The Miko - 02 (28 page)

The fish was close now. He could see its frothy wake every so often as it neared the surface, knew that that was the time to brace himself, to let off the reel’s safety and allow the creature its head to plunge downward into the ocean’s depths. That would do nothing more than set the hook more firmly in its cheek but it only knew that it must get away, and instinctively it went down.

The reel screamed as the line played out in a blur and he knew that if he were holding on to the line too tightly, it would snap under the enormous force of the fish’s dive.

And now it reached the end and, lifting the rod in a long smooth arc, he began to reel in the line, slowly, steadily, with a great deal of patience. It would be a long afternoon out here and he had nowhere else to go unless the skipper of the nearby pleasure boat decided to move on.

Always he had one eye on the other craft. It was important, he knew, not to become a passive observer. Most likely, you’d be put to sleep and you’d learn nothing. He had been taught to use stakeout time to actively learn about the subject. Moods as well as habits were important, because there would surely come a day when observer and subject would meet and in that confrontation the observer’s acquired knowledge often made the difference in establishing a dialogue.

The big fish was tiring, and as Bristol wound the line in more quickly now he saw Alix’s tall, lithe form detach itself from the pack and move with surefooted grace up along the deck forward. The Red Monster, drinking a beer, turned his head for a moment, catching the movement. Nothing was happening, so he went back to his quiet drinking.

Alix reached the tubular aluminum railing rising from the prow of the boat and stood leaning, her arms rigid, her long-fingered hands wrapped around the upper bars. For a long time she stared out to sea, at the long unbroken line of the horizon, blue on blue. Then her gaze dropped to the water lapping gently below her. Her eyes were fixed. She seemed mesmerized by something she saw down there in the clear water.

In one last burst of energy, the fish at the other end of Bristol’s line dove straight down and for just a moment his entire concentration was directed at not losing the creature.

When he looked up, Alix was gone. Bristol’s head whipped around. She was not on deck. Perhaps she had needed to use the head. Or the sun had got to be too much for her.

Bristol had a sinking feeling in his gut. That fixed look in her eyes, that staring. He had seen it before when he had first met Gelda. His gaze was drawn to the sea just in front of the pleasure boat’s prow. Caramel hair floating, a golden shoulder bobbing. Was she swimming or drowning?

The Red Monster glanced forward and didn’t see her. He put his beer can aside and got up. His mouth opened and he said something to the skipper. The other man shook his head in a negative, pointed toward the forward railing.

The Red Monster sprang upward and Bristol thought, He’d better be quick because Alix was drifting away from the boat and there seemed no doubt now. She was making no effort to stay within range and this far out with the current so strong it was as good as saying, “I give up.”

Running along the side deck, Red spotted her and he leaped overboard. His strong confident strokes brought him to her in minutes. On board the pleasure boat, the skipper was breaking out the inflatable rubber dinghy. Several of the oiled men were helping him. The women were gaping.

The skipper lowered the dinghy, and the Red Monster with one capable palm tucked beneath Alix’s chin swam slowly toward safety.

They were lifting Alix’s body up onto the deck as Bristol’s fish broke the surface. It was a marlin, and by all rights it should have whipped him out of his chair and into the sea during its fight for life.

Bristol watched the long arch of her golden body, raised like a rainbow being lifted into position. Her hair, darkened by the sea, hung down like seagrape, obscuring one shoulder.

Moments later, after the Red Monster had given her mouth-to-mouth, she rolled over. Sea water ran from her mouth in a torrent. Someone came over and put a baseball cap on her head to keep off the sun. The skipper draped a towel across her shoulders, and the Red Monster took her below.

Bristol looked down into the huge, glistening eye of the marlin. Its long body whipped, its tailfin sending a spray of cool water up into his face.

The fish was very close, and as Bristol leaned over the side with his landing hook at the ready he saw the marlin for what it really was: not a game fish, not a trophy stuffed over the mantel in his apartment, but another life.

He thought of the burning car, the fight he had had to put up in order to escape death, and he saw that the martin’s desperate battle had been no different. They were both gallant soldiers, and this creature deserved to die no more than Bristol did.

He stared once more into that round eye, so alien yet for all that so full of life. He could not take that away from the creature. Dropping his landing hook, he dug in his pocket for the knife. He used the blade to slash through the line just beyond the hook.

For just an instant the marlin lay there, close to the boat, floating, its eye on him. Then with a flash of its mighty tail, it leaped away, its blue-green-black body arcing, sunlight spinning off its scales, and then there was only a narrow foaming wake, a tiny incision in the skin of the sea to mark where it had once been.

Tengu was the name his
sensei
, as tradition dictated, had given him. He was another of Viktor Protorov’s agents inside the precincts of the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu.
As such he walked a fine line, and even his sleep had developed a crack in it upward to the more alert alpha layers so that he might never be caught off guard. As Tsutsumu had.

Always he was conscious of being in a hive filled with buzzing, angry bees. That anger, he knew very well, needed only one word of accusation to be leveled at him. Never had he experienced the kind of conglomerate emotional upheaval that had come from the unexpected and unexplained death of Masashigi Kusunoki, the erstwhile leader of this ninja
ryu.

Tengu had come from a large rural family in Kyushu and he remembered the day his father had died. The family reunited silently, moving almost as a single unit. But even that display of togetherness could not compare with the singleminded will which apparently pervaded all levels of the society here.
Jonin
, leader-
sensei, chimin
, the tactical unit leaders, and
genin
, as well as the students such as himself were all affected to a frightening degree.

Something was happening within the
dōjō
that Tengu did not understand, some unconscious whirlwind, some spiritual flashpoint of which he was not part. He tried—and pretended to be a part to those around him—but he knew inwardly that it was useless. He was lost here and he could not say why. Had he been able to step outside of himself and observe the totality of the circumstances within which he found himself, he would have seen that he simply lacked the dedication, the intense concentration of energies that would have allowed him to become a part of the mourning, the renewed dedication of spirit that came with Kusunoki’s passing.

Tengu developed many fears during these volatile days when he was obliged to expend tremendous amounts of psychic energy in concealing his true mission at the Tenshin Shoden Katori from those about him. But none was as acute or as draining as the fear he developed of Phoenix.

Next to Kusunoki himself, Phoenix was the most powerful of the
jonin.
In fact, to Tengu’s way of thinking, Phoenix was more of a threat than Kusunoki ever had been. For one thing, he was younger, his vitality at the peak. For another, he was an explorer of pathways it seemed to Tengu that Kusunoki had long ago turned away from. Foolishly.

Too, Phoenix had always spent more time with the lowly
genin
than Kusunoki ever had, at least during Tengu’s tenure at the
dōjō.
The old
sensei
had increasingly seemed to devote himself to quiet contemplation and the instruction of certain favored pupils, among them the lone female, Suijin.

So it was that just before dawn Tengu would slip silently back into his cubicle, exhausted and utterly drained after a night spent alternately hiding and searching, his heart pounding heavily every time he sensed the approach of another.

Terror stalked him. He lived in fear that Phoenix would become aware of his clandestine activities. The thought of coming under the scrutiny of that glowering countenance was too much for him to contemplate for long. Better by far to die by his own hand than to be delivered up to the vengeance of such a one.

To Tengu, who had been brought up with all the superstition and ritualism of country folk, it was like trying to battle a
kami.

Phoenix was a shade, something that Tengu could not understand. Seeing him, seeing the fiercely visaged tattooed tiger rampant across his shoulder and back, Tengu was gripped by a primal paralysis that he could not break. Therefore, despite what Protorov had advised, he kept his boldness in check, masking himself against discovery while he continued his recreancy.

When Nangi returned to the larger office suite his face was entirely composed. He had done all he could for the moment. It was now up to Allan Su and his staff to go through Anthony Chin’s books and ferret out just what had been done to All-Asia, to see if it was still a viable entity. Su had advised that they close their doors until the matter was determined but Nangi, knowing how rumors flew in the Colony, had decided to keep the bank open and to issue an immediate story about Anthony Chin’s dismissal for fiduciary improprieties to both the Chinese- and English-language newspapers. He had no compunction about ruining the career of the man who had brought his bank to the brink of financial destruction.

The waters in Hong Kong must be muddied, Nangi had told Su. “We must do whatever we can to buy time,” he had said. “I do not want to transfer in capital from here to cover a run in an already skittish atmosphere. I will not throw good money after bad. Remember that, Mr. Su. Your job and those of all the others under you is in your hands. Please don’t fail.”

Running over it all again, he was certain that he had covered everything. Now it was in the hands of God. Let Him decide the fate of All-Asia. Of course he had not told Su that the
keiretsu
could not afford a major transfer of funds. But if the bank could not provide it, capital would have to come from somewhere.

Satisfied for the moment, he turned his full attention to matters within Sato’s office. He remembered what he was going to ask Linnear when the phone call had deflected him. He stopped behind the back of the sofa on which Nicholas, Sato, and Ishii were sitting. Tomkin was now sprawled in an oversized chair, facing them.

“Linnear-san,” he said, extracting another cigarette and producing his lighter, “before I was inopportunely called away, you said that it was highly unusual for death itself to be associated with this
Mo
.”

Nicholas, his face pale, said nothing, and Nangi, staring hard as he lit up, wondered whether he had hit a nerve that would somehow serve him in his quest for dominance of the
gaijin.

“I wonder,” Nangi continued, pouring blue smoke from his half-open mouth, “whether you would be kind enough to tell me the
Wu-Shing
’s purpose.”

Now Nicholas had a choice of losing face or possibly causing a panic among the Japanese and thus endangering the negotiations Tomkin had made eminently clear must be completed this week. He had told Tomkin part of it back in the hotel room on Friday, and now he had told them all a little more. But only he, Nicholas, knew it all, and the ramifications were so terrifying that, at least for the moment, he preferred not to think about them. Yet tenacious Nangi, intelligent Nangi was about to force his hand and in so doing wreck how many years of Tomkin’s planning?

His mind was racing, working on the problem, when his head turned as if of its own volition.
Haragei
—his peculiar sixth sense—was warning him…of what? Tomkin! What was wrong? Nicholas began to move even before fully coherent conclusions had been made.

Raphael Tomkin’s brown eyes, usually so full of cunning and impenetrable guile, were now liquid and runny, as if all the color of the irises were drooling out across his lower lids. His pupils were dilated and he seemed to be having trouble focusing.

Nicholas touched him, felt the minute vibration in his torso, arhythmic, fluttery, abnormal.

“Quickly,” Nicholas said, “call for a doctor.”

“There’s one in the building,” Sato said, motioning to Ishii, who was already halfway to the door. “He’s ours and he’s very good.”

Tomkin tried to open his mouth and could not speak. His hands grasped at Nicholas’ jacket, crumpling the fabric in thick swatches beneath his clawed fingers. Within his eyes jumped the red spark of fear and terror.

“It’s all right,” Nicholas said, his tone soothing, “there’s a doctor on his way.” Something was trying to surface within his mind, a half-remembered memory, tiny, fleeting, seemingly insignificant at the time. What was it?

Tomkin’s face was mottled and so close to him Nicholas could feel the beat of his pulse like an engine gone wild. He put his forefinger against the underside of the other man’s trembling wrist. After a moment, he moved his finger, then again. His mind was numb with disbelief. He could not find a pulse!

Tomkin’s mouth was working and he pulled Nicholas toward him wanting, needing perhaps, to whisper. Nicholas put his ear against Tomkin’s lips and listened hard. Hard breath like a bellows working overtime and the sickly sweet stench of decay. It brought up the buried memory, but just as he reached for it, he heard Tomkin’s voice, sere, fibrous, unearthly.

“Greydon,” Nicholas heard between pants. “For. Christ’s. Sake. Get. Grey. Don.
Now.
”

Pink light reflecting off the
kanzashi
in Miss Yoshida’s hair turned the water-soaked stones glistening at the bottom of a pool into gems. She knelt just inside the open
fusuma
on the fiftieth floor of the Shinjuku Suiryū Building, home of Sato Petrochemicals. It had been given over to a master interior architect and then a
sensei
of gardening in order to create a sanctuary of peaceful contemplation in the smoky madhouse of downtown Tokyo.