Angel Eyes (38 page)

"Is that all?"

"What else were you expecting?"

Tori glanced at Russell, then said to Deke, "Let's hear the rest."

"Cool," Deke said. "This here's a pellet of hafnium," he said, nodding at the pellet. "Good quality shit." He looked at Tori. "You have any more of this stuff to sell?"

"Not in the business," Russell said tersely.

"Can you give us some background on hafnium?" Tori said, before Russell's American aggressiveness could get them into trouble.

"No sweat," Deke said. He plopped the pellet into Ton's hand. "Hafnium is a by-product of zirconium mining. It's used to make control rods for nuclear reactors. These rods are like dynamic controllers, meaning they move in and out of the reactor core so that they can like absorb more or less of the neutrons given off by the atomic reaction. You like control the power output that way.

"Usually, boron is like used for the control rods, but boron wears out, and new rods have to be fitted. Hafnium's advantage over like boron and the other similar control rod substances is that it has an enormous capacity for absorbing neutrons. See, like the neutrons bombarding it change it into another substance which also has the capacity to absorb neutrons.

"Because of this property," Deke continued, "hafnium is used most often in like the nuclear reactors of submarines. The longer such a reactor can go without replacement, the longer the sub can stay underwater without refueling."

"What kind of time are we talking?" Tori asked.

"Boron would give you like maybe six months," Deke said. "But with rods of hafnium in your reactor, you could stay underwater like over two years.''

"Okay," Russell said. "You said control rods, but these are pellets. Does this mean what we have here is raw hafnium?"

"Solid choice." Deke nodded. "But wrong." He looked at Russell. "What you gave me to analyze isn't raw, dude. It's the refined, finished stuff."

''Yet it's not a rod. This must be some special stuff,'' Russell said.

"Uh-huh. Now you're in the loop." Deke's eyes gleamed. "This here's something better than a rod. It's a fixed poison. Meaning it's like part and parcel of the reactor's core itself. Which means that this kind of core is something new. I'd sure like to get my hands on it."

"You'll have to get in line," Tori said.

''I hear you, dudette.''

Russell said, "What would you use this kind of new reactor for?"

Deke shrugged. "Hard to say. A sub could stay independent for like five years, maybe more."

"Any other possibilities?" Tori asked.

Deke thought for a moment. "Well, with like a fixed poison of this kind of hafnium, I suppose it would be theoretically possible to construct a miniature reactor of a much higher potency than what we already have.''

"How potent?" Russell asked.

Deke scrunched up his face in concentration. "If you got the right brains together, I imagine you could come up with a backpack-size reactor that could-well, it could like power just about anything. Care to name your poison, dude?"

"Christ on the cross," Russell said sometime later. "One murder has taken us from a mission involving cocaine running to a multinational conspiracy to create the ultimate portable power source. Tori, imagine it! An atomic reactor you could carry on your back! Think of the possibilities!''

"I am." Tori shuddered. "And in this context they're all monstrous."

"Another bit of interesting news," Russell said. "According to the tests Deke ran, the cocaine being manufactured at Estilo's Colombian factory in the llano negro is normal, not the killer stuff the Japanese are manufacturing. So at least he's not involved in that side of it."

"Small comfort," Tori said.

They were sitting at a window table at a second-floor kissaten-one of thirty thousand such coffee shops in Tokyo-overlooking the trendiest street in the trendy Roppongi district. The decor was highly futuristic, both inside the kissaten and out in the street.

Red neon strips hidden by pink lacquer sconces that ran the length of the interior of the coffee shop lit stainless-steel sculptures of bonsai trees, waves, cranes in flight. Old symbols in a new medium. It was as if the Japanese, in stepping boldly forward into the future, were duty-bound to drag their past with them.

Outside, people passed like peacocks, their clothes so outlandish they could be considered costumes. Russell noticed that the futuristic domes were almost colorless: black, white, putty, simple hues that allowed the fantastic cuts and shapes of the blouses, skirts, and jackets to take center stage and, like sculpture, to make their own impact in the purest state.

"Tori," Russell said, "why is it that everything in Japan is a symbol?"

"That's not so hard to figure," Tori said. "The Japanese fixation on symbols is merely a reflection of their culture: say one thing, act another way. Too many people in too little space. And because of chronic earthquakes, the traditional housing construction was of wood and paper-easier to rebuild after a quake has leveled your house. But both these factors made for an acute lack of privacy. Did you ever try to tell someone a secret in a room whose walls are made of rice paper? Don't bother.

"In Japan, everyone shares, everyone is part of a series of groups, so it was natural that an elaborate system of politeness and protocol should arise. The obsession with symbols is an outgrowth of these things. A symbol is easily identifiable for groups, something happily embraced by many.''

"I'm with you so far, dudette," Russell drawled, and they both smiled. "But if you take the time to look behind these symbols, you find that they have no meaning."

"Right. And that makes sense, too, if you can learn to think like a Japanese. What is on the surface is to be admired, but not necessarily adhered to. As long as form and protocol are outwardly satisfied, what difference does it make what's really on your mind or in your heart? Under these circumstances, it's far better for the symbols to be meaningless. That way, there's no chance of an entanglement that could cause shame and loss of face."

Tori thought, I am so Japanese, yes. All the while I'm expounding like a professor on their culture, I am part of it, a living symbol. I am talking, hearing myself talk, but that is only the surface, the gleaming shell, all that I'm allowing Russ to see. To show him more would bring me shame, a loss of face.

Tori was trying desperately to come to terms with her own emotions. Ever since she had seen Russell in the Medellin corrida, about to die, something had changed inside her. She knew, deep down, that it was not merely a sense of decency or even guilt that had motivated her to leap into the corrida, climb upon the bull's humped back.

And later, in the 727 on the way to Tokyo, when he had burst in on her, had held her while she was racked with the pain of the trust she had lost in Estilo. She had been so certain that Russell would reprimand her, push her face into the uncertainty that now loomed before her: could she trust any of the network of friends she had so slowly, so painstakingly nurtured, cultivated, relied on? Her network was her eyes and ears on the clandestine movements of the world. And now that that network had so clearly sprung a leak, now that she was bleeding, was the time for the Russell Slade she knew to hit her, hit her hard, so that he could at last wrest the reins of control from her. Because she had been convinced that this was Russell's weakness: he was a control freak, and the fact that she had her own way of running a mission drove him crazy.

And yet... Russell had not acted in character. Just the opposite, in fact. He had been gentle, kind, understanding, all traits she could not reconcile with the Russell Slade she had known in the past.

The fact was, she had gotten a great deal of pleasure from driving Russell crazy. And the fact that she was so obviously successful with her unorthodox methodology should have shown him his own weakness as clearly as if it were a mirror. It hadn't. She hadn't counted on his stubborn streak-and the depth of his weakness. Control was everything.

Tori had promised herself on the day he had severed her from the Mall, that one day she would create a laboratory experiment where Russell's sense of control was stripped from him.

This new mission had presented just the opportunity she had been looking for. Since it was clear Russell and Bernard were desperate to have her back, she had decided to exact her revenge on Russell. The field was the greatest laboratory she could hope to find. There was no control in the field, where one was continually bombarded with the randomness of life. The only problem was that she had herself forgotten how random a mission could be, and events had not gone as planned.

For one thing, Estilo had betrayed her. For another, Russell had turned out to be far more clever and resourceful in the field than she ever could have imagined. She had maneuvered Bernard Godwin into ordering Russell into the field with her just so she could show him up as the desk jockey he was, to send him back to Mail Central humbled and defeated by his incompetence. But, Tori thought, that's not how it's turned out.

She had been increasingly impressed by his expertise, his bravery under fire, both psychological-at Cruz's apartment-and physical, at the cocaine factory in the llano negro. And then in a stunning display of courage, he had challenged Cruz, throwing himself, weaponless, into the corrida in Machine-Gun City.

My God, she thought, sitting across from him in the second-floor coffee shop in Roppongi, this can't be happening. I don't know this man at all. Russ has been my rival, my enemy. Who does Bernard love most, me or Russ? That's the way it's been ever since Russell came on board-at least, I'm convinced that's how he's seen it. Bernard Godwin, the Mall's eminence grise, has been our surrogate father, and like disputatious children we've been yelling ''Choose me! Choose me!" at the top of our lungs.

Staring at Russell across the table, watching him drink his ten-dollar cup of coffee, Tori could no longer see him as the man who had outsmarted her at every turn at Mail Central. I'm supposed to hate this man, she thought. Haven't I hated him from the moment he severed me? I hate him; I don't, I can't possibly—

But she could not even think it, and with an inner convulsion, she turned her thoughts in another direction, any direction to distract herself...

She remembered a time at Diana's Garden in L.A., late in the day, when the shadows grew long and as dark as plums, her favorite time, lazing by the pool after a ninety-minute workout on the board and in the water. She was in her second year of junior high, and Greg was a sophomore in college, home for Easter.

She was staring up at the glazed sky. Greg was at her side. She could feel him, his coolness close to the heat of her own body. She liked that he was always cool, always a contrast to her warm skin, because often, when she looked in his face, it was like staring into a mirror, two pairs of identical angel eyes reflecting.

Her workout had not been enough to calm her on that particular day, and Greg had caught her crying.

"What's up, Tor?"

"Nothing."

"You're crying over nothing?'' He grunted. "That's stupid.''

"I'm not stupid."

"I know."

She looked up, almost shyly. "I'm having a hard time in Russian. I can't seem to understand it at all."

"Don't give up on it. It's important to him that we know Russian."

"Uck!"

It had always seemed an enigma that her father, so desperate to be part of American society in so many ways, also wanted not to lose his Russian heritage. It was he who had insisted she take Russian instead of French, the elegant language most of her friends took. Russian classes were filled with nerds with Coke-bottle-bottom glasses, thick necks, and pimply faces. She hated them, and she hated the language in which nothing seemed to make sense. She thought she'd rather study Martian.

"You have a test today?" Greg asked.

"Mid-term. I got sick and threw up before I took it. I think I might have failed it."

''You've got to apply yourself,'' Greg said, stretching into the last patch of sunlight on the coping. "It's easy if you try. Everything's easy."

''For you, maybe."

"For you, too. We're not so different as you think."

"But I don't understand a thing!" she wailed. "I've gone to every class, I take notes, but I don't know what it is I'm writing."

"Maybe it's the teacher, then. Who've you got?" Having graduated the same junior high six years before, Greg knew everyone.

"Mr. Broker."

"Broker sucks," Greg said. "I'll go have a talk with Bob Hayes, the principal, tomorrow after classes. Hayes knows what a prick Broker is. Peter Borachov's the best Russian teacher. I'll get you transferred to his class."

"I'll still hate it."

"Don't be a dope. It's neat. You'll like it, I promise."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Gee. Great!" And just like that. Tori's insoluble problem had been solved. It had taken Greg to come up with the answer. Greg always had the answers.

All of a sudden that afternoon was so peaceful, so perfect. But not for long. Greg, laughing, rolling over, reaching out, taking her with him into the pool. Down, down, down, into the water, Greg's wide, powerful hand pressed against the top of her head, keeping her deep in the water while the air running out burned her lungs and a kind of animal panic gripped her so that she flailed out with her arms and legs and, at last, as she began to cry, feeling the weight come off her, Greg lifting her upward into the air and the light.

"Stop! Stop! Stop! Don't ever do that again!" She could remember him peering into her face while she wept and gasped, until she said, "Why are you looking at me?"

"To see your face change," Greg said.

"How did my face change?" Tori asked, wiping away her tears. This was an altogether grown-up conversation, and she had already forgotten her fear and her anger.

"I can't tell you," Greg said, "but I can show you." He put her hand on his head. "Push me down into the water. Don't let me come up."

"Greg, don't be stupid. Why should I want-"