“Should I know what that is?”

“It’s an app that lets you share your workouts online. It’s a terrible idea, especially when you let it auto-post to Facebook. I’ve looked at her runs from the last two weeks, and they all start and stop at the same place.”

Hachirō squinted at the map. “That’s Yoyogi Park.”

“She starts here, where the red line begins, every morning at a quarter to six, before she goes to work. She runs into the park, does two laps and then returns. I Googled the address where she starts and stops. Yoyogi Uehara. It’s residential. That’s where she lives.”

“Why is this relevant?”

“Someone like Furokawa is not going to be easy to reach. The sword, too—he’ll know that your brother will want it back, and he’ll have it somewhere safe, maybe in a vault or somewhere that I wouldn’t easily be able to get to if I tried to steal it. But I don’t need to steal it. Natsuki is his weakness. If I can get to her, I can get to him. He’ll deliver it to us.”

Hachirō shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”

“I’m not proposing that she be hurt,” Milton said. “That’s not how I work.”

“So what are you proposing?”

“That I take her and keep her somewhere and tell Furokawa that he can only have her back in exchange for the sword.”

“And you need my help to do that.”

Milton nodded. “I need a vehicle and a driver to help me get her away, and then I need somewhere where she can be kept while I negotiate with her brother, and someone to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t leave until the exchange has happened. I might be able to manage it alone, but it wouldn’t be easy. The chances would be higher that she would be hurt, too.”

Hachirō’s skin, tanned and wrinkled like old leather, grew taut as he clenched his jaw. “No,” he said. “This is what I used to do. Hurt people. Frighten them. I made a promise to myself twenty years ago that I would never do that again.”

“And that was a worthy decision,” Milton said. “I promised myself something similar. But she won’t be hurt—you have my word on that. She has no stake in this save the fact that she’s related to Furokawa. The worst thing that happens to her is she’s shaken up a little and then she has an inconvenient few hours. That’s it.”

“You don’t think there’s another way?”

“I can’t think of anything with a better chance of success.”

Hachirō took the empty plate and stacked it in a dishwasher tray.