"Oh, God. Don't tell me—"
Jack nodded again.
He slammed his fist on the table. "Kokami!"
"Pardon?"
"A Hawaiian term of endearment. Any way of tracking it down?"
Leaving out the deaths and the yakuza and what he'd had to go through to get the sword, Jack told him about the attempted exchange, Naka One's attempt to kill him, the subsequent accident, and the disappearing sword.
Slater squeezed his eyes shut. "So, it's literally a dead end."
"Very literally. Very dead."
Slater's second JD arrived. As he scooped it up and sipped, Jack remembered something.
"Roll up your sleeves."
"Why?"
"The other Naka was younger, but otherwise copied you down to the hair comb. I wonder if his tattoo was part of that."
Slater showed Jack a pair of bare forearms. "I don't have any tattoos. As someone said, why decorate your body with drawings you wouldn't hang on your wall?"
"Okay. This other guy had some sort of hexagon or something tattooed above his left wrist."
Slater frowned as he pulled down his sleeves. "Hexagon? That's it? No dragons or hibiscus or carp or any of the usual Japanese design salad?"
"No." Jack tried to picture the dead man's arm. "Just a hollow hexagon with a bunch of crisscrossing lines. Like hatch marks." He glanced at Slater and found him staring at him. "What?"
"You're pulling my leg, right?"
"No."
He signaled to the waitress. "Can I borrow your pen?"
She handed it to him and he began scribbling on the butcher-paper tablecloth. When he'd finished, he pointed to it.
"Did it look anything like that?"
Jack looked. "Exactly."
"It can't be." He slammed the pen down. "Impossible."
"If you say so. But for curiosity's sake—let's just assume I'm not lying—what's it supposed to mean?"
Slater was silent a long time. Finally…
"Sorry. I'm not calling you a liar. It's just… that was one of the symbols used by an ancient Japanese cult of self-mutilating monks. They—"
"Whoa." A cult? Winslow had mentioned a cult. "And did you say self-mutilating?"
Slater nodded. "Well, not self-mutilating in the strictest sense. They mutilated each other."
"Swell."
"Once they'd gone through acolyte stages and reached the inner circles, they'd cut little flaps in their facial skin to hold a cloth mask in place, leaving only the eyes visible. Then they started giving up their senses, one at a time: sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch."
"Touch? How do you give up touch? Unless you cut off your skin."
"They had a slower method. One limb at a time. The final cut was high on the spinal cord, severing all sensation from the body but not so high as to affect the diaphragm. They were left floating in a black, silent void, seeing the thing they'd suffered for: the Kakureta Kao."
"Which means…?"
Slater pointed to his drawing and ran his finger along the outline of the hexagon. "See this? That represents a head." Then he tapped the hatchmarked center. "What sort of face do you see here?"
"None. Just a bunch of lines."
"Exactly. Originally, when the tattoo was in progress, the artist would draw a rudimentary face inside and then obscure it with all those crisscrossing lines. Hiding it. That's what Kakureta Kao means: They were called the Order of the Hidden Face."
"And what happens when they see this Hidden Face?"
"Then they knew the meaning of everything. They died happy and fulfilled, and joined it in its eternal void."
Jack had noticed something. "You keep using the past tense."
"That's because the last surviving members of the sole remaining enclave were incinerated by Little Boy on August sixth, 1945."
"I hurt, sensei."
Wearing a surgeon's mask and a stolen lab coat, Toru Akechi stared down at the man in the hospital bed and grieved. Poor Tadasu. Had he succeeded in his mission he would have been admitted to the Inner Circles.
But he had failed.
Tadasu lay in the bed like a broken marionette—legs suspended on wires, both arms in casts, his neck sheathed in a hard plastic brace.
Toru nodded toward the clear plastic bag suspended over the side of the bed. When he spoke, the surgical mask he wore muffled his voice more than the traditional mask worn in the temple.
"They give you painkillers."
"The pain is in my heart, sensei. The pain of failure."
Toru controlled a sudden burst of fury. He wanted to say, You should feel pain, Tadasu Fumihiro. In your heart and everywhere else. You deserve intractable pain for such miserable failure.
For although Tadasu had to answer to him, Toru had to answer to others.