First, Do No Harm
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

Standard Copyright Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz is, quite obviously, not mine. It is in fact the intellectual property of Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya, Project Weiss, TV Tokyo and Movic, amongst several others both in Japan and Stateside. This is a fan work written for fun, not out of any notion of personal gain, and on the off-chance that anyone did decide to pay me for doing this (which they won't) I would just spend the lot on Weiss-related merchandise, so any money would make its way back into the coffers of them as deserve it anyway.

Author's Notes: Written for the Weissday fic exchange on Livejournal, this fic owes its existence to a prompt from Kat, also known as Genkischuldich, who wanted to read a fic involving Weiss working through a mission. One month of working my ass off later, in between far-too-frequent bouts of illness, I managed to deliver this fic just in time to make the community deadline. It was surprisingly liberating to write a fic which involved precisely no romantic complication for once, just Weiss doing their thing. Thanks must go not only to Genkischuldich for running Weissday and providing the prompt, but also to an RL friend of mine whom I have bored to tears about Weiss Kreuz, who set his plot brain loose on my extremely tenuous ideas and made it possible for me to get this fic written in the first place.

There is a remedy for everything; it is called death.
Portuguese Proverb


Chapter One – The Repertory

Tuesday hadn't even started well.

Eight AM and there was, Youji had always said, a terrible inevitability about mornings in the Koneko. There'd be Aya, fussing over the orchids with an eyedropper and the rich, brown exhalations of the coffee maker mingling with the scent of soil and pollen and damp, and the susurration of shivering leaves as the bamboo they still hadn't found a buyer for was carried out to its spot on the pavement. Cut flowers and ceramic pots and Omi in the kitchen snatching a hurried breakfast before he left for school, and Ken—

Ken should have known better than to go running in a rainstorm, but he hadn't been willing to let a little thing like the weather cramp his style. He was a healthy kid, always had been, Ken didn't get sick and anyway, everyone knew all that crap about getting ill just from going out in the rain was an old wives' tale. That had been yesterday: today Ken had risen late with a fever and a dry, unpleasant cough and Omi had taken one look at him and, in the face of Ken's repeated protestations that he felt absolutely fine, really, had ordered him back to bed.

Condemning Youji to the morning shift, and hours and hours of Aya Fujimiya. Looked like he was cursed to spend his days round people who were Good At Mornings, and at least Ken he could complain to…

Really, Ken should have known better.

Youji didn't like the morning shift at the best of times and he made his distaste known by sleeping through as many of them as Omi's careful rotas would allow; it wasn't a problem when Ken was there to pick up the slack, but when he wasn't? Stupid for a flower shop to open so early but when the bulk of your custom came from high-school girls with hormone complexes, didn't it make sense? God knew what the early rush did with the flowers when they got to school.

God only knew what the Hell he was doing up. Youji hadn't appreciated, after his decidedly gaudy night, being informed by a disgustingly chipper and healthy-looking Omi that Ken was feeling bad and had gone back to bed, and he was going to have to pick up the slack. Ken owed him for this, Youji thought as he slumped by the register and struggled to unlock it. Big time.

Across the room, Aya had finished with the orchids and, closing the glass display cases, crossed to the front of the store to raise the shutters, letting the morning sun flood into the shadowy shop. Youji winced, and – God damn it, Aya – shielded his eyes with one raised hand.

It was, almost, a relief to spot Manx's ankles.

Immaculately turned out, in spite of the earliness of the hour, in blazing crimson and haloed by the light that spilled in through the half-open shutters, Manx stood waiting on the pavement. Patient and poker-faced as a statue, she could have been standing there for hours. An utterly unremarkable buff folder was tucked under one of her arms

Of course, they had all known it was coming. It had been far too long without a word, and the weird thing was it was the long waits that were the worst. To be thrown from one mission to the next, ready or not, with barely time to catch one's breath was bad; to spend week on dragging, tedious week with nothing to do but play at floristry and wonder at the silence, and try to handle one another, was somehow far worse. Weiss hadn't been formed to waste their days on begonias, curling ribbon and stock taking, or on giddy high-schoolers, fastidious yet fickle society brides, and energetic old ladies dropping in to pass the time of day with Momoe.

"Well, well, if it isn't Miss Manx," Youji said, camouflaging genuine surprise behind a slow and languid smile. "You're here early. Couldn't stay away?"
"Well," Manx said with a toss of her head, "I must say that's a far friendlier greeting than I might have expected."
Youji grinned. "What can I say? Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

Manx – well, Kudou, what did you expect? – merely smiled coolly as if she had heard nothing, walking into the still-dormant store like an actress strutting the stage, cool and collected as if she had absolutely every right to be there. Small and curvaceous yet effortlessly commanding, she let her presence speak for itself.

"Good morning, Balinese, Abyssinian…" She inclined her head briefly in Aya's direction, a gesture that included. "Is Bombay still around?"
"Omi? I haven't seen him. Hey, Aya, has Omi—"
"No." Aya cut him off, his voice calm and inflectionless. "He's still here."

Aya should have been anal about routine. It would have fitted with the rest of it: the focus so single-minded that it verged on the obsessive, the utterly needless mania for secrecy that carried over into everything he did. He folded his shirts like he worked for Armani, leaving them so neatly pressed it seemed a crime to sully them by shaking out the creases, and slipping them on. That he reacted to Manx's sudden presence by not reacting – simply reaching back up to close the shutters again, not even acknowledging the startled looks of a couple of early-rising schoolgirls – seemed, to Youji, somehow wrong.

The shutters, with a rattle and a clang, snapped closed, Aya shooting Youji a look that betrayed absolutely nothing of what he might have been feeling and left his pale face a scrupulous blank. Maybe, to Aya, this was just another habit.

"I'll go find the others," Aya said.

He didn't wait for an answer, simply slipped off his apron and vanished into the back rooms. Leaving the break room door slightly ajar and Youji stranded with Manx, suddenly feeling uncomfortably like an awkward teenager on a not-entirely-successful date. Oh well, unsuccessful date or not, they didn't have to stand in silence…

"What's the deal with the morning call, then, if it's not for the sheer joy of my company?"
Manx laughed briefly, tapping her manicured nails against the buff folder she carried: it was an answer in itself. "I'm afraid, Balinese, that it would take rather more than the prospect of seeing you to get me here so early."
"Huh," Youji said thoughtfully. "This has gotta be some mission. Takatori again?"
"Actually, no," Manx replied, noting Youji's look of surprise. "But the rest can wait until the briefing."

When Aya walked in, Omi Tsukiyono was having waveforms for breakfast.

Mr. Yamamoto's physics quizzes were, for Class 3-A, a Tuesday tradition. First thing after break, Mr. Yamamoto would check his students had been paying attention during the last week by giving them a ten-minute quiz. The quiz, for Omi, was seldom a challenge, but it never hurt to make sure. Double-checking his physics notes on Tuesday mornings had, for Omi, become routine – a routine that, today, had been interrupted by shooing a clearly feverish Ken back into his bedroom, then dragging a hungover Youji out of his.

By the time Aya arrived, padding silently into the kitchen and waiting, quiet as a ghost, at the foot of the stairs, Omi was in no mood for another interruption. Sighing, he looked up from the textbook he had spread in front of him and tried not to look too hard done by. Aya always had walked too quietly.

"Aya-kun? I thought you were opening up…"
"We have a mission."

And that was all that needed to be said.

Conscientious as always, Omi had stopped to call his school before heading to the basement. Yes, this is Tsukiyono from 3-A… could you please tell Mr. Nakata that I won't be able to come in today? Yes, I'm afraid I'm not well… stomach pains, I couldn't eat at all this morning. Yes Ma'am, I will be sure to see a doctor…

He sighed as he placed the phone back down in its cradle, letting his hand rest on the smooth, cool plastic of the receiver for just a second before turning to the stairs, his breakfast half-finished and his schoolbooks abandoned. For all he was a consummate liar, and for all he understood the necessity of it, Omi never had liked lying to his teachers. Tuesdays were always interesting, physics quizzes and all; he had a science project to work on, and he hated the thought of letting down his group with yet another period of inexplicable absence.

Kritiker, of course, came first; for Omi it always would. Mr. Yamamoto would just have to wait.

It wasn't exactly a surprise. It had been too quiet for too long, with nothing but the swirling currents of rumor to give him any insight into what the shadows still hid; the girls in the shop, talking in whispers behind their hands, trading tall tales and urban myths no responsible adult would believe a word of. The papers pontificated about Takatori and his rivals or obsessed over trivia – a young actress's malfunctioning wardrobe, a younger singer's failing marriage, with truth trapped somewhere between the lines of print. Rumor: only that, and near-impossible to find the truth in it…

Don't knock rumor, Youji had said once: Omi couldn't remember when, or why, or even who he had said it to. He'd just said it and it must have been years back now, back when it all began. Before Takatori and Esset, before Aya even. Before it had all gotten so much more complicated. Don't knock rumor. Peel away the distortions, unpick the hyperbolic flourishes, and you'll usually find a statement of fact… it's simply a matter of knowing what to ignore.

Weiss knew it better than most – but even the rumor mill had been eerily quiet as of late and that, of course, didn't prove a thing. The shadows remained.

Omi smiled brightly at Manx as he stepped from the spiral stairway and into the darkened basement, perching on the edge of one of the armchairs and holding one hand out for the data folder, which Manx passed him without a word. Opening it a crack, he stole a quick glimpse inside it, furtive as a child who had torn the corner of the wrapping from his Christmas present three days too soon. Youji was already there, sprawled at one end of the couch and listing slightly to starboard, eyes closed and hair spilling across the back of the seat; eight in the morning, he often said, was a time that simply shouldn't exist.

"Youji-kun," Omi said suspiciously, looking up from the folder he held, "do you feel all right?"
"Sure I do, Omi," Youji said vaguely. He didn't open his eyes. "Don't sweat it."
Omi sighed – well of course I'm going to sweat it, Youji, if it looks like you're going to fall asleep in the briefing. "Youji-kun, please. It's not that early."
"Early enough for me, kiddo," Youji said sleepily; he did, at least, condescend to open his eyes, sit up a little straighter.

Aya, moving as ever far too quietly, slipped down the stairs with Ken, every bit the irritable younger sibling taking exception to being ordered around by someone he felt had very little right to, a few dragging, resentful paces behind him. Okay, I'm here, what else do you want? He was fully dressed save for shoes, and trying desperately not to look as if he were ill; from the way he blinked, though, and the bleary, half-alert look in his eyes, Aya had startled him from sleep. Abandoning Aya by the wall – the redhead folding his arms and leaning back, as if he had nothing to do with any of it – Ken slumped down onto the other end of the sofa in an undignified, adolescent slouch; the cushions sighed in protest as he dropped heavily down onto them, shoulders shifting as he tried to get comfortable.

Manx didn't speak; her gaze, schoolmistress-stern, said only good, let's get on with this. A quick glance about the room, checking they were all present and about as alert as they were going to get, and she was stepping over to the video, bending over to slip the cassette inside the machine—

—and Youji's head slumped forward, his eyelids slipping closed.

Omi opened his mouth to speak; Ken got there first. He leaned over, nudged Youji not-too-gently with one elbow. "Hey, Youji, you alive in there?"
"Okay," Youji said weakly, "okay, I'm paying attention…"

Even this was a routine, of a kind. Manx ushered them to the basement, a sheepdog rounding up her little flock, and dimmed the lights, the television flickered into life and there on the screen, veiled as always in shadow, was the form of a man who knew each of them intimately, and who, for Weiss, was little more than a digital phantom: a silhouetted shape, a made-up name, a distorted voice – and no sign of the human form that must have been caught behind it. They had met him, yet Persia might as well never have existed at all. There was, to Omi's mind, something peculiar and terribly disquieting about that.

He hid it, of course. What else could he do? Hands resting on his knees, he gazed intently at the screen. After all, you never could be sure how much of this would be on the test.

The mission was simple, yet mystifying. All over the city, people were falling down dead and all their doctors could say was, this was natural. Previously healthy adults were dying from massive tumors that formed in days and utterly consumed their bodies, or from sudden and inexplicable strokes; they were found in the street without a mark on them, paralyzed from the neck down. An Olympic hopeful had died of a heart defect that had only ever been seen in newborns. A company president had been rushed to Saint Luke's with all the symptoms of Graft-Versus-Host Disease. Someone was doing this to them and none of them remembered who, they'd just been to this clinic and Hunters of Light—

The perfect murder is the one which looks only natural.

"Wait," Ken said; his voice sounded unused, something long ago left to rust struggling to function again. "Wait, there's no—" He broke off to cough convulsively, eyes closed, one hand held before his mouth. He really, Omi thought, ought to wear a cold mask. "Did anyone else get a target name?"
"There was no name given, Ken," Aya replied.
Ken turned to look at him, blinking once, twice, in clear confusion. "How does that work? If there's no name, how are we supposed to find them?"
Omi frowned thoughtfully. "I'm guessing we can work around that. There was a clinic name…"

The boy spoke distractedly; it sounded more as if he were thinking aloud than trying to answer Ken's question. Opening the folder he held on his knees, Omi flipped quickly through it again, his head bowed and an over-long hank of blonde hair tumbling into his eyes.

"Ah, here it is." He straightened. "Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic. The target works here, Manx-san?"
"The prospective target," Manx corrected him, flipping the lights back on somewhat belatedly; Omi frowned, looking almost as lost as Ken. "I'm afraid Kritiker have been unable to conclusively confirm the target's identity. The victims, however, have one thing in common: in the weeks before their deaths, they all had a consultation at Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic for minor ailments unrelated to the diseases they died of. The target, therefore, could be either of the doctors at the clinic, or both of them, or a third party they have been referring certain clients onto."
"I see," Omi said thoughtfully.
"So the clinic staff could be totally innocent?" Ken asked.
Aya unfolded his arms, stepping slightly away from the wall – an understated gesture that still effortlessly drew attention to himself. "It's possible, but unlikely. Manx, do we have anything on these doctors?"
"Basic personal data," Manx replied, bending to Omi and leafing through the file he held, pulling free a couple of sheets of printouts and holding them out to him. "I must stress, however, that no action has been sanctioned against either of these people at present. Bombay, I'll be counting on you to contact Kritiker when you have confirmed the target's identity. Am I to take it you're all in?"

She was answered by a single brisk nod from Aya, all his attention already on the sheaf of printouts Manx had handed him. Youji – yeah, I'm in – stood up, and tried to read over his shoulder; Aya shooed him away, and he stepped back smiling, with his hands raised as if to show he had no designs on Aya's reading matter. Omi said nothing; he hardly had to. You can count on me, Manx-san… Even if he'd had the option to turn the mission down, he wouldn't have dreamed of doing so. Instead, he closed the folder and tossed it onto the small central table then, resting the flat of one arm along the back of his overstuffed chair, turned to look at Ken.

"Ken-kun, are you going to be okay to—"
"In." Ken cut him off, his brows drawing sharply downward when he caught the look that had crept across Omi's face. "Oh for fuck's sake, it's just a cough. I'll be fine by the time we get going."
"Ken," Youji said simply, "not to put too fine a point on it… you sound like shit."
"In," Ken repeated, "and look who's talking." To drive the point home, he leaned toward the burdened table and snatched up the first thing his fingers touched: a glossily overdesigned, green-and white brochure with Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic printed on the front in flowing, unctuous kanji. Flipping it open, he slumped heavily back against the couch cushions and glared at Youji over the top of it, as if daring him to speak again.
Youji shrugged, clearly unwilling to push the matter any further. "Well," he said, as if it didn't matter either way, "suit yourself, but don't blame me if you drop down dead."

Omi – honestly, Ken could be so stubborn – simply sighed and shook his head, and went to turn on the computer, and tried to pretend that a small part of him wasn't glad of it. Ken-kun, you're an idiot. I knew you wouldn't let us down.

Six hours later and dust motes danced in the mid-afternoon sun as it slanted in through the kitchen windows: Omi, stood by the counter making tea, was a study in cheerful concentration. Behind him Aya and Youji, ostensibly taking a late lunch, were gathered about the kitchen table, strewn with files and photos and spread-out sheaves of printer paper, all spread out across the surface like a bizarre makeshift tablecloth. The contents of Manx's data file meeting and marrying with the sum total of the morning's researches, in print format.

Omi hadn't been surprised to note that there was no sign of Ken.

"Omi," Youji said in something akin to admiration, "you're at light speed on this one."
Omi smiled at his friend over his shoulder, but shrugged, brushing off the compliment. "It's not hard to find this stuff. You can get quite a lot from a name and a birth-date." Though, he added privately, you probably wouldn't get much that was relevant from one of ours.
"Well," Youji said wryly, "they can't all be paranoiacs, I guess… so these are our targets?"
"Prospective targets," Aya corrected him. "Unless there's a third party."
"I haven't been able to find any connection to one, but of course that doesn't mean there isn't one, does it? I think at least one of them knows something, Aya-kun. I'm just not sure—oh, just a minute."

The kettle steamed and burbled quietly to itself by the boy's elbow, turning itself off with a small, soft click. Omi (does anyone else want tea?) turned away from the table and the others, busying himself by filling the teapot and hurrying through the usual last-minute search for cups and plates, grabbing a half-opened packet of biscuits as an afterthought. He hadn't really realized he was humming under his breath, a snatch of a song Ken had liked, when they first met. He reminded himself to go check on Ken, just as soon as he'd talked things through with the others. Maybe Ken would want tea, too…

Aya hadn't wanted tea, and he raised his brows slightly when Omi placed a cup down in front of him anyway, pushing aside a few of the papers that rested beside him. It's just so much friendlier, the boy might have said, if we all drink together. Aya, of course, might have wanted to live set apart from the rest of them but why, Omi thought, should he get away with that?

He sat, the legs of his chair scraping slightly across the kitchen floor, and sipped his tea. Two-twenty and he should have been sat in Miss Imari's math class, and here he was in the kitchen sipping hot tea… maybe one of the girls would bring his homework over, later.

"So, then," Youji asked, leaning back into his chair and lighting a cigarette, "what've we got?"
"Well," Omi said, placing his mug down in front of him, fingers spread to warm themselves against the striped china, "there's nothing conclusive, I'm afraid, and as I was saying I can't rule out the possibility there's someone else involved. I think we're getting somewhere, though."

We'll start, Omi said, with the clinic.

Thousand Leaves Holistic Clinic turned out to be a relatively new concern. It was founded in 1991 by a former oncologist – his name, to Omi's surprise, had turned out to be Amano, not Chiba – who had made the switch to alternative therapies after becoming disenchanted with Western medicine and the medical establishment. His own clinic, in the words of its own glossy brochures and barely less overdesigned website, offered patients a gentle and holistic system of therapy that was individually tailored to their own physical, mental and emotional symptoms, via the miracles of homeopathic medicine.

Aya had never heard of homeopathy. Youji once knew a girl who suggested he take diluted monkshood when he'd cancelled a date with a five-minute fever that was actually a knife wound to the thigh. Was that the same thing?
"Yes, Youji-kun," Omi said. "that was a homeopathic cure. Alternative medicine's kind of popular with some people."
Youji took a drag on his cigarette. "So it's a girl thing, right? Plant extracts…"
"It's not just plant extracts," Omi replied, "and I doubt it's just a girl thing. But I don't think taking it would have done you much good. If you'd had a fever, I mean. A lot of these remedies are so diluted they're basically just water."
"So it's a scam," Aya cut in.
"I think it's a little more complicated than that, Aya-kun. I'm pretty sure most of the practitioners genuinely believe it works."

Doctor Keisuke Amano didn't look like anyone's idea of a holistic doctor. He was, at forty-nine, still tall, handsome and husky, his hair thick and glossy as that of a man half his age – and, like so many oversized men, he was by all accounts gentle and considerate, and inclined to contemplation. He had been a good oncologist, but had been worn down by prescribing the best treatments science could devise and money could buy only to watch his patients waste away before his eyes, and then die anyway. He had suffered a breakdown, he had found religion. He had invested his life savings to open Thousand Leaves.

"Sounds like a holistic mid-life crisis," Youji said. "He just chose the Buddha, not a babe."
Omi smiled, but ignored the interruption. "Whatever influenced him, it doesn't seem to have done him any harm. His clinic's always had a very good reputation – at least it did have, up till now."

From almost as soon as it opened its doors, Thousand Leaves had turned a profit. Homeopathy was a godsend for rich, stressed urbanites who weren't very ill, and upwardly-mobile mothers who refused to entrust their children to the clinical so-called horrors of Western medicine. Doctor Amano was kindly and attentive; he listened to his patients' stories and nodded in all the right places. His remedies were gentle and natural, with none of the hideous side-effects the cancer drugs he had spent so many years prescribing had caused. His patients, or many of them, got better.

Three years after the clinic was founded, Doctor Amano had moved to a brighter, more spacious office, in a rather wealthier neighborhood. Three years after that, he had looked again at his finances and at his burgeoning caseload and decided it was high time he hired a second therapist.

In August 1997, Doctor Takagawa began work at Thousand Leaves.

"That's her," Omi said, fishing a photograph from amongst the clutter on the table.
Youji gave a long, low whistle. "Well, hey there, Miss Venice Beach. How the Hell'd you get that surname?"
"She's married," Aya said, as if it should have been obvious.
"And that, Youji-kun," Omi said with a bright smile, "means she's very definitely taken. Family registry says she's the wife of a Doctor Shigeru Takagawa. He's an anesthesiologist. They married early last year."

Elizabeth Takagawa told her patients to call her Liza. Tall and slender and twenty-eight, with strawberry-blonde hair, a peaches-and-cream complexion and a wide, stars-and-stripes smile, she was the very picture of an American girl. Her residency, she said on the clinic website, had left her disillusioned by conventional medicine. Ladies who disliked the thought of consulting a male therapist about their conditions could talk to her in the strictest confidence…

Then the deaths had started.

Neither of them looked or acted like a murderer, and that meant precisely nothing.

"Basically," Omi said, taking a sip of his slightly tepid tea, "we're looking at a six-year time-span in which nothing happens save for Doctor Amano building up his business. Then he decides to expand, hires Doctor Takagawa, and all of a sudden his patients are dying. First theory: Doctor Amano was planning this—" whatever, he thought, it turns out to be, "—all along and hired Takagawa to throw investigators off his trail, making Doctor Amano the target."
"And he is a former cancer specialist," Youji said. "Manx said a lot of the victims died of sudden cancers, he could be…"
"No. Amano's all wrong for this."

Aya spoke with such assurance it caught his teammates off-guard. Youji blinked, an expression of almost comedic confusion crossing his face; Omi raised his head, brows furrowed. Aya-kun?

"We can't be sure of that, Aya-kun," Omi said reasonably. "As far as the clinic staff go I'm most inclined to suspect Doctor Takagawa, but we can't exactly rule Doctor Amano out yet. Besides, they still might be working together. Second theory, part A: Doctor Takagawa is the target. She joined the clinic because it gave ready access to a pool of potential victims. Second theory, part B: Doctor Takagawa is the one who had the idea, but convinced or coerced Doctor Amano into helping her, which would make them both targets."
"Whoa," Youji said, holding up his hands as if he were directing traffic. "Wait a sec. You're saying this is right for Takagawa? I'm not seeing a motive for her, either."
"There's no motive for either of them," Aya said, "as far as we know."
Omi sighed, and hoped Youji hadn't caught it. Of course Youji would want to believe in the woman's innocence, for no reason other than she was young and attractive… "The husband, of course, could be the third party. They could be in it together, or he could be manipulating her. That's the third theory, and theory four would revolve around an as-yet unknown third party. I don't think I much care for theory four."

Privately, Omi didn't much care for any of it. The more he thought about it, the harder he found it to believe that Kritiker could have deemed a string of natural deaths to be somebody's fault. The victims – victims? – had died of illness. No matter how ugly and sudden their deaths may have been, they had been utterly natural. They must have been. Nobody could make someone else sick, not like that. No existing drug could provoke the human body to turn upon itself in such sudden and varied ways… and this, if Kritiker was to be believed, was illness used as a weapon, cancers like gunshots and strokes like the slash of a blade.

Omi trusted Kritiker implicitly; he hardly knew how not to. If they thought the doctors at Thousand Leaves were potential targets, they had to be – but that didn't change the fact this mission made no sense to him. Surely it wasn't possible to induce a healthy adult to suffer a stroke? Was there perhaps some logical reason: a statistical fluke, or a string of bad luck?

"So, where does that leave us?" Youji asked.
"The first step," Omi said, "is to see if we can clear Doctor Amano. Youji-kun… how's your head at the moment?"

And he smiled, like a child with a secret.

For what better way was there to get the measure of Doctor Amano than meeting him? The man was, after all, a doctor. He'd help anyone provided they could pay, and Kritiker's money was as good as anybody else's. Invent an ailment then ask for a cure: herbs or minerals, diluted. It was hardly as if they would then have to take it. What could be more natural than that?

But you have, Omi said, to go down together.

That, Aya supposed, was as good an explanation as any for the presence, in the passenger seat of his Porsche, of one Youji Kudou. All foppish clothes and pale, floppy hair, smelling of expensive cologne and warm leather and, as a grace-note, ever so slightly of cigarettes.

Of course he understood the logic behind it. Thousand Leaves Clinic was a dangerous place for anyone to be, not just for an undercover assassin; doubly so as Weiss had no idea how the target selected their victims, or how it was they could induce them to fall ill. A first-time patient – a young man, with no wife or children to worry about what happened to him – who came in alone might very well have been seen as nothing more than easy pickings. At least, if the staff knew there was someone waiting for this patient, they would be less inclined to casually harm them.

So Aya and Youji were to go down together, and make it obvious to the staff they were together. One of them was to go for the consultation, it didn't much matter who; the other was to wait in the reception area. Whoever felt most like being Haruki Nagata – a stressed-out college student, suffering from sleeplessness and tension headaches – could be, and the small tape player which would be left recording in the pocket of the patient's coat was merely a courtesy detail. The coat pocket, Omi admitted, was not an ideal place to hide a surveillance device, but they couldn't risk anything else. They couldn't be sure what a holistic consultation might involve. Anything concealed beneath clothing might be detected on a physical, and the smaller, discreeter bugs wouldn't be able to continuously record for long enough…

"I'm not sending Ken-kun," Omi had said.
"Why on earth not?" Youji asked, and he sounded genuinely curious. "He's actually sick."
"That," Omi had replied, "is why I'm not sending him."

(All he was saying was, it's too dangerous.)

And Omi himself, of course, was better used elsewhere: embodiment of a game of chess. The teenager had already made his way down into the basement by the time Aya left, head bowed over the computer screen as he gently coaxed the clinic's computer systems into letting him in. You two take the front door; I'll slip in round the back…

"I think," Youji said thoughtfully, "it'd work better if you were the one to see the doctor."
"Oh?" Aya felt himself frowning, glancing briefly and suspiciously at Youji from the very corners of his narrow eyes. "Why would that be?"
"Because, Aya my man, there'll be a receptionist," Youji said, with a wink and a grin, "and chances are she'll be bored out of her pretty little mind. It's amazing what you can get out of those girls if you just ask nice."

Like a promise to meet up for drinks—but Youji, at least, was an old hand at mixing business with pleasure. He would drift up to the reception desk and lower his sunglasses and give the girl a slow, lazy smile that would have her (if the shy type) coloring and averting her eyes, or (if she was bold and brazen) grinning and tossing her head. He would lean heavily on the counter and rest his chin on his hand and ask all the right questions, and do it all in such a sly and subtle way that the girl wouldn't even realize she was the subject not of an idle flirtation, but a thorough cross-examination. People opened out to Youji in a way they simply didn't to Aya. He put strangers on edge; Youji put them at their ease.

The worst thing about it was that it wasn't such a bad idea. Aya sighed, and concentrated on the road.

The traffic was bad, of course. Tokyo during the morning rush on a wet and windy Wednesday; it didn't know what else to be and Youji fidgeting and fussing in the seat beside him, and gazing disconsolately out of the window at the rain rattling sporadically on the glass. Aya felt himself frowning and this, Youji said dryly, with a melodramatic gesture that seemed far too large for the cramped confines of Aya's car, is why we have a delivery bike.

It seemed to take far longer than it ought have done to reach Sumida-ku. The street Aya turned into could have been any street. It could have been their street, quiet and unremarkable, scattered with ailing urban trees and lined with a near-identical parade of small, neat shops – a bookshop, a delicatessen, a scattering of clothing stores, a small, slightly faded family restaurant, its shutters still tightly drawn – though the rush-hour crowded sidewalks seemed rather narrower, the buildings taller, huddled close as if for protection against the chill.

Thousand Leaves Clinic turned out to occupy the first floor of a low-lying concrete-and-steel building which, though it lacked the picture windows and elaborate façade, was not too dissimilar to the Koneko: storefront at street level, small apartments above. Small, trim, quietly prosperous, it didn't, to Aya's mind, look all that different from any other small clinic offering acupuncture or Chinese herbal medicine, or chiropractic, or any of a dozen other treatments that no doubt would work best on the worried well.

"So that's it?" Youji said quietly, turning in his seat to get a better look at the building. "Well, well. Our Doctor Amano's got to be doing pretty nicely for himself…"

Aya said nothing. All this, of course, they knew from the brochure.

Inside was all warmth and light and nothing whatever to see. Just a small waiting room with three white-painted doors, all closed, leading off from it – two consulting rooms, one with 'staff only' printed on it in large, blocky kanji. A slightly tired-looking dracaena wilted beside a group of low-slung leather chairs, a couple of which were occupied by equally tired-looking patients. They sat huddled around a small glass-topped table on which someone had laid out the usual collection of dull old lifestyle magazines. It looked like every other private clinic Aya had ever been in. It looked harmless.

There was a receptionist, tucked neatly away behind a high wooden desk, surrounded by filing cabinets and little display stands laden with boxes and phials of homeopathic preparations. She was cute as Youji could have wished, all doe eyes and shining black hair pinned up in a chignon. The usual smiling, standardized young beauty so similar to every other receptionist Aya had ever seen it was mildly disturbing.

He couldn't remember actually agreeing to Youji's ridiculous plan – you deal with the doctor; I'll be right out here flirting with this pretty girl – but there was Youji, hanging discreetly back by the huddled armchairs and pretending an interest he didn't possess in the view of the street through the rain-smeared plate-glass doors. Clearly Youji wasn't going to be pretending he was ill any time soon: Aya spared him a small frown and, somewhat to his own surprise, found himself walking over to the receptionist. Would it be possible to see Doctor Amano?

The girl started: she had, Aya realized with no surprise at all, been staring at Youji. "I'm sorry, sir?"
"I'd like," Aya repeated, "to see Doctor Amano."
"Doctor Amano, Doctor Amano…" The girl bent her head over her computer, tapping delicately away at the keys for a minute before raising her head. "Yes, he should be able to fit you in this morning. Can I take your name?"
"Nagata," Aya said. "Haruki Nagata."
"Okay… and your date of birth?"
"July the fourth, 1978." You never, Youji had said once, never go by a fake birthdate, not unless you're very confident, or very stupid, or very, very desperate. Give the wrong name, wear a wig, talk with a Tohoku accent – change whatever else you like, but never change your birthday. It's too difficult to keep straight, and much too easy to get caught out. Nobody has to hesitate when asked what day they were born.
"Thank you… would I be right in saying this was your first appointment with Doctor Amano, Nagata-san?" When Aya nodded, the girl turned in her seat, tugging a sheet of paper from a cubbyhole and handing it to him, along with a disposable ballpoint. "Doctor Amano requires all new patients to fill out a questionnaire before their first consultation. The doctors at this clinic are holistic practitioners – that means they're not only concerned with your symptoms but also with you as a person. The more information you provide, the better the doctor will be able to help you… You needn't worry, it's all strictly confidential."

She gave him a diffident smile and turned back to her computer, eyes drifting briefly back over to Youji. The blonde (maybe he had sensed her gaze?) glanced over at the pair of them, raising his eyebrows as Aya walked over to the chairs: a comic parody of surprise. It would have been infuriating if it hadn't been so predictable. Youji was, after all, all about the show. Aya ignored him, merely dropping down into one of the leather chairs – a surprisingly boyish action that had Youji blinking – and unfurling the questionnaire, balancing the glasses he usually only used for reading on the end of his nose.

He had expected the demographic data: name and date of birth, and current occupation. Expected the questions about his condition, his perceptions of his general health and is this your first consultation with a holistic practitioner, how did you hear about Thousand Leaves Clinic? He had even expected Youji discreetly reading over his shoulder.

Then there were the questions about his temperament (did he consider himself the nervous sort?) and if the time of day or the weather affected his moods and, if so, how. He hadn't expected them, nor had he expected to be discreetly interrogated about whether his sex life satisfied him, and how he got on with the spouse-stroke-partner he didn't possess. It left him feeling obscurely irritated, like a child who had diligently prepared for an exam only to open his paper and find an entire section of questions he had no idea he was going to be asked.

No wonder the receptionist had wanted to reassure him that anything he said would stay between him and Doctor Amano.

"Huh," Youji said. "So that's a holistic questionnaire?"
Aya glanced back up at him, raising a single narrow brow. "What were you expecting?"
Youji smirked at him. It was the kind of smile that could only accompany an exceptionally silly answer. "Wholemeal paper."

With a stroke of the pen, Aya drew a single contemptuous line through the questions about his sex life. Not applicable. Lack of sex, no matter what Youji may have claimed, couldn't cause so much as an imaginary headache.

A few more prospective patients walked in, smelling of the cold and of their own damp clothes – a girl, plain but plump-calved and bosomy, briefly lingered in the porch to shake out her umbrella where Youji gave her a bored once-over before resuming his study of the trim little receptionist. The receptionist ducked her head and tried not to smile too much, and called for a Miyamori-san. A pinch-faced woman in a pale, expensive-looking coat got to her feet and vanished into one of the consulting rooms. Aya finished the questionnaire and flipped back through it idly; to an outsider, Haruki Nagata might merely have seemed bored.

"We need a copy of that," Youji murmured, so quietly Aya had difficulty hearing. "Try and hang onto it."
Aya didn't turn to him. He merely said, in a near-whisper, "they'll keep it," and thought he heard Youji sigh.
"Then try and remember what it says."

A door creaked open and an elderly man, so spry it was anyone's guess what he could have needed the clinic for, walked out into the reception area, pausing to pay his bill and exchange a few words with the receptionist. Doctor Amano would see Nagata­-san now.