Angel Eyes (59 page)

He arrived in Arkhangelskoe free of ticks, and skirted the magnificent estate, the birch forest, but he did not park in the lot outside the insane asylum. Instead he pulled into a badly rutted dirt track that cut diagonally through the forest and switched off the ignition.

He sat listening to the ticking of the hot engine. The bluebirds and cardinals sang in the trees, the insects droned and whirred, life went on here no different than it had the day before, than it would the day after. If only that were true for Valeri Bondasenko.

Valeri pulled open the locked glove compartment, extracted the handgun. It was of West German manufacture, and extremely reliable. He slid it into the waistband of his trousers. It was uncomfortable there, but that was good, he thought as he began his nerve-racking trek toward the grim Victorian facade of the insane asylum; it would remind him of what had to be done now.

He took out a slender switchblade with a long, wicked blade. He tested the action of the blade, then strapped the knife in its sheath to the inside of his wrist.

If he was expecting a contingent of KGB Border Guards to have surrounded the place, he was mistaken. By the time he arrived near the front steps, he had almost convinced himself that Natasha was still holding on, that she hadn't spilled everything in her mind into their laps. He said a little prayer as he turned away from the main lobby, entering the building through the rear service doors.

He was immediately hit by the familiar noxious odors, but he was too concerned to be repelled. He went quickly up the south staircase to the third floor. He stood just outside the door to the floor corridor, peering through the meshed square of glass. In a moment he saw a plainclothes man coming in his direction. Valeri ducked back into the stairwell. The man passed by the door, and Valeri watched him as he went into his daughter's room.

His heart sank. Natasha was as good as dead. She had told them everything she knew. Poor Natasha.

The only good news for him was that it appeared that she had just been broken, otherwise all entrances would have been guarded, the place would have been surrounded. Time was running away. He knew that the Border Guards contingent must be on its way.

Valeri opened the door, looked first to his left, the direction from which the KGB man had come. The corridor was clear in that direction, but to his right another KGB man stood guard outside his daughter's room.

His heart thundering in his chest, Valeri ventured out into the corridor. He walked directly up to the KGB man, said, "I'm looking for Dr. Kalinin. Have you seen him?"

The KGB man opened his mouth to reply, and Valeri depressed the stud that opened the switchblade, shoved the blade between the man's third and fourth ribs, in a slight upward tilt so that the blade pierced his heart.

The KGB man's jaws snapped together as he collapsed into Valeri's arms. Valeri dragged him quickly across the corridor, parking him just inside the door to a room occupied by a comatose woman in her eighties. He went through the KGB man's pockets, taking his ID folder, his weapons.

He strode swiftly, confidently, back across the hall and through the door to his daughter's room. The second KGB man looked up, said, "Stop where you are," then looked down in astonishment at the hilt of the knife buried in his chest.

He went down on one knee, but still had the presence of mind to draw his pistol. Valeri kicked it out of his hand. The KGB man grabbed Valeri's foot, twisted it from the heel.

Valeri felt himself going over, and the man was upon him. Blood was seeping from the wound in his chest, but Valeri could see how his aim had been off. The man's sternum had been pierced, but the bone had taken the brunt of the wound.

His hands were around Valeri's throat, and Valeri used his knee, kicking the man in his crotch. Pink froth flew from the KGB man's mouth, and his eyes almost bugged out of his head. He growled like an animal, but did not relinquish his stranglehold on Valeri's throat. His spatulate thumbs were pressing into Valeri's windpipe.

Valeri used three kites to the man's rib cage, felt it stave in on the third blow. The man toppled to the floor. Valeri scrambled to his feet, went to the bed, gazed down at the placid face of his daughter. He was never so happy to see her. Bending down, he scooped her up, stepped over the body of the fallen KGB man.

He peeked out into the corridor. It was clear. He ran to the stairwell, headed downstairs. It took him seven minutes to ferry his daughter out of the asylum, back to where the car was hidden among the birches.

Then he hurried back. There was more to be done.

He skirted the building, heading around back to the long, sloping lawn. He looked back toward the open doors to the main lobby. There was the usual activity, with nurses passing this way and that, some with their charges in wheelchairs, others shepherding slow-shuffling figures in tatty robes from one corridor to another. There was a clot of doctors to the left who seemed to be huddled over a chart.

Valeri saw Dr. Kalinin among the clot of doctors and, at almost the same moment. Dr. Kalinin saw him.

Valeri saw the doctor's face go white, then he began to surreptitiously edge away from his colleagues, away from the spot where Valeri stood.

Valeri ran down the lawn toward the bench that overlooked the large birch tree where he always sat with his daughter. It was empty. He turned, looked beyond the tree, toward the birch forest, and he saw to his horror the young man with the strawberry birthmark on his cheek running from two plainclothes men. The young man was heading toward the forest, but Valeri could see that he was not going to make it.

Valeri drew his pistol, went down on one knee, held the gun in both hands. He sighted, squeezed off one shot, two. Both the KGB men fell.

"Comrade!"

He heard the shout behind him and whirled. Dr. Kalinin had come down the back steps onto the lawn. He kept shouting, pointing at Valeri. Valeri shot him. Dr. Kalinin threw his hands into the air as he spun around. By the time he hit the ground face first, Valeri was already off and running toward the forest of birch trees.

He crashed into the underbrush, then was within the woods, the light dimmer, speckled with deep shadow. The rich scents of moss and humus perfumed the air.

"Halt!"

Valeri came up short.

"Hands!"

Valeri raised his hands.

"Stay right where you are or you will be shot!"

In a moment the young man with the strawberry birthmark emerged. "Valeri!"

Valeri put down his hands. "You gave me a start, Sergei!" Valeri's voice was filled with relief. "What are you doing waiting around here?"

"I wanted to make certain you got away clean," Sergei said. "That was some shooting, comrade!"

They laughed together, clapping each other on the back, but Sergei quickly sobered. "What has happened?"

"Come," Valeri said, leading him through the forest. "The KGB picked up Natasha."

"But how? How could they know about her? If there is a leak of such proportions, we're finished."

Valeri found the rutted dirt track, followed it back toward where he had hidden his car.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he said, but Sergei could see the concern on his face.

"This is Volkov's doing," Sergei said. "I can smell his duplicity from a mile away." He shuddered. "That charm of his. How many people he has gulled."

And, of course, that was when Valeri thought of Irina.

Deke was no problem. He was a scientist, not a hero. Koi left him hanging by his ankles in the lab at the back of his tattoo parlor. His face was purple, bloated beyond any easy recognition, but it looked a good sight better than did his body.

Twenty-two minutes, Koi thought as she emerged into the teeming nighttime streets of Shinjuku, from the time I walked in there. She had been fascinated by the smells in the lab: formaldehyde, sulfuric acid, acetone. They spoke to her of death and destruction by increments, breaking down the building blocks of life one at a time. She had used some of these substances on Deke, rubbing them into his skin as if she were in the process of pickling him.

Koi rode the subways, advertisements everywhere: on long cards overhead, on banners hanging at eye level, even on the straps standing passengers held on to while the train was in motion. Koi read them all, but they were meaningless to her. She was outside of time, traveling down her own dark tunnel even as the train she was riding snaked through the tunnels beneath the city.

Her mind was empty, her expression approaching the one of the mask of the god that had so entranced Big Ezoe: the combination of ecstasy and despair. But not yet.

She emerged onto the street near Hammacho Station. The killing ground.

In her mind a roll of thunder. Big Ezoe saying, We must punish Hitasura for his transgressions against members of my family. We must destroy Tori Nunn for her part in all this. She murdered Fukuda.

Deke had told her how Tori Nunn and a man named Russell Slade had come to him with a pellet he had identified as hafnium. They had returned later, along with Hitasura. The two men were carrying Tori Nunn. According to Deke, she had been poisoned by a complex organic doku, a toxin, usually lethal, whose main elements had been distilled from monkshood and the poison in fugu, Japanese blowfish.

Fortunately for Tori Nunn, she had been exposed to a very small amount of the doku. That, combined with her own inner resources, had prevented her from dying immediately. Deke had prevented her from dying at all. According to him, she was recuperating in one of Hitasura's safehouses near Hammacho Station. Deke had not wanted to give Koi the address, but she had finally persuaded him. By that time he had looked like meat ready for the slaughter.

Koi found the house with little difficulty. It was one of those expensive postmodern ferroconcrete structures, angular, minimalist, higher than it was wide, with windows inset like those of a medieval castle, and a heavy iron gate fronting a tiny courtyard dominated by a slender cryptomeria tree, a bonsaied dwarf juniper. A powerful grouping of rocks provided the negative space, and thus made the courtyard appear far larger than it actually was.

She spent forty-five minutes watching the house from all angles, noting who walked by and what cars passed on the street in front of it. Parking on this street was nonexistent. No one was loitering about, but she knew that Hitasura's men must be hidden somewhere. She understood that she must solve that puzzle before she could confront the one waiting for her inside the house: how to kill Tori Nunn.

Less than an hour after she had arrived in the vicinity, Koi spotted the first of Hitasura's street men. It had taken him quite a while to make a second circuit of the block, which meant-as she suspected-he was not the only one guarding the house.

Koi watched his movements, thought with a little luck she could avoid him. Her instinct from the moment she saw the house was to get to the roof, and now, an hour later, the roof was still her first choice. The front door was out of the question, and when she had made her way around to the rear of the house, there was a vehicle with two of Hitasura's men stationed at the back entrance. Besides, for security reasons Hitasura was sure to have put Tori Nunn on a top floor.

Two more of Hitasura's men were waiting for her on the roof. They heard her only when she was very close to them. She broke one man's neck instantly, but the other one, she saw, was going to be a bit of a problem. He was a bull of a man with a bald head and an evil look in his eyes. He grinned at her, ignoring his fallen comrade. He beckoned for Koi to come to him.

Instead she melted into the shadows on the rooftop. The bald man looked around, then unfurled a kyotetsu-shoge, a particularly nasty weapon composed of a chain with a spiked ball on one end, a curved double-edged blade on the other. He began to whirl the spiked ball around as he made for the spot where she had disappeared.

When he reached the shadows, Koi had had sufficient time to work her way around behind him. She leaped at him, slamming her elbow into his side, then locking her forearm across his throat.

It was a mistake.

The huge man bit into the flesh of her forearm with such force that his front teeth scraped the bone.

Koi stifled a cry, whirled off him. The bald man swung his weapon at her, and she rolled as the spiked ball slammed into the tarred roof where she had just been.

Immediately it struck and missed; he reacted, arcing the double-edged blade down at the spot between her eyes. Koi swung left with her head, kicked right with her feet. The soles of her shoes cracked the bald man's shins just below the knees.

His legs buckled; he reached out instinctively to break his fall, and Koi took up the double-edged blade of his kyotetsu-shoge and slashed his throat.

Now she had the roof all to herself. The thick layer of industrial smog that had caused the pollution alert blurred the lights of the city, running the colors together so that Tokyo seemed embedded inside a giant clamshell. The sky was the largest sheet of mother-of-pearl she had ever seen.

From up here she had a good view of the Hammacho Station itself, where so many customers embarked and debarked each day. The overhead rail lines shone like quicksilver as a train pulled into the station. Crowds surged forward. Koi turned away.

She tore a piece off the bald man's shirt, wrapped it tightly around her forearm to stop the bleeding. When she was satisfied, she took a careful look around her immediate environment. There was a small raised ferroconcrete structure in which was set the metal door down into the house, but she did not want to use it. Too vulnerable. If she were caught in the narrow stairwell, there would only be one way to go: back to the roof, and that could all too easily prove to be a deathtrap.

On the other hand, all the windows were illuminated by the streetlights, making it far too risky to seek entrance through any of them. But during her initial reconnaissance she had spent some time studying the facade of the house, and thought she had noticed a vulnerable point: a small pebbled-glass window in back-probably leading into a bathroom-that was in the shadow cast by a large building opposite. It was too small for a man to get through, but she thought that she might be able to make it.