As soon as Jones left, Neil quickly ran to the bed. “You can come out now, but we’ve got to work fast. Pass me the pictures.” Larry’s hand slid the papers out. Neil grabbed the copies of the illustrations and taped them back up on the wall.
Larry groaned as he crawled out from under the bed and stretched. “Hey, Hachiko, I hope you’re making more coffee in there.”
There was no answer.
Neil tacked the last image in place. “Nakamura went out the back door. I imagine he’s giving Jones some help. I have a feeling they’ll need it if Koko sees them.”
“Explain to me why we suddenly had to stash everything, including me, under the bed.” Larry dramatically wiped a few imaginary dust bunnies off his shirt.
“Let’s ask Isabella,” Neil said. Isabella was leaning with her back against the wall, her brows furrowed in deep thought, but she looked up when she heard Neil mention her name.
“Did you notice anything about her, Isabella?”
“Her mesmerizing eyes, perhaps,” Isabella said with a sarcastic flick of her head.
“Yes, aren’t they wonderful?” Neil said. “Seriously, though, how about her smell?”
Isabella pushed herself off the wall and walked over to join Neil. “She didn’t smell odd, exactly. She smelled like cherry blossoms. It’s a wonderful scent. I meant to ask her where she got it.”
Neil nodded. “I noticed it too, as soon as she walked in the door. I’ve also smelled it before, at Hiro’s funeral and then twice when I was being followed. I’d assumed it was from all the cherry trees here, but I noticed at the park yesterday that they aren’t in bloom right now. But I didn’t make the connection to Koko until she showed up here.”
“I’ll tell you one other thing I noticed,” Isabella said. “That wasn’t love in her eyes when you mentioned that her brother was alive, that was anger. I know the difference.”
Larry got up. “Isabella, you are a very interesting person. A little scary sometimes, but always interesting. I’ll go make us both a coffee.” He walked into the kitchen as Neil continued to talk.
Neil ignored him. “Koko has been following me. She’s been looking for the scroll too, and I think she’s dangerous. Did you notice how hard she squeezed that canister?”
“Then why did you tell her all that stuff?” Larry called from the kitchen.
“I needed to know if she knew about the scroll. She did.”
Isabella folded her arms and stared at the floor for a second, then spoke. “I think she was telling the truth about the copy. I think she knew, or at least suspected, that the original was lost in that fire. She looked like she was trying to piece it all together as she was talking.”
“She was probably hoping that I’d fill in some details for her as well,” Neil said. “Which means she probably believed my story about Nori and the scroll.”
“Did you notice how she was always spying on people? She kept saying she ‘overheard’ conversations or ‘saw’ her father and the artist. I don’t think she went with Hiro to get the scroll from the artist. I think she followed him.”
Neil nodded. “She said the scroll was handed down from son to son. Maybe she wants it for herself?”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Larry said, peeking around the corner. “Isn’t it equally plausible that she’s trying to find the scroll to help her family and find her brother? Maybe she’s on our side, and maybe she doesn’t trust us.”
Just then Jones and Nakamura returned. “She got away,” Nakamura said. Jones seemed too angry to say anything.
Neil continued to stare at the pictures. “Let me guess, she got on a motorcycle and drove off. You got stuck in traffic with that glorified troop carrier.”
Jones growled. Neil took that as a yes.
“Koko is a motorcycle ninja, and no innocent grieving sister,” Neil said, thinking out loud. “She’s been trailing us for days. She’s working for someone—maybe the police, maybe for herself, maybe for whoever attacked you and Hiro on that sightseeing boat. She told that same lie about you heading out on a whaling protest.”
“Sorry about that surprised squeak when she said that,” Larry said. “Nice recovery by Nakamura, though. And I still can’t explain why she’d make that up.”
Neil continued. “Maybe she’s working for Nori. That whole hovercar thing could have been set up so I’d think she was trailing him. If she is working for Nori, then she knows I was lying about the scroll and she’ll be back soon with backup. If she isn’t, then Nori’s in for a surprise visitor.”
“If she attacks Nori and finds out that we’re lying, then she’ll be back with a vengeance,” Larry said. He walked back in carrying the whole carafe of coffee and a straw. “So what do we do now?”
Neil began to rearrange the copies on the wall, putting them in a different order, and flipping a few upside down. He still didn’t see a pattern. “We’ve got to crack this code and do it fast. We’re going to need to find that treasure first. All our lives, including Hiro’s, might depend on it.”
“Sounds like a late night,” Larry said. “I’d better make more coffee.”
* * *
The late night turned into an early morning. The rising sun sent yellow beams of sunlight streaming into the room. Neil blinked. He had stared at the bowls of rice so often his eyes were practically swimming with visions of dancing rice grains and fish. He sat down at the table and rubbed his eyes.
Jones stood guard at the door, but so far he’d seen nothing. That was good. Nakamura was looking for anything in the text that might give a clue about what to look for in the images. “The stories are really straightforward histories. They mention riches and treasure, lots of food, but that’s it. There’s no pattern.”
Larry was busily making more coffee for everyone, and drinking most of it himself. Only Neil and Isabella said no. Larry sipped his latest coffee and stared at the prints, which Neil had shifted around yet again. “I guess when you hide a treasure and leave a clue, you want the clue to be a tough one.”
“I just feel like we’re going around and around in circles,” Neil said, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s think about Hiro’s dad for a bit. Koko said he had seen the scroll and was happy there was a copy. Is there anything about him that might be a clue?”
“The file said he was a mathematician,” Isabella said, suppressing a yawn.
Larry took another sip of coffee. “It’s funny you’d mention circles. He was a circle mathematician . . . in a way.”
“A what?” Neil said.
“Circles are huge in Japanese math, at least old Japanese math.”
“What do you mean?” Isabella said.
“It’s all tied to the Zen theory of Enso. It means ‘circle’ in Japanese, but it’s also a concept.” He walked over and put his coffee mug down. Then he formed a circle by touching his fingertips. “It means complete, perfect, like we’d say ‘full circle.’ But it also means strength and beauty, like the earth, or two hands touching.”
“That’s so sweet I might get a cavity,” Neil said with a frown. “What about the old math?”
“Hiro’s dad was a mathematician. In Japanese math the circle is also hugely important. The Takoyakis’ house is full of pictures of mathematical problems with circles. I looked into it a bit. There was an ancient type of math in Japan called wasan, all based on circles. What ancient math scholars would do is come up with math problems, like how many circles fit inside a square. Then they’d draw the problem on a board, post the picture outside their houses, and challenge other mathematicians to solve them.”
“Other mathematicians who just happened to be strolling by?” Isabella raised an eyebrow.
“Yup. Very educated townsfolk back then.”
“Did you happen to solve any, genius?” Jones called from the door.
“Actually, yes. I solved five of the pictures in Hiro’s house, because I’m a genius.” Larry sighed proudly and picked up his coffee.
“You’re a doofus!” Neil said, standing up suddenly and pointing. “You put your mug down on the scroll! It left a stain on the woodcut.”
Larry, Neil, and Isabella looked. The mug had left a perfect circle impression right around one of the rice bowls. The fish on the page seemed to be swimming counterclockwise against a current of black coffee. Neil stared, cocking his head. “Hiro’s dad was on the right track!”
All the words he’d been thinking merged together in Neil’s brain—dancing, swimming, enso, secret code. He sprinted to the copies on the wall. “It’s a circle! The fish are all in different locations around the rice bowl, but it’s because they’re swimming in a circle around the rice bowls.” He grabbed all the pages and stacked them one on top of the other, then he ran to the window and slammed them against the glass. “I knew it! Larry, bring me some tape.”
Larry ran over and Neil taped one of the pictures onto the window. “Now look what happens when I match up the rice bowls, one on top of the other, and put the fish in order, counterclockwise.” Neil laid them one after the other until they were stacked and taped together, each page fanning out in a different angle from the fishbowl center.
“Um, nothing happens,” Larry said, looking at the resulting collage. As far as he could see, it was just all the pictures jumbled together. “Try putting the order clockwise maybe?”
Neil wasn’t deterred. “No, this is it. I know it. Okay, so then maybe we have to start with a different fish on the bottom.” Neil carefully tore the tape off and started putting them back together again.
Finally, on the third try, Larry’s eyes grew wide. “Stop, Neil . . . wait, just turn that second one a little more to the right. Okay . . . now the top one a little bit to the left. Wow!”
They stepped back and stared. There were a number of lines in each drawing that now met, forming . . . something.
Neil squinted. “The lines in the artwork meet too neatly for it to be a mistake: what is it?”
“It’s got to be a map,” Larry said.
“Maybe the lines are a series of roads?”
“Or rivers?”
“It could be almost anywhere.”
Neil grabbed a marker and darkened the lines. “It looks like a coastline, maybe, or a bay or something?”
Jones gave an annoyed rumble and walked over to the wall. Without taking his eyes off the trio he pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it up to the picture, clicked, and took a photo. Then he typed something into his phone and there was a ping.
“It’s Tokyo Bay and some of the ocean. The dots down the last samurai’s leg armor are islands.” He held the phone up for them to look at. There were the lines from Neil’s collage with a photo of Tokyo Bay superimposed.
“Hey, is that a facial recognition app, but for maps?” Larry said, amazed.
“Yeah,” Jones said. “It coordinates maps with satellite images and then tells you what you’re looking at. Very helpful for airplane surveillance. Also keeps me from having to listen to you spend the next five hours wondering what you were looking at.” He slipped the phone back in his pocket and walked back to the door.
Now they could see the map clearly. The folds of the oldest samurai’s left leg formed the eastern side of the bay. A tree limb formed the west side. And Jones was right, the dots on the samurai’s leg were the islands that sat south of the bay.
“Now all we have to do is figure out whether the exact location is some dead guy’s leg or a tree branch.”
Neil’s phone buzzed. Neil gave an audible gulp.
“Another message from Nori?” Larry asked.
“No, worse. It’s from my school.”