Linnear 03 - White Ninja (37 page)

He had not learned his lessons well; his arrogance had misled him into believing his mastery of ninjutsu was far more advanced than it actually was. His heart had not been pure. Instead of concentrating on reaching the state of mind/no mind that was the Void, the path to understanding, he had been intent upon besting Saigo again.

In a way, he saw now, he and Saigo had been alike in that. Their rivalry had become, for them, a monomania

- as the Book of Five Rings had been for Miyamoto Musashi - infusing their study of the martial arts with a very personal motivation. Their hearts had been tainted, then warped by the same sin: hate.

The revelation shook him to the core, making him unsure whether he wanted to see this arduous journey through. In truth he had no idea how long ago the secret message had been written on Kyoki's scroll, or even what it portended. Even if Genshi, the tanjian's brother, had indeed lived within sight of the Black Gendarme, he might well be dead by now.

But Nicholas knew that if he did not go on, he would never know. There would certainly be no salvation for him, and he would lose everything - Justine, his family, Tomkin Industries - because he could detect like a menacing iceberg sliding through the water the slow disintegration of his own sense of himself.

With comprehension will come the certainty of despair.

Shiro Ninja.

The path from Nishi peak to the Devil's Graveyard was so arduous and hazardous that it had attracted far fewer climbers in recent years, after the disasters of 1981 and 1982 when ten people were lost there. And yet, within the community of professional mountaineers, there continued to be a fascination with the Hodaka and, in particular, with the Devil's Graveyard.

In retrospect, it seemed clear that Kansatsu, in selecting the Hodaka as the site of Nicholas's graduation from the ryu, had meant to drive out of the boy all thought, conscious and unconscious, of his obsessive rivalry with Saigo. Nicholas could not imagine what other reason Kansatsu-san might have had for choosing it.

The Black Gendarme was a locus of death; it had no place in a teenage boy's life.

It had been December and, even in ultra-efficient

Tokyo, great drifts of snow, charcoaled from soot, rainbow-hued from car oil, lay against the pavements.

It had been the coldest winter in twenty years when Kansatsu took Nicholas north-east into the Hodaka. Snow lay hip-deep like sand; the mountain had been transformed by nature into a desert of ice. Snow eaves sixteen feet wide overhung the passes and shoulders which they traversed, their breaths coming hard, the hot exhalations crystallizing instantly in the thin, frigid air. The sky, an almost painfully brilliant shade of blue-purple, seemed brittle, little more than an eggshell.

Nicholas had been barefoot because Kansatsu had said, Ice and the fear of death are one and the same. Once you learn not to feel the one, you will not fear the other.

Nicholas remembered vividly how clear it had been on their ascent of the Hodaka. To this day he could not fathom where the storm had come from. But the range had mighty canyons, vast peaks like flying buttresses which acted like tunnels, directing the elements, magnifying their force, their virulence. Up here, when the sun shone, its rays could burn the skin off your face and hands; the same was true of an ice storm.

Nicholas had been in sight of the Black Gendarme when the storm hit. He had been perhaps half-way through the programme of tests Kansatsu-san had devised for him. Perhaps - this was forever an enigma in Nicholas's mind - the storm itself had been part of the examination.

In any event, a snow eave, perhaps twenty feet in length, was broken off by the rising wind whipping through the canyons between the peaks. Nicholas, who had been fighting just to breathe the thin air that the wind swept away from him, should have felt the solid arc of snow and ice dropping towards him, should have heard the echo of the crack as it was dislodged, even though the wind sucked the sound away into the storm.

The truth was that Nicholas was fighting haragei, the sixth sense Kansatsu had taught him to find within himself. Haragei, the precursor to Getsumei no michi, could be terrifying to the inexperienced. Controlling it was far more arduous than finding it. Nicholas did not fully know himself. Therefore, he was having difficulty manipulating haragei; it was, in part, controlling him.

Ice and snow dropping out of the sky crushed him beneath its weight. The storm was upon him, darkness and cold enveloping him all at once. The first thing he did was panic. He tried to breathe and, when he found that he could not, his mind dissolved into chaos.

Like a flash of lightning the panic quickly passed. Silence rang in his ears. He could hear the beating of his heart, the blood rushing through his veins, amplified in the dimensions of his tomb. Curiously, this revived him. I am alive, he thought.

Something - an ancient instinct, he believed - came to the iore, told him to centre himself. And with centring came haragei. He reached out with his mind, and rediscovered the world outside. Immediately, he became aware of Kansatsu's presence and was comforted.

He began to dig. He used his skills. He could 'see' Kansatsu pointing, showing him in which direction to dig, just as Nicholas imagined that Kansatsu himself was digging.

There was a finite amount of oxygen in the tomb, and it was fast giving out. Carbon dioxide burned his lungs. His body was on fire. Still he concentrated on the task before him, refusing to be distracted by fear. He did not feel the cold; he was not afraid to die.

The storm hit him square in the face when he emerged like an infant from the egg, the chrysalis, the womb. He gasped, taking in long shuddering breaths as Kansatsu, pulling him free from the pile of ice and snow, wrapped

him in his powerful arms, and sought shelter beneath a ledge of twisted black rock...

Nicholas, upon the Hodaka again, stared at his nemesis, the Black Gendarme. It was the present, the past merely a vapour drifting above his head, a ragged war banner shredded by the sharp mountain peaks. Part of him could not believe that he was actually here. He had been certain that he would never again set foot otpon the Hodaka.

But he was Shiro Ninja, and everything had changed.

The sky was an opalescent white, giving the impression that he was inside a mass of cartilage, cut off from the rest of the world or in another world altogether. A distant howling told him that a wind had sprung up; the first drops of ram, fat and heavy, roughly brushed his cheeks like a dissatisfied lover.

Nicholas stiffened. As it had done so many years ago, a storm was approaching. It was at his back, moving swiftly north. There was a crack of thunder, and the shell of the sky was split open by a tongue of iridescent lightning.

In a moment, the rain came, part ice, part hail, beating down upon him. He took shelter beneath a ledge of twisted black rock. It occurred to him that this might be the spot where Kansatsu had held him safe and warm so many years ago.

Nicholas shivered. He was unutterably tired. His body ached in so many places he could no longer distinguish individual pain. His head throbbed where the incision had been made, and he unconsciously touched the spot beneath his knit cap. Despite the Gor-Tex parka, his layers of thermal clothing, he was cold. His teeth began to chatter.

He could see nothing beyond his shallow lair. He clung to the side of the Hodaka, at the foot of the malevolent wall of the Black Gendarme, as insignificant as an insect upon an elephant's back. In the face of the soaring majesty of this mountain range, the elemental

fury of this storm, he was nothing, less than a speck lost in time, soon forgotten.

He closed his eyes, rocking himself. It would be so easy to sleep now, encysted in the bosom of the storm, curled upon the Hodaka, ancient of the earth, to sleep the eternal sleep, and in such sleep an end to fear, to struggle, to Shiro Ninja.

He heard the siren call and part of him responded, edging closer and closer to a surcease for which he surely longed. Death came again to him, as soft and seductive as his first lover, at once a melancholy and exhilarating reunion...

He awoke with a start. His throat was dry and raw, as if he had been breathing sulphur instead of oxygen. He blinked heavily. He could still see nothing beyond the hollow in which he crouched. He could no longer feel his feet. He squeezed his calves, pounded his fists weakly against his thighs. Numb. Totally numb.

Nicholas knew that he was dying. Even if he wanted to get up to run - did he want to? where would he run to? - he could not. The storm raged; night came down like a heavy cloak, the darkness of a moonless midnight.

Nicholas knew that if he fell asleep he would never awake. He exercised his mind, dredging up memory after memory, parading them across the theatre of his mind, immersing himself in the detail of recall. But he was so tired. His bones ached. He was cold. His eyelids drooped, and once or twice his head jerked up, his heart thumping wildly with the knowledge that against his will he had begun to drift off.

He was terrified, not only because he was losing con

scious control over his body, not only because he was

helpless, but because he knew that part of him welcomed

death. He fought against that part of him as, years ago,

he had fought against haragei.

He thought of Nangi, his friend. He thought of Lew

Croaker, the friend he had pushed away because of his own guilt. He thought of his tiny dead daughter, white-faced beneath the plastic tent that had not been able to keep her alive. He thought of Justine, of how much he loved her.

His heart broke then, and he wept bitter, crystalline tears. They froze on his eyelids, his cheeks, his lips. And still they came in such profusion that he might have been made of tears.

At last it was over. A calm after the emotional storm.

Emptiness.

Nothingness.

With his tears still frozen on his face, Nicholas drifted away into sleep. Through vapour he was falling, endlessly falling...

Until at last Death came to claim him.

'If virtue were its own reward,' Tanzan Nangi said to the Pack Rat, 'it would not be a human trait. It would belong solely to the gods.'

The noise emanating from the rows of pachinko machines was deafening. All the better for them; the Pack Rat knew it was safe hi here.

'I was speaking just now of Kusunda Ikusa.'

Nangi nodded. 'And so was I. If Ikusa seems virtuous, it is because it will prove useful to him.'

'Not to Nami itself?' the Pack Rat asked.

'We must examine most carefully the motives of those near a nexus of power who profess too easily to pure altruism. One suspects anything in a pure form, but most of all virtue, which is not natural to man, and which does not come to him without a struggle.'

Outside, in the dazzling Ginza, it was raining. Here, in the Twenty-Four-Hour pachinko parlour, all was the same as it always was, day or night: bright with garish neon colours, humid, dense with the sweat of human

emotion. The place never closed, which was why, the Pack Rat had said, he liked it. He came here often, Nangi knew, playing pachinko while he worked put problems in penetration, surveillance, and so forth. The nuances of his trade-craft.

'I have passed on your computer record of the virus attack to an associate,' the Pack Rat said.

'It is most frustrating. My people have got nowhere,' Nangi said.

The Pack Rat nodded. 'Then identifying the source of the virus has become my sole responsibility. But I must tell you, Nangi-san, it is proving to be a difficult problem to solve. Its architecture is wholly alien.'

Although there were a number of pachinko machines free, the Pack Rat was waiting for a specific one. Pachinko, something of a national craze in Japan, was similar to American pinball, but played on a vertical field. It was a decades-old game but, as with almost everything, the Japanese liked it best in its current high-tech form. Some of the newest machines were equipped with tiny televisions so the player could keep up with his favourite shows while scoring.

'I always play that one,' the Pack Rat told Nangi, pointing to the sixth machine in the seventh line. An old lady was on her last game; she must have been there for hours, moving from machine to machine.

'Is Justine Linnear being guarded?' Nangi asked as he watched the Pack Rat prepare to play. Curiously, the Pack Rat had bought only one token from the cashier at the front of the parlour. Nangi wondered whether the Pack Rat was that good. Winning would give him free tokens from the machine itself.

The Pack Rat put his hands on the machine, nodded. 'As you requested. I've put my best man, Han Kawado, on it. Please don't worry about her.'

'It is a precaution only,' Nangi said. 'I have no idea

yet what this dorokusai is after, but one cannot be too careful. I want full security maintained.' The Pack Rat nodded. He began to play. He won the first game, but not by much. His score only netted him a single token. He began a second game. 'Getting back to Ikusa,' he said. 'Seeing him and Killan Oroshi together, I can tell you firsthand there is nothing virtuous about their relationship.'

Nangi grunted. 'So much for protestations of the absolute.'