Munroe and Okada stood side by side, watching wordless as the story unfolded in grainy silence, and Nakamura, footsteps heavy, left his office.

In the hour since Munroe had walked out, the activity in the executive wing had picked up, the company bosses leaving one by one for the boardroom, and they were all there now, waiting for Nakamura, all but Yuzuru Tagawa.

Okada’s phone beeped. He checked the screen, answered a text, and to Munroe said, “Maybe twenty minutes.”

Those were the first words spoken since she’d entered the room, silence their best precaution against electronic ears. They’d soon have company as the evening techs, sent off on errands by Okada, finished the busywork designed to keep them away. On the monitor, Nakamura entered the boardroom.

By design there were neither cameras nor recording devices beyond those walls, but she had no doubt that in the security operations center on the other side of the building, there were ears listening in.

Tagawa, too, had gotten wind that something was afoot.

In her days at the facility, Munroe had observed him; first as a part of Bradford’s initial list, then as a suspect as the data continued pointing toward him. Tagawa was well-kept, fastidious with his appearance, a man of routine and long hours, never arriving later than seven or leaving before eight, but in the days following Dillman’s murder he’d grown disheveled and had begun displaying the jumpy nervousness of a man with demons at his back. Now, at just after seven in the evening, breaking routine and a history of patterns, he was in the hallway, headed for the stairs, head hung low as if in a trance or deep in thought, on his way out of the facility.

Okada pointed toward the screen.

Munroe was already on her way for the door.

Wars were won through exploiting the enemy’s weakness.

Shame was Tagawa’s weakness, honor was his weakness, and in using Nakamura to force a catalyst, she’d manipulated both.

Tagawa would lose his job, but that was the least of his worries.

Munroe raced down the stairs and reached the entry in time to catch a glimpse of Tagawa through the glass, rounding the corner for the parking lot.

Losing his job would mean losing access to ALTEQ’s trade secrets, but selling those to Jiro had been an undermining operation in the short term for which Tagawa had been well compensated, revenge for which ALTEQ had no proof, thus no way to retaliate legally or otherwise.

The technology in the lower lab had been Tagawa’s ultimate goal, the theft for which his brother had been held responsible and over which the brother had taken his life. Tagawa’s failure to steal it back would be a bigger shame but not the end of everything. No, the reason for his slow coming-apart, the reason he’d left the facility dazed and weighted like a man on the way to his own funeral, was the murder. Tagawa knew what the authorities didn’t, knew that if his role as thief had been uncovered, his connection to Jiro would soon follow, and then accusations, possibly arrest, for murder wouldn’t be far behind.

In this shame-based society, where judgment was the social control, where a man maintained his value not by choosing right over wrong but by living according to the expectations placed upon him, Tagawa had exceeded his brother’s dishonor. He would bring his family greater shame.

Munroe gave him time to reach his car and then tagged after him to the Ninja, which was closer. She followed him because suicide, embedded as a noble tradition within the culture’s history, and still often viewed as a moral responsibility, meant that many a man, facing financial pressure and much less disgrace than Tagawa did now, had turned to death by his own hand as the means of preserving honor. Inseki-jisatsu, responsibility-driven suicide.

Munroe wanted Tagawa dead.

To save Bradford, she needed him alive.

He drove a wandering route, erratic and unpredictable as he braked, then sped up, and made lane changes at the last second or too far ahead of time, driving like a drunk or a man so distracted that he was no longer mentally present. He received calls and made calls, then rerouted back toward Osaka proper, and in a sudden about-face, turned in for a train station and abandoned his car in a no-parking area. Munroe swore, looped around, and lost sight of him in the process.

She hastily parked, left the helmet with the bike, and rushed for the entrance, searching for her target and for traps so easily missed in the hurry to find him.

The station had four tracks, two to a platform. She slipped the transit pass into the ticket stile, pushed through, and took the first set of stairs.

There was no way to hide if he waited for her at the bottom.

Speakers chimed. A woman’s voice announced a train arrival.

Munroe stopped halfway down for a glimpse along the front end of the platform, then leaned over the rail and scanned the parallel platform. Tagawa was there, two tracks over, in line at the door mark, hands limp and head down, oblivious to the lights of the approaching train.

Munroe raced up, ran down the concourse. The train hissed to a stop below. She pushed against the crowd of bodies starting up. Her feet hit the platform as the doors began to close and she rushed the nearest car, shoving an arm between rubber stoppers. She pulled the doors apart enough to slip between.

All eyes in the crowded car were on her when she squeezed inside.

The train lurched and Munroe grabbed a handhold ring, caught her breath, and then started the slow walk, car to car, in Tagawa’s direction. She stayed with him for several stops, followed him through a line change, and when at last he stepped off onto the white tiles of Kitashinchi station, Munroe slipped along the stairwell’s edge, realizing what he’d done.

This was Jiro’s territory.

The flow of passengers headed up the stairs, but Tagawa crossed to the other side, just shy of the yellow safety line, and stood there even after a train had come and gone. Munroe inched closer and watched him: every step, every muscle; the way he held his head; the way he breathed; tense and ready to call upon speed and reflex and intervene if necessary.

A human accident, the polite term for railway suicide.

She expected him to jump, eventually, but not there. Not yet.

He hadn’t seen her following him, but someone in the facility had; someone had called him. And then Tagawa had made calls and he’d changed paths and abandoned the car. He’d brought her to Jiro, laying the trap and gifting the gift, and waited for Jiro’s men to take her first: revenge for what she’d done to him, honor before an honorable death. Two wins for the price of one.

The taste of underground, of metal and heat and oil, filled the air inside Munroe’s head, where on a chessboard of strategy knight played against rook and pawn against king. Shoes and boots thudded down the stairs, echoing a tell of a cluster greater than regular foot traffic. There were six of them, conspicuous in the way they didn’t belong, conspicuous enough that transiting passengers averted their eyes deliberately so as not to see as Jiro’s men fanned out among the crowd, searching for white skin in a sea of beige.

Munroe looped around the back of the stairwell in Tagawa’s direction.

She stood behind him at the edge of the platform, on the danger side of the caution line. He felt her presence and turned; seeing her, his eyes narrowed.

Munroe drew nearer to him.

Jaw clenched, he said, “You heap shame upon me.”

“You brought it on yourself.”

A shout not far away overrode whatever next escaped his lips.

The station’s speakers chimed. The voice announced an arriving train.

Jiro’s men came striding for her.

Waiting passengers moved out of their way.

Familiar eyes bored into her from a familiar face distorted in rage: the man with the gun, the man she’d hit with Bradford’s car. He moved in close and took a swing.

Munroe braced for impact.

He hit her back and punched her side.

Munroe gritted her teeth and smiled while his fellow thugs crowded in, sandwiching her and Tagawa in the press. She grabbed a fist full of Tagawa’s shirt and belt while blows rained down, and she panted past the need to strike, counting seconds, feeling the rolling thunder through her feet, and then she jerked—away from the fists and kicks, backward, off the platform, dragging Tagawa with her, into the path of the oncoming train.