Disciple of the Wind (19 page)

No. No one could be that skilled. Yet Mariko had no alternate explanation.

“See what I mean?” Han said it as if he’d read her mind. “Someone is setting you up, Mariko. I don’t know why, but I know they might be waiting for you on the other side of that door if you decide to kick it down.”

Then at least I’ll get some answers, Mariko thought. But to Han she said, “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I need to think this through.”

“Bullshit.” Han jabbed a finger at her like an umpire calling a strike. “You’re bullshitting me. You’re going to wait until I turn my back, and then you’re going to rush in there guns blazing.”

“No, I’m—”

“No, you’re not, are you? You don’t have any guns to blaze with. Your service weapon is locked up at headquarters.”

Mariko had never seen him like this. All his witticisms were gone. What remained was a sense of urgency that bordered on anger. “Han, I can’t get a warrant to go in there. I can only show probable cause if I reveal all the work I’ve done tracking that woman to this spot, and if I do that . . . well, this isn’t a narco case, is it? As soon as Captain Kusama gets wind of it, he’ll take a hatchet to whatever remains of my career.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Sit back and watch you walk into a trap?”

“We don’t know it’s a trap. We don’t know anything about it.”

“And that’s a
good
thing?” He peeled back his jacket to reveal the Nambu M60 holstered under his left arm. “At least take a fucking gun with you.”

“I can’t. Not yours, anyway. If I have to use it, it’s registered to you—”

“And that violates regs. Okay, so case closed,
neh
? You don’t have a weapon and I’m not letting you go in there unarmed. I’m coming with you and that’s that.”

Mariko gave him a sad smile. “It’s not. I’ve got the day off and you need to report for duty in about an hour and a half. So as much as I love you for wanting to join me on this career-ending caper, all I have to do is sit and have a cup of tea and wait for you to go to work.”

Han fumed and steamed, muttering a litany of unintelligible curses. At last he said, “All right, then go do it. Right now, before I change my mind. At least this way I can stand outside and listen for enough reasonable suspicion to justify coming in after you. Do me a favor—hell, do both of us a favor: scream loud when they try to kill you.”

16

M
ariko took a deep breath to quell the butterflies in her stomach. Then she palmed her Pikachu and went back to the strip club.

For her first four years on the force she’d carried a Cheetah stun baton. It had never been ideal for plainclothes work; it was too long, too hard to conceal under a jacket, and the 850,000 volts it boasted four years ago were downright anemic by today’s standards. She’d made the compromise because of the baton’s greater striking power. For her first four years on the job, she’d never felt strong enough to hit a perp and really make it sting. But thanks to her departed sensei, Yamada, she felt stronger now, more confident. The big guys didn’t intimidate her as much anymore.

The first time Han saw her new stun gun, he joked that she’d traded a Cheetah for a Pikachu. He wasn’t far wrong: two and a half million volts of whup-ass packed into a little black box the size of a pack of cigarettes. Unfortunately, once Sakakibara overheard the joke, she was stuck carrying “the Pikachu” forever after. Somehow, somewhere along the way, someone had managed to stick shiny prismatic Pikachu stickers all over it when Mariko wasn’t looking. She suspected Han.

On closer inspection, the invisible door wasn’t quite invisible. Mariko still couldn’t find hinges or handles, but she could see the tiny seam running the perimeter of the door. It looked like the wall panel
had been painted over but the paint had cracked. Mariko guessed it was supposed to look like that.

Not surprisingly, pushing and prodding did nothing. She tried the front door instead, which was perfectly ordinary: a heavy pane of plate glass seated in a steel frame, with a little plastic box to slide a key card through to unlock the door. Mariko wondered what would happen if she zapped the lock with her Pikachu, and whether two and a half million volts would act as a master key or fuse the lock shut permanently.

In the end she didn’t need to find out. The door opened at her touch. Weird, she thought. Tokyo wasn’t exactly a den of thieves—the city saw as many burglaries in a year as New York saw in a day—but still, leaving the front door unlocked was asking for trouble. The whole thing felt wrong. In fact, it felt like she was being set up, just as Han suspected. But she went inside anyway.

On the outside the strip club was two stories of nothing but brightly colored signage. Inside it was just the opposite: a dark and cavernous expanse, lit only by the green glow of the emergency exit lights far off in the corners. The stink of stale cigarette smoke suffused the furniture, the carpeting, the very paint on the walls. A stage dominated the floor space, of course, dotted with stripper poles and surrounded by chairs. There was a bar in one corner, a flight of stairs in the other. The stairs led to a room overlooking the whole first floor and walled in by floor-to-ceiling one-way mirrors. The VIP lounge, Mariko guessed, but she didn’t bother checking. The only detail she cared about was the secret door.

There was no trace of it. If it had led to this room, it would have opened up right under the stairs, but instead Mariko saw only a blank wall.

“No,” she said to herself. She wouldn’t allow the trail to go cold. Not here, not after she’d come so far.

It stood to reason that the door wouldn’t open into this room. Secret doors were for secret places, not the decidedly un-secret main floor of a strip joint. So where did it go, then? There had to be a hidden space inside the wall. But how could she get to it?

She couldn’t. Not from here. The whole point of that hidden space was to stay sequestered from the public areas of the club. So if there was no access on this floor, the only place left for it to go was up or down.

Let’s try down, Mariko thought. She went cautiously to the bar, taking care not to stumble in the dark in this unfamiliar space. Behind the bar she spotted exactly what she’d hoped to find: a door to a staircase, which in turn led down to the stockroom. The door wasn’t locked but the stockroom was. A good, hard kick ripped the hasp right out of the wood.

That was the moment she really wished she had her sidearm. Any bad guys on the other side of that door now knew exactly where she was. Unless they stepped within arm’s reach, the Pikachu would be useless.

Mariko moved through the doorway fast and low, eager to find cover just in case bullets started flying her way. She needn’t have bothered; the storeroom was empty.

Flickering fluorescent tubes automatically sputtered to life, triggered by the opening door. Mariko saw walls of heavy-duty shelving, stocked to the ceiling with cases of booze, boxes of napkins, giant bags of
arare
. No women in white, nor anyone else to tackle Mariko or put a slug in her.

A refrigerator’s compressor purred contentedly, causing Mariko to look for the source. She found it quickly enough: a pair of tall, stainless steel, industrial-sized units, one a fridge and the other a freezer. Still no women in white, no ninja Secret Santas, no signs of any criminal activity.

Then she heard movement upstairs.

Heels thumped the floor hard and fast. They sped straight for the bar—straight for Mariko. She heard the door upstairs being knocked aside. Mariko dashed for the stockroom door, slipping behind it a fraction of a second before her intruder rushed into the room.

She jabbed him in the nape of the neck with the Pikachu and pulled the trigger.

“Fuck!” Han shouted. He jumped away from the contact studs like
a bullet leaving a gun. At the same time, Mariko pulled the stun gun away. Han clutched his neck with one hand and brought his revolver around with the other.

“It’s me! It’s Mariko. Don’t shoot!”

He blinked hard and shot a double take in her direction. His face was as red as a beet. An involuntary convulsion careened through his body. He could hardly stand up straight, but at least he lowered the gun. “What the hell, Mariko?”

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Mariko managed that much without cracking up. Then she let out a guffaw. “You should see your face,” she said, laughing so hard it was tough to get the words out. “I wish we could have filmed that. Best YouTube video ever. I swear, everyone in the department—”

“Ha-ha,” Han said, not the least bit amused. “I come down here to save your life and this is the thanks I get?”

“What can I say? This cop thing is a dangerous profession.”

“Damn right it is.” He rubbed his neck and laughed. “You are
such
an asshole, you know that?”

Mariko almost forgot they were in enemy territory. “How did you know to look for me down here?”

“I heard a banging noise and I came in. I guess it was you kicking that door open. Anyway, I saw the light coming from downstairs behind the bar and I rushed to your aid. You know, like a superhero. And for that you tased me in the neck.”

“I am so sorry—”

“Don’t be. I’ll just go buy a stun gun and get you back.” He holstered his weapon and for the first time he looked around the storeroom. “What were you doing down here, anyway?”

“I was hoping to find where that ninja bitch’s secret door lets out. Hey, what are you doing?”

Han was reaching for the handle on the refrigerator door. “Looking for something to drink. A little orange juice really hits the spot after getting electrocuted, you know?”

“Han, you can’t.”

“We’re already guilty of breaking and entering; I don’t think they’re going to miss one little can of—”

At first it seemed like the door was a bit stubborn. Han tugged it a bit harder, and suddenly the whole refrigerator pulled away from the wall. It swung out as if one corner was connected by hinges to the wall—which, in fact, was precisely the case. The refrigerator doubled as another hidden door.

Han had the firearm, so he was the first one through. Mariko shadowed him, feeling useless with the Pikachu in her hand, but at least she could offer a second pair of eyes. As it happened, she was the first one to spot the light switch.

She flicked it and two long rows of fluorescent lights came to life. Below them stood at least a dozen desks, the pressboard kind with the thin faux-wood veneer. Each one was home to what looked like a little black octopus: a bundle of cables, zip-tied together and blossoming up through a plastic-rimmed cutout in the desktop. Power cords, Ethernet cables, USB something-or-others; Mariko wasn’t great with computers, but she knew enough to understand there used to be a hell of a lot of them in this room.

Many of the cables ran to a large, blocky, important-looking metal armature on the back wall. Not long ago, this must have stored a number of smaller but equally important-looking gadgets, probably with lots of fans and LED lights. These would have something to do with servers and cloud computing and other networky things that might as well have been magic spells for all Mariko understood about them. Not that it mattered. Someone had absconded with everything a police detective might have used to figure out who had been down here and what they’d been up to.

There were no office chairs. No carpeting. No fabric at all, actually, which was a shame, because DNA evidence was especially clingy to fabric. The 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.