The Nicholas Linnear Novels (149 page)

“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.

Russilov, one hand on his holstered pistol, took the man’s arm in a viselike grip.

Watching them depart, Protorov tried vainly to control the rage sweeping through him, shaking him like a tree in a storm. He could not believe it. How could this happen? he thought. It was outrageous, inconceivable. He
would
not believe it.

He turned back to Nicholas’ limp body. He looked upon it as one does one’s own failings. He despised it with a fierceness that bordered on pain. He remembered striking down an icon once, a Crucifix made of wood, painted in gilt and white, bright red where drops of blood leaked at open palms, crossed ankles, bethorned forehead.

It broke when it fell, and he ground it underfoot with the heel of his polished boot. The agony it had conveyed, which, for the owner, at least, had been transmuted into a constancy of faith, had been incoherent to him.

Yet now the extreme of pain the Crucifixion represented was revealed to him. It was as much a shock to him as if he had woken up in the morning to find that his legs had been amputated. Abruptly the world was not the same anymore, and never would be again. A certain peace—a wholeness not only of flesh but of spirit as well—was gone, and in its stead rose, a torment, engulfing and endless.

Up until this moment there had never been any real doubt in his mind that he would achieve his goals. Lofty or not, they would be his. He was clever and he was ruthless. Like Einstein, he was an intuitive thinker who could make great leaps that bypassed plodding logic. That, he knew, was as close as man would ever get to traveling at the speed of light.

Now he had to face the crushing reality that that was not enough. He would not learn the secret of
Tenchi
, he would not make his summit; there would therefore be no coup. No greatness for Viktor Protorov. History would not enthrone him. It would now not even notice him.

Protorov looked at Nicholas Linnear with a murderous glare and saw only his own undoing. He saw how close he had come to ultimate victory…and how far away. It was knowledge that he could not tolerate.

A man berserk, he railed at the cool flesh, pounding it over and over again while great gasping grunts emanated from him in such profusion and with such clarion pealing that even Russilov dared not reenter the vault.

But even this physical venting of his rage and pain was not enough. The body was manacled, an absolute prisoner. To strike his late client thus—a man who had caused him to lose everything—both diminished Protorov and increased his agony.

Swiftly, still grunting like a wild boar, he unfastened the leather straps that bound Nicholas to the wheel. First fingers and wrists were freed, then thighs and ankles. Lastly the waist strap came undone, and the form fell onto him with the force of a sack of cement.

Clawing and kicking, Protorov thrust the body away from him while at the same time seeking to follow it to attack it anew now that it had been freed and, in his mind at least, was fair game for him.

What could he think then when, in the midst of his red, red rage, a corpse pronounced deceased by his neuropharmacologica expert reached an arm out and grasped the side of his corded neck?

For the Western mind death is a difficult commodity to come by. Because there is no acceptance of it, because there is no thought as to its confluence with life, human beings are, more often than not, most difficult to kill.

The simple fact is that the organism does not want to die. To this end it will cling tenaciously to life, it will push the body to superhuman, inexplicable feats of strength and endurance. Cars have been moved by quite ordinary people in this kind of situation, extraordinary jumps have been made, exposure to the elements sustained beyond all measure.

Then there is the body itself. A bullet to the head may be turned aside by the skull. Similarly, a knife thrust can be deflected by an intervening rib.

In the East, however, where traditionally death means nothing, it is different. Death comes with the speed of a lightning bolt, giving the spirit of the organism no time to react at all. Ancient teachings, as well, allow an assailant to actually use the human body against itself.

And that was precisely how death came to Viktor Protorov, how Nicholas Linnear did, indeed, become C. Gordon Minck’s terrible swift sword. Perhaps he knew to what use he had been put. Certainly he did not care.

Nothing was in his mind—his spirit was as clear as a mountain lake after a strong rain—as he pressed inward with the thumb of his left hand, breaking apart Protorov’s collar bone and using it as a sword to sever the vital arteries that rose upward from the heart like a branching tree.

There was nothing to it. It was over in the space of a double heartbeat. It was so simple. Thirty-five years of personal training, perhaps a thousand more before that for the discipline itself, made it so.

Nicholas was slow to rouse after that. The process by which he had withdrawn blood from the surface of his body, by which he had stilled his pulse and his pressure, was an enormously complex and draining one, both physically and mentally.

Slowly, blood returned to all of him and his skin blushed. He was heating up again, a dying sun returning from the embers of dormancy.

Slowly he focused on the grotesquely canted corpse sprawled beside him. Blood drenched them both, binding them in a last attempt to bridge a gap that could never be spanned.

Nicholas felt no remorse. Though there was no fine feeling in snuffing out the life of another human being—or even an animal, for that matter—the elation of life lifted him in its glorious embrace. He was alive and Viktor Protorov was dead. He was flooded with the juices of life. He rode all the air currents of the world, swam in all the seas, lakes, and streams. He padded through the forests and loped across the plains. He stalked the veldts, skittered through the deserts. There was not any place on earth where he was not at that moment. Connected once more to the cosmos, he stood at the Void and was replenished.

“And this is for Third Cousin Tok himself,” Nangi said, sliding HK $6000 across the table to Fortuitous Chiu. “I want you to be generous with the
h’eung yau
,” he said, knowing that the sowing of fragrant grease brought great face with it. “But also be certain to stress the patriotic elements of this matter. I want it made perfectly clear to Third Cousin Tok just who these people are. In that event there will be genuine pleasure in what they will be doing.”

Fortuitous Chiu nodded. “I understand completely.”

“Good.” Nangi smiled. He had already sown his seeds in the form of anonymous calls to several police sergeants—one in Wan Chai, one in Central, a third in Stanley—who, it was suspected by the Green Pang, were working for the Communists. When Nangi had asked Fortuitous Chiu why they were allowed to operate, the young Chinese had smiled and said, “How do the
quai loh
put it? Better the devil you know than the one you do not.”

“You’d do well at the Golden Mountain,” Nangi had said, using the Chinese designation for America.

“Perhaps,” the young man had said. “But I have no wish to leave the Crown Colony. My fortune will be made here.”

Nangi had no doubt about that at all.

Now, as the heavy fog of twilight settled over Hong Kong like a mantle of velvet, he rose and said, “I’m starved. Shall we have dinner?”

Fortuitous Chiu nodded. “Where would you like to go?”

“I want a fine Chinese meal,” Nangi said. “I’ll leave it in your hands.”

The young man looked at him for a moment. Then he bowed slightly and, without making another gesture, said, “This way, please.”

Fortuitous Chiu took him into the countryside, north into the New Territories. Gradually, as they approached the border of China itself, the communities became smaller, high rises giving way to two- and three-story housing, strung together by arcs of slapping washing. Naked children ran in the dirt streets. Dogs barked angrily and fought with each other amid the trash heaps.