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  “All right, ordinary human being. Let me show you what I’ve got.”

  Martine took the envelope from her bag and shook out the photo.

  Saya studied it closely, lips pursed, her large eyes suddenly serious and alert. “Do you know who this is?” she murmured, tapping a fingernail on the figure in the dark polo-neck sweater.

  “I believe she’s some kind of student radical. At least she was thirty years ago.”

  “Not just any student radical. That woman is Reiko Matsubara, leader of the Red Core Faction. You can find her picture on the wall of every police station in Japan.”

  “What did she do to earn that?”

  “Hijacking, kidnapping, assassinations, almost anything you can think of. She’s personally responsible for dozens of deaths in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. It’s said that she ordered the execution of her first husband.”

  “Really? What did he do?”

  “Apparently he’d been conducting secret negotiations with one of the rival groups. Matsubara couldn’t tolerate that. So she decided to show that her devotion to the cause was pure, untainted by even the tiniest blemish of personal sentiment. Her group was staying in Syria at the time, being treated like heroes after the attack on that Israeli airport. The guy was strangled in the middle of an ideology session. They wrapped a rope around his neck, and everyone there helped to pull it tight.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “For people like you and me it’s horrible. But if you’ve already killed twenty or thirty people, I guess another one doesn’t make much difference.”

  “Even your own husband?”

  Saya shrugged. “Husbands and wives are always killing each other. It’s the most common form of murder in the world.”

  They were silent for a moment, both aware of the gap between the world view of a female cop and the world view of a female journalist. An idea came into Martine’s head, a question that would be a mistake to ask unless they had reached a certain level of openness and intimacy. They had hardly spoken before, but Martine decided it had been reached.

  “Can I ask you a favor?”

  [191] “What kind of favor?”

  “One that needs you to be cop and a friend at the same time. I think Nozawa is connected to this Matsubara woman somehow.”

  Saya Miki’s large, lustrous eyes got a little larger. “Tsuyoshi Nozawa? What a strange idea!”

  “Well, they’re almost the same age, aren’t they? And Nozawa used to be pretty radical, back in his folk-rock period.”

  “But Nozawa mixed up with a crazy woman like Matsubara—it hardly seems possible.”

  “Even the sane people went a little crazy in those days, or so I’m told.” Martine was picturing Makoto with long hair and an Afghan coat.

  “Maybe so. I was in junior school at the time. So what do you want me to do?”

  “I’d like to know if there’s any mention of Nozawa in this woman’s police file.”

  Now Saya the cop was genuinely shocked. “Wait a moment. This is serious stuff you’re asking. Revealing police data is a criminal offense.”

  “It’s serious all the way, Saya-san. Nozawa could be the next prime minister. Don’t you think the world should know what kind of person he really is?”

  Saya shook her head, sending a drop of moisture flying against Martine’s cheek. “You’re talking like a journalist again. People could lose their jobs helping you.”

  “You’re right. I am talking like a journalist. But I believe in what I’m doing, just as much as you do. If Nozawa goes any further, there’ll be much more to worry about than lost jobs. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Saya Miki turned to face her and their eyes locked. Saya had big, liquid eyes, friendly and funny most of the time, but hardcore scary when you were facing her in a karate match. Now she was giving Martine her toughest, most menacing karate stare. Martine held the stare, absorbing it just as she had the first time they faced off.

  “What’s the matter, Saya? Don’t you trust me?”

  Saya Miki paused, holding her gaze, then nodded slowly. “All right” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She walked over to her locker, letting the towel drop to the floor. Martine sat there admiring her high, shapely breasts, the smooth strength of her legs, the way she moved, back straight, no bullshit, no apologies. If it ever occurred to Martine to feel attracted toward a woman—although it never had, not once, not even in the days when a lot of unusual things occurred to her—then this was definitely the kind of woman she would choose.

  [192] In mid-morning Martine called Kimura and arranged to meet him and his computer expert friend in the grounds of a shrine dedicated to scholarship and literacy. Outside the exam season it was a secluded spot.

  The stone staircase leading up to the shrine was half hidden behind a pachinko parlor and a Starjacks café, now closed “pending investigation” like every other Starjacks outlet in the Kanto region. Kimura and his friend were already there, tossing a Frisbee between the thick red pillars of the shrine gate. The only others present were a homeless man sprawled under a pine tree and a one-eared cat watching the Frisbee spin through the air with supercilious indifference. From their hiding place in the bushes, the cicadas were screeching out a long chorus.

  Kimura moved stiffly, grimacing with effort whenever he had to bend his knees. His friend was as lithe as a dancer, every movement precise and balanced. He would have been a natural at karate, thought Martine. Kimura flicked the Frisbee at Martine in a wobbly parabola that ended at ankle height and she made a one-handed catch and sent it whirring back toward his head in a twisting, ducking curve. Kimura missed his catch, and the Frisbee smacked into the old shrine gate, knocking off flakes of red paint.

  “Ouch!” he yelled, clutching his fingertips. “Where did you learn that?”

  The answer was from her father, on a beach in Greece twenty years ago, the summer her mother’s drunken outbursts finally drove him away for good. She didn’t say anything, however, and just laughed.

  They sat down on a stone bench at the side of the shrine. Kimura produced a big plastic bottle of green tea and offered it around. Martine took a swig, then stared in amazement at the label.

  National Regeneration Tea

  Cool, refreshing, packed with vitamins to help you strive for Japan’s future.

  Underneath was a cartoon picture of Nozawa wearing his “certain death” headband, his hand balled into a fist almost as large as his head.

  “So which one of you is the Nozawa fan?” asked Martine, handing the bottle back to Kimura’s friend.

  Kimura grinned. “Neither of us. I went to the convenience store at the corner, and this was the only brand available. Apparently it’s a new product, with huge marketing muscle behind it. You know how the system works, don’t you?”

  Martine nodded. She knew how the system worked because Makoto had complained about it so many times. The simplest way for manufacturers to ensure the success of a key product was to persuade the retailers to take [193] competitors’ products off the shelves. The favored means were kickbacks posing as “discounts” and threats of across-the-board supply cuts. Illegal, of course, but nobody cared. One aspect of the crisis was that the strong got stronger and the weak got weaker, and meddlesome rules like this were only applied to the latter.

  “So what about my stalker?” asked Martine, dabbing her face with a handkerchief. “Any progress with tracking him down yet?”

  “You need to be patient,” said Kimura’s friend. “These things always take time.”

  The sweat was beading Kimura’s forehead, glistening from the pores on his nose, and running down his hairy forearms in tiny rivulets. His friend was as cool and unruffled as if he were sitting in an air-conditioned office.

  “I understand that. It’s just that I’ve been getting a little nervous lately.”

  “So what’s making you nervous?”

  Martine wrinkled her nose
in irritation. Everything that came through to her computer was automatically bounced through to Kimura’s friend. Surely he had seen that comment about the color of her underwear.

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? The guy’s a pervert. He’s probably dangerous.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Kimura’s friend. He picked up the Frisbee and started twirling it around on the end of his finger.

  Martine sighed. It would be impossible for a man to understand how she felt about the situation.

  “What makes you so certain?” she retorted.

  “Simple. This person is no ordinary stalker. Everything he does is carefully planned. He never repeats a pattern. He never uses your name. He always varies the way he addresses you—“blond goddess,” “favorite beauty,” and so on. This makes him very difficult to trace.”

  “But what about the personal comments?”

  “I think he planted those as attention grabbers, to make sure you didn’t ignore the messages. And it worked, right?”

  “It certainly did,” said Martine tightly. “If I ever come face-to-face with this guy ...”

  Kimura’s pal shrugged, eyes fixed on the spinning Frisbee. “Of course we don’t even know it is a guy.”

  “What? You think it’s a woman?”

  “That’s always possible, I suppose. More likely it’s a computer program, instructed to generate information strings that are hard to trace and highly likely to be read.”

  Martine gazed at him in amazement. A machine in an empty room generating lewd thoughts about her panties and breasts. The idea was bizarre, even by the standards of all the other bizarreness she had been encountering recently.

  [194] She reached out and lifted the Frisbee off his finger. “Look, a real human being was watching me yesterday. He saw me on my balcony wearing a brand-new pair of shorts.”

  Kimura’s friend nodded. “Okay,” he said nonchalantly, “but a sophisticated program would have requested exactly that kind of input. It would have said, ‘Find item of clothing worn only at home,’ and someone would have gone to check.”

  “You think that’s likely?”

  “It’s only a theory. At the moment everything is only a theory.”

  Martine handed him the Frisbee. What she had just learned was both reassuring and disturbing. Reassuring because the mystery messages were not coming from an ordinary pervert, the kind whose fantasies can do terrible damage to other people’s realities. Disturbing because she now had even less idea of what was happening around her.

  When Martine passed through the shrine gate, the homeless guy was sitting with his back against the pine tree. She glanced at him, and his eyes shifted to the ground. His hands, she noted, were strangely clean.

  At the bottom of the stone steps, a baked yam seller had parked his van at the curb. He was staring at Martine through the grubby window. A potbellied salaryman stood outside a pachinko parlor, watching her out of the corner of his eye. A woman in a bookstore glanced at her over the top of the magazine she was reading.

  Who were these people? Why were they watching her? Could they be students of the Morikawa school, following her around as part of their life experience? Or data-gatherers sent by a computer program? Or just ordinary people curious at the sight of a tense-looking blond woman walking away from the shrine with unnatural haste?

  Reiko Matsubara sat in her hotel room in Macao waiting for the man from Shanghai. He was late again, which annoyed her. Right from the start Matsubara had distrusted him. Whenever someone made a comment, he always watched how the others responded before making a response himself. If they smiled, he smiled. If they looked stern, he looked stern. It was only a split-second glance—usually directed at the young general, or some other powerful person—but Matsubara had trained herself to notice these things. That was how she had survived the past thirty years.

  For the moment there was no choice but to take his instructions. The man from Shanghai had the young general’s total confidence, and the latter was [195] crucial to Reiko Matsubara’s plans. Backed by the young general, there was no limit to what she could accomplish. The opportunity for revolution in Japan, a wave of terror that would destabilize the ruling clique and dissolve the false attitudes of the masses, was closer than ever before.

  For years it had seemed like a distant dream, but not any longer. All around the world, the dispossessed of the earth were finally rising up against their oppressors, toppling the glittering towers of capitalism with the sheer force of their revolutionary spirit. A new generation of activist no longer willing merely to wave placards and chant slogans was targeting greedy bankers, pollution-spewing oil companies, and pharmaceutical companies that maximized profits while millions of children were dying. Farmers were torching supermarkets. Animal liberation guerrillas were kidnapping scientists and giving them a taste of their own experiments. And this was only the beginning. You couldn’t expect the masses to attain true consciousness during an economic upwave. Only in the depths of an economic downwave, when the gaps in wealth between the oppressors and the oppressed became too wide to endure—only then would ordinary people be ready to rise up and join the struggle. She had known this as a teenager reading Adorno, Marcuse, and Fanon, and all these years she had been waiting for the downwave to arrive. Now at last it was here, tearing through whole regions, and shattering the false promises of capitalism with gratifying ease.

  Over the past quarter of a century she’d traveled under hundreds of different passports from dozens of different countries. She’d been expelled from Syria, Bulgaria, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Cuba, and Venezuela. She’d spent two years in the Andes with the Shining Path, watching as they rounded up villages of government sympathizers, flayed the headmen alive, and threw their women into tubs of boiling oil, and she’d survived an Israeli rocket attack in the Bekaa valley. But always she had known that she would return to Japan. That was where her struggle had started, and that was where it would end.

  There was a knock on the door. Matsubara opened it a bit and put her eye to the crack. The man from Shanghai was standing there, and next to him was someone with hollow cheeks and the narrow eyes of a fox.

  “Who’s that?” queried Matsubara in English.

  “He’s the man I told you about.”

  Matsubara opened the door. The fox-eyed man walked inside. He was carrying a calfskin attaché case which he placed carefully on the table. He said nothing, and didn’t give Reiko Matsubara even a sideways glance.

  She frowned. “What’s his name?”

  “He’s called Li. He’s one of our top men, certainly the best for your purposes.”

  [196] “How do I know that?”

  “He’ll show you.”

  The man from Shanghai nodded at Li, who sat down at the table. He clicked open the briefcase and began to assemble the rifle that was inside. He moved quickly and methodically, using a superfine white cloth to rub down every joint and screw before engaging it.

  Matsubara watched his every move closely. He looked young, probably in his mid-twenties, and he had a prominent Adam’s apple which bobbed up and down as he worked.

  “What has he done?”

  “Many things. He has just returned from Kansu, where there were disturbances caused by antipatriotic elements. Li was part of a squad that tracked down the leaders and eliminated them. He has also done special work in Tibet and Nepal.”

  Li finished assembling the rifle, then fitted the sight and the silencer. He spent several minutes lying flat on the bed, fiddling with the sight. When he was satisfied, he walked over to the window and eased it open. They were high up—on the twenty-fifth floor—but the roar of the traffic was loud enough to make them raise their voices.

  “The bird,” said Li, with good English pronunciation.

  Matsubara squinted in the direction he was pointing. “What bird?”

  “The one on that satellite dish.”

  The satellite dish was jutting out from a building about five hundred yards away.
Surely it would be impossible for the human eye to make out a bird at that distance.

  “Here, take these.”

  Li handed her a pair of binoculars. Matsubara scanned the satellite dish, and sure enough there was a straggly seagull perched on the top lip.

  Li got into position, leaning forward, with the barrel of the rifle protruding through the window. There was a dry crack, like the sound of a stick breaking, and suddenly the bird wasn’t there any more.

  “Not bad,” said Matsubara, putting down the binoculars.

  “You can rely on Li,” said the man from Shanghai with a smug smile. “Show him your bird, and he will do the rest.”

  Li closed the window and carefully placed the rifle on the table. Matsubara frowned. She had no grounds for rejecting Li, but was conscious of the way the man from Shanghai was scrutinizing her out of the corner of his eye.

  “What if I asked for someone else?”

  The man from Shanghai shrugged. “As you like. But time is so short now. I don’t know what the others would say ...”

  He left the comment hanging in the air, but the meaning was clear. The [197] young general would not be happy if her stubbornness put the project at risk. He might reduce his support for her plans. He might even reconsider entirely.

  “Okay. I suppose he’ll have to do.”

  The man from Shanghai glanced over at Li, who didn’t even look up from his work with the rifle.

  SEVENTEEN

  So what shall I do with Plato?” asked Saya, leaning into Martine’s entrance hall. Martine glanced down at the dog by her side. It was a short-haired, sandy-colored creature, about the height of Saya’s knees, with friendly eyes and a floppy pink tongue.