Time to say goodbye, she thought, lifting up her phone. One quick phone call to Amy. The last call she’d ever make. Whatever secrets the Yakuza bakayaro had, he was taking them to his grave.
Secrets.
The word danced around in her brain.
Really secret.
She froze.
Fibonacci. Goro-awase, or Japanese word play. Her mind spun, connections forming. Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight. Ma, hi, hi, fu, mi, i, ya. Ma, hihifumi, iya! Well, the burnt ratio woman’s body is disagreeable!
June’s breath exploded from her chest. She pressed the phone up against her ear and jumped off the sofa.
“Leopold, Jerome,” she said, frantically pacing the carpet. “Where the hell are you?”
A voice came back on the line. “Forty-five seconds, doctor. Make it count.”
June kept pacing. “Leopold, what kind of numbers are on the keypad?”
“There’s no time for guessing. We’re gong to try our luck just shutting the damn thing off, cut the hard line. Take our chances it isn’t rigged to detonate the gas. We figure –”
“I don’t give a shit about the wiring,” June said. “Just tell me about the damn keypad.”
“Basic keypad, rigged from a cell phone. All single digits, zero to nine.”
June smiled. “I know the combination.”
“How?”
“Never mind that now. Try these numbers…” She listened as Leopold got someone’s attention. “Try zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight.”
There was a pause.
“Well? Did it work?” she screamed down the phone.
She heard Leopold sigh. “Nope.”
“Shit.” June was certain the sequence would work. The pronunciation of “really secret” in Japanese rhymed with the first seven numbers of the Fibonacci sequence, and was the last thing the Yakuza suspect said before he was belted again. It would’ve been the perfect mind game, to hint at the combination. A typical Oguchi calling card. But she had been wrong.
“Twenty seconds!” the woman’s voice shouted in the background.
Leopold came back on the line. “We’re out of options. We’re going to have to cut the line.”
June felt her knees buckle. There was no time left to call Amy, the only family she had left. No time for anything, except to sit and wait for the inevitable. She glanced around the room. Her eyes settled on a selection of takeout menus spread across the coffee table. She smiled grimly. An order of Udon noodles would go down pretty well as a last meal.
Wait a second…
She lifted the phone to her ear again. “Leopold, the suspect’s Japanese, right?”
“No time, Doctor,” Leopold said, his voice barely audible.
“Just listen. We were looking at this all wrong. In Japanese, words and numbers should read right to left, not the other way round. In English, that would look backwards. Just the kind of shit the Oguchi would pull. Try the same numbers again, just reverse the order.”
Leopold paused. “Read them about again, I’ve got you on speaker. Make sure you shout so we can hear you over this damn noise.”
June took a deep breath “Eight, five, three, two, one, one, zero,” she said, as loud as she could.
She heard someone shout “hurry up” and she agreed. It felt as though time had crawled to a standstill, and she had no way of knowing whether the code had worked. Gas might stream up through her room at any second. She could take cover, maybe last a few minutes, but rescue efforts would focus on the crowded areas downstairs and next door, not on her. There was nothing she could do but wait and wonder.
Another rustling noise on the line. June flinched, snapping out of her thoughts. She listened hard, trying to hear past the clattering noises. There was someone on the other end, breathing heavily.
That’s it, she thought. It’s all over. They won.
The breathing slowed and June heard voices. She strained to hear what they were saying.
“What’s going on?” she said, shouting down the phone. “Where the hell did you go?”
“Doctor Kato,” a woman’s voice said. “My name is Joanne Harper.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” June said, her voice still raised. “But what about the frickin’ detonator?”
A pause.
“Are you going to give me a Goddamn answer or not?”
Another pause. “The code worked,” Harper said.
June’s breath caught in her throat. She fell back against the sofa cushions, vision spinning. It worked.
“Congratulations,” Harper continued. “You saved a lot of lives today.”
“Yeah, thanks.” June hung up, exhaustion washing over her. Unable to form any more words, further attempts at conversation seemed pointless. She let the phone drop to the floor and closed her eyes, letting the darkness fall over her.