Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

well as their Tokyo and Yokohama branch offices, and all they got was a recording that business had closed for the day. Right now, he said, they were calling Hinode’s branch offices, regional offices, and sales offices one by one, but the result was all the same. Calls to the executives’ homes all reached answering machines, and while surely the executives and managers were gathered together somewhere, they had no clue where. Moreover, MPD’s Public Information director had called in the chief reporters from every media organization, so it was certain that they intended to request a temporary embargo.

As Kubo replaced the receiver, worried that time was running out, he saw that several hired cars from other media companies were now flanking his. The time was 12:41 a.m. There were even TV crews with video cameras in tow. Just as Kubo had done when he first arrived, the other reporters ran around the darkened building, then, once they had given up, gathered on the sidewalk. A reporter Kubo recognized from the Yomiuri Shimbun scurried toward Kubo’s car, where he rapped on the window.

“You got here first, didn’t you? Any way we can get in?” he asked, sticking his neck in as soon as Kubo had opened the car door.

“I wouldn’t be here if there were. Any bright ideas?” Kubo shot back, and he heard the other reporters who had gathered behind him sigh in unison.

It was obvious that none of the other journalists had made contact with anyone at Hinode. Still, every one of them standing there in the road knew the Hinode executives must all be together somewhere, and their eyes darted around like foxes as they racked their brains trying to figure out where that might be.

“This is going to be an uphill battle . . .” someone muttered.

Fifteen meters away by the side of the road, where a van from a commercial broadcasting company was parked, one of the crew members signaled to them by making an X with his arms. The time was now 12:45 a.m. The embargo had been issued.

Kubo and the rest of the reporters looked at one another, and signaled back “okay” to the crew. Cries of “Shit” and “Damn it” erupted all around him, followed by pitiful goodbyes and “See ya”s as the group scattered to their hired cars. In Kubo’s window as his car pulled away, the towering Hinode building seemed even more formidable than a few minutes earlier, as if mocking the challenges the reporters would face in the days ahead—but at the same time, the few lights visible on perhaps the thirtieth floor appeared blurry in the mist, almost weakened and cowering in such unexpected circumstances. Looking up at the skyscraper, Kubo tried to convince himself for the third time that night that the master of this castle had been kidnapped.

It was 1:18 a.m. when Kubo returned to MPD in Sakuradamon. In the elevator, he ran into a few other reporters who had also returned there after the embargo went into effect. In lieu of a greeting, they searched one another’s faces and asked tersely, “So?” “Got anything?” “What about you?” There was no need to answer—it was clear from their expressions that none of them had managed to reach Hinode.

There were three kisha clubs on the ninth floor, and Toho’s press nook was located inside the Nanashakai kisha club, to which the six major national daily newspapers belonged. Even the entrance to the Nanashakai was crowded, and Kubo had to weave this way and that to slip past the tumult of people and reach his paper’s nook. Every paper had assembled their chief kisha club reporters as well as all of their beat reporters. Toho’s nook was partitioned off from the others, and when Kubo parted the entry curtain he bumped up against an unfamiliar back right away. In the few steps it took him to make his way to his desk, calling out “Excuse me, coming through,” he became nauseated from the stench of hair tonic and cigarette smoke, several times more potent than usual. The nook, which was as tiny as an eel’s lair, typically accommodated at most four or five journalists working at the desks while others were out reporting or sleeping in the built-in bunk bed, so now that it was packed with all seventeen or eighteen members of their team, including the beat reporters, there was not even standing room. Amidst this melee the direct line to the news room rang incessantly, and the fax machine spat out pages that everyone scrambled for and passed from hand to hand.

In the innermost seat amongst this crowd, there was Chief Sugano, his expression immutable no matter the situation, holding the receiver for the outside line in one hand while raking a comb through his salt-and-pepper hair with the other. Whenever there was a crisis, Sugano had the indelicate habit of taking out his comb, no matter where he was.

“Apparently the Hinode executives are gathered at the Hinode Club in Kioi-cho,” Kagawa, the deputy chief reporter, called out from beside Sugano. Makes perfect sense, Kubo thought, immediately recalling the old European-style stone mansion near the New Otani Hotel in Kioi-cho. It was a corporate guesthouse used for entertaining, and sometimes there would be luxury cars in the driveway, idling in front of the entrance tucked away from the main road.

“Did somebody go check it out?” Kubo asked, looking around him.

“No. We heard them talking about it next door,” responded Yuichi Kuriyama, the reporter in charge of First Investigation, as he rapped on the partition wall with his fist. Beneath the spot where he knocked sat Kondo, another reporter on the First Investigation beat, along with Maki and Kanai, who were on the Second and Fourth Investigation beats, respectively, and were now manning the phones that were ringing off the hook. The Reserve section of the Metro desk had already created an assignment chart and launched into action, and was now relaying information—“We sent copies of