THE LAST CON
Volume One
"A man who lies for a living will one day receive a truth he cannot escape."
Chapter 1: The Envelope
Kaito Mori had a rule.
Never feel anything you cannot use.
He had followed this rule for eleven years, and it had served him well. It had kept him fed, kept him moving, kept him one step ahead of every person who had ever trusted him. Feelings were liabilities. Feelings made you slow. Feelings were what marks had, those soft, ordinary people who sat across from him in his dim little office in Shinsaibashi and wept about their dead husbands, their dead mothers, their dead children, while Kaito nodded with practiced grief and took their money and felt nothing at all.
Or so he told himself.
He was counting his week's earnings at his kitchen table when the envelope appeared.
It was a Wednesday night in November. The ramen shop below his apartment had closed an hour ago and the smell of pork broth still came through the floorboards, which Kaito had stopped noticing months ago the way you stop noticing things that are always there. His apartment was small and deliberately bare, a table, two chairs, a futon in the corner, a single shelf of books he had never read because he bought them for show. The window looked out over Namba's backstreets where the neon was starting to go out one sign at a time, pink then blue then nothing, like a city slowly losing consciousness.
Four hundred and twenty thousand yen on the table. He stacked it neatly.
Then the envelope was there.
He had not heard the door. He had not heard footsteps. The narrow strip of floor between the door and the welcome mat, a mat that said irasshaimase, welcome, which Kaito found privately funny, had been empty one moment and occupied the next, as if the envelope had not been slid under the door but had simply decided to exist there.
He picked it up.
His name was written on the front in handwriting so precise it looked like a machine had produced it, except machines don't press slightly harder on the downstrokes the way this pen had, as if the writer was someone who'd spent decades making their handwriting unreadable and had only recently learned to let it be seen.
Mori Kaito.
And below that:
Also known by fourteen other names. We know them all.
Kaito's hand did not shake. He was proud of that later, when he had time to reconstruct the sequence of the evening. His hand did not shake. He carried the envelope to the table, sat down in his chair, moved the money aside, and opened the red wax seal on the back with his thumbnail.
The letter inside was short.
Dear Mr. Mori,
Your death has been scheduled for 11:58 PM. This is exactly twenty hours from the moment your eyes find this sentence.
The method is already in motion. You will not find it by looking. You will not stop it by running. The people you would call cannot help you. The places you would go are already known.
This letter is a professional courtesy.
We enjoy watching the ones who try.
—The House
Kaito read it twice.
Then he put it face-down on the table, stood up, went to the bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror for a long time.
He looked ordinary. That was always the first thing, how ordinary he looked. Medium height, lean, the kind of face that people forgot within an hour of meeting him, which was professionally useful. He had dark circles under his eyes that had been there so long they were simply part of his face now. His hair needed cutting. He was wearing a shirt with a small ink stain on the left cuff that he'd been meaning to throw away for two weeks.
He looked like a man who should be alive for many more years.
He went back to the table and read the letter a third time.
The fourteen names. That was the part that stayed in him like a fishhook. He had built those identities over eleven years with the patience and care of someone constructing something meant to last. Mori Kaito, his real name, or at least the one he'd started with, was one of fifteen identities, and the other fourteen existed in separate rooms of his life that had never been allowed to touch each other. Different cities. Different paperwork. Different banks. Different voices, even, Kaito had spent months learning how each person sounded, how each one held a pen, what each one was afraid of.
No single human being on earth knew more than two of those names.
He sat with that for a while.
Then he poured himself a glass of whiskey, cheap, from the convenience store downstairs, the kind that burned all the way down, and did what he always did when a situation was bad.
He started thinking.
Not about running. Running was what people did when they had already lost and were simply postponing the acknowledgment of that. Not about calling the police, he had outstanding fraud cases in three prefectures and the police were not his friends. Not about praying, which he had not done since he was eight years old and had discovered, with the particular clarity children sometimes have, that the universe was not listening.
He thought about the letter itself.
A letter is a product. Something made it. Someone made it. Someone with fourteen names written on the same page, which should be impossible, but impossible things have architects the same as possible ones,you just have to find them.
He had eighteen hours left.
He finished the whiskey, washed the glass, put on his jacket, and walked out into the Osaka night, where the streets were wet from rain he hadn't heard, and the last of the neon was going out, and somewhere in the city a system he had never seen was already running toward him.
He thought, very clearly: Someone is going to regret building this.
He was afraid. He was more afraid than he had been since he was a child. But fear, he had learned, was just information, it told you the situation was real, that it mattered, that the part of your brain responsible for survival had taken the problem seriously.
Good. He needed it to.
He walked.