The Three (36 page)

[
another long pause
]

ACE:
Why are you telling me this?

ME:
I thought… I dunno. I guess… what you said about Bobby… Like I say, it’s crazy to even think like this, but Paul said, ‘ask the others’ and I—

ACE:
You know something, Elspeth? I know you got a lot of criticism for what you included in that book, but far as I’m concerned you were lambasted for the wrong reasons. You published all that inflammatory stuff about the kids’ personalities
changing, dropped the bomb and just walked away. You didn’t take it further; you assumed everything had a rational explanation and naively thought everyone who read it would also see it like that.

ME:
My intention wasn’t to—

ACE:
I know what your intentions were. And now you’re sniffing around to see if there really
was
something up with those kids, am I right?

ME:
I’m just looking into things.

ACE:
[a sigh] Tell you what. I’m gonna email you something.

ME:
What?

ACE:
Read it first, then we’ll talk.

[The email came through immediately and I clicked on an attachment entitled: SA678ORG

At first glance I thought it was an exact copy of the Sun Air Cockpit Voice Recording transcript that I’d included in
FCTC
. And it was exactly the same, apart from this exchange that occurred a second before the plane ran into trouble:

Captain: [expletive] You see that?

First Officer: Hai! Lightning?

Captain: Negative. Never seen a flash like that. There’s nothing on TCAS, ask ATC if there’s another aircraft up here with us—]

ME:
What the fuck is this?

ACE:
You gotta understand, we didn’t want to fuel the panic. People needed to know that the causes of those crashes were explainable. The grounded planes had to get back in the air.

ME:
The NTSB faked the Sun Air transcript? You’re telling me that you guys seriously believed you were dealing with an alien encounter?

ACE:
What I’m telling you is that we were confronted by facts that we couldn’t explain. Sun Air aside, the only disaster that had a definite cause was the Dalu Air crash.

ME:
What the hell are you talking about? What about the Maiden Air disaster?

ACE:
We had a multiple bird strike with no snarge. Sure, possibly explainable if the engines had been consumed by fire–but they weren’t. How in the hell do two jet engines get imploded by birds–without a trace of matter? And look at the Go!Go! incident. We were grasping at straws with that one–but one thing’s for sure–it’s pretty damn unusual for pilots to fly into a storm of that magnitude in this day and age. And answer me this, how in the fuck did those three kids survive?

ME:
Look at Zainab Farra, the little girl who survived that crash in Ethiopia. The Three were like her, they got lucky—

ACE:
Bullshit. And you know it.

ME:
This transcript… why did you send it to me? Do you actually want me to publish it?

ACE:
[a bitter laugh] What’s the worst that can happen now? Reynard will give me a medal–more proof that The Three weren’t just normal kids. Do what you want with it. The NTSB and JTSB will deny it anyway.

ME:
So you’re seriously saying you think there’s something… I don’t know… otherworldly about The Three? You’re an investigator–a scientist.

ACE:
All I know is what I saw when I went to see Bobby. It wasn’t an hallucination, Elspeth. And that photographer, the one who ended up being dinner for his goddamned reptiles, he saw something as well.

[
another sigh
]

Listen, you were just doing your job. I shouldn’t have gone after you for publishing what I said about Bobby. Maybe I said it was off the record, maybe I didn’t. But it was the truth. Fact is, you gotta be blind not to see that there was something wrong with those kids.

ME:
So what do you suggest I do now?

ACE:
Up to you, Elspeth. But whatever you do, I suggest you make it quick. The End Timers are hell-bent on fulfilling their own prophecies. How in the hell do you negotiate with a president who’s convinced that the end of the world is nigh and that the only way to save people from eternal damnation is to turn the US into a theocracy? Simple. You can’t.

Of course I struggled to believe that the NTSB would actually doctor the record–even if it was concerned about people panicking about the causes of the disasters. Could the transcript be Ace’s revenge for the eye-bleeding debacle? If I made something like this public, the Rationalist League would have another reason to string me up.

But you know where this is going, right? I had Paul’s note, Ace’s (possibly faked) transcript, and his assurances that he really had seen blood in Bobby’s eyes.

It could all be bullshit–probably was. But there was one child left.

I spent the next few days researching Chiyoko and Hiro. Most of the links led to new material on Ryu and Chiyoko’s tragic love story, among them a recent article on a spate of copycat suicides, but there was surprisingly little on Hiro. I contacted Eric
Kushan, the guy who’d translated the Japanese extracts in
FCTC,
to see if he could give me any leads, but he’d left Japan a few months earlier after the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation between the States and Japan was overturned, and all he could suggest was that I look into the Cult of Hiro.

I thought it might have morphed into something approximating the Moonies or Aum Shrinrikyo, but rather than becoming a hardcore nationalist cult, it had fizzled into little more than a bizarre celebrity trend. Now that her husband had won the election, Aikao Uri appeared to have dumped her alien theories and surrabot, focusing her energies on campaigning for the tri-Asian alliance. The Orz Movement had gone completely underground

Do you remember Daniel Mimura? He was one of the
Tokyo Herald
journalists who’d given me permission to use a couple of his articles for
FCTC
. He was one of the few contributors (along with Lola–Pastor Len’s ‘fancy woman’–and the documentary filmmaker Malcolm Adelstein) who’d sent me a supportive note after the shit hit the fan. He sounded delighted to hear from me, and we chatted for a while about how the Japanese people were coping with the spectre of a possible alliance with China and Korea.

I transcribed the rest of our conversation:

ME:
You think Chiyoko and Ryu really did die in Aokigahara?

DANIEL:
Reckon Ryu did for sure, they did an autopsy, which is quite unusual for Tokyo–they aren’t done automatically in every suspicious death. Chiyoko’s body was never found, so who knows?

ME:
You think she could be alive?

DANIEL:
Possibly. You heard the rumours about Hiro? They’ve been circulating for a while.

ME:
You mean the usual ‘The Three are still alive’ bullshit?

DANIEL:
Yeah. You want me to go into it?

ME:
Sure.

DANIEL:
This is crazy conspiricist stuff but… Look, to start with, the cops shut down that scene really fast. The paramedics and forensics guys were instructed not to talk to the press. Even the police agency guys couldn’t get much of a story out of them, except for the official statement.

ME:
Okay… but why would they fake his death?

DANIEL:
The New Nationalists could have planned it, maybe. I mean, what better way to turn the public against the US? S’pose at a push, if you were that way inclined, you could say they set the whole thing up, staged the scene, killed the Kamamotos and that soldier, made it look like Hiro was dead.

ME:
That doesn’t make sense. Private Jake Wallace was a Pamelist–he had a motive to kill Hiro. How would they get him involved in a scheme like that?

DANIEL:
Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just telling you about the rumours. Hell, I dunno, maybe they got wind about what he was gonna do, set him up. Hacked into his emails like those other guys did.

ME:
But the witnesses said that they saw Chiyoko carrying Hiro’s body.

DANIEL:
Yeah. But have you seen those surrabots Kenji Yanagida makes? They’re eerie. Unless you’re close up to them, they look seriously convincing.

ME:
Hang on… wouldn’t that mean that Chiyoko would’ve been in on it?

DANIEL:
Yeah.

ME:
So let’s say what you’re saying did happen. Chiyoko sat back and allowed her parents to be murdered… why?

DANIEL:
Who knows? Money? So that she and Hiro could go off to some unknown country and live out their lives in luxury? And poor old Ryu got caught up in it and ended up another casualty.

ME:
You any idea how often I’ve heard these kinds of theories?

DANIEL:
Sure. Like I say, all bullshit.

ME:
You ever looked into it?

DANIEL:
Dug around a bit, nothing major. You know how these things go. If there was anything to it, someone would have leaked it by now.

ME:
Didn’t Kenji Yanagida identify Hiro’s body?

DANIEL:
So?

ME:
If anyone knows the truth, it’s him. Would he talk to me?

DANIEL:
[a laugh] No fucking way. It’s all bullshit, Ellie. The kid is dead.

ME:
Is Kenji Yanagida still in Osaka?

DANIEL:
Last I heard he left the university after being hounded by the Cult of Hiro–they were desperate for him to be one of
their high-profile mascots. Apparently he moved to Tokyo, changed his name.

ME:
Can you track him down for me?

DANIEL:
You have any idea how many people have tried to talk to Kenji Yanagida and been stonewalled?

ME:
But I have something they don’t have.

DANIEL:
What?

I didn’t tell Daniel about Ace’s transcript. It might be my way into speaking to Kenji Yanagida, it might not.

I know what you’re thinking: that I didn’t tell Daniel about it because it was my exclusive and I wanted to use it for my own ends–maybe shove it in another book. But again, I’m done with all that, Sam, I swear.

I didn’t do anything for the next few weeks. The world was holding its breath after that group of renegade End Timers tried to set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque at the Temple Mount in another effort to step up the race to the Rapture. Not even I was stupid enough to fly to Asia on what could be the cusp of World War III.

And the news we were getting in from the States was just as depressing. I may have been sticking my head in the sand, but the reports of escalating attacks on gay teenagers; the mass closure of reproductive health clinics; the Internet blackouts; the GLAAD and Rationalist League leaders being apprehended under so-called state security laws, filtered through. There were anti-US protests in the UK, too. The UK was cutting its ties with Reynard’s regime, and MigrantWatch were campaigning to stem the tide of US émigrés. And I don’t want you to think I wasn’t worried about you. That’s all I thought about over the holiday season (I’m not going to whine about spending Thanksgiving alone in my freezing flat eating take-out jalfrezi). Thought of you
when those UK celebs joined the US A-listers in their ‘Save Our Bill of Rights’ campaign–it would have brought out your cynical side. All the YouTube clips and supergroup iTunes songs in the world weren’t going to change the convictions of people who honestly believe that by wiping out ‘immorality’, they’ll be saving others from burning in hell for all eternity.

But I couldn’t let it go.

Remembering what Ace said about not dragging my feet, I called Daniel in early December and told him I needed help getting into Tokyo. He thought I was crazy, of course–his contract had just been cancelled (he said it was happening to Westerners all over Japan, ‘their way of saying we’re no longer welcome’). Even with my British passport, thanks to new regulations, I’d need a visa, a valid reason for travel and a Japanese citizen willing to stand as my sponsor and representative. He reluctantly said he’d ask one of his friends to help.

I tracked down Pascal de la Croix–Kenji’s old buddy–and begged him to ask Kenji to see me. I told him the truth–that I had new information regarding the Sun Air crash that Kenji needed to know. I told him I was flying into Tokyo especially to see him. Pascal was reluctant of course, but he finally agreed to email Kenji for me on the proviso that if I did get to see him, I wouldn’t publish anything about our meeting.

I reckon I checked my inbox about fifty times a day after that–filtering through the hate mail and spam–for a response.

It came through on the same day as my visa. An address, nothing more.

Sam, I’ll be honest. Before I left I took a long, hard look at myself. What the hell did I think I was doing? Didn’t following this up make me as crazy as the End Timers and the conspiracy freaks? And let’s say my batshit insane Kenji Yanagida wild-goose chase did lead me to Hiro. Say he was still alive and I managed to talk to him. And he told me that The Three were all possessed by the horsemen out of Revelation, or were all psycho aliens, or were three of the Four fucking Tops, what then? Did I have a duty to ‘let the truth be known’? And if I did, would it
make any difference? Look what happened with the Kenneth Oduah scandal. Solid proof that his DNA results were faked, but still millions bought into Dr Lund’s bullshit that ‘it is God’s will that the fourth horseman may never be found’.

The flight was a nightmare. I got the total Pamela May Donald heebies before we even took off. Kept imagining how she must have felt in the minutes before her plane went down. I even found myself composing an
isho
in my head just in case. (I won’t embarrass you with it.) It didn’t help that half-an-hour into the flight, 90% of the other passengers (all Westerners, mostly Brits and Scandinavians) were already drunk. The guy next to me, some kind of IT specialist who was heading to Tokyo to help disband IBM’s Roppongi branch, filled me in on what to expect when we arrived. ‘See, it’s not that they’re openly hostile or anything like that, but it’s best to stay in the “Westerners’ section”–Roppongi and Roppongi hills. It’s not bad, lot of pubs.’ He downed his double JD and breathed bourbon fumes over me. ‘And who wants to hang out with the Japs anyway? I can show you around if you like.’ I declined, and thankfully he passed out shortly afterwards.