The Miko - 02 (79 page)

Nicholas took his sidearm, searched him thoroughly for other weapons. He found a knife on the inside of the Russian’s left calf. “Now you’re going to get me out of here.”

“Impossible as well,” Russilov said and, when Nicholas tightened his grip, said hurriedly, “No, it is the truth! There is an electronic scanner. Prisoners are stamped with an invisible mark that is renewed every week. If we were to walk or drive out through any gate you would be fried—I along with you if we were in the same vehicle.”

“There must be some way to get it off prematurely,” Nicholas said.

“There is,” Russilov nodded. “Protorov knew how. Only Protorov. You’ll never get out of here, with me or without me.”

Nicholas did not despair. He had been taught to infiltrate and he knew that there was a way out of every manmade structure, just as there was a way in.

“Quickly,” he said, “tell me about this place.”

Russilov complied. The building that Protorov had chosen as his base had originally been a barn complex which he had converted to his own uses. There were two exits and, as Russilov had said, they were useless to Nicholas. Stone walls had been erected inside the wooden ones, one extra story had been built, which was where they currently were.

Russilov laughed low in his throat. “There’s nowhere for you to go but up, to the parapets. From there you may leap into the dense woods, my friend. Perhaps you will not die; perhaps you will be lucky and the fall will only break your legs!”

Nicholas’ mind was racing. It was conceivable that Russilov had described his way out.

“Out now!” he commanded. “And whoever we run across must not become suspicious, is that clear? If you raise your voice, you die; if you make an unaccounted-for move, you die. Clear?”

The lieutenant nodded.

Outside in the hallway, they saw no one. The two lieutenants had taken the doctor downstairs to a detention cell. Russilov led him toward the stairs up to the roof. On the way, they passed a number of bamboo and aluminum poles perhaps fifteen meters in length.

Nicholas stopped him. “What are these for?”

“Bamboo groves all around here,” Russilov said sullenly. “Farmers used to store and age these here. The aluminum ones were for anchoring fledgling stands against the winter winds.”

“Take two,” Nicholas ordered. And when Russilov did so, said, “No, the bamboo poles.”

On the roof Nicholas commanded the Russian to strip, ordering him to spread out each item on the stones. In the meantime, employing Russilov’s knife, he cut the bamboo poles in half. Then he set about cutting off the arms of the lieutenant’s blouse and jacket. He cut his trousers in two, took the laces from the boots.

“What are you doing?” Russilov asked, huddled naked in a corner.

Nicholas said nothing. He sliced the Russian’s heavy leather belt into four long strips. Using these and the boot laces, he set to work constructing his scaffolding. Then he attached the pieces of cloth. He worked with the loving concentration of a father constructing his child’s first kite.

What in fact he had made was a
hito washi
, what some ninja called “the human eagle.” It was a makeshift glider.

When he was finished he walked back to where Russilov knelt. Stripped of his uniform, his rank, he seemed to have shrunk in size. Like many military men, he very nearly had ceased to exist without the armor of his command.

“Good-bye, Russilov,” Nicholas said, bending down and touching the
juka
, one of the
kyukon
, the nine organ meridians. This one was just beneath the ears. Russilov immediately collapsed, unconscious.

Then Nicholas mounted the
hito washi.
There was a fair wind blowing from the southwest, gusty and unpredictable. He shrugged mentally.
Karma.
He was enormously tired and he wanted to sleep badly. Soon, he thought. Be careful now.

He mounted the stone parapet. There was no moon and his chronometer had been taken from him. It was deep into the night, the early hours of morning. It was not yet that peculiar time of predawn when a special tinge of nameless color comes into the world, but he did not know how long dawn would be in arriving.

Two good gusts came while he was still working out the vectors. Then, as he set himself, the wind died to a tickle on his face. Come on, he thought. Come on!

His hair began to ruffle, he felt the temperature drop on his bruised and purpled skin. Strengthening. Such an ephemeral thing, you could not even see it. He closed his eyes and felt it.

And when his body told him it was time, he used the powerful muscles in his legs to launch himself into the dark, dark void. Spinning for a moment, plummeting. Then he corrected and caught a substantial updraft.

Soared into the night like a bat.

Akiko picked Koten up at the
rotenburo
and followed him out of there. He had arrived emptyhanded and he left with a long, polished wood case. To Akiko, whose eyes were trained for such things, it appeared to be a weapon’s case. Judging by its length it could contain nothing but a
dai-katana,
the longest of all the
samurai
swords.

Deep in the shadows, she stiffened. Koten had passed through a squat ellipse of lantern light and she had gotten a good look at the case. It was the same one she had seen open in the garden between Nicholas and her husband. Koten had Nicholas’ sword!

Car followed car. But because there was little traffic this late at night Akiko was forced to douse her headlights, using peripheral illumination, as well as the twin ruby taillights of Koten’s car, to aid her. Once or twice, when the road wound up a hillside, she thought she had lost him. But each time as she crested, the lights reappeared.

This was farm country—very rural—and she had to be careful not to be spotted. But the sky’s darkness that hindered her also aided her for it made Koten’s vision behind him that much more difficult.

Not more than thirty minutes after they left the
rotenburo
, Koten’s car abruptly slowed, turning left onto a hardpacked dirt lane that immediately disappeared in underbrush.

Akiko quickly pulled onto the side of the road and got out, following on foot; she could not chance taking her own car in there—the noise alone could alert her quarry.

Because of the narrow twisting nature of the path she had no difficulty in keeping Koten in sight. In a small clearing bordered by great stands of whispering bamboo, he drew up. Men were all about and she was close enough to hear what they were saying. Nicholas had escaped!

But what of Sato? She had not been at the
rotenburo
for long enough to find out anything of substance other than that a man—apparently a patron—had been killed in a mysterious auto explosion. Who?

She did not know. Koten had come, distracting her; but even so she would not have been able to ask questions without arousing suspicion. Japanese society was extremely clannish. There was a fierce community spirit. She did not belong here; a stranger asking questions about what might easily be a murder—what was in any case an unexplained death—would be noted and the local police notified. Akiko could not afford such scrutiny.

But now she had to wonder. They had spoken only of Nicholas. Not one word was spoken of Sato; his name simply never came up.

To Akiko this led to one inescapable conclusion: Sato was dead. Perhaps it had been he who had died in the car explosion; or again perhaps he had died here at this forested place. It did not matter; part of her revenge had been taken care of for her. That did not make her particularly happy—she would have preferred to exact her own vengeance—but she resigned herself to the reality of the situation.

Nicholas was now her target. She turned away from the edge of the clearing, beginning to quarter the area immediately surrounding the clearing and its central building which looked so much like a barn but which she was certain was not.

At length, to the southwest, she found the remnants of the
hito washi.
She hunkered down, fingering it, admiring the workmanship. She laughed low in her throat. Then she set off after him.

Of course Alix had tried to stop him. She had called him everything from a madman to a moron; she had even cried and, at the end, begged him not to go.

By all this Croaker surmised that she was genuinely afraid for him. But he was not at all sure. After all, she was a consummate actress, making love to the camera every day when she worked. She could turn on or off any emotion as easily as she applied mascara each morning and wiped it away at night.

But then it occurred to him that she had no earthly reason to act in this case. What would she get out of deterring him from flying off to Washington besides seeing him safe? She knew full well who it was who had tried to kill him or at least who had ordered it. The same person who had now contracted for both their deaths, breaking his oath to her.

C. Gordon Minck, the man before whom Croaker now stood.

“Where the hell are we,” he said looking around at the leafy patio, “the goddamned African veldt?” He did not like the edge to his voice. But he was frightened, not only of this man and the power he wielded to cut off pursuit, to twist the law to his own design, but also of what he himself was thinking of doing to Minck.

Minck contrived to laugh and Croaker glared at him, his tightly controlled emotions flaring. “I ought to kill you right here with my bare hands,” he said low in his throat.

Minck was still trying to recover from seeing a man standing next to him who up until just a moment ago he believed dead and buried at sea. He put one hand tentatively up to his temple, as if with that gesture he could press away the pain that now throbbed there like a traitor.

“You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, Lieutenant.” It was the best he could do for the moment; he needed some time to marshal both his emotions and his thoughts. This day was rapidly turning into one of the worst in his life and he was determined to give his full attention to it lest matters deteriorate even further. He gestured. “Please sit down.”

“Which one of these chairs is mined?” Croaker said with a sneer.

“Just what’s that supposed to mean?” Minck said despite himself. He had promised himself that he would not vie with Lieutenant Croaker on his own base ground. But the pain in his head was unsettling him.

“You’ve tried to kill me three times; you’ve tried to kill Alix Logan twice. What else would you expect me to say walking in here?”

Minck sat heavily down. He groaned inwardly as the pain increased. His heart rate was accelerating. “What are you talking about?” His voice was a trifle shaky, his face pasty beneath his rich tan. It was only now that the true gravity of the situation was beginning to dawn on him. Croaker’s expressed threat echoed in his mind like a taunt. How had he managed to miss this tinkering?

Croaker, observing all this, was curious. The edge of his anger had dulled. “Alix and I were pursued out of Key West. Once in Raleigh, North Carolina, and once in New York City, we were attacked. That’s attempted murder, Minck.”

Minck shook his head. “I don’t understand this,” he said to no one in particular. “I never sanctioned Mix’s death.” He looked up, as if abruptly aware of Croaker’s presence. “I would never do that. I told her I wouldn’t. You must believe me.”

Words, as Croaker knew well, were cheap. But there was something in Minck’s eyes, a kind of pleading, that caught him. He saw that somehow Minck, who through Alix’s eyes he had come to see as a master spider spinning his unbreakable web from the absolute sanctity of the nation’s capital, was enmeshed in a gray area just as he himself was. Suddenly they were both lost, both confused as to which direction was up, who was good, who bad. In that moment, their adversary position had somehow been dissipated. For the first time since he had entered Angela Didion’s plush apartment and found her naked body as cold as ice, Croaker began to see that there was more here than one model’s murder. Much more. “Then who did?” he said gruffly.

And Minck was forced to another inescapable conclusion. To whom had he given over custody of Alix? Who had he entrusted to keep her safe from all harm? Tanya Vladimova, that’s who. The same Tanya who had been gone from the building—God only knew where—for the last forty hours or so.

He grabbed up a phone, asked for a trace on Tanya’s movements during the last three and a half days. He was immediately patched through to the ARRTS computer. He repeated his question and waited impatiently for the answers. When they came, he stared openly at Croaker.

“Tanya,” he said slowly.

“Who the hell’s Tanya?” Croaker asked.

“She’s the woman who sanctioned both your deaths,” he improvised, telling a half truth. Something had begun to spin inside Minck’s mind. One dark and tiny satellite that needed some space and time to grow. The germ of an idea. The beginning of a massive salvage job. A kind of miracle, even, if such things actually could be said to exist. Minck did not believe in God so therefore it followed that he could not believe in miracles. Until this moment, perhaps.

In a more normal tone of voice, he said, “About Alix. Is she all right?”

“She’s confused, angry, frustrated, and maybe her life’s been ruined by all this crap but, yeah, she’s essentially okay.”

Minck found some genuine solace in that. If he had suspected for any amount of time that he was merely indulging himself by keeping Alix Logan alive, he now dismissed such thoughts entirely. The relief that swept through him went deep indeed.

He took a breath, but before he could continue, Croaker said, “Don’t think for a minute I’ll tell you where she is, though. If you make any move against me now, she’ll go straight to the State’s Attorney General with everything she knows. I know you can’t afford that. You’ve gone to great lengths to prove it.”

Minck paused for a moment as if weighing Croaker’s words. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll propose a truce…a kind of bargain, if you wish.”

“What kind of bargain?” Despite observing Minck’s genuine feelings for Alix, Croaker was a long way from trusting this man.

“What I propose is this. I will not harm you or seek to find Alix’s whereabouts, unless she wishes it, of course. In return, you will sit down and listen to what I have to tell you and consider it carefully.”