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Chapter Text

Those that stood by him often said that Koki Tanakabara had never changed; it was the world that had changed, as he stood immovable. Tanakabara could not, in honesty, say the same. There was no mandate to conform to the shifting of the times – that, he knew as well as anyone alive – but there was no helping being changed. When the ground shifted under a man's feet, like it or not, that man was obliged to alter his footing.

He had once had, like most men in the journalistic line with a scrap of integrity, a firm belief in the power of exposure to cure all that ailed the world. It was now clear that sunlight was the same as any other disinfectant: there existed a threshold beyond which the medicine was lethal rather than curative. Tanakabara had come to know Nature provided as much time and purpose for the shadow of night as for the light of day.

He believed he still strove for a clear-eyed view of the truth, but all effort to dispense with political bias had fallen away years ago. You could set aside matters like Sakura in which he was personally vested, and the dilemma became not a whit easier. For instance, one could assess the crime statistics at face value, or one could allow for the possibility that many crimes were going unrecorded by victims who did not wish to be party to murder. Neither could be considered a neutral stance, and there was no alternative to be had.

He was sure, too, that the man that he was would never for a moment have considered permanently residing in an isolated and well-provisioned bunker amid the deep snows beyond the Japanese Alps.

Tanakabara would not have altered his choices, not for any incentive. Yet he missed himself as he had been. Who would not miss himself, who had been a happier man in a freer world, unbeset by this constant fear?

Chapter Text

“An announcer has no choice,” explained Tanakabara to the new newswriter who soberly surveyed him across the break-room table, “but even a news anchor ought to be more than a pretty face. Especially those like Okimoto that haven't got the good looks to excuse them.”

Arisu Sawaya raised an eyebrow. She gave no laugh, genuine or obliging – she simply evinced a desire for Tanakabara to come to his point. It was of a piece with her utilitarian dress, her sensible bob, and her face, too – an ordinary one, without so much as a dab of lipstick. Unusual, in such a personable field... but after all, she wasn't going on camera.

“Understand, Sawaya, that the teleprompter at the airing of the late-night news will be the first time Okimito sees your script. So do your own part, and don't let your stringers, cameramen and investigative reporters off the hook – and that means me and my cameramen, especially. NHN is not in the business of pulling stories from thin air before the public.”

Sawaya quirked her lips. “And supposing one of your interviews gives us a verifiable source who states that these high-profile convicts are being killed by little green men from Mars –”

“That's why we stick to events, or statements from relevant authorities. Baseless opinion is strictly for the six o'clock debate hour. But we may register the little green men as one of a list of wild speculations from the street – if we need the padding badly enough.” In truth, Tanakabara was struggling to drum up an explanation for the convict deaths that was substantially less far-fetched, but Sawaya needn't know that. It would set a bad precedent for her first week.

“May we register your own opinion in the reels, if it has sufficient basis?” asked Sawaya. No plea or push at the boundaries there. Her question was purely matter-of-fact; she wanted to know the ground rules before she began work.

“The Golden News provides the basis for opinion,” said Tanakabara. “In fact, if you think about it, that's all the news is really for. But supplying the opinion itself is beyond our scope. People should be smart enough to make up their own minds.”

Sawaya nodded, and made to go, but something kept her in her seat for another half-minute.

“My first set is due Friday,” she said at last. “Might you go over the programme with me at noon then? Since you say Okimoto isn't willing.”

“Better make it five o'clock, if I'm not filming anywhere too exciting to make the appointment. Five hours is a long time in journalism – you never know what might catch fire or say something unwise.”

As it turned out, Sawaya's first script and reel selection needed only slight modifications to appear like the news on any other night. But she would never have been put to the test in any case. Friday, December 5, 2003 would turn out to be one of those days that forced the Golden News to improvise.

The ICPO special broadcast that evening upended understood reality. It presented ten uncertainties for every concrete fact. By the time of the seven o'clock news hour, Okimoto was reduced to spending five minutes on the facts and fifteen asking unanswerable questions in ringing tones; in between, he forwarded to Tanakabara, who rounded out the airtime ceaselessly demanding of members of the public opinions that had not had time enough to form, and answers they could never have known. The job at such a time as this was not to possess a good knowledge of events, but to present that impression whether it was there or not.

Chapter Text

Though colorful disagreement was the foundation of their program, the three commentators of the Viewpoint Exchange at six o'clock were known as the most reliable after-hours drinking partners at NHN. Nonetheless, prior to the broadcast, they chose to fraternize with others, because they believed that preexisting conversation among themselves would make their discourse that much staler at airtime. While Mori preferred to stay off the coming topic altogether, the other two sometimes wanted sounding boards.

Yoshio Maekawa's normal choice for a sounding board was Koki Tanakabara.

Six hours before his murder, Maekawa had lunch in Tanakabara's office and spoke of the coming debate on Eileen Schenker. Schenker was an American teacher-activist who appeared to regard the Kira killings as a bid for Japanese world hegemony, and by extension regarded Japanese educational customs as a direct threat to her own.

“This is no defense of the American education model,” said Maekawa, dabbing a bit of crumbled tempura from the corner of his mouth, “but even beyond high school, I question cramming as the royal road to the professions. Do you know that your Miss Sawaya had never seen the Golden News before she began working here? Only cramming can create a situation where a person can meet every qualification to work for a major network without ever once seeing us on TV.”

“I know that's what you think about cram school,” said Tanakabara with a sigh, “but you don't need to look like you're on the side of this idiot. It's annoying that you need to address her to begin with. No one needs to be told to know that cram school predates Kira and is irrelevant to Kira's aims, and everyone will have forgotten all about this within forty-eight hours.”

“I can hope not,” said Maekawa.

Tanakabara looked long and hard at him.

“You're being serious,” he finally decided.

“This isn't just one American teacher with stupid ideas, Tanakabara-san. People are paying more attention to Japan because of Kira, and they're associating the Japanese way of life with the killings on a subconscious level it's hard to fight.” Maekawa laid his hands on Tanakabara's desk with a low, heavy thud. “If an American does start to think cram school is a good idea – which it isn't, but it's a step up from their slovenliness – the automatic response will be 'see, here's a supporter of Kira.' If nobody does anything to correct course, that perception will run from prosecution of self-defense right down to women who cook gyoza. As we speak, Kira is tarring all of Japan.”

“Not to any rational person,” said Tanakabara, but he knew even as he said it how weak it was.

“Really? Find that rational person, then. In the real world, people draw unfair associations. Since everyone knows what I think of that deranged serial killer, we can at least have them draw unfair associations that help us – and they aren't what you think.”

“Hm?”

“As of tonight, there's none of that nuance. Publicly, I'll be completely in favor of cram school. Some people will probably notice I was more critical in the past, but they'll still think I'm saying it because of my views on Kira. Everything is about Kira first nowadays.”

“Ah,” said Tanakabara, feeling suddenly wrong-footed. Maekawa's job was to offer opinions... but to offer opinions he didn't believe himself?

“In fact, I'll make the connection before anyone else can. I'll point out that cram school has helped make Japan one of the most peaceful countries on earth, and Kira is a solution in search of a problem. In fact, he must not have benefited from cram school at all, to have the ideology he has. And before Mori says she's in favor of cram school too (which she is), I'll strongly suggest that can't be sincere, because she talks more about Kira's upsides than anyone there.”

Maekawa smiled in the self-deprecating way that always indicated he thought he'd planned a good night's work.

“It's not about cram school, in the end. They'll have forgotten about cram school, you're right. But they'll remember that if you support the Japanese way of life, you oppose Kira.”

“If you were a news anchor,” said Tanakabara quietly, “this would be beyond the pale. But even for a commentator... Are there really no hard feelings when you use that sort of tactic?”

Maekawa shrugged. “We recapitulate our plays every night at the cocktail bar, and mostly we laugh about it. If it weren't a game for us, we'd have a hard time. But if you ask my opinion, it would be better if we were more like Taiyo TV –” (this was the Viewpoint Exchange's fiercest competitor for the time slot –) “and had a news anchor saying things like that. News anchors are more trusted.”

The disgust Tanakabara truly felt must not have shown in his face, for Maekawa only smiled more broadly with affection, and cuffed Tanakabara jocularly on the shoulder.

“Meanwhile, you won't even publicly admit you oppose him, will you, Tanakabara-san?”

Strictly speaking, Tanakabara hadn't said that in private, either. But he had told stories about insisting on sketches prior to interviews on court cases. And there had been the anecdote where Tanakabara had asked about for some person actually present to credit with a neighborhood refurbishment, but everyone said it was down to the existence of Kira, and he only got to the details of their actual efforts when he found they could not drum up any local person Kira had killed who had made the refurbishment previously impossible.

All the same, he hadn't said it.

“Nice try,” said Tanakabara, and forestalled further ado by closing his eyes and raising his coffee cup to his mouth.

Maekawa simply laughed at him, and the sound of Maekawa's laughter faded beyond the closing of the office door.

At 6:04 PM, when the alert came, Tanakabara was halfway through recording a press conference with the Minister of Culture. No need to assess the priority number of the alert: at this moment, only the highest could even reach his pager.

The woman representing Taiyo had stood up just a moment before, staring at her cell phone, and seeing Tanakabara rise, she rushed up to him, pale. “Sakura TV?”

“Please excuse us,” Tanakabara told the Minister, and the reporters and cameramen of NHN and Taiyo withdrew from the conference hall together.

Sakura TV? Tanakabara's mind whirled as he fumbled for his own cell phone. Sakura didn't even rate an invitation to government press conferences. Since when did a news network cover its competition? And at highest priority...

Sawaya picked up midway through his first ring. “You need to get to the Sakura station at once,” she confirmed without preamble. “I'll explain on the way.”

The reporter for Taiyo covered her mouth to suppress a scream.

But there was no place in a live report for emotions like confusion, panic or grief. Tanakabara had maintained his calm from the scene of many disasters, and as his mind and spirit roiled, his voice was largely suspended in some steady higher plane.

We are cancelling our scheduled program to broadcast live from in front of Sakura TV, he announced, within five minutes of the destination. The site of a hostage crisis instigated by Kira, and resulting in the deaths of a news anchor on Taiyo TV, and one of our own commentators, just minutes ago...

From in front of Sakura TV. He carefully did not say he would be broadcasting from Sakura TV. He doubted Sakura would deign to give an interview. They knew what NHN thought of them even at the best of times. NHN newsreels mentioned Kira only when he was directly involved, but in the past month at Sakura, it had been Kira, Kira, Kira without any pause for relevance or breath; it had been as though Demegawa were begging Kira to make a statement for his cameras.

Hitoshi Demegawa had gotten his wish. Yoshio Maekawa was dead because of that wish, dead for the crime of giving his opinion during a debate hour, and as for Demegawa, damn him, he probably was really a hostage. Even a bad imagination like his could visualize how he might pay for the crime of taking attention away from Kira in the middle of an address to the world.

But the press wasn't likely to be the only contingent going to Sakura tonight.

“Taiyo's arrived before us,” Sawaya's voice informed him. “The front is deserted, except... there seems to be a man's body lying just outside. I think those doors must be locked, seeing that lobby as empty as it is...”

This just in! Someone is reported to have collapsed in front of Sakura TV! Sakura does not appear likely to be open to NHN representatives...

Collapsed. That had become an official euphemism, like the suspect: a term that usually only meant one thing, but left a back door in case of a mistake. There could be no mistake tonight. Maekawa had collapsed on live TV (and he'd been eating tempura at Tanakabara's desk and talking about dubious takes on cram school – how can that be someone with six hours to live?). Another man had collapsed in front of the studio that had commanded his murder.

The same studio Tanakabara was headed for now. But he wouldn't let that seep downward past his mind into his nerves. Tanakabara was filling the role of an announcer, and it was the role of an announcer in such times as this to draw near the flames that the common men fled.

On arrival at the scene – the dead man sprawled out on the ground before his car – Tanakabara switched off his mic.

“Move about eight meters forward,” he told the driver. “We don't want the Taiyo crew in our sightline; it's too great a risk. If we crack open that window,” he instructed Seno, his cameraman, “we can roll footage in relative safety. Be sure to include the victim's car.”

“Any particular reason?” said Seno.

“Only another angle. If Taiyo had that in frame, Sawaya would have mentioned it.”

Seno got his gear into postion. “Rolling,” he said.

(Seno had in fact missed the video record button by a millimeter, and unbeknownst to himself and Tanakabara, the viewership for NHN was left for the next ninety minutes with an audio feed over the bare NHN logo. Fortunately, this would be assumed by all concerned to be a deliberate choice for the sake of security.)

At the moment Seno began, an ambulance pulled into the scene at the speed of normal traffic. No lights, no siren. No need to pretend life-saving measures were needed at Sakura TV tonight.

Paramedics are now carrying the body away. Note that they are operating under the assumption that this is the work of Kira, and the victim is beyond medical help...

Tanakabara's voice droned on authoritatively as the ambulance made its way to the mortuary, while Tanakabara himself hovered hazily on the outside of it all. It was a good voice, he thought, the voice of a professional conducting everyday business. Can that be the voice of a person with minutes left to live?

And then his fellow-announcer from Taiyo standing out in the street – behind the camera, yet at least as exposed as the man who had already died here tonight; it wasn't hard to learn announcers' names.

She knew it, too. Her voice was probably carrying all right, but she clutched herself tightly, and her head was bowed. Tanakabara closed his eyes, immersed himself more fully into his work. It must not be thought about.

“Kira has just made an ultimatum on the cooperation of the police,” Sawaya informed him, and Tanakabara relayed the information as though being led in song. “He desires their answer by April 22. It's not clear what the consequences would be if they refused, but Sakura – ”

CRASH.

“Oh my god!” screamed Seno. Tanakabara hadn't burst out with a similarly involuntary interjection only because he needed a double-take to understand what had happened to the doors.

A van. Large. Windowless. Armored, to get through even a glass-and-metal door as intact as that. He narrated as much. And those markings...

It appears to be a police vehicle! The armored van belongs to the police! Officers are emerging...

But next moment, Tanakabara sat back, disappointed.

No, just one man – it's unclear whether he is a police officer, but either way, he is taking pains to conceal his face... he seems to have successfully entered the lobby...

He clipped off his mic. “Sawaya,” he said sotto voce into his phone, “are you still on the line?”

“NPA Director Kitamura is withholding comment for the time being,” said Sawaya, curt and technical as ever. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Precisely,” he said, feeling an absurd pricking of gratitude at the corners of his eyes. “Thank you, Sawaya.”

NHN staff have reached out to the NPA for comment on this development...

 Kitamura, from all Tanakabara had learned as an announcer, was a fairly normal high-ranking civil servant – officious, weak, tied with a strong string to the rules and to the opinions of others. There was no telling how such a man would respond to Kira's ultimatum, but Tanakabara could not imagine his directives extending to crashing an armored van through the plate-glass doors of a major studio.

And once that thought had entered his head, he found himself, almost automatically, doing a thing he had never done before. Koki Tanakabara deliberately, unilaterally kept silent about a major fact in his coverage of which he was certain.

If Tanakabara said this truck crash must have been a rogue action unauthorized by Kitamura – if the man who had just driven into the Sakura station was, indeed, a police officer – if Kitamura saw his analysis at any point in the next four days –

(in the real world, people draw unfair associations)

then Kitamura would interpret that as an easy way out of responsibility for a wild decision. And to deny responsibility for the crash but take actions in accord with the officer who enacted it would only make him look complicit after all. No, Tanakabara knew he must keep silent. Everything stood or fell on the decision the police would make by the 22^nd

(everything is about kira first nowadays)

and a thoughtless word from Tanakabara stood a real chance of nudging Kitamura straight into Kira's arms.

The police have made no statement as regards this incident as yet –

Seno jogged Tanakabara's elbow. He had failed to notice another police car had turned up.

A single police car. Still ambiguous as regarded the police answer to Kira, as he dutifully narrated. Tanakabara wanted a definitive answer, as badly as anyone he spoke to on the airwaves, because –

The two men fell to the ground almost as soon as they had exited the vehicle, and at once the Taiyo team fled to their van, leaving only the camera to keep record.

Because Tanakabara was likely to die tonight, before the answer could come.

He let it sink down to the core of him, that thought of himself as a man poised before his death. In that moment, Koki Tanakabara knew two things with a cold, crystalline clarity:

He knew Maekawa had never known his death was approaching, and died on the cusp of a dangerous compromise.

And he knew he, who saw his death square in the eye, must compromise nothing in the face of it.

And when the deaths of the men in the patrol car had forced Kitamura's hand, and the plainclothesman discreetly ushered the NHN van from the scene, and the police arrived with amazing speed in rank on rank, behind buses and cloths and riot shields, to defy Kira to his face, Tanakabara knew he would not die without knowing this story's place in history.

Tonight, as Maekawa had wished, the Japanese way of life was shown to be antithetical to Kira. Not by some rhetorical sleight of hand: by the straightforward actions of the Japanese people themselves.

“Seno,” he said, once they had got behind the perimeter. “Get photographs of the mobilization, but don't roll live. We're not going to chance one of those police officers turning his head back. For the broadcast, just concentrate on me in the van.”

Seno poised his camera once more (pausing to swear under his breath; he'd now realized his error at the station.) “Rolling.”

Sincere apologies for the interruption, said Tanakabara. The police have arrived at Sakura TV, where Kira is almost certainly lurking in person, and your NHN team was ordered to vacate the premises. The police seem to be on their highest alert. The entire area around Sakura TV has been sealed off, except for a few checkpoints. The police are clearly planning to fight Kira. Their answer is a resounding no! They are going to fight Kira! The police are obviously rejecting Kira's offer to work together! They're going after him!

I...

Now it came to the point, Tanakabara felt the blood drain from his face.

“What's wrong?” mouthed Seno, from behind the camera's eye.

Well, let me just screw up some courage and say this... 

He looked down the barrel of the camera, his eyes intent on the audience at the end of the tunnel.

They're doing the right thing. This is the right answer! This is how a country under the rule of law ought to respond!

My name, he said, his voice breaking, is Koki Tanakabara. I am Koki Tanakabara, announcer on NHN's Golden News!

And Kira – self-proclaimed judge of the world, who had claimed five innocent lives that night – flinched at his challenge.

Chapter Text

After the resounding rejection of April 18, Kira took a strategic backward step.

It said something about him, no doubt, that Kira did not present that step backward as a genuine change of his own position. Instead, he dreamed up an alternate persona – someone else striking down evildoers with heart attacks from afar – and the televised conversation between the “false” Kira who had killed reporters and policemen on national television and the “true” Kira (who of course abhorred destroying his reputation in such a fashion) provided a number of piquant yet unknowable details which distracted in some measure from the initial crisis.

This was not the first nor the last time the public would run away with a false idea. Tanakabara's only sorrow was that L, too, seemed to be fooled by this charade, after he had begun so well, but he retained hopes that the source within Sakura was lying or mistaken about that. In any case, all the tapes changing hands would surely be a liability to Kira.

There was no one at NHN who misunderstood Kira to have truly relented. Some would say that was their view, but no one took action as though that were true.

In the week after Maekawa's death, NHN aired an arbitrary selection of drama reruns to fill the gap at six o'clock, and it soon became clear that the Viewpoint Exchange would never air again. Very understandable. Mori, Machida and Maekawa had become fast friends over the course of their run; to find a new third man would have made a mockery of their dynamic, and so far as Tanakabara was aware, Mori never said another word in favor of Kira.

Nor was any debate show proposed to take its place. Tanakabara understood that, too, though it left an acrid taste in his mouth. What point was there in a debate show if you were going to be killed for having the debate?

It was inevitable that the new six o'clock slot would be less subjective, and Tanakabara very much hoped it would not concentrate on trivial material – that stuff was rightly reserved for slots when people who had proper careers to occupy their lives were either working or asleep.

But it blindsided him completely when he was informed that the announcer at Golden News had been replaced, and that he, Koki Tanakabara, was to be the new six o'clock anchor.

“Doesn't the senior producer worry for his safety?” said Tanakabara to Sawaya half an hour after the email, trying not to lay his head in his hands.

“This was a decision by the board of directors,” Sawaya explained. “The voting breakdown is completely sealed. So, yes, we may conclude they worry for their safety.”

“They won't get what they expect, you know.” Tanakabara's laugh was meant to make light of the matter, but it had a shrill edge to it. “Granted that if Kira isn't caught, I will drive up ratings in the future when I die of a heart attack – if that's their reasoning, they've reasoned well. But just because I mouthed off for thirty seconds in one night doesn't mean I'm going to replicate the anchor who died at Taiyo, never dropping Kira's name without placing the word evil somewhere in the same paragraph. My business is the news.”

“The board of directors are bound to prioritize the ratings,” Sawaya acknowledged. “But you have priorities, too, Tanakabara-san. Since you're stuck with this position – at least, I find it difficult to imagine anything you could gain by resigning – you may as well use it to make the news into something you would like.”When she put it like that, his time with Okimoto had given him much food to contemplate what he would like.

Full participation by an informed anchor. Due accountability at every step of the line. No more dipping unthinkingly into fat pockets: every company press release would be paired with a statement from a competitor or an opponent. Those that made worthwhile products shouldn't be overly concerned about that, and the others could always run ads. Stories that relied on unsubstantiated statements as heavily as this “Second Kira” business would be properly peppered with words along the lines of “alleged” and “claim”; fully verified stories, such as the innocent man mistaken for a getaway driver and killed by Kira the day before yesterday, would not contain words indicating the matter was still uncertain, no matter who didn't want to hear it.

And Sawaya – Sawaya was still the newest member of Okimoto's writing team; probably Okimoto would trade her for one of Tanakabara's, because he didn't bother to talk to his writers long enough to tell the difference between them. If so, he would give her the title of “senior newswriter,” with pay to match as soon the financial department permitted. Playing favorites was wholly socially permissible if you only took the care to formally announce the favorite.

Under the prosaic but functional banner of “News 6”, Koki Tanakabara stepped into the gap the Sakura Incident had blown in the ranks, conveying the truth to the public without compromise. This was the way he intended to spend the full length of his stay of execution.

Meanwhile, Kira's reign wore on.

Chapter Text

But there was a time of false dawn.

The waters of June had come in accompanied by fewer than two dozen heart attack deaths: an extraordinary paucity. The next day had repeated the pattern, and it became known that the victims were not, on the whole, obviously criminal.

At which point a sharp-eyed statistician at the network had re-added the heart attacks which had been reported by the victim or otherwise recorded as non-instantaneous, and found that death by cardiac arrest had simply reverted to pre-Kira levels.

It unnerved Tanakabara that he had come, against all conscious inclination, to regard swift heart attack deaths as solely the work of Kira, when all the while such an impression was mistaken nearly 40% of the time. News 6, he decided, would need to explicitly accommodate the possibility of natural causes.

How quickly he reverted to the old burden.

He had been prepared to declare L's victory by the end of the month. It was true that (unless you believed the wilder specimens of celebrity gossip) none of the events of the thirty-first of May or the first of June seemed indicative of a secret arrest, yet had Kira's silence lasted even until yesterday, he might have gone ahead and declared that victory early. That glorious period between the first and fourteenth of June taught Tanakabara a thing he had not known he had forgotten: what it was to breathe with ease.

In the period between the seventh and the fourteenth, would-be criminals suddenly found that they, too, breathed more easily.

It would be a gross overstatement to say (as many did say) that six months' worth of pent-up lawbreaking broke loose that week. But the crime rate mounted to three times the level of an ordinary second week in June.

There were premeditated crimes, come of quiet and building obsessions that only the shadow of Kira had held back: Addicts robbed convenience stores. Wives killed husbands. Boyfriends killed girlfriends. There were the resoundingly unpremeditated crimes resulting from wild parties (usually held in explicit celebration of Kira's downfall) – and even these alone were enough to tax the resources of the police system. And one man, who had submitted information on a blackmailer to News 6 on the thirtieth of May, burned the same blackmailer to death in his home on the ninth of June because Kira was no longer at hand to do the job for him. (Unsurprisingly, police found he had first forwarded several millions of yen, in five separate installments, to the blackmailer's account.)

Yesterday, all these (excepting most of the carousers) had fallen dead at one stroke. For Kira had not after all been apprehended, nor killed, nor otherwise impeded. He had merely done for fourteen days with the whole world as he was doing for a longer span with Tanakabara himself: turn a blind eye, and let them grow complacent in their defiance before he swooped in again for the kill.

But the side of the story that went down sweeter with Kira's supporters could not be ignored: When or if Kira was truly brought to bay, there would be repercussions. Indeed – whether anyone willed it or not – the longer the delay, the weaker and more dependent on Kira's executions the police force would become, and the worse the fallout would be. Tanakabara was therefore glad to interview a guest that night with a proposal, which she hoped would be directed to L, for the formation of a volunteer auxiliary police force against that emergency.

Kira's “Reposes,” as they became known, would occur periodically over the next years. But Tanakabara knew now the pains of false hope; moreover, he knew how narrowly he had avoided discredit in the public eye by sharing that hope. He would not fall prey to the snare again.

It would not be from any public quarter, nor for so just a cause, that the first blow to his reputation would fall.

Chapter Text

“I regret to call you in on such short notice.” Senior Producer Iseri poised his hands in the attitude that meant he was about to broach something both delicate and distasteful. “But you must know there are those who wish the network to project an air of respectability,” he said. “Including certain major sponsors, who run a substantial amount of our existing advertising – therefore, it becomes recommended that our public-facing employees adjust for...”

Iseri twirled a hand vaguely in the air.

“In what way am I meant to do that?” said Tanakabara, fixing his eyes on Iseri's. He could guess the answer well enough – no other anchor but himself had been called to the producer's office, and Tanakabara only had one bete noire – but for Iseri to spit it out, knowing a straight answer would cost him his star prime-time anchor at a stroke, would be another thing again.

“Er,” said Iseri, hastily breaking eye contact toward the desk. “Let me see...”

“If you're uncertain what the sponsor wants,” said Tanakabara, “I can't be certain of pleasing them. I had better speak to the representative directly.”

Iseri ran his fingers absently through the magnetized steel office toy by his console. “You see, a direct conference is...”

“Scheduled,” interjected the secretary cheerfully, before Iseri could say impossible or out of our power or whatever the chosen euphemism of the hour was to be. “Mr. Arayoshi Hatori, vice president of Marketing at the Yotsuba Group, is drinking tea downstairs in the company cafe at this moment. He has agreed to a second meeting in Tanakabara-san's office on the next half-hour.”

“Ah,” said Iseri, with the distant relief of an indecisive man who has (on whatever terms) had a difficult decision made for him. “That will do, then. Tanakabara-san and myself will...”

Tanakabara stayed in the doorway, and fixed his eyes on Iseri's until he had no choice but to return his gaze.

He was resolute. They both knew there was no stopping Tanakabara from making the decision he was going to make.

He was plaintive. Another thing they both knew was what opposing Kira really meant. Even if Iseri had been prepared to live the rest of his life under an uncertain death sentence, Tanakabara would have been loath to allow it.

“If you will permit me to take full responsibility?” said Tanakabara.

The habits that had served him as an investigative reporter, and then as an announcer, had never ceased to be a part of his life. Tanakabara therefore made due arrangements, arrived at his office ten minutes early – five minutes behind his guest – and did not enter, but listened at the door.

“–no, it was with Iseri – well, yes, he was bound to tell – but I'd thought if we forced his resignation –”

Arayoshi Hatori did not have the voice of a man with strong emotional composure.

“Another venue is in the works – yes, I would never risk... – whatever the case, Sales is always given due say in Marketing decisions – no, I'm asking for your advice – Namikawa –”

From the ringing silence that followed, Tanakabara gathered that this Namikawa was a man sensible enough not to get himself involved.

He found a chair in the hall and waited another five minutes for Hatori to compose himself.

“At the Yotsuba Group,” said Hatori, giving a very creditable facade of assurance with his palms open on the desk, “we pride ourselves on the values of good citizenship. The foremost of all those values is honesty.”

“Yes,” said Tanakabara quietly. “NHN wholeheartedly agrees with that priority. If the news is fraudulent, what is left?”

“In journalism,” said Hatori, “you prioritize honesty in speech. In business, we prioritize honest dealings. Theft, robbery and embezzlement are to us what dishonesty is to you.”

“Dishonesty in the sense of not telling the truth must be a lower priority in business,” Tanakabara observed. “As a number of Yotsuba subsidiaries do run ad spots on Sakura TV. Including, or so I have heard, a full-length late-night infomercial for erectile dysfunction aids.”

Hatori, apparently seeing no profitable way to respond, gritted his teeth and plowed ahead with his script. “From the businessman's point of view, Mr. Tanakabara, Kira is a very favorable influence. There is no lack of human-interest stories to illustrate that point, if you take the care to look.”

“And if I do look,” said Tanakabara, “but do not decide to televise lightweight human interest stories which glorify Kira, the whole network may kiss your sponsorships goodbye?”

“You must understand our values as a business,” said Hatori.

“It seems to me that bribery and coercion would fall under the same category as theft and embezzlement,” said Tanakabara calmly. “But on the brighter side, Mr. Hatori, none of those are capital offenses as understood by legitimate governments. With Kira out of the picture, you might be looking at a few years of minimum security.”

Hatori stood, wearily. “So be it. You have left Yotsuba with no choice to withdraw.”

Tanakabara smiled grimly.

“Suzuki,” he said, his voice slightly raised. “Do you have all that?”

“All recorded and ready,” said Sawaya's voice from the speaker on his desk phone. “It would also interest you to know that he mentioned plans to force your resignation in a cell phone conversation prior to your arrival.”

“Suzuki isn't my associate's real name, of course,” explained Tanakabara. “It is possible you may not know I have spent the last five months under a death sentence whose suspension may be revoked at whatever moment Kira finds most convenient. Her publication of the stories in my queue is one of the provisions I made for my own demise. But I suppose it will do as well in the event that we need to plug a few spaces in the ad programming.”

Hatori had sunk back into his chair, his mouth working miserably.

“Don't worry overmuch, Mr. Hatori,” said Tanakabara, offering a farewell handshake. “In the case that neither occasion should occur, News 6 may stick to business as usual.”

Hatori rose, seized his hand, bowed in a quick and perfunctory manner, and hastily shuffled out the door.

In retrospect, perhaps it would have been wiser – notwithstanding that it would present a mortal blow to Tanakabara's career; wisdom had nothing to do with that – if he had simply aired the exposé whether Hatori and associates liked it or not.

On the tenth of October, News 6 would learn from an anonymous informant – anonymous, but surely the same plainclothesman Tanakabara had encountered at the Sakura building last April – that a number of members of the Diet had been sent accurate predictions of Kira's next victims, accompanied by large checks from an untraced shell organization, and placed pressure on the NPA to officially disband the Kira investigation. On the eleventh, persuaded of the story's veracity, Tanakabara would run the story as an “allegation” from a “highly placed source.” And on the twelfth, the Yotsuba Group would pull its ads after all, citing cheaper and more profitable adspace elsewhere.

It was to Tanakabara's lasting regret that no source ever did emerge to step forward and name Yotsuba as a part of Kira's financial base.

In the end, the Diet lost a staggering number of incumbents in the following election, the marketing coordinator was lightly chastised, and all concerned at NHN – whether from desire to save face, or from genuine respect for Tanakabara's ethos – pretended not to know who was really to blame for the loss of revenue. But the meeting with Arayoshi Hatori was the last marketing decision in which Tanakabara would be involved.

Chapter Text

Kira's chosen vocabulary, if you wanted to put it that way, was a highly limited one. But any language, spoken frequently enough, became a fluent means of communication.

The message, spelled out in lifeblood, was clear for all to read. His policy had first shifted to the strict letter of the law, and shifted again to the older and marginally better tack of sparing perpetrators whose motives he deemed innocuous. Each time, the shift had occurred after a “Repose,” making it seem more a formal changing of the guard than a response to outside criticism – though the slow ratchet of what offenses merited death went on tightening without such pomp and circumstance. After the “Repose” last autumn, Kira was also no longer bothering to pretend he needed a name to kill when a photograph would do.

Full-time criminal sketch artists, by this time, were in high demand and short supply. Tanakabara would air their work whenever he could, but the network would not allot a budget for one, and Tanakabara could not retain one out of pocket money. He was profoundly grateful when wanted criminals had vehicle information available. When they did not, that posed a serious concern whether a photograph was to hand or not, for wanted criminals had developed a pronounced tendency to kill witnesses.

That was the larger picture. But in small, discrete events, Kira could be no less expressive.

Tanakabara drummed his fingers across the portion of the printout captioned Reiji Namikawa, Vice President of Sales.

“Six Yotsuba executives in one day... and you say our Mr. Hatori died last October?”

“In a fall down the stairs, officially,” said Sawaya. But they both knew that family loyalty or publicity (and Hatori had had both a family and a public) often occasioned the concealment of deaths by heart attack.

One and six, then. That made...

...room for speculation, at least.

“I think you're right,” he said at last. “It is time we aired the covert recording.”

A scrap of his own vanity still made him hesitant: Hatori was not the only one whose voice was recorded, and Tanakabara had been very confrontational that afternoon. One bold island of editorialization in a sea of studied neutrality was a powerful statement. An editorial tendency... that made one an agent of faction. Even his professionally doubtful semantics surrounding the “Second Kira” in particular, and L's ability in general, had given him a poor reputation in some quarters; the things he had said to Hatori went well beyond semantics.

Yet it couldn't be helped now.

“Sawaya,” Tanakabara continued. “There may be a follow-up to this piece, and I think I must ask of you the most daunting task I have set before you yet. If you were not my senior newswriter, I would never burden you so – but...”

“But...?” said Sawaya warily.

“There is a three-hour filler piece on eight associates of Kira that aired on Sakura TV last October or November.”

(This had come to Tanakabara's attention only as tidings of the bad fortunes of a despised rival: when the revelation of Kira's identity teased for three hours had been abruptly withdrawn at the last possible moment, even Demegawa's core audience had been unable to stomach the bait-and-switch.)

“Your mission, Sawaya, painful as it is, is to obtain this footage, sift through the three hours, and select highlights as though there were really something in it.”

“At Sakura's rate and terms for the broadcast rights? We regret that footage is only releasable bundled with advertisement spots, with all due share payable to our sponsors...”

“I told you it wouldn't be easy,” said Tanakabara, poker-faced. “I ask only because I seem to recall another Yotsuba executive being arrested around that time. If the team should find I'm mistaken about that, you needn't go to the trouble.”

Arrested on the same night, it turned out, by a full forty-car contingent of police officers, every one behind tinted windows and helmets. (All concerned seemed, Tanakabara remarked on air, to have given little heed to any restrictions imposed by a corrupted Diet.)

Tanakabara remembered something of this: a late-night announcer had found himself unable to get past the periphery, and could do little more about it than warn of a traffic blockage on the regional highway. He had expressed a good deal more curiosity about the matter in the staffroom the next evening – when Kira had gone quiet again – than he had that night on TV. But the name of the executive had only surfaced a few days later, and no connection to the traffic block had been made clear.

Possibly, Kyosuke Higuchi had died on the scene. Stories varied on what had happened (the man who claimed to have been nearest to the scene said little, for fear he might be betraying sensitive information), and whatever the case, some portion of the witnesses had to be lying. News 6 omitted that part entirely. But it was agreed in any case that the man was no longer alive.

And the pretext may have been the death of a traffic officer in pursuit, but it could not be more clear that the police had erroneously believed the Yotsuba's Director of Technology Development to be Kira.

They had, seemingly, been close. Close enough that the “Repose,” coming directly on the heels of the broadcast and the arrest, might have represented Kira's need to take a step back and recalculate. And Tanakabara acknowledged he might need to give L a little more credence.

After ponderous consideration, Tanakabara decided to show the face of the young informant on the Sakura special. Kira, after all, was bound to know his face already. If he hadn't been killed by now, he would likely be endangered by this report – yet, should News 6 expose his face, his death might present bad publicity for Kira.

If anyone knew better than to discount Kira's need for good publicity, it was Koki Tanakabara.

Apart from collaboration with Kira – an unlikely reason for the heart attacks – the precise malfeasance of the six executives who had been killed on the tenth never came to light. But on the whole, their deaths had indeed been expressive. More expressive on every front than Kira had intended.

That was no triumph of Tanakabara's. It was, really, Kira's own fault. The night of the Sakura Incident – nearly a year ago, now – he had shown himself more than capable of using human words. But his chosen language remained death by heart attack.

As the example of the eight Yotsuba executives proved, death by heart attack was not a language naturally bent toward expressions like “well done, good and faithful servant.”

Chapter Text

After comprehensive input from L, newsrooms worldwide are subject as yesterday to a new ICPO mandate requiring that all photographs of criminals, suspected or convicted, be subject to one of several strict standards of censorship, in order to restore the possibility of a penalty in accordance with national law.

News 6 is therefore empowered to implement a measure we have carefully considered for the past months: from now on, all full-face photographs of convicts and suspects will be cut off just beneath the eyes and, in the case of those still at large, accompanied by as comprehensive a description as is available. We believe this will provide the best balance between the rule of law and the public interest in these times.

Among those who have labored hardest under the parameters of the old dilemma is new NPA Director Kanichi Takimura. Our announcer spoke with him this morning...

Sakamoto, the junior announcer for News 6, rushed in excitement to greet Tanakabara at the door. “Congratulations on your change of tone, Tanakabara-san! We can say goodbye to all those idiots calling you Kookabara behind your back, now.”

The kookaburra was an Australian bird whose syllables corresponded somewhat to his name, but more importantly, in English, the term “kook” carried connotations of insane ideas. It was, strangely, a term which had attached to his persistence in operating under the assumption that there was only one Kira. Tanakabara supposed that came off as insanity simply because L disagreed.

But whatever Sakamoto thought, the fact that Tanakabara wholeheartedly threw his support behind L's latest policy was unlikely to erase the epithet.

“Insults,” he said carefully, “have a way of justifying their own existence – even when the original justification fails. You ought to be young enough to know that, Sakamoto. In any case,” he added, “trying not to be insulted is a very bad reason to hold a belief. The ethical benefits of the new censorship protocol are obvious; you don't need anything else.”

Tanakabara, hearing his own stick-in-the-mud tones, let himself relax into the smile under the surface. Good news was rare, after all. There was no sense not enjoying it when it came.

But Sakamoto frowned.

“There's one thing I don't understand,” he said. “You more or less said you'd wanted to censor photographs for months, but weren't able. Was the Japanese government actually preventing that?”

If Tanakabara could trust Sakamoto to be discreet without extensive treatment from his newswriters, he would have answered the question properly. But he only said: “To an extent.” The Japanese government provided most of the photos Tanakabara had been forced to air, so that was at least technically true.

The trouble, in fact, was Senior Producer Iseri. To be more accurate, it was and was not Iseri, for Iseri never posed much trouble from his own reserves of energy. The trouble was the direction of the wind that had been blowing Iseri about.

Tanakabara's first mistake had been in refraining from making his own formal petition for photographic censorship until last November, when Kira had obligingly made the question of airing full photographs or sparing human lives a clear binary. At that time, the loss of Yotsuba's sponsorship weighed heavily against him – no one imagined then that, within a few months, the conglomerate would be on the verge of collapse – and Iseri had dismissed him out of hand. After all, he had said, glancing off into a far corner of the floor, the public had a right to know what lawbreakers looked like.

For the past six months, then, Tanakabara had been essentially ordered to select victims for Kira. He had numerous methods of evasion at his disposal – sketches, dossiers, bad-quality security screencaps, stories concerning criminals who were already dead, stories that avoided the topic of crime and Kira altogether – but at least once a week, there was an occasion where none of these methods would hold water, and Tanakabara was left indirectly responsible for someone's death.

(Journalism was a calling that had always meant a high civic responsibility. But had Tanakabara known, when he began as a pollster in 1998, precisely how much responsibility journalism would come to entail, he would have declined the call.)

Now, at long last, the question of photographic censorship had been put to rest. Yet when Tanakabara opened Iseri's circular email that night...

Good evening, NHN!

In light of the recent ICPO directive, all members of the NHN journalism team are advised to adhere to the new framework for photographic support in its entirety. This includes particular attention to segment 1.2.1, which states:

“As of 1 May, programming concerning criminals and suspects must therefore feature photographic material [emphasis added] which adheres to one of the following guidelines for facial concealment.”

All NHN staff are urged to act in accordance with international law.

Thank you to our valued journalism team for your continued efforts to produce quality programming!

Tanakabara stared agog at the screen, rubbed his eyes hard, and stared again.

He couldn't possibly be reading this correctly. If programming on crime didn't contain a full mugshot, it couldn't be aired at all? Was that actually what Iseri meant to convey? No matter what ill-fated wind whipped Iseri through the sky at this moment, could even he seriously persuade himself that L had meant –

Well, then. Tanakabara would set a duly censored mugshot as the bumper for features on crime, and that would fulfill the letter of the international law. Done.

Yet he knew the Okimotos of the world, confronted with a directive like this, would not take that sort of initiative. If enough took this line, major bulletins on crime would fall through the networks' hands like water through cupped hands. The ultimate result would be that the networks – NHN, at least – would no longer be reliable sources of information.

And he realized with a sinking feeling that, if you stripped away all the patently obvious context, this interpretation was a valid reading of the letter of the law. The error was very slight; L was almost certainly not a native speaker of Japanese; but there it stood, all the same, for anyone with a will to strain their eyes to see. It was a disappointment, and weighed all the more heavily for the high hopes it had come alongside.

Even if the flaw in the language had not been there, it would have mattered little, all the same. For it was not only Kira's opponents who made quiet schemes against changes in the state of the world.

In two weeks' time, Namebook Neighborhoods, Vigyl and the others would arise to take the place in Kira's substructure that NHN had so recently and mercifully vacated. These websites were, at the least, more structured toward ensuring reliable information than the Internet was in its natural state. The same would not, however, prove true of everyone who made an account; Kira's rate of demonstrable error would rise accordingly. And some users on websites like Vigyl proved to have access to police records: entirely reliable, by the standards of Kira and the executioner webmasters, but by any rational standard, treacherous.

Amidst these events, for whatever it was worth, News 6 carried on much as Tanakabara had intended it to. More and more, his victories were like that: like one small turret at the corner of a sandcastle that managed to stand in the wake of a surging and obliterating tide.

Chapter Text

“I may be a news anchor,” intoned Tanakabara, “but don't be fooled by that. I am more than just a pretty face.”

The newest newswriter hastily coughed to cover his laughter.

Masahiro Yoneda was not to be blamed for that. For the last few years had not been kind to Tanakabara's visage. Pouches the size of pea-pods had sprouted under his eyes; the tracings of worry lines were forming about his mouth; a patch of half-baldness stood like a sparse stand of scrub at the crown of a prematurely graying head.

He had never forgotten that his stay of execution was an indefinite one. It had become a routine joke at NHN: “Tanakabara's called in a favor for tomorrow, but since he's sure he'll die tonight, I don't know how seriously I should take that.” “I'm trying to get a line in Tanakabara's will before he reports on Kira doing something again – wait, isn't he reporting on that in a couple hours?” “We used to have a monthly does-Tanakabara-die betting pool, but we dissolved it when everyone realized the under could only win once.”

Tanakabara had, in fact, come to believe that Kira would kill him as soon as his death would not incense those around him. He believed that day was not long in coming now.

The irony – and probably the part of the job that aged him most – was that those jokes came from the same people who acted most as though Kira would kill them for putting a toe out of line. The announcers who conversed anxiously with one another on which questions were still okay to ask. The anchors who'd stuck to Iseri's policy of downplaying crime even when the ICPO directive was revoked six months later for being of no use. To be fair, it wasn't always fear. Some, like his second newswriter, Kiyomi Takada, appeared genuinely to believe that there was so much less in the way of real news now that the news media should turn its attention to other things.

Some of the newer staff members even wondered whether he'd really been at Sakura in the first place. He hadn't rolled live footage, after all. Seno was still on staff, and Tanakabara directed such inquirers his way, but it didn't seem to help.

As he talked to Yoneda of their mutual responsibilities, he couldn't help but feel this junior newswriter was not giving Tanakabara's lecture his full attention. He gave a good deal of earnest looks and fervent nodding, but sound, practical questions like the ones Sawaya or even Takada had offered were not to be found. Satisfactory enough, perhaps, to Human Resources. Not quite satisfactory for Tanakabara's plans for News 6, but that didn't matter. His days of influence in staffing decisions were behind him.

Then again, perhaps it was Tanakabara who had been distracted during Yoneda's briefing.

His thoughts had twice come round to Takada, and he hadn't even intended that. She had no right to nag at his mind as much as she did. Takada was a talented young woman, for all her emphasis on fashions and pop idols. Her scripts were very smoothly written, and her film editing was even more polished than Sawaya's. They had worked together for nearly a year now, and professionally, there was no fault to be found in her.

Professional, and as impressively neutral as a writer could be in these days. But for anyone who took the trouble to look, there were no secrets between the newswriter and the cutting-room floor. The pattern of her selection made it very clear that Kiyomi Takada was a Kira supporter. Yet she insisted in staying on staff with the most notorious ronin at NHN. (Ronin. There were few things Tanakabara detested more than the emergence of that term. Admittedly, it was a word with impressive cachet in reference to an enemy of Kira, but that there was a word for it at all implied that opposition to Kira had become something special and unusual.)

Well. It was possible Takada's professional relationship with him was a relic of the old world. A world where those who disagreed on just about everything – Mori and Maekawa, for instance – could coexist, and thrive, and enjoy one another's company all the while.

But he couldn't quite convince himself to believe it. If it were like that, there would have been some warmth between them.

Kira had been a stumbling-block in conversation from the start. He had grown from there to a wall of division that built slowly higher every day. Perhaps it was shoulder-high now – you could look your neighbor in the face without trouble, but it took an athletic effort to surmount the wall.

But if there was one topic remaining that could unite anyone with a passion in his breast, it was the dorians.

It went without saying that false identification was a crime against Kira. He was currently leaving an exception for law enforcement – after another directive from L, every police officer in Japan now went under false identification – but that was no doubt in the knowledge, gained by direct experience, that it would be unwise for him to alienate the police. For all others, the mere fact of being in possession of a fake ID warranted the death penalty.

There were purveyors of fake ID who took advantage of this situation.

Their clients were, after all, already criminals marked for execution. All it took to make the execution a reality was a well-constructed post on Namebook Neighborhoods.

And what, then, was a favor or two toward that purveyor, even if it crossed a few legal lines? The worst was already a reality, after all.

No divisions existed where dorians were concerned. Dorians were a scourge. Tanakabara himself rejoiced when Kira took out a dorian. Tonight, News 6 was bound to feature a particularly noxious case which had taken place over the past sixteen months in Chicago – a dorian who really was a barkeep, rather than merely claiming the title on an executioner website, and who used his leverage primarily to obtain grotesque sexual favors from underage girls. In such a circumstance, Tanakabara would not particularly regret the fact that Takada would be writing on a night when he expected Sawaya.

“I'm deeply sorry to hear Miss Sawaya is ill,” said Takada, entering Tanakabara's office. “I will have to make it up to her over ice cream.”

Or perhaps he would regret it no matter what the news of the day would be.

It would have been just possible that Tanakabara and Takada would come to like working with one another after all, but for one thing. She had become subtly condescending toward Sawaya.

The specific offenses were hard to pin down – inevitably oversensitive if mentioned aloud, which of course neither Tanakabara nor Sawaya would ever do – yet he would see Takada express a too-avid interest in Sawaya's secondhand clothing. Make unnecessary corrections to her writing style as though she only wished to help. Tell her they were good friends more frequently than any truly good friend ever had to. And he knew that was only what passed between them in public in the staffroom.

Takada closed her eyes and smiled slightly. Tanakabara couldn't help but suspect she knew the effect of her remark on him.

“It's all right,” said Tanakabara. “I can trust you have put together as good a reel on Benjay Steffans as she would have done.”

She had, of course, done an impeccable job. Professionally, Takada was faultless.

The lights went on. Seno put his camera on roll.

Good evening. This is News 6, and I am Koki Tanakabara.

The formerly patchy neighborhood of Tachikawa in Tokyo continues to climb in quality as it has since the last quarter of 2003. French architect Yvette Terreblanche has acquired a number of dilapidated lots, and has developed an innovative, postmodern concept for a replacement...

The screen showed an impersonal white conglomeration of shapes that looked like an ill-fated cross between an elite condominium and a sculpted honeydew salad. Tanakabara strongly suspected he would prefer to live in the dilapidated building, but he dutifully went on:

The simplicity of the form is a signature of Terreblanche's work...

This had not been a part of the reel he had reviewed, and he had not missed the intended import of the “last quarter of 2003.” Evidently, Takada was upping the ante. He would need to have a serious talk with her.

Polls regarding behaviors society would be better without have shown an increase in societal standards as compared to last year...

That one hadn't been in Takada's script, either. He let a little contempt color these words.

An intrepid group of youth leaders is making strides to stop bullying by making use of the Vigyl –

Tanakabara closed his eyes.

Forgive me, I won't go on with this. This is not the script I approved with my writer this afternoon. The teleprompter is still rolling – unbelievable – this isn't even like picking grains of white sand from a black beach. It's like painting the grains.

The irony is that I had intended to speak this evening of the heart attack death of a Chicagoan barkeep, by the name of Benjay Steffans, who deserved that fate if anyone did. Apologies in advance if this narration should clash with forthcoming reels. Again, this is not the script I approved this afternoon...

Tanakabara saw the hour through to the grim end, but as it turned out, he needn't have remained in the studio. From his perspective, the teleprompter and reel rolled on (and never did get to the subject of Benjay Steffans) – but so far as viewers across Japan were concerned, after he had said this is not the script I approved, footage had cut abruptly to commercials, then resumed with a syndicated children's anime.

It was the last appearance Koki Tanakabara would ever make on NHN. The board of directors quickly saw to that; it was not a difficult decision to make.

The reel turned out not, in fact, to be Takada's. It was the work of Yoneda, who had simply presumed to cart his own reel into the studio without asking. His pleas of inexperience were not looked on with favor; Sawaya informed Tanakabara over the phone that the pleas had sounded as though he had rehearsed them before being called to account. And Sakamoto, his announcer – who, ten minutes after his arrival the next afternoon, resigned at once in protest – told Tanakabara with towering indignation that he had seen Yoneda lunching with Takada shortly before Tanakabara's orientation.

Tanakabara would have seen nothing in that before the fact. He had often done things of that kind himself. But there was the small fact that Sawaya's illness had turned out to be a gastric ailment which cleared up soon after she finished a chocolate cake Takada had given her as a gift.

All the same, this was no mere opportunistic strike on Takada's part. The role of the broadcast division made that painfully clear: it was a multilateral, orchestrated coup. A sufficiency of key players at NHN – Seno, too? it wasn't impossible – had decided they had had their fill of old Kookabara, and arranged to silence his shrill chitter.

It was, nonetheless, Takada who reaped the prime benefit.

She emerged as the interim anchor of News 6 with poise, professionalism, and a studied neutrality. Regarding Kira, she would continue to stay two paces behind the edge of the envelope – but the envelope continued to move in Kira's direction. And she earnestly thanked – not by name, of course – the mentor who had taught her that an anchor was more than a pretty face.

Kiyomi Takada did also possess a pretty face. Tanakabara had worked in the medium of film far too long to pretend to himself that that didn't matter.

“I have placed my two weeks' notice,” said Sawaya, the moment Tanakabara picked up the phone on the 31^st.

Tanakabara sighed. “You have found another situation, I hope?”

“Yes, of course. An administrative office in Marunouchi. I'm not very enthusiastic about it, but it's preferable to having that woman pull my script apart every afternoon. Besides, it keeps me in Tokyo.”

“...Why do you attach particular importance to Tokyo?” He knew perfectly well that Sawaya's family lived on Shikoku.

Sawaya laughed. “I know you too well, Tanakabara-san. A little thing like this never stood a chance of silencing you.”

No, he allowed. It never had.

“I only want you to know I am available for any plans you may have.”

Chapter Text

Sakamoto let his mouse linger over the glorious letters beneath the kookaburra-and-warship crest: Phone line currently open. Call in?

It had been a hard slog since he left NHN, especially since he gave himself minimal savings to begin with, and the first job that would take him after he'd stormed out – delivery driving – was more grueling than announcing had ever been: but Sakamoto had finally scraped together the money for a minimal Bananatek suite and headset. If you couldn't wrap your head around Linux, and Sakamoto had barely salvaged his PC after trying, Bananas were the only computers on the market that really provided for informational security. He'd looked and looked since Exile Radio first began, and he'd never seen that link before.

It had been hard to ask around about why that was, too. It wasn't illegal to listen to a ronin podcast, or even call into one, but if you came out and said you wanted to call Exile Radio, casual friends had a way of growing cold. The site forums were also hidden to anyone without a good VPN. He'd had to figure out the pattern by piecing together some things guests had said at the beginning of their calls.

But here he was at last.

He clicked.

Thank you for contacting Exile Radio, said the dialog box. What shall we call you?

He'd thought the alias was decided after you called the show. Maybe not; everyone on Saturday's podcasts made up their minds so quickly, and he was belatedly realizing he hadn't come up with one at all.

Zettai Ryouki, he decided. Tanaka-sama probably wouldn't laugh; he was much more a stick-in-the-mud than anyone who'd only heard him on Exile Radio thought; but sillier names than that had got onto the show.

What is the subject of this conversation?

The state of NHN, he typed.

What filter shall we use?

He sampled each, but filter number five turned out to be his favorite, the one that made you sound all watery like a swamp demon.

Transferring...

He was left staring at an animated gif showing radio waves bouncing between a phone receiver and the kookaburra crest for the next twenty-three minutes, before the dialog finally came:

Accepted.

Welcome to Exile Radio. What shall I call you?

Zettai Ryouki. Thank you for having me, Tanaka-sama.

Why is the picture on your website a kookaburra, anyway? Didn't you always hate being called Kookabara?

It didn't sting too badly. Besides, the kookaburra crest isn't much more than a dramatic logo. You'll find the basis in Canon 48.

Oh, a Sherlock Holmes story. Is it the one with the Australian mutiny...?

No, but you can easily find a chronological list of the canons online. What was the reason for your call?

Now that Iseri's retiring from NHN, do you have hopes the next senior producer will turn things around?

My sources offer a dismal prognosis on that score. Listeners have to understand: network representatives are very public figures, and they have a natural human tendency not to want to put themselves in harm's way. Kira's been casting his shadow on anyone whose identity is public for more than four years now. Any network on the air – even Taiyo, as you'll see if you revisit the podcast released December 19 – is going to be leery of that.

Not necessarily. You were anything but leery, Tanaka-sama. And I was a public journalist, and I never was.

Really? What is your history as a journalist?

That's... that's identifying information.

There you have it, then. A public journalist who was not leery of Kira is no longer in the field, and still knows enough to withhold identifying information. The only reason I'm any different is that I was expecting to die the night I revealed myself as Kira's enemy. And remember, Kira will kill me, the moment my death would help him more than it hurts him. There will come a week when there is no Saturday podcast on Exile Radio. That will be your sign.

Listeners must never forget what I learned too late. Public anonymity is essential. And it is a necessity that the modern press lacks.

Tanakabara turned off record , but did not disconnect the call. “That'll be the end of your segment this Saturday. Off the record... I won't have people who actually know me call me Tanaka-sama. I can't stop my entire listener base, but you, Mr. Sakamoto, can call me by my right name.”

“What–? How did you –”

“Your voice is coming in raw. The filter's only added in post. We're not operating on a large budget here at Exile Radio.”

“Neither am I, these days,” laughed Sakamoto sadly. “Even for your program, I can only donate about a thousand yen a month. And meanwhile, that Takada, after what she did to you –”

“ – is publicly staying within the bounds of accepted discourse. What happened with Takada is a thing of the past; celebrity feuds are Demegawa's line, not mine.”

“But Tanaka – er, Tanakabara-san –”

Tanakabara's console made an alert noise. Interesting. The latest request's stated topic of discussion was the Kira task force in 2003. Odds were that this conversation, whether true or false, would not turn out to be verifiable... but there was always that chance.

“Sakamoto, I need to take other calls. If you'd like to catch up socially, we can simply meet up. Saturday at eight, Red Sails Sushi Bar?”

“Red Sails? Really? Now that you mention it, I'd go there for just the sushi.”

The conversation had been a happy and a long one, and as Tanakabara found when the place closed at ten that he had overindulged in the sake, he had tossed his keys to Sakamoto and the conversation went on its merry way.

“And you won't air this guy who's talking about his time on the original Kira task force just because he can't be verified?” said Sakamoto. “And he can't be verified just because he doesn't completely trust you to know who he is? It's really unfair. You should get it out there regardless.”

“Insider police reports are contradictory,” said Tanakabara, waving a lazy hand through the air. “I've had at least, at least a dozen people claiming to be policemen come forward about encounters with Yotsuba executives alone, and some of them have to be untrue. I mean, I mean Exile Radio isn't neutral like News 6, but it's not going to be a gossip mill.”

Besides, that particular call wasn't one that would edify the public. The idea that Kira could control the actions of his victims... it had given him half a week's worth of nightmares that everything he had done for the past three years was really just predetermined by Kira and played to his own advantage unto the hour of his death. He would need more than an unverified claim to set that bogey loose on his faithful listeners.

Sakamoto paused at the last stoplight. “It really makes you think. If you had a proper news team – I mean, I know you won't tell me who's on your team –”

“Need to know,” slurred Tanakabara in assent. Sawaya's continued role in his career was not to be discussed with anyone.

“But it has to be a small team. And because it's small, they can't do all the legwork they need to get their job done.”

“Exactly right,” said Tanakabara. “Exactly.”

They pulled in to Tanakabara's home street.

“I'm realizing how frightening it is,” said Sakamoto, “that Kira is only one man.”

They sat a while in silence.

“I think I can make it up the stairs all right,” mumbled Tanakabara, undoing his seatbelt. “Thank you for sharing sushi with me. I needed a break more than I realized.”

He waved vaguely as he watched Sakamoto pulled away.

The moment Sakamoto was out of sight, he found himself seized in a strong grip from behind.

“Koki Tanakabara,” said a rough voice in his ear. “I'm a big fan. Your story on Rie Morishige was really something else.”

Rie Morishige. A Japanese national councillor, assassinated by a pro-Kira fanatic two weeks ago. The police had apprehended her killer. Someone had leaked his identity to the executioner websites. And in the end, Kira had passed him over with a ringing silence.

One thing Tanakabara had mentioned on his program was that several small valuables had gone missing from the room in which she died.

Fans of Koki Tanakabara knew that. They also knew Tanakabara had a high-end Bananatek studio system and a number of costly artworks in his home.

Tanakabara was roughly thrown to the ground; the wind was knocked out of him, his face and wrist collided raw against the icy pavement.

“So. The enemies of Kira are fair game now, huh?”

Sakamoto abruptly remembered that this was not his car.

He guessed Tanakabara had done a lot to encourage him to forget. Sakamoto was one thing, but Tanaka-sama, forgetting about his own car? He really had needed a designated driver. Imagine if he'd crashed into something – it'd be bound to get out, and then Kira –

Sakamoto shook himself. When had that become the first thought? When had driving drunk stopped being an obvious hazard by itself?

He turned round the block all the same. U-turns were illegal here.

And found Tanakabara pressed against the front wall of the apartment, struggling desperately with a knife-wielding assailant. His coat was smeared with mud. He'd already taken a fall. He needed both hands to hold off the knife in the man's right.

Sakamoto rushed from the car, but couldn't think what to do next. Was this a criminal? He certainly had a rough look to him, but he also hadn't bothered to put on a mask. If heuristics fell through, and it was an assassin –

He couldn't do anything about an assassin from here. The attacker had just twisted Tanakabara's right hand away. The left couldn't hold off the knife...

“Hey!” he shouted, running forward. “Hey, bastard! Do you think you'll get his stuff when he's dead?”

Come to think of it, that would have been distractingly offensive to most Kira fanatics, too.

“I have the keys!” he screamed. “These are his keys! You want his things, you want me!”

And the assailant turned.

“Throw the keys,” said Tanakabara desperately at the top of his voice - which, after all the physical excitement of the last moments, was not much above a whisper. Sakamoto couldn't possibly hear him. And Sakamoto did not throw the keys. He just stood there five meters down the sidewalk, keys tauntingly extended in his hand.

Escape wasn't what Sakamoto was after. He wanted to right an outrage done against a man he knew and admired.

He wasn't quite so wiry as he had been as an announcer. Delivery driving had given him a lot of muscle; he'd bragged about that over sushi, so he knew it. Counted on it.

It wouldn't be enough.

“Sakamoto,” Tanakabara tried to shout through the blood-taste of a body that had done too much in too short a time. He stumbled forward; that was all he could do for running.

The assailant's knife rose up over Sakamoto's attempt at a center-of-gravity block and caught his former announcer in the side of the neck.

Sakamoto fell to the ground, gasping, bleeding profusely. His keys fell off into the street. The assailant, having no more use for Sakamoto, turned toward the curb.

It was only when he bent down to get the keys that an obvious calculus belatedly passed through his head. He turned back in an icy confusion to where Sakamoto had fallen – Tanakabara had reached Sakamoto, had dialed 119 on his cell phone, was doing his best to keep the young man's head raised against his chest – but Sakamoto's body was thrashing enough to make that difficult. In his time as an announcer, Tanakabara had learned what thrashing meant.

The question in the attacker's eyes couldn't be clearer. Kira would never punish the murderer of Koki Tanakabara. But what of the young man dying in Tanakabara's arms?

The answer was no. The murderer of Tatsuo Sakamoto would no doubt also be commended.

But the attacker had no way of knowing that.

Tanakabara met his eyes.

“You'd better go now,” he managed to say, through the alcohol and the shock. “And leave the keys.”

He managed to hold himself together long enough for the man to retreat into his beat-up sedan before he passed out.

The paramedics must have arrived very shortly afterward.

The blood loss and the nerve damage had worked on Sakamoto much the same as a major stroke – like a major stroke, in a healthy young man of twenty-five. He had essentially lost the use of the right side of his body. He would speak with a permanent lisp and slur. But he was alive to tell Tanakabara he had no regrets. Chances were, strangely, that he even believed it.

Tanakabara ran the story on Exile Radio. He had to, for no one else would: the only willing witness who still possessed speech enough for television was a man the major networks no longer wanted to take the risk of interviewing.

Listeners rallied round in support. Funds poured in. One small businessman of independent means, who gave his real name but asked not to be published, gave Sakamoto an apprentice situation as a copywriter, a position in which he turned out to thrive. Sawaya, who had functionally become Tanakabara's sole investigative journalist whose deserved salary Tanakabara had never been able to pay since he had been forced out of NHN, was given a hefty recurring bonus for the rest of the year.

The bulk of the funds went toward the secret bunker on the east edge of the yukiguni.

It was a Cold War artifact – remote, all but inaccessible except at unpredictable intervals, boasting two well-fortified entrances (one of which went two miles from the bunker before it emerged deep into the side of a foothill of the Akaishi mountains). He installed new electronics, security and transmission, and provisioned the larder for a two-year siege.

This was to be his new home, and the new headquarters of Exile Radio.

Tanakabara had spent the last years operating under the assumption that, however brightly the target on his back might be painted, that was his concern and his alone. But it was not so. The world had warped so tightly around one anomaly – Kira – that anything, however unwillingly, caught in that anomaly's orbit had a gravitational force all its own. A force that could draw other bodies, willing or not, into the building black hole.

It was best that the possibility of another casual personal call be eliminated.

Chapter Text

Tanakabara's pre-screening questions were brief and limited in scope. But any language, spoken frequently enough, became a fluent means of communication. The queue that had sprung up immediately on the opening of Exile Radio's lines had taken on much more expression than met the eye.

A typical sample from the second half of 2008 ran as follows:

Schooner 47 – American election re: cabinet appointments – filter no. 3.

Schooner 47 was a regular. Off the record, Tanakabara knew her to be Sue Fredericksen, an American ambassador from a political legacy family. She viewed everything from a slightly antiquated American perspective, but Tanakabara had developed a pleasant rapport with her, and she had taken to teaching him about windsurfing after her proper segments.

Outraged in Kyoto – Takimura is just Kitamura slightly scrambled! – filter no. 1.

Tanakabara appreciated the wordplay, but this one seemed to generate a little more heat than light. He pressed reject without a qualm. Outraged would simply see the words failed to connect. Judging by the alias and the fact that he had chosen the default filter, Outraged was probably old and inexperienced enough to take that at face value.

Nothing to Lose – Nevada initiative – filter no. 2.

He had not heard of an initiative in Nevada. He only knew filter no. 2 was the one that most resembled L's voice. The callers who used it tended to be earnest types who took themselves a little too seriously, but Tanakabara had found they had cause to more often than the others.

Peach Milk Assam – Kira's methods – filter no. 6.

This would either be a good bread-and-butter conversation, or as wild and irrational a guess as could come from human lips. Difficult to say which.

Lady Adair – Canon 26. – filter no. 4.

This one, on the other hand, was clear-cut. Anyone who called Exile Radio on the topic of Canon 26 was a person so wrapped up in fiction that it distorted their perception of reality. They varied widely in their specific opinions, but they had all called to propound, in elliptical terms, some fantasy they had had about L as fact, and usually, it involved the idea that L was, in some capacity, actually effectual against Kira. Of all the wild ideas circulating about L, that – though it was the most common – was the only one that could not withstand scrutiny.

One saving grace was that, when Canon 26 found its way into the podcast on the coattails of a more worthwhile conversation, all this byplay was invisible to most Kira supporters. Thanks to the strong ronin character of the readership, a good Kira worshipper would be mortified even to be suspected of closely reading Sherlock Holmes, never mind knowing which order the stories were published in. It was the phenomenon that had made Sherlockiana a viable argot in the first place.

Unfortunately, failed to connect was not usually a phrase Canon 26 callers would take for an answer. Besides, the alias “Lady Adair” suggested that this caller might have lost a son. He supposed she deserved a little off-the-record sympathy.

Fr. Dominic Marie Hoshino – Earth is not Heaven. I do not require a filter. – filter no. 1.

And that mainly went to show that anyone who held Tanakabara as a paragon of stubbornness had never met a Nagasaki Catholic. His first emotional instinct was to put Father Dominic Marie at the front of the queue, but realistically, the man was more than able to wait.

White Flame – principles of false identification – filter no. 1.

Here, Tanakabara foresaw several undesirable directions this conversation could go. He could handle them all, with the exception of one: a caller meaning to entrap him, and recording on the other end. Did Tanakabara support false identification? Of course he did. Did he know the cutting-edge methods for making fake ID and safe venues to obtain it? People couldn't help themselves from telling him. Did he broadcast his views, or his knowledge?

Not a chance. He saved that information as a private link to those callers who stood in need and did not seem to be plotting hard criminal activity. And callers like that didn't announce themselves in such a way.

He pressed reject. White Flame, whoever he was, would have a rough understanding of what he meant by it.

In the end, he decided to proceed with the remaining queue as it stood. Schooner 47 might not be quite so high-priority as the Nagasaki priest or the Nevada initiative (whatever that might be), but she had become a casual friend. A man sitting alone in a snowbound bunker knew the value of friendship like no one else on earth.

More winnowing would occur in post. Schooner's public pitch for David Hoope had the right wording to air. Once Hoope actually won the presidency, he set aside her subsequent insider remarks on possible appointees (names redacted) for Inauguration Day. Peach Milk Assam turned out, after a follow-up from Sawaya, to be another addition to the pile of unverifiables, and never made the air. As for the Nevada story, Exile sat on that until the secure ballot procedure had actually become a reality.

Only the Catholic priest offered a plain and straightforward conversation.

Tanakabara had begun Exile Radio with News 6 in mind. All he had intended was the same job, but with a bit more editorial freedom and a safeguard for anonymity. But as soon as the first wave of ronin from all their walks of life began calling in, those premises had sprouted complications he had never foreseen, and now he had gone from a news station that held stories back when they were impolitic to publicize, only to found another that held them back primarily when they were too important to publicize.

He had sifted out what could not be proven, and accumulated what could, and aired what the public could and should hear, and by the third month he still found he had unwittingly built under himself a mountain of solid news he could not share, for fear Kira was a listener. Developments in fake ID. Methods of digital encryption. Homegrown anti-Kira investigative teams in France and Russia and Brazil.

One particularly foolish man, claiming to be a member of the crime cartel known to be thriving in western America, had outlined the methods by which they had avoided judgment. Tanakabara did not consider sending Sawaya out for verification, but they had agreed the methods – one had involved breaking into databases of the deceased (far less secure than databases for living criminals) and inserting profiles with false names and altered photographs, backdating suitably shady memorial websites to match – were sound and creative.

These methods were also, should they become known, surmountable. Little as Tanakabara loved drug cartels, there was no sense in vaulting Kira to the lead at the next level of the information arms race. He had informed his listeners only that unverified sources claimed the cartel had a price on the head of all dorians within and without the organization, because the existence of dorians devalued all false identification.

And he sat about day on day, month on month, pondering how regrettable it was to have learned so many things which could be put to good use and couldn't be broadcast, and one day a fragment from his freshman course in journalistic history snagged in his mind.

Broadcasting had not been the original intent for the medium of radio. Radio had been intended first as a means of narrowcasting – of private communication.

The Saturday broadcast went on as before. The narrowcast occurred wherever and wherever it was safe and helpful. Sometimes, after Tanakabara's move to the bunker, there were situations which could not be narrowcast from behind a console. Sawaya broadened her wardrobe, and belatedly developed a talent for various styles of makeup. When the snow subsided and she had nothing pressing, she would visit – the most solid ray of sunlight in Tanakabara's new, solitary existence. Usually, she brought valuable USB drives with her.

Among the most intriguing potential narrowcasts came from the call on Thursday, February 5, from a young man who wished to be known as Base Jump.

His conversation had begun on a very commonplace footing. One small criticism, the subject line had said. Criticisms which came under such headers never were small, but they presented Tanakabara an opportunity to defend his position, and he was glad of their frequency.

This particular criticism had, seemingly, been intended to be helpful.

“Mr. Tanakabara,” Base Jump had said, earnest and plaintive, “I love your show. I love what you do here. But I'm calling to tell you to stop being so dismissive of L.”

“Oh, really. And how's the Kira investigation coming along?”

“I can't tell you that!” Tones of innocent shock, as though he had asked the young man to reveal what he planned to get his girlfriend this Christmas. “But that's Kira we're talking about. It's not exactly a normal case.”

Tanakabara sighed and let his pointer hover over the disconnect button. “And how many normal cases has L solved since he began investigating Kira?”

“Let's see... at least twenty. No, probably closer to thirty? I'll have to check with... um.” Base Jump's voice took on a note of suppressed panic. “With my sources.”

His mouse drew back.

Anyone who had researched the matter knew that L's cases were not completely tabulated in any public record. A number of anecdotes had squeaked through and been repeated ad nauseam , but Tanakabara had not heard of one, never mind twenty or thirty, in the past four and a half years.

And yet there was a source. Tanakabara was sure of it. Interview subjects were notorious for covering for the lack of a source, but there were also those who covered for the source's identity . Tanakabara had been at this more than long enough to tell which was which.

“I just want you to know L is a genius detective,” Base Jump went on, with every sign of obliviousness that he had said anything unusual, “and he doesn't deserve your insults. He'll definitely catch Kira.”

And then, the way he had reacted to the question about the Kira investigation...

Base Jump was an idiotic young man. But that didn't contradict what Tanakabara's ears were telling him. In fact, if idiots like that were serving as L's eyes and ears in Japan, that possibly helped to explain L's own incompetence.

Tanakabara had spent far too many hours in fruitless guesswork about L's abilities and limitations. A direct source from the Kira investigation in Japan... that was not an opportunity to be squandered.

“As an established commentator,” said Tanakabara carefully, “I have gotten in touch with a number of police departments worldwide. If you could offer the specifics of some of these cases, I might be obliged to change my perspective on L.”

“Okay,” said the voice readily. “There were... the three dorians in Amsterdam who tried to cover their tracks by getting their victims to commit crimes beneficial to themselves first, and then there was a fake cryptologist from Hong Kong – he called his system Nameless ISP – who was really just siphoning money from L sympathizers... of course we don't know the criminals' names, and they were sentenced in secret, but even when it's not an L case, that's pretty common these days...”

There was something vaguely nagging at him about that cadence of speech, too, but the need to keep the conversation moving overtook the thought.

“Yes, that should be enough background for me to verify your claim. You understand, of course, that I cannot publish this conversation onto the podcast, as it presents a direct threat to L...” Tanakabara left a tactful opening for his caller to get a word in.

“A direct threat? To L?” The boy, disappointingly but not surprisingly, sounded crushed. He had, Tanakabara thought, imagined the possibility of a real security risk would go away with sufficient hope, only to watch it rematerialize from the ether without a dent in it.

“For safety's sake, we assume at Exile Radio that Kira is among our listener base. If I were Kira and I had the least bit of self-awareness, I don't believe I could stand listening to myself for long –”

Base Jump laughed.

“– but if that's the case, we assume some fanatic is pulling me apart line-by-line on their blog, and he's reading that instead. I don't know how many others you have as good as told you are a member of the Kira task force in Japan – and I hope it is zero – but Exile Radio has an audience of millions. Anonymity can only go so far; that is why all the fully realized news I will give of Kira's opponents concerns the dead. But should your leads pan out –”

“They will,” said his caller eagerly. “L is amazing.”

“Then I would like to set up another conversation with you.”

“All right! I knew Tanaka-sama would give the truth a shot! Only... that is... if you don't want me giving away anything important...?”

“Not in public. It's important to give truth to the masses, but it's even more important to help the people doing something about this mess, even if the masses have to be left in the dark. Are you able to receive data on your console?”

"Erm, yes.”

Tanakabara pressed the Banana and S keys on his console.

“Listener Base Jump, an encrypted link has just arrived in your dispatch box. Let me know when you are free to set up an appointment in Tokyo seven to fourteen days from now.”

Base Jump quickly agreed to a meeting with an Exile Radio associate on the twentieth. Tanakabara's researches into Hong Kong bore fruit enough to make him question his premises about L's incompetence. In that case, there were only two things that could kept L at bay these last six years. One was the inherent barriers surrounding Kira: the other was the quality of the subordinates that L was forced to work with. Tanakabara fervently hoped it was the latter. And when he looked on how hampered he had been with Takada - how hampered he was even now, working with just one woman, even though she was the most capable colleague he had ever known - it was a reasonable hope.

This, then, was not likely to be a narrowcast. It was more likely to end as an ambush interview, for public consumption. It was a tactic Tanakabara disliked, particularly with someone as apparently well-intentioned as Base Jump, but at times like this, there was no helping it.

In the end, however, Sawaya reported Base Jump as a no-show.

And he could well imagine why Base Jump might get cold feet. This boy had made a leak from the Kira investigation to the press, without consulting L. Suppose Kira gleaned information; suppose (many did, when it came to the point) that Tanakabara were Kira?

A disappointment, but Tanakabara understood. In the hours after Exile Radio had made a new contact, he usually had that same worry himself.

Base Jump had been a no-show. That a young man with a similar voice had stood at the corner, semi-patiently enduring a quietly enraged lecture from a man with big hair in a rumpled and inexpensive suit, didn't change the fact. Nor did the fact that the young man had had a somewhat familiar look to him; Sawaya was always falsely recognizing people. One way or another, the follow-up interview with Base Jump was not to be. It was all right, Sawaya told herself, that she had omitted a detail she'd meant to mention. Everyone did that now and again.

She absently pulled out a pocket notepad.

Chapter Text

Welcome to Exile Radio. What shall I call you?

Call me Queen of Sheba. Thank you, Tanaka-sama.

I'm calling on the topic of... well... the Ethiopian effect.

Ethiopian effect. I can't say I'm familiar.

Well, it's something my Internet community has noticed. Japan and the United States were Kira's prime targets in the early days, but he was killing across the globe from the beginning, in fits and starts. And yet for the first year, Ethiopia was completely immune to Kira. Completely immune, and even in the second year the killings weren't as reliably tied to broadcasts as in other parts of the world.

Surely the Ethiopians couldn't have failed to notice that.

I don't think so. But Ethiopia isn't exactly a major epicenter of world events, and that means they were able to keep it to themselves. Wouldn't you, if you could?

To be honest, I might not have – but as Kira did apparently overcome this Ethiopian effect, I'm glad I was not in a position to make it known to him sooner.

And, no doubt, few people are interested in this fact now, because Ethiopians have started to die like everyone else.

Right, exactly.

The thing is... we're figuring out it might not just be Ethiopia. The Maldives, traditional Cherokee reservations in the United States - those two were also immune for the first year, as far as we can tell. And there might be a more limited Ethiopian effect that didn't last quite as long in other countries like Georgia and Mongolia.

Have you noticed what all these places have in common, Tanaka-sama?

...I think I can see a commonality between three of them, at least. But unless you are trying to say there are traditional Americans who use a different alphabet –

<laughter> That is sort of a way to put it, actually! Not the traditions you were thinking, but...

Obscure systems of writing. Interesting.

So I'm wondering – would it be an effective anti-Kira measure if we began to denote legal names with something that is very difficult to write? A unique and complex ideogram, let's say?

As in... your daughter's name is written like an intricate demonic circle, only it's pronounced “Keiko”?

No, I think that's too risky. Kana is writing, too, you know. But maybe the name is pronounced like... I don't know, the third bar of Haruga Kita, transposed to F minor on the flute. No – the slamming of a door, three times. But then, you see, the nickname can be anything you choose.

This unique ideogram sounds... er... difficult to record in the family registry. Not to mention to place on routine paperwork.

Oh, you'd have a personal stamp for that.

A personal stamp. Hmm. That would be dependent on the form being physical paper, but then, we all know the digitization of personal information is not our friend. There is a problem I see, though. You would need a policy already in place that would allow name changes along those lines.

...now that I consider it, Queen of Sheba, it might be just possible.

...Really? <nervous laughter> I was sort of steeling myself for disappointment just now.

There's a chance. A small one, at least. As regular Exile Radio listeners know, organized crime in the western United States is well enough protected from Kira that the state of Nevada has now decided there is nothing to lose in a full-throated opposition. Nevadan listeners, especially those residing in Carson, might do well to put this information to use.

Thank you for your call, Queen of Sheba. If our listeners are hearing this on Saturday, the 14 ^th of March, 2009, they may presume that the Ethiopian effect is a verified truth.

“That was profitable,” remarked Tanakabara, putting down his headset. “I'm glad someone is calling for better reason than to commiserate about the leak.”

Sawaya nodded stiffly. A week ago, just hours after she had heard Tanakabara's coordinates had gotten out on Namebook, she had arrived at the far entrance of the bunker with snowmobile and shovel to dig her way in. Even if the most recent blizzard had not buried her vehicle, Tanakabara doubted she would be inclined to leave him. He was taking care not to ask, but he was morally certain that the weight in the right pocket of the jacket she had not taken off since her arrival was the weight of gunmetal.

He decided he had better take her mind off things.

“It is a strange picture of Kira's limitations,” he said. “Ethiopians who couldn't be killed just because their names were a bit difficult to write...?”

Sawaya opened her mouth in a businesslike manner, but abruptly snapped it shut and sat back for a long moment. Her pupils widened.

“Peach milk Assam,” she said breathlessly.

Tanakabara eyed her with uncertainty. “We do have ordinary sweet milk Assam in the pantry...?”

“Tanakabara,” said Sawaya severely, “I am not asking for milk tea. Peach Milk Assam. You must remember him. The caller who –”

“ – who claimed,” said Tanakabara slowly, “to be a witness to Kyosuke Higuchi's arrest...”

One of at least half a dozen, none of them obviously reliable. But he remembered one among them, a stated retiree from the force, who said he had long since given up on L, who had claimed the Kira killings were done by writing...

“Sawaya,” said Tanakabara, feeling a little dazed, “may I trust Peach Milk Assam did leave us a line of communication?”

“I'm almost certain. Anyone would, in that position.”

“We will get in touch before Saturday. Perhaps it's best to contact Schooner 47 as well – find out if Ambassador Fredericksen has any contacts higher in the American State Department.”

“She should,” said Sawaya dryly. “Sue Fredericksen is now the Assistant Secretary of State.”

“Was she holding that back on me?” Tanakabara tried to make light of it, but in truth he was deeply disconcerted at his oversight. “Then, yes, pass her the contact information.”

He would never have lost track of such a change in position in the old days. He could not have abided the embarrassment of the mistake. When a news reporter makes a contact, and he doesn't let the public know it, does he, in some material sense, cease to be a news reporter at all?

Perhaps. Perhaps he had, in that way or another. And if so, at what time had the change come? And just what manner of man had he become instead?

He opened his mouth to ask that aloud, but he realized Sawaya had already gone to her duty.

It was scarcely an hour later that the security camera on the snow pole high above the near entrance picked up the crowd gathering above the gate – each one bearing a snow shovel, and most of them sporting an openly carried weapon at the hip.

Tanakabara stopped the recording.

“A bit rough,” he said, “but then I never expected I would have time to record anything like this.” He began upload.

“The doors are the best civilian security available,” said Sawaya shakily, watching the armed men founder a little in the mountain of snow they had built above the door. “They might not get in, you know.”

“And if they lose interest before they do?” said Tanakabara quietly. “Do we find a new hideout? With what funds? All the money is being plowed directly back into Exile Radio and its headquarters; we have almost nothing to spare. But that's not even the question, Sawaya. If that mob turns aside now, will Kira be able to withstand his impatience to see me dead any longer?”

“He does seem to be the patient type,” said Sawaya, biting her lip.

“Please. Sawaya. Would anyone whose opinion mattered to him care about my death now?” Tanakabara clenched his jaw. “Look how many have died already. People whose deaths I was sure would matter. Councillor Rie Morishige was killed in a similar way without budging the tide of opinion. Former Director Kitamura is allegedly dead in a traffic accident, but his driving record doesn't bear that out. Natsumi Kagawa...” (that was the woman who had reported the Sakura Incident for Taiyo TV –) “...she is dead because she went thirty kilometers over the speed limit on a high-priority call. And no one but the Exile listener base cares. Of the Yotsuba informant, there's been no word at all, so at this point we can assume he died long before I even...”

Tanakabara turned his head in alarm.

“Sawaya?”

Sawaya – faithful, unflappable Sawaya – shook for a full minute where she stood, like a leaf in a storm, before she collapsed on the floor, dissolving into tears.

“I shouldn't have said such things,” murmured Tanakabara soothingly, hastily climbing from his chair. “I ought to have kept these ideas to myself. I am a morbid middle-aged man, Sawaya. I don't even need a crisis like this; I have thoughts like that every day of my life...”

Sawaya only wept all the more strongly. Tanakabara sat down on the floor beside her and held her tightly as she screamed inarticulate sobs to the void.

After twenty minutes, twenty minutes that seemed an eternity, she was spent of tears, and relaxed dully into Tanakabara's shoulder.

“They'll get through.” She gave a watery hiccup. “I know they will, now. It could have been a traffic accident, you know – Kitamura, I mean. A traffic accident that ended in cardiac arrest, at least. Bathroom Break... the one who said he was an officer on the original task force... I think he was right. I...” She trembled violently, shut her eyes, clenched her teeth. “Tanakabara, there are things I can't say...”

Bathroom Break. He had said that Kira could control the actions of his victims.

Arisu Sawaya was naming herself among the victims of Kira.

“No.” His mouth trembled. It was always Tanakabara who had been supposed to die. Sawaya had had no part in his lot...

Had had every part, so much a part, invaluable and steadfast and...

“You can't lose control now,” said Sawaya quietly. “You are an announcer. It's your job to keep a calm head in situations like this, remember?”

She drew away, scrubbing a sleeve across her eyes; she climbed slowly to her feet, and extended a hand to help Tanakabara to his.

In the security footage, the men with the snow shovels had dug a shaft into the snow five feet deep. Soon, the camera would no longer be able to see the bottom.

“The barbarians are quite literally at the gates,” Sawaya intoned. “Kira –” – her voice broke – “is closing in on renegade ronin reporter Koki Tanakabara. It is possible he is moving at this late date because Tanakabara's clandestine connections to anti-Kira movements worldwide have come to his attention.”

It is possible. Sawaya knew well enough that a claim like that needed better support. But suppose the support consisted in things Kira was preventing her from saying?

He hadn't the heart to ask.

And yet what else could it be? Why now, after all these years – and why not just a simple heart attack – if it was not that?

“Reliable sources now inform us,” said Tanakabara, “that the prolific serial killer is capable of controlling the actions of his victims. Under these circumstances, it is likely that Kira aims to obtain all data at the reporter's disposal. Tanakabara's name and face being public knowledge, he is entirely able to ensure the reporter's unwilling cooperation.”

Tanakabara turned, as though in a dream, toward his console. “This is one of the bolder known moves in his continued quest for world domination.”

Sawaya seized his wrist like a vise.

“It is anticipated –” Sawaya had never been an announcer, and she did not hide her alarm and grief well – “that his companion, caught in the siege, will do everything in her power to prevent this development.”

With a sudden shudder, she latched onto his wrist with her other arm, as though for dear life.

“Yet... it is conceivable that this is precisely what Kira has in mind. She has purchased an illegal firearm intended for the defense of the facility, but was that truly her decision? Is Tanakabara's assassin to come from without, or – or from within?”

Tanakabara smiled through his sorrow, shook his head in reassurance. “With the exception of Kira, every assassin known to Exile Radio must be in proximity to his victim. Yet Tanakabara reports he has noticed nothing out of the ordinary in his associate's sudden return to headquarters, just ahead of a blizzard.” He looked her calmly and squarely in the eye. “This associate's identity is seemingly known to Kira, but there is no evident means by which he can have learned of her loyal and intelligent character.”

Gently, he covered her hands in his left, felt them relax a little. “Indeed, owing to Arisu Sawaya's gift for on-the-spot analysis, we are now learning that Tanakabara is better informed than Kira has any reason to expect. We now have reports,” he announced, “that her input has already made the key difference.”

Her eyes widened in recognition. She nodded. Released his wrist.

They walked side by side to the console. Tanakabara drew out the office chair for Sawaya, and took up his headset.

“Sawaya, please record the following audio file to an empty USB drive.”

Sawaya paused, frowning. "They've taken out the broadband."

"That might be a lucky stroke," said Tanakabara. "Let's begin."

They made the recording. Tanakabara placed the drive in his breast pocket.

Together, they removed the casing from the Exile Radio console. Tanakabara went to the pantry to fill a basin of water, as Sawaya moved toward the tool drawer.

Tanakabara's hard drive smashed to splinters under Sawaya's tack hammer. The rest of the USB drives drowned in the basin of water. And at that moment, the audio file in Tanakabara's breast pocket constituted the whole of the data in Tanakabara's possession.

He and Sawaya then took light provisions from the pantry, sat before the security screen, and as they watched the sanctioned mob dig down and down toward them, they spoke of the past. They remembered the wild tales of the journalistic life. They remembered the darkest hours. They remembered the life they had known apart from their work; there had been, they knew now, too little of that. They remembered all the turnings they had made in these terrible years, and despite where the turning had led them, neither could point to any one choice which had been cause for regret.

They remembered the world as it had been, and remembered themselves as they had been. They wondered whether anyone they had spoken to in their time on Exile Radio presented a hope that that world would be known again. They found they had no answer.

After three hours – thirty minutes after the first snow shovel had scraped against the vault door – Sawaya suddenly removed her jacket, pistol and all. Tanakabara rose automatically, stepped to the switch, and let the mob pour in. He saw, surreally, that a man in the back had brought a home video camera to record.

He moved as though magnetically drawn to a man wearing a red parka festooned, of all things, with buttons depicting female pop idols. With perfect serenity, the challenge still firm in his eyes, Koki Tanakabara let the USB drive fall at his killer's feet.

Chapter Text

My name is Koki Tanakabara. I am Koki Tanakabara. Announcer for Golden News. Anchor for News 6. Head commentator for Exile Radio.

I am likely to die today.

Last week's leak has come to fruition. A contingent of armed men has gathered at my studio with intent to break and enter. Be assured that these are criminals whom Kira will not punish. The illegitimate policy under whose auspices I was attacked at my home in early 2008 has never been revoked. Crimes against Kira's personal enemies do not, in his view, qualify as crimes at all.

“And back to this,” said Aizawa, replaying the footage of Tanakabara opening the door, walking to his killer, letting the USB drive fall. “Look at that, Matsuda,” Aizawa said. “Murder – maybe blunt trauma – must be a valid cause of death in some usages. This is the Death Note. Tanakabara was clearly controlled by Kira into giving up information, and you were going to meet him at the ramen shop within twenty-three days –”

“He was never fair to Light, or Ryuzaki,” said Matsuda, staring woefully into the screen. “But Tanaka-sama deserved better than this.”

Aizawa pinched between his eyebrows. “Is there any getting through to you –”

“Aizawa.” Soichiro Yagami laid a firm hand on Aizawa's shoulder. “He understands.”

Ide said nothing, but focused grimly on the screen.

“Tanakabara was wrong about one thing,” said Light Yagami. He let his irritation show; it would be read as righteous anger under the circumstance. “The man who killed Koki Tanakabara is the same one who took that drive. Unless that's actually Kira, and I can't believe Kira would be so reckless, I think it's a fair bet that Kira punished Tanakabara's murderer after all. If we can just find out who he was, and trace the path of that file...” (He'd specified a computer at an Internet cafe without cameras for the email to Misa, and had the man crash the whole cafe with a slightly time-delayed ransomware virus before he left his chair. This trail wouldn't pose any problems.)

“There he goes,” said Matsuda, nodding fervently. “Light-kun will show Tanaka-sama what he's really made of.”

Light turned toward the window.

You see, Kira? the sole and brief recording on the drive had said. So many of your supporters thought you would waver from your purpose. But after all these years, I never lost faith in you.

The irony was that he had never intended to kill dissenters to begin with. That had been Misa's theatrics. If all Kira's opponents did was talk, society would sooner or later force them out of the way of its own accord: Tanakabara's downward career spiral had been a case in point. But Matsuda, charging in like a fool as always, had revealed to him the complication. Tanakabara, because he mistook one small data blip for the whole picture, had gone beyond talk and become a real enemy.

In what capacity? A small one, or he wouldn't have needed Matsuda to tell him. But there was no knowing the specifics now. And one thing was clear: Koki Tanakabara had anticipated his death, and the manner of his death. That alone meant he had known more than Light had expected. In fact, it meant he had – within the parameters Light had set, and even so – consciously fought the power of the Death Note.

Now, Light wondered if he wouldn't have been better off killing the man sooner.

To my old colleagues at NHN, if any are listening: don't feel relief that you didn't take my path. If you've ever appeared on screen, you already have. So long as Kira remains, to maintain a public presence is to live in fear, and ultimately to die at his displeasure, no matter how you cramp your lives and contort your souls to keep that from happening. Or do you think that he will kill law enforcement, and increasingly petty criminals, and the peaceful opposition, but he will draw the line at the most lukewarm reporter in the studio?

To anyone who has suspected I don't care whether society improves, please note: I have just described a decline in the quality of society.

I'd intended to ask my old colleagues to air something in my memory, but I think I just ruined my chances there.

By mid-December, Arata Seno was bottomlessly grateful he had been listening.

At any rate, that this particular episode of Exile Radio had gone viral and he had bit the bullet long enough to listen to that.

When all those junior staffers had started hounding him about the footage from in front of Sakura, all he'd wanted was to protect his image. After all that time in the clear, he didn't want the whole office to learn he'd simply fumbled the record button for one of the biggest stories he'd ever covered and didn't realize it for over an hour. So he evaded the question. And then, after he'd done that, he couldn't go to the story everyone believed, that he'd deliberately failed to run the cameras for reasons of safety. There wasn't any reason to be ashamed about that.

He'd had to lie.

At least, had to was the way he put it to himself.

But what had been on the line? Not his life, not even his job. His reputation from three years before? He could imagine what Tanakabara would say to that. (He could have imagined it then, too, which was why he never came clean while it still would have mattered.)

He and Tanakabara had never actually made it to Sakura, he'd told them. They were just narrating based on Taiyo's footage.

And from the moment Kiyomi Takada got hold of the true story – from Tanakabara himself, no doubt; who else knew? – from the moment she approached Seno with a compassionate attitude about his “error” and suggested that a few favors around the office would make up for it, Seno hadn't had to imagine answering to Kira. Thanks to working with Takada, Seno knew all about a cramped life and a contorted soul already.

It was what you got when you betrayed, a little, and because of that, you found yourself maneuvered into betrayals you'd never meant to commit.

If Seno had turned away from Tanakabara's dying message – if he'd let the worm of betrayal quietly gnaw at him so long as he had his situation, if he'd stayed on with News 6 until Kira entered the picture and it spun out into the endless personality-cult delirium parade it had become – would he even be allowed to leave at this point? If there wasn't some crisis with health or family, what legitimate reason could someone have to turn away from the chosen representative of the only justice on earth?

Seno had never actually been in front of the news cameras, and he was out of NHN now. Even if you didn't think about how you lived and only wanted to make sure that you lived, that gave him more of a chance than anyone trapped in that studio, playing out the second edition of Kira's Kingdom. Seno had heard Tanakabara's final words, he had seen what he'd become, and he'd found another post while there was time.

In fact, he'd sought out Sakamoto, first thing after sending the footage of Tanakabara's death direct to NPA headquarters. Because NHN never would have aired anything in the memory of an anchor they'd fired and driven to a snowbound vault. Even without Kira to complicate everything, there was no amount of tasteful censorship or relevance to events that would have let them put themselves in for criticism like that.

(Though if Tanakabara had died now, not nine months ago, maybe they'd have aired his death in hopes of getting a medal for it.)

Seno would have looked for Sawaya first, not Sakamoto – but he had seen the tape. A heart attack. Only a minute after Tanakabara went down. Seno didn't think Kira knew she was on camera at the time.

Seno noticed there was one thing Sakamoto had in common with Tanakabara and Sawaya in their last moments: They all looked like hell since he'd seen them last. He thought he'd gotten a little peaked and acne-ridden in the two years since Takada took charge of News 6; maybe the way they looked was just the price of the most powerful entity in the world being against you. But Sakamoto wasn't letting his injury dampen his spirit, and once he had told Seno just how he'd wound up in a wheelchair (another story he couldn't recall anyone at NHN mentioning), Seno wasn't inclined to let that make him walk out.

They were part of the same small ad agency now – Sakamoto as a copywriter, and Seno as a film editor. Since the death of President Hoope, even the advertising business had its pressures now – our company supports Kira was a bumper at the end of every third ad these days – but their boss, who'd listened to Exile from the beginning, was just quietly standing back from doing that, and if it ever came to a point where he couldn't, he'd decided he'd try his hand at music or comedy videos instead. Most importantly, everyone in the firm was quietly given fake ID.

But the first thing Seno had done after meeting Sakamoto wasn't even to apply with his boss. It was to help him write an online memorial for Tanakabara-san. As the only one who had actually been with him at the Sakura station, the only one with the power to undo his own lies, Seno couldn't really have done anything else.

So in a way, it turned out Tanakabara's old colleagues at NHN did remember him, after all.

Sincere apologies to Queen of Sheba that I was not given time to verify your story. If you are certain of your hypothesis (and there is circumstantial evidence in its favor), I ask that you find a way to communicate it to the people we discussed.

Best of luck to the friend of Peach Milk Assam in all her future endeavors.

Thank you to all the listeners who expressed your concern for my well-being this week. I am sorry I could not give your concerns a happier resolution.

Those cryptic salutations had begun circulating the Internet again. When first a member of the Exile forums (still three weeks from their own death sentence) had noticed that neither Queen of Sheba nor Peach Milk Assam had actually appeared on his program, the speculation had been virulent (arguments waxed hottest over which of the four highlighted parties was most likely to be L.) It had happened very quickly. Koki Tanakabara might still have been alive, still waiting for the blow to fall, by the time those two usernames had begun sprouting like fungus on every major forum.

But by the time Sue Fredericksen got to her home console, saw the data packet, and learned firsthand what he had meant, he was dead. It had been a long and dreary workday she would never cease to regret.

“The friend of Peach Milk Assam.” Tanakabara hadn't addressed good wishes simply to Schooner 47. Schooner 47 was, after all, a regular on the program. Seemingly an ordinary policy wonk, from the public record – but to mention her at a time like that would have invited noses where they didn't belong. A close examination of Schooner 47 might reveal a lot. She'd probably let slip, for instance, that she was well-to-do. And her idea of a presidential demeanor was stuck in the early sixties, and she knew a surprising amount about John Quincy Adams. If there was anything else she'd missed, she might well find herself identified.

Tanakabara had thought of that, essentially on his deathbed: Assistant Secretary Fredericksen belonged in the penumbra.

As she did, more than Tanakabara had known. In their first conversation, as she had intended, he had remarked that the 47 in her callsign must stand for the Forty-seven Ronin. It was an intuitive answer, especially if you were Japanese. But in truth she had not named herself after the Forty-seven Ronin. She had named herself in honor of Canon 47.

Canon 47: The Dying Detective.

It was fitting in these times that shadows should form a chain of hierarchy. There was not only the penumbra, there was the penumbra of the penumbra. There was not only the friend of Peach Milk Assam, there was the friend of the friend of Peach Milk Assam, scarcely discernible within discrete bits of negative space on a ruined console belonging to a murdered man: the boy in the white pajamas who, posing as Fredericksen's nonexistent son to the clerk at the counter, had inveigled his way into her London hotel room two years before and changed the course of her unwritten political career.

He had been gratified to hear what Peach Milk Assam had to say. More than gratified; she would never forget that uncanny, soft-edged, luminescent smile. But Fredericksen had heard little of him since. Nothing, in fact, for nearly three months – not since the riot last November.

And now the more optimistic ronin of the Internet were remembering Tanakabara's words, reading things into them, without knowing any of this. But Fredericksen would not get her hopes up, not yet. It had been only four days. The only Repose she knew even a little about had gone longer than that.

Yet all the renewed speculation had been a fresh reminder. Through all the layers of intrigue that had apparently come to constitute all the friendships – indeed, nigh all the supporting walls – in the life of George Sairas's Assistant Secretary, there remained one uncomplicated truth.

Sue Fredericksen had been a friend of Koki Tanakabara.

She still wished to heaven that he had saved some of those shadows for himself.

Thank you to everyone for your ears, your words, and your deeds. And don't lose spirit. This was never a fight to be fought by just one man, and it's not over yet.

It's in your hands now.