The Nicholas Linnear Novels (212 page)

He had intellectually savored each coupling with the avidity of a cryptographer tackling a new code. For the rest, the wolf in heat throwing his shaggy head back and howling at the night, there was nothing.

Then he heard, with a start, Justine whispering in his ear, “Save me. Oh, save me,” and he began to tremble with despicable desire just as if she had said, Take me.

Because he thought of someone else: his sister, with whom he shared everything of importance: strength, sin, punishment, the terror of weakness, destiny. And a longing that was pain swept over him.

Justine was lying so close to him that he could feel the press of her heavy breasts, feel the accelerated beating of her heart. Her face was upraised to his. Starlight picked out highlights in her hair, the waning moonlight coated the soft flesh of her neck.

That was when, with eyes of copper, Senjin again wrapped the silken cord around Justine’s neck, jerking her against him. He captured her hips with his powerful thighs. She tried to cry out but could not. He saw her teeth, white in the moonlight. He imagined blood on them, an animal’s mouth thrown back and howling at the soft moon, and knew that he wanted to—
needed
to—make her as much like him as possible, to merge her being into his as he had pathetically tried to do and failed with Mariko when he devoured her susurrus at the moment of her death, as he had tried to do with the other women he had been with. To possess them in as full a meaning of the word as was imaginable.

Because he could no longer possess his sister in that unique way that, for him, filled the dread place inside him where even he would never venture, where pleasure was pain.

“Pleasure and pain, yin and yang, the light and the dark,” Senjin whispered hoarsely. “This is the world view, the false reality. Kshira showed me the truth: that pain and pleasure can be one, the width of a circle, and when they are, the result is otherworldly, leading to a state beyond even ecstasy.” His breath hard and hot on her cheek. “I promised you an example. I want you to understand. Now…”

Senjin pulled up her skirt, roughly ripped her underclothes. The terror emanated from Justine’s wide-open eyes, filled her face like a river swollen to a torrent from spring rains. Her terror exuded from her pores like sweat, its peculiar scent making his nostrils twitch, his mouth water.

Senjin was so hard that he could barely feel his member. It was stiff, it was numb; he thought of Haha-san. Now not only Justine. But his sister as well.

His sister and possession.

The cord around Justine’s neck was making the white flesh turn red and raw. Her neck began to swell as it bruised, as the blood filled it, as he pulled the cord tighter, as it was further abused. The sight made Senjin dizzy with desire and he almost collapsed into her.

He pulled on the cord, cutting off more oxygen, and her head went back, lolling as her eyes rolled up. Drool spilled from the corner of her mouth, her hips lurched inward against him, against the quivering tip of him.

Senjin was overcome by desire. Never before in his life had its advance been so swift, so overpowering. He was delirious with sensation, about to thrust himself into her when, unbidden, he remembered that he needed her in another way, just as he had once needed Haha-san, and his hot, desperate seed spilled out of him in a paroxysm of need.

Senjin grunted like an animal. His head fell forward onto her shoulder. With a sob he released the cord from around Justine’s neck, seeing not her but his sister, Haha-san, his sister, they were all fused in his mind because he needed all three, hated himself for that need.

Then the three images became unstuck, drifted apart. Senjin tenderly kissed the already blackening welt, licking it with his tongue, tasting the salt on her skin, already associating it with her wound, the pain he had inflicted on her.

He held her head as she had before, to take away the pain. “You must tell me,” he whispered hoarsely, “I must know what the ninja did with the emeralds he took out of the box.” But he could tell that Justine had not heard him, and he put his lips against her ear, said into it, “Think of the ninja, think of your husband in his workout room, with the box in his hands. Now he has the emeralds, you can see them sparkling in the light. What do you see him doing next? Tell me.”

Justine, her eyes only half open, her mind benumbed with Tau-tau, said, “I remember…something…”

“What?
What!”
But Senjin could see it was no good, she would not be able to dredge it up just yet. Not yet.

Staring at her white, sweat-slicked face in the moonlight.

But soon.

Leaving her there, untied in the moonlight, freed, but only for a time.

Shisei, dressed ever so fashionably in the Louis Feraud suit that Douglas Howe had bought her at Saks Jandel, locked the door to her borrowed brownstone just off Foxhall Road in Georgetown, skipped down the steps to the waiting black Jaguar sedan.

Branding himself was behind the wheel. Although he employed a driver to get him crosstown in rush-hour traffic or out to the Pentagon while he was doing business in the backseat, he preferred on off hours to drive himself, taking pleasure in the purr and power of his own automobile.

“You look tremendous!” he said as she slid into the leather seat beside him. “I’ll be proud of you.”

“What have you planned for Howe?” Shisei asked nervously. “Or for us?”

Branding laughed, swinging out into the Washington twilight. “You must know General Dickerson, Howe’s pet dog inside the Pentagon? Woof! Woof! Anyway, just about, oh, twenty minutes ago, while Howe was dressing for tonight’s dinner, the general called him at home. But, you know, the funny thing is, there’s a guy on my staff who does an amazingly accurate imitation of Dickerson’s voice. In any case, whoever it was who called swore that there’s a security leak at the Johnson Institute. This information surely set Howe to drooling with anticipation. Greedy people are predictable people.

“The general—or whomever it was—insisted that Howe meet him in the wilds of Maryland where—so Howe’s been told—the information is being leaked.”

Branding laughed again. “It’ll take Howe about an hour and a half to get where he’s been told to go—longer, even, since this is his chauffeur’s night off and he has to drive himself. He’ll wait there, oh, I’d say an hour or so, just to make sure he got the time right, that the general hasn’t been detained somewhere. Then another ninety minutes back. By then the State dinner will be over.”

It was almost eight o’clock, the worst of the rush hour had dissipated, and the monuments were just being lighted. It was a magical time of day, Branding thought. If you were in New York, you’d be on your way to a Broadway show; in Paris, strolling down the Boulevard Haussmann to the Opera; in Tokyo, in Roppongi, taking in the fashion show on the street while on the way to a glittering dining spot.

Here in Washington they were heading for the seat of power: the White House. The thought never failed to set Branding’s heart to pounding. He wondered whether one day he would sit in the Oval Office after having been elected to the nation’s highest office. As he often reminded himself, that was one of the reasons he had gotten into politics in the first place.

He knew that with the success of the ASCRA bill, with the formidable array of strength he had been able to muster, he now had a shot at the next nomination, less than two years away.

“Cook,” Les Miller, the chairman of the Republican Party, had told him last night, “I’ve never seen any one man impact the party the way you have. This bill is just the final touch. Even our most conservative sonsabitches are mighty impressed with you. They’ve told me privately that they’ve been aware of you for some years. By God, you’ve got their full attention now. We’re all tired of the man in the White House. This party wasn’t founded to be led by a man who’s turned out to be more Democratic than most Democrats.

“I can tell you your last speech on the Senate floor had them spellbound. They saw in it, as I did, the new platform fundamentals to return us to being the party of hard, no-nonsense principle. It’s not too early to begin thinking about running for the nomination. Right now organization is half the battle. The sooner you give us the go-ahead, the sooner I can throw the full weight of the party machine behind you and get the process going. That’s how sure we are of you, Cook.”

“Oh, God,” Shisei said, “I’ve forgotten my bag. I always do that. I think it’s deliberate. I hate evening bags.”

“No problem,” Branding said, making a U-turn. “Anyway, if we’re late, it will create a bigger splash.”

Shisei turned to look at him. “I thought that’s exactly what you wanted to avoid.”

“Look at yourself, darling,” he said. “In that outfit, even a blind man would notice you.” He shook his head as he pulled into the curb in front of her house. “Strategy is useless unless it can be changed. And I’ve changed mine.” He saw her puzzled look, kissed her hard on the mouth. “Go on, get your bag. Otherwise you’ll never get to see how this evening ends.”

Shisei went up her steps, dug in her pocket for her key. She opened her front door and disappeared inside.

In the foyer she put the key in her pocket and removed her high-heel shoes. Then, on stockinged feet, she crept up the stairs to her bedroom.

The hallway on the second floor was dark. The door to her bedroom was ajar, just as she had left it, but a thick wedge of light streamed out into the hall.

Keeping to the shadows close to the mahogany banister, Shisei went silently past the half-open door without attempting to peer inside. Instead she went into the adjoining bedroom, which shared the huge, luxurious bathroom with her bedroom.

She entered her bedroom through the bath. She could look at the full length of the room in this way, saw the vanity closest to her, her evening bag sitting on its marble top, just where she had left it. She saw the drawers to the antique oak dresser piled hastily one atop the other, their contents strewn in a jumble across the Oriental scatter rugs and the polished oak floor.

David Brisling was rummaging in her closet, frantically pushing aside her hanging clothes. Soon, she knew, he would reach her shoes and, behind the carefully piled boxes, her computer, headphones, her entire cache of clandestine equipment.

She went across the room so silently that an animal would not have heard her. But in so doing, her shadow was thrown partway into the closet’s interior.

Just as she came upon the figure, it turned. She saw the muzzle of the pistol and Brisling’s face in the same instant.

Shisei ceded all conscious control of her body to Kshira: her mind emptied, to be filled with the Void, the sound-light continuum that was Kshira.

Her left foot blurred out and upward even as her upper torso twisted away. Her rigid toes struck the inside of Brisling’s wrist at the vulnerable juncture where nerves and veins come together.

Brisling’s hand went numb even as his brain, in shock from surprise, gave its sluggish command to his forefinger to pull the trigger.

The pistol flew out of his hand, and Shisei dropped down, cupped her hands and, jamming them under his chin, drove upward with strength emanating from her hips, her lower belly—her
hara—
forced upward into her shoulders, her arms.

Shisei shouted, one quick bloodcurdling cry—a
kiai,
a giving voice to the spirit, more than a battle cry, a martial art in its own right. At the same time, she shoved Brisling’s head backward with such force that the top of his skull shattered against the edge of the closet door.

Only then, with the threat ended, did Kshira recede, did the Shisei familiar to Cotton Branding reappear. She blinked once and, within the space of a heartbeat, took in the entire scene, ran through her plan again in her mind. She recalled with delight Branding telling her where Howe would be tonight; it was perfect. Plausible deniability. She could find no flaw.

She picked up the phone, completed her preparations.

Four minutes later she was back in the Jaguar with Branding. “Sorry I was so long,” she said a bit breathlessly.

“I was getting worried about you,” Branding said, putting the car in gear. “I thought I heard something, I don’t know what. I was just about to come in and get you.”

“It was nothing.” Shisei leaned across, kissed him on the mouth. “My boss called just as I was leaving. I had the answering machine on but I had to pick up.” She put her hand on his thigh. “By the way, he says to thank you for taking me to this party. I wouldn’t’ve gotten in otherwise, and I’m certain I can break some new ground with the people who’ll be there.”

“Good,” Branding said, grinning. “Now you can say I’ve done my bit today for environmentalism.”

“It’s something, Cook. But don’t think it’s enough. It won’t ever be enough until ‘environmentalist’ stops being a dirty word in American politics.”

Outside the tinted windows northwest Washington, the Washington tourists saw, glittered like a million-dollar necklace. But Branding knew that for the magician’s illusion it was. Hidden from sight was the poverty, the crime and unemployment running rampant in the predominantly black neighborhoods. While tuxedoed pols like himself gorged themselves nightly on fine food and power, the real Washington simmered and, like an unwatched kettle, threatened to boil over.

A cop car heading in the other direction, its cherry lights flashing, its siren screaming, gave physical weight to his thoughts.

But for this night, at least, Branding wanted to put all that out of his mind. “How did you get into being a lobby for the environmentalists, anyway?” he asked.

“Murder,” Shisei said. She saw Branding looking at her from the corner of his eye. “Too many whales slaughtered by my people. Too many seals clubbed to death on the ice and the beaches. The dumping of hazardous wastes into our streams, rivers, and oceans. The senselessness and evil in greed was never more apparent to me. I wanted—I needed—to do something. It was important to me to know that what I was doing was making a difference.”

Branding thought about Shisei’s life, how she had been imprisoned, tortured, how Zasso, the mad artist, had attempted to remake her in the image of the demon woman. Branding thought mostly of how Zasso had failed, of how Shisei had overcome her past, becoming a strong-willed woman whose work
did
make a difference in the world. He realized then just how proud of her he was.