The Nicholas Linnear Novels (69 page)

The sniper, seeing at last the full outline of the onrushing figure, did not drop to one knee and aim but turned his rifle crosswise across his body, using it as one might an ancient longstaff. He jammed the heavy stock forward in an attempt to wreck the figure’s momentum, felt a jarring crash as it hit a protrusion, the figure’s elbow perhaps.

He took one step back and to the side, bringing the muzzle end forward and down in an oblique slash. Saigō struck it away and down with his forearm while extending his leading leg. This brought him within intimate range and he used a kite, the edge on his hand as hard as a block of concrete. The entire right side of the sniper’s rib cage collapsed like an eggshell.

The man had time only to grunt once, as if in surprise. As his head and torso came forward, Saigō kicked high, catching him on the bridge of the nose. Skin ripped away and cartilage tore itself from its tendon foundations. Blood gouted and, spinning, the sniper followed his useless weapon, cartwheeling over the side of the catwalk.

Leaping, Saigō was away, racing toward the stairs. At his side, he gripped his scabbarded
katana.

“They got him. Listen to all that noise.”

He meant the firing.

Tomkin stood behind his desk, torso canted forward at the hips, the way an athlete might hold himself. The columns of his thick arms were rigid, his fists against the desk top.

The sounds of the machine guns had come like an echoing roll of thunder, amplified and hurled upward by the vast core of air in the atrium.

Nicholas, at his post near the double metal doors, had not moved at all.

“What do you think, Nick?”

He wondered at Tomkin’s sudden nerves. He had been as cool and relaxed as a man about to leave on a long vacation the last time he had seen him. Now he seemed on edge.

Across the room, faced with the reality of the situation, Tomkin was sweating. He was having serious second thoughts about his deal with the ninja. There seemed to be an inordinate amount of activity down there. He knew just how many men Croaker had deployed and with what armaments. Had they got him? It sounded like a world war down there. What if he made it up here? What if I can’t trust him? My God, Linnear is my last line of defense and I’ve sacrificed him.

Tomkin opened his mouth to speak, bit back the words at the last minute. He could not tell Nicholas what he had done, no matter what. He put his shaking hand inside his suit jacket and felt his fingers slip in sweat against the warm edge of his gun. He felt wildly out of place, a piranha stripped of its teeth, watching the shark as it swam ever closer. The feeling did not sit well with him. He enjoyed being in control—at his desk, in the boardroom in the midst of proxy fights, overseas taming recalcitrant buyers—while others hung precariously on to the twists and turns of a destiny he was creating. Now, for this moment, others controlled his life and he felt a brief stab of a fear he had not known since one sun-drenched day sixteen years ago; the house on Gin Lane, the summer’s heat, the sound the wind made as it raced through the high beach grass, the dryness of the sand like beads of glass, sounds on the sigh of the wind, a rising and falling tide, moaning, and movement and—Gelda. My God, Gelda. Gelda!

His heart pounded in his chest as upon an anvil and something sat astride his intestines, racing up from his genitals, squeezing, squeezing.

“… better sit down and do as I told you.”

“What? What?”

“Sit down, Tomkin. He’ll be coming soon now.”

“Coming? Who?”

“Saigō. The ninja.”

Tomkin’s face was shiny in the half-light coming in through the wall of windows to his left. All the lights were off on the floor.

“They didn’t get him?”

“I think not.”

“What about all those men—down there?” He was thinking of them as lines of his defense. They could not all be crumbling so quickly, so easily.

Nicholas misunderstood him. “I’m surprised you care. This wasn’t my idea. It should just have been me and you—and him. They’re all innocents down there.”

“Meaning,” Tomkin said, moving a little toward the windows, wondering if Nicholas would follow him as the ninja had suggested he might, “that we—you and me and the cop—are not.”

Nicholas might have been a statue. “No. Up here on Olympus morality has little meaning. When you get used to watching people from such a lofty distance their features blur, becoming at last so indistinct that they are as interchangeable as ants—and as insignificant. What does one less ant mean to the course of history? It’s too insignificant even to think about.”

“You’re crazy,” Tomkin said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” The trouble was, he thought, I
do
know what he’s talking about. He pressed his hands against his temples, squeezing his eyes shut against the sun-dazzle tumble of images limned against his eyelids. Gelda and another girl. How his pulse raced! Now the hatred sluiced like venom through his veins. His head pulsed as if being blown up like a balloon. How could she have… He’d meted out retribution all right. Deservedly so. His thoughts began to race dangerously.

Where had the days of innocence got to? he asked himself. The Easter egg hunts in Connecticut, the school dances, the easy, laughing summers when the girls would come in from the surf like two brown-skinned mermaids.

Caught in faded photographs, irretrievably mired between Kodak paper and photographic chemicals, as real as Coleridge’s dream of Xanadu; gone up in smoke like an addict’s hopes.

“You said he’s coming.” Tomkin’s voice was clotted with emotion and he had to clear his throat before he could continue. “What are you going to do?”

“Sit down,” Nicholas said. “I want you away from the windows.”

“I want to know!” Tomkin shouted. “It’s my life!”

“Sit down, Tomkin.” Nicholas’ voice was even lower than it had been a moment before. “Keep yelling and you will guide him right to you.”

Tomkin glared at him for a long moment. His chest heaved beneath his suit jacket. Then, abruptly, he collapsed into his chair.

Nicholas turned his head toward the rear of the office. Next to the open door of the bathroom was a narrow hallway leading first to the electrical and air conditioning circuits for the floor and then to the offices on the far side of the floor.

He did not believe that Saigō would come through the front doors. For one thing, they were bulky and slow-moving. Too much time and effort was involved in opening them. He could not, of course, discount the ledge outside the windows but, as in the manner of most newer, centrally temperature-controlled buildings, these windows could not be opened. Certainly they were easily breached but that also would take time and, worse, an inordinate amount of sound.

It was logical, then, to expect the attack from the rear of the office. He thought briefly about positioning himself more advantageously, in the air-conditioning alcove, perhaps. But if Saigō chose another way in, he might take too long recovering and he could not chance that.

That Saigō was at this moment on his way up he had no doubt.

It was quiet now, just the gentle white-noise hissing in the inner ear, as of the aftermath of a violent tornado. With the front doors secured, no sound seeped in from the street; all the glass was in place here.

He could hear the sound of Tomkin’s heavy breathing, as if he were an asthmatic with his mouth partly open. Where he sat, behind his desk, he was in total shadow.

“Move a bit to your right,” Nicholas said softly. “No, with the chair. That’s right.” He turned his head. “Now keep still.” A bar of light shone over a portion of the steel-gray hair, quartering the head.

The place was alive with them.

But, of course, that was to be expected.

Two at the entrance to the stairwell, three more guarding the cage elevator. He had not even considered using the main elevator bank.

The easiest thing would have been to use hypnosis. The plan was practical as well as amusing. The idea of having one of those plainclothesmen shepherding him skyward in the elevator appealed to him. But that would depend on a very specific set of circumstances. Given time, he had no doubt that he could execute them. He did not, at this point, think that he had the time. They would have begun to sort things out down there. They’d turn on the lights, roll up the casualty figures and send for reinforcements. He did not want to risk a get-out through a cordon of a score of men all on the hair-trigger lookout for one thing and one thing alone.

Not that he could not do it but it was foolish to take such risks when there was absolutely no need to.

In the shadows, he reached out four pads from his belt. These he carefully tied, one on each soft-soled shoe and over the palms of his hands. He slung his
katana
obliquely across his back. He could take no step now without attracting attention, for sprouting from the outer side of the pads were two-inch steel spikes set in a complex pattern.

Saigō unwrapped from his waist a long nylon cord, weighted on one end by a small sharp triangular hook. He looked up, studying the sides of the atrium though he already knew them quite well. He found what he was looking for and began to twirl the weighted cord about his head.

He let it go and it shot high into the atrium, arcing around a transverse iron beam. It was close enough to the wall so that, as he flung himself upward, he was swung inward by his momentum. He drew his legs up so that the soles of his shoes faced outward. He felt the impact as the spiked foot pads dug into the pitted face of the pseudo-marble facing.

This was one of the most ancient of ninjutsu techniques, used for centuries in infiltrating an enemy’s castle stronghold. Mere walls, no matter how sheer, could not confound a ninja.

Upward he went with appalling rapidity. A fly on the wall, he was quite invisible to those below, even had they chanced to look this far up. He had, once again, total security.

To the shocked and bewildered men on the atrium’s floor it was as if he had vanished into thin air and this was what they reported to Croaker via walkie-talkie.

The hallucinogen was raging full force within him. His involvement with his immediate environment was total. He could see-smell-taste-hear-feel simultaneously as he crawled up the wall.

Small sounds, brittle and three-dimensional, drifted to him from below, funneled by the peculiar acoustics. It was curious because he could hear specific sounds with more clarity from this vantage point than he might have if he were still down below: voices talking, shoes pounding against the cool flooring as they called for the ambulances. Do you no good, he thought. Talking, unanswered. The walkie-talkie, he thought. No matter.

The fine dust of his passage took to the slowly swirling air, a minute ineffectual cyclone passing through the light.

There was silence on the top floor; this was Nicholas’ doing; this was why he had insisted that none of Croaker’s men be on the floor. Sound was his greatest potential enemy now.

“I want you,” he had said to Tomkin some time before, “to face away from him when he comes. Do you think you can do that?” Because it was a most difficult thing to turn your back on someone who meant to kill you. But this was essential. Nicholas was afraid of what the Kuji-kiri might do to Tomkin. Kick out the glass and take one last step down, that was only one possibility.

“Yes, I can do it.”

He heard the fear shivering Tomkin’s voice and wondered again at it.

“Is that where you’re going to stand when he comes?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just remember what I’ve told you. If you do anything else, chances are you’ll be dead before you know it. This is no time to think about being in control.”

“What can you know about that?” Part of his fear, Tomkin realized belatedly, was that somehow he had recognized a kind of a kindred spirit in Linnear. He had neither the knowledge nor the insight to understand in what way this was so, only knew that it was. This was a deadly man, a sort of a raw animal spirit held in check by a thin veneer of civilization. Tomkin shuddered to think of what might happen if that veneer should crack apart. Perhaps that was why he wanted to trust Linnear with his secrets yet could never bring himself to so unburden himself. Kindred they were and he judged Nicholas in the same light he judged himself. He would do anything to preserve himself thus—

“I know all about that. I’ve been too much in control all my life. That’s hard to take. Calluses don’t only grow on hands.”

“What do you mean?” But already he suspected that he knew.

“I feel like my head’s been full of novocaine for years.” He paused for a moment, his head cocked at an angle as if listening to a far-off sound, and Tomkin felt his guts turn to water. Was he coming already? Dear God but he wanted to make a break for the bathroom!

“Your daughter’s a very special person.”

“Who, Justine?” Tomkin snorted, feeling better now that he was on safe ground again. “Sure, if you call loony special. I don’t.”

“You really are a fool, aren’t you?” There was a small silence as they glared across the darkened room at each other. Nicholas wondered if Croaker had overheard all of this and was chuckling to himself.

“It’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?” Tomkin said, backing off somewhat. It would not do to have Linnear angry with him now. “I mean, I’ve been through a lot with her. You only know her a short time. But, listen”—he tapped a forefinger on the desk top—“I told you where she was, didn’t I? I helped you find her. I want you two to make it, I’ve told you that and I mean it. You’re good for her. Your strength can keep her from going back—”

“You don’t know her at all,” Nicholas said. “She’s got more strength than a lot of men I know.” He let that hang in the air. Had it been a glove thrown down at Tomkin’s feet? If so, Tomkin chose to ignore it as such.

“Perhaps there has been some change. I haven’t seen her for some time, I’ll grant you that. I suppose I still think of her as the baby of the family. Gelda, my oldest, always seemed so much more capable of taking care of herself, even when they were both much younger. She was always so much more social than Justine.” Oh yes, social. He had to laugh at that. Women fucking women. My God, where had she picked that up? “I am afraid we aren’t exactly a closely knit family.” How in hell could we be? “There is little sense of family loyalty between my daughters. I regret that most bitterly but it’s to be expected, I suppose. When there is not enough time”—Nicholas could sense the shrug in the dark of the office—“the children inevitably turn away from their parents, find others who can satisfy their needs.” The finger stopped tapping, hung suspended for a time in the air. “I imagine you could say that both my daughters are arrested adolescents in a sense. Ah well.”