The Nicholas Linnear Novels (136 page)

“Redman,” Fortuitous Chiu said. “Charles Percy Redman. She used his name. Know him?”

Nangi thought for a moment. “Shipping
tai-pan
, yes? British fellow. Family goes way back in Hong Kong.”

“That’s Redman,” Fortuitous Chiu acknowledged. “But what almost no one else knows is that he’s an agent for Her Majesty’s Government.”

“Redman a spy? Madonna!” Nangi was genuinely shocked. “But what’s his connection to Succulent Pien? Is she somehow raiding him?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

This is all very interesting, Nangi thought. But how does any of it help me with the Communists? My time is running out. If I don’t give Liu an affirmative by phone by six tonight, the deal’s off. I’ve got no capital, the All-Asia will fail and, eventually, so will the
keiretsu.

“Is there more?” he asked.

“Not until I climb into bed with Succulent Pien and see what she’s got between her thighs.”

“It’s a pillow like all the rest,” Nangi observed tartly. “I need something before six.”

“This evening?” Fortuitous Chiu’s eyes opened wide. “No way, José. She’s home and not going anywhere. She had her amah go shopping for her. I think she’s whipping up a midnight snack for a friend. Early tomorrow morning’s the best I can do. I’m sorry.”

Nangi signed deeply. “Not nearly as much, I’m afraid, as I am.

Night. The drip-drop of rain pattering all around them. The sky was black and impenetrable save for a tiny patch, a nacreous gray behind which the full moon rode as ghostly as the face of a former lover. The warm water moved in minute wavelets up to their bare flesh, reflections of the swinging yellow lanterns in the trees behind them in a white spangle, diffused and softened to a rich glow by the stream rising all about them.

A double strand of manmade lights, curved like a string of lustrous pearls around the neck of an exotic African princess, showed the way toward a black humpbacked shadow rising out of the undulating land. And behind its bulk must be the sea, for Nicholas could already scent the salt tang.

Sato stirred beside Nicholas, sending soft ripples away from them both. “Out there,” he said softly, “tell me that sight is not one of the most beautiful in the world, a sight that makes Japan unique.”

Nicholas followed the direction, saw the steep falloff of the cliffs down to the Pacific and on its heaving bosom the rhythmic bobbing of tiny orange lanterns hung from the prows and the sterns of the squid boats as their masters and crews bent to their task.

“They seem as small and fleeting as fireflies,” Nicholas said. His eyes were somnolent. It had been a long, hard day full of anxiety and fear for his friend’s life. And now the hot water was working its magic on his tensed body, loosening his knotted muscles, the cords in his neck and shoulders relaxing, the day’s accumulated tension leeching away from him.

It was not that his anxiety about allowing Sato to come had disappeared entirely. But with him here and Koten guarding the front of the
rotenburo
, he felt more confident than he had at the outset.

Sato luxuriated in feeling good. He stretched his long legs outward into the gently swirling water, sighing deeply with the sense of well-being this spa engendered in him.

It was then he felt something against his left calf, soft and warm, bumping, bumping, bumping with an odd kind of insistence.

Languidly, he leaned forward, imagining himself a crane gliding through the currents of a narrow inlet to the sea. His searching fingers grasped what felt at first like a bed of seaweed. Curious, Sato drew it upward slowly. It had great weight.

The rain let up. Racing clouds became visible as the lanterns’ glow illuminated their billowing undersides. Now they slid apart and the cool, opalescent light of the pocked moon crowned the silhouette of what he dragged upward from the steaming water.

Sato’s muscles bulged with the effort and he was obliged to use his hands even with Nicholas helping him, struggling with the monstrously heavy thing that now fell across his legs beneath the water.

Slowly it rose like a specter out of the deep, and Nicholas made a sharp movement beside him, grunting.

“Oh, Buddha!” Sato whispered. His hands shook so much that droplets flew from the thing like rain, off the great tiger curving around one shoulder, flung down the muscular back, the extended talons of the rear paws indented along the buckled ridge of the spine. Movement as if the colored tattoo had come alive. “Oh, what have they done to you, Phoenix?” Sato cried softly.

Those eyes, milky and unseeing in death, fixed him as the bloated face rose, glittering in the moonlight, the teeth clamped together in pain and determination.

Akiko was thinking about the promise she had made to Saigō. Or, more precisely, to Saigō’s
kami.

She rolled over on her
futon
, passing an arm across her eyes. Red light blotted out the darkness.
Giri.
It bound her like steel manacles. Not for the first time, she found herself wishing that she had not been born Japanese. How free it must be to be American or English, and not feel
giri.
Because Akiko knew that if she did not feel
giri
she would not be bound by it. But she was Japanese.
Samurai
blood flowed through her veins. Oh, not the blood of the famed Ofuda. She had chosen that name upon her majority for much the same reason that Justine had chosen to call herself Tobin instead of Tomkin; she wished to conceal her past.

But had there ever been a time when she had thought of herself as Akiko Shimada? She did not even know her mother’s last name. In
Fuyajo
only given names were used, and oftentimes those were not real ones. Ikan. Had her mother been born with that name? Had she taken it inside
Fuyajo
? Or, what was just as likely, had those who ran the Castle That Knows No Night assigned it to her?

She put her hands down between her thighs, cupping herself. She could still feel the aftertremors, the expansion of her inner flesh that Nicholas’ stroking had caused. She would never be the same now. And, terrifyingly, was not sure that she wanted to be.

Then what of her vow? Revenge had shaped so much of her life, had given her purpose when she thought that she had none. Without the solace of revenge to warm her soul, she might have withered and died. Those who had driven her out of
Fuyajo
were long dead, put to endless sleep as she hovered over them in the night. But they were old men, and that was not true justice as she saw it. She could do nothing about their longevity; to her way of thinking they had seen the procession of too many days. Still she had avenged herself.

Life must have a shape. Revenge was her destiny. She must have been someone evil in a previous life, she had thought, for her
karma
in this one to be so unremitting.

Now Nicholas Linnear threatened that dark harmony. She supposed that she had known it from the moment she had first seen him in person at Jan Jan. He had melted a heart she had thought made of granite and ice. She thought in her arrogance that she was beyond love.

She was wrong.

As she wept on her
futon
in the otherwise deserted house of her husband and her prey, she beseeched the Amida Buddha only for absolution and death. For the thought—oh, Buddha! the knowledge—that she could love just like any other mortal sent waves of panic through her. She had set her life on a certain course, believing specific things about herself.

But now the ache she felt through to the core of her spirit whenever she thought of Nicholas Linnear—which was to say all the time—blasted her in the furnace of revelation. For she was sworn to destroy him.

She thought about turning away from her vow, of letting peace flow down around her. She dreamed of surcease.

But then she parted her naked thighs and stared down at the delicate flesh of their insides. On each writhed a flaming horned dragon, multicolored tattoos of fantastic workmanship.

And she knew that peace was not for her; or love either. For Kyōki had marked her soul just as surely as he had her flesh. There was no hope of surcease.

She had had her respite, the one lull in the storm, and for that time had reveled in the joy of another life.
Giri
bound her, heart and spirit. What had begun must be seen to its final conclusion.

She thought of Saigō again, standing strong and handsome in the forest glade in Kyushu, the sunlight striking his shoulders, silvering his hair. How his presence had altered her life!

She rose and went through the silent house. It already seemed dead and buried, the thick bars of sunlight beating against the closed panes of glass, seeking entry. But this was a house of the dead; the sun no longer held any dominion here.

Akiko glided from room to room as if fixing each space, each object in her mind for the last time. She touched everything; she moved everything. In this manner she came upon the mini tape recorder by which Koten had been eavesdropping on her husband.

When she rewound the tape and pressed “Play,” she heard all that Phoenix had said to Sato.

Rain puckered the skin of the
rotenburo
, splashing against their shoulders, beating against the tops of their heads. Neither of them felt a drop.

In the distance the beckoning amber lights of the squid boats winked on and off through the downpour as Nicholas and Sato hauled on Phoenix’s corpse, pulling it slowly out of the heated water.

“Amida!” Sato whispered through the sibilance of the rain, and scrambled hastily out of the pool, holding the small patch of cloth over his groin while he searched in the wetness and the dark for another one.

He returned as quickly as he could to where the ninja was stretched out by the side of the
rotenburo
, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms spread wide. Sato placed the small square over Phoenix’s private parts.

“The indignity of it,” he murmured as he hunkered down beside Nicholas. There was no one else about; the rain had seen to that. “This is no way to die.”

“It was not how he would choose to go,” Nicholas said, and pointed. “Look here.” A hole, black and gaping, disfigured the back of Phoenix’s head. “This was done by no
samurai.
”

Sato looked sadly down at the corpse, white and bloated, spat upon by the storm. “It could be a KGB execution.” His voice was a trifle unsteady. “I had a cousin once in the
Kempeitai.
He knew all about such things and he told me. A bullet through the brain, that’s the Russian style.”

“Whoever did it,” Nicholas observed, “had to be very good indeed. This man was ninja
sensei.
”

Sato put his head in his hands. “He had information for us. Perhaps he got careless. He was certain that the Soviets had no knowledge of his pursuit.”

“He had to have been surprised here. He would never have died otherwise. This could not have happened in a pitched battle. They were here, waiting for him.”

Sato lifted his head. His eyes were red rimmed and perplexed. “But how?”

Nicholas did not like the answer he was about to give. “If there’s a traitor in the
keiretsu
, perhaps he is closer than that. Inside your
kobun.
”

“Nonsense,” Sato said. “No one from my
kobun
—
absolutely no one
—knew where I was going. Phoenix’s call came to the house. Only you were there. Akiko—”

“And Koten.”

“Koten?” Sato’s eyes were wide all around. “Oh, Buddha, no!” Then he considered. “He has been with me the last three or four times Phoenix phoned.” He shook his head. “But even so, I took great pains to make certain I was alone when we spoke.”

“You mean it was impossible for him to eavesdrop.”

“Well, no. I mean—” Sato slammed fist into palm. “Koten is
sensei
of
sumai
, the most ancient form of his art: combat
sumō. Phoenix
knew him, trusted him.” He looked to the sky.
“Muhon-nin!”
he cried.

Between them steam rose slowly from Phoenix’s cooling body and it seemed as if the twisted, multicolored tattoo that covered his shoulder and back was rising with the mist, the only part of him still alive.

“He must pay!” Sato said. “He knows where Phoenix would have led us. And I’ll make him tell us!”

He was up and running before Nicholas could stop him. Beyond the
rotenburo
’s terraced tract, the lights of the squid fleet had disappeared and now only swirling darkness sought to engulf them. The lights of the swinging lanterns in the trees surrounding the pool were smeared by the slanting rain; some of them had already gone out, felled by the strengthening wind.

“Sato-san!” Nicholas called as he ran. But it was useless. The wind tore his words from his lips and, in any case, Sato was not about to listen to reason.
Tenchi
was far too important to him and there was no time for caution.

Nicholas raced across the open expanse between the camphor trees that lined the walkways to the pool. There was no sound but the moaning of the wind and the heavy beating rain.

Nicholas’ concentration narrowed as he slewed into the dimly lit locker room. Koten, master of
sumō
and the more deadly
sumai
, would need less than three seconds with Sato to put him away, and thus Nicholas’ anxiety level was high.

That was the only explanation as to why he did not sense the surreptitious sound until quite late, and then it was actually the movement of shadow on the periphery of his vision that alerted him.

He whirled just in time to duck away, swivel to his right. Heard the whirr as of a bright insect, the brief puff of wind at its passage. The soft
thunk
just behind and to the left of him indicated the position of the thrown
shuriken.
Ninja! That meant that Phoenix’s quarry, the
muhon-nin
who had fled the Tenshin Shoden Katori, was still here. Then there was still a chance to keep
Tenchi
alive and out of reach of the Russians!

Nicholas followed his instincts. His working muscles gleaming with beaded water and sweat, he set off after his adversary. He wanted to come to close quarters with him as quickly as possible in order to negate the advantage of the long-range
shuriken.