The afternoon sunlight was no longer as blinding as it had been when they first arrived.
A breeze blew through the campus, and the leaves rustled.
After changing out of her lab coat, Suzuki Emi finally returned to her usual appearance, though her hair was not completely tidied up yet, with a few strands of short hair swaying back and forth in front of her forehead in the wind.
She walked alongside Satsuki for a while, but her gaze kept involuntarily drifting to the right.
Satsuki at first pretended not to notice, but when she looked over for the third time, she finally turned her face.
"What have you been looking at since a moment ago?"
Looking as if she had been caught, Suzuki Emi quickly shifted her gaze away.
"Nothing at all."
"Yes, you have."
Satsuki reached out again to touch her right cheek.
"Did not you just look at it a moment ago? It is pretty much recovered."
"Mm..."
Suzuki Emi answered obediently.
Yet after walking less than ten meters forward together, she still could not help stealing a glance.
Watching her look of clearly wanting to look yet feeling too embarrassed to continue doing so, Satsuki suddenly felt a bit mischievous.
She simply stopped in her tracks, turned around to face Suzuki Emi directly, and wore a very pretty smile on her face.
"There."
Suzuki Emi was stunned for a moment.
"What?"
"Did not you want to keep looking?"
Satsuki slightly raised her chin, even cooperatively tucking a strand of hair that had fallen beside her face behind her ear.
"Now I will let you look your fill."
She had originally just wanted to tease Suzuki Emi.
Based on past experience, this girl would probably blush immediately and then flusteredly say that she was not peeking at all.
As it turned out, Suzuki Emi actually stopped talking.
Standing in front of Satsuki, she adjusted her glasses and then began looking with incomparable seriousness.
First the eyes.
Then the nose.
Her gaze slowly fell upon the lips, then shifted back to the cheeks, as earnest as if she were appreciating some piece of artwork.
The smile on Satsuki's face gradually became hard to maintain.
"..."
Suzuki Emi was still looking.
She even leaned in a little closer.
Satsuki finally could not take it anymore and took half a step back.
"That is about enough, right?"
"Did not Satsuki-chan say you would let me look my fill?"
Suzuki Emi raised her eyes, answering with utter innocence.
"I have not looked my fill yet."
Now it was Satsuki's turn to not know what to say.
She fell silent for two seconds and turned around to walk forward again.
"I am not letting you look anymore."
Suzuki Emi let out a laugh and quickly caught up.
"Is Satsuki-chan shy?"
"No."
"You clearly are."
"Suzuki Emi."
"Fine, I will not say anymore."
Though saying she would not say anymore, the smile on Suzuki Emi's face could not be suppressed no matter what.
The path ahead happened to be shaded by the trees. A few students holding balls ran past from the other side, and their laughter and footsteps quickly faded into the distance.
She took two quick steps to catch up to Satsuki's side, lowered her head to look at the distance between the two of them, and suddenly reached out to take her hand.
Feeling the force coming from her hand, Satsuki turned her head to look.
"What are you doing?"
"Afraid Satsuki-chan might get lost."
"This is the University of Tokyo, where could I possibly get lost to?"
"That is hard to say."
Suzuki Emi said with a straight face: "Satsuki-chan ran over to look for me on her own today after all, what if she secretly runs away again later?"
Satsuki was somewhat amused by her words, yet she did not pull her hand back.
"When have I ever secretly run away?"
"Just a moment ago you still wanted to sneak upstairs to scare me."
"That is called a surprise."
"But it failed."
"..."
This sentence successfully made Satsuki quiet for two seconds.
Suppressing her smile, Suzuki Emi held her hand and continued walking forward.
"So I am still the more impressive one."
"Suzuki Emi, are you getting a little carried away today?"
"No way."
The two of them walked all the way deeper into the campus along the tree shade. Along the way they ran into a few groups of students, and Suzuki Emi finally remembered this was the University of Tokyo, so she did not continue saying those words that would make passersby turn their heads, but she never loosened her grip on Satsuki's hand.
Finally, they wandered around the Sanshiro Pond.
It was much quieter here than the main road outside, with trees blocking out most of the surrounding buildings, and large patches of dark green leaves floating on the water's surface. Occasionally a breeze blew across the pond, and the tree shadows originally reflected in the water swayed gently along with it.
Satsuki found a bench and sat down, and Suzuki Emi sat down right beside her.
"So what else have you been busy with besides that project these past few days?"
"Nothing much."
Suzuki Emi answered very naturally.
Satsuki tilted her head and glanced at her.
"Really?"
"..."
Suzuki Emi hesitated for a moment before honestly confessing.
"I also helped Masato-san look at a few things."
"Masato?"
"Mm."
This name actually surprised Satsuki a little.
"What did he ask you to look at?"
"Coleman's call records."
Satsuki had been gazing at the pond, and only turned back upon hearing these words.
"You got involved too?"
"I only helped look at a part of it."
Coleman was captured the afternoon before yesterday.
Several consecutive days of hotel screenings, vehicle records, and immigration restrictions had compressed the scope of his activities smaller and smaller. The SIS and the police pursued him all the way to the end, controlling him just as he was preparing to leave a temporary residence.
No accidents occurred during the capture itself.
What was truly valuable was that the person was alive.
Coleman admitted to participating in the operation and also confessed to a portion of his arrangements after coming to Japan, but once asked about the person truly responsible for giving the orders, the things he could provide rapidly dwindled.
The entire operation had been deliberately split into many layers from the very beginning.
The person who introduced contacts to him did not know the true purpose; the people providing vehicles, weapons, and personnel were only responsible for one section of it. Although Coleman himself was right in the middle, he likewise had no direct contact with the true masterminds.
However, a living person would ultimately leave behind many traces.
Where he had stayed, what times he had met people, and at what locations he had used telephones could all be pieced back together little by little.
"The National Police Agency later pulled the communication records for the relevant time periods," Suzuki Emi said. "There is some from NTT, and another part is from international lines. Yesterday, the United States also sent back a batch of numbers and company verification results through the mutual assistance window."
As she spoke, she gently nudged a small pebble by the roadside with the tip of her shoe.
"Masato-san originally just wanted me to see if there was any place where we could use what we have been making recently to help out."
Satsuki quickly caught the meaning in her words.
"That network project of yours?"
"It is pretty much the same line of thinking."
Suzuki Emi nodded.
"Have not we been studying fault localization recently? Sometimes if the last node slows down, it does not mean the problem actually originated there. It could be that some preceding section ran into trouble first, and the subsequent anomaly was just propagated all the way through."
She reached out her hand and made a gesture.
"Telephone records are actually the same."
Satsuki already more or less understood.
"So you did not look at what he actually said, but rather at how these phone calls traveled?"
"Correct."
Suzuki Emi immediately corrected her: "And we do not even know what he said at all. All we got were times, numbers, switching areas, and transfer relations, and for international calls we can also confirm which exit point they went out from."
This was also the boundary of what the investigation could achieve at present.
Although Saionji possessed its own dedicated data lines and telecommunications business license, it did not mean the SIS could arbitrarily view the public telephone network.
The reason these data could be compiled was because Coleman had officially entered a criminal investigation, and the police had followed procedure to retrieve the corresponding records from NTT and related telecommunications operators, with the American side supplementing a portion of them through established mutual assistance channels.
What the SIS was responsible for was merely reorganizing this information coming from different channels.
And Suzuki Emi happened to find another way of organizing it.
"At the very beginning, nothing could really be seen either," she continued. "Coleman was very careful and did not use the same number all the time. Sometimes it was a public payphone, sometimes he changed locations, and the numbers he dialed would change accordingly; a few even only appeared once from start to finish."
If any single communication was taken out and looked at alone, it was just one person making a phone call in Tokyo.
What was truly interesting was after stacking all of them together.
The American side had also provided assistance, gradually confirming the registration details of some numbers—some belonged to companies, some were private lines, and a few had already been deactivated long ago, forcing them to keep digging backward into the original users.
Masato had then added Coleman's past interpersonal relationships into the mix.
Former colleagues, private security companies he had collaborated with after retirement, and acquaintances still active within the contracting system over these years.
"There are still a lot of things, and they are very messy," Suzuki Emi bent down, picked up the pebble she had just nudged away, and placed it on the edge of the bench. "But once time is factored in as well, repetitions start appearing."
She found two more small pebbles.
"For example, Coleman makes a call from Tokyo, and this number itself is not anything special. But after a while, people related to this number will contact another place."
She moved the second pebble aside.
"The next time, Coleman changed a line, and the number changed too, looking completely unrelated to the previous time. But if you keep investigating further down, you will run into that group of people who appeared before."
A third pebble was placed at an even more distant position.
"Every time the path taken is not completely identical, and it makes many detours in between, but after many times, several lines that were originally separate start continuously drawing closer."
Satsuki lowered her head to look at those pebbles.
"Where did they draw close to in the end?"
"Washington."
Suzuki Emi answered very calmly.
Only then did the smile on Satsuki's face gradually fade a little.
She did not immediately press further, instead falling silent for a moment while looking at the pond's surface.
In the distance, exactly two students passed by along the path, one of whom was still holding a soda just bought from a vending machine in his hand.
After they walked far away, Satsuki asked:
"Does the American side know about this result?"
"Part of it. After all, many of those relationships were helped confirmed by them in the first place."
Suzuki Emi gathered the few pebbles on the bench back together.
"However, right now this can only prove that connections exist between these people; it cannot prove who participated in June 27th. Knowing each other before, business interactions, or there still being people in between that we have not found yet—all of those are possibilities."
Satsuki also nodded.
A few phone calls, past working relationships, plus a gradually tightening interpersonal network—it was still a very long way from proving who ordered a cross-border assassination.
What truly concerned her was another matter Suzuki Emi had mentioned just now.
"You said there is someone I know in here?"
"Mm."
"Who?"
Suzuki Emi turned her face.
"Arthur Vance."
This name made Satsuki freeze for a moment.
"Arthur from the SEC?"
"He used to be."
Satsuki's brow furrowed slightly.
Arthur Vance.
She had a very deep impression of this person.
In 1990, it was precisely Arthur who held CFIUS's special directive and forcefully withheld one billion dollars from S.A. during the fund liquidation process. That time truly caused Satsuki a lot of trouble, yet she ultimately voluntarily abandoned that money, threw a massive legal team into the mix, and the investigation was quickly dragged into lengthy judicial proceedings.
Later on, Arthur pursued Saionji a few more times.
Every time he was very difficult to deal with.
This person was capable and sufficiently persistent; once he set his mind on a certain matter, he rarely truly let go. Yet Satsuki's judgment of him back then was also very clear—Arthur had strong personal capability, but after all, he was merely a chess piece.
The last time the two sides came into conflict, Salomon Brothers and Wall Street only mobilized a few layers of connections, and his investigation was obviously restricted.
Therefore, in Satsuki's past perception, Arthur was at most an extremely tough American regulatory official.
Professional, persistent, and sufficiently dangerous.
But the danger ultimately came from the permissions granted to him by the SEC and CFIUS.
Once away from that position, he himself did not have much power to directly leverage Washington.
Precisely because of this, hearing that Arthur appeared in this relationship network, what Satsuki produced first was not vigilance, but doubt.
"How could he be together with these people?"
Satsuki looked at Suzuki Emi.
"Is not Arthur still at the SEC?"
Suzuki Emi blinked her eyes.
"Satsuki-chan does not know?"
"Know what?"
"He has not been at the SEC for a long time."
This time it was Satsuki's turn not to speak.
She had a ton of things to deal with all day long, where would she have the leisure to pay attention to a minor official's position changes?
Suzuki Emi also seemed to finally realize that the two of them's understanding of Arthur had stopped at completely different points in time.
"The mutual assistance materials sent back by the U.S. yesterday have his latest resume." She paused slightly, "Arthur is now in the White House."
Satsuki's expression finally changed.
"The White House?"
"Mm."
Suzuki Emi looked at her.
"His position is Special Assistant to the President."
The wind happened to blow across Sanshiro Pond, tearing the tree shadows on the water's surface into pieces.
She really had not expected that Arthur Vance, who back then could cause Saionji to suffer losses relying solely on extremely limited authority, had actually climbed to this position.
However, the surprise only lasted for a moment.
If Arthur was now already able to directly enter the White House's policy circles, then many past judgments would have to be remade.
In the past, Satsuki had never truly placed him in a position requiring long-term precautions, not because this person lacked capability, but because his tier was not high enough.
Satsuki appreciated him, but that was all.
No matter how persistent an investigator was, as long as they could not leave the regulatory agency's own authority, there were always lawyers, procedures, and political connections capable of blocking them.
Yet a Special Assistant to the President was already another matter entirely.
At this position, the people he could contact, the things he could know, and the decisions he could influence were completely on a different level compared to the past.
Satsuki looked at the gently swaying surface of the pond.
It seemed this old rival finally qualified for her to take another serious look at him.