From the Fatherland, with Love, page 64
He designated the entire system of wiring on the fifth floor “Group Five,” that on the sixth floor “Group Six,” and so on. The wiring for each floor was fundamentally the same, he explained, but because the number of charges was different for each, it was necessary to use a certain device to provide consistent resistance levels. “This is a cement resistor,” he said, holding up a small white box and explaining that the component itself was inside the ceramic case, embedded in cement. He had already calculated how many of these to use on the other floors to match the resistance level of Group Five, with its three hundred and twenty LSCs.
The exploder remained on a table in the Italian restaurant on the fifth floor, guarded by Kaneshiro and Okubo, who were armed with the Uzi, the FN pistol, and hand grenades. Takeguchi had constructed his hell-box out of metal plates, and it was about the size of a box of tissues. On top were three holes the diameter of small coins through which you could insert a metal handle to turn a switch. Beneath the holes were the words CHARGE, FIRE and STOP, written with a felt pen. Above the switches were small pilot lights, and when the device was sufficiently charged, a green one came on. A black cable extended from a gap beneath the top plate and was connected at the other end to a cellphone charger. A blank email sent to the phone resting in the charger would supposedly turn it on, delivering an electric current to the exploder and triggering the blast. Hino didn’t know a lot about electrical stuff and was impressed that Takeguchi did. But when he said as much, Takeguchi shook his head and told him, “A hell-box is a simple thing. You hook up a dry battery to a converter, turn up the voltage, accumulate the electricity in a condenser, and then release it into the cable all at once. I only know as much as I need to know to make bombs.”
In the corridor outside Room 8030, Yamada, Mori, and the Satanists Sato and Orihara were connecting the red detonator wires to the blue auxiliary busbars. Using wire-stripping nippers and pliers, they first skinned about two centimeters of vinyl coating from the auxiliary busbar to expose the bare copper and three or four centimeters from the end of the detonator wire. Then, after reconfirming positive and negative, they connected the bare wires by hand, twisting the end of one around the other ten times or so, then using needle-nose pliers to crimp and secure the connection, and finally covering it all with electrical tape. The most important thing, Takeguchi reminded them several times, was to avoid mistaking positive and negative, and next was to make sure the connections wouldn’t come apart even if accidentally given a tug.
Sato was surprisingly good at this. He handled the various pliers and nippers with delicacy and precision. He was also faster than everyone else, and he didn’t make mistakes. Takeguchi asked him if he’d had any experience working in a blasting company. “Nah, I don’t know anything about explosives,” he said, his big eyes sparkling. “Besides, I’m only sixteen.” Orihara, the de facto leader of the Satanists, said, “This guy always was good with his hands, even as a little kid.” Back in the Lucifer Incident days, he said, they had shown the media a Satanic altar, a booklet in which the Devil’s signs were displayed and decoded, and bizarrely shaped accessories the Devil had supposedly worn; and all of these things had been Sato’s handiwork.
The charges yet to be set were stashed in the corridor. Of the six hundred and forty they’d brought along, less than seventy remained. There was still an hour left before noon, when the blast was scheduled. Plenty of time, thought Hino.
The hotel had been built to look like an ocean liner plowing toward Hakata Bay, and Hino referred to the “front” end as the bow and the “rear” (where the ground-floor tour bus entrance was) as the stern. “Forward” meant toward the bow and “aft” toward the stern. The main entrance to the hotel was on the starboard side, as was Fukuoka Dome, only about a hundred meters away. Along both of the forward corridors were narrowly spaced doors to single rooms. Felix and Matsuyama were in charge of unlocking the starboard doors by inserting an electronic device into each slot. Approximately every third room housed a column. On the eighth floor only the ten columns on the side toward which the building would fall were to be cut. On the fifth they had rigged all forty columns; on the sixth, ten in the service corridor and ten around the central elevator hall, for a total of twenty; and on the seventh the same ten as the eighth.
The seventh floor had Japanese-style guest rooms, and in the bow were the baths—one for men and one for women. These were large pools complete with boulders to evoke the atmosphere of natural hot springs, and the column there was inside the partition between the men’s and women’s baths. In the women’s changing room, underwear and robes and towels lay scattered about, suggesting that the bathers had dropped everything and fled. But the boys had all been focused on the job at hand and no one fooled around inspecting the panties and bras or sniffing them or waving them in the air.
Stripping veneer from columns was the only thing on Hino’s mind. Shinohara followed behind with his chisel, hammer, and crowbar, looking more like a real construction worker than a guy who raised frogs and flies and centipedes. Fukuda was placing homemade antipersonnel mines on the three emergency stairways between the third and fourth floors. The five Satanists were busy carving more styrofoam blocks to hold the charges the proper distance from the steel columns and setting the electric detonators, taking special care not to tangle the increasingly complicated network of wires. Takeguchi, whose eyes were now badly bloodshot, eventually left Sato in charge of overseeing the entire wiring operation.
Dawn had broken by the time they finished their work on the sixth floor, but none of them noticed. They had continued working with penlights, and no one was aware of the pale light seeping in through the slit in the curtains until Shibata looked up from the styrofoam he was cutting and said, “Whoa. Here comes the sun.” Those who weren’t working at any given moment, whether waiting for the others to catch up or taking a break, would hydrate with water or soda and eat Calorie Mate bars while studying how to operate the weapons. These included a sub-machine gun, two automatic rifles, two pistols, some hand grenades, the short-barreled Scorpion, the Franchi shotgun, and a grenade launcher.
Takei had left detailed memos regarding the maintenance and use of all the weapons, and they practiced the correct grip and stance for firing a handgun, the way to work the charging handle on an automatic rifle, and so on. Hino had pored over the shotgun and hand-grenade sections. The US army grenades Takei had bought were called M67s. They exploded on impact, which meant that you couldn’t bounce one around a corner, for example, to get at an enemy.
The first column Hino had taken his cutter to was near the window in the Italian restaurant on the fifth floor, and he hadn’t slept since. When he had first come to Ishihara’s place, he’d slept like a dead man for days on end. At the construction site where he lied about his age to get a job, he had always slept well in the unfinished buildings of bare concrete after working all day, but the walls of the institution he was confined in just before coming to Fukuoka had smelled of new synthetic materials, and being unable to sleep there he’d gone off the deep end.
One thing Hino had never admitted to anyone was that he had always hated and feared mirrors. He would sometimes look at a mirror and find that he couldn’t recognize the person it reflected. Even if no one else was in the room, he would begin to wonder if that was really his face—and if not, whose was it?—and end up panic-stricken. About a week after arriving in Fukuoka, he’d been walking through the Living, carefully blocking the big mirror from sight with a shielding hand, when Ishihara burst out laughing. “Hey, Vladimir Hinochinko, what the heck are you doing?” Nobody else was around, so he mumbled something about his fear of mirrors. “Well well well,” said Ishihara. He stood in front of the mirror, pointed at it, and said, “Hinochinko, look in here from there. What do you see?” Reflected in the mirror, of course, was Ishihara’s clock-stopping face. “I see you,” he said, and Ishihara told him to come stand next to him and look. Hino was reluctant, but something about the man’s voice and way of speaking seemed to drain him of his will, and he found himself standing before the mirror. “Looky, looky! Do you see two widdle faces?” Ishihara said in a creepy voice, as if hosting a TV show for toddlers. “Hinochinko, which of these two faces do you think most closely resembles your own? Not which one is you; that’s not what I and I mean. When you look at this noble face here, like a Latin American freedom fighter turned genius poet, and then that round and pathetic face there that would be right at home on a little roadside stone bodhisattva, which would you say most closely resembles your own image of yourself?”
Hino couldn’t help laughing, but he thought he understood more or less what Ishihara was saying: that nothing was certain, and that being unnerved by mirrors was perfectly normal. At least, that’s the way it came across to him. Ishihara hadn’t said there was something wrong with him or that it was loony to be afraid of your own reflection, he’d merely suggested a new way of looking at the problem. “It’s definitely this one,” Hino said, pointing at his own face in the glass. And ever since then, strangely enough, he’d been all right with mirrors. Whenever he did get anxious about what he saw there, he would think of Orihara’s old-man face or Miyazaki’s Moai statue face or Shibata’s squashed and zit-covered face or Toyohara’s big round skinhead face and realize that the one he was looking at was much more like him than any of those. It was from that point on that he’d begun sleeping twelve or more hours a day, as if making up for the sleep he’d lost in the institution.
Massaging his numb hand and arm, he wondered if all that hibernating had somehow been in preparation for this day. He walked out of Room 8033 and headed for 8036, where the next column was, with his team in tow. Felix and Matsuyama, who had already unlocked the door and left it ajar, were now in front of 8048, sticking the electronic master key into the slot. Felix looked across at him but didn’t wave or say anything. He mechanically opened the lock, set the doorstop so it wouldn’t close, and moved on.
Three blue lines ran parallel down the corridor’s cream-colored carpeting. There were only two buses, connected to the exploder’s plus and minus terminals, but the “negative bus” U-turned back on itself. To minimize the danger of getting the polarity wrong, Takeguchi had wrapped bands of white tape around the negative bus at intervals of about a meter. Sixteen red detonator wires from the column’s eight LSCs snaked out from 8033 into the corridor. They looked like capillaries visible through translucent skin, reaching for the blue veins of the auxiliary busbars.
Seven columns remained, including the one here in 8036. When Hino stepped into the room, the clock by the bed changed from 11:09 to 11:10. It had been taking an average of five or six minutes per column, from veneer removal to connecting the wires. At this rate, they would probably finish well before the scheduled zero hour. Once their work was done, they were going to retrace the route they took to sneak in, leave through the Cafe Luggnagg exit, descend the steps, cross the road, run to the seashore, and take cover behind the breakwater. The breakwater was to the port side of the hotel, so if they got in the water and hugged the concrete, they should be okay, according to Takeguchi. The only problem was that while crossing the road they’d be visible to the guards at Checkpoint E. They would probably be shot at, but not even the Koryos were likely to hit anything from a distance of five hundred meters. Once they’d crossed, they would drop to the beach and out of the line of fire; and the moment they all reached the breakwater and took cover, Takeguchi would hit the switch on his hell-box by remote control, and it would all be over.
The column in 8036 was in the left-hand corner of the room. Tateno stood at the window, watching the movements of the sentries outside the Dome; Ando plugged in the hand-held electric cutter and readied the stepladder; and Shinohara stood by with his stripping tools as Hino drew the cut lines with a felt pen. None of them spoke as they worked. So this is what it’s like to share a goal with other people and work together to achieve it, Hino thought as he turned the cutter on. Everyone who’d gathered at Ishihara’s place, himself included, had always refused to follow orders from adults, had been categorized as mentally ill, and had attempted or committed serious crimes. All their lives they’d been told to reform, but none of them had ever even understood what the word meant.
Hino’s teachers, the attendants at the institution, and other adults had always trotted out, like a mantra, the proposition that nothing was more precious than human life. Great numbers of people were being killed every day in the continuing upheavals in the Middle East, and tens of thousands of children were dying of starvation in Sudan and Ethiopia and other African countries. But these authority figures never spoke about the preciousness of those lives—apparently only the lives in their immediate circle counted. What were children supposed to make of people like that telling them how to live? Some, of course, simply knuckled under, but it wasn’t because they’d concluded that the adults were right. They merely knew that obedience led to reward and rebellion to punishment, and they wanted to avoid the latter. The key was to find something you thought needed to be done and to do it, just as he and the others were doing right now. If you didn’t have anything to do, if you merely accepted the advice of corrupt adults, obeying them and living the way they told you to, you woke up one day to find that your life was devoid of any excitement or pleasure. You lost hope and became homeless, or you searched for like-minded souls on the Internet and committed group suicide, or you resigned yourself to being a slave to the “grown-ups” for the rest of your days.
This room, 8036, was bigger than the others. According to the floor plan posted on the inside of the door, the rooms up to 8035 were all singles, and those aft of there were deluxe twins. Probably pretty expensive. Perhaps even the covering on the columns was meant to suggest luxury—the material was thick, with a long pile. Hino had to take even more care than usual, or fibers would get caught in the blade, making it slip. As with welding or cutting or chiseling, however, “taking care” didn’t mean being gentle or slow. He had to grip both handles of the cutter tightly and then move decisively, cutting in one quick stroke. Bits of the material got in his mouth and nose, and he fought against the tickling in his throat. When he finished the first cut, he fell to his hands and knees and coughed violently. “Wanna rest awhile?” Shinohara said, lowering his crowbar. “No, I’m all right.” Hino raised his head, and both Shinohara and Tateno burst out laughing. Shinohara touched his own upper lip and told Hino he was “leaking.” A drip of snot, white with dust particles, was dangling from one nostril.
Ando went to see how Takeguchi and the others were progressing. On his return he said, “Looking good. Let’s take five.” Hino went to the bathroom to blow his nose, wash his face and hands, and put in some eye drops. Returning, he sat on the floor with the others. They drank cans of oolong tea and Coke and Pocari Sweat from the fridge. “Hino’s snot balloon reminded me of something that happened to me once,” Ando said. “My father was a tax accountant, and when I was maybe twelve, he said he wanted to treat me to some oysters and took me to this French restaurant, the only one in town. He didn’t live with us, but about three or four times a year he’d take me out to dinner like that. So at the restaurant he ordered some wine and even poured some for me, though I didn’t drink it, and I don’t know if it was because we hadn’t talked in a long time or what, but he was really nervous and kept guzzling this yellow—I mean, I guess you call it white wine.
“Anyway, he wasn’t much of a drinker, and in the taxi on the way back he started feeling sick. He didn’t want to barf in the cab, so he had the driver stop and got out and threw up. He crouched there for a long time, and finally I got worried and went to check on him. I’m like, Are you all right? and he’s like, Yeah, sorry about this, or whatever, and he turns to look at me, and this big gray blob is hanging out of his nostril. I’m freakin’ out, I’m like, What the hell is that? Well, what does it turn out to be but a whole undigested oyster, all covered with snot, just hanging there over his lips. And ever since then I can’t even stand to look at an oyster, much less eat one.”
Ando related this little reminiscence in such a heartfelt way that the other three felt obliged to stifle their laughter. Hino stood up and said, “Shall we get back to it?” Tateno grabbed the binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck and went to the window, where he immediately gave a strangled cry and dropped to a crouch, pointing the binoculars downward over the windowsill. “Koryo soldiers,” he said. “They’re coming in the main entrance.” His voice was shaky, his face and fingers pale. “Nothing unusual about that,” Shinohara said. “Their HQ’s here.” He stepped toward the window, but Tateno raised his right hand to stop him and began counting the soldiers. “One, two, three, four,” he said. “Five, six, seven, eight. Yeah, but this is different. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. They’re running. Got weapons too. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…”
By the time he passed twenty, the blood had drained from the others’ faces as well, and Hino began to feel as if he were trying to digest a golf ball. “Twenty-two… Ah! One of them just looked up this way. Twenty-three, twenty-four—another one looked up. Twenty-five, twenty-six… Twenty-six altogether.” Tateno turned around. “They’re all armed,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re onto us,” Hino said. “Anyway, let’s finish the job.” He was picking up his cutter when Fukuda poked his head through the open door and said, “You’d better come and look. The elevators are moving.”
