Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

to fall on the moat of Chidori-ga-fuchi just beneath them. Several of the reporters who had been called in during the wee hours after news of the incident broke were stretched out on the row of sofas near the windows. The rest were either staked out on the frontlines in Omori and Sanno or stalking an early-morning interview subject, mindful of the news embargo.

On the other side, the editor-in-chief and managing editor, along with the chiefs of Metro, Political, Finance, and Layout, had been locked in a meeting since around 7:30 a.m. Based upon Chief Sugano’s assessment from MPD that there was unlikely to be any movement in the abduction and unlawful confinement of the president of Hinode Beer, and that the police had not yet narrowed down any suspects, they were discussing what to do with the Metro pages should the situation remain unchanged for the foreseeable future.

The Political and Finance sections had the nationwide local elections in two weeks to worry about, and if the news embargo were not lifted until right before the election, media coverage would then be dominated by news about the kidnapping, which would have a detrimental impact on voter turnout, so they were rightly concerned about the outlook of the situation. Depending on how it developed, they might have to redraw a significant portion of their election projection map, and the anticipation of election results could even have considerable effects on both exchange rates and stock prices.

Meanwhile the Metro section had a backlog of crucial incidents all requiring follow-up articles, so if the present situation were to drag on, they would run into complications with dispatching reporters. What was more, their branch manager in Hachioji, whose older brother was a human resources manager at Hinode Beer’s main office, proffered the information that late last year, Hinode had distributed a strictly confidential manual detailing the company’s crisis management system to the leadership at each of their branch and sales offices, which did not bode well for Toho’s reporting going forward.

Hinode had overhauled their online system last fall, and the company had installed a new access management and feedback system, in addition to strengthening their system surveillance. Since then the addresses and phone numbers of all executive staff above the level of manager had apparently been scrubbed from company directories and computer files. This meant that Hinode had presumably contracted with a specialized overseas insurance affiliate to install a risk management system—these were not yet widespread in Japan—and since the existence of such a contract itself would be considered a trade secret, no one outside the company would have known about it. When Negoro floated this story past Sugano, he gave his own opinion on the matter. “I’ve heard that Hinode’s negotiations with Limelight over their merger leaked straight to the CIA, so no doubt Hinode’s on their toes now.”

Before going into the executive meeting, the Metro chief, Toru Maeda, had rubbed his ample belly and remarked, “This is a quandary . . .” But from where Negoro sat in the Reserve section, the elation evident on Maeda’s face suggested that the situation, though still a quandary, was not entirely unwelcome.

The first words out of Maeda’s mouth when he got to the office shortly after two that morning had been, “Bet this is linked to extortionists.” And shortly after, a reporter covering the evening interview session at the District Public Prosecutor’s Office informed them from the courthouse kisha club that some of the officers from the special investigative division of the District Public Prosecutor’s Office had indeed been summoned to meet at 7 a.m., and another reporter on his morning interview prowl at the MPD kisha club—this was before 6 a.m.—confirmed that the Fourth Investigation Division in charge of corporate extortion would most likely be convened at the Special Investigation Headquarters set up at Omori Police Department. Following Maeda’s speculation, at dawn the Metro section had tweaked the assignment chart and rounded up however many reporters they could find to hit up extortionists and their corporate underlings, and they had just fanned out.

If extortionists were involved then organized crime would soon follow. In certain cases even ultranationalists and politicians might be in the mix. Before the war, because of the liquor tax, Hinode Beer had a history of involvement with the political world, and though they treaded much more carefully after the war, there was no doubt that they were among the corporations inducted into the troika of politics, bureaucracy, and business established alongside the “1955 system” of the Liberal Democratic Party’s decades-long dominance. There was also no doubt that, judging from their purchase record of political party fund-raising tickets, Hinode’s pipeline to the current political world ran through Taiichi Sakata, who served as the Secretary-General of the LDP. There had been no particular problems as of yet between Sakata and Hinode, but the so-called “S. Memo” that emerged during the infamous Ogura Transport and Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank scandal had belonged to none other than Sakata himself. Behind the ultranationalist Zenzo Tamaru, who had maneuvered behind the scenes to bring down Chunichi, was the group known as the Okada Association, which held in its arsenal extortionists, corporate raiders, and loan sharks, and behind Okada the vast crime syndicate the Seiwakai stood in the wings. Now that the head of the corporation had been kidnapped, it would be impossible for the investigating authorities not to be gravely concerned about these mysterious connections.

Negoro returned to his seat as he ran through all this in his mind. “Go get some coffee,” he said to the reporter in the Reserve section who was yawning repeatedly beside him. “But before you do—those interviews you got from the campaign offices of the gubernatorial candidates? For the piece that didn’t make it in yesterday? I’m going to use some of the comments, so could you show them to me?”

“If you like, I also have what I call the Collected Off-the-Record Pomposity,” the reporter said as he slid over a few pages