The Nicholas Linnear Novels (145 page)

He was never quite certain whether the ringing of the telephone had roused him out of slumber or deep thought. In any case, he rolled over and grabbed for the instrument. The glowing dial of his wristwatch told him that it was thirteen minutes before four
A.M.
A Chinese might have found this an inauspicious numerical combination; Nangi did not care.

“Yes?”

“It’s Fortuitous Chiu,” came the thin voice down the wire. “I’m on Po Shan Road, a block from Succulent Pien’s flat.” He sounded a bit out of breath.

Nangi sat up. “Haven’t you been able to find a way in yet?”

“Been in and out already.” Now Nangi recognized the excitement in the other’s voice. “I think you’d better get down here pronto.”

“What is it?”

“Forgive my bluntness, sir, but I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you outright. If you see for yourself, that’ll be another story.”

“I’m on my way,” Nangi said, his heart beginning to beat fast. The sweat had dried on his skin. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he reached for his cane.

The vault was as airless as it was lightless. Behind him Nicholas could hear the circular door through which he had stepped sighing closed. He heard the pneumatics and was not cheered.

Alone and in total darkness, he moved to where his
haragei
told him was the center of the vault. Then he stood still, his senses questing. A desk and several chairs, a lamp unlit, some machinery which it was beyond him to identify in the absence of visuals. A kind of wooden scaffolding whose purpose was also a mystery to him.

Took stock. He was on Hokkaido but he did not know where since Koten had blindfolded him after binding him hand and foot. He had then been carried to what he could only guess was the trunk of the Soviets’ car and locked in. They had driven for just under an hour. Giving the car an average speed of forty-five m.p.h. put him in a radius of approximately thirty-five to forty miles from the
rotenburo.
He knew that was not good enough.

Humming invading the void of darkness in which he stood, broke through his thoughts. It was subtle, might not have been discerned by a normal man.

Immediately Nicholas went toward the sound, sniffing like an animal, quick, shallow breaths. Scented it when he was fifteen feet away from the vent high up in the wall and turned away, getting away from that side of the room. It would only prolong the time that he had left before the chloroform derivative took effect on him. But he needed all the time he could get now.

“I don’t see why we’re waiting so long,” the doctor said pointedly. “It only takes the gas three-and-a-half minutes to fully permeate the vault space.” He waggled the wrist on which his chronometer was fastened so that those around him would not miss the fact that it had been almost fifteen minutes since the gas—an interesting mixture of a soporific in the chloroform group and a powerful peyote concentrate, altered to be effective when inhaled rather than ingested—had been pumped into the room.

“Patience, Doctor,” Viktor Protorov said calmly. “I fully appreciate your enthusiasm to sink your spikes into a new client, but I think I know what is best in this case.”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders, began a ragged rendition of “The Czarist and the Revolutionary,” a folk song his grandmother had taught him when he was a child, just to show these others that he was not the total Protorov puppet that they were.

With the doctor and Protorov were Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov, Koten, and a pair of junior lieutenants under Russilov’s direct command. The most recent Alpha-three codes had brought Protorov word that Yvgeny Mironenko, the GRU colonel, had received enough vouchers from his compatriots for Protorov to hold a special session of the General Staff. All the senior generals would be in attendance. All that was required now, Mironenko’s most recent communiqué had said, was for Protorov to bring the generals proof of his power.

Proof of my power, Protorov thought now.
Tenchi!
Then, for the first time in history, the GRU and the KGB will be united in a common cause. The Kremlin will shake to the sound of our bootsteps, the old men will fall before us like stalks of wheat; the day of the bureaucrat will be a memory; all the Russians will be on the march. The day of the Second Revolution will have dawned!

With great difficulty he kept his elation concealed; not even Russilov must suspect the vast changes forming on the horizon. Not yet. He will have his hands full running the Ninth, Protorov thought. I do not want to give him too much, too soon.

“All right, clear the vault,” he ordered.

One of the junior lieutenants, responding to a hand sign from Russilov, Shut one valve, opened another. A pair of 150 h.p. suction fans drew the noxious fumes out of the room. When the red light ceased to glow, replaced by the green one, Protorov ordered the vault door unsealed.

Koten went first, then Russilov and the two junior lieutenants. The doctor and Protorov brought up the rear. Inside, they could smell nothing. The air was pure and clean again.

The men fanned out into the vault as if they were a line of gentlemen on the hunt: arrogant in the knowledge of their elite status, yet wary of a new and extremely dangerous prey.

“He seems quiescent enough,” the doctor said, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think there is going to be anything different about him.”.

Thinking him a fool, Protorov signed to Koten. As the enormous
sumō
moved across the room, Protorov paced him at a tangent that took him to a spot directly in front of where Nicholas lay on his left side.

“Breathing is deep and regular,” the doctor said, circling the fallen figure “No eyelid flicker; pulse is slowed, skin color is consistent with deep delta unconscious state.” He recited these medical observations like a litany against that which he did not understand and therefore could not control.

From his position, Protorov signed to Russilov to move into position just behind Nicholas. “All right,” he told Koten.

Nicholas launched himself feet first at the oncoming hulk. It had not been difficult for him to cease to breathe a sufficient amount of the gas to put him under. At least eight separate forms of
ninjutsu
discipline had as their bases the breath and autonomic system regulation that Tibetan Yogi practiced. This extended to body temperature control as well.

The doctor yelped, skittering away as Nicholas careened into the oncoming
sumō
, the heels of his feet directed at Koten’s knees not, as someone unfamiliar with a
sumō
’s strength would have done, at his vast stomach.

Koten was incredibly quick and he almost regained the angle he needed to deflect Nicholas’ strike. But not quite. As it was, he saved himself from a pair of broken joints, moving slightly into the line of attack and thus canceling a measure of its force. He went down anyway.

Nicholas was aware of Protorov shouting orders, the doctor retreating past the fringes of the melee, two younger soldiers moving in. He was certain that he could handle them all. Yet some unbalanced equation stirred the periphery of his mind. He was busy with Koten and most of his consciousness was taken up with constantly shifting stratagems against four enemies.

Four!

It was his last coherent thought before Russilov plunged the six-inch needle into the meaty part of his upper arm. Too late, he lashed out. Five black spots swirled before his eyes; he saw five of each individual, closing in on him, felt Koten’s blow on the side of his head five times.

The five spots expanded into five black wells down which he plummeted. From a long way off echoes came to him, words without meaning, questions without answers. Then the powerful drug hit his cortex and he passed into unconsciousness.

“Good work,” Protorov said to Russilov. “You see, Doctor,” he went on, “contrary to what your book may tell you, we are
not
dealing with an ordinary human being. This man could reach out with one finger and destroy you.”

The doctor said nothing; he was quietly shaking, thinking, I do not understand this at all. He should have been unconscious long before this. “Perhaps he is faking yet again.”

Protorov snorted. “I think not. He has no power to counter injections into his bloodstream.”

He nodded toward the wooden scaffolding set against part of the back wall. “All right, Koten,” he said softly. “String him up.”

You must return to the source
…his
source.
Masashigi Kusunoki’s words rose up from her unconscious, penetrating the dialogue between Sato and Phoenix. Akiko had played and replayed that section of tape as if this might give her some further insight, turning an artifact over and over again in a vain attempt to divine its secret.

She sat in Koten’s room, her forehead against her drawn-up knees, her arms girdling her shins. She was naked, and in the lamplight her skin gleamed as if oiled. Shadows rilled her even as light revealed her. Hidden and open, she was a physical paradigm of the riddle inside herself.

The people who sent him, who trained him represent a very great threat to Japan.
Masashigi-san’s words.

Masashigi. What had possessed her to go to the Gyokku
ryu
in the first place? She did not know or could not recall. She remembered the first moment she had seen Masashigi Kusunoki, though. It was as if she had found a connection with her past—
some
past. As she belonged with Saigō in her private life, so she seemed to belong with Masashigi in her martial one. She had been married to Saigō for three weeks, gone from Kyōki’s castle for six.

The Gyokku was where Masashigi-san had made his first stand for her. Together they had left when the other
sennin
of the
ryu
rose up and dissented; they would not allow her—a woman—to stay.

Together they had gone to the Tenshin Shoden Katori in Yo-shino.

Why had he done this for her? What was it that the
sensei
had seen in her? What made her so special? And how wrong he had been! All his loyalty had brought him was death; death by the hands of the one he had defended.

Akiko remembered the smile that wreathed his face like lilies at the moment he passed from life into death. Why? Why would anyone smile at that instant? Sadness had no place in Masashigi-san’s life. He was attuned to the universe, at peace with himself and the cosmos. He could not have welcomed death. He was, at least in Akiko’s mind, somewhat of a holy man. That was another reason why she had chosen him as her first victim. If the masking of her
wa
that Kyōki had taught her would work with such a one, it would work on anyone.

There was something in the air—a spice perhaps—that Akiko could not define. Her head came up and she looked around as if she suspected that she was not alone. For a moment the air shimmered before a half-open
fusuma.
Papers stirred on the desk farther into the room. But it was only the wind, wasn’t it?

Akiko shivered slightly. Why was she dredging all this up now?
The people who sent him, who trained him represent a great threat to Japan.
Masashigi-san had been speaking of the
muhon-nin
Tsuts-umu. She herself had slain the second
muhon-nin,
Tengu, returning that which he had stolen to the
ryu.

Now she knew that there had been a third traitor within the Tenshin Shoden Katori. Masashigi Kusunoki rose up like a specter before her and bade her do what he had trained her to do; to fulfill the promise he alone had seen in her. She thought of Sato, Phoenix, and Nicholas in the north, in Hokkaido. Especially Nicholas.

She rose and went into the bedroom. From the bottom of a low drawer where Sato would never look she drew out a kimono, light gray on dark gray. The top half of one side was stained a dark brown where some of the
sensei
’s fountaining blood had spattered.

Slowly, reverently, she drew it on. Within moments she was ready. She headed north.

When Nicholas awoke, he found himself on a wheel. He rose out of unconsciousness rapidly but did not open his eyes, change his breathing pattern, or in any other way give those who he assumed to be in the vault with him any indication that he was now conscious.

Whatever they had pumped him with was very powerful for its effects were not yet gone. His head felt light, he felt a touch of vertigo; he was not at all sure that he could fully trust his senses. Still, logic dictated that he attempt to assess his current situation.

He was bound by fingers, wrists, waist, thighs, and ankles with leather straps. He was suspended off the floor. He recalled the dim outline of the scaffolding.

But what worried him most was Protorov. He was smart enough to understand what kind of creature Nicholas was. He alone among the Russians had suspected that Nicholas’ training would keep him from succumbing to the ambient gas. He had set Nicholas up superbly, distracting him with Koten—the obvious main threat—while he kept within Nicholas’ sight. Only the young officer who had been in charge of the
rotenburo
, Russilov, had been missing. Not missing but behind Nicholas. And no time for even
haragei
to work. The stress factor had been too high. Nicholas reflected that perhaps he was getting too old for this. He should have felt Russilov’s presence. He had underestimated the Soviets—Protorov in particular—and had paid the price.

Opened his eyes.

“Ah,” Viktor Protorov said amiably, “did you enjoy your rest?”

How does he know so much about me? Nicholas asked himself as he tried to flex his fingers. The straps would not allow it. Interesting, Nicholas thought. He had this ready for me; surely this would be unnecessary for a prisoner without my skills.

Nicholas was aware of how many people were in the room—two besides himself and Protorov: Russilov and the doctor—as well as where they were. Russilov stood just behind and to the right of his directorate chief; the doctor was near Nicholas’ left shoulder, a hypodermic and medical kit on a stool beside him.

Protorov was not interested in a reply. Instead, he unfolded a long sheaf of computer printout which then trailed down behind him like a tail. He held one page up in front of Nicholas’ face. Nicholas stared at the markings, trying to focus his brain. He thought he had seen something quite like this in several magazines such as
Scientific American
and
Smithsonian
, detailing passes of various NASA satellites across the face of the Earth.