Escape (7)
Judge Yoshine gave a cold smile.
“We arrested a man who committed a crime. Why would that be a false charge?”
“A person is presumed innocent until a sentence is finalized through trial.”
Did I really have to teach a prosecutor the presumption of innocence?
“That will be established in court.”
“If there’s a court hearing, that is.”
They weren’t going to hold one anyway. I knew that from the first round.
This wasn’t some backward country or dictatorship. It was absurd to think they could keep a conglomerate chairman locked up for more than two years without even putting him on trial.
Finding nothing to say, he changed the subject.
“From what I’ve learned, Mr. Han Miru, you’re fairly famous. You blocked the merger proposal at Hanjung Group’s shareholder meeting, and you personally stepped in to resolve the Blackwood Hotel incident as well. I understand you’re not just an employee, but a co-CEO. Is that correct?”
I put on a deliberately annoyed expression.
“So you did dig into my background?”
“It’s a standard procedure. I hope you won’t take offense.”
Well, fair enough.
Still, if they knew my name even in Japan, I really had become pretty famous. Was I supposed to be happy about that?
“I can’t imagine the co-CEO of Continue Capital came all the way to Japan just for an investment consultation. So what’s your real purpose?”
He really wasn’t easy to bluff, was he?
He was curious what I was plotting, but he clearly didn’t think I’d actually come here to spring Samara out.
In situations like this, it helped to throw him a bone.
I let out a calculated sigh and said, “To be frank, we’re very interested in this whole situation. Especially in Kionos’s outlook going forward.”
“And what do you think that outlook is?”
You’re not supposed to hand out information like this to just anyone, of course. But I decided to make an exception this once.
“It’s going to go through a major crisis.”
“Why?”
“Because you drove Chairman Samara out. Kionos would have gone under long ago if not for him in the first place.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because no Japanese conglomerate could ever have carried out restructuring and plant closures on its own.”
From the way things had been described so far, it was easy to picture Chairman Samara as some maniac whose hobby was firing employees and whose specialty was bulldozing factories. But what kind of manager would cut productive workers and shut down profitable plants? That wasn’t management. That was just insanity.
The fact that Samara had done it at all only showed how badly Kionos had been doing.
So why had Kionos ended up in that state?
Because the previous executive, Yusuke Moriguchi, had run the place into the ground, of course. Even as the losses piled up and the company headed toward ruin, he never moved to restructure anything.
In truth, there were all sorts of complicated interests tangled up in this, not just the company itself.
Mass layoffs and factory closures affected the local communities, and ultimately society as a whole.
Given the nature of the zaibatsu—conglomerates with close ties to the political world—carrying it out in practice was nearly impossible.
That was why SPME, when it stepped in to provide support, had first demanded a change in CEO.
The Japanese government had tacitly approved that too. They could simply pin the entire restructuring on the unilateral decision of a foreign executive.
As expected, politicians and the media poured abuse on Chairman Samara, calling him a heartless devil.
And yet not a single one of them pointed out the real reason this situation had come to pass.
The truth was, Samara hadn’t only done restructuring.
He had actually expanded hiring in the semiconductor division, and he had revised the bonus system to attract talent.
More than twenty thousand people lost their jobs, and several factories were shut down or sold off, but in the end, Kionos had come roaring back to life.
No one in the media ever praised him for that, of course. Instead, Samara was portrayed like some French-made demon.
Maybe that was why, unlike the rest of the world, where outrage over his arrest was pouring in, public opinion inside Japan was overwhelmingly in favor of it—well over ninety percent.
Japan, as always.
As if something had just occurred to me, I said, “Come to think of it, I heard that because Chairman Samara shut down the factory, a company run as a family business closed down too.”
When a big company shuts a plant, that isn’t the end of it. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of subcontractors get hit in succession.
The company his father had run for generations was one of the casualties.
At my words, his face hardened.
“You investigated me?”
I shrugged.
“It’s a standard procedure. I hope you won’t take offense.”
“……”
Well, prosecutors were usually the ones investigating other people. It wasn’t exactly a job where they got investigated themselves.
Yoshine soon gave a thin, icy smile.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you’d do well to be careful.”
“I’ll be careful, but I am a little worried I might end up like Chairman Samara.”
In a country with a tradition of enzai, would being careful on my own really be enough?
“If you get tied up in anything illegal, it wouldn’t be good for Continue Capital’s reputation either.”
I waved that off. “Ah! We don’t really care about things like reputation.”
“Then what do you care about?”
“Only money.”
He looked faintly disgusted.
“How long are you planning to stay in Japan?”
“Probably for a while, until everything’s wrapped up. Since I’m here, I might as well do a little sightseeing too.”
He nodded and got to his feet.
“I see. Sorry to take up your time. Then I’ll be going.”
Thanks to the bullish forecast that Yuseong Electronics would enjoy a windfall from entering the data center industry, Kionos’s stock price soared to 13 trillion yen.
At that level, it still couldn’t match Yuseong Electronics, but among Japanese electronics firms, it was the biggest by far.
Continue Capital dumped short positions as subtly as possible. As a result, it looked as though the amount of short selling was simply increasing naturally along with the stock’s rise.
For a company that enormous, even shorting it wasn’t much of a burden.
We poured in every dollar Continue Capital had, and then some—we even pulled in money from the Rush Fund.
Chairman Samara invested fifty million dollars as well.
His total assets were around two hundred million dollars. At that point, it was fair to say he had dragged out every bit of cash he could possibly spare.
Seeing him go that far, it seemed the bitterness of not receiving his severance package must have really festered inside him.
As the investment neared completion, I got a call from David.
“Everything’s ready.”
“Then let’s start.”
Yoshine Kentaro rose to stardom overnight when he took charge of the investigation into Kionos’s chairman.
Political circles were already flooding him with offers, and a promotion was slated for next year’s regular personnel reshuffle. To secure that, he needed to wrap this case up neatly and hand it off without issue.
In truth, the arrest and investigation of Chairman Samara had been heavy-handed in more ways than one.
The moment he stepped off his private jet at Haneda Airport, they arrested him on the spot and cut him off from both his lawyer and his family.
After keeping him in the detention center for nearly half a year, they finally let him out on bail.
He had been given tacit instructions from above to keep Samara detained until Kionos had stabilized and public anger had died down, and Yoshine had followed those instructions faithfully.
Then, a few days ago, something troubling happened.
Continue Capital...
Chairman Samara was the highest-paid executive in Japan and had substantial assets of his own.
After being locked up for so long, it wasn’t strange for him to meet with an investment firm to handle his money.
The problem was that the firm in question happened to be Continue Capital.
Everything Continue Capital had done so far had been astonishing.
After making its name through the collapse of Thomas Motors, it acquired a cloud company called Snow Crash.
In Korea, it had defeated the merger proposal at Hanjung Group and effectively broken the conglomerate apart, and just recently it had resolved the Blackwood Hotel incident.
The investigation showed that a Korean man named Han Miru had been deeply involved in all of it.
And now that same man had entered Japan to meet with Chairman Samara.
Yoshine could more or less guess what their purpose was.
Are they trying to prod Samara into exposing everything?
Yoshine knew very well how many people were entangled in this case.
If even a small problem arose, he would be the one held responsible as the man in charge of the investigation. Even while buried in work, he kept a close watch on Samara and Han Miru’s movements.
If necessary, I’ll just have to revoke bail and arrest him again.
Beyond the charges already made public, he still had a few more accusations in reserve. If he chose to, he could arrest Samara again at any time.
The reason he hadn’t done so yet was simple: arresting a defendant he had already released on bail twice over would look terrible.
It also carried a serious risk of provoking the international public opinion he had only just managed to calm.
So he could only hope nothing like that happened.
Yoshine ordered the security around Samara’s residence to be reinforced in case of any emergency.
Then an unexpected report came in.
Samara’s son was getting married.
The venue was Singapore.
All of a sudden, a wedding?
In any country, a wedding was an important event. Of course the parents would attend. But Samara was currently in no position to leave Japan.
He invited his relatives and acquaintances to his home before the ceremony.
Was he trying to win sympathy by having them complain about how unfair his detention was?
Still, there was no legitimate reason to stop people who had come to celebrate the wedding from seeing him.
The relatives and acquaintances stopped in Tokyo before heading to Singapore, and Samara held a party at his house, thanking each of them personally and giving them gifts.
After the party ended, the relatives and acquaintances headed on to Singapore, where the wedding was to be held.
Yoshine received a report from the police.
“There’s nothing unusual.”
“I see.”
He was about to hang up and breathe a little easier when the officer in charge said something unexpected.
“However, none of the household staff has shown up for work for two days now.”
“...What?”
After a party, it wouldn’t have been strange to give them a few days off.
But...
“Not a single one?”
“That’s correct.”
One day, you could chalk it up to him being alone. Two days, and something was clearly wrong.
Samara had a number of staff in his house. He was famous as a gourmet, and even while confined at home, he had chefs come in on rotation so he could enjoy a wide variety of dishes.
He wasn’t about to start cooking for himself, was he...
He had a bad feeling about this.
“Tighten the perimeter. Check carefully who’s coming in and going out.”
“Ah, yes sir.”
He rushed straight to Samara’s residence. Just as ordered, the police had the area sealed up so tightly that not even water could leak through.
“Where is the suspect?”
“He hasn’t come out of the house since the party.”
“You’re sure he’s inside?”
“Yes, but...”
Before the officer could finish, Yoshine had already pressed the doorbell. There was no response from inside. He pressed it again and again, but nothing changed.
Yoshine no longer bothered hesitating.
“Break the door down.”
“What? But—”
“Now!”
Together with the police, he smashed through the gate and the front door and stormed into the house. Then they searched every inch of the interior, from the underground parking garage to the third floor.
But no matter how thoroughly they searched, they couldn’t find even a trace of anyone inside.
The officer in charge looked flustered.
“Chairman Samara never left the house.”
“Could he have slipped out among the relatives?”
“Impossible. We checked everyone who came in and everyone who went out.”
Yoshine barked, “Then where did he go?!”
The reason bail had been granted was because they were certain he wouldn’t run.
This was Japan, not Europe.
Even if he somehow managed to get out of the house, where would a foreigner who didn’t even speak the language possibly go?
Unless he hid himself away in some mountain or on some island, they would eventually catch him.
And because he had violated the terms of his bail, he would be arrested the moment they found him.
Don’t tell me he planned to run from Japan?
He had two French passports and one Jordanian passport.
One French passport and one Jordanian passport had been held by his attorney under the terms of his bail, but in accordance with immigration law—which required foreign nationals without residency status to keep their passports on them—one French passport had been stored in a locked case.
And now the passport was gone!
Even if he did have a passport, he had already been registered in the database as a suspect, so there was no way he could get out through an airport or seaport cleanly.
What on earth is he trying to do?
Why had a man who had been quiet until now suddenly pulled something like this?
What had happened in the meantime?
Then one name surfaced in Yoshine’s mind.
“Han Miru?”