"He is difficult to follow, but I believe so, sensei."
"You think he is an honorable man, then?"
"I do, sensei."
"Will that make it more difficult for you to do what must be done when the time comes?" Toru sensed an instant's hesitation. "Well… will it?"
"No, sensei. Nothing will deter me from my duty to the Order."
"Good." He waved a hand. "Prepare the shoten for me. We leave within the hour."
The door closed, cutting off the light from the hallway and plunging the room into darkness. Toru did not move. He sat and thought, and his thoughts were not happy. Instead of handling this matter on its own, the Order had been forced to depend on a gaijin mercenary. Humiliating.
But the Kakureta Kao would rise again. The Seer had promised.
He went to the small wooden bureau that held his worldly belongings and withdrew a small case of sturdy ebony, its top inlaid with ivory. He removed the top and examined the doku-ippen within: two dozen slivers of wood, each saturated with a different mix of herbs and extracts, rested in individual grooves. The ones ringed with blue caused mere unconsciousness. The others were soaked with deadly toxins: Those marked with black were employed for instant effect, those marked with varying shades of red conferred a delayed death. All were untraceable.
He would need one of the reds tonight.
So many needs in his life now…
The Order needed the katana, so that its future might be measured in millennia.
The Order also needed a successful test of the ekisu tonight so that New York City's future might be measured in days.
Hideo's ancestors answered his prayers.
A fair number of traffic cams around the city were fakes, installed on the principle that if one thinks one is being watched, one will behave accordingly. But the cam near Gerrish-san's apartment was of the functioning variety and—bless his ancestors—showed the building's entrance in the far upper left corner of the frame.
Kenji sat with him, absorbing all Hideo was doing. So difficult to reconcile this young, eager-to-learn face now with his cold-blooded expression while pumping round after round into Cooter-san.
Hideo turned to him. "How long do you think Gerrish-san was dead when we found him?"
The answer was important. He needed to know how far back in the recording to go. He had no idea of how to judge a death, but he sensed Kenji had seen his share of corpses.
He answered in English: "From way blood was only part"—he looked to Hideo for help—"thicked?"
"Clotted."
He nodded. "Yes, clotted. I say one hour."
To be safe, Hideo began reviewing at a point ninety minutes before their arrival at the apartment. He showed Kenji how to fast-forward, then leaned back and concentrated on the screen. The entrance was not terribly busy, so he did not have to stop Kenji often.
The onscreen clock read 19:52 when he saw a man step out of the entrance carrying an oblong object.
"Stop."
Kenji did so and Hideo took over the controls. He enhanced and enlarged the image. The object under the man's arm appeared to be a rolle-dup rug. He estimated its length at approximately ninety to one hundred centimeters. Long enough to hide the katana they sought.
The man was moving north. If he walked any faster he would have been trotting. One might even think he was escaping from something. A murder scene, perhaps?
Unfortunately he kept his face straight ahead, providing only a high-angle profile that Hideo doubted would provide sufficient mapping points for the facial recognition program.
Hideo called up the map of traffic cams in Jamaica and found one two blocks north. He prayed again to his ancestors, begging them to go back in time and guide this man on a straight path to this intersection. Then he accessed the new cam and began his review at 19:52. He did not fast-forward but waited patiently, praying for the man to appear. If he had turned left or right at the preceding intersection, Hideo might never find him again.
Finally, miraculously, he appeared. Hideo closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief and thanks, then focused on the man with the rug. He crossed the intersection heading north, then turned west and waited for the green.
"Look up," Hideo said aloud, earning a puzzled look from Kenji. "Look up and check the traffic signal. Look up!"
And then, almost as if he'd heard him, the man looked up, almost directly into the camera. Hideo froze the frame, enlarged, enhanced, and saved. He would enter it into the facial recognition program later. But first…
He returned to the view of the entrance to Gerrish's apartment building and watched until he saw himself and the three yakuza exit. He let the recording run even longer, but no sign of Yoshio's ronin.
He sighed. He didn't see any way of finding him. But he should be grateful. At least he'd secured a picture of the current owner of Sasaki-san's katana. That was the important thing. Of course it would all come to nothing if he had never been arrested and entered into the system. But Hideo had a feeling that a man who would slit another's throat to acquire a sword would have to have been arrested at some point during his adult life. And if he had, Hideo would find him.
The ronin, however… the odds were high against his ever having another chance at that man.
But Hideo had a feeling that, with the help of his ancestors, he might beat those odds.
Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
Someone had seen her. She totally knew it.
All right, she didn't know it, but how could someone not have seen her? She'd got on the C without knowing where she was going, but that had been okay. What had counted was being off the street. Then she'd looked around the subway car and seen her face on half a dozen flyers.
She'd kept her head down, her mind screaming for a solution. Finally it hit her: tourists.
Totally.
Native New Yorkers would have her face burned on their brains by now, but tourists came and went. And tourists usually spent their time gawking at the sights and gazing up at the skyscrapers and such, not studying posters. So where could she find the most tourists? In the Times Square/theater district, of course.
Tons of tourists.
She'd ducked out of the C at 42nd Street. The Port Authority had tempted her—hop a bus to New Jersey where Jerry would never find her. But she knew nothing about Jersey, and figured she'd probably need a car there. She didn't know if they even did abortions in Jersey.
No, better to stay where she knew her way around. At least for now. Lots of abortion clinics in the city. Once that was over she could think about relocating.
She'd wound through the crowds on Eighth toward the theaters. When she saw a bunch of men wearing John Deere caps and string ties come out of the Milford Plaza, she knew that was the place for her.
But checking in hadn't been easy. They'd been totally suspicious about her wanting to pay cash, but she had no choice. She couldn't use a credit card—someone watching her account would know exactly where she was. They'd wanted ID and she had to show her driver's license. That put her real name on the register.
And then the room. A single. Dawn could so not believe how small it was. A postage stamp with like four feet between the walls and the king-size bed. Even the mirrored wall couldn't make it look bigger. Plus the bathroom had fixtures that looked fifty years old.
All for the bargain price of $326 a night.
She guessed she could have chosen a better grade, but that meant more money and she wanted to conserve as much of her cash as possible. She had no idea of how long it would last.