coincidence, Mariko followed up on it, and sure enough, it was the same Akahata she’d met in the hospital, the fanatic who never stopped chanting his mantra.
As soon as she confirmed the match, her heart began to race. A growing dread had been swelling in her gut like a tumor, ever since they’d discovered the cyanide. There might have been some who argued that anyone crazy enough to join the Divine Wind deserved whatever fate Joko Daishi would lead them to, but Mariko didn’t fall in that camp. Mass murder was mass murder, regardless of whether the victim was willing to swallow the poisoned pill. With Akahata out of pocket and Joko Daishi still a ghost, each passing hour amplified her queasy sense of foreboding. Every time she looked at the clock, she wondered how much time she had before the fateful bell would toll.
And since Han was better on the keyboard, Mariko could only stand by and wait as he executed the very same searches she would have done. Once again their likemindedness struck her. There was no point in hunting and pecking her own way through; whatever she might have learned through the computer, Han would learn it first. So Mariko made what phone calls she could, but her concentration never strayed far from Han.
“Got it!” he said. “Rented storefront in Bunkyo. Tax-exempt status, leased to the Church of the Divine Wind.” He released a sigh he seemed to have been bottling up for some time; evidently he was every bit as nervous as Mariko was. “I figured we were going to get a front company, you know? But I guess the regs on prohibited substances are too strict for that. This isn’t a front; it’s the real deal.”
“Let’s move,” said Mariko.
42
She’d never commanded a raid before. The decision didn’t come easily, either. The biggest part of her wanted to wait for Lieutenant Sakakibara, but he was busy unruffling the feathers of all the circuit court judges he’d pissed off in railroading his warrants through the system, and Mariko’s growing sense of dread wouldn’t accept unnecessary delays. She might have asked SWAT to take command, but their reputation in Narcotics was that they were too slow to respond. The SWAT guys would have cast it in a different light, to be sure: you couldn’t prep an assault on a target in a matter of minutes, and barging in without a plan was a good way to get people killed. Asking them to launch a raid in less than an hour would be like asking a drunk surgeon to operate before sobering up. The right thing to do—the professional thing to do—was to say no.
So, since Sakakibara had already assigned a small army to report directly to Mariko, she decided to deploy it. Borrowing heavily from SWAT’s playbook, she found electronic maps of the Divine Wind’s rented storefront- become-church and studied the layout carefully. She chose a staging ground in a parking lot half a kilometer away from the target building, where she could convene everyone in her command. And now she stood in a circle with them, with all of them looking expectantly at her. It was discomfiting, having twenty cops glued to her every word. She couldn’t help noticing that, as usual, she was by far the smallest one in the group.
“Listen up,” she said, too quietly if she wanted to command as much authority as Sakakibara would have done. That was a lot easier at his size than at hers, and until she’d worked with them long enough to earn their respect, most guys in the department treated her not as a cop but a girl cop. She wasn’t off to a great start, but she had no choice but to raise her voice and soldier on. “I’m not going to try to stage this like the SWAT guys would. We’re just going to do good old-fashioned police work. Treat this like you did it back in academy, when you focused on the fundamentals. Watch your corners, clear your doorways, nobody enters a room by himself. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” her twenty officers said, much louder than she’d anticipated. She entertained the thought that maybe this wasn’t going as poorly as she thought—or maybe her nervousness just made everything bad seem worse and everything good seem as thin as Han’s cigarette smoke.
“Consider our targets to be armed and dangerous,” she said. She meant the chemicals, not guns and knives, and now she wished she’d remembered to requisition gas masks for everyone. SWAT wouldn’t have forgotten that. “Remember, on paper this place qualifies as a church. That means we might be seeing parishioners in there, not just bad guys. But we know our bad guys have killed at least once using cyanide, maybe using a laced pill, and we suspect they’re willing to kill a lot more. If you see civilians trying to pop pills, do what you can to stop them—but don’t let that compromise officer safety, understand?”
Her chorus boomed, “Yes, ma’am!”
“All right. Let’s hit it.”
When they breached the building, it was nothing like the SWAT raid of Kamaguchi’s shipping company. There, four teams had hit four sides of the target in the same instant. Here, Mariko heard shouts from inside before she even reached the front door. She, Han, and the four cops with them broke into a dead sprint.
The target used to be a discount mattress retailer, which meant it was
Han reached the door before she did and put his boot into it. It burst open and Mariko was through. She’d expected to see what was happening on the B-side, but to her left was a flat wall. The room she was in—probably the showroom floor at one time—was now empty and dimly lit. B-team must have hit offices or a stockroom, something on the opposite side of that wall. She couldn’t help them. She could only clear the area in front of her.
An exit sign glowed green on the back wall, with a steel door beneath it. On the other side of that door, a motorcycle engine roared to life, followed by another. Mariko’s team declared the vacant showroom clear. Mariko couldn’t even remember any details of the area; she knew only that wherever she pointed her SIG, there was nothing dangerous to be found.
Mariko charged the steel door and kicked it with everything she had. It burst open and she breached the next room. Sunlight blinded her. The room was a cavernous expanse, the sun streaming in from the truck-sized door scrolling itself open on the far wall. Han was right on Mariko’s heels, shouting “down, down, down!” at someone off to her right, someone Mariko hadn’t even seen. Her eyes were fixed on the two motorcyclists in front of her.
They were big bikes, maybe fourteen hundred cc’s, and Mariko instantly recognized one of the riders as Akahata. His face, still purple and livid, was too bruised for him to wear a helmet. The man astride the second bike had long black hair and wore an iron demon mask instead of a helmet. He could only be Joko Daishi.
He cut a sharp turn in front of her, filling the air with the stink of scorched rubber. Akahata had already made the same turn, and now he rocketed away. He raced for the loading dock on the far side of the room, where that scrolling door rolled ever higher. Mariko saw five cops—her C-team—converging on the opening door, pistols drawn. Akahata cranked the throttle, jumped the loading dock, and blew past her officers before they could react. Joko Daishi whipped his bike around and gunned it.
Mariko put her front sight on him but hesitated before she took her shot, doubting her aim with her left hand. C-team advanced on the door, closing Joko Daishi’s line of escape.
He put the bike down in a hard spin, forcing a howl out of the back tire and leaving a wide black slash on the concrete floor. His engine roared louder than gunfire. He made for the emergency exit on the B-side, where Mariko’s officers were already embroiled in a fistfight with three or four men in white. Mariko could only assume they were Divine Wind cultists, but whoever they were, their free-for-all blocked the fire exit.
Two of her B-side cops spotted the bike, broke free of the fight, and brought their weapons to bear. Joko Daishi whirled again, leaning so low his knee touched the floor. It was the same squealing spinout as before, only this time he used it as a leg sweep. His back tire arced wide, breaking bones, reaping both cops to the ground. He rammed the throttle again and bore down on Mariko like a charging warhorse.
She didn’t know what happened to the rest of her element. Han was gone. The cops with them were gone. The door behind her was still open; she didn’t know why, didn’t care. For Mariko the whole world was herself and Joko Daishi.
She put her front sight right on that iron demon mask but she couldn’t pull the trigger. It would be the first
