The following day at the DanariTek factory had passed by just as uneventfully as the last one for Maria. She hadn’t dared take the risk of diving into the Dark Net during office hours again, but she wished she had. Sticking to the good side hadn’t ad-vanced her investigation into her father’s death considerably. Harashima was still all over the feeds. But she knew that venturing into the Dark Net was risky, doubly so in the middle of a workday on the company’s computers. Yesterday’s dive had already put enough of a target on her back.

But she was determined to get to that cabin. To do some digging and see if she could find anything there that’d bring her closer to figuring out who had killed Yoshiro. And now, it was time to put said plan in motion.

The only thing she had to watch out for was the police. And that had become significantly harder overnight. There were at least twice as many police cars on the streets now as opposed to yesterday. Patrols were more frequent. But what had caused this increased level of police alertness?

Ignoring her anxiety, Maria raised a hand and waved it to stop a taxi that was just driving by. It stopped and its back door opened, welcoming her in.

“Where to?” the driver asked in Jangl as the door closed. Maria was too busy fiddling with her phone to take note of his facial features. The only thing she could reliably decipher was that he looked like a native Japanese.

“I’m trying to get to a cabin,” she replied while looking for its picture and coordinates on her phone, doing her best not to sound suspicious. She handed her phone to the driver when she found it. “Know the one?”

The man’s eyebrows shot skyward. His hand shook as she handed Maria’s phone back to her. “I can’t take you there. I have a wife. Kids. I’d rather not leave her to raise them as a sin-gle parent.” He knew what was at stake, she had to hand it to him. Poor man was scared for his life. Maria almost climbed out of the cab, but if she did, there was no knowing how soon she’d be able to get another one.

“Please, it’s urgent,” she pleaded. “I really need to get there. I’ll pay you extra.”

The driver was quiet for a long time while he contem-plated Maria’s offer. Her anxiety increased steadily in the mean-time. If they didn’t move soon, the police would surely catch and arrest her before she got as far as the next crossing. Finally, he asked: “How much?”

“Ten thousand.”

“Twenty.”

“Twelve.”

“Fifteen.”

“Deal.” Maria extended her arm, and the driver clasped his hand in hers and shook it. His grip was unexpectedly firm for someone who was afraid of not going home to his family.

And then he finally started driving towards the cabin, with Maria sitting in the back, doing her best to keep her breath-ing steady.

Josh and his team were gathered in their usual meeting spot, getting ready for Josh to open their auxiliary meeting for the day. Progress on the Harashima case had felt particularly slow to him today. No one had procured any new information related to it. But then again, slow days like this one were more so the rule than the exception. And he certainly didn’t blame anyone. He had to admit that there was a limit even to police efficiency.

“Alright,” he grunted, trying not to let his frustration color his tone. He looked over to Goro and Devin, whom he had assigned as the investigators of the cabin leak, and asked them: “Progress on the cabin leak investigation?”

“Effectively none,” Goro confessed. “But we did wipe it from the Dark Net.”

“Well, that’s something at least.”

“One thing we do know so far,” Devin piped in, “is that the nature of the leak narrows out the grunts.” Lowest-ranking officers, effectively street cops. “It’s almost inevitably someone higher up.”

“Yeah,” Josh muttered. “But who?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“Take your time.” Josh’s eyes darted to the whiteboard. The cabin leak investigation reminded him of something else in the moment. He turned his attention to Shinji and asked him: “Still no ID on the murderer?”

“Nope,” Shinji exclaimed with a sigh. “Been trying to look for the better part of a week and nothing’s turning up. It’s as if her record was wiped from the population database.”

“Wiped from the database?!” There were only a select few people with such access to the country’s population data-base. None in the police. Whoever had wiped the murderer’s record had to have done so deliberately. “That’s going to com-plicate things.” More than it needed to.

“Speaking of complicating things,” Jenn interjected, “we’re going to have to do a background investigation on Miss Harady.”

“Still not talking, is she?”

“No. She was pretty clear about having no interest in helping us further.”

“You did ask a perfectly reasonable question,” Josh said in an attempt to comfort Jenn. The way she hung her head down gave him the impression the reminder had the opposite effect. Nonetheless, he continued: “Her being hired at one of Hara-shima’s companies definitely doesn’t add up given their history. And if she’s not willing to talk, we have no choice but to look into how she achieved that ourselves.”

“Just don’t assign that task to me,” Jenn expressed an immediate wish. And Josh understood why. “Noted,” he replied with a nod and continued: “Well, in lack of any substantial pro-gress today, the best we can do is—”

His wrist comm chirped and interrupted him.

One of the street teams. He picked up and hollered in a slightly annoyed tone: “What is it?”

“Sorry to interrupt,” the officer on the other end said. The sense of urgency in his tone told Josh this was something important. “Got a visual on a cab with a suspicious passenger, headed south.” Busujima’s daughter trying to skip town, no doubt. “We’re already pursuing, but we’re going to need backup if we want to cut them off. Sending the details as we speak.”

“Roger. On our way.” Josh ended the call and addressed the room: “Goro, Shinji, you take one car. Jenn, you’re with me. Let’s move.”

The sudden blaring of a siren startled Maria. She released her grip from her knuckles and threw her head back. A police car right behind her. Shit. They caught me.

“Faster!” she hollered in panic as she turned her gaze back to the driver. Now she actually focused on him, glanced at him through the rearview mirror, took in his facial features. De-finitely native Japanese, roughly in his mid-30s as far as Maria could tell. Still scared for his life.

And yet he obeyed her command.

The cab sped up, the driver weaving through traffic with a finesse that gave Maria the impression that this wasn’t the first police chase he’d been involved in. He did his best to lose the police car tailing them, but his efforts quickly turned out to be futile. There it stayed, no matter how many sudden turns he made.

A bead of sweat trickled down Maria’s forehead.

The sight of a second and third police car intercepted the view beyond the windshield. Stationary. Parked sideways. They’d cut her off. The driver hit the brakes as hard as he could, and Maria prayed – more for the driver’s sake than her own – that the cab would stop before it collided with the police cars ahead.

It stopped an inch short.

The door to Maria’s left opened, and she was greeted by the sight of a gun right in her face. She took a careful glance be-yond with her hands already raised. It was the same police officer she’d now seen twice before. And he looked ready to shoot.

A feminine hand yanked his arm back before he could. Then another face appeared next to him. Another police officer, this one female, considerably younger but still mature. In more ways than one. The female officer yelled: “Plan wasn’t to kill her, was it? Just keep her from leaving.”

As if in some form of apology, the male officer stepped back, letting the woman handle the rest. “Please get out of the vehicle,” she spoke, and Maria obeyed without so much as an exhale. In fact, she didn’t even realize up until now that she’d been holding her breath.

The officer spun her around, yanked her arms behind her back and slapped handcuffs around her wrists. Now Maria ex-haled again. Her anxiety was in overdrive. “You’re under arrest for planning to infiltrate a government facility,” the officer told her, then proceeded to guide her into the police car.

Well, I tried.

As they began to drive away towards what was in-evitably the police station, Maria started wondering how she could escape prison. In case that was where she was going.

She also remembered that she didn’t pay the driver.