The Miko - 02 (64 page)

Saunders’ head turned. “Sit on it, you clowns,” he said
sotto voce
, “we got company.”

They all turned their heads, saw a trenchcoated figure coming down the corridor. None of them liked what they saw.

“Oh, holy Christ,” Spinelli said under his breath, “it’s a fuckin’ woman.”

“Gentlemen,” she said as she came up, “who’s in charge here?”

“Detective Sergeant Harry Saunders, ma’am,” Saunders said, taking a step forward.

“At ease, Sergeant,” she said with a straight face, “I’m not about to make a grab for your clusters.” She took a quick look around. “Anything been touched here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“He’s just as you found him? Exactly?”

Saunders nodded and then swallowed, angry at himself for being dry-mouthed in front of this woman. “Can I ask what your, er, affiliation is?”

She turned away from him, running her gaze carefully across the area immediately surrounding the body. “You may ask your captain that, Sergeant Saunders. He may be more willing to assuage your curiosity.”

Saunders clenched his teeth, biting back a sour comment while Spinelli smirked at him from a distance.

“Sergeant.” She was kneeling down now beside the corpse. “I won’t need your help anymore. Why don’t you and your men retire to the barricades and assist with crowd control. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Saunders said with exaggerated politeness and, turning sharply, jerked his head at the other three, who followed him silently down the faintly echoing corridor of the mall to where their units, red lights flashing, were parked.

When they were gone, Tanya Vladimova confirmed her initial I.D. The body was, indeed, that of Jesse James. Quickly, she opened up a small kit and set about taking a set of prints off the bloody glass shard that still pierced James’ chest. For the first time she allowed herself to think of what had gone wrong. But she knew the answer without having to go through any process at all.

It had been foolish to allow Alix Logan to live. Foolish and, from a security point of view, sloppy. But men were weak, she thought now, even a man as powerful and intelligent as C. Gordon Minck. It had been Minck, after all, who had insisted she be kept alive, over Tanya’s vigorous protests.

And not for any humanitarian reasons, but because he had been making love to her on a regular basis, flying into Key West on clandestine weekends when he was supposed to be sailing his boat on the Chesapeake. Like Scheherazade, Alix Logan had wrapped Minck up and in so doing had stayed the date of her execution.

“Pajalsta zameretse no myeste, Gospadin Linnear.”
Please stay where you are, Mr. Linnear.

He saw the gun muzzle looming dark and impossibly large.

“If you make a move I will shoot you dead.”

Nicholas was not giving away any knowledge he had of the language so he took a step in the direction of the gun. The night exploded for a second time and a clot of asphalt screamed upward, erupting in flying fragments so close they stung his ankles and calves.

“I know you can understand me,
Gospadin
Linnear. The next shot will take off the top of your head.”

To his left the twisted remains of the rental car lay partially on its side. Smoke coiled about its stark sculpture like a loosed cage of serpents.

Nicholas’ body had twitched when he had heard the muffled explosion, the reaction of an animal in flight for its life. Skidding out into the night, he had confronted the dying flames of the initial fireball. Blackened parts of Seiichi Sato lay smoldering in three separate spots on the tarmac. Rain pounded it all—charred flesh and scorched metal—into rivulets black against the black of the parking lot.

Immediately he had ducked back into the concealing shadows of the
rotenburo
’s cedar eaves. The Russian, with a sharp eye and even sharper ear, had found him anyway. Nicholas suspected that this had been the one who had executed Phoenix after Koten had incapacitated him.

He was carrying one of the newest of the Kalishnikovs, the AKL-1000, a short doublebarreled shotgun that threw anti-personnel projectiles. It was so compact it could be used with one hand. There was absolutely nothing Nicholas could do against it.

So he came out into the night and was pelted by the rain.

“That’s better,” the voice said, still speaking Russian. “Now I don’t have to guess where you are.”

“With that thing all you need is a guess,” Nicholas said.

“Precisely.”

Nicholas could see him now, a tall square-shouldered man—most probably a soldier, judging by his bearing and gait—in a long, black-belted raincoat. He wore no hat and Nicholas could see his face clearly in the harsh spill of the overhead lights: beak of a nose below brows that would in middle age become beetling and would dominate his rather handsome face. Now that face was dominated by wide-apart pale blue eyes.

The Russian smiled thinly. “I am interested in intelligent men…no matter what their ideological perversion.” His head gave a formal nod. “Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov.”

“I was expecting Protorov.” He had only words to work with at the moment and he intended to make the most of them.

Russilov’s face closed down, his amiable expression wiped away. “What do you know of Protorov?”

“How did you know I spoke Russian?” Nicholas countered. “Let’s have an exchange of information.”

The Russian spat, gestured with the AKL-1000. “You’re in no position to bargain. Move out farther into the light.”

Nicholas did as he was told. He sensed movement behind him in the doorway to the building, and a moment later Koten emerged. He looked transformed. In the bad light it appeared as if his already considerable girth had been added to, his shoulders enormously wide, humped with unnatural muscle. Then, as he came out from beneath the dripping eaves, Nicholas saw that he had a body slung across his shoulders.

Using a short stepping trot he moved easily with his burden, keeping away from Russilov’s line of sight, finally depositing the body at the Russian’s feet like a retriever.

“The ninja is beyond reclamation.” It was odd to hear him speaking Russian. “That one”—he shrugged in Nicholas’ direction—“hit him once too often.”

Russilov did not even glance downward. “Did you find it?”

Koten held up a tightly rolled oilskin pouch. It looked minuscule in his huge fist. “It came out of him when he died.” And then he laughed, a high-pitched squeak, seeing the Russian’s hesitation. “Go on, take it.” He proffered the thing in his open palm. It looked no less tiny. “The rain’s washed it clean.”

Quickly, with his free hand, Russilov pocketed the cylinder. And there goes
Tenchi
, Nicholas thought. He remembered Sato’s words,
They have the power to destroy us
—
all of us
—
if they discover
Tenchi. What
was Tenchi
that its infiltration by a foreign power could ignite a world war? Nicholas knew that he must find out. And soon.

Koten’s dark eyes slid toward Nicholas. “Shall I take care of him now?”

“Keep away from him,” Russilov said sharply. Koten glowered at him.

“You’ve just lost him face, Pyotr Alexandrovitch,” Nicholas said.

“The two of you are far too dangerous to pit one against the other.”

“Really?” This exchange was beginning to interest him. How in the world did this KGB operative know so much about him? “Surely you can’t have a file on me. I’m a private citizen.”

“Oh?” Russilov’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Then what are you doing here?”

“Sato-san and I are—were—friends as well as business partners.”

“And that’s all.” The Russian’s voice was brimming with irony.

There was no point in keeping things at this level. “That car bomb couldn’t’ve been meant only for Sato. There’s no way you could have been certain that just he would be at the car when he opened the door.”

“If you went, so much the better. As long as we got this”—he patted the pocket where he had dropped the packet—“we didn’t need either of you. If our agent had been intercepted—”

“By Phoenix or myself.”

“Oh, I believe Koten here would have found some way to deter you. But as I was saying, had our agent been intercepted, we would have brought you in.”

“If you want to live,” Nicholas observed, “you’d do well to shoot me now.”

“I plan to.”

“Then you’ll never know the modifications we recently made in
Tenchi.
”

“We?” For the first time Russilov seemed uncertain.

“Why do you think Tomkin Industries is merging one of its companies with Sato Petrochemicals? Not for the sheer pleasure of it, I assure you.”

“You’re lying,” the Russian said. “I don’t know anything about this.”

Of course you don’t, Nicholas thought. But you can’t be sure. And if you don’t get me to Protorov it might be a grave error. Time is short; this is no time to blunder.

“Well there
is
something you don’t know then.” Part of his training had been in speaking. Just as
kiai
was used as a war shout to terrify and, in some cases, paralyze one’s opponent, so there was a more subtle offshoot,
ichi.
In this case it meant “position” because of what the wielder could accomplish with inflection and intonation. It was immensely difficult to master. This, combined with the fact that
ichi
was often affected by outside factors beyond the wielder’s control, made it virtually a lost art. Akutagawa-san had, among other things, been an
ichi sensei
and he had seen in Nicholas an apt and willing pupil. “I was beginning to think of
Gospadin
Protorov as omniscient.” He thought that
ichi
just might save his life now.

“Kill him,” Koten growled. “Shoot him now or I will kill him for you.”

“Quiet, you,” Russilov said. He had not taken his eyes off Nicholas during the entire exchange. He cocked his head. “Come here, Comrade Linnear,” he said as thunder rumbled east to west above their heads. The rain beat down on them, silvered as it spun through the lights. “You are going to get your wish, after all.”

And Nicholas thought, Protorov!

T
HIS IS HOW AKIKO
came to save Saigō’s life and how he paid her back in kind. The autumn of 1963 was a cold and dismal one, filled with an inordinate amount of rain, sleet, and even snow, premature and the color of silver, dying upon the ground like stranded carp.

Already, in Kyūshū, where Sun Hsiung sent Akiko for the next phase of her training, the farmers were hard at work atop stained wooden ladders, spinning delicate cocoons of retted linen gauze over their precious trees to keep them from winter’s harsh hand.

It was unusual to see them at this so relatively early in the year, and like the unpredictable inclement weather it boded ill for the coming winter, whose expected virulence had been spoken of in hushed whispers throughout the countryside ever since summer evaporated overnight like woodsmoke.

Mist shrouded this part of Kyūshū so thoroughly that upon her arrival Akiko could discern neither Mount Aso nor the giant smokestacks of the vast industrial complex sprawled through the valley to the northwest of the city.

She hated Kumamoto immediately. Once in feudal times perhaps it had possessed a certain charm, but in these days of Japan’s mighty economic leap forward the blued patina of industrial wastes coating the old buildings were merely a reminder of how tiny a backwater Kumamoto really was.

Nevertheless Akiko had resigned herself to be here at the
Kanaka na ninjutsu ryu.
Its symbol was a circle within which were nine black diamonds. Within the open heart of them was the
kanji
ideogram
komuso.
And when she saw it she knew: the
Kuji-kiri.
Black
ninjutsu.

There was difficulty, even with Sun Hsiung’s personal chop affixed to her letter of introduction. The
sennin
, an ax-faced individual who appeared to be almost unhealthily thin, let her cool her heels for fully half a day before he summoned her within his chamber.

Then he was most effusive in his apologies. In his eyes Akiko could discover nothing, not even the basic spark that distinguished human beings from the less sentient creatures of the earth. And alone, kneeling before him on a bare reed
tatami
, she began to feel at last a sadness she needed some time to identify. At length she was surprised to discover that she missed Sun Hsiung, and part of her wished that she had never left his warm and comfortable house.

And yet there was a stronger, more urgent desire which had driven her from comfort and warmth. It was her
karma
to be here now, she knew that as well, and did not question it. Acceptance was all she had of her own now.

For his part, the
sennin
despised her on sight and silently cursed her former
sensei
for evoking his right of privilege here. There was absolutely no question of sending her away though the
sennin
wished most fervently for such an occurrence.

His only hope, he correctly detected, was if the training here—and the life—were too rigorous, too taxing both emotionally and physically for this woman. He shuddered inwardly and tried not to think about her presence here, the inevitable disruption of discipline and ritual her
wa
would cause.

Even now he could sense the peculiarly female flux of her spirit, experiencing it almost as a painful interruption in the confluence of forces he and those beneath him had labored so long and hard to perfect.

Therefore he smiled as benignly as he was able and with an inward exclamation of delight consigned her into the care of the one pupil who, at the very least, would drive her out of Kumamoto.

The
sennin
watched unblinking as she bowed formally and rose. As he watched her retreating back he smiled to himself, his thoughts on the best of possibilities regarding his newest student’s fate: that Saigō would destroy her.

Not literally, of course, for had that occurred the
sennin
would have lost enormous face with Sun Hsiung and that he could not have tolerated. No, no. If he knew anything about his pupils, he had chosen correctly. There was a peculiar and somewhat frightening demon which rode Saigō’s back, its talons sunk so deeply that the
sennin
had given up trying to exorcise its presence.