In the small, dark room, a man in a monkey mask was sitting in front of Itachi. He carried out his duties matter-of-factly, processing the mountain of documents piled on the desk. Papers covered in dense text, papers that looked like blueprints. There were also some pages with photos of faces attached to them. All were documents related to the Uchiha clan.
Itachi was in the room given to him in the Foundation mansion.
“It’s been a year since then. Time flies, hm?” the man in the monkey mask said. His voice sounded like he was still just barely twenty.
Itachi had known the face under the mask since he was little. He had seen it any number of times since the Uchiha clan was forcibly moved to the compound on the edge of the village.
Uchiha Kagen. Itachi had only learned his name once they started working together. Kagen was an unremarkable man, in a logistical operations division in the Military Police Force. His rank was genin, and he didn’t have any particularly spectacular techniques. At the meetings, he never voiced his own thoughts, but rather, always followed the opinions of other people.
Or that’s what I thought, anyway …
The man before his eyes was a member of the Foundation. The real Kagen was dead. The man before him had a twin, a little brother with the same physique and chakra. The two had both been given Kagen’s face. These twins were the Foundation members Sugaru had said were investigating the movements of the clan.
The fact that Kagen worked in a logistics division meant that he hadn’t had any opportunities to activate the sharingan. Thus, due to the fact that during his lifetime, he had been thoroughly unremarkable, and the fact that he had no close relatives, no one suspected anything when he was secretly replaced. The roots of the village reached that deeply into the Uchiha clan.
The real name of the man in the monkey mask was Gozu. His younger brother was Mezu.
The “since then” Gozu was talking about was the death of Shisui.
“Because Shisui died, the radical faction was forced to revise their plan, and postpone the day of action. So his death delayed the coup d’état, which is a bit of irony, hm?” The older Gozu was using a more polite form of speech because Itachi was his superior.
The subordinates given to Itachi after Danzo made him an Anbu team leader were Gozu and Mezu. Isolated from the other Anbu teams, Itachi’s role was to watch the Uchiha clan very closely, along with these two men.
“They were going to use Shisui’s teleportation to charge the Residence and abduct the third Hokage. That was the basic idea. So, I suppose it is only natural that Shisui’s death would slow their movements.”
“Quit babbling, and do your job,” Itachi said, running his eyes over Yashiro’s revised plan for the coup d’état.
Just as Gozu had noted, one of the key elements of the plan put together by his father and the others was the abduction of the third Hokage. The Military Police Force would strike a blow against the village ninjas by kidnapping their leader. Those ninjas would attack them, and they would fight back, buying time and forcing the village to accept the demands of the clan. That was the overall concept of the coup.
Their demands were four: Uchiha participation in the center of the village, dismantling of the compound, the freedom to choose where they lived, and Uchiha Fugaku named as the fifth Hokage.
Itachi couldn’t believe the village would accept such impossible demands, but the members of the radical faction seriously intended to push them.
“As noted in the revised draft you are reading, Team Leader, it seems that they have come up with an idea for abducting the Hokage that doesn’t require Shisui. They should start to move again soon, yes?” Gozu said calmly, not bothered in the slightest by Itachi’s rebuke.
Itachi lifted his eyes from the document in his hand, and glared at his subordinate. “Such impertinence.”
Silly monkey mask in place, Gozu shrugged his shoulders exaggeratedly, like a clown.
“Team Leader!” A shrill cry came from the door.
“Hey, Mezu! How was your watch?” Gozu asked the man in the doorway.
On Mezu’s face was a monkey mask just like Gozu’s. The only difference was the color of the markings. Gozu’s were red, while Mezu’s were blue. In the compound, one of them would pretend to be Kagen, and watch over the clan. Gozu being here meant that Mezu had to be in the compound.
“No time for that. They’re moving, Team Leader.” Mezu’s tone was somewhat rougher than Gozu’s, as he turned his monkey mask to Itachi and began to speak. “There’s a clan meeting today, and apparently, Fugaku’s going to tell everyone the date of the action and their assignments.”
“Did you know that, Team Leader?” Gozu’s asked, and Itachi shook his head from side to side.
The time to come has finally come …
This was the thought that replayed in Itachi’s mind. Shisui’s death had only put off the coup. At some point, the clan would begin to move again. He wasn’t alone in thinking this; Gozu and Mezu were with him there; Danzo and the other village officials also shared his view.
As Itachi kept his two subordinates in check with his eyes, his lips trembled faintly. “I knew that there was a meeting today, but I didn’t know what it was about.”
He had barely spoken with his father since the incident with Yashiro and the others, and he had stopped showing up at the meetings. Itachi honestly knew nothing, other than what he discovered here with his team.
“You’re the one going to the meeting, right?” Mezu said, looking at Gozu.
The monkey mask with the red coloring nodded.
“I see.” The words abruptly slipped out of Itachi’s mouth. “Time to move, then.” Up to that point, he had deliberately run from it. From facing the clan head on.
This was his last opportunity.