The day of the mission was rainy.
The evening news in Tokyo had just broadcast a heavy rain warning, and as the night wore on, the rain came down with a swish. The doors to the airport lobby were not closed, and the crackle of the rain against the ground carried dully to the ears of the passengers who were close to the doors.
Ichijō Mirai, whose hearing was so good that he could hear it from where he sat in the center of the concourse, folded his umbrella and put it away as he had found it, reached up to brush the rain off the hem of his shirt, and sat calmly in the crowded concourse.
A few meters away, Gin was also sitting on a bench, back to back with Ichijō Mirai, unable to see each other's expressions and movements, quietly listening to the various noises in the dreary hall, and only when a delayed flight alert came over the radio did he speak up coldly: "What are you going to do?"
It was nice to finally stop ignoring Rum, casually waving him around like bait, and open his eyes and look him squarely in the eye.
It meant that damn Rum might finally be watered.
But what was the point of calling him and Belmode...?
On the plus side, maybe it was a wake-up call, maybe it was a dead rat threat in front of them, and on the minus side, maybe it was an attempt to clean up all of them, the hardened feudalists who dared to stop the great non-Chief from doing what he wanted.
Gin favored the former.
Over the headset, Ichijō Mirai laughed, comforting the poor victim who had grown numb from his own torment, "Don't worry, I'm taking it personally against Rum."
"With you," He mused for a few seconds, "nothing will happen, right?"
"I trust you."
The benefit of experience was that without words, just the tone of voice, Gin could automatically translate: the time had come to test human hypertension once again.
He had to remain silent for a moment before saying, "There are a lot of people here."
Because of the rain, almost everyone had converged on the hall, many of them are not Japanese, and if Ichijō Mirai went crazy like he did when he joined the organization and happily decided to do it again in
"Yes, there are a lot of people here, and tourists from all over the world, so if there's a disturbance it's bound to be an international incident," Ichijō Mirai admitted before asking, "but that's not the concern of an illegal, is it?"
"Be careful with your identity, Gin, sometimes I really wonder if you're a black man for being so kind."
He sighed without a change of color, and then said in his mind: "And you're so kind that you're missing the head of a man.
Gin: "..."
No matter how vicious a villain is, compared to Ichijō Mirai, it does make him look like a refreshingly kind person. There's no way to argue with that, so he can only say, "Sorry, I'm used to it."
He was used to following the Shadow Principle of the organization, even though the organization was no longer a secretive organization that was unknown to the public the moment 'Satan' came out of the blue.
Having been told not to concern himself with what the lawbreakers shouldn't be concerned with, Gin took a moment to concern himself with what the lawbreakers should be concerned with, "You're joining forces with the police to solve Rum?"
Heavy rain suddenly came, let most people are unexpected, which naturally includes some carefully selected to the ability of the police more outstanding, according to the plan, they should be disguised as ordinary citizens walking in the hall outside, not far away from waiting for orders, but now, they can only retreat into the hall, improvised to maintain the identity of the unlucky citizens who were trapped by the rain.
It was obvious to Gin's eyes.
The police didn't appear to have a problem, but thanks to the great non-Chief, Gin's intuition had improved over the past ten years, and compared to the individual members of the organization who couldn't be named, the police were so trivial that he didn't even need to look at them before he sensed something: it was the police.
They shouldn't have been here, because only a few people knew about Ichijō Mirai's call, and those who knew knew the great non-leader's character, and it was impossible for him to inform the police. Even if Belmode couldn't stand it anymore or Rum was desperate and wanted to cooperate with a certain force to get rid of the devil, they would never choose the useless Japanese police. That's not resistance, it's choosing a beloved funeral companion.
Then it's obvious that the person who told the police was Ichijō Mirai.
The reason is easy to figure out: he wanted the police to get rid of Rum.
It was humiliating to have Rum, once the second-in-command of the organization and a favorite of that man, in the position of being arrested, but it suited Ichijō Mirai's bad taste and vindictive nature.
"Well," Ichijō Mirai responded indifferently, smiling again, "which police officer did you find?"
As he asked, he glanced to his right, and found a corner of the dense crowd that had been dwarfed.
In that corner was a small child, about six or seven years old, with unusually shaggy hair that looked almost like a smaller Matsuda Jinpei, who looked like he was playing a game with his head down, but was actually extremely nervous, and was gripping his cell phone with a grip so hard it was turning white.
It's Conan in disguise.
Gin probably noticed Conan when he was watching Ichijō Mirai, so he offered to disguise himself during the operation.
Even though he was in disguise, he was still very nervous when he was within a straight line distance of Gin of only 10 meters or so, and he was also very sensitive to all kinds of sights, and after a few seconds of Ichijō Mirai glancing at him, he looked up sharply, and then breathed a sigh of relief.
The sound of relief traveled through the headset to the other side, and Akai Shūichi, who was checking the hall's surveillance, faintly said, "Gin's looking over."
Conan hurriedly lowered his head and continued to busily play with his cell phone, and through the sound of the cell phone that made a little noise, he muttered, "What were they talking about just now, and why does it seem like they're having a good time?"
Of course it's a lie, 'Messiah' wouldn't be having a nice conversation with someone like Gin, so he follows up with a lower voice, "Mr. Mirai is so tolerant..."
Akai Shūichi: "..."
This was probably the charm of Ichijō Mirai, even though Conan had been cautious and wary of contacting him not long ago, after just one meeting, he once again trusted him, no longer wondering whether 'Satan' was dead or not, but trusting him with complete confidence.
Especially since Ichijō Mirai doesn't race cars with children, or play with guns with children, or have nice dinners with children, or feed children blood wine, or encourage children's blood pressure so that they get so angry that they want to jump up and punch him in the knee, and so on, it's normal for Conan to trust him as much as he trusts a reliable adult.
No one had a problem with that.
"I guess in Gin's mind, he thinks he's pretty tolerant, too," Akai Shūichi said lightly, then reminded, "All the passengers have disembarked."
He watched the monitor.
The plane from New York to Tokyo had landed just in time before the rain came down in a torrential downpour, while other planes that hadn't landed were either halfway through their flights when they got the news of the storm in Tokyo or were about to take off when they learned of the postponement, and all the planes in Tokyo stopped taking off.
As all the passengers on the lucky plane disembarked, the noise in the airport grew louder.
Most of the passengers, in groups of two or three, were ordinary people who could not leave the airport without complaining about being temporarily stranded, before they had a chance to be happy that they did not have to change their destination and land safely.
Among the ordinary people, a blonde woman stood out, she looked to be in her late twenties, the time of her youthful beauty, and her blonde hair fell to the edge of her chin, just enough to outline her clear jawline, not too deep, not too shallow.
She was traveling with an old man, probably his granddaughter, and was walking slowly with a smile on her arm, a pair of cat's eyes like green jewels seeming to sparkle, a rare bright presence in the dreary rainy day.
They didn't go for their luggage first, and the blonde helped the old man to find a seat.
As Akai Shūichi scanned all the passengers and set his sights on these two, Conan, who was sitting in the lobby, saw them as well.
He looked over, looked over again, thought about it, and looked over again.
The detective's part of the magnifying glass skill hadn't been activated yet, and he didn't really see anything suspicious about the blonde other than her extraordinarily radiant appearance, but the Kudō Shinichi part had been activated, "Uh," he said uncertainly.
He looked at the blonde for the fourth and fifth time with uncertainty, his eyes fixed on the blonde's deep eyebrows that were very much European and American, not at all the same as those of the Japanese people, and froze for a few moments at the look he was not familiar with at all, and the aura that he was quite familiar with.
"So-Sonoko?"