only things left behind had hard surfaces, and judging by the chlorinated smell that got stronger with each step into the room, they’d all been wiped down with bleach. Mariko and Han would find no useful evidence here.
“You wanted your ninja Secret Santa,” Mariko said. “I think this is his workshop.”
“And the ninja elves are all long gone.” He whistled. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”
Mariko just shook her head. What was there to say? This place wasn’t Joko Daishi’s style. She remembered his headquarters all too well. That place was just as sterile as this, but here she saw no place to worship. No private sanctum for the cult leader to fuck his acolytes either.
“Don’t worry,” Han said. “Whoever these people are, they’ll have left trace evidence upstairs. We’ll sweep the carpet, the bathrooms, the whole works. No one can keep track of every hair.”
“They don’t need to. Han, how many guys come to that strip club in a given weekend?”
Han shrugged. “I don’t know. A couple hundred, maybe.”
“See? Down here they leave no trace, while up there they leave too much. You want to send evidence techs into that club and tell them to catalog every last hair? You’ll give them all heart attacks.”
Mariko ambled around aimlessly, lost in her thoughts. Who was the woman in white? Who was pulling her strings? Why did they want Mariko to have the mask? Was it to weaken Joko Daishi, to shatter his deluded belief in his own divine power? Or was it a ploy to draw him into attacking Mariko in order to reclaim the mask?
She had so many questions, and so far only one answer: she knew where the woman in white had gone once she’d disappeared through the secret door upstairs. A sturdy steel fire door on the right-hand wall concealed a ladder that climbed back up to street level. Solving that riddle brought her little solace; she had a hundred other questions she’d like to have answered first.
“Uh, Mariko? You’re going to want to take a look at this.”
She turned to see Han standing like a drunkard barely able to keep his feet. A sheaf of paper sagged in one hand, and he could not have looked more flummoxed if he were holding a dead baby alien.
Dumbfounded, he passed the papers to Mariko—ordinary A4 paper, the same as she’d find in any photocopier in the city. Nothing remarkable there. The first line on the first page didn’t knock her socks off either:
10-09-29 CEST 10:11:11 MX10-1-9-1 000807 UC VM PI
The time stamp was easy enough to understand, but the rest was gibberish. Almost gibberish, anyway. That MX number seemed vaguely familiar, but Mariko couldn’t place it.
Thus, the rest of the page didn’t do her much good. They were all slight variations on the first line. She could see each one had a different string of numbers, each time a little later in the day, but what were they? Stock trades? Print jobs? Train departures? There was no way to tell. Thirty lines per page, all of them useless.
Halfway down the next page, a line break and then a new list of alphanumerics, these dated 10-09-30—September 30, 2010. Thursday. Apart from that difference, Thursday’s gibberish was as unintelligible as Wednesday’s.
“Han, what am I supposed to be reading here?”
“Skip to the end.”
She shrugged and flipped to the last page. The very last line read,
10-10-02 CEST 08:00:00 LOC UNSPEC Meet Watanabe Masayori
Mariko dropped the paper like it was on fire. “What the hell?”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Han.
No one in Narcotics called Han by his real name. In fact, most of the guys didn’t even know his real name. Sakakibara had nicknamed him Han years ago and the name just stuck. Mariko might have been the only one who knew that his nickname before that was Masu, short for Masayori. Watanabe Masayori. Who met her at oh eight hundred hours this morning, October 2, just like it said on the page.
There it was, staring up at her. She picked it up again, and with each line she read, she felt her gut tighten. The penultimate entry: the previous night, twenty-one hundred hours, commence sting operation against Lee Jin Bao. The entry before that: same day, twelve thirty hours, intake Yuki Kisho on suspicion of trafficking. The entry before that: one day earlier, a string of numbers just like the ones that dominated the previous four pages. Except now she remembered why the MX number seemed familiar.