Disciple of the Wind (14 page)

Oh, yes, she thought, and what fun it would be to lay a double trap! Shichio was clever enough to sense a set-up, and he would never willingly expose himself as bait. But what if he believed he was not bait at all, but rather the trapper? If Nene could place the boy in a vulnerable position, Shichio would pounce on him, and if the boy was forewarned, he could counterstrike before Shichio landed the killing blow.

Now that was a clever notion. A bear trap, but in this case the bear
was
the trap. There was a witty haiku in there somewhere. Nene decided she’d write it after all was said and done.

In the meantime, she’d left herself a dangerous game to play, with a hunted bear and a spiteful cobra as her playmates. In the best of all worlds, the trap would result in a mutual slaying. But the worst case was very bad indeed. If she were caught in league with the boy, Hideyoshi’s wrath would be swift and terrible. Shichio could not be allowed to escape her trap alive. But if she put the Bear Cub in the right position, how could she be certain he would strike true? Could she even trust him to strike at all? There was no telling. She didn’t know his character. And there was only one way to rectify that; she would have to speak with him face-to-face.

She was like her husband that way: a keen judge of character, and loath to rely on hearsay when she could gather her information
firsthand. But before she could arrange a meeting, she needed a plausible pretext for them to cross paths at all. It would not be enough for her to simply tell him she wanted Shichio dead. He would have no reason to believe her—and in fact no reason to believe she was not in league with Shichio. She had to
need
something from him, and then offer Shichio as payment.

But what? She would need some time to think about that. It was time to gather her spies, dozens of whom she’d sent to Izu before ever departing the capital. Nene was not one to act in ignorance; she had long maintained the habit of gathering as much intelligence as possible before making a decision. This evening’s decision required special care. She needed the Bear Cub to believe the two of them were on the same side, and she needed him to believe that he was doing her a service, the payment for which would be Shichio’s head. Only then could she lay the double trap she had in mind.

She mused on the problem over dinner, eating only lightly; her primary duty at table was to nod, smile, and issue the occasional word of praise as the assembled generals told their war stories. What could a rogue
ronin
offer the Lady in the North? The obvious answer was Glorious Victory, but she knew he would never part with it. Nene had never fully understood men’s fascination with their swords, though she supposed a genuine Inazuma was something special. But if not his sword, what could he offer?

A sudden shout from her husband broke her train of thought. “To General Shichio,” Hideyoshi cried, rising drunkenly to his feet. He thrust a
sake
flask at the sky. “The best damned quartermaster anyone could ask for.”

That raised a round of cheers. “And he’ll damn well need to be,” Hideyoshi said. Suddenly he was deadly serious. “These islands are not enough for me, gentlemen. Within the year the whole empire will be mine—and what then? Eh? What then?”

His commanders looked at him, all of them sober-faced, some of them a little scared. Only Shichio knew the answer. “The world!” he shouted.

“The world!” Hideyoshi echoed, laughing maniacally. Up went the
sake
flask, like a sword thrust triumphantly at the moon. “Start learning Chinese, gentlemen, because by this time next year we’ll be marching on the Forbidden City!”

The generals all laughed again, and some started shouting toasts and cheers.
“Banzai! Banzai!”

Banzai
indeed, Nene thought. The word meant “ten thousand years.” She joined in the cheering, thinking, if only he had a hundred years, he could bring the whole world to heel.

In a flash she had the answer to her riddle: Streaming Dawn. If Glorious Victory was real, then why not Streaming Dawn? It too was said to be an Inazuma blade, and it was said to abide in these parts. How many spies had she sent in search of it over the years? Not one of them had so much as laid eyes on the blade. The best they could manage was to tell her it had been seen in Izu—not by one, but by many. Daigoro will have heard of it, she thought. That is what I can ask of him. If he does not believe in the blade, then let him think me naive, and be happy that I am selling Shichio’s lifeblood for so small a price. If he believes, then he will understand why I want it for my honored husband—and by the buddhas, if the legends of Streaming Dawn are
true, then that little
tanto
is far more powerful than the Bear Cub’s great
odachi
.

Let the legends be true, Nene prayed silently, and give my husband his hundred years. Give me a path to the Bear Cub, and cloud his sight enough that he will not see the trap I mean to lay for him.

BOOK THREE

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010
CE
)

11

T
he man known as Sour Plum reached into his black leather jacket and pulled out his cell. He could have drawn the serrated Spyderco combat knife he kept in the same pocket, but as Mariko saw it, the phone was more dangerous than the knife.

She had a bright pink cast on her right forearm, a jagged line of stitches in her scalp, and bruises covering half of her face. The two bodyguards flanking her would make her look a lot worse if Sour Plum heard the wrong words come out of that phone. Thus far they’d been perfect gentlemen—or as gentlemanly as a black marketeer’s heavies were ever likely to be. They hadn’t broken her arm. In fact, no one had; the cast was a fake. They weren’t the ones who bashed her face in, either. Those bruises were two days old, still lingering after the woman in the diaphanous white dress walloped Mariko right in the face during their foot chase through Tokyo Station. Mariko had lost track of the woman then and hadn’t found her since.

She knew it was a million-to-one shot, but she had hoped to find the woman in a fancy second-story shot bar called the Sour Plum. The place was named for its owner, a big round man whose name in his Narcotics dossier was Lee Jin Bao. Since Japanese people couldn’t pronounce the name Lee, he’d acquired the nickname Plum, the meaning of the kanji character for Lee. The Sour part was easy enough to understand: he wore a permanent Robert De Niro frown and he had a reputation for knifing people at the slightest provocation. Sour Plum
was Chinese in a country that had no love for the Chinese, but being an enterprising sort, he’d used that fact to establish a niche for himself in the criminal ecosystem. Since no yakuza family would have him, he was the ultimate neutral party, the Switzerland of the Tokyo underworld. When rivals and enemies had no choice but to do business together, they met at the Plum.

As such, he was long overdue for a covert sting operation—or so Mariko had argued, anyway. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn’t the whole truth. Sour Plum
was
on Narcotics Division’s radar, but what Mariko really wanted was free rein to question him about his criminal associates. She was hoping a certain scantily clad, fleet-footed, shoulder-bag-swinging hellcat was on the list.

So that morning she’d talked her new shift sergeant into making a play. She went right out and arrested a midlevel dealer named Yuki Kisho who carried out most of his deals at the Plum. Yuki didn’t always pay attention to the subtle details of the trade—nuances like not pissing off your girlfriend if she knows you sell meth for a living. Scorned girlfriends made for terrific covert informants, and in Yuki’s case, he’d pissed off both his girlfriend and his mistress. Mariko’s ex-partner, Han, already had contracts with both of Yuki’s ladyloves; from there it was only a matter of waiting for the right time to burn down their cheating boyfriend.

Not long ago, Mariko and Han would have brought him down together. But that was before Han got himself busted back to general patrol. Since fate had a wicked sense of irony, it was his misconduct that freed him up to pursue Joko Daishi. Mariko should have been working the same case, but instead she was stuck in Narcotics working penny-ante buy-busts. Given the choice between being ladylike and doing her damn job, Captain Kusama wanted Mariko to be a lady.

She wondered what Kusama would think of her now, working her first undercover job instead of sitting behind a desk with her pinky sticking out as she sipped her tea.

“Still ringing,” Sour Plum told her.

“He’ll pick up,” Mariko said. “For you he’ll pick up.”

“He better.”

Mariko winced at that. She could hardly tell him the truth: that she was only pretending to be Yuki’s girlfriend, and that maybe Yuki hadn’t answered the call because she’d tossed him into an interrogation room that got crappy reception.

Sour Plum narrowed his eyes at her, looking her up and down. Mariko wasn’t sure if he was interested in her figure or in the plaster cast on her right forearm. Could he tell it was a fake? If so, then things were about to go south.

The only thing more conspicuous than her cast would have been the four-fingered hand it concealed. Losing that finger in a sword fight made her a media sensation for a week. She’d made the news again by fatally shooting a man on a populated subway platform. Captain Kusama had allowed the public to believe that Akahata Daisuke was unarmed when she shot him, and that made Mariko the most infamous cop in Tokyo. She was utterly useless for undercover work.

Until someone tried to bash her brains in with an iron mask. Now everyone would focus on the bruises, not the face that bore them. Truth to tell, she hardly looked like Oshiro Mariko anymore. The real giveaway was her missing trigger finger, which the cast concealed completely. The cast also went nicely with the bruises, and together they anchored Mariko’s cover story—a story Lee was soon to confirm if Yuki would just pick up his goddamn phone.

“Don’t make sense,” Sour Plum said, his gaze roving from her cast to her tits. “What’s a nice piece of ass like you want with a dumbshit like him?”

“Maybe I don’t want anything from him anymore. Maybe you’ve got what I need.” She pulled a thin stack of folded, sweat-slicked 10,000-yen bills from her bra. “Just sell me enough to pay off this yakuza asshole. Then maybe you and me can talk about what we want to do later.”

“You got money. Why not pay him yourself?”

“Says he wants product, not cash.”

Sour Plum took her money, held it up to his nose, and sniffed it like he was sniffing her panties. “Double,” he said.

“Huh?”

He leered at her and smelled the money again. “You’ll pay me double, ’cause most days you’d pay me in pussy. But I don’t hit no woman, and I don’t want nobody saying I do, neither. So double, or else walk your skinny ass out of here.”

“Done.” A thrill of adrenaline ran through Mariko’s veins like bubbling champagne. Her first undercover job, and it was going off without a hitch.

And then Yuki answered his phone.

“It’s me,” Lee said. Mariko wanted to snatch the phone and toss it down the stairs. She already had Lee where she wanted him. There was nothing Yuki could say to make matters better, and ten thousand things he could say to make everything go right to hell.

“Shut up and listen,” said the man called Sour Plum. “You tell some skinny bitch to come around here?”

Mariko hoped Yuki said,
Yes
and not,
Yes, but she’s a cop.

“How I’m supposed to know you ain’t setting me up?” Lee grimaced as he listened. “Hey, you got yakuzas on your ass, that’s your problem, not mine—and the next time you get in deep with one of those fuckers, you tell ’em to kick
your
ass instead of your woman’s, you chickenshit. Now tell me where you’re at.”

Mariko’s stomach fluttered like a bird trapped in a mason jar. Please, she thought, please don’t tell him.

“I don’t like surprises,” Lee said. “You pull this crap again, you gonna look like your girlfriend.”

He clicked off the phone, and when he returned it to his jacket pocket Mariko got another glimpse of the Spyderco. “Says he didn’t rough you up. Says a yakuza did it.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Mariko said.

“I know. I’m saying your bullshit matches his bullshit. So maybe it ain’t bullshit.”

“Then we have a deal?”

“We got a deal.”

He took the money, Mariko left with a little baggie of meth, and half a minute later she took point on the raid. It went as smoothly as could be expected, given the tight quarters and the sheer mass of cops trying to make their way up the narrow staircase. Sour Plum’s bodyguards let her by, thinking she was trying to flee from the police. That trapped Mariko upstairs with Lee Jin Bao while his heavies dealt with the rest of the squad.

Mariko had been entertaining a pet theory that a plaster cast could do lots of things a sword could do. Lee put that theory to the test. He was twice her size and damn quick with his knife. She parried the first slash with her cast, then snapped a
kote-uchi
strike to the wrist. His knife hit the floor. When he started throwing punches, she let him bloody his knuckles on the fiberglass for a while. Then a
shomenuchi
to the forehead dropped him right on his ass. Her cast was in tatters by the time she was done, but apart from that, she decided she’d logged some good
kenjutsu
practice tonight.