Disciple of the Wind (50 page)

He floated in the hall in that strange, weightless, tweaker way, as if gravity had only a tenuous hold on him. Between the perm and the peroxide, his hair was as stiff as paintbrush bristles, and since it didn’t spill down normally it reinforced the illusion that he might blow away at any moment. “So, uh, what can I do for you, Officer?”

“You spend time by the harbor,
neh
? Lots of business down that way?”

“Sure. But I’m not, you know, like . . . I mean, we got that agreement.”

“Yeah, I remember, Bumps. What time did you wake up this morning? Have you even been up long enough to know what’s going on?”

He nodded hugely, his eyes wide. “Those kids? Heavy shit.”

“Yeah. So here’s the thing: the guy who took them, he’s got to be hiding them somewhere. Somewhere with a lot of room, with no windows, ideally with only one exit. And it has to be a place not a lot of people ever have reason to go. You follow me so far?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mariko had her doubts. But she had greater doubts about Furukawa’s reasoning. She could buy Joko Daishi hiding in plain sight; what she didn’t buy was that he’d hide exactly where Furukawa expected him to. The image of a school full of dead kids was terrifying, but she just couldn’t derail the logical part of her mind that wanted to know how he’d get all the kids in there without being spotted. Today of all days, people were going to call 110 if they saw something suspicious going down in a schoolyard.

Maybe there was a decommissioned school being torn down somewhere. Maybe Joko Daishi had planned for that months in advance. With the Wind’s resources, he could have bought out a construction company, secured the demolition contract for a school, and filled the whole job site with his cultists. That would give him a perfect front for moving kids in a few at a time. All of that was possible. Even so, Mariko thought it much more likely that Furukawa’s closed school idea was bogus.

“Here’s my theory,” she told Bumps. “Shipping containers. No windows, one entry, and once it’s locked there’s no way for those helicopters up there to spot the kids.” And easy to fill with cyanide gas, if that was the way Joko Daishi wanted to play it. She didn’t have the stomach to say that aloud. She felt stupid indulging in a childish superstition like that, but if ever there was a day not to jinx something, today was the day.

Bumps walked to the end of the hall, where a dirty window commanded a less than beautiful view of the harbor. Mariko followed. “A lot of containers down there,” he said.

“Exactly. So get down to the waterfront and talk to your people. Have them talk to their people. I’m interested in unusual traffic patterns. Moving these kids is going to take hundreds of cars, so someone’s got to have seen—hey, are you listening to me?”

“Huh?” Bumps flinched when Mariko snapped her fingers in his ear. “Yeah. I got you. It’s just . . .” He laughed ruefully, and surprised himself as much as Mariko when a tear rolled down his cheek. “Today’s not going to be a good day to have a drug problem, know what
I mean? If shit goes bad, I don’t know if they got enough meth in this city to get me through it.”

Mariko took a step back. She actually needed to find her balance; his words struck her like a tsunami. Somehow she’d just assumed that people like Bumps were disconnected from current events, and that these attacks on her city passed right over their heads. Bumps showed her a deeper truth: Joko Daishi had shaken her city all the way down to the gutters. But if even Mariko and Bumps were on the same side against him, he’d also created a sort of citywide unity.

“Let me know what you hear, Bumps. And do it fast; the clock is ticking.”

“Yeah. Totally. Wait . . . does it have to be shipping containers?”

“No. That’s just a pet theory.”

Bumps chewed his lower lip with his gray meth-mouth teeth. “How about train cars?”

“Maybe, yeah. What are you thinking?”

“I know a guy. A car thief. Specializes in rental cars. Because the insurance is good,
neh
? The customers don’t take it personal, and—”

“Get to the point, Bumps.”

“Okay, you know what an Elf is? Like, an Isuzu Elf? Boxy little truck?”

“Sure.”

“Well, my guy has a thing for them. They’re super-popular rentals. The chop shops give him a real good price on—”

“The
point
, Bumps.”

“His girlfriend likes E. He used to buy from me. This morning he calls me and says he wants to buy everything I got. She has some friends coming over or something, and they like to party, and he’s all excited because he’s got a line on all these Elfs. They’re coming by Shinagawa Station one after the other. That’s where he lives, down by the rail yard—”

Mariko’s least favorite part about dealing with meth-heads was that when they were tweaking they just couldn’t shut up. “Did he see any kids in these trucks?”

“Well, you can’t really see inside them. The back is just a big box, you know?”

“Exactly. Did he see them stop anywhere?”

“He didn’t
see
them, no. . . .”

“So he didn’t see anyone take a bunch of kids out of the back, did he?”

“Um . . .”

Mariko wanted to smack him in the head. “Then what the hell does this have to do with anything, Bumps? I told you the clock is ticking.”

“Oh yeah, the train cars. See, there’s a bunch of them in the rail yard. Like, hundreds. Parked, just sitting there, you know? No one ever goes back there, because why would they? The cars are all empty. So my guy, he’s wondering, how come all those Elfs are going into the rail yard if there’s nothing back there?”

Bingo, Mariko thought. Hiding in plain sight, but not where Furukawa expected. And who would suspect foul play if they saw delivery trucks coming to meet cargo trains? The two went together like rice and shoyu.

She punched the elevator call button, then decided that way was too slow; she’d take the stairs. “Shinagawa rail yard. You’re positive?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

She wasn’t going to get anything more conclusive than “pretty much” from a tweaker. “Thanks, Bumps. Be seeing you.”

She sprinted down the stairs, jumped in the car, and gunned it. Shinagawa Station was well within Bumps’s turf, just a few blocks away from his rattrap apartment. When she got there, she pulled onto a skinny, little-used frontage road running parallel to the train tracks. It occurred to her that she’d spent her entire adult life in Tokyo and she’d never been here before. She passed through Shinagawa Station dozens of times a year, yet she’d never ventured as far as the rail yard, just a few hundred meters north of it. Not that there was much cause to come. There was nothing to do, no one to meet, nothing to shop for. The sightseeing consisted of dirt, gravel, weeds, kilometers of steel
rail, and a few hundred train cars. It was all fenced in, and she had to drive around a bit before she got to a place where authorized personnel could pass through a gate and get into the yard itself.

Beside the gate, a uniformed rent-a-cop sat in a box not much bigger than one of those huge American refrigerators, manning a radio and minding his own business. At the sight of him it dawned on her that she had no idea how to proceed. Usually she’d have her badge, gun, radio, and probably a partner. Had she come in a squad car, dispatch would know right where she was, and given the severity of the situation, by now she probably would have called for a tactical team. As a civilian, she had none of those assets. The safest thing to do—in fact, the only intelligent thing to do—was to dial 110 and wait.

Mariko wasn’t very good at waiting.

Furukawa could fake the dispatch call and get a tac team down here. But he might send assassins instead. Besides, Mariko wanted this to be a win for the TMPD, not the Wind. She called Han.

“Hey,” he said, “what’s up?”

“You said quid pro quo,
neh
? I’ve got something for you. Shinagawa rail yard, lots of trucks moving in and out all morning. I’m sitting outside a gate looking at about a million tire tracks leading in and out of the yard—”

“And you’d badge your way through it and go snooping around, except you’re not carrying a badge today. Got it. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”

“Call—”

“SWAT,” he said. “I know.”

“I was going to say HRT. Well, SWAT too, but if we’re lucky and this is a hit, it’s really a job for hostage rescue.”

“Good idea. I’m on my way. Oh, and Mariko?”

“Yeah?”

“Ahh, never mind. I was going to tell you to do yourself a favor and don’t go in there. No chance of that, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Then do yourself a different favor: don’t get caught.”

43

M
ariko’s method of not getting caught was a little unorthodox. She drove right up to the gate guard and said, “Hey, I’m pretty sure I heard a crying kid back there.”

He looked down at her with an apprehensive look, but not the kind she expected to get. He wasn’t worried about a kid in danger, or how a kid got past him, or how completely screwed he’d be if his boss found out a kid got past him. Mariko would have read any of those easily enough, and she’d have sympathized with all of them. This was different. He seemed more concerned about Mariko than anything else.

Usually flashing a badge sped things along in this sort of situation, but this guy was giving her a different vibe. She leaned in, lowered her voice a bit, and said, “We don’t want anyone hearing those kids, do we?”

“What?”

Uh-oh, Mariko thought. Maybe she’d misread him entirely. But she’d already grabbed the tiger by the tail; the only thing to do was hold on. “What if some random person on the street hears one of the kids? That could ruin everything,
neh
? So maybe one of us ought to head back there and have a look around.”

His suspicion deepened. “Who are you?”

“Relax,” she said, saying it as much to herself as to him. She’d read
him correctly after all. “I’m with you, brother. A servant of the Purging Fire.”

He loosened up, but only for an instant. The two of them spoke the same language; that was what set him at ease. But he had been placed here to carry out his holy errand; the thought of duty strengthened his resolve.

“Say the words,” he said.

Mariko gulped. Her only weapon was her Pikachu, but the cultist was well out of reach. He was armed with a radio. That was all he’d need to contact whoever was watching the children. Mariko was certain this gate guard wasn’t alone. He would have been the one to admit all the trucks, but there had to be someone on the other end to direct them. One quick call and all of those kids were as good as dead—if they weren’t dead already.

“Say the words.” His voice was ice cold. He picked up the radio.

“There is no place the Divine Wind cannot reach?”

Mariko’s breath froze in her lungs. He put the radio to his mouth. “One coming down,” he said. Then, to her, “Car thirteen oh four. You can’t drive that, though. People will see. Take one of the carts.”

She looked in the direction he was pointing, and used the brief moment facing away from him to recover from fright. Her situation wasn’t rosy yet, but at least she’d kept it from going right to hell. She gave the guard a nod, then pulled the BMW into line with the row of little electric carts he’d indicated. They bore Japan Railways logos and they all had keys in the ignition. Mariko hopped in the first one and zipped off into the rail yard.

It occurred to her as she drove along that a lone undercover officer posing as a cultist might actually have been the TMPD’s best bet against that gate guard. Much safer than a fully armed tac team, she figured. Cops weren’t military; they weren’t allowed to shoot just because a suspect raised a radio to his mouth. Joko Daishi had trained his people with code phrases; surely they’d have one that meant “kill the hostages.” Mariko had seen his handiwork at the house in Kamakura.
Pull one lever and the death chamber flooded with hydrogen cyanide gas. There was no reason he couldn’t rig a train car the same way.

It took her a long time to find car 1304. The cars were linked together in huge parallel lines, five or six rows deep, each one hundreds of meters long. Boxcars, mostly, but there were passenger cars and tankers too. She had assumed 1304 would be in the middle of the middle, well out of public view, but it wasn’t. It was close to the end—hiding in plain sight—one of a string of rust-brown boxcars that had all seen their day. The cars could have been identical octuplets, and unlike the rest of the cars on this end of the rail yard, they were coupled to a locomotive. It rumbled restively, a massive noise compared to the wimpy electric purring of Mariko’s cart.

She overshot 1304 the first time, and a guard had to whistle at her to draw her back. Like the last one, he was dressed as a JR worker. No, Mariko thought—they
are
JR workers. Cultists have day jobs too. And Joko Daishi needed insiders, people who wouldn’t seem out of place if they were seen here day after day. An operation of this scale hinged on having the right people in all the right places. It was just the Wind’s style to put sleeper agents in key positions months before they were needed. Mariko figured the Divine Wind followed suit.

She stopped the little cart and twisted around to face the man waving her toward car 1304. “Where’s everyone else?” she asked.

“At the new church, with the first ones.”

First ones? Was that a religious term, like Daishi or Purging Fire? Furukawa would probably know. Mariko cursed herself for not asking; she should have demanded a full briefing on the Divine Wind. Whoever the first ones were, it was a bad sign that they’d left only one man behind. This guy couldn’t manage hundreds of children by himself—not live ones, anyway. And there was no noise coming from within the car.

She wanted to break into a run, to rip the huge sliding door aside and look inside the boxcar. She had to press her body into the seat just to keep herself inside the cart. She wheeled around and came to a stop at the foot of the cultist, who stood on a little platform above the couplers.

“I can’t believe they left you here alone with all the kids.”