Soldiers [Detective Conan] [Crow series 1/2]

a bullet's

4 August, 2010

Haido City, Tokyo, Japan

The city sprawls into the distance, horizon rendered increasingly hazy by Tokyo's bright summer humidity.

Inside her hotel room, Jenever is presently spending her first morning in Japan finishing up some paperwork whilst enjoying a room-service continental breakfast consisting of a surprisingly decent pot of coffee, a selection of just-okay croissants and jams, and an extravagant fruit platter arrangement. Instead of the air-conditioning, she's managed to open the window a crack to allow the breeze around the 115-meter mark to gust in and help air-dry her hair after her extensive shower.

The jetlag has done an insane turnaround on Jen's sleep schedule. Where back in New York, she was near-nocturnal (which, with her 9-to-5 job, meant she barely got any sleep at all), she's now been up since seven in the morning, writing up her full report on the data taken from Tequila's remaining hardware.

As she'd already acknowledged to herself yesterday, it's not particularly difficult work. But it is also, as she'd acknowledged to herself yesterday, unnerving for a variety of reasons.

(With proper internet access, Jenever's been able to look up a lot of the terms and names she hadn't understood before. 'Naicho-han', a contact whom Tequila had called on all of his Japanese phones, is actually short for Naikaku Joho Chosashitu, or CIRO, the Japanese equivalent of the CIA. Several of Tequila's shell companies that Jen has bookkeeping spreadsheets of, have in the last few days been bought up, declared bankruptcy, or otherwise deleted themselves. A minor civil war has seemingly broken out between the local Yakuza families, apparently all stemming from a post on the Japanese dark web leaking news of 'Snake's Death'.)

Still, it's just work.

She hits enter one last time, and scrolls back up to the top of the document to read it all through again. The hardest part of writing this report

(aside from the unease of still feeling like she shouldn't know any of this at all;
like holy shit she didn't even have the mental capacity back on the airplane to internalise the lists of codenames and associated civilian aliases, job descriptions, and value to the Organisation and Tequila specifically - but reviewing them now makes her feel unpleasantly cold in the august heat)

has been putting all the data in some kind of logical and legible order. After struggling through various structures as if she was writing her Master's thesis again (chronological? By source? By geographic location?) she's now settled on chapters broken down by theme. So there's a section titled 'Contact with Intelligence Services', and another titled 'Military Contracts', and so on.

Fucking weird, that something can feel simultaneously so far above my paygrade and so far beneath me, too.

Jenever has written it in English, mostly because the spell- and grammar-checking bot she's got installed on her Alienware operates best in that language. With any clumsy mistakes thus taken care of, and satisfied that the report is the best she's going to get it, Jen saves her document for the first time and then chucks it into the Crow-standard encryptor.

And it's only... oh, ten-sixteen. Might still catch the tail end of the news.

She gets up with a heavy stretch and turns the hotel room's TV on.

It's Kir's voice that rings out immediately, finishing up a report as Rena Mizunashi for Niichuri TV's the late-morning news recap:

           "...-welfare officials have since admitted that there are scores of centenarians like Furuya Fusa-san who remain unaccounted for. With doubts and distrust for the nation's welfare system on the rise, the main worry on the Japanese citizens' mind has become..."