The Miko - 02 (75 page)

“I felt like I had when I was younger, and, you know, I was the prettiest girl in my class by far—oh, don’t think me big-headed; you only needed a mirror to see it. Boys buzzing around me like bees. At first I reveled in it. What girl wouldn’t?

“But then, as I got to know them, as I went through them one by one, as brief boyfriends, just dating and doing, you know, kid things, I’d always get to a point when I’d suddenly realize why they wanted to date me. They weren’t interested in talking, in getting to know me. They loved being seen with me and, after a time, trying to slip a hand underneath my dress. They were hard all the time; it was the only thing they thought of.

“For a while it made me hate my beauty. It was as if I had thick ankles or a long nose or was flatchested.”

She put her hand on him. “It was the same with you, Lew. Why were you there, I asked myself? What was it you really wanted from me?” She laughed again. “It even occurred to me that Minck had sent you to test me; but I soon realized that was
really
crazy—you killed both his men.”

“Do you care about him?” It wasn’t an idle question; in the future it might become a key bit of knowledge for Croaker to have, like an extra shield or a mace held behind his back. Because he had already come to a decision. There was only one thing left for him to do after all.

“How can I answer that?” Alix said as they pulled up outside an apartment house in the Twenties. “The affair has been taking place in limbo or outer space. I don’t have any signposts to use as reference points.” She turned away. “I wouldn’t’ve gone to bed with him if I hadn’t felt…something. I’m not at all like Angela was. Yet I haven’t a clue what it was I felt. It’s almost as if by having sex with him—by establishing a link that was physical as well as, oh, what should I call it, psychic, I suppose?” She shrugged.

“Not emotional?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I have some small perspective on it now. I think I felt that by establishing this link with my—well he was my jailor, really, wasn’t he—I’d somehow be less of a prisoner.”

“But it didn’t work out that way.”

The curl of a smile. “Do you really think it could have?”

“No.”

“Of course not. It was stupid of me, really. I never should have trusted someone like that in the first place. But my God, Lew, I was so desperate. It was just crushing me inside. I felt—”

Alix screamed as the explosive bullet burst through the side window, tore off three-quarters of the top of the sedan. Croaker had already been moving, pulling her toward him, covering her upper torso and head with his bulk.

At the same time his gun was drawn. But another shot rocked the car on its shocks, a great fist reaching out from the void, exploding layers of chrome, steel, aluminum, and plastic. Safety glass webbed and pebbled, fluttering down over them as gently as doves’ wings.

Croaker could smell smoke. There was no rear door left on his side, not much top over their heads, either. He leaned forward, making Alix squeal with the pressure, and jerked down the handle of the door on her side. Pushed with the flat of his free hand, rolled her out onto the sidewalk like a sack of potatoes.

He turned off the ignition but the third shot had already hit the car, ripping through metal into the gas tank. There was a dull thud like a dropped bowling ball. Flames licked up, and a curl of oily smoke made him cough.

Croaker turned toward the direction from which the shots were being fired. But he had no vantage point, could move very little, and the smoke was becoming denser. He heard sirens rising and falling, loudening. Coming this way.

He got out the same way Alix had and, taking her hand, began to run. He ignored the entrance to Matty the Mouth’s building as if it had no significance for him.

They hurled down Second Avenue, passing a Police Emergency Squad wagon, a fire truck, and a pair of blue-and-whites, all heading the wrong way up Second. Horns blared, traffic snarled. People stood and stared, then began to drift toward the scene. Within moments a good-sized crowd had formed.

Watching the flow of people, Tanya Vladimova cursed herself for firing prematurely. But she had not known how long they were stopped for. Further, just ten minutes ago her beeper had gone off; it was time for the drop into Japan. She had not been ready for that, not when she was so close to her quarry.

Circumstances had conspired against her; they had manipulated her rather than the other way around. Now, as she dismantled the Attlov-Sonigen .385, stowing it in a compartment beneath the carpeting of her car, she resigned herself. Even had she not been on a time allotment she would not have been able to go after Alix Logan and Lewis Croaker. Her link-up with ARRTS had digested the fingerprints she had lifted in Raleigh, had spat out his name. Too many people, too many cops. More coming, more sirens. Detectives’ unmarked cars spreading the traffic like Moses heading out across the Red Sea.

Tanya turned her ignition and got out of there, heading uptown, through the Midtown Tunnel, out to the Long Island Expressway and Kennedy Airport.

She cleared her mind of what she had not been able to accomplish here. She accelerated into the left lane. Not more than a mile later she was slowed by traffic that seemed to build up out of thin air. She began to go over what she had to do next and in what order she must do it.

There was a pinpoint of light. It was extremely annoying because it kept pricking into his brain in an odd kind of cadence.
Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-dum.

Otherwise he was surrounded by the milky luminescence of
getsumei no michi.
It should have been wholly opalescent and peaceful. It would have been except for the pinpoint of light.
Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-dum.

He tried to think of nothing. That, at least, should have been easy. He could not. In vain he reached out for the Void, but each time he sought a clear path to it the pinpoint of light stood directly in his way. He tried to push it aside; he could not. He tried
kiai
; this, too, had no effect. He had no strength left within him because the white pinpoint kept pricking his brain as if with electric shocks. He could not think, could not concentrate, could not center himself. If only he had his
katana
; if only he could remember where he had left
Iss-hōgai.

Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-DUM.

“Iss-hogai,”
Nicholas murmured, strapped and sweating on Protorov’s wheel.

“What the hell is that?” Protorov wanted to know. “Koten?”

“It means, ‘For life,’” the
sumō
said sullenly. “It sounds to me like a name of a
samurai
’s
katana.
” He was not happy. This process was tiresome. He wanted to be left alone with Nicholas Linnear. Five minutes would do nicely, he thought. “Although what a ninja would be doing with a
samurai
sword is beyond me.”

“It’s his
sword
?” Protorov asked, missing nothing. “Russilov, did you confiscate such a weapon from him?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you
see
such a thing?”

“No, sir.”

Protorov directed himself back to his client. “Nicholas,” he asked in an entirely different tone of voice, “where is your
katana
? Where is
Iss-hōgai
?”

DUM-TEE-DUM-TEE-DUM-DUM.

The pinpoint would not let him go; pincers inside his brain.
“Ro—Rotenburo.”

“That’s not good,” Koten said. “A
samurai
sword is its master’s signature. We don’t want anyone picking it up and asking questions about it.”

Protorov nodded as if he had already thought of that. “Go and get it, Koten,” he said.

“If you bring it back here, there’s a chance he’ll be able to get his hands on it,” the
sumō
warned.

“That won’t matter at all.” Protorov considered options. “Tell me, is he right- or left-handed?”

Koten moved closer to Nicholas, observing the layers of callus along the bottom edge of either hand. “Right, I would say.”

“Break the first three fingers of that hand.”

Koten was overjoyed to do it. Almost lovingly he reached out and grasped the index finger of Nicholas’ right hand. He undid the strap, then snapped the digit sideways. Nicholas groaned; his body shook. Sweat rolled off him like water scrolling from a swimmer.

Twice more Koten unstrapped a finger and went to work on it. Twice more Nicholas groaned and jerked. He was drenched. His head hung, chin on heaving chest. The doctor stepped in and checked his pulse, his blood pressure.

“Now go and do as I’ve ordered,” Protorov said to Koten. “You will save us the possibility of embarrassment and he will only be able to look at his weapon longingly.”

When Koten was gone, Protorov dug out the papers his spy had stolen from the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu.
He stared at Nicholas’ right hand hanging by the straps at two fingers and wrist. Already the broken digits were swollen like sausages, the flesh was darkening.

“How will the pain affect him?” he asked the doctor.

“It should rouse him a bit.”

“Will it interfere with cerebration at all?”

“With him, I would say no, definitely not.”

Protorov nodded and, reaching out, took a handful of Nicholas’ wet hair. He picked up the head, slapping at the cheeks until the eyelids fluttered open. Then he shoved the first page of coded text in front of the bleary-eyed face.

“Focus,” he commanded in a soft voice. “Something here for you to read, Nicholas. Something you’ll enjoy.”

Nicholas frowned. Deep down he felt a terrible aching, a trident, its tines coated with poison, lancing into him. It seemed very far away, however, as if, even, it might be part of a dream or an hallucination.

It seemed important to focus so he tried to do so. He seemed to be swimming through viscous gas. He could not fathom how he was breathing the stuff because it was obvious that he could not move through it. He flailed and stayed still. Or was it that he only thought he was flailing.

Black and white, breaking up, coalescing, only to dissolve once more.

“Focus,” came the command from the bright pinpoint which seemed directly inside his brain. So he thought he would do that. Focus.

Characters swimming by him like schools of fish, like a forest’s underbrush, like tongues of fire, like the hissing rain. It was pouring. Pouring letters.

Not letters.
Ideograms.

He read. And came face to face with that which he had sought for so long.
Tenchi.

“Three years ago…
Hare Maru
lost at sea in violent typhoon …over fifty lives lost…sailors and civilians…greatest marine disaster in twenty-five years….Therefore underwater salvage operations begun immediately the weather cleared at spot of last radio message: Nemuro Straits.”

He pushed the dulled pain away from him, sealing it off; he closed an inner door on the white pinpoint:
dum-tee-dum-t…

Quiet. He moved out of
getsumei no michi
, which had been no shelter at all, and therefore of no use to him. He commenced to still himself, beginning with his fingertips, a number of which, for some reason, he could not feel. Rising inward, the moon lifting into the cloudy heavens, its bright, clear face reflecting in unending undulations.

Thus he began to pull himself together, centering slowly, despite the enormous amount of chemicals inside him. While he began the difficult process of breaking them down into harmless components which would then be flushed out—a
ninjutsu
art known as
Ogawa-no-jutsu
—he did precisely what Protorov was asking him to do: discover the secret of
Tenchi.

It was not lost on him that what he was reading was in code. The Tenshin Shoden Katori code. He also grasped that if his enemy was showing it to him then he must have no one else to translate it for him. And if Nicholas died, that would be the end, therefore Protorov would have nothing to transmit or to use.

Therefore, Nicholas decided, after he had finished reading this document, he must die. And even as his mind reeled with the fantastic knowledge of just what
Tenchi
was, even as he recalled Sato’s wish for Japan to end its childhood of dependence on the rest of the world, to enter the adulthood of self-sufficiency, he began the process.

Just a foot away from him, Protorov could not tell whether Nicholas was just looking or reading. Did he know the code or didn’t he?

“Tell me what this says,” he repeated over and over, brandishing all four sheets. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.” But Nicholas’ eyes kept crossing and Protorov noticed that his client’s color was fading.

The doctor stepped between them. “That’s enough,” he said, putting the flat of his stethoscope over Nicholas’ heart. Immediately, he ripped the ear plugs off and began to pound on Nicholas’ chest, fist against the flat of his hand.

“I warned you against this,” he managed between grunts. “We’re going to lose him.”

“No!” Protorov cried. “You must save him! I order it!”

The doctor gave a grim laugh. “Unlike you, Comrade, I know that I am not a god. I cannot create life out of death.” He allowed his hands to drop. He stared at them, then turned around to glare at Protorov. “I cannot undo what you have done, Colonel.”

“Rouse him, Doctor!” Protorov was beside himself. “He has told me nothing! Nothing at all!”

“That’s always the risk one takes in these neuropharmacological matters. The balance is ever so deli—” He recoiled, bounding off Nicholas’ frame, as Protorov hit him with his fist. “That will cost you, Colonel,” he said, wiping at his split lip. “Central will hear about this.”

“You!” Protorov’s voice was a low, guttural growl. “You killed him! It was your doing!” His hands were shaking with the force of his rage.
Tenchi
, the GRU-KGB summit, the great coup, all dust in the wind now, as ephemeral as wishes. “Russilov!” he cried. “Take him into protective custody. If he gives you any trouble at all put a bullet through his head.” He grabbed the doctor by his shirtfront, jerking him forward. “You’ve made your last empty threat,” he said, just before he threw the doctor away from him.