Kaname and her friends sat in a burger joint under a department store. They munched on fries, talked, and messed around.
Sousuke had followed them. He was currently sitting in a corner in the back, pretending to read a Tokyo Sports paper he’d picked up three days ago in the station. But all the while, he remained acutely focused on his surroundings.
There was a figure in his field of vision that concerned him: a man in his late twenties with a medium height and build, sitting behind Kaname at one of the counter seats. He wore a gray beret low over his eyes and had a black attaché case at his feet. He kept checking his watch, as if very conscious of the time.
That attaché case... could it be...? Sousuke wondered. It looked a lot like one he’d seen in a War Against Terror weapons catalog. It had a built-in machine gun, and you could press a button to switch it to firing mode.
The man finished off his hamburger and stood up, tray in hand. Is he making his move? Sousuke stood up. But the man just threw his trash away, placed his tray in the return, then hurried out.
Or not, he thought. No, wait... The man had left the attaché case behind. Could it be— Damn!
Sousuke had heard about this MO from an acquaintance who’d fought terror in Italy—blowing up an entire business to take out an assassination target. But... weren’t they trying to abduct her? Sousuke thought. But then, circumstances might have changed... Yes, he didn’t have time to question it!
Sousuke broke into run. He turned over a table and shoved a customer out of the way to snatch up the attaché case. It felt heavy in his hands.
Just then, Kaname turned around. “S-Sagara-kun?”
“Get down!” He knocked over a few more customers as he charged out of the shop. Somewhere free of people... He looked around. It was a shopping district in early evening, so the sidewalks were packed. But across the street was a parking lot. That might just—
“Out of my way!” Sousuke dashed out into the road. There was a blare of a horn. He turned to see a kei-truck bearing down on him. The driver failed to brake in time; Sousuke was hit and sent flying into a bicycle rack.
Out of time... The world was spinning around him. His consciousness fading, he forced himself to his feet. Throw it... throw the case. Throw the case somewhere safe...
“Hey, you okay?” Suddenly, the man from before was standing in front of him. He took the attaché case from Sousuke, opened it and looked inside. “Oh thank goodness, my manuscript’s okay... Thanks for trying to bring it to me.”
Sousuke just stood there, stunned, as the man clapped him on the shoulder and walked swiftly away.
A dozen people were staring at Sousuke—the truck driver, Kaname, and her friends among them—their faces a mixture of awe, confusion, and concern.
“Sagara-kun... What are you doing?” Kyoko, standing beside Kaname, asked him.
“I thought it was a bomb...” he said. And with that, he collapsed.
✦ ✦ ✦
“You’re gonna get yourself killed before the week is out.” Kurz said as he bandaged Sousuke’s head. “We haven’t seen one sign of an enemy so far, but you keep taking yourself out like this. Can’t you just chill out?”
“I’m trying,” Sousuke moaned.
That incident at the hamburger shop had been just one of many. It had been four days since his mission started, but Sousuke was still floundering at school. Every day he seemed to lose his cool, make trouble, destroy public property, disrupt class—he’d been yelled at both by Kagurazaka Eri and by Kaname, herself.
His injuries were constant. He’d never suffered like this on a mission before. What’s more, most of his injuries—falling down stairs, busting through glass, being crushed by library books, getting beaten by busts in the art room—were the result of things he had brought on himself.
He knew that he was just off his rhythm. But that didn’t mean he could stop it. Kurz was right: he might die at that school, possibly very soon.
“You can’t keep this up. Just tap out for tomorrow—Mao and I will stand watch outside the school.”
“What if the kidnapper is inside the school?” Sousuke demanded.
“They won’t be. Honestly, we still don’t know if they’re after her,” Kurz breezed.
Sousuke just scowled. “It’s dangerous to be too optimistic,” he warned. “We should consider all situations as possible—”
“And that’s the thinking that gets you hit by a truck,” Kurz told him. “You ever hear the term ‘solo sumo’?”
“Solo sumo?”
“Yeah, solo sumo. Swinging yourself around by your own mawashi?”
“Mawashi?”
“You don’t know that either? How are you even Japanese? There we go...” Kurz finished the wrapping and went back to the window. “But here’s one thing I don’t get.”
“What?”
“Kaname. She seems totally normal. I mean sure, she’s pretty, but not ‘marry the king of Monaco’ pretty. Nothing weird in her background, either... Well, compared to you and me, anyway.”
“True... I suppose you’re right.” It was only these last few days that Sousuke had realized how different his upbringing was from most of his peers.
“So why would the KGB be after her?” Kurz wondered. “Same with the girl we found last week... I heard she was a totally normal student before they took her. What the hell do they get from kidnapping some foreign girl in high school and drugging the life out of her?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Sousuke told him.
“Right? Same here. What the hell is the major hiding from us...”
✦ ✦ ✦
“When are you going to get it done already?” the colonel barked into the receiver. He had ordered the kidnapping three days ago.
“Soon,” Gauron responded apathetically from the other end of the phone. The terrorist (nationality unknown) was currently staying in the Soviet embassy in Tokyo. According to reports from the embassy staff, Gauron had mostly stayed inside since his arrival, making only a few brief contacts with his men. “I’m currently laying groundwork. I need to do a lot of preparation to abduct the target safely.”
“Preparation? Just break in in the middle of the night, grab her, and drive her to Niigata. What groundwork could you need for such a simple plan?”
“You need to stop being so impatient.”
“What did you say?” the colonel fumed.
“Mithril will have prepared for such a straightforward operation,” Gauron predicted.
“You think they have eyes on this ‘Chai-dory Kanamm’?”
Gauron chuckled at the colonel’s crude pronunciation of ‘Chidori Kaname.’ “It seems that way. So I need to act carefully to avoid their notice.”
“What for?” the colonel demanded. “If they try to stop you, just eliminate them.”
“Not possible. Even if I sent all of my skilled men at the problem, we’d just end up dead for our troubles.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that they have an AS,” Gauron explained. “It’s staking out the target with an ECS on invisibility mode.”
“Invisibility? Full invisibility? There’s no way those devices are out of preliminary—”
Gauron interrupted him condescendingly. “Didn’t I tell you their technology was ten years ahead? Forcing a fight will just invite trouble. They’ve likely put elite agents on the case.”
“But...”
“Just leave it all to me. I’m preparing a method that will eliminate all chance of interference. You just be careful that you aren’t sent to an internment camp.”
With that, the man hung up on him.