“Quite right. Financial transactions in this case. Can you imagine what the ninja of old must think of our targets today? The poor fools save every aspect of their lives in digital form. Voluntarily.” Furukawa let out a laugh and slapped his belly, a masculine gesture for such a feminine hand. “It’s like leading lambs to the slaughter, but these lambs operate their own slaughterhouse.”
Mariko wasn’t laughing. “That’s what we are to you? Livestock?”
“Oh, do have a sense of humor, Detective.”
She gave him a paper-thin smile. Furukawa put her ill at ease, but she hadn’t quite figured out why. She also hadn’t put her finger on why he seemed familiar to her. He was almost like a bunraku puppet: human enough, but existing in the uncanny valley where the more lifelike the puppet was, the more unsettling it became. But if he reminded her of someone, who was it?
Since she couldn’t put her finger on it, she had no choice but to set it aside and let it percolate through her mind. Mariko crossed the room, swiped up the TV remote, and zapped the anchorman into oblivion. The Takanuki story had rubbed her raw. “Okay,” Mariko said, “let’s say I believe you. You belong to the Wind, and the Wind has puppet strings everywhere. Neh?”
Furukawa nodded. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”
“Then what do you need me for?”
“That is the question of the hour, isn’t it?” He took his hand away from the table, focusing entirely on Mariko. “We believe you are the one who can put an end to this reign of terror. Koji-san’s ambitions have grown far too grand for our liking. As a cult leader he was no trouble, but now? Now things are different.”
“So let me at him. Tell me where he is. If I get the credit for arresting him, maybe I can get myself off Kusama’s shit list.”
“Would that I could,” Furukawa said. “There was a time when we might do just that, but no longer. Koji-san is too good at staying hidden.”
“Hidden? From the guy who can pick up the phone and end the career of any politician he wants? I don’t think so.”
Furukawa could not respond. He looked like a man at a funeral, not sad but drained. Empty. He picked up the black eight ball, tested its weight in his willowy fingers, and sent it on a collision course with its kin. Balls clicked and clacked, rolling in every direction. Not one of them found a pocket. Mariko got the distinct sense that Furukawa felt like one of those billiard balls: powerless, ruled only by the heartless forces of inevitability.
She had seen that same fatalistic detachment before. Not often, but she’d seen it. The first time was with Yamada-sensei, who had first opened Mariko’s mind to the possibility that fate was something other than defeatist thinking. The second was Shoji Hayano, a blind woman and Yamada’s friend of over sixty years. She was a goze, a seer, exactly the sort of thing Mariko never would have believed in until she saw it herself. But she had seen it. Shoji foretold Mariko’s encounter with Fuchida. She even foretold Mariko’s death, and did nothing to stop it. She’d given up trying to defy fate.
The third person was Joko Daishi. He had spoken of his heavenly calling with the same overtones of inevitability. He believed in the supernatural too. And, come to think of it, he was the first person who had ever spoken to Mariko of the Wind. Born of the Wind, yet not of the Wind. That was how he described his Divine Wind cult. At the time she had no idea what to make of that. Now Furukawa had given her a little more to work with.
“Joko Daishi was one of yours, wasn’t he? A genin of the Wind?”
“At first, yes. He rose to become chunin, like me. Middle management.”
“The Wind trained him?”
“I am ashamed to admit we did.”
Mariko jerked the Glock from her waistband. “Then as far as I’m concerned, the Wind sent four drivers straight into oncoming traffic. You killed four and injured twenty.”
She racked the slide and put her front sight right on Furukawa’s breastbone. The suddenness of her anger surprised her; she found herself blinking back tears. “You killed twenty-three more with ricin at St. Luke’s International,” she said. “You killed a hundred and twelve at Haneda, and you damn near killed me too.”