June 29th, 2:17 PM.
Tokyo, Taitō Ward.
Coleman glanced out through the glass gap of the public phone booth.
On the small path coming from Asakusa, two uniformed police officers were stopping a white box truck.
The driver had already been called down and was standing at the rear of the vehicle explaining something, with one police officer lowering his head to check identification documents, while the other pulled open the back door and looked through the inside of the cargo compartment.
Coleman lowered the brim of his baseball cap a bit and turned to walk in another direction.
His pace could not be fast.
Running would only attract people's attention.
Nor could it be too slow.
A white man wearing a hat and a gray jacket wandering around idly in a place like Taitō Ward was equally likely to make people take a second look.
Thirty-seven hours.
Ever since that operation on the night of June 27th, which should have been very clean, ended, he had been hiding among the streets and alleys of Tokyo for thirty-seven hours.
According to the original plan, he should be sitting in the waiting hall of Osaka Kansai Airport at this moment.
The passport was Canadian, the name was brand new, the flight was to Vancouver, and transferring to Miami.
The plane ticket had been bought three days ago, the hotel was checked out, and the luggage was only a single carry-on suitcase containing two clean shirts and a bestselling book that business travellers would carry around...
——That was how it was supposed to be.
The entire evacuation process had been rehearsed many times.
The only thing that was not factored in was that Saionji would be this fast.
When the news of the operation's failure came, Coleman was packing up his last remaining things in a business hotel in Shimbashi.
Failure was very normal, no matter how much planning one did beforehand.
Anyway, his task had already been completed; regardless of whether the mission succeeded or not, as long as he left Japan next, there would be more money than he could spend in a lifetime waiting for him.
He shoved the Canadian passport into his inner jacket pocket, zipped up the carry-on suitcase, and went directly to Tokyo Station after checking out.
Just as he walked into the station, everything still looked no different from usual.
The evening Shinkansen was still departing, people rushing to catch the last few trains to Nagoya and Osaka passed by with briefcases in hand, and the broadcast constantly reminded passengers to pay attention to the last train time.
Coleman had bought a ticket to Osaka.
Just over a dozen minutes later, he could leave Tokyo and rush toward his true retirement life.
Then he saw the people next to the platform entrance.
At first, there were only two police officers.
One of them was talking to a JR staff member, and the other was holding a few fax papers in his hand.
The distance was far, and the content on them could not be seen clearly, but Coleman took just one glance and discovered that they were not dealing with an ordinary dispute.
That police officer would look up every once in a while at the passing passengers.
Near the ticket-checking area, there were also two people in plain clothes.
They were also looking at people.
Coleman continued walking forward for a dozen meters without looking back, only observing the rear through the reflection of the display window glass.
One of the plainclothesmen was answering a phone call.
The other person pulled a page of something from the folder beside him and handed it to the JR staff member.
Coleman stopped in his tracks.
He lowered his head to look at the ticket in his hand, then turned into a nearby passageway like a foreign tourist who suddenly discovered he had walked to the wrong platform.
That was the first time he changed his evacuation plan.
It was also the last time he approached a large railway station.
Later, when he pieced together the news he heard from different places bit by bit, he finally knew what had happened in Tokyo that night.
From the attack on the Saionji convoy to the rollout of the Metropolitan Police Department's first round of cooperative investigations and intensified inspections targeting major routes leaving Tokyo, it had been less than four hours.
If this kind of speed happened in New York, it might not be considered particularly exaggerated, but placed in Tokyo, it was a completely different matter.
Coleman had worked in Asia for most of his life and was all too familiar with the way Japanese police did things.
They were serious, cautious, and their procedures were so rigorous that one could hardly find fault.
And then slow enough to drive a person crazy.
Several departments confirmed back and forth regarding the scope of responsibility, local police stations waited for instructions from the Metropolitan Police Department, and the Metropolitan Police Department needed to coordinate with other systems. Encountering foreigners, military weapons, and international backgrounds would only make things even more troublesome.
According to past experience, he should have had at least one night.
This time, there was none.
Saionji's people started moving even earlier than the police.
They did not have the qualification to set up checkpoints, nor could they stop vehicles for search like the police, but Saionji did not need to do that at all.
Japan was a capitalist country, a commercially developed country, and as one of the capital bosses among them, Saionji had plenty of ways to block a person without going through administrative means.
Several major taxi companies in Tokyo received the news.
Hotels and inns related to the group received faxes.
Car rental companies, parking lots, warehousing enterprises, transportation companies, and a batch of port business units around Tokyo Bay also had people starting to inquire about suspicious foreigners appearing in the past two days, temporarily rented vehicles, and abnormal goods.
In an instant, the entire commerce of Tokyo became unavailable.
These things did not belong to government orders.
There was no unified format.
It was even hard to say who sent it out first.
But by the next morning, more and more people had already begun to actively cooperate.
The person who almost died two days ago was the heir of the Saionji Family.
At this time, who would be willing to offend Saionji for a foreigner with a suspicious identity?
What is more, the police had also begun to act, and showed an unprecedented, breathtaking enthusiasm.
At 1:00 AM, police cars began to appear at the Tokyo entrances of the Metropolitan Expressway and Tomei Expressway.
Before 2:00 AM, immigration inspection personnel were added to all international departure levels of Narita and Haneda.
At 3:00 AM, after Coleman withdrew from Shinagawa Station, he tried to hail a taxi to go to Yokohama—as soon as the taxi got onto the Metropolitan Expressway, there was a row of red and blue lights ahead.
All vehicles were checked one by one.
He had the driver get off at the previous exit, with the excuse of "I remembered I forgot to get something."
In the thirty-odd hours afterwards, Coleman had almost constantly been circling around Tokyo's urban area.
During the most difficult times of the day, he would find a coffee shop that stayed open very late and had a sufficiently mixed clientele to hide in.
Places like Shinjuku and Ikebukuro were not uncommon for this; as long as he ordered a cup of coffee and sat in a corner for hours, few people would ask questions.
Once, he sat in the innermost spot on the second floor for nearly four hours, took off his hat and placed it on his knees, closing his eyes to listen to a few young people nearby talk about baseball.
The television in the shop was always on, and the news replayed the June 27th Incident at intervals.
On the television screen, the anchor was recounting the latest investigative progress after the attack.
The weapons left behind at the scene were filmed one by one to show the audience, and the photos of several M16A1 rifles were particularly eye-catching.
Then the screen switched, and several human faces with varying degrees of clarity appeared on the right side. Some were ID photos found in airport immigration data, and some obviously came from road and hotel surveillance footage with poor angles, where even facial features could only be barely distinguished.
When Coleman opened his eyes, he happened to see one of them.
He knew that person.
A South African who used to be in the military and later worked for several private security companies. Coleman was only responsible for sending him and a few other people into Japan. Once it reached the operational level, the two sides would no longer contact each other directly.
Originally, no one in the coffee shop cared about the television.
Until those photos appeared, a few people near the counter raised their heads one after another.
A middle-aged man holding coffee watched for a while, then turned his head and said a few words to his companion. Two young people nearby also followed to look at the screen, and one of them seemed to be discussing how those guns actually got into Japan.
No one noticed Coleman sitting in the innermost part.
At least he hoped so.
He closed his eyes again, but this time he could not fall asleep no matter what.
At past 6:00 PM, the sky outside began to darken.
Coleman left the coffee shop and walked east along the shopping street.
There were more people in the evening than during the day; off-duty corporate employees, students leaving school, and housewives preparing to go home crowded together, which was instead a good thing for him.
As long as he blended into the crowd, a foreigner would not be so conspicuous.
When he walked past an electronics store, more than a dozen televisions in the window display were broadcasting the same program.
Still the June 27th Incident.
Those photos appeared simultaneously on screens of different sizes, and a dozen identical human faces covered the entire storefront window, looking somewhat absurd even.
Two girls in school uniforms were standing at the entrance of the store, one of whom was pointing at the television and saying something to her companion.
Coleman clearly heard the word "foreigner."
He continued walking forward without changing his expression, until the electronics store was blocked by the crowd behind him, only to find that his pace was a lot faster than just now.
This city was remembering those faces.
There were not his yet at present.
This should be considered the only good news.
That night, he originally planned to return to a temporary foothold near Ikebukuro.
That place belonged to an American businessman who had left Japan for many years. The house had been vacant for a long time, and he had only been there once in the past few months. Logically speaking, it would not be exposed so quickly.
But when he was still two streets away from that building, Coleman saw a car parked on the roadside.
An ordinary Toyota Crown.
Two people were sitting in the car.
There were no police lights, nor any government logos. One of them was holding a newspaper, looking no different from someone waiting for people.
Yet Coleman still stopped.
He immediately turned a corner and left without even knowing if those two people were looking for him.
The most dangerous thing right now was "should be fine."
If he misjudged once, he was done for.
That night, he stayed in an old apartment building scheduled for demolition for five hours.
The wooden door at the entrance was broken, and water and electricity inside had long been cut off. The stairwell was filled everywhere with waste wooden boards and broken cardboard boxes that the construction party had not yet cleared away.
Coleman sat at the corner of the second floor, leaning his back against the wall, pulling his jacket all the way up.
The concrete steps were very hard and very cold.
At past 2:00 AM, a cat crawled in through the broken window, walked a circle stepping on the broken glass on the ground.
It stopped in front of Coleman for a few seconds, probably feeling that this person posed no threat, and went up to the third floor along the stairs.
Coleman watched it disappear.
For a moment, he actually felt a bit envious.
At least wherever this cat wanted to go, no one cared.