Chapter Six: The Fortress

The line rang twice and then clicked open.

'Yamashita.'

There was no trace of sleep in the voice. It was low, flat and wary, the voice of a man who had been sitting in a dark hotel room for hours with the phone in his lap. Behind it, very faintly, Tomoya could hear an air conditioner humming.

He had spent most of an hour on the veranda working out how to sound. A waiter would apologise for the hour and ask whether this was a convenient moment, and a waiter would be dismissed in three sentences. So he straightened his back, as if the man could see him through the phone. He let his voice drop and flatten into the clipped neutrality he had been hearing for a week across the tables of the Executive Lounge, the voice of men who were never contradicted.

'Mr Yamashita. This is Hisa. I'm calling on behalf of Origin Holdings.'

'Origin Holdings.' A pause. 'I've never heard of it.'

'No,' Tomoya said. 'That's rather the point.'

A short, dry breath came down the line, which might have been a laugh. 'You pitch well, Hisa-kun. I'll give you that. For a waiter.' The wariness returned at once. 'But you'll understand that I need more than a pitch. Last week a man from the Nikkei bought one of my engineers three beers and started asking about a big overseas customer. If one reporter gets so much as a glimpse of my guests, the Americans walk, Kyoto Glass loses the biggest order in its history, and I lose everything I've spent thirteen years building. So tell me plainly. How safe is this fortress of yours?'

Tomoya looked out at the dark garden. Frogs were calling under the persimmon tree.

'I'll tell you what it is and what it isn't,' he said. 'It's a former press works at the end of a dead-end lane. There's no neighbour within a hundred metres and no reason for anyone to drive down it. There is one gate, which you can see from where you'll be sitting. Inside, the meeting takes place in a free-standing enclosure of theatre velvet in the middle of the workshop. No windows. No outside wall to put a microphone against. Heavy rugs on the floor, and on the other side of the curtain, industrial fans and music, so that anyone nearby hears a hum and a piano and nothing else. And nobody takes a mobile phone in. They go in a box at the door.'

'And a directional microphone? A laser on a pane of glass? There are people who do that for a living.'

'There are,' Tomoya said calmly. 'But they'd have to know where to point it. You aren't hiding from a foreign intelligence service, Mr Yamashita. You're hiding from a reporter with a notebook and, at best, a photographer with a long lens. Men like that wait outside hotels in Marunouchi. They don't wait down a lane in Misono outside a disused press works, because nobody has any reason to think of it. I won't tell you it's impenetrable. Nothing is. But nobody will look, and that's worth more.'

He had worked that answer out on the veranda too. A frightened man would believe a salesman who said impenetrable for exactly as long as it took him to think of a counter-example. He would believe someone who admitted what he couldn't promise.

The line was quiet for a while. When Hakiro spoke again, something in his voice had slackened by a turn.

'Good,' he said. 'That's the right answer. If you'd said impenetrable, I'd have hung up.' He cleared his throat. 'All right. What's the damage? I assume you'll want a figure for the catering and so on.'

Tomoya's mind raced. Frightened rich men didn't trust a bargain. Quote them fifty thousand yen and they would assume they were dealing with a fool or a trap. Velvet, rugs, fans and hire fees had come to roughly fifty thousand yen in all. He multiplied it by forty.

'It isn't catering, Mr Yamashita. It's the hire of a private venue, and the coffee is a courtesy. The fee is two million yen for a four-hour window from one o'clock on Friday. It's non-refundable, whether you use the room or not, and it's payable in cash on Thursday night, when you come to inspect it.'

The silence was longer this time. Tomoya realised he was holding his breath.

'Cash,' Hakiro said slowly.

'No transfer, no invoice, and nobody in your accounts department asking why Kyoto Glass has paid two million yen to a company it has never heard of.'

He heard the man let out a breath, and it sounded like relief. The price had done what no promise could. In Hakiro's world, only expensive things were safe.

'Cash is better,' Hakiro said. 'Thursday, then. I'll come myself, not before ten. If the room isn't what you've described, I'll turn round and walk out and you'll never hear from me again. If it is, you'll have your money.'

'Understood.'

'And Hisa-kun.' The voice dropped. 'It's two in the morning, and I haven't slept properly since Wednesday. You've given me the first good news I've had all week. Don't make me regret it.'

The line went dead.

Tomoya lowered the phone and found that his hand was shaking. It wasn't quite fear. It was the lurch of a man who has just made a promise and only now looked down to see how high up he is standing. He had sold a fortress in four days, and what he owned was a concrete shed, a lease and a few sheets of paper covered in sketches.

A floorboard creaked behind him. Eichiro stood in the doorway in a faded cotton yukata, glasses pushed up on his forehead, hair flattened on one side.

'I couldn't sleep,' he said. 'I heard you talking. I didn't know you could sound like that.' He rubbed his eyes. 'Well?'

'Two million yen,' Tomoya said. 'In cash. Thursday night.'

Eichiro stared at him. 'Two million. For four hours in a shed with a curtain in it.'

'For discretion.'

'It's more than I paid for my first car,' Eichiro said faintly. Then the restaurant manager in him woke up and frowned. 'And the coffee? We've no food licence yet, Tomoya. If we serve a drink to a paying customer—'

'We aren't selling a drink. We're renting a room, and the coffee is a courtesy, like the water jug in a conference hall. The licence matters when you sell food. It doesn't when you lend a room.'

'That's a lawyer's argument.'

'It's the only kind I've got.'

Eichiro let out a long breath. 'It's grey.'

'It's grey,' Tomoya agreed. 'We do it carefully, once, and we don't make a habit of it.'

For a while neither of them said anything. The frogs went on calling. Then Eichiro gave a small, helpless shake of the head and turned back into the house.

'I'll put the kettle on,' he said. 'It's going to be a long week.'

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It was a long week. Tomoya worked the lounge on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning, gliding between the tables with his tray and his empty face, and spent every other waking hour at the warehouse. Eichiro, who approved the time-off requests for his own department, wrote Hisa down for Thursday and Friday without a word. Then he looked at his own signature as if it belonged to somebody else. Kaito read the form twice and looked at Tomoya for a little longer than he needed to. Then he stamped it.

By Wednesday afternoon, the front room of the old press works smelled of hot dust, sawn timber and machine oil. The sun had been beating on the corrugated roof since eight, and the air under it was thick enough that you had to push through it. Tomoya and Eichiro stood on either side of a wheeled pallet with their hands under the steel chassis of a La Marzocco Linea, trying to lift ninety kilos of Italian engineering the last half-metre onto a counter.

The counter was Tomoya's own work. He had built it over two nights out of four oak beams from a demolition yard in Kawaguchi, bolted to a frame of steel angle, and it was by far the best-looking thing in the building.

'On three,' he said. His soles slid on the bare concrete. 'One. Two. Three.'

They heaved. Eichiro's face went the colour of a boiled prawn, and a vein stood out at his temple. Something in Tomoya's shoulder popped. The machine rose, wobbled and came down on the timber with a thump that made the oak groan and sent a stack of paper cups tumbling off the shelf. Tomoya laid a spirit level along the top, watched the bubble drift to the middle and nodded.

Eichiro slid down the front of the counter until he was sitting on the floor, and dragged a towel across his face.

'I'm fifty-five years old,' he panted, 'and I'm doing the work of two removal men. My spine's turning to dust. The cheque cleared this morning, Tomoya. There's money in the account. Why couldn't we have hired a couple of lads from an agency for the afternoon?'

'Because it's all spoken for, Mr Eichiro, every yen. And because the dealer in Kappabashi wanted a hundred and twenty thousand to install it, and I'd rather keep the hundred and twenty thousand.' Tomoya peeled off his gloves. 'There's another reason, too. Water, power, steam, the grinders, the filter. If we don't understand every pipe and bolt in our own shop, then the first time something breaks we're at the mercy of a man with a van who knows we've no choice. Everyone who opens a second shop learns that the hard way. We pay for the knowledge now, in sweat.'

'In my spine, you mean.' But Eichiro was smiling a little. He hauled himself to his feet and shuffled through the double doors into the main workshop, where five Persian rugs lay in heaps on the concrete. Tomoya had won them on Yahoo! Auctions for thirty-eight thousand yen the lot, and collected them from a widow's house in Kawagoe in the back of a hire van. Eichiro nudged one with his toe, and it unrolled in a long red tongue.

'I understand the rugs,' he said. 'But go through the curtains again. How does a bit of hanging cloth stop a man from listening?'

'It doesn't.' Tomoya had fetched the stepladder and was fixing the last bracket to a roof beam. 'Not by itself. Cloth doesn't block sound. Velvet just stops it bouncing around, so the room doesn't echo. The rugs deal with footsteps and chair legs. What actually hides a conversation is noise. Put a steady hum and a bit of piano on the other side, and a person three metres away can't pick words out of it. It's called sound masking. Hotels and doctors' waiting rooms use it so you can't hear the next room.'

'So you're telling me the curtain does nothing.'

'I'm telling you it does what it needs to. Come and stand outside.'

By six, the velvet was up. Tomoya switched on the two big fans and a pair of cheap speakers, stepped inside the enclosure with a copy of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and began to read the market pages aloud in an ordinary speaking voice. Eichiro stood three metres away with his head on one side.

'I can hear that somebody's talking,' he called, after a minute. 'I couldn't tell you what about. It sounds like a man ordering fish.'

'Perfect.'

By Wednesday night, the effect was almost indecent. Outside the curtain stood a grimy, abandoned factory, with rusted pipes, bare wire and a pigeon's nest in the girders. Then Tomoya parted the velvet and stepped through, and the air changed. It was quiet and heavy and warm. The black walls swallowed the light, and the red of the rugs glowed underfoot like the inside of a lacquered box. It didn't belong in that building. That was the whole point.

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At ten past three on Thursday morning, the ThinkPad hummed on the low table like a small, overworked aeroplane. Its fan had barely stopped since Monday.

Blue-white light washed over Tomoya's face. On the screen, Internet Explorer 6 had loaded the members' area of Matsui Securities, and he sat forward with his chin on his fist, studying a dense grey grid of flickering red and green numbers that looked like the control panel of a submarine designed by someone who hated submariners. The login had arrived by registered post that evening, in a plain envelope Eichiro had signed for. It was view-only until the paperwork was done. He could watch every price in the market, and he couldn't touch a single one.

Slippers shuffled in the hall. Eichiro appeared in the doorway, tying the cord of his dressing gown, and surveyed the glowing screen the way a man surveys a smoke alarm that has gone off in the night.

'You're still up.'

'I couldn't sleep.'

'You don't sleep. You wait for me to.' He dropped into the chair opposite and rubbed his face. 'I've been thinking about this. How is a nineteen-year-old supposed to put two million yen into the stock market?'

'He can't,' Tomoya said. 'I should have known that before I told you I'd open an account on Saturday night. Matsui won't open a margin account for anyone under twenty, and a big cash payment into a minor's account gets read by a compliance officer. So it can't be me.' He turned the laptop round. 'It has to be the company.'

'The company.'

'Origin Holdings. The name I made up on the telephone for that man from Arata. It's real now. The change went through at the Legal Affairs Bureau on Tuesday. Origin Holdings Y.K., formerly Café Lumina. The shop trades as Origin Coffee, and the company above it is Origin Holdings. You're the representative director.'

Eichiro peered at the screen. 'And Matsui has agreed to let a coffee shop trade on margin?'

'Matsui has approved, in principle, a company with a registry extract, a seal certificate and a fifty-five-year-old director who has never missed a payment in his life. The people who read these applications like boring. You're the most boring man in Saitama.'

'Thank you.'

'It's a compliment.'

Eichiro snorted. Then he pulled his dressing gown tighter. 'Explain the margin part to me properly. As if I were a fish wholesaler.'

'It's simple enough.' Tomoya took a sheet from the printer tray and turned it over. 'Normally, if you want ten million yen of shares, you pay ten million yen. In a margin account, you put down thirty per cent as a deposit, with a minimum of three hundred thousand, and Matsui lends you the rest and holds the shares as security. They charge a little under three per cent a year on what they lend. So two million yen in cash lets us hold about six and a half million yen of shares.' He wrote it out in his small, tidy hand: 31 units × 1,000 × ¥214 = ¥6,634,000. Deposit needed: about ¥1,990,000. 'Thirty-one units of Kyoto Glass.'

'And if the price goes up?'

'Then everything above what we paid is ours, on the whole six and a half million, not just the two. That's why people do it.' He tapped the figure. 'If it goes down, it works against us just as fast. If the shares fall by an eighth or so, Matsui rings and asks for more cash, and if we can't find it, they start selling. If they fall by a third, the deposit is gone and we owe them the difference.'

'And we couldn't just buy it all in one morning?'

'We could try. Thirty-one thousand shares is three-quarters of what changes hands in an ordinary day. If I put that order in, I'd push the price up all by myself, and the Surveillance Commission would see it on their screens before I'd finished. Those are the people who helped catch Murakami, along with the prosecutors' special squad. So we buy a few units a day, in the morning, when nobody's looking.' He shrugged. 'Everything I do from now on has to be boring. And there's a file. From tonight, every reason anyone could give for buying Kyoto Glass is written down and dated: the balance sheet, a share price below book value, all of it public. Nothing in it that couldn't be read on EDINET by anyone who cared to look.'

'Do you think somebody will ask?'

'If it works, somebody always asks.'

Eichiro turned the page, found page nine and read it with his lips moving slightly. 'The director guarantees it personally,' he said at last.

'Your seal, and the house behind it.' Tomoya held his eye. 'I'm not going to pretend otherwise, Mr Eichiro. I said on Friday it would be my risk alone, and it can't be. If you say no, I'll understand. I'll find another way.'

The laptop hummed. Somewhere out in the dark, a lorry changed gear on the bypass. Eichiro looked at the page for a long time, and when he raised his head, his kind, creased face had set into something Tomoya hadn't seen on it before.

He got up without a word, fetched his briefcase from the sofa and took out a clear plastic folder.

'I'm not going to be your lamb for the slaughter, Tomoya.'

'I wasn't—'

'You were going to let me sign a guarantee on the whole house, and I'd own not one yen of what was built on top of it.' He laid two sheets of paper side by side on the table, over the risk disclosure. 'A share transfer agreement. I printed it on Tuesday. And the register of members, brought up to date. I'm transferring forty-nine per cent of Origin Holdings to you. The other fifty-one stays with me.'

Tomoya stared at the paper. 'Forty-nine.'

'Fifty-one so I keep the casting vote if you ever go mad. I know my own weaknesses.'

'Mr Eichiro, I'm nineteen.'

'I know. I rang a scrivener I know on Monday. A minor can accept a gift without anyone signing for him. It's only when he buys things that someone has to sign.' Eichiro tapped the register with a thick finger. 'We're in this together now. If it sinks, we drown together. If it floats, we float together. I pulled you out of a river, Tomoya. I'm not going to stand on the bank and watch you drown in the stock market.'

A small, cold habit stirred in Tomoya. It had grown in him over too many years among men who said one thing and meant another, and it told him he could turn his attention on the man across the table and have the answer in a second. He kept his eyes on the paper. For once, he didn't want to know.

Something unfamiliar and warm moved through his chest, and it was heavy. For the first time since the bridge, he felt the real weight of what he was doing, and of who else would be carrying it.

He picked up the pen and signed the line on the register, pressing hard enough to dent the page. Eichiro nodded, took the hanko from his pocket and inked it from the little tin of red paste. The seal came down first on the transfer, then on page nine, and the red shone wet in the lamplight.

Outside, a cicada began to whirr in the persimmon tree, as if it, too, had been up all night.

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The hire firm's van had come at four on Thursday afternoon with the mahogany table and the eight leather chairs. Tomoya had spent the evening polishing the table with a soft cloth until he could see the pendant lamp in its surface. By ten he had put on the hotel waistcoat and bow tie. A man who had come to a dark shed in the middle of the night, he had decided, would want a familiar face and a uniform.

At twenty to eleven, gravel crunched in the lane. A black Mercedes crept up to the fence and switched off its headlights.

For a second, something cold turned over under Tomoya's ribs. It was the same colour, the same long glossy bonnet, the same smell of money in the dark. He saw a cherry tree and a green silk dress. Then he put the thought away, the way he had been putting things away all week, and went out to the gate with his hands folded in front of him.

Hakiro stepped out of the back seat in a pale summer suit with his tie loosened. The colour left his face as soon as he saw the building. The rust ran down the walls in long brown streaks. Weeds pushed up through the cracks in the yard, and the sign over the gate hung by one bolt. He crossed the loading dock with his polished shoes crunching on the grit, and he looked like a man who had made a terrible mistake and was too tired to turn round.

Tomoya bowed slightly and said nothing. He led him across the dark workshop, past the stacked pallets and the girders where the pigeons shifted, to the edge of the hanging velvet. There he parted the curtain and stepped aside.

Hakiro went in. He stopped dead.

The mahogany table gleamed under the low lamp. Eight leather chairs stood around it. The rugs swallowed the sound of his shoes. By the curtain, on a small stand, was a plain wooden box with a lid, for telephones. When he turned and looked back through the gap, he could see the fans turning in the dark. All he could hear was a soft rush, like wind in a distant wood, and beneath it, faintly, a piano.

'My God,' he breathed, running a hand through his hair. 'It's a tea house designed by a gangster.' He turned slowly. 'And you can't hear a word from in here, can you?'

'Say something at your normal speaking voice,' Tomoya said. 'I'll stand outside.'

He did. Hakiro read out the first lines of a spreadsheet he knew by heart. When Tomoya came back in, he said only, 'I could tell you were speaking. I couldn't tell you what about.'

Hakiro let out a long, unsteady laugh. 'It really is the most private room I've ever sat in.'

He drew a thick manila envelope from inside his jacket and pressed it flat against Tomoya's chest, the way you hand a baton to a runner.

'Two million. Count it if you like.'

'I'll take your word, Mr Yamashita.'

'Count it anyway. Everything in my life is going to be counted tomorrow.' His voice tightened with leftover nerves. 'Right. The Americans arrive at one. There are three of them. The lawyer, the man from head office, and a security man who'll walk the room at noon with some gadget. Let him. Black coffee, no sugar, no milk. You come in once with the tray. You look at no one. You say nothing to anyone at that table, not so much as good afternoon.'

Tomoya bowed deeply, burying the fire in his eyes.

'Understood, Mr Yamashita,' he murmured. 'We'll be ghosts.'

When the Mercedes's tail lights had dwindled down the lane and vanished, he stood alone in the dark with the envelope in his hand. He had never held so much money in his life. It was strange how light it was. Two hundred notes weighed no more than a paperback.

The adrenaline drained out of him all at once, and a bone-deep tiredness rolled in behind it. He lay down on the stack of folded rugs outside the curtain, with the smell of concrete dust and new wool in his nose, and closed his eyes.

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The darkness swallowed him, and shifted.

He was standing in the middle of the bridge over the Arakawa. A wind howled across the deck, carrying rust and river water, and above him the sky was the colour of beaten gold. Instead of rain, thousands of thin white strips of paper drifted down like snow, ticker tape from an older age, when men still shouted prices across the floor of the exchange. They were piling in drifts against the steel guardrail.

'You look like rubbish, boy.'

Tomoya turned.

Something sat on the concrete ledge on the far side of the rail, with its legs dangling over the water. It had the shape of the tall man in the white suit, but the marble was gone. What was left was translucent and ash-grey, and it flickered at the edges like a television between channels. The left wing still glowed faintly. The charred stump on the other side dripped burning embers onto the road.

'You're not much better,' Tomoya said, brushing a strip of paper off his shoulder. 'Last time, you glowed. Now you look like the picture when the aerial's come loose.'

The Entity threw back its head and laughed, a sound like grinding metal and breaking glass. 'Careful. I could show you what hell is really like.'

Tomoya walked over and leaned on the railing beside it, letting the paper run through his fingers. 'So you're stuck in my head,' he said lightly. 'What's with the golden sky and the paper snow? Bit much, isn't it?'

'It isn't mine. It's yours.' The Entity caught a strip on one long finger. 'It's the architecture of your ambition, Hisa Tomoya. I expected small things. You'd read a few minds, win at mahjong, frighten a loan shark or two. Instead I get a shell company, borrowed money and psychological warfare against company directors. You move quickly.'

'Hard labour is a good motivator.' He watched an ember fall and go out on the asphalt. 'But I want to know something. You told me you were dying. Why give me this at all? What do you get out of it?'

'I am dying. Slowly. You've bought me time.' The nebula eyes turned on him, and the banter drained out of the voice. 'There's a weight in the world, boy. Power sits in a few hands and presses down on everyone else. When it shifts, when an arrogant man loses what he's hoarded, it sends a shock through everything. Energy. My kind feed on it.'

'So I'm a farmhand,' Tomoya said. 'Growing food for a dying ghost.'

'You're an apex predator.' It jabbed a finger at his chest. 'Tanaka. Arata. Tomorrow, if you're as good as I think, Yamashita. Every time you tear weight off a man who has earned the fall, it releases something real. But hear this. If you become a mindless agent of chaos, if you rob a shop or hurt someone innocent, some old fool who pulled you out of a river, say, you generate nothing. Rot. You hunt wolves, Tomoya. You gut the corrupt empires. I feast on what falls.'

'And what do I get?' Tomoya was already calculating the angle. 'Apart from the money.'

The Entity's smile spread, cosmic and unsettling. The ember on its shoulder flared, throwing orange light across the gold dream.

'Keep feeding me,' it said, leaning close, 'and I'll grow your gift. You think surface thoughts are the limit? That's the first floor, boy. The noise. Wait until you see what's underneath.'

The paper rustling against the road swelled into something deafening, dry leaves in a hurricane—

Tomoya woke with a gasp.

He lay in the dark warehouse on the heap of rugs. Pale morning light cut through the high windows in dusty bars. It was Friday, the first of September. In five hours, the Americans would come down the lane. The envelope lay under his hand, flat and light.

He sat up, his heart still pounding, and held his hands up to the light. They looked exactly as they always had, with the scarred knuckles and the calluses from the steel bars. But whatever had been done to him on the bridge wasn't finished. His gift was no longer just a tool. It was a weapon, and it was still growing teeth.