Less Than Human (22 page)

The Prefectural Office detectives got there in an amazing twenty minutes. This alone would have convinced Ishihara that the
Silver Angels were bigger game than he’d been led to believe.

Which pissed him off in a big way. If he was expected to provide backup for these hotshots, the least they could do was tell
him what the stakes were. The old priest Gen hadn’t given him any practical information, although his philosophical rambling
was sometimes useful.

Inspector Funo came into the kitchen, peeling off her platex gloves with a frustrated snap.

“We got a statement…” began Beppu.

“Why didn’t you call us earlier?” she interrupted.

“We called you as soon as we confirmed it was genuine,” said Ishihara. He was on solid ground here, playing by the rules.

“And why didn’t you keep the informant here until we came?” Funo wasn’t playing.

“We got a statement,” Beppu said again.

“Inspector, what are we doing here?” Ishihara said politely.

“You’re following orders,” she snapped.

“The information I’ve been given access to,” continued Ishihara, “indicates that all we’ve got is a group of runaways who
get off by painting themselves silver and using people’s empty homes. Surely it’s a problem for Missing Persons and Juvenile
Crime?”

The western sun turned the light in the closed kitchen to bronze, and it felt like a sauna. Funo patted her upper lip with
a neatly folded handkerchief. “It’s classified. I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to.”

“How can we assist PO if we don’t know why we’re doing it?” put in Beppu reasonably.

Funo looked from one to the other. She doesn’t want to do anything without permission in case it affects her career, thought
Ishihara in disgust. This is what’s ruining the police force. Lack of initiative.

“At least give us a hint of what we’re after.” Beppu gave Funo his best competent smirk. “It’s not like we’re going to blab
about a case in progress. Give us credit for a little professionalism.”

The three of them waited as the forensics team trooped past them and out of the apartment. They sounded like shod elephants
on the iron stairs. The apartment seemed very quiet once they’d gone.

“Remember how the four kids got into the Betta?” said Funo finally. “We’re worried they might have a hacking technique that
can bypass Betta security.”

“Or they’ve got someone on the inside,” said Ishihara. He still suspected the Betta manager of knowing more than he let on.

“Possibly,” conceded Funo.

“What did you find in those computers?” said Beppu. “The ones the kids were wired to?”

“Enough to worry the experts,” said Funo, then relented. “They found a completely unknown program. Some kind of indoctrination,
I’m not sure of the details myself.”

“Computer crime is white-collar work,” said Beppu. “Nothing to do with us.”

“Not anymore.” Funo seemed on firmer ground. “We’re assembling multitasked response units for this kind of crime now. Got
to move with the times.”

It made sense. If terrorists and gangs played the stock market to finance weapons, for example, there was no point in the
police having two or more departments trying to deal with it.

“This person who called from here,” said Funo. “Any chance it’s a hoax? Or a deliberate attempt to confuse us?”

“No,” said Ishihara. “This same expert gave us an opinion on a different case, quite reliable.”

“We’ll have to talk to him. We should give him a quick-response number to call in case the daughter…”

“Niece,” corrected Ishihara.

“Niece contacts him again.” She put her handkerchief back into her handbag. A square, black box that looked big enough to
contain an entire scene-of-crime kit plus folded laser rifle.

“We might even put a tracer in his phone,” she considered, then more enthusiastically. “Has he got a phone implant?”

“No,” said Ishihara.

“Er, it’s a ‘she,’” put in Beppu. “A foreigner.”

Funo’s eyes widened. Ishihara could see the fine, pale line of her corneal enhancement scars under the real line of her eyebrows.

“Well, well. We didn’t think the Angels had any foreign connections.”

“No,” said Ishihara loudly. “The woman is foreign. She has no connection with the Silver Angels except for this niece.”

“All right.” Funo looked at Ishihara speculatively. “Your informant, you handle it. But I still want to do a background check.”

“Do what you like.” Ishihara turned and stomped down the stairs. He’d never get anywhere with her.

At the bottom he halted. McGuire had asked him for help in getting her niece back from the cult. So far he’d done nothing.
He needed more information, but to get that, he’d have to use McGuire as a bargaining chip. There was a nice irony there,
one he was sure McGuire wouldn’t appreciate.

“Adam first surfaced in 2008.” Inspector Funo placed her handbag primly on the low table in the tatami mat room. “He didn’t
call himself Adam, he was just The Guru. He had a Web site where he posted all sorts of neo-Buddhist mystical proposals for
self-enlightenment. Gradually the stuff got more and more over the top, and after three servers banned the site, it disappeared
in 2012.”

“What do you mean by ‘over the top’?” Ishihara lit a cigarette, ignoring her disapproving eye. He and Beppu leaned on the
peeling wall.

“He predicted a massive plague that would wipe out most of the human race and welcomed this. He actually offered a prize to
anyone who could come up with a new disease.”

Beppu snorted. “What was the prize—a posthumous fortune?”

“He offered to tutor the winner in techniques that he claimed would make them invulnerable to any disease.”

“Some kind of out-of-body meditation technique?” said Ishihara, puzzled. “How would that protect you from a plague?”

Funo pursed her lips. “Out-of-body in a way. We’re not sure, but we think he meant some kind of downloading of consciousness.”

“Download? You mean, into a computer?” Beppu grinned. “Who’ll keep the electricity flowing into the computer if everyone’s
dead? That’s the trouble with these messiahs, they don’t think things through.”

“We know from this,” Funo raised her voice a little, “that three years ago Adam was involved with advanced digital research.
You can see why we were concerned to find that new program.”

It certainly fit in with the four dead children wiring themselves to computers.

“We lost track of him after the Web site was banned,” she said. “But now he seems to have gathered a group of believers, and
he’s got private funding from somewhere.”

“Not from the believers,” put in Beppu.

Otherwise, they’d have to register as a religion.

“It all depends on the people close to him, doesn’t it?” said Ishihara. “We’ve all seen this before—charismatic leader, message
that gets through to some people, funding that allows them to build places to worship, etc. But unless his second- and third-in-command
are willing to carry out dangerous orders, the group is no threat.”

Funo nodded. “The so-called Soum army wouldn’t have been much of a problem with just the leader. It was his ruthless disciples
who allowed things to get out of hand.”

Beppu belched reflectively. “What we need is someone on the inside.”

“Or someone who’s lost a friend or relative to the group and knows something about them.” Ishihara stubbed out his cigarette
in the dusty sink. He thought of McGuire’s niece. Maybe she could have been persuaded to defect. If they’d got to her first.

“Or luck,” said Funo unexpectedly. “Like the newspaper delivery boy who noticed the Happy Universe truck before the timer
went off.”

Ishihara didn’t want to think of the Silver Angels as a ticking bomb. “What do you want us to do now?”

Funo picked up her bag and swung it over her shoulder. “Continue the background checks for those students who had any connection
with the dead and the geography club. Send on all the information you find. We’ll correlate it with our data.”

They locked the door, put a police seal on it, and clattered down the iron stairs. It took Beppu and Ishihara ten minutes
to get all the cats out from under Funo’s car.

Later that afternoon, Ishihara waited for McGuire’s description of her niece’s boyfriend to be processed into a format he
could run through the NDN and tidied the piles on his desk from the Kawanishi Metalworks case. That morning he’d heard about
Sakaki’s gambling debts and thought it might provide a motive for Mito’s murder, but McGuire assured him that Sakaki couldn’t
have used the robot.

Yet his intuition said the man was involved in Mito’s death somehow. He stubbed out his cigarette and left a message for Beppu
that he was going to tidy up a loose end in the Kawanishi case. One more little chat with Sakaki.

E
leanor reached the company about three o’clock. She nodded vaguely at the department admin assistant’s cheery “good morning,”
threaded her way between the four rows of desks to her own little alcove in the corner of the room, and sat down with a barely
suppressed groan. Her feet hurt from the unaccustomed walking, and her head ached where she’d hit it on the table when Taka
pushed her.

She’d taken Kazu for a cup of coffee after they left Mari’s abandoned apartment and lent him her phone—he’d forgotten his
in his rush to get there—so he could call Yoshiko and tell her Mari wasn’t coming home yet. He’d looked so miserable, and
she had so little to say to comfort him, that she tried to think of another topic. The only thing she could think of was to
apologize for getting him in trouble with Grandpa on Sunday, which sounded inadequate, for the normalcy of the workshop and
the Tanaka house seemed far away.

Kazu said merely, “You don’t need to apologize. It’s between Grandpa and me.”

“I didn’t mean to…” she hesitated, unsure of how to phrase it tactfully “… to bring back any unpleasant memories for you.”

He waved away the idea. “That’s fine. But I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind?” He sat on the edge of his seat, his faded,
stained work clothes out of place in the bright cafe.

“I can’t…”
change jobs,
she intended saying, but instead said, “decide just yet. Give me some time.”

“We could make you a partner.” He looked at her directly, and said in a rare burst of honesty, “We need to get the factory
back in competition. All we do now is take the same old orders from the same old companies, for less and less money. If we
don’t make more profit, we won’t be able to repay the debt.”

She remembered Masao talking about Kazu’s failed business venture. “You mean from livelining the old factory?”

He nodded miserably. “We need an edge. I was hoping you might be it.”

Tomita obviously doesn’t think I’m an “edge” anymore, she thought. “Kazunori-san, I don’t know if I can make such a huge change.”

“We’re not going anywhere, if you change your mind.” He left abruptly after that, saying he had to get back to the workshop.
He was so flustered he let Eleanor pay the bill.

She should have called the police before she went to the apartment, she realized. Especially after seeing the frustration
in Ishihara’s eyes when she told him what happened. His restraint about it only made her feel worse.

She eased off her outside shoes and slid her throbbing feet into the comfortable old sneakers. On the other side of the filing
cabinets, shelves, and potted plants that formed her little alcove, the main office hummed with muted conversation and computer
noise. All very familiar and, just then, unreassuring.

Although she hadn’t said so to Kazu, she felt better about Mari’s disappearance after seeing her. Before, she’d imagined Mari
as a helpless victim spirited away by outlandish kidnappers. The worry was still there, but it was tempered by the glimpse
of Mari very much alive and well, and rebellious. Short of dragging her away physically, there didn’t seem much they could
do to bring her back.

In the coffee shop earlier Kazu had kept repeating, “Why didn’t she tell us? What does she see in these people?” Eleanor could
find no answers. She didn’t know who “these people” were. What had Gen said? The Silver Angels are afraid of death and decay.
And Mari said something about a “white nothing,” but Eleanor had been feeling woozy at that point and didn’t remember clearly.

She leaned her forehead on her hands and stared blankly at her personal com screen. How do we convince Mari that this is the
wrong thing to do? Hell, how do we know it
is
the wrong thing to do? Is our way of life so wonderful? She heard Masao’s voice,
I never see you.
She’d worked fifteen years for a company that now axed her best work.

If this Adam guru had found a way to cheat death, how could she tell Mari not to join in? Gen’s Buddhist reservations aside,
she would be interested herself… Or would she?

It’s not death itself that frightens me, she decided. It’s saying good-bye and knowing there will never be another meeting.
Good-bye to the child Mari used to be. Good-bye to her father and mother and all the things she should have said but didn’t.
Someday, good-bye to Masao. Then she’d regret all these hours spent at work.