in a huff. Mariko watched him go in shock. Three years. She’d graduated from police academy at the top of her class, and professionally speaking, she’d stayed there. That would never be true again. By the time she could take the sergeant’s exam again, even the most incompetent candidates would have passed her by.
She couldn’t care less about how prestigious the Haneda case would be. Not that Kusama was wrong. If anything, he’d understated the case. Haneda wouldn’t define a career; it would define a generation. Ten years from now, twenty years, fifty, you could ask someone where they were when they heard about Haneda and they’d be able to tell you. It was one of those moments. And Mariko knew who had plotted it. She knew more about him than anyone else in the country, and she couldn’t put that to use.
Sakakibara and Han had reached the same conclusion. Han tried to shrink into himself, to pretend he hadn’t heard, to be anything other than a mirror of Mariko’s shame. Their lieutenant looked like a disappointed father, more disgusted than angry. “I’ve got to hand it to you,” he said. “You got his attention, all right. So congratulations, Frodo. I didn’t think it was possible, but you’re actually more annoying than terrorism.”
6
Mariko borrowed Han’s phone before she left. Lines were tied up all over the city, so it took her nine tries to get through to her mom and her sister. Mariko kept the call short, partly out of respect for all the others who were on their ninth or tenth attempt to complete a call, but mostly because she wasn’t in the mood for conversation. Her demotion had crushed her like a freight train. Just thinking of it made it hard to breathe.
So she checked in, told her family she was all right, and arranged to meet them at her mother’s apartment around lunchtime. Normally the subway could get her there in less than an hour, but Mariko had no way of guessing how many trains would be running on time in the wake of the bombing. The National Police Agency might well have shut down half the city.
But they hadn’t. In fact, even the monorail to Haneda was still up and running; it just stopped at Terminal 1 instead of at the terminus underneath what was now Ground Zero. When Mariko got to the train, she found it was even departing on schedule, which, she was certain, could only have happened in Japan. Only Japan Railways was fastidious enough to guarantee on-time departures even in the wake of a terrorist attack.
The train roared as it barreled through the underground tunnels, then rose out of Tokyo Bay like a Bond villain’s personal monorail. Its single track skimmed over the water on broad concrete trestles, their blocky silhouettes totally at odds with the sleek, streamlined angles of the train cars. The morning sun glittered on the bay, leaving dazzling spots in Mariko’s eyes.
She caught a transfer to Tokyo Station, and almost rode right past it on her way to her mother’s apartment. Then she remembered she was still carrying her service weapon, which she needed to check back in to post. Not for the first time, she envied the cops on all of those American police dramas who could just carry their weapons home with them. It wasn’t that she felt unsafe without a firearm. This was Tokyo, not Detroit; her little stun gun was enough. That said, she felt an overwhelming need to crash on a couch and fall asleep. Stopping in to post was one more obstacle between her and that couch.
Tokyo Station was an anachronism. From the outside it looked like a large Victorian train depot, one that would have been more at home in Trafalgar Square in the 1800s. Surrounded by state-of-the art skyscrapers, the station seemed ill at ease, as if its modern neighbors had invaded its personal space. The grand lobby was also Victorian, capped with an enormous cupola ringed with windows. Their verdigris sashes were set into frames of white, which in turn were set into butter yellow walls and bracketed by arches and relief sculptures and other flourishes Mariko didn’t know the names for. But buried underneath all of this was the most advanced mass transit technology in the world. It was the birthplace of the bullet train, and to this day it remained the hub of the fastest rail network on the planet. An underground mall provided every service a