Year of the Demon

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

1

Detective Sergeant Oshiro Mariko adjusted the straps on her vest, twisting her body side to side to snug the fit tighter. The thing was uncomfortable, and not just physically. Mariko hadn’t had to wear a bulletproof vest since academy. Even then it had been for training purposes only; she’d never strapped one on in anticipation of being shot at.

“Boys and girls, listen up,” Lieutenant Sakakibara said, his voice deep and sharp. He was a good twenty centimeters taller than Mariko, with a high forehead and a Sonny Chiba haircut that sat on his head like a helmet. He looked perfectly at ease in his body armor, and despite the heavy SWAT team presence, there was no doubt that the staging area was his to command. “Our stash house belongs to the Kamaguchi-gumi, and that means armed and dangerous. Our CI confirms at least two automatic weapons on-site.”

That sent a wave of murmurs through the sea of cops surrounding him. CIs were renowned for their lousy intelligence. Narcs with holstered pistols, SWAT guys with their M4 rifles pointed casually at the ground, all of them were shaking their heads. They all spoke fluent covert-informantese, and in that surreal language “at least two” meant “somewhere between zero and ten.”

Mariko was the shortest one in the crowd, and if she looked a little taller with her helmet on, everyone else looked taller still. Police work attracted the cowboys, and the boys really got their six-guns on when they got to armor up and kick down doors. Being the only woman on the team was alienating at the best of times, and now, surrounded by unruly giants, Mariko felt like a teenager again, awkward, soft-spoken, trapped in the midst of raucous, rowdy adults and just old enough to understand how out of place she was.

It was no good dwelling on how she felt like a gaijin, so she returned her attention to Lieutenant Sakakibara. “There’s going to be a lot of strange equipment in there,” he said, though he hardly needed to. SWAT had downloaded images of all the machines they were likely to encounter. The target was a packing and shipping company, an excellent front for running dope, guns—damn near anything, really—and the machinery they’d have on-site would offer cover and concealment galore. Everyone knew that, but Sakakibara was good police: he looked out for his team. “Weird shadows,” he said, “lots of little nooks and crannies, lots of corners to clear. You make sure you clear every last one of them. Execute the fundamentals, people.”

Again, everyone knew it, and again, everyone needed the reminder. Mariko marveled at how some of the most specialized training in the world boiled down to just getting the basics right. In that respect SWAT operations were no different than basketball or playing piano.

“B-team, D-team,” Sakakibara said, “you need to hit the ground running. I want to own the whole damn structure in the first five seconds. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said twelve cops in unison.

“C-team, same goes for you, but don’t you forget”—Sakakibara pointed straight at Mariko as he spoke—“Detective Sergeant New Guy is a part of your element. The Kamaguchi-gumi has put out a contract on her. I won’t have her getting shot on my watch, got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Mariko said with the rest of C-team.

The first of the vans started up with a roar, and the sound made Mariko’s heart jump. She chided herself; she was thinking too much about those automatic weapons, and now even the rumble of a diesel engine sounded like machine gun fire. She reached down for the SIG Sauer P230 at her hip, taking yet another look down the pipe of the pistol she already knew she’d charged.

“The seven-oh-three gets here in”—Sakakibara checked his huge black diver’s watch—“six minutes. That gives you five and a half to get where you need to be. Now mount up.”

“Yes, sir,” the whole team said, and Mariko started jogging toward the B and C van. The rest of her element fell in behind her.

When she reached the dark back corner of the van her heart was racing, and she knew it wasn’t because of a ten-meter jog. Her hand drifted to the holster on her hip, satisfying an irrational need to confirm that her SIG was even there. Running her left thumb over the ridges of her pistol’s hammer, she absently wondered why the movement should still feel strange to her. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t logged the hours retraining herself to shoot as a lefty; at last count she’d expended about two thousand rounds on the pistol range. She hadn’t yet hit the same scores she’d been shooting right-handed, and that idea weighed on her, heavier than the ceramic plating of the body armor that now made her shoulders ache. Despite all the training, somehow her brain couldn’t even get used to the fact that when she held something in her right hand, she held it with four fingers, not five.

Thinking about her missing finger made her think about the last time she had to point a pistol at a human being. Fuchida Shuzo had cost her more than her trigger finger. She’d actually flatlined after he rammed his katana through her gut, and she had matching scars on her belly and back to prove it. But more than this, he’d scarred her self-confidence. Everyone on the force knew they could die in this line of work, but Mariko had died, if only for a few minutes, and ever since then she wondered how things might have gone if she’d pulled that trigger even a tenth of a second earlier—if she’d put a nine-millimeter hole right in his breastbone, if she’d spared herself the weeks of rehab, if she’d earned herself a bit of detached soul-searching about the ethics of killing in the line of duty rather than ruminations on everything she’d done wrong to let things get that far.

Those ruminations plagued her day and night, and images of Fuchida and his sword flashed in her mind every time she visited the pistol range. Sometimes it got so bad that she couldn’t even pull the trigger. The more she needed to hit the target dead center, the more she got mired in the fear of failure, and once she fell that deep into her own head, she couldn’t even put the next shot on the paper.

Her former sensei, Yamada Yasuo, had a term for that: paralysis through analysis. Swordsmanship and marksmanship were exactly the same: the more you thought about what you were doing, the less likely you were to do it right. So long as Mariko trapped herself in doubting her marksmanship, she was a danger to herself and others.

Now, listening to her pulse hammer against her eardrums, she worried she might freeze up when those van doors opened and her team had to move. Two thousand rounds she’d slung downrange, trying to train her left hand to do its job, and two thousand times she’d failed. Now other cops were counting on her, and if she failed tonight the way she did with Fuchida, it might be one of their lives on the line. She drew back the slide on her again, knowing it wasn’t necessary, needing to do it anyway.

She felt a tap on her shoulder pad and looked up. “Hey,” Han said, “you think you checked that weapon enough yet?”

It was a little embarrassing being caught in the act, but the fact that he’d noticed was reassuring. Han and Mariko were partners now, and his attention to detail might save her ass someday. She’d already made a habit of noting the details about him. He always put his helmet on at the last minute. He tended to bounce a little on the balls of his feet when he was nervous. He had an app on his phone that gave him inning-by-inning updates on his Yomiuri Giants. The TMPD patch Velcroed to the front of his bulletproof vest was old, curling at the corners. Hers was curling a bit too—the vests usually sat in storage, sometimes for years, and who would ever bother to peel the patches off?—but Han’s patch had a weaker hold on his chest, probably because he caught the curled-up corner of it with his thumb every time he reached up to brush his floppy hair away from his ear. He wore his hair longer than regulations allowed, and his sideburns—longer and bushier than Mariko had ever seen on a Japanese man—were against regs too. But violating the personal grooming protocol was one of the perks when you worked undercover, and Han made the most of it. He’d have worn a beard and mustache too, if only he could grow them, but his boyish face didn’t allow him that luxury.

“I’m pretty sure that chambered round hasn’t gone anywhere,” he said. “Then again, I haven’t checked it myself. You mind checking it for me?”

“Smart-ass.”

Han grinned. “Guilty as charged.”

She noticed he was bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, and since he didn’t make any noise Mariko knew he’d strapped everything down tight. The SWAT guys that filled the rest of the van were equally silent—no mean feat given the close quarters and the sheer numbers of magazines, flash-bangs, gas masks, and radios they’d affixed to their armor.

The floor rumbled, someone pulled the door shut, and they were off. The lone red lightbulb cast weird shadows. There was an electric tension in the air, a palpable enthusiasm silenced of necessity but champing at the bit. “Han,” Mariko whispered, “you ever had to wear a vest before?”

“Sure. At my brother’s wedding.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Not since academy.”

“Me neither,” said Mariko. She lowered her voice even more and said, “Does it make you scared, knowing they have submachine guns in there?”

“Well, yeah.”

Mariko took a deep breath through her nose and held it awhile before blowing it out. It felt good to have someone on the team she didn’t have to be defensive with. With everyone else she was always on her guard, because everyone else was all too willing to see her as a girly-girl if she ever showed a moment’s weakness. But she and Han could tell each other the truth—even if only in private—and while she wouldn’t be caught dead whining to him, just being able to admit she was scared lessened her fear somehow.

“Jump-off point in one minute,” the driver said.

That palpable, silenced excitement mounted. It was strange, feeling that much nervous energy restrained by cops who were otherwise as rowdy as hormone-addled frat boys. She couldn’t see them well in the red light, but somehow Mariko knew even the SWAT guys were tensing up. “Han,” Mariko said, “you put your lid on yet?”

“Nope.”

“Well, put it on, damn it. I don’t want to tell the LT C-team didn’t hit their door on time because my partner bobbled his helmet while he was getting out of the van.”

“Jump-off in twenty,” said the driver. The doors opened up and suddenly the cabin filled with light and industrial stink. Acrid paint smells told Mariko there had to be an auto body shop nearby, and a wind out of the west carried all the smog that should have been marinating Tokyo and Yokohama. Or maybe that was the exhaust from teams A and D, which pulled away faster and faster as Mariko’s van slowed to a halt.

Then she was following Han, her heart pounding just as hard as her heels pounded the pavement. She wished her gear wasn’t so heavy, wished her goggles weren’t fogging up so soon, wished she’d spent a little less time on the pistol range and a little more time training for her next triathlon.

But just like running a tri, this too proved to be a case of pre-race jitters. She overtook Han as they turned the corner into a narrow alley. She could have passed the SWAT operators too, but she reminded herself that it was their job to breach the target, her job to seize the dope once the target was secure.

As they passed a shabby, weather-beaten, wood plank fence, Mariko got her first look at their target. It was a two-story slab of beige bricks nearly identical to the buildings beside it. There were six of them, lined up like the pips of a die on a dirty, seldom-used lot. Apart from being a tenth as high as most of the buildings in the neighborhood, the target and its little siblings were utterly without character. Light shone through most of the windows, which was good; it was easy to see perps behind them.

Mariko kept the darkened windows in her peripheral vision as she ran. Her focus was on the back door, and on the empty expanse of concrete between her and it. It was the only exposed stretch of their approach, but there was no getting to the C-side of the target, the back side, except to cross it. If the buildings on this dirty lot were the six pips on a die, the target building was the lower right pip and C-team was just rounding the lower left. Running right past the two were the twin tracks of the Chuo-Sobu Line, where the clackety-clack, clackety-clack of the 7:03 was getting louder and louder by the second. There was no crossing the train tracks—they were fenced, and the chief of police had nixed SWAT’s plan to just cut through the fences and approach the C-side directly—and so the only way to the back door was to cross that shooting gallery of a parking lot.

Mariko’s team tucked themselves into a corner to catch their breath. They waited for the train for the same reason they’d been so careful in strapping their gear down tight: speed and surprise were their only sure defense against automatic fire. The helmet and vest were half armor, half security blanket; every cop knew there was no protection against a lucky shot. Submachine guns could spit out a lot of potentially lucky shots.

Mariko heard a little snik behind her and turned around to see Han adjusting the straps of the helmet he’d just put on. He shot her a wink and a grin. “Go time.”

The train was upon them before she knew it, and then they were running again. Off to Mariko’s left, A-team’s big black van roared through the parking lot and B-team was almost to the B-side windows. As Mariko’s element reached the C-side door, the SWAT guy with the ram—a heavy goddamn thing by the look of it; Mariko could hardly believe he’d kept pace with the rest of the team—charged the door and laid into it.

The ram bounced back.

He hammered the door again, but the ram bounced off like it was made of rubber. “Shit,” Mariko said. So much for owning the building in the first five seconds.

Now that the train had gone, she could hear shouting, shattering windows, the explosion of flash-bangs. Now two SWAT guys were on the ram, beating the holy hell out of the door. They were supposed to have made their breach by now. A-team would already have punched right through the front door, and if Mariko’s team couldn’t punch their door, their suspects would only have A-team to shoot at.

Mariko didn’t like the thought of volunteering to draw some of that fire, but the whole point of converging on the target at once was to overwhelm and confuse the opposition. Besides, the longer her suspects had to think, the more time they had to find weapons or flush product down the toilet.

She pulled a flash-bang grenade from her belt and set it on the windowsill behind her. “Get down,” she said, and she tried to hide her whole body under her helmet.

White light consumed the world. The concussion was enough to buckle her knees. It sounded like Armageddon, but it sure blew the hell out of the window. Mariko hopped through the gap, Han following like her own shadow.

For Mariko the world narrowed to whatever her pistol could see. She put her front sight on the empty doorway, then this corner, then that one, not checking the other two because that was Han’s area and she knew he’d do it right. The furniture didn’t even register to her except as cover.

With the room cleared she and Han made for the hall, looking for the bathroom. When they raided residences, that was where perps disposed of product, and there was no reason a commercial storefront’s toilets couldn’t be used for the same purpose. Mariko reached the hallway just in time to see the C-side door exploding inward, finally succumbing to the ram. Two of her SWAT guys breached and held. The other two followed Mariko and Han.

Footsteps thundered on a flight of stairs somewhere nearby. So many voices were shouting through Mariko’s earpiece that she couldn’t keep them straight. She rounded a corner and saw a balding man in a maroon track suit closing a door behind him. She only got a glimpse of the room on the other side of the door, but she thought she saw some kind of heavy machinery back there.

In an instant Han had a pistol on the suspect too, shouting at him to get down, and both SWAT guys had him in the wavering glow of the flashlights undermounted on the barrels of their M4s. The man in the track suit gave all four cops a cocky smile, held his hands up near his head, and let something small and shiny fall from his right hand.

Keys.

That arrogant smile told Mariko all she needed to know. Her suspect didn’t care about being arrested. All he had to do was stand there getting handcuffed long enough for some machine on the other side of that door to destroy all of her precious evidence.

She rushed the perp. Still wearing that cocksure smile, he stood with his hands in front of him, as if to offer his wrists. It was the sort of pose she’d only seen in people who had been handcuffed before. Mariko took the tiniest bit of delight in seeing his eyes widen a bit as she drew near. Apparently he assumed she’d slow down before she reached him. But body armor wasn’t just for stopping bullets.

She hit him like a wrecking ball. They crashed through the locked door, which, unlike the reinforced door that had repelled the battering ram, was just an interior door like the ones she’d expect to find in the average apartment. She let her shoulder pad sink into her suspect’s solar plexus, rolling right over it and up to her feet. Han would be on the guy; Mariko didn’t need to look back and check. She didn’t recognize any of the weird machines standing in front of her—and there were a lot of them—but she didn’t need to. She just hit the STOP button on the one that was mixing a bunch of white powder.

She learned afterward that the machine was for making those biodegradable packing peanuts, and that doing so involved turning cornstarch into tiny little pellets, which were then subjected to extremely high heat to expand them to their peanutty volume. She also learned that mixing highly combustible amphetamines into the cornstarch wasn’t exactly a foolproof method to make a whole lot of speed disappear, but if you let the laced cornstarch hit the pellet processor, it was a great way to flood the building with noxious gases and make the whole neighborhood smell like ammonia for a week. In the moment, though, Mariko stood with her hands on her hips, panting a bit and smiling down at the guy she’d just blasted through the door.

Frowning at the splintered doorframe, Han said, “You know, Mariko, I thought we worked pretty well as a team, but I have to tell you I didn’t see that one coming.”

Mariko grinned at him, enjoying her adrenaline high. “Opened the door, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. But you know, these do that too.” He jingled the perp’s keys at her. “And these don’t give the SWAT guys heart attacks and make them hope they can clear the big roomful of weird-ass machines before someone puts a bullet in the chick they’re supposed to protect.”

SWAT had indeed cleared the rest of the factory floor, and judging by the chatter coming over the wire, the operation was over. It seemed impossible. “Han, how long did this thing take?”

“What, the op?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “Starting from when we first hit the back door? I don’t know. A minute, maybe? No, less than that, I think.”

“Me too. Call it forty-five seconds.”

“Okay. So what?”

“So,” Mariko said, “was that the best forty-five seconds or what? Damn, I love this job.”

2

Mariko sat on the edge of the desk in the shipping company’s sales office and waited for her verbal beating.

It was inevitable. She’d violated standard operating procedure, and cops who violated SOP suffered a thorough pummeling by a commanding officer. Han knew it too, and he sat beside her on the broad desktop, arms folded across the peeling TMPD patch on his chest, equally resigned to the same fate. “Hey, check that out,” he said, as if making small talk could distract them from their impending fate. “You think we can get these guys on weapons possession?”

Mariko had been looking at the same thing: a weather-beaten katana, obviously ancient, sitting on an elegant wooden holder on the shelf that ran the perimeter of the room, forty centimeters or so below the tiles of the drop ceiling. It was a shelf designed for collections, but this was a collection that defied categorization. Another katana, this one of spring steel, coupled with a little placard verifying its authenticity as an actual prop used in filming Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. An iron demon mask pitted with rust and age. A series of ceramic samurai figurines that looked more like action figures than art. A bronze helmet, its studded laths worn green with age, clearly a fragile piece that ought to have been behind glass in a museum. A wooden Fudo statue of the same vintage, lacquered in red, his trademark sword and lariat wrought in solid gold. An autographed head shot of Toshiro Mifune. Hanzo the Razor on LaserDisc, also autographed. One after the next, a parade of miscellany circumnavigating an otherwise coherent and cohesive room.

Mariko gazed absently at the old iron mask while rehearsing what she’d say in her own defense. The facts were plain: if she hadn’t breached the target when she did, she and her element might never have seen their perp closing that door behind him. They would simply have put a rifle on the locked door, cleared the rest of the building, and only then punched the factory floor, after they’d collected a full complement. Impeccable tactics, but it might have made the difference between having a bunch of hard evidence mixed into a hopper full of cornstarch and having hazmat teams evacuating the neighborhood while every hospital in town was choked with a glut of narcs and SWAT cops getting treated for chemical burns of the eyes, sinuses, and lungs.

All perfectly sound observations. All of them irrelevant if either she or Han had sustained an injury. SOP was SOP, and breaking it brought down the Hammer of God, regardless of whether anyone actually got hurt.

Han must have been entertaining similar thoughts. His right foot was doing a sewing machine impression, and he rapped his thumbs nervously on the top of his helmet, which he held in his lap. “Hey,” she said, “does that demon mask look familiar to you?”

“Huh?” She’d snapped him out of some distant reverie. “Uh, no, not really. You?”

“Yeah, but I can’t place it.” Mariko frowned. The more she looked at it, the more she was certain she ought to recognize the mask. It was like seeing the face of an old high school classmate, someone she ought to know but whose name maddeningly escaped her. Suddenly she found Han’s little drumbeat against his helmet distracting. She was about to ask him to stop when Sakakibara stormed into the office.

Instantly both of them stood to attention. “There they are,” Sakakibara said, “Butch and Sundance.”

Sakakibara never called anyone by name. He rarely took the trouble even to tell people which nicknames applied to them; he just made them up on the fly and expected everyone else to sort it out. Sometimes he’d give someone three or four names a day; other times the first nickname would stick like a steel-tipped dart and hang on for years.

He marched around them to drop heavily into the salesman’s chair behind the big desk. “The SWAT commander says I’m to suspend you for a month without pay and bust both of you back to general patrol. Says it’s no good for you to run around trying to get yourselves killed while his boys are trying to do their job. He’s not wrong about that.”

“Sir,” Mariko said, “if we had breached even ten seconds later than we did—”

Sakakibara fixed her with a glare. “Who the hell gave you permission to speak?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Which one of you pulled the stunt with the flash-bang?”

“I did, sir.” Mariko said it quickly, knowing that Han might well take the hit for her if she left him the opportunity. He’d been with Narcotics for eight years already, serving under Sakakibara for five of those. The LT was likely to go easier on a seasoned veteran than the newest addition to his team.

“The SWAT guys are having a fit over that, believe you me,” Sakakibara said. “Any guesses as to why?”

Mariko had a few. Broken glass was a hazard, period; there was a reason the SWAT operators all wore Kevlar gloves and Nomex hoods. And Mariko got lucky that she’d ported a carpeted room with her flash-bang. Crossing a glass-strewn linoleum floor was like tap-dancing on marbles.

But Sakakibara didn’t give her a chance to reply. “If you ask me, I figure it’s because none of them thought of it first. Wish I was there to see it; it must have been pretty damn cool.”

“It was,” Han said. Mariko just looked at the floor, struggling to restrain a grin.

“All right, chalk one up for Batgirl. So blah, blah, blah, don’t do that again, consider yourselves chastised. Now sit your munchkin asses down.”

Mariko and Han did as they were told, taking the two swivel chairs facing the desk. The chairs and the desk were a matching set, and they would have been at the height of fashion if this were 1981. Mariko allowed these details to pass by more or less unnoticed, as she was still trying to figure out the nickname. “Munchkin” was simple—Han was a head shorter than their LT and Mariko was shorter still—but “Batgirl” took a little longer. The stunt with the window. With the flash-bang. That she got from her belt. Utility belt. Batgirl.

Mariko hoped that wouldn’t be the nickname that stuck.

“Either of you know the name Urano Soseki?” Mariko and Han both shook their heads. “Well, you’re about to,” Sakakibara said. “He’s your buyer. Runs this place for the Kamaguchi-gumi. You’ll find him out back in the ambo. Did I hear it right? Did you Justice League him through a door?”

“Yes, sir.” Mariko didn’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed.

Sakakibara gave her an approving nod. “Not bad for a munchkin. Anyway, like I was saying, Neck Brace-san is your principal buyer. We’ve got five of his crew too, but they’re little fish. You’ll want to talk to them eventually, but get to Neck Brace before they wheel him out of here.”

“Sir,” Mariko said, “I could swear I heard an ambulance leaving five or ten minutes ago. Are you sure he’s still here?”

Sakakibara looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and more than a little disdain. “Are you questioning my judgment?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“You’ve got pretty big balls for a chick.”

At first Mariko read his tone as angry, but she changed her mind when he gave her a wry, snorting chuckle. “Not that I have to explain myself to you, but yes, we had two ambos on scene. The one you heard was running your seller to the OR. Neck Brace and his boys roughed the guy up pretty good.”

Mariko frowned. “Do we know why?”

“That’s your job to figure out.”

“Sir,” Han said, “does this mean you’re giving us this case?”

“Put that together all by yourself, did you? I figure Frodo here would be hungry for it, seeing as it’s Kamaguchis buying serious weight and it’s Kamaguchis that put the hit out on her. What do you say, Frodo? You want these guys or not?”

Mariko could only assume she was Frodo, though for the moment she was less concerned about the nickname and more concerned about Sakakibara’s loaded question. She had a history with the Kamaguchi-gumi, all right. Not of her own design; they just took it personally when a cop got famous by taking down one of their own. Fuchida Shuzo—the man who chopped off Mariko’s trigger finger, the one whose crazed face flashed before her eyes every time she went down to the pistol range to retrain her left hand—was once a street enforcer under Kamaguchi Ryusuke.

Mariko had killed Fuchida out of sheer self-preservation, an offense that a high-ranking underboss like Kamaguchi Ryusuke wouldn’t usually take personally. Everyone had a right to self-defense, a right that Kamaguchi had exercised himself on more than one occasion, always with lethal effect. Word on the street was that Kamaguchi would have preferred to write off Fuchida’s death as an unfortunate cost of doing business. Fuchida had been getting uppity anyway, and it wasn’t as if Mariko was some contract killer from a rival clan. But thanks to Fuchida’s predilection for swords and a couple of bizarre twists of fate, Mariko had killed him in an honest-to-God duel, and that was the sort of thing that splashed Mariko’s picture and the phrase “samurai showdown” all over the nightly news for a week. Kamaguchi Ryusuke had to put out a contract on her after that. In his line of work it was just saving face.

He’d passed the job off to his youngest son, Hanzo, known on the streets as the Bulldog. Like his father, the Bulldog had an underbite and a big, muscular frame. Mariko remembered his photos from her debrief with Organized Crime. His father had a reputation for being cool, levelheaded, and tenaciously territorial, but the Bulldog was only known for a brutish, sloppy brand of bloodshed that had become his signature. OC had long suspected him of being the Kamaguchi-gumi’s go-to guy when it came to vendetta killings. Now it seemed he’d signed on to even the score on Fuchida Shuzo.

It made Mariko’s heart do somersaults just to think of the fight with Fuchida. Somehow the thought of a bounty on her head was less scary. Troubling as it was, the idea of a hit man out there somewhere was still an abstract concept, while the vision of a madman trying to hack her to pieces was all too vivid. She wished it were otherwise. It was embarrassing to be afraid of things in the past, things that could no longer hurt her. She wished she could be as worried about the hit man as Han and Sakakibara seemed to be, but that wasn’t what kept her up at night.

Either way, the lieutenant’s question was clear. It wasn’t Would you like this case? but rather Are you man enough to take this case? And there could be only one answer to that. “Damn right, sir. Let me at them.”

Sakakibara gave a single, curt, approving nod. “Good. Like I said, your buyer’s out back. If you pass the SWAT commander on the way there, do me a favor—hell, do yourselves a favor—and look like I just gave you a royal ass-whupping.”

The ambulance was parked in the loading dock, and to get to the loading dock Mariko and Han had to pass through the splintered wreckage of the door Mariko had bashed down. She felt a cold little thrill of adrenaline at the sight of it.

They crossed the factory floor, which was cavernous, and Mariko imagined it must have been deafening when all the machines were running. As it was, the only sounds came from the sparse population of cops that had migrated into the room. One of the cops sat idly with a rifle across his lap and eight or nine perps sitting against the wall in front of him, most with their heads bowed, all with their hands zip-tied behind their backs. A gaggle of narcs had gathered around the machine that, until Mariko had shut it down, had been processing an admixture of cornstarch and amphetamines into a thick white goo. Mariko had a quick word with them before she and Han proceeded to their suspect.

“Hey, by the way,” Han said, “what gives with ‘Frodo’?”

Mariko shrugged. “Because I’m short?”

“Nah. That was ‘munchkin.’”

The fact that he didn’t ask about “Batgirl” probably meant that he’d figured it out already, and not for the first time, Mariko was glad to know she and her partner thought so much alike. For one thing, it helped them work as a team, and for another, Han was a veteran narc and good police; if Mariko thought like him, it meant she was thinking in the right ways.

She opened the door to the loading dock and was greeted by a blue cloud of diesel smoke. Inevitably, in the tradition of cops and firefighters everywhere, the paramedics had left their vehicle’s engine running. Through the haze Mariko looked down on Urano Soseki. They’d strapped him to a backboard and, as Sakakibara’s nickname foretold, he was bound in a neck brace. A cop sat next to him in the ambulance, still armored just as Han and Mariko were; SWAT’s tactical medic, no doubt. Unintelligible voices squawked over the paramedics’ comms, different from the chatter coming in over the SWAT and narc channels. Straining in his neck brace to see who had just come in, Urano said, “You again.”

“Me again,” said Mariko, jogging jauntily down the short flight of stairs to where the ambulance was parked. In the tone a doctor would use with a six-year-old patient, she said, “And how are you feeling today?”

“I been bowled over by a piece of snatch before, but never quite like that. You want to go for another roll with me?”

Lovely, Mariko thought, but she didn’t let it show on her face. Han ignored him too, for which Mariko was eternally grateful. She didn’t need anyone leaping to her defense as if she were some kind of damsel in distress. There weren’t many cops that understood that—not very many men who understood it—and once again Mariko was glad to have Han as her partner.

The tactical medic wasn’t as enlightened. He thapped Urano in the forehead with a knuckle and said, “Shut up.”

Han hopped up in the back of the ambulance and sat down next to Urano. “So,” he said, “I guess you know you’re going to prison for a while.”

“You got nothing on me,” said Urano.

“I don’t know about that,” Mariko said. “There’s all that speed in your cornstarch hopper. That’s got to count for something.”

Urano snorted. “It’s not mine.”

“Sorry,” Han said, “that’s not the way this works. See, if it’s illegal and it’s in your building, we’ve got you on possession.”

Mariko nodded. “Felony possession, since our guys are saying you’ve got quite a bit of it in there. How much did they say, Han?”

“At least fifty kilos,” said Han. “Maybe more.”

“That’s right. Urano-san, did you know that machine in there has a scale built into it?” He didn’t need her to connect the rest of the dots. There was an inventory log too, and nothing could be easier than checking the weight of what was actually in the machine against the weight of the bags some factory worker had recorded pouring into the machine.

“You got nothing,” said Urano. “We didn’t pay for it. It’s not ours.”

“Really?” Han said. “So, what, some guy just came by and decided to donate a whole bunch of speed?”

“It’s not ours,” said Urano, his patience fading fast. He tried to sit up to look Han in the eye; a jolt of pain slammed him flat on his back. “Not ours,” he grunted. “We told that little shit not to bring it by here. He said you were coming. I told him we’d set up another meet. The dumb bastard came by anyway.”

“And that’s why you and your boys beat the hell out of him,” said Mariko.

“So we get to add aggravated battery to the possession charge,” said Han.

“Not possession. It’s not ours.” Another shot of pain made Urano wince. “Book me on the assault thing. Fine. He deserved it. But we didn’t pay for the shit. We don’t even got any money around here. Go look. You see any big stacks of bills, you tell me; I could use them. But we got nothing. We bought nothing. So you got nothing.”

“You keep saying that,” said Han. “We’ll have to sit down and chat sometime about how the drug trade works.”

“But maybe downtown,” said Mariko.

“Yeah,” said Han, “and maybe after you go see a doctor. You look like someone kicked your ass.”

Mariko and Han sat on the concrete lip of the dock as they watched the ambulance pull away. Han fished through his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. Lighting up, he said, “You think he’s telling the truth about the cash?”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Me neither.” He said it with a knowing tone. When it came to narcotics, no one wanted to tell the truth. Users, dealers, suppliers, all of them lied—and not just to cops, but to their own loved ones and even to themselves. Mariko knew that all too well, as did anyone with a history of addiction in the family. Mariko prided herself on her ability to detect when someone was lying to her, and if anything, Han was better at it than she was. Eight years on Narcotics meant eight years of seeing through the smokescreens.

“So what are these guys selling the dope for, if not for cash? A hostage, maybe?”

“I don’t like it,” Mariko said. “Why piss off the hostage takers? You’ve got to deliver payment on their terms, neh?”

“Good point.”

“But what, then? You can’t have a drug buy with no money.”

“Yeah,” Han said around his cigarette, “but you’re not supposed to have dealers show up to a blown sting either. Urano said his guy knew we were coming.”

“Which means his guy doesn’t mind pissing off the Kamaguchi-gumi. He’s got to be out of his mind.”

“Or desperate.”

“Lucky to be alive either way. Assuming he survives, that is.”

“Right,” said Han. “Sakakibara said the dude’s in surgery, neh?”

Mariko nodded. “So we’ve got a seller who’s willing to take enormous risks—”

“Enormous by dope slingers’ standards. Not exactly my grandma’s sewing circle.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And a buyer who’s willing to beat his supplier half to death. Is this case making any sense to you?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither.” Mariko chuckled and shook her head. “But you’re interested, neh?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Me too.”

3

Mariko could smell herself in the elevator. She was sweaty, her matted hair felt as if it still had a helmet strapped onto it, and she smelled faintly of Fourth of July fireworks.

She was the only person in the whole apartment building who would have drawn that comparison. She was the only one who had ever celebrated the Fourth of July, because she was the only one who spent her childhood in the States. It was strange, thinking of fireworks she hadn’t smelled since junior high, and she wondered why on earth her hair would suddenly share that smell. Then she remembered the flash-bang going off right above her head.

The elevator announced her floor with a canned voice that sounded just like the woman who narrated those airline safety videos. Mariko hauled herself out of the elevator and tromped down the narrow corridor to her apartment. Her boots felt like they were made of lead and she wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and collapse into bed. But that was a pipe dream. She’d won enough races and tussled with enough bad guys to know her body’s reaction to an adrenaline high. She wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon.

That was all right, because she had some research to do.

But the shower came first. Then she flicked on the electric teapot, and when it clicked itself off she poured boiling water into two extruded polystyrene containers of Cup Noodles. It was something of a post-workout ritual for her, planting herself on the bed, savoring the soy sauce smell of instant ramen, and cracking open one of her old sensei’s notebooks. Usually her evening workouts involved swords, not bulldozing bad guys through locked doors, but the cool-down ritual was equally effective in either case.

Professor Yamada Yasuo, her first kenjutsu teacher, had earned himself a seat in the pantheon of Japan’s greatest medieval historians. He harbored a fascination with the material culture of the samurai that began with his first week in army boot camp and stayed with him until his dying day, leading him to earn black belts in every sword art Japan had to offer. Fate had a cruel sense of irony: Yamada-sensei died of a vicious sword wound, and at the hand of his own student, no less. Fuchida Shuzo was a butcher and a sociopath, and after killing Yamada, he’d forced Mariko into the sword fight that cost Mariko her finger and Fuchida his life. Mariko wasn’t religious, but she knew fate’s cruel irony when she saw it: living by the sword and dying by the sword and all that.

She had the honor of being Yamada’s last kenjutsu student, and also of being the inheritor of all of his notebooks. He’d written everything by hand—had never even owned a computer—and most of his work was over Mariko’s head. In fact, much of it was over the heads of the many tenured and gray-haired history professors whose dissertation committees he’d chaired back when they were in school, but even so, Mariko enjoyed working her way through his notes. She thought of them as her way to have a little conversation with him.

Tonight, however, she was looking for something specific. That demon mask, the one on the office shelf in the packing plant, was familiar somehow. At first she thought it might have been a pop culture thing—growing up overseas, she’d missed out on a lot of her generation’s icons—but Han hadn’t recognized it either. That made her think the mask must have been somewhere in Yamada-sensei’s many scribblings.

She had hundreds of his notebooks, stacked in tightly packed banker’s boxes along the far wall of her tiny bedroom. She had no space for them, but neither could she bear to part with them. She liked coming home to him, even if all she had left of him was his old notes and his sword. Glorious Victory Unsought, the final masterpiece of Master Inazuma, rested in the sword rack she’d installed over her bed. It was enormous, a horseman’s weapon, and it threatened to pull out the mounting screws with its weight. That in and of itself might have been tempting fate’s sense of irony—in a land of earthquakes, a swordswoman was unwise to sleep directly under her weapon—but the sword was so long that this was the only wall it would fit on.

She was skimming tonight, not reading, and she worked her way through five volumes in the time it took her to finish her dinner. It was on the last page of the last notebook that she found what she was looking for.

The demon mask stared back at her. Its long, curving fangs were sharper than its stubby horns, its face wrought in a permanent grimace. It had a sharp row of incisors but no lower jaw, as it covered only the top half of the face, like something one might wear to a masquerade ball.

Yamada-sensei must have sketched it when he was younger, before he lost his vision. He’d surrounded it with notes, including guesses at its weight and size, and also the names of some historical figures attached to it. Mariko only recognized one of the names: Hideyoshi, one of the San Eiketsu, the Three Unifiers. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga, and Tokugawa Ieyasu were the founding fathers of her country, three great warlords who united dozens of warring fiefdoms and turned them into one pacified empire. If not for them, there would be no Japan.

A thrill of adrenaline clenched Mariko’s stomach and froze her breath in her lungs. It was the same feeling she would expect after narrowly missing what should have been a fatal car crash. Not two hours ago, she’d raided that packing plant with a small army of cops. What if the Kamaguchis had initiated a firefight? Both sides had automatic weapons. This was the kind of artifact that Indiana Jones would risk his life to recover, and one stray bullet could have destroyed it forever.

It was uncanny that she should own the only notebook with a sketch of this mask and that she just so happened to be in the same room with the mask. Not so long ago, she would have called it a spooky coincidence, but this was Yamada’s notebook, and her time with him had been weird enough that she’d stopped using the word coincidence when it came to him.

Of course it was possible that Yamada’s mask had nothing to do with the mask she’d seen tonight. More than possible, in fact. Probable. Almost certain. There were thousands of masks in Japanese history, tens of thousands, and as a historian and a lover of medieval artifacts, Yamada would have had an interest in any number of them. But his particular speciality—his raison d’être, in fact—was studying the artifacts that no one else dared to study lest they be accused of believing in magic. Mariko wasn’t ready to believe in magic, but she did believe in fate. Her experience with Yamada left her no other choice. And that meant she had to admit the possibility that she and the mask were fated to cross paths.

A strange catharsis settled over her. She’d satisfied her curiosity about the mask. She’d reinforced her faith in her own powers of recollection, association, and deduction—never a bad thing for the only female detective in a department run by chauvinism and prejudice. And she’d forged a new connection with her departed sensei. She didn’t like believing in fate. It was too close to astrology for her, too trippy-hippy, so if she had to suffer her new belief, it was good to find more evidence in support of it.

And it was good to find something that made sense tonight. It was weird enough to cross paths with an artifact like the mask, and her new narcotics case was weirder still. A buy with no cash. A supplier with no fear of cops or yakuzas. Nothing about the case made sense. It was the kind of thing to keep her up all night, staring at the ceiling and working over one failed theory after the next. Catharsis was the best sleeping aid she knew of. As tired as she was, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

4

The instant she awoke, she knew something was wrong.

It was impossible to say what tipped her off. It might have been some scent in the air, noticeable only on a subliminal level. Mariko couldn’t say for sure. It wasn’t her alarm clock—it hadn’t gone off yet—and there was no other noise in her apartment. Mariko only knew that something wasn’t right. And that was before she saw Glorious Victory was missing.

Her sword was always the first thing she saw in the morning, right above her head as soon as she awoke. And now it was gone. An intruder had been in her apartment. He’d been standing right over her, in her bed, asleep. He could have done anything to her. And he’d stolen the most valuable thing she’d ever own.

The sight of the empty sword rack hit her like a hammer in the chest, but she didn’t have time to think about it. Someone had been in her apartment. Her only safe place wasn’t safe anymore. Someone had been in her apartment.

Her pistol was at work, locked in a desk drawer. Her Cheetah stun baton was on the little wall-mounted bookshelf above her kitchen table. Her gaze flew wildly around the room, looking for a weapon. There was nothing. The intruder might still be in her home and she was unarmed—and caught in panties and a T-shirt, no less. She’d never felt more vulnerable.

The best weapon she could find was her alarm clock—battery powered, not heavy enough to really hurt anyone, but it was the best she could do. She gripped it like a cavewoman’s brain-clubbing rock and got a sight line on her kitchen. It was clear. She traded the clock for the Cheetah, then opened a drawer with her free hand and dug around for her biggest kitchen knife. It seemed cheap, flimsy, almost toylike now that she needed to use it for self-defense. But she was as heavily armed as she could make herself, so she checked the last hiding place in her apartment: her bathroom. It was empty.

She went to relock her door, only to find it was already locked. She’d actually hoped she’d forgotten to lock it the night before, because now the truth was clear: she wasn’t safe at all. Not here. Her doors and windows were no protection. Someone had been standing over her in her bed. He could have beaten her with her own stun baton. He could have put that flimsy knife to her throat. Raped her. Killed her. Anything.

Noise erupted behind her. She whirled, her breath frozen, her heart pierced by a million icy needles. She brought her feeble weapons to bear, but only in vain. It was just her alarm clock.

It buzzed irritably on her countertop, louder than it had ever been. In truth it only seemed that way, and Mariko knew it. She was jumpy. The damn thing had taken her by surprise.

She killed it and slumped to the floor. Her back pressed against her front door, and the cold of the floor tiles seeped into her feet and her ass. She felt naked. What now? she thought. Call the cops? You are the cops. Call Mom? Saori? They wouldn’t be any help. But Mariko had to call someone. She didn’t want to deal with this on her own.

That in itself was an alien instinct. Self-reliance was one of her strong suits, maybe her strongest. But this invasion of privacy had shaken her to the core.

Dialing 110 was the right thing to do after a burglary. It was what she would have advised anyone else to do. But Mariko didn’t do it. She grabbed her phone and dialed Han. “Get to my place as quick as you can,” she said. “Bring a fingerprinting kit with you, and don’t touch my door until you dust it.”

• • •

“Screw the prints,” Han said, “how are you?”

“I told you, I’m fine,” Mariko said. They both knew she was lying and they both knew why, and Mariko wished Han could just leave it at that. “What did you find on my doorknob?”

“Prints all over it—most of them yours, probably, but we know your guy definitely didn’t wipe it clean. No scarring around the keyhole, so I don’t think he used a bump key. No scuffs on the frame near the jamb either, so I don’t think he worked the bolt. But I’ve got this funny suspicion that you knew all of that already. What’s going on here?”

“Weird stuff. Ninja stuff.” Mariko took the fingerprinting kit from him and started dusting her apartment, starting with the sword rack in the bedroom. “I checked with the night watchman; only four people came in or out all night, and they all live here. The security cameras tell the same story. My windows are all intact, all locked from the inside—”

“Which hardly matters, since you live on the seventeenth floor—”

“But I checked anyway, just to be thorough. And you’re going to love this: the door chain was latched too.”

“What? That’s impossible.”

“Clearly not.”

“Come on. How could he—?”

“I don’t know, Han. All I know is that when I come home I always slide the chain on the little thingy, and when I woke up this morning, the chain was on the little thingy.”

Han poked his head in her bedroom. “So your perp couldn’t have come through the door.”

“Nope.”

“And he couldn’t have come through a window.”

“Not unless he knows how to relock them from outside.”

Han scanned the room, maybe looking for additional entries and exits. “So what’d he do, pass through the wall?”

“Kind of looks that way, doesn’t it? And he walked out of here with a sword this big.” She spread her arms as wide as they would go. “Not exactly inconspicuous. I’ve had the radio on ever since I called you. No reports of a ninja creeping through the neighborhood with a giant sword.”

“To hell with the radio. You need to call Mulder and Scully. This isn’t a home invasion, it’s a damn X-Files episode.” He studied her for a second. “Shit, Mariko, I’m sorry. This has to be scary as hell for you.”

“I’m not exactly thrilled about it, no.” She looked away from him, and pressed her eyes shut and her lips together as if sheer force of will could keep her face from going red. She didn’t want to have this conversation with another cop—not even with Han, the one person she trusted more than anyone else on the force.

“Did he . . . I mean, are you okay? Like, okay okay?”

Mariko swallowed. “If you’re asking what I think you’re asking, no, he didn’t rape me.”

Han sighed as if she’d just lifted a parked car off his chest. His relief was so palpable that she even felt some of it herself. This was why he’d earned her trust. Any other man in the department would have pressured her to go in for a rape kit. Han took her at her word, and he did it because he treated her like an adult. Lots of the other guys respected her, but they did it the same way they’d respect a high school athlete doing something amazing, something only the pros should be able to do.

So when he felt relieved, it wasn’t fatherly or brotherly or anything else. It was plain old thank God you’re okay, and that meant the world to her. Given the morning she was having, it almost made her cry.

But that wasn’t something she was going to do, even in front of him. She busied herself with studying the crime scene so she’d have something other than her emotions to think about. Her eyes passed over Yamada-sensei’s sketch of the demon mask, in the notebook she’d left faceup and sprawled open the night before.

She winced at the thought of what damage she’d done to the spine of the notebook, leaving it sit open like that for hours. It was the most trivial concern imaginable, and yet it niggled at her, so she reached down to close the book. As she did so, the next page flopped over, and on the overleaf she saw Yamada’s handwriting running like a banner at the top of the page: What is the connection between the mask and Glorious Victory Unsought?

She sat heavily on the bed. Kamaguchi Hanzo—the man who had a contract on her life, the man whose drug den she’d raided the night before, the man whose brutality on the streets had earned him the name Bulldog—owned an ancient mask that was somehow related to her sword. A sword that was now missing. A sword that had been taken by someone standing over her bed as she slept.

“Oh, hell,” she said.

“What?” Han said.

“It was the Bulldog. I think he’s sending me a message.” Mariko handed Han the notebook, opened to the page with the mask. “Remember the shelf of antiques in his office? All medieval stuff, most of it related to the samurai. My sword would fit right in.”

“So what, last night he decided to expand his collection?” Han thought about it for a second. “I don’t like it. I mean, there’s a hit out on you, right? If he’s going to take all the trouble to break into your place, why not just shoot you?”

“Gee, thanks. You really know how to help a girl feel safe.”

Han winced as if he just felt the squish of dog crap under his shoe. “Sorry. But you know what I’m getting at. Why not collect a double payday? The sword plus the bounty?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I think he’s trying to send me a message. But I’m damned if I know how to read it.”

Han looked back at the door, then at the windows, his boyish face scrunched up in thought. “There’s something else: that message of his is in the wrong language. I mean, the dude’s got a list of priors going back twenty, twenty-five years, almost all of them violent crimes. Now picture a guy like that breaking into your apartment. How is he going to do it?”

Mariko thought of the Bulldog’s photo on the top sheet in his file. Broad shoulders, ferocious eyes, an underbite like a wild boar’s. Not the type to run a stealth mission. “Good point,” she said. “Kicking down the door and shoving a shotgun in your mouth is more his speed.”

“Exactly. This ninja stuff is just weird.”

“So is his dope deal.” Mariko ticked off each point on her fingers: “No cash on hand for the buy. A dealer who knows there’s a sting and shows up anyway. Kamaguchi-gumi enforcers who don’t mind beating the hell out of their supplier but somehow grow a conscience when it comes to killing him—”

“I don’t know about that,” Han said. “Last time I checked, the dude was still in surgery.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean. They could have killed him, but instead they just roughed him up. We’ve got a drug deal with no money and no logical motives for the buyers or the sellers. And now the buyer just happens to break into my apartment on the very same night? Why wait this long? If Kamaguchi knows where I live, he could have aced me weeks ago.”

“And if he wanted to hock your sword for drug money, he could have kicked in your door whenever he wanted.”

“Exactly. But instead he waits until the very night I’m involved in a raid on his speed operation, and then he does all of this elaborate ninja shit.”

Han shook his head. “I don’t get it. You?”

“Not a clue.”

“But you’re interested, aren’t you?”

“Ten percent interested, ninety percent pissed off.” Mariko clenched her fists in frustration. “This guy broke into my home, Han. And from the look of it, he can do it whenever he wants. Can you understand what that means to a woman who lives alone? Where the hell am I supposed to sleep tonight?”

Han took a deep breath, as if he were getting ready to jump off a cliff. Then, just before offering the invitation Mariko knew was coming, he deflated. He couldn’t put her up at his place. That was a line male and female partners couldn’t cross, and both of them knew it. The department’s prohibition against “fraternization between officers” was admittedly old-fashioned, and Han had no qualms about bucking bullshit regulations when he had a mind to, but Mariko didn’t stray outside the lines. She counted herself lucky to have a commanding officer who was willing to let her kick down doors instead of pushing paperwork, and she wasn’t about to jeopardize that.

Besides, the real problem wasn’t Mariko’s accommodations; it was the break-in, the upside-down drug bust, the price on Mariko’s head. Somehow they’d all become interconnected. Whatever the connection was, it had Mariko feeling so vulnerable that she hadn’t even mustered the courage to take a shower. The thought of trapping herself in a tiny room, naked and cornered, was too unsettling.

She pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her jeans and checked the time. She and Han had half an hour before Lieutenant Sakakibara would bust their asses for being late to work. No time for a shower now. She stepped past Han, poked her head into the bathroom, and studied her reflection in the mirror. Her short, choppy, bed-head hair stuck out in a hundred different directions.

“That’s just great,” she said, cranking on the hot water. She’d have to run her head under the faucet and call it good. “Han, do me a huge favor and stand guard outside my door for two minutes, would you? If you see any ninjas in the hallway, shoot to kill.”

Han grinned. “You got it.” He made a show of racking the slide on his pistol for dramatic effect.

She forced a laugh, pushed him into the hallway, and locked the door. It wasn’t even six thirty yet and it was already shaping up to be one hell of a day.