The Miko - 02 (57 page)

Her flesh was hot and moist. Her nails clawed at him, her small white teeth bit at his hard flesh as if that, too, were a sexual act. Neither of them wanted it ever to end and so their feverishness was tempered with an almost painful holding back.

Their restraint caused Akiko to whimper and moan. He felt her smaller body trembling uncontrollably against him; when his hand first made contact with the already soaking mount of her sex, her hips convulsed inward again and again, her eyes closed, and she gripped him until her fingers went white.

Around them the mist seemed to congeal and darken. The sky could no longer be seen and the air had grown heavy and dank as if with the incipience of a storm. Abruptly, thunder rumbled brokenly, and early morning seemed to turn into dusk.

Akiko was arched against him, trembling, her thighs open, her hands stroking lovingly his back and buttocks. Her tongue licked the hollow at the side of his neck.

Then an animal cry broke from her and she moaned, “I must…I must…” Twisting herself around until her hot mouth engulfed him, inching down him until her lips enclosed the very root. He wanted to do the same to her, but even with pinpoints of ecstasy sweeping through her she had the presence of mind to deflect him, keeping the insides of her thighs away from his eyes. She could not afford to let him see what lay there, grinning with power. For that would end it all. Yukio would be gone forever and nothing either of them could do would bring her back again. He would know…and he would try to destroy her.

So she sucked more heavily on him, reaching up to enclose the totality of his sex, using every technique she had learned to bring him pleasure. He gave up his grip on her, surrendering.

But, oh, how she longed to feel his lips and tongue on her as she was on him. In her mind’s eye she imagined it and shivered. Then she felt his fingers returning to the core of her and she sighed inwardly, feeling her sex like the heavy pulse of a second heart.

It began to rain as she reluctantly let him go. Immediately he moved atop her, his wet sex grazing her thigh and belly as he did so. Gently she took hold of him, guiding him. His mouth came down over one dark nipple, then another, back and form. She could not slow her breathing.

Thunder cracked overhead, approaching, and the rain picked up. There was virtually no wind and the rain came almost straight down, striking the smooth pebbles all around them in a muted roar. They could see nothing clearly but themselves.

Akiko rubbed him against her wet opening with the delicacy of a courtesan. She begged him not to tease her, yet her hands continued to tease them both, increasing the tension and them pleasure until it became unbearable for them.

With a burst of exhaled breath Nicholas tore himself from her gentle grasp and slowly moved into her. Akiko gasped and, shaking uncontrollably, arced herself up against him. She rubbed her wet flesh against his, reveling in the scrub of his hair against her body.

He hilted her and she felt connected to the universe. She felt all weight leave her heart, all hate melt like snow in the burgeoning heat of the first spring day, all blackness disappear from her sight.

She floated in the rain and the thunder like a slender reed on the riverside. Birds flew, calling, above her, the wind rippled all about her, the rain struck her and she bent willingly before its force. Water rushed by beneath her and small burrowing insects tickled her roots. She was part of the river, the forest, the sea shore, the depths of the world.

She plummeted and rose at the same time, night became day, then reversed itself. The cosmic clock beat in her ear, turning seconds into centuries, minutes into eons. Her breathing was the growth of bedrock, the metamorphosism of carbon into diamond, of fossil detritus into fuel.

She sighed and the seasons changed, she shuddered and new islands sprang into being across the bosom of the Pacific. She convulsed, crying out wildly as he shot and shot into her, as their loins ground together, as orgasm followed orgasm, and the world winked out in the blink of an eye.

The Blue Monster had changed cars three times on his way up north. The first time had been in Miami when Route 1 became I95. The second time had been in Savannah when the bastard and Alix Logan stopped to get a bite to eat. The third time had been just outside Beaufort, South Carolina. The Phoenix cipher machine was on a locking slide mount and was easy to move from vehicle to vehicle. Right now the Blue Monster would have felt naked without it.

The bastard drove like a sonuvabitch and the Blue Monster had to be doubly careful because this was strictly solo and there was absolutely no margin for error. If he lost them now it was all over for him; he knew that neither he nor anyone else would be able to find them quickly again.

He bided his time. He smoked unfiltered Camels and was patient, allowing the harsh tobacco bite to keep him awake. He took no pills.

The Blue Monster was far better than Croaker had anticipated and he arrived outside the hotel four-and-a-half minutes after Croaker and Alix Logan had disappeared inside the stone and glass lobby. It was an eastern chain hotel just outside Raleigh with an enormous tri-level shopping arcade across the six-lane highway off which its drive curled in a macadamed crescent.

Jesse James, the Blue Monster, pulled his cream-colored Aries K car off Highway 70.

He had spotted what he suspected was their car—a late-model maroon Ford four-door—and had made the turn from the middle lane, causing both voiced ire and the screeching of brakes and horns from those vehicles to the left of him as he slid across their bows, speeding toward the egress.

He lofted a rigid middle finger in their direction. After the incident five miles back he had no patience for any of these southern North Carolina hicks. The goddamned pimply kid in the dusty pickup with the straw cowboy hat and denim jacket, James thought as he rolled up into the parking lot. Probably wasn’t even seventeen and sure as shit didn’t know how to drive.

James spat out his open window. The kid was how he had come to lose the maroon Ford. Imagine. To come all this way on that bastard’s tail only to lose him at a goddamned stoplight because a candy-assed kid wouldn’t pull over to let me pass. James still seethed inside at the thought.

Then his keen eye had picked out the maroon Ford sitting in the hotel’s parking lot and he had made his move. He pulled into a space three cars down from the Ford and ambled out, stretching his legs. No point in hurrying now, he told himself pragmatically. Either this was their vehicle or he had lost them for sure.

His pulse rose as he saw the license plates. Florida. He came and stood next to the car, put the flat of his hand on the hood. Still warm. It was them all right.

He knelt down as if tying a shoelace and wiped the accumulation of mud that wily bastard had smeared across the plates, making a note of the letter-number combination. Then he rose and went up the stepped concrete path toward the hotel’s side entrance.

The young lieutenant’s name was Russilov, and the more Protorov saw of him the better he liked him. The man had initiative. The problem with most of the soldiers coming up through the strictly controlled Soviet system, Protorov thought, was that they lacked just that. Initiative.

They were all right if you gave them a blueprint. They’d follow it down to the letter or die trying. You couldn’t fault that kind of dedication. Unless you were in Viktor Protorov’s line of work. Then that kind of robotic thinking could blow a network, destroy a potential defector coming over from the other side, or expose the mouse in someone else’s house. Protorov had too many mice in other people’s houses to be satisfied with the grade of soldier that would normally be assigned to him. Bureaucrats were, of course, out altogether.

It galled him that he had to take this raw and basically unthinking talent and make it over. Beneath his skillful hands the clay of Mother Russia was reformed into individuals useful to the Ninth Directorate.

To that end he was headmaster of a school in the Urals. It was much smaller than the one the KGB itself ran—the one filled with American streets, American money, milk shakes and hot dogs, talk of the Yankees and the Dodgers, the Giants and the Dallas Cowboys. That was fairytale stuff and, besides, it had proven to be potentially dangerous. Too many Russian sleepers assimilated into American life via that school had failed to respond to their wakeup call. Life in the West presented a siren call apparently too seductive to resist for all but the most hardened personality.

Protorov preferred to keep the Soviet ethos very much alive at his academy while he expanded the minds of his pupils, broadened their outlook. In short, taught them to think independently.

The old bureaucrats in the Kremlin, had they known what he was up to, would no doubt have closed him down summarily. But the truth was they were afraid of the Ninth Directorate and afraid, especially, of Viktor Protorov. Besides, he brought them too many third world victories. It was too convenient for them to swell upon his most recent successes in Argentina, snaring England into an idiotic and draining war; and in El Salvador, egging the hawkish American administration on into what could easily become another Vietnam. They were not adept at examining their fears, anyway.

Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov was a graduate from Protorov’s Ural academy. But he was special in many ways. For one, he had graduated at the top of his class. For another, he had adapted superbly to the field. Protorov had found through bitter experience that academic life had little in common with the awesome pressures at work in the field. Many graduates did not make the adjustment and were “retired” to the Ninth’s bureaucratic section, where they never again came into direct contact with Protorov.

But
Gospadin
Russilov was different in another way. He was an orphan. Early on the State—or, more properly, Protorov—had taken him over. He was a reclamation project of the first rank.

Because Protorov was married to his job, and also perhaps because sex had never meant that much to him, there had only been one woman in his life. She was someone he would have preferred to forget but could not. Alena was the wife of a Jewish dissident. After Protorov, then head of the First Directorate, had sent Alena’s husband off to a gulag, he took her to bed. It had been far more pleasurable for him than he had ever imagined.

Whether it was because of the peculiar circumstances surrounding the incident or whether it was something within Alena herself Protorov could not say. He thought of himself as a basically dispassionate man, able to see clearly and objectively all situations. Yet he had never been able to fathom this one. It remained like a great ice floe, hidden beneath arctic waters, mocking him with its opacity.

But like it or not, Alena was all he had, in reality, and then, after he had her sent down in Lubyanka, in his memory. Until Russilov. Without quite knowing how it had happened Protorov had come to look upon his protégé as family. Son was not too strong a word to use. When Protorov retired from the Ninth, which would not be very long now, he knew that Russilov would run it well.

Now that he had received the signal from Colonel Mironenko that the KGB-GRU summit was scheduled for a week away, his time at the Ninth was coming to an end. But he had to have penetrated
Tenchi
by then. Tengu, his second agent inside the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu,
had been mysteriously murdered as he was escaping with the prize that Protorov had been seeking since he had received the information that that particular ninja
ryu
was safeguarding
Tenchi
’s written records. It was a frustrating setback, Protorov thought now. But not a fatal one by any means.

“Sir?”

Protorov looked up, his train of thought disturbed. “Yes, Lieutenant Russilov.” He liked the way the young man addressed him as “Sir” and not “Comrade.” Rank was important in the Ninth Directorate and, unlike the hypocrisy running rampant in the Kremlin, Protorov made no bones about it.

Russilov entered the soundproofed chamber through the vaultlike door. He held a sheaf of computer printouts in his hands. “I believe Sakhov IV has given us a clue after all.”

Immediately Protorov cleared his desk of paper, stacking files. Russilov set the sheaf down in the open space. It was open to the fourth page. Both men stared hard at the readout broadcast from the tracking satellite’s onboard computer. It showed a gridform geographical tableau approximately 150 by 200 kilometers. The land-sea area was quite familiar to the Russians. It was the section of sea between the northerly end of Hokkaido and the most southerly of the Kuriles, Kunashir. Part of that area was Japanese territory; part was a Soviet possession.

The young lieutenant’s finger stabbed out. “You see here, sir”—the pad of the finger roamed across the Nemuro Straits—“there is nothing. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Now”—he reached up and flipped to the next page—“just here.” His finger hovered over one small point in the Straits.

“What is it?” Protorov asked, knowing quite well what it was. He did not want to deprive Russilov of the fruits of his victory. That would have been unfair.

“An emanation of heat,” Russilov said. Protorov looked up at him for a moment. He had to give the young man credit. There was no triumph in his voice, though surely he must be feeling it. “Very strong.”

“Volcanic action,” Protorov offered. It was the most plausible explanation.

“Oh, this is much too localized for that. Besides, the known northerly fault is here.” His finger moved off to the southeast.

“I see.” Protorov sat back.

“What is it, then?”

“Tenchi.”

Oh yes, Protorov thought. That’s precisely what it was. Because they knew from reliable sources that
Tenchi
was some form of monumental industrial or resource project. What Protorov and his unit had been searching for all this time was some discrepancy. Now Protorov felt it was here. Then, as he glanced down at the readout, something else caught his eye. He did some rapid mental calculations, then mulled it over for a time before saying anything.