariko-san. I don’t want to tell you. . . .” Shoji cleared her throat and blinked back tears. The way her eye scars bent at the corners made her seem sadder. “My child or all the others. For my whole life I’ve chosen mine. Today . . . Mariko, don’t go after him. I see him wearing the mask. You have the sword in hand. He can see it coming. Do you understand, Mariko? He has seen his death coming. He sees it as a bright light, as bright as the sun. You’ll try to ambush him. You’ll fail.”
“Am I going to . . . ?”
Mariko couldn’t bring herself to finish the question. It was better not to know. If she got the wrong answer, she might have trouble seeing this through.
“I’ve got to go, Shoji-san.” Mariko hurried for the door.
41
By ten o’clock the numbers were in. 1,304 public elementary schools in the Tokyo school system; 1,290 kids taken; thirteen botched attempts; two fatalities after one of the kidnappers got himself killed along with his abductee in a stupid, preventable car crash; zero sightings of Joko Daishi, the Divine Wind, or the kidnapped children; nineteen attempts on Mariko’s part to get something useful out of a contact or confidential informant, with zero results to show for it.
Every school was locked down, not just in Tokyo but Chiba, Yokohama, Saitama—every major city in the region. Not just the grade schools, either; all of them, public and private, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. There weren’t enough police to cordon every school—not even close—so principals and teachers were left to fend for themselves. The advice they were getting from the National Police Agency was to lock down the campus completely. The NPA needed head counts from every classroom, and the counts had to be pristine. Well-meaning parents were being arrested for trying to take their kids home. The arresting officers had no choice; there was no way to tell between an earnest mother and a cultist of the Divine Wind.
Tokyo was crippled. Its hospitals were plague zones, its roadways were death traps, its airports and train stations were targets. If there was a positive side for Mariko, it was that getting around town had never been easier. Traffic was light, and though the sky was swarming with police choppers, they were hunting for kids, not speeding drivers. Mariko didn’t own a car, but Furukawa had left the white BMW parked outside Shoji’s house, with the keys in the same box as the pistol, badge, and ID. As promised, Mariko left the gun in Shoji’s foyer, unloaded and safetied. She kept the false badge, knowing it could get her in trouble but predicting greater trouble if she went without it. It hadn’t done her much good thus far; none of her contacts had asked to see it, and even if they had, none of them knew anything.
Most of the kids hadn’t been yanked screaming off the streets. That much was clear. There were