“Terminal 2?” Furukawa sounded alarmed. “You don’t mean Haneda?”
“No, McDonald’s. Of course I mean Haneda. He’s using the airport bombing as a smoke screen to hide the kidnapping.”
“Oh, very good. Bravo.”
Mariko rolled her eyes. “You’re disgusting. Look, I have things to do. Figure out what to do about Terminal 2. Whatever you do, only use people you trust; as soon as Joko Daishi finds out we’re onto him, he’ll start killing kids.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be very careful.”
“You better. One more thing: usually this would go without saying, but with you . . . look, try to solve this without murdering everyone, okay?”
“As you like, Detective Oshiro.”
He said it as if she’d asked him for extra sprinkles on her ice cream sundae. Mariko shook her head, sighed in exasperation, and hung up. Then she put the BMW in gear and doubled back toward Shinagawa Station.
She called Han along the way. “Hey,” she said, “you find them?”
“Three hundred and sixty-five of them,” said Han.
“Jesus.” Did Joko Daishi plan to kill one a day for an entire year? Or set one free every day? Or did he just want everyone to leap to wild conclusions, and to be perpetually terrified of what would come next? Mariko supposed it didn’t matter. These kids were safe; the Divine Wind wasn’t getting them back. But that still left over nine hundred children unaccounted for. With luck, they’d all be in one place at the south end of Terminal 2. But so far all the luck was blowing Joko Daishi’s way.
“How soon can you get out of there?” Mariko asked.
“Right now, I guess. Why?”
“Come out to the sidewalk. I’m picking you up.” Her engine roared as she gunned it through a yellow light.
“Mariko, tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ll explain everything on the way. How long do you think SWAT’s going to be tied up with those kids?”
Han thought about it for a second. “The area’s pretty well clear. We should leave a couple of guys to watch the train car. Everyone else . . . I don’t know, fifteen minutes?”
“Too long. We’ll have to call another team.” She downshifted and punched it around a big, slow newspaper truck. “You came in that SWAT van, not a cruiser, neh?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Damn. My car doesn’t have lights or a siren. We’d get there faster if we could run code the whole way.”
“What? Since when do you have a car?”
Just ahead, she saw Han jogging out from the access road to the rail yard. Mariko jammed on the brakes and the BMW skidded to a stop in front of him. “Holy shit, Mariko, where’d you get this?”
“Long story.”
He ran around to the opposite side and jumped in. “Nice wheels.”
“Thanks.”
Mariko peeled out into traffic. Han grabbed the door for stability, then hurriedly snapped his seat belt shut. “Okay,” he said, “you mind telling me what the hell is going on?”
“We’re going to a pool hall over by Kikuchi Park. You need to make some calls and get a SWAT presence over there, because the Kamaguchi-gumi is sending a bunch of guys with guns.”
“What? Why?” Han shook his head as if trying to shake off a knockout punch. “Mariko, I know you think we’re on our usual wavelength, but I have to tell you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sorry. Here’s the deal. Joko Daishi still has his eye on his demon mask. I’m going to put it right out where he can reach it, and I’m going to hope his obsession with the mask overrules his desire to kill hundreds of innocent children. I think this is going to be our best shot at him.”
“Hell yeah. Nice work.”
Mariko punched it through another yellow light. Then she looked at the speedometer, realized a hundred kilometers an hour was double the posted limit, and released the accelerator. “The thing is, there’s a little bit of a hitch,” she said. “I wasn’t totally sure I’d be able to get enough cops on scene to catch Joko Daishi.”
“Uh-oh. What did you do?”
Mariko winced guiltily. “I may have called the Bulldog. And I might have told him the cult leader who stole his mask is going to be at Kikuchi Billiards.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. So basically, the mask is the cheese in the mousetrap. The Kamaguchi-gumi is the mousetrap. And you and I are the great big human hand that’s going to try to grab the mouse before the mousetrap kills him.”
Han nodded reluctantly. “Major style points for the analogy, but this is