Furukawa fiddled with the remote, powering up the room’s top-of-the-line surround-sound system. Opulence upon opulence, Mariko thought.
“Oh, look at this,” Furukawa said. “The Hyatt does like its toys.” He pressed another button and with a whoosh the fireplace sprang to life too.
“Actually, that’s pretty cool.”
“Isn’t it? Ah, here we go.”
He got the sound system synched with the television, which was tuned to JNN, one of the all-news channels that Mariko never bothered to watch. She wasn’t alone; many detectives found the daily news too depressing. At work they stood eye-to-eye with the worst aspects of human nature; for them the purpose of watching TV was to wind down, not to take a closer look at just how awful people could be.
Sure enough, the anchorman was just wrapping up a story on yet another sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. He turned to face a different camera and the image behind him changed. An annotated bar graph vanished in a flash of computer-generated lens flare, replaced by a close-up of a well-dressed man wearing a scowl. Mariko recognized him.
“How much is enough?” the anchorman asked. “That is the question for Councillor Takanuki Hayato. JNN has breaking news on a campaign finance scandal that may have netted Takanuki as much as ten million yen in the last year alone.”
Mariko’s heart stopped. She couldn’t have been more surprised if the anchorman had stepped out of the TV screen and walked into the room. Furukawa, on the other hand, only had eyes for Mariko. For her part, Mariko belatedly noticed that she was gaping at the television with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare. It shamed her to be caught like that, with no more than a gaijin’s control over her facial expressions.
“How did you—?”
“You asked for proof of the Wind’s existence. Now you have it.”
Mariko shook her head. “That’s the why. I’m interested in how.”
“Quite simple. We were the ones to teach him how to siphon the money without being caught.”
He said it as if anyone could do it. Mariko gaped at him—again, to her embarrassment—but Furukawa just ambled toward the pool table. With one hand he held his whisky. With the other he lifted the triangular rack from the pool balls and set it aside. An idle swipe with his long pianist’s fingers sent one of the balls rolling lazily across the table.
“No.” Mariko could not make herself believe it. “Even if that were true, you . . . no, it’s impossible. You make a phone call and thirty seconds later it’s on the news? How?”
“I suspect you can answer that yourself.”
Mariko looked at the phone, then the anchorman, then the phone again. “You have someone in JNN. Like, right there in the studio, right this minute.”
Furukawa nodded. “Go on.”
“It’s got to be, what, an executive producer? Someone like that, anyway. Someone who has the power to . . .” The thought went careening through her brain, setting off sparks of other ideas. “It’s not one producer, is it? You have someone in there twenty-four hours a day. And it’s not just JNN. You could have done this through the papers, the nightly news. . . .”
“I could have, if I thought you could wait a few hours to see your evidence. Patience isn’t your strong suit, though, is it?”
Mariko scarcely heard him. “Wait. What if I’d said someone other than Takanuki? You can’t have dirt on everyone.”
Furukawa sipped his whisky. “Not everyone. Just everyone that matters.”
“Come on. You can’t tell me every single person takes the bait when you offer them a payoff.”
“Oh, no. But they don’t need to. In the court of public opinion, guilt by association carries a death sentence.” He ran his fingertips over the pool balls, scattering them. “We never act to achieve only one goal, Detective. It’s much like billiards. It’s not enough to sink your shot; you must always set up the next shot. You required me to expend Takanuki to prove a point. He was a ball that can only be sunk once, so now we will choose who will fall with him.”
“How?”
Furukawa gave her a devilish grin. “Once you prove a man is corrupt, all of his closest allies are subject to scrutiny. Their alliance need not even be real; in a matter of minutes we can fabricate a relationship of many, many years. Oh, is it a wonderful thing to be in the espionage business these days. Your targets always set themselves up for a fall.”