CHAPTER 92
The temples in Japan had always left Thomas with a sense of calm and beauty, but if they were spiritual places it was a kind of spirituality he didn’t really understand. He resented the church he had grown up in, but he understood it. Zenko-ji, Minobu, and places like them were fascinating to him because they were otherworldly, exotic, but in them he always felt alone. If there was one thing he had always understood about Ed’s religion it was the way it imagined a community, a living social world spreading out from the altar. Other people— Japanese people—probably felt something like that here, but Thomas couldn’t, and he was surprised to find that he wished he were in church, a church he knew and recognized, not as a tourist, but as someone born with it singing in his blood.
They left the temple with barely a word. Kumi’s face was still red, but she had wiped her tears away in a brisk, decisive fashion that said the subject was now closed. For a moment Jim took her hand, but though she thanked him for the gesture she permitted it for only a few seconds before releasing him and insisting that they begin the walk to the station in Kofu.
Thomas drifted behind her, saying nothing, remembering the route past the net-covered vineyards, through the narrow, winding streets of garden walls, down to the old onsen baths, each curve in the road surprising him with its painful familiarity. Uniformed schoolkids cycled past as they always had, less interested in the foreigners than they once were, perhaps, but otherwise the same. He had lived here, even if he had never quite belonged here, and the way the place tugged at his memory now made him feel old and lost and irrelevant.
A more recent memory came back to him: Peter the Principal giving him his marching orders. “You’ve gone from maverick to pariah, Thomas—and I’ll be honest here—I don’t really understand why.”
“I know,” he had said. “I’m sorry.”
And now he was back here, in his Japanese prehistory, wondering what the hell he was trying to achieve, these three mismatched people with him. Outside a corner store stood a pair of vending machines. One of them sold beer in oversized cans. Thomas walked toward it, fumbling in his pockets. An odd, rhythmic pounding drifted over the tiled roofs.
Drums?
It sounded like it. He paused, straining to hear, and then walked quickly after the others, but it wasn’t till they came to the edge of some dusty high school playing fields that the extent of the thing became clear. He realized it in the same instant that Kumi turned to him, her eyes bright with the same knowledge, the same memory.
“It’s the Shingenko matsuri,” she said.
He nodded, his smile matching hers for its balance of joy and sadness.
“What the hell is that?” said Parks.
“More prehistory,” Thomas said.
The field was packed with people clustered in groups of twenty or more, all marshaled under glorious banners, all dressed or in the process of being dressed in the armor of samurai or their foot soldiers armed with bows, pikes, and katana.
It was the annual celebration of Yamanashi’s sixteenth-century warlord and folk hero, Takeda Shingen. Today thousands would march in battalions around the major streets of Kofu: schoolchildren, company men, office workers, civil servants, and half the population of the city—including a special regiment of foreigners—while the rest of the populace cheered them on. It was as interminable as it was spectacular and would go well into the night before Shingen’s representative would dismount from his horse and preside over the closing ceremonies. Thomas and Kumi had walked in the procession twice before, had cherished the silliness and grandeur of the thing so much that even now, with all that had been lost between them in the intervening years, the sight of it worked like nostalgia on them.
“Can we stay and watch a while?” she said.
“Sure,” said Thomas, drawing beside her.
“There isn’t time,” said Parks. “We have to get to the station and out of here.”
“Just a few minutes,” she said, and Thomas gave Parks a look so that he shrugged and walked away to wait for their moment to pass.
“It’s pretty cool,” said Jim, watching a samurai in black armor laced with red and gold cord lead his ranks of armored troops out and into the streets.
“Yeah,” said Thomas. “It is.”
For ninety seconds they just watched.
“You ready now?” said Parks, tapping his watch.
“Kumi?’ said Jim, leaning into her with immense gentleness, pretending not to see her tears.
She nodded once, and they began to walk once more.
War thought the parade was a pain in the ass. The sleepy little town was suddenly teeming with people and the sidewalks were jammed with stalls selling all kinds of inedible shit. He had dispersed his team all over the major roads around the railway station because he was sure that was where Knight and the others would go, but it was a nightmare trying to make sure they didn’t get past him in the crowds. He had to stop them here, and though he didn’t especially want to start shooting with all these people around, the procession might distract long enough for a few bleeding foreigners to be bundled into a van.
He checked in with the team leader, a man War had personally recruited after his second tour with the Navy SEALs in Afghanistan.
“You in position?”
“Got the north side of the station covered, sir,” he said.
“How are the crowds?”
“Not so bad up here. There’s nothing to see.”
“Keep your eyes open,” said War. “And if you see them, call for the van before you start shooting unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
There was something odd about the man on the corner, odd enough to make Thomas stop in his tracks and press the others back into the alley. They were only a few blocks from the station now and the parade was close to its height in terms of noise and energy.
So why is that guy watching the crowd?
He was tall, athletic-looking, and vaguely Nordic, though the clothes were generic American and too warm by half for the mild weather. He looked serious, focused, dangerous.
“They’re here,” said Thomas, ducking back into the alley.
“Which one is it?” said Parks.
“Don’t know,” said Thomas. “Never seen him before.”
“So how do you know . . . ?”
“I know,” said Thomas. In the States the foreigner might have been a security guard keeping an eye on the crowd. Not here.
“We can’t get past him,” said Jim. “And there’ll be others.”
“What if we took a cab right up to the station?” said Kumi.
“The streets are blocked off,” said Thomas. “We can’t get there without being spotted.”
“What if it’s not them?” said Parks. “Just because you see a stray foreigner doesn’t mean it’s them. You’ve seen them. I’ve seen them. If this is someone different, maybe it’s not them.” He sounded more than insistent. He was getting desperate. “I mean, how many can there be?”
“How the hell should I know?” said Thomas, not wanting to think about the scale of the organization that was bent on stopping or killing them.
“We’ve got to get on that train,” said Parks.
“Wait,” said Kumi, taking charge as she sometimes did when facing a crisis: her way of getting through it. “Come with me.”
“You’re sure they were on the train from Minobu?” said War into his headset. He was getting irritated now, because he was also getting anxious. He needed to call the Seal-breaker and tell him that all was in hand. That they were in hand. Or dead.
“Yes, sir,” said the team leader. They were seen to get on, but my man on the platform in Kofu says they did not get off at this end.”
“Could they have stayed on?”
“Unknown, sir.”
“Unknown?” said War, petulance getting the better of him. “What kind of answer is that?”
“Sorry, sir. It’s unlikely but we can’t be sure.”
“Make sure,” War snapped. “Get on that train and search it.”
“Yes sir.”
War went back to scanning the crowd. This ludicrous parade was the problem; all these heathen idiots marching about in their golden-age crap. Any other day of the year the streets would have been deserted and a gaggle of foreigners would have stood out like sore thumbs.
Every face was turned toward the parade except his. He was therefore the only one who didn’t see the four partially armored people, three foreign men and a Japanese woman, break from the parade line as it skirted the steps at the entrance to the station only feet from where he was standing, watching the crowd.
Kumi flagged down a schoolboy in the station, proffering a five-thousand-yen note and the bag of faux helmets that had been a good fifty percent of their disguise. By the time Thomas had collected their tickets, the kid was running back to the schoolyard’s impromptu armory, grinning as if he had won the lottery.