Linnear 02 - The Miko (57 page)

“She caught me. I honestly don’t know how else to put it. I knew she was a bitch from working with her. And I knew she was into drugs: opium and coke. Nice combo, huh? But I thought… Oh, I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I blinded myself to all those things because I needed a mother; someone to show me the ropes and protect me.”

Alix stopped fussing with her hair, sat again with her hands in her lap, so that she appeared very young, almost a little girl, innocent, made of spun pink candy. “We fought all the time. In many ways she made my life hell.”

“You could have walked out,” Croaker pointed out.

But Alix was already shaking her head. “Like I said, you didn’t know Angela. What she wanted, she kept until she was tired of it. She would have ruined me professionally if I’d tried to leave. She could have done it easily; she was quite the expert at it. I saw her do it once to a young model coming up who said the wrong thing to her one day. Angela made one phone call and no one in the business even spoke that girl’s name again. Angela had the power of a pharaoh.”

Her head came down so far that Croaker could see the soft bit of light down at the nape of her neck. “But the truth is, I didn’t have the strength to leave her. She… frightened me and, oddly I suppose, within the power of her manipulation I felt more secure than I had outside on my own in the world.”

There was a silence that stretched itself, filling the room with an odd kind of chill.

“Then what happened?” Croaker prompted.

“Then everything changed,” Alix said, her voice so soft Croaker had to lean forward to hear her properly. “Angela met Raphael Tomkin.”

Jesse James had picked up the bastard’s name, Tex Bristol, from the harbormaster at the Key West marina when the man and several others who had been on the dock at the time had noticed his boat leaving its slip just after Alix Logan’s had.

James did not know who the bastard really was, but he promised himself he would soon find out. He had asked for Bristol by name at the front desk, figuring the bastard wouldn’t see any reason to change the alias at this stage, but he had been wrong. He had been told that no Bristol with the first name of Tex or with any other first name had registered that day.

The Blue Monster had launched into explanation C, going the full route, showing a badge. He was a private detective, a case of adultery, here are the descriptions of the pair, nothing to get het up about, just serving divorce papers, et cetera. He got their room number. One room. Very cosy, James thought. What does this bastard have that I don’t? He took the elevator up.

The doors opened and Jesse James emerged onto the third floor of the hotel.

Croaker had just come out of the shower. He felt thirty years better. Toweling himself dry, he put on the lightweight slacks, dark blue T-shirt with “KEY WEST IS BEST” stenciled in green across the chest, and his tattered topsiders that he had brought with him into the bathroom.

Alix wore a pair of cutoff jeans and a pink cap-sleeve silk shirt. Her bare toes curled on the bedspread. She was sitting up, her back against a pair of pillows, reading a paperback book she had picked up at the place along the highway where they had stopped for lunch.

“This thing’s as bad as the food we had this afternoon,” she said, throwing the book away from her. “Vampire’s in the bayous. Who’s kidding who?”

That was when the door to the hall burst open with a crack like a rifle shot.

Sato found his guest in the garden. In the rain.

“My dear friend,” he called from the dry sanctuary of his study, “you’ll catch your death of cold out there.”

Nicholas did not answer at once. His shoulders were slumped as he sat on the stone seat, facing the swaying branches of the boxwood. There was a fat gray plover strutting impatiently back and forth along a dry patch near the wide bole. Every so often it cocked its head upward, its glaring eye seeming to curse the foul elements.

As for Nicholas, he barely noticed the wetness. The kimono was soaked through and there was not a part of him that was dry. It did not matter. He knew now that Akiko and Yukio were two separate entities.

Deceit could only be taken so far. A face could lie, for instance, whispered words, even a knowing glance. But a body was different. Response to an intimate touch, the softening, the opening, all these were unique. They could not be counterfeited.

An unutterable sadness filled him at the thought that he had lost her all over again. Of course it had been an impossibility that she should be alive. Logic dictated that she had died by Saigo’s hand just as he had described it to Nicholas, savoring each word’s effect on his hated cousin.

Yet Nicholas, for the first time in his life perhaps, had not heeded logic. He had thrown a lifetime of training and understanding out for the possibility of one desperate hope. It was laughable and sad at the same time.

And he despised himself for the enjoyment he took from the adulterous joining. Though Akiko was not Yukio, still, he had made love to her with more than his body. Who she was and why she looked like his lost love became secondary to the knowledge that his heart was open to her. If she were not Yukio, could he love her anyway? By what magic was that possible? Or had some vital piece of Yukio’s somehow lodged in Akiko’s soul? In any case, he felt tainted, an outcast from himself. His misdeed had lost him his centricity, and without that he was powerless in a world gone mad.

“Linnear-san.” He could hear Sato’s voice raised above the racket of downpour. Then the older man was beside him, draping a clear plastic wrap across his shoulders. “Contemplation must conform to the elements which it honors,” he said softly. “I will leave you alone.”

“No, Sato-san. Please stay.” Abruptly, Nicholas did not want to be alone. He already felt too isolated, bereft almost. All his youthful dreams were gone. In the space of a thunderclap, wild hope had died. But what, he thought, is a human being without hope.

“This garden is most calming at all times of the day.” Sato moved beside him. He opened his mouth to continue, closed it as a crack of thunder rolled across the sky. “I’ve often thought that it is the shouting of the gods,” he said. “Thunder. I was awakened early this morning by the storm. I drowsed, listening to its cries. Almost human, don’t you think?”

“Very human, indeed,” Nicholas said. I must confess, he thought. I must return harmony to my spirit. “Sato-san”

“The Chinese taught our forefathers geomancy,” Sato said, forestalling Nicholas, “so that we might forever remain in harmony with the forces of nature. We are not tigers, though we may strive to be. There is a perfection in that lesser state to which we human beings can only aspire.”

His eyes were liquid and soft as he looked down at Nicholas. And, quite startlingly, he put his hand on Nicholas’ shoulder. “Won’t you come inside now,” he said, “and allow me to brew you tea?”

Watching Russilov’s ramrod-straight back disappear out the steel door, Protorov thought about how, after struggling for so many years to devote himself to the service of ideology, his life had taken on a personal cast. Not creating a family for himself he certainly saw as proof of his overriding dedication to the eventual worldwide triumph of Soviet ideals.

But now he had Russilov. How had that happened? His intense feeling for the young man caused him to feel vulnerable. And being vulnerable made him feel afraid.

Viktor Protorov had not been afraid for eight years. Not since the death of his olderand onlybrother. At that time Protorov was head of the First Directorate, responsible for Russian internal security. Creating an unassailable kingdom for himself within the Ninth Directorate, a bastion from which to strike outward at the right time, to lead the motherland onward to global victory, was just dawning on him.

In the winter of that yeara particularly bitter one, filled with day after day of heavy snowhe had many missions running. All were important. In those days he lacked the internal clout to request more men for his understaffed directorate. He had learned to make do. But because of the acute manpower shortage and the inclemency of the weather he was forced to physically oversee more missions than he should have.

Consequently he had been outside Moscow, far to the north, when they had brought in Minck. Protorov had known of his presence inside Russia and had wanted him, badly. A fluke had landed him early, and he was inside Lubyanka when Protorov’s brother, of junior ranka lieutenantthough he was three years older, learned of his presence.

Protorov had always done better than Lev, academically and socially. Protorov knew how to speak to people, knew how to take exams, knew in his own mind what he wanted to be. Lev was always the dreamer, unsure of which fork to take in a road, in which direction to turn his life. He had always been afraid of making a mistake.

He had made a mistake that dark, snowfilled afternoon. Even while notification of Minck’s capture was being relayed to Protorov by the despicably unreliable wire system, Lev went into Lubyanka to interrogate the spy himself. He wanted, no doubt, to prove to his younger brother that there was something he could do as welland on his own.

He failed. Somehow Minck was able to overpower him and, using him as hostage, break free. Then he killed Lev, slaughtered him in the snow like a butcher.

They left him there in the storm, terrified to touch him before Protorov arrived. There was little blood for him to see when, hours later, he returned to Moscow; the cold had congealed it, cauterizing the wound. Still there was a gaping hole in Lev’s left temple where the bullet had torn through the skull. Protorov did not want to look at the damage inflicted on the back of the head, knowing that the devastation would be far worse at the egress point. Quite deliberately he turned Lev’s body over and stared at the carnage. Snowflakes caught on his lids making vision difficult. Still he persevered even as he ordered the manhunt for Minck and his fellow escapee, Tanya Vladimova.

Perhaps it was then that Protorov thought for the first time that there was too much pain to be borne in having a family. Perhaps it was at that moment that he decided not to have one of his own. For the sense of utter isolation, of a terrible vulnerability, was overwhelming. He found himself hating the American named Minck far more than he had ever thought he could hate another human being.

Six months later he had awakened an important sleeper in order to kill Minck’s wife, sleeping alone and vulnerable in their bed in rural Maryland. One shot from a pistol Protorovand Minck knew well at close range through the left temple.

Still it had not been enough. So the war went on. And on.

Protorov sighed now, alone in his inner sanctum. He pushed his glasses up onto the dome of his forehead, scrubbed at his face with a palm. He found that he had been sweating. Though Tengu, his second agent within the Tenshin Shoden Katori ryu, had been killed, his backupthe last agent Protorov had in that field was making progress. At that moment, the compact cipher machine began to buzz, preparatory to decoding an Alpha-three. His satellite was about to whisper in his ear once again.

Croaker grabbed Alix’s slim wrist and jerked hard, hearing her short, high scream of surprise and pain as he used his strength to roll her across to the far side of the bed and out of harm’s way.

At the same time, his hand snaked beneath the bed to where the gun lay and, without aiming fully, shot out the lamplight in the room.

Now only the oblong of illumination filtering in through the open doorway to the hall pushed back the darkness. And in its midst, the shadow rushed into the room.

He’s a goddamned bull, Croaker thought, as he pushed Alix’s inquisitive head down to the carpeting and rose at the instant he felt the shadow at its closest.

He lifted his arm, brought the muzzle of the pistol down in a vicious slash across the shadow’s cheekbone, felt the contact with pleasure, the split of skin, flesh, and the pressured scrape against bone.

But despite the blow, the shadow’s momentum was enough to keep him coming on. And such was his strength that he slammed full tilt into Croaker, knocking the pistol from his grip. It skidded across the floor in the darkness, lost.

Oh, Christ, Croaker thought, we’re in for it now. He felt a heavy blow land on his shoulder, twisting him, and blindly he kicked upward, missing once, his knee connecting with the shadow’s thigh bone, adjusting his aim accordingly and plowing into the shadow’s groin.

He heard the whoosh of air and a groan, and the weight and pressure on him eased sufficiently for him to squirm out from under.

“Come on!” he yelled at Alix, fumbling for her hand and half dragging her from the room, down the blindingly lit hallway to the exit door and the stairs.

Down the metal and concrete staircase they ran until at last they burst out into the soft-skinned night. The car would have been the best bet, but Croaker had left the keys back in the room.

He took a quick look around. There were few people about except at the entrance of the hotel where locals were drawing up as they went into the disco in the lobby, one of the only nightspots in the area. Croaker took them that way though they were certainly not dressed for the occasion. People in dinner dress watched their approach with more amusement than alarm. But he saw it was going to be no go right away. They stood out like beggars at a masked ball, so he veered them away, rushing down the sloped scimitar drive toward Highway 70, dodging the slowly approaching line of cars, pushing Alix out of the illumination of the headlights.

He did not turn his head to see if the Blue Monster was after them; he assumed the worst. If he had been dogged enough and, Croaker had to admit to himself, smart enoughto follow them all the way from Key West, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to lose them now.

He rushed them across the six-lane highway on the amber with the traffic already beginning to pile up and move, jockeying for position for turns.

“Christ!” Alix breathed. “Where are we going?”

Croaker made no reply. He thought it wiser to let her believe that he knew what he was doing. Ahead of them loomed the darkened mass of the shopping mall, all angles and black shadows, a silent, deserted city in the heart of the darkness.