Free Disciple of the Wind by Steve Bein Page A

cracked her in the back of the head. Her stun gun skittered across the floor like an oversized cockroach. She saw stars, and through them she could just make out her assailant. Mariko curled into a ball, not out of fear but just to shield her vitals. She reached for her pistol with her left hand, and held her right in a kickboxer’s high guard, hoping to ward off the next blow to the head.
    The woman reared back for another swing. Mariko lashed out with her foot as hard as she could.
    Her kick landed first, blasting the woman’s leg out from under her. The shoulder bag missed its target, landing with a heavy metallic clang right next to Mariko’s ear. She grabbed the bag with both hands and cradled it to her chest. This thing was not going to hit her again.
    The woman stood over her, got a grip on the bag, and pulled like her life depended on it. Mariko let fly with a kick and hit her square in the crotch. It was a better target on a man, but not a bad shot on a woman either. Her assailant grunted and doubled over. Mariko had a shot at grabbing her hair, her clothes, anything to bring her down, but she knew she couldn’t afford to let go of the bag. Another shot to the head would be the end of her.
    Mariko rolled on top of the bag, pinning it with her bodyweight and freeing her left hand to reach for her sidearm. The woman let go of the bag and ran like hell. Mariko tried to get up and pursue, but made it only as far as her knees. Dizziness and nausea sat her right back down. Her vision was full of glowing squiggles. When she pressed her palms to her eyes to clear them, her right hand came away bloody. She probed her fingertips through her short, choppy hair and found a wide gash in her scalp.
    Still nauseous, she crawled to the wall and pushed herself up to aseated position. Giving up wasn’t her forte, but she was too dizzy to stand and she had no way to call for backup. She had to count herself lucky that her assailant had fled instead of fighting for the bag—or worse, for the pistol at Mariko’s hip. Mariko was lucky to be alive.
    Once she caught her breath, the squiggles started to subside. She found herself looking at the shoulder bag in her lap. One corner was stained with blood—Mariko’s—with something pointy poking up from within the fabric. Mariko opened the bag to see what it was.
    A familiar mask looked up at her. It had stubby horns and sharp teeth, and someone had sliced the tip off of one of the fangs. Its iron skin was pitted with rust and age. Whoever first crafted it had a gift, for it was astonishingly expressive, its scowl as livid as any human’s.
    Mariko had seen this mask before, most recently on the face of Joko Daishi. The only difference was that it now had a ragged, gleaming, rust-free dent in its forehead, almost as if someone had ricocheted a bullet off the mask.
    It was impossible—or if not impossible, then downright creepy at the very least. Not twenty-four hours ago, Mariko had asked Captain Kusama to seize the mask as evidence, to keep it out of Joko Daishi’s hands. Mariko had no doubt that Joko Daishi had taken his inspiration from it in bombing the airport. And no sooner had it fallen into Joko Daishi’s possession than he lost it again. It could have gone to anyone, yet somehow it found its way to Mariko.
    In her gut Mariko didn’t believe in destiny, but intellectually, she had to acknowledge that this was more than coincidence. She didn’t have a name for the forces that could have put the mask in her hands. She was certain the woman she’d taken it from hadn’t intended for Mariko to steal it. Mariko had a grade two concussion to prove it. But she was equally certain that she couldn’t have crossed paths with the woman by accident. There were thirty-five million people in greater Tokyo, and thirty-five-million-to-one odds against this woman losing the mask only to Mariko.
    No, this was no coincidence. Someone had orchestrated their encounter. The only question was