The Kaisho (46 page)

Now time was as much his foe as the lack of space. Half-in, half-out of the dormer, he was at his most vulnerable. He could not go down, he could not go forward, he could not stay where he was.

So he went up.

Raising his torso up on his palms, he brought his legs slowly through the open window by drawing up his knees against his chest. He was now in what was essentially a ball, and he shifted an infinitesimal amount in order to get his feet flat on the surface of the sash. In the process, his nose almost touched the laser wire. All movement ceased. His heart hammered in his chest, the flow of adrenaline escalated, and with it the lethal possibility of inadvertent motion.

He sought
prana,
the slow, cleansing inhalation and exhalation that brought oxygen all the way to the bottom of the lungs. He closed his eyes, concentrating on what he must do. He opened his
tanjian
eye, re-imagined the room, its dimensions clearer to him now than they had been with normal sight impaired by the intense gloom.

There was a crossbeam, so he had perhaps three feet of clearance above the laser wire. Always before, when he had tried this maneuver, he had had at least that much space. Now he knew he would have to use up no more than two and a half feet or part of him—his forehead or his feet—would break the laser wire.

He gathered himself, sinking deeper into Akshara. Time shattered into ten thousand fragments and, like moonlight on water, became insubstantial. He could feel the pulse of
kokoro
as he summoned those forces of the universe locked deep inside him. He could feel the pulse running through him, like fire in his veins. More and more slowly the pulse beat until it ceased to throb at all.

Now.

He launched himself up and outward. Tumbling, he felt his head graze the top of the ceiling, a split instant, but enough to minutely change his trajectory. His arc was foreshortened, and with his
tanjian
eye, he could foresee the disaster of one foot breaking the laser wire.

He reached up, the
nekode
secured to his palms digging into the ceiling’s crossbeam, swung there for a moment like a mad monkey, legs drawn up. He heard a creak, felt a trickle of sawdust: his temporary perch was sagging.

He took a desperate chance, holding on long enough for his momentum to swing him in another backward arc. He dropped a bit lower as the beam, rotten from past roof leaks, started to give way for real.

Then he was swinging forward and he let go, tumbling out into the blackness, the laser wire below, flashing past his whirling vision, a ruby needle, and then he was past it, on the other side, as he fell, tumbling still.

He hit the floorboards with a soft thump, rolled over on his back, his head tucked between his shoulder blades as he came up on his haunches.

He was in.

It’s not my mother I need to forgive, it’s my father.
This was Celeste’s thought as she awoke into darkness. She had started up in bed, in that curious middle state suspended between living one life and another. Which was real, which the waking state and which the dream? For a long, uncomfortable moment, she could not decide.

The life she had been living was the one before her father was killed. Sacrificed, was it, as Okami-san had explained it to her? What she hadn’t told him, what he would never understand, was that no amount of explanation would be sufficient to accustom her to her father’s death. She didn’t want explanations: she wanted him back.

Her father had been so Eastern that often Okami-san said jokingly to him that he was more Japanese than Venetian. He looked at problems from the inside out, and his solutions often baffled his competitors and helped him amass a small fortune, even by today’s inflated standards.

Celeste stirred in the darkness of her Paris hotel room, not yet willing to acknowledge the reality of her present surroundings. What she wouldn’t give to have her father alive and standing beside her. Anything. Even, she knew, Okami-san’s life. She was pledged to defend him now because this was her father’s wish, but the truth was she despised Okami with a vitriolic passion. Only a true Venetian could understand how it could abide deep beneath the surface without showing its ugly face.

It was Okami who had come into their lives so many years ago, ensnaring them in a nest of vipers, a world largely of his own making filled with bitter enmities, ancient as oak.

His affinity for her stepmother, a schemer in her own right, had been instantaneous. Celeste had never trusted her stepmother, had hated and feared her. For one thing, as a Sicilian, she was an outsider; for another, she seemed to possess a dark power, an ability to weave a web of scandal and deceit that destroyed anyone who stood in her husband’s way.

When Celeste grew older, she understood that Okami had helped her stepmother. Together, they had built a base of power that her father, alone, could not have done.

Celeste’s world had revolved around her father. She had grown up with her older sister, sharing secrets in the dark, until, gradually, a pattern of knowledge she could not share with her sister overtook her.

She recalled the first time this had happened, she and her sister lying on their backs on a beach in the Lido, a sultry summer’s day when the throngs in the Piazza di San Marco made movement all but impossible, when the walls of history all but disappeared behind phalanxes of human heads.

Staring up at lazy clouds, her sister seeing a griffin, an amorous couple, a stampeding horse within the billowing masses. Celeste had concentrated, trying to see the fantastic forms her sister was describing.

What she saw was the drowning, the air engulfed in darkness, a small, black-haired, turning face upward as it bobbed in the ocean, then the wave coming down with such vivid clarity that Celeste had gasped, as if she, too, could no longer suck air into her lungs.

Then she was up and running, her mind reeling, her equilibrium as cockeyed as a drunkard’s, racing along the wet shoreline, stumbling over bathers who turned their sweating, oiled faces to stare openmouthed at her.

Where was she running to? She had had no idea, except that the faster she ran the closer she seemed to come to... the Event. As if her pounding strides were crossing not distance but time, drawing her nearer to her vision, the drowning.

In the distance she could make out a commotion, young men wading into the breakers, shouting to one another, leaving their feet to knife their bodies beyond the place where the waves crashed in white spume, out to a dark spot in the water. The drowning.

Celeste felt as if she wanted to vomit. The sense of death was so palpable that, for a black instant, it seemed more real than life. An intense sense of dislocation struck her so that she stumbled, living for a moment in eternity, in two places at once, and being fully in neither one, she fell, her limbs no longer receiving the correct commands from her numbed brain…

“Nicholas!”

Celeste, in the bed of the Paris hotel, reached out in the dark for the body she expected to find beside her. She looked at the empty space and... in the dislocation that followed, she saw him, knew precisely where he was because she, too, was there, in that way she had come to fear and abhor. And in the last crystal instant of the dislocation, she became aware of the enemy not more than eight feet away, across the city, crouched and waiting in the darkness for him.

“Nicholas!”

Nicholas crouched in the darkness of the building that housed the offices of the mysterious firm of Avalon Ltd. All around him, the old building seemed to respire as if it were some being alive in light slumber. He felt that it would be perilous to wake it.

He crept out of the attic room into which he had dropped from the roof. He found himself on a narrow wooden landing. He opened his
tanjian
eye and saw the steep pitch of the stairway directly in front of him. He descended, silent as a cat, faced obliquely down so that his feet were placed almost horizontally along each tread, distributing his weight more evenly and over a wider area of the tread. His balance was centered, so that his weight was at all times evenly distributed between both feet.

Halfway down the stairway he stopped, crouched motionless, listening with his ears and his
tanjian
eye. He could hear the rain beating against windowpanes, an occasional slap as the wind took a loose shutter against the face of the building, nothing more.

He was frightened now. He could recall with a suprareal precision the power of the Messulethe, and he knew he was no match for it. He had been lucky the last time, taking the Messulethe by surprise; he had no illusions about being able to do that again.

There was a time when nothing frightened him. But that was before the advent of Tau-tau, before a
tanjian
had gone to work on his brain, turning him
shironinja,
blocking all his powers. He was physically healed, had, in fact, learned of his
tanjian
heritage because of it. But there was embedded deep inside him a shadow on his soul. He understood now—as he had not when he was younger and more ignorant—the power of the Unknown. His
sensei
—
the one man he had trusted with his very life—had turned out to be his enemy, and at the very core of him lingered a terror that what Kansatsu had taught him was in some way he had yet to understand inimical to him.

The Unknown.

The Messulethe was the Unknown, and he was out there, somewhere in the rain, in the Parisian night, waiting. The encounter this morning had confirmed a suspicion Nicholas had harbored ever since the Messulethe had led them to the palazzo where he had conjured the Kanfa bridge: the Messulethe had another agenda. Perhaps he had, indeed, been dispatched to murder Okami as Celeste believed. But though Okami was missing, there was as yet no sign that he had been killed. Moreover, the Messulethe seemed to be concentrating on them. Of course, now that Okami was in one way or another out of the way, it might be natural for him to attach himself to the people pledged to guard Okami.

But the incident with the Kanfa bridge may have occurred before Okami had disappeared.
This one possibility had stuck with Nicholas, making him wonder. The more he turned it around in his mind, the less sense it made, given the overall setup within which he had been operating.

To go back to the beginning, if Okami was marked for extermination by a traitorous Yakuza
oyabun,
then why on earth was the assassin going after Nicholas and Celeste? Why waste the time and expose himself to potential danger? He had Okami out of sight; why not kill him and be done with it?

Two chilling possibilities occurred to Nicholas: either the Messulethe’s assignment had not been to murder Okami, or the Messulethe did not have Okami. One possibility meant that Okami had lied to him, the other that he had totally misread the situation. Either answer would surely lead to a dire conclusion.

Filled with apprehension, he stepped onto the landing of the floor below and began a thorough exploration of the rooms there. What he discovered startled him. There were no workshops for mask-making, none of the paraphernalia one would normally expect in the business of supplying hand-made masks. In fact, if he’d had to guess, he would have said he was inside a company specializing in investments.

In the half-light coming in through the windows from the Place des Vosges, he could make out banks of phones, faxes, computer workstations arrayed like sentinels, silent and ghostly. Desks, lamps, chairs, all the accoutrements of an office, except one thing. Files. There were no filing cabinets.

Nicholas stepped up to a computer terminal, turned it on. He stood there for an instant, transfixed by the blinking orange characters. A password was required to get into the system. That, in itself, was hardly out of the ordinary. What was, was that he was staring at a line of
kanji:
Japanese characters.

He turned off the computer, certain now that Avalon Ltd. was not what it had been purported to be. He recalled Fornovo telling him that the company had been sold five years ago to a foreign company no one seemed able to identify.

What was it now?

He had no idea, but it was clear that it had been sold to a Japanese concern.

Nicholas froze. Something in his peripheral vision, the hint of a movement, reflected off the slightly curved fascia of the computer screen. Slowly, as if his body had turned to smoke, he sank to his knees. As he did so, he twisted until he was half-facing the direction from which the movement had come. Nothing.

Slowly, he quartered the area, taking in each shape, identifying it if he could, coming back to it when he couldn’t. In this methodical way, he took in the environment. He stayed in this uncomfortable position for a very long time, waiting.

He saw the movement again, this time nearer the center of his vision. It had reflected off the dark computer screen, and now he could see it for what it was: a tangential spark from the headlights of a passing car. He gripped the edge of the workstation’s desk as he raised himself and felt the difference in surface texture on the underside beneath the pad of his thumb.

Moving beneath the desk, he tilted his head upward, saw the square plastic button, set flush into the melamine of the desk surface. He reached up, pressed it. It would not give. Then he saw beside it a lock, countersunk into the melamine so that it would not protrude.

He extracted another
shuriken,
inserted the sliver of steel into the lock. A moment later, the button gave beneath his thumb. Nothing seemed to happen. Then he rolled the chair away, moved the plastic pad, and found an opening in the carpet. He drew out a box of a dozen three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. On the box was written a numerical sequence.

He turned the computer on, took the first floppy, inserted it into the A drive. When the prompt for the password came up, he typed in the numerical sequence. The system rejected it. He reversed the order with the same effect. The computer flashed a warning that unless the correct password was entered within thirty seconds, an internal alarm would sound.