Chapter 157: Cornering the FBI
"...Either he's in the same situation as Vermouth, or he joined the Organization while he was still a teenager," Conan said, picking up where Haibara left off.
He thought it over for a moment before adding, "But that person seems to be fairly close with Vermouth, so I'd say the first possibility is the more likely one."
Haibara considered this for a beat, then nodded her agreement.
"If Shinichi's guess is right, then the Organization has at least two people whose faces never age. Doesn't that mean they've already gotten their hands on the relevant biotechnology?" Professor Agasa asked, worry creasing his face.
If the Organization really had mastered such a technique, things would be grim indeed. Fighting them would only get harder from here on out.
"I doubt it. Back when I was with the Organization, if they'd produced results like that, there's no way I wouldn't have heard a whisper of it. This is probably just a coincidence." Haibara paused, then offered an example. "Like Edogawa and me."
Gradually, the rain outside the car grew heavier, and the signal began to waver. The voice in Conan's earpiece crackled and broke up, growing harder and harder to make out.
Earlier, when he'd heard Curaçao mention that Organization members were lurking nearby, secretly watching for suspicious vehicles, he'd told Agasa to park at the side of the road.
Now, with the bug's signal unstable, Conan roughly pinpointed the transmitter's location through his glasses. Ignoring Haibara's cries for him to stop, he pushed open the car door and climbed out, intending to run over and check things out himself.
But he hadn't taken two steps before he slammed straight into someone.
When Conan's eyes snapped to the shape of a gun muzzle in the man's pocket, pointed directly at him, his pupils contracted sharply and his whole body froze in terror.
He slowly lifted his gaze — and the moment he saw the face above him, the corner of his mouth couldn't help but twitch.
It was Ms. Jodie!
"Hi there, cool kid." Jodie held up her umbrella, fished her phone out of her pocket, and tilted her head with a mischief-succeeded grin. "Bang!"
In the car, Professor Agasa and Haibara finally relaxed after the sudden scare.
"Ms. Jodie, wh-what are you doing here?" Conan stammered.
Jodie explained that since Rena Mizunashi had recently been in rather frequent contact with Dr. Araide — the same doctor Vermouth had disguised herself as — she'd been assigned to keep Mizunashi under surveillance these past several weeks.
"Ah! So you're the person spying from the apartment across the way — the one Xiayu-nee spotted!"
Connan felt that was a bit too much of a coincidence, but if Ms. Jodie was showing up here, the surveillance operation had probably just wrapped up — which meant Xiayu-nee's trip over there to scope things out had been for nothing.
"Hey, cool kid, lemme ask you something. What exactly is that Xiayu-nee of yours? Where'd she learn to move like that?"
At the mention of Xiayu's name, Jodie felt a faint, lingering ache across her body.
She really had been a little impulsive today — though that was entirely Shuichi's fault for rating Xiayu's combat ability so highly. Her curiosity had simply gotten the better of her.
As Jodie replayed what had happened that morning, she thought, that genuinely scared the daylights out of me.
That morning, at around six thirty.
Jodie noticed movement at the entrance of her surveillance target's apartment building, so as usual she checked the scene through her binoculars.
That was how she learned that the Mouri detective and his party, who had stayed over at Mizunashi's place the night before, had helped her catch the culprit behind the once-a-week doorbell pranks. The perpetrator had turned out to be a little boy — and the whole affair had nothing whatsoever to do with the Organization.
What's more, nothing Jodie had observed during all her time watching the place suggested Mizunashi had engaged in any suspicious activity.
She therefore judged the odds that Mizunashi was an Organization member to be quite low, and called her superior, James, to report the situation and ask whether the surveillance should continue.
Once the order to pull out came through, Jodie set down her phone, lowered her binoculars, and began preparing to clean up any traces of her presence.
"So Ms. Jodie was actually with the FBI all along..." A low, womanly voice drifted over from just a short distance away, entirely out of nowhere.
Xiayu had climbed over from the neighboring balcony while Jodie's attention was elsewhere. Based on the approximate position of the gaze she'd felt on her back at Mizunashi's place, she'd narrowed down the rooms a watcher might occupy, then checked them one by one without alerting anyone.
When she peeked into this particular room and saw a familiar figure, even Xiayu had been a little surprised.
She hadn't expected the FBI agent conducting surveillance here to be Ms. Jodie — much less that she'd still be here.
Once Jodie finished her call to her superiors, Xiayu spoke up, announcing her presence — and letting the woman know that she might well have just overheard the contents of her phone call. Truthfully, Xiayu was rather curious how Jodie planned to handle the situation.
"Xiayu!"
At the sound of the voice, Jodie's chest tightened and she whipped around toward its source — only to find a familiar face staring back at her. She cried out the girl's name in astonishment.
"What are you doing here?"
Seeing someone she knew, Jodie let her rigid posture ease somewhat, though she kept a thread of wariness.
As far as she could tell, Xiayu had no connection to the Black Organization — but that was hardly certain. There was no such thing as a hundred percent guarantee in this line of work.
And even if she had no ties now, who was to say she wouldn't stumble onto an Organization deal someday and be forcibly drafted into their ranks? Then again, with Xiayu's skills, ordinary Organization foot soldiers would hardly be a match for her. In that case it probably wouldn't be a matter of dark forces dragging an innocent girl down into the abyss — more like a heroic, hot-blooded citizen escorting a pack of villains on a little field trip to the police station.
Once her nerves had settled, Jodie found her thoughts spiraling off in absurd directions entirely beyond her control.
Her face, however, betrayed nothing. She calmly asked Xiayu why she had turned up here.
Xiayu, of course, had no idea what had just been running through Jodie's head. At the question, she gave a brief, no-frills explanation of how she'd come to be here.
She also mentioned that she and another companion were investigating the area separately — she'd been working her way over room by room from the other side, and was nearly done.
She had barely finished speaking when Jodie heard a faint stirring on the balcony Xiayu had indicated.
Clearly, someone had just climbed over from the neighboring balcony — and had deliberately kept their movements feather-light.
If Jodie hadn't already shifted her attention that way, she doubted she would have noticed at all.
"Charlotte." Xiayu called out the name, both to announce her own position and to signal that there was no danger here.
Sure enough, once Xiayu called out, the footsteps of the young lady climbing over the balcony grew slightly louder.
Before long, a girl with pink hair and a red dress appeared before them.
After Xiayu briefly introduced the two sides to each other, she turned her gaze to Jodie, clearly waiting for an explanation.
Feeling Xiayu's probing eyes settle back onto her, Jodie squirmed inwardly.
The business with the Black Organization absolutely could not be shared with uninvolved civilians. In the end, Jodie could only cobble together her words and offer a vague account: they had merely suspected that Mizunashi might be connected to some underground organization, and her surveillance here was just a precaution. Now that the woman's suspicion appeared minimal, Jodie was preparing to withdraw.
As for why an FBI agent was in Japan in the first place — well, she was here on vacation, had happened to run into this little affair, and lent a hand while she was at it. Nothing of any real importance.
"Oh, I see."
Watching Xiayu and Charlotte nod along and accept her explanation, Jodie had no idea whether they actually believed it — or how much of it they believed.