Chapter 189: Whose Key

Chapter 189: Chapter 189: Whose Key

Kagawa Tetsuya was shelving secondhand paperbacks in a narrow bookshop in Setagaya when Haruki and Hirose walked in. He looked up, saw them, and knew at once why they had come.

He didn’t run or pretend to be busy. He put down the stack of paperbacks very carefully on the counter, took off the canvas apron with the shop’s name stitched on the pocket, and folded it.

"There’s a café across the street," he said. "The owner won’t mind. I’ll tell him I’m taking my break."

It was the fourth of August, a Monday, and very hot. The café across the street had one table by the window, and they took it. Kagawa sat with his back to the wall, the way Mizuno always did, and put both hands flat on the table. He looked older than he had at the yakitori place in May of the previous year. His hair had more grey in it. He was wearing an ordinary cotton shirt, and there was dust from the bookshelves on his sleeves.

Hirose laid the printout on the table between them. It showed the five rows of the access log, with the last two highlighted in yellow.

May 19, 02:47 — kagawa.t — External (IP: Osaka).

June 9, 03:12 — kagawa.t — External (IP: Osaka).

Kagawa read it once, slowly. Then he read it again.

The colour went out of his face.

"I didn’t," he said. His voice was very quiet. "I haven’t logged into anything on that platform since the day I left. I don’t own a computer. I threw the laptop in the Tama River." He looked up at Hirose. "I told you that in May."

"You did," said Hirose calmly.

"Then you know it wasn’t me."

"I know you told me that," Hirose said. "That’s why we’re here. Not to accuse you, Kagawa-san. To ask you who else knew your password."

Kagawa stared at him.

For a long time, he didn’t answer. He sat with his hands flat on the table, looking at the two yellow rows. Outside the window, a delivery bicycle went past, its bell ringing.

"Nobody," he said at last. "I never told anyone." He stopped. "I’ve used the same password for five years."

"Since when?" Hirose asked.

"Since the day I joined the platform," Kagawa said slowly. "Five years ago. From Yamashita. Ishikawa-san arranged the job for me. He said the platform needed someone in senior management who understood rookies, and who he could trust." His mouth twisted slightly. "The IT department set up my account on my first morning and asked me to choose a password. I didn’t know what to choose. I was very nervous." He looked at his hands. "So I used the first thing I thought of."

"What was it?" Haruki asked.

Kagawa was quiet for a moment.

"The date Ishikawa-san hired me at Yamashita," he said. "The day he called me into his office when I was twenty-four and said I was going to be the best editor in the country." His voice was barely audible. "I thought it was lucky. I never changed it."

Nobody said anything.

"So Ishikawa knew it," Haruki said slowly. "Or could guess it."

"He knew the date," Kagawa said. "He’d have known I’d use it. He knew everything about me." He shook his head. "But he’s in Singapore. The log says Osaka."

"Did anyone else know the date?" Hirose asked. "Or the password itself? Think carefully."

Kagawa closed his eyes.

When he opened them, something in his face had changed.

"The partnership," he said. "Two years ago. When Horizon bought a quarter of the platform, and the Creator Partnership Programme launched." He swallowed. "Ariadne’s systems had to connect to ours. For the referral tracking, and the partner weighting, all of it. Their technical people needed to test the connection with a Director-level account." He looked at Hirose. "They asked for mine. For one afternoon. I gave it to the person in charge of the integration. I watched her type it in."

"Who?" Hirose asked very quietly.

Kagawa’s hands had gone very still on the table.

"Ishimura Reiko," he said.

The café was very quiet. Behind the counter, the owner was polishing a glass and not listening.

Haruki remembered the name the way you remember a cold draught from under a door. Ishimura Reiko. She had been a director of Ariadne Strategic Partners and sat on Horizon’s board. She had sent a midnight email offering to make a forum go away within twenty-four hours, and told Kuroda Ryu she would handle his file personally. She had sat at the end of a wood-panelled table in Osaka in a grey suit while an eighty-one-year-old banker read page six aloud to her. She had stopped beside Nishida Wakana on her way out and said We never needed Naniwa. We only thought it would be faster.

"She was never named in the Commission’s findings," Hirose said slowly. "Only Ishikawa and you. She’d resigned from Ariadne’s board a month before the inspection."

"Where is she now?" Haruki asked.

Hirose had already taken a second sheet of paper from his briefcase. He had apparently prepared it before they came, in case. He laid it on the table beside the access log.

It was a page from the Osaka Legal Affairs Bureau’s company registry. It listed the directors of a property company registered in Osaka: the one that had offered the Kinoshita brothers three times the value of their building.

Beneath it was a second extract, for a web manga platform registered at the same address. It had launched in the spring with a large advertising budget, and it hosted a series called Crownless.

Both companies had the same representative director.

Ishimura Reiko.

Kagawa looked at the page for a long time. Then he put his face in his hands.

"I gave it to her," he said, muffled. "For one afternoon. Two years ago. I watched her type it."

"You didn’t know," Haruki said.

"I never asked," Kagawa said. "That’s worse." He lifted his head. His eyes were red. "That’s what I did for sixteen years. I never asked."

Hirose put the two sheets of paper carefully back into his briefcase, one on top of the other.

"You’ve asked now," he said gently. "That’s what matters for the rest of it." He closed the briefcase. "Kagawa-san, would you put what you’ve just told us in writing? In a statement, for the case?"

Kagawa looked at him for a long moment.

"Yes," he said. "Today. Before I lose my nerve."

They walked back toward the station afterwards through the hot Setagaya afternoon, past quiet houses with potted plants on the steps and a shrine with a single old camphor tree. Kagawa had gone back to the bookshop to finish shelving paperbacks. He had promised to come to Kichijōji at six with his statement written out by hand, because he didn’t own a computer.

Hirose walked slowly, with his briefcase in one hand and his jacket over his arm. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

"There’s something you should understand," he said at last, as they reached the station. "Before tomorrow. Before you tell anyone else."

Haruki waited.

"Using someone else’s password to log into a computer system without permission isn’t a civil matter," Hirose said. "It isn’t unfair trade practice, or a contract dispute, or something to argue about in front of a judge for two years." He stopped at the ticket gates and looked at Haruki over his glasses. "Japan has had a law against it since the winter before you graduated from high school. Unauthorized access to a computer. It’s a crime. The police investigate it. Prosecutors charge it."

Haruki stood very still.

"The platform is the victim," Hirose said. "Not you. It’s their system, their database, and their account left open by mistake. It’s their decision whether to report it." He paused. "Arai-san and ōtsuka-san will have to decide. Mizuno-san will have to explain how it happened. Nakamura-san’s logs will be the evidence."

"And if they report it?"

Hirose was quiet for a moment.

"Then for the first time in two and a half years, somebody on the other side of this will have to sit in a small room and answer questions," he said. "Not a fund in Singapore, or a law firm in Chiyoda that can withdraw a complaint in eight days. A person, with a name on two company registries in Osaka." He passed through the ticket gate and turned back. "Ishimura Reiko has never once been in that room. She always resigned from the board a month before anyone knocked."

He walked away down the platform, an old man in a cardigan with his sleeves pushed up, carrying two sheets of paper that had taken two and a half years to find.

Haruki stood at the ticket gates for a long time, while commuters flowed around him on both sides like water around a stone.

[Ghost Project — Account user identified (probable): Ishimura Reiko.]

[Evidence: kagawa.t credentials disclosed to Ishimura during the Ariadne–platform integration. Access origin: Osaka. Registry: Ishimura = representative director of (1) the Osaka property company (Hikari building offer) and (2) the platform hosting Crownless.]

[Kagawa Tetsuya — Written statement: Agreed.]

[Legal status: Unauthorized computer access (criminal). Victim: Platform. Decision to report: Board (Arai, ōtsuka).]