hoped Endo was alive. If he was, he’d do everything possible to take the mask to Joko Daishi, and Mariko and Han would follow him. If he was dead, then the odds against Mariko were long. She’d need someone else to follow back to Joko Daishi, which meant the Divine Wind would have to win the gunfight outside. That wasn’t likely; the Bulldog was a savage fighter. If the Kamaguchis won the battle, then Joko Daishi wouldn’t be so stupid as to walk up and demand the mask. He’d abandon the plan and come back for it some other time—after killing hundreds of innocent children.
In all likelihood, Endo was dead, splattered on the sidewalk just out of view. His brothers and sisters in the Divine Wind still sent stray bullets into the pool hall. Mariko risked a peek and saw the Bulldog drop behind the Land Rover to slam a new clip into his Kalashnikov. The man was clearly in his element. He even took a moment to pull a cigar from his jacket pocket. As he lit it, he accidentally made eye contact with Mariko. Seeing her made him do a double take. “Hey, sorry,” he shouted. “Didn’t know you were in there.”
Mariko was too stunned for words. In her vocabulary, “sorry” didn’t offset pumping forty or fifty rounds in someone’s direction. But she got lucky; someone else in her profession decided on an appropriate response. “Throw down your weapons,” blared the megaphone, and Mariko heard tires squealing to a stop. A police cruiser. It had to be.
Then came a second set of braking tires, and a second voice shouting commands over a loudspeaker. Mariko heard a helicopter too, low and coming lower. Now sirens rang out on all sides of the park. The cultists were effectively caged. The cavalry had come. It wasn’t SWAT; they must have been tied up elsewhere. This was general patrol. Tokyo’s police had never been stretched thinner, yet somehow they’d still managed to respond in minutes. They made Mariko proud to be a cop.
Even as she felt that swell of pride, everything went to hell.
Yakuzas had the good sense not to shoot at cops. There was no money in it. But cultists didn’t care about money. They didn’t care about good sense, either. One of them popped a round at a squad car. It was a terrible mistake.
The cops in the squad shot back, just as they were trained to do. The cultists returned fire. Every other cop on scene took aim and fired on the cultists, just as they were trained to do. Some hit; most missed. One of those misses punched right through two doors of the Land Rover and hit the Bulldog in the hip.
Once the Kamaguchi guns lit up, it was a free-for-all. The Bulldog was shouting at his own guys to calm the fuck down, but it was hard to hear him over the sound of gunfire and a raging testosterone rush. Then, as if he’d been waiting all along just for this cue, Endo Naomoto reappeared.
After the initial fusillade, Han and Mariko had taken shelter under their pool table, behind one of its broad, wall-like legs. Endo had been hiding behind the other leg the whole time. Now he dashed past Mariko, grabbed the bags holding the mask and the sword, and ran for the shot-out windows.
“Stop! Police!” Han shouted. Endo didn’t stop. Han took aim and put a round in his hamstring.
Endo crumpled, tumbling out of the pool hall and onto the sidewalk. The Bulldog heard Han’s shot and came around with the AK-47. Mariko yelled for him not to shoot—too late. As Endo limped to his feet, the Bulldog pulled the trigger.
The round took Endo through the lung. It should have drilled straight through him, killing Mariko next, but it must have taken a funny bounce off a rib, because it winged off in a random direction instead. Endo fell to his knees. In his right fist he held the mask and the sword as if they were trophies—as if by holding them high he could show defiance to his tormentors. His whole body quivered with the effort.
No one noticed the motorcycle until it was too late.
Joko Daishi shot past, a deafening blur of white and yellow. Then he was gone, and so were the sword and mask. Endo must have held on a little too tightly, because the handoff whipped him around hard, slamming him to the sidewalk. The bike’s high-pitched whine filled the