at the hospital, they’re the same ones who took the kids?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then fuck ’em. I’ll help you bury them.”
“Um . . . can I ask why?”
Another snort into the phone. “I got a girlfriend. Turns out she was pregnant. I didn’t even know. She never told me; she just went to the hospital to have it taken care of. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.”
“She came out of there sick. Like I said, I didn’t even know she went in. Now I get this fucking phone call telling me she didn’t make it. Looks like ricin.”
“Oh.” That brought the ricin death toll to twenty-four. No one would even hear about it, not in the shadow of the largest mass kidnapping in history. “I’m sorry, Kamaguchi-san. That’s horrible.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m going to help you find these cocksuckers, but for a price. I want the ringleader. I’m going to beat him to death with his own fucking mask.”
Mariko had some experience with that. Unconsciously she ran a finger over the line of stitches Norika had left in her scalp. “You know I can’t make that deal.”
“No? Then there’s no deal. Simple as that.”
“Come on, Kamaguchi-san. You’re asking a cop to turn a blind eye to premeditated murder. You have to know that’s not going to fly.”
His nasal breath roared like an airplane engine over his phone’s tiny receiver. “I’m asking a suspended cop. That’s why you’re calling me: because you can’t call your own people. Am I wrong?”
“No.” There was no point in lying. He had his police connections, just as she had hers in the boryokudan.
“Then we play it my way. I been asking around, seeing if my people seen anything you’re looking for. You want to find a place that’ll hold thirteen hundred kids, neh?”
“Or close to it, yeah.”
“I’m thinking somewhere out of the way—somewhere not too many people are going to notice when those kids start screaming.”
“Yes.” Mariko shivered; his cold logic gave her the creeps.
“Last thing: it’s got to be somewhere that no one will look twice if a bunch of vehicles show up out of the blue—say, a bunch of light trucks.”
“You know something. Tell me.”
“You’re going to love this.” Kamaguchi paused as if waiting for a drum roll. “Haneda airport.”
“What?”
“Some pretty cherry contracts went out for the cleanup and reconstruction. I made sure a Kamaguchi company got a couple of them. Heh. We’re going to make a million yen a day out there.”
“How nice for you. Get to the point.”
“Women! Always so damn touchy.” She could almost hear him shaking his head. “All right, here it is: Terminal 2 is huge, neh? Those bombs really only took out the lobby, but they had to shut down the whole terminal. It’ll be months before anyone can fly out of there again. That leaves plenty of places to hide—big, dark places where no one’s got any reason to go. So my foreman down there, he sees a bunch of trucks running in and out of the south end this morning. He doesn’t think anything of it until I ask him, but then he says yeah, he hasn’t seen them before.”
“It’s brilliant.” Mariko just blurted it out. She didn’t want to think it, much less say it, but Joko Daishi was a genius. He’d taken hiding in plain sight to a new level. First he transformed Haneda into an international symbol for terrorism, then he camped out right inside it. But the Bulldog was right: strange vehicles would be running in and out of there for months to come. No one would think twice about them. And since all the reconstruction efforts were centered on the bomb site, no one there had any cause to explore the rest of the terminal.
“South end of Terminal 2,” she said. “You’re positive?”
“Yes, I’m fucking positive. What did I just say?”
“And you say I’m bitchy and temperamental. Chill out, Kamaguchi-san. I’m just doing my job.”
“Then do it. And when you find that cocksucker, you bring him to me. That’s the deal.”
“I’ll do you one better,” Mariko said. “Kikuchi Billiards, across the street from Kikuchi Park. You know the place?”
“What about it?”
“Joko Daishi’s on his way now,” Mariko said, hoping to hell that she could get cops there too. If not, she had just set up a hit. “You head there, you’ll find him.”
“Done,” said the Bulldog.
He hung up. That brought Furukawa back on the line. “Norika’s churches are a dead end,” Mariko said. “The ‘new church’ is in the south