extraordinarily high, they were paid directly from an online checking account, and the bank of record had no idea who held the account. When Mariko tried the same trick with the Internet service, she found more or less the same thing: a big empty hole where its electronic footprint was supposed to be. The place had the bandwidth and computing power of the whole TMPD, yet somehow it was entirely off the books.
The worst part was that she’d done all of that legwork fully expecting it to fail. These people had created a blind spot in a citywide surveillance system; they weren’t going to pay their electric bill by personal check. She’d dug up all the leads she could find, and she’d followed them as far as they would go. Every last one of them fizzled out.
Fifty-one minutes to do something meaningful, when the last five days hadn’t been enough to make a single step forward.
“Fuck it,” she said, and she opened her departmental e-mail one last time.
To Whom It May Concern:
If you found this message, then you are who I think you are. I know it was you who gave me the iron demon mask. I know it was you who tracked me tracking you. Your printout was a cute trick, but I don’t believe you left it there in order to scare me off. I think you left it to tell me that you know I’m onto you. I hear your message loud and clear: you’ll let me find you, but only on your own terms.
Now hear my message: I don’t care about your terms. If you want to talk to me, you know where I live. Ring the doorbell. I’m not playing your stupid game anymore.
She saved the message in her Drafts folder without specifying a sender. Then she closed everything down and went to the pistol range. Forty-nine minutes. Plenty of time to unload a bunch of rounds and pretend the target was Captain Kusama’s pretty office furniture.
22
Mariko didn’t have to wait long for someone to ring her doorbell.
After the pistol range she went straight to the dojo, where Hosokawa-sensei begrudgingly admitted her into the morning class, which wasn’t a part of her monthly membership and which she hadn’t registered for in advance. He routinely allowed male students to drop in like this, but he was of the old-school belief that women had no place in kenjutsu. He didn’t understand why Mariko, already twenty-seven years old, wasn’t at home minding her children. A woman who was more interested in martial arts than marital arts made no more sense to him than a fish riding a bicycle.
Mariko was well aware of his views. He’d acquired them during the war years and showed no sign of surrendering them. On her first day he tried to persuade her to give up. On her second day he explained that the woman’s weapon was the naginata, and that Tokyo was home to several excellent naginata dojos. But when Mariko proved too stubborn to quit, Hosokawa-sensei had no choice but to capitulate. He and Mariko had a sensei in common: Yamada Yasuo. Hosokawa was one of Yamada-sensei’s first students and Mariko was his last. The fact that Yamada had spent his final days with Mariko, not with his more established students, made her important in a way that Hosokawa’s seventh-degree black belt could not trump.
So Hosokawa-sensei had to put up with her, and if he wanted to persist in his bullheaded attempt to drum her out, Mariko would show him the meaning of bullheadedness. On this particular morning she needed someone to put her through her paces. She knew he’d work her twice as hard as everyone else, hoping she’d quit the art out of sheer physical misery. Today that was just what she needed.
By the end of class she felt her arms might fall out of their sockets. But at least her head was clear. All the nervous energy Captain Kusama had worked up in her was utterly spent. The only downside was that her fingers barely had the strength to button her blouse.
Her phone rumbled in her pocket. Fishing it out, she was surprised to see the caller ID said OSHIRO MARIKO.
“Huh,” she said. She couldn’t remember bumping the phone, and she didn’t even know it was possible to call herself. She idly wondered which button she’d hit, then hung up on herself.
The phone buzzed again almost instantly. ANSWER YOUR PHONE, said the caller ID.