“And then tries to take my head off with it. Thanks for reminding me.”
Han winced. “Sorry. But here’s my point: look at the timeline. Tuesday morning: Joko Daishi makes bail and reclaims his mask. Tuesday afternoon: he commits the worst act of terrorism this city has ever seen. Wednesday morning: you’ve got his mask flying at your head because some whack-job ninja chick is trying to beat your brains out with it.”
“Huh.” Mariko was a little ashamed she hadn’t thought of it that way before. “So either she found him within hours of the bombing—”
“Or else she had already insinuated herself next to him and she was just waiting for the right time.”
“Or for the right orders. Han, I don’t think she’s operating alone.”
Han blinked and shook his head as if a tiny flash-bang grenade just went off in his brain. He sat back in his chair and considered the implications of what Mariko had said. Mariko did the same. She hadn’t consciously recognized the idea until she blurted it out. Now she had to wonder: if her assailant was being handled all along, who was the handler? Not Joko Daishi, to be sure. The mask held holy power for him; he wouldn’t give it up easily.
That meant someone stole it from him. That was a staggering thought. His Divine Wind cult had operated invisibly for years. They’d carried out murders, sold huge quantities of narcotics, amassed precursor chemicals to make bombs and drugs, all under the radar. In fact, the first time they’d drawn any attention from law enforcement, it was by wheeling fifty kilos of high explosives into the Tokyo subway system—a disaster Mariko managed to avert by a few tenths of a second. Yet this woman in white had not only found this invisible cult, but she’d stolen its holiest relic. How?
“All right,” Han said. “What if we assume it takes a ninja to find a ninja?”
Mariko rolled her eyes. “Should I just go buy you some ninja action figures? Would that make you happy?”
“No, seriously. Hear me out. One: Joko Daishi was a ghost to us, but your friend the mask-swinger found him, like, instantaneously.” He counted off each point on his fingers. “Two: she’s got higher-ups, people who can put her just where she needs to be. Three: in the notebooks, the old man refers to both—”
“He has a name, you know.”
“Sorry. Professor Yamada. He doesn’t always refer to the Divine Wind. Sometimes he just says the Wind.”
Mariko remembered that. Before she’d ever met Joko Daishi, she had read Yamada-sensei’s musings about the Wind and the Divine Wind. Mariko had been operating under the assumption that they were two names for one syndicate. If that syndicate was over five hundred years old, as Yamada surmised, it wouldn’t be so strange to adopt a name change now and then.
But now Mariko questioned that assumption. She’d seen no evidence whatsoever of a second shadow group in Tokyo, but clearly someone was interfering with the Divine Wind’s plans. Someone had put the mask in Mariko’s hands—not Han’s, not Sakakibara’s, but hers alone. Why?
“Okay,” she said, “let’s say the Wind and the Divine Wind are separate organizations—”
“Separate ninja clans.”
“Whatever. Suppose the Wind is fighting the Divine Wind. What’s their end game? Why send the woman in white after me?”
Han threw up his hands. “That’s the part I don’t get. If she was supposed to kill you, she sure did a lousy job of it.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You know what I mean. Of all the murder weapons she could have picked, a metal mask in a shoulder bag? Seriously?”
“Okay, good point.”
Han looked pensively at the ceiling and scratched his cheek where his big, curly sideburn used to be. “Okay, let’s rule out the possibility that this was an attempted homicide. What else would give her motive to jump you?”
“If I knew that, we’d have solved this a long time ago.” She watched a pair of pigeons swoop in for a landing right in the middle of the Blind Spot. It would have been convenient for the woman in white to make an appearance just as suddenly. Mariko had plenty of questions for her.
Han followed her gaze. “What do you think is over there?” he asked. “In the Blind Spot? What’s being hidden?”
“My best guess? A doorway, maybe to a safe house or something. Or maybe it’s a dead drop. Or some way to leave secret messages in public, something no one would figure out if they