Steel Breeze (23 page)

Bell
remained as still as a statue but for the deep focusing breaths. His shoulders
did not move with those cycles, only his stomach, his center of gravity where
he gathered the
Qi
. His hands rested on the insides of his thighs, and
he gave not the slightest sign that he had heard the command. Not a word, not a
move, not a tick of the head. But he listened so very closely to the texture of
Fournier’s footsteps as they moved across the concrete and the grass mats. The
room became an acoustic chessboard as he stared at the blank wall tracking Fournier’s
unseen progress across the grid of mats. If he did nothing he would soon feel
the cold muzzle of the gun between his shoulder blades. He imagined how hard it
must be for a man as impulsive as Fournier to resist shooting someone who had a
sword strapped on after all those victims of the blade. But Bell was presenting
an indefensible opportunity for a kill shot. Forensics would show that he had
been shot from behind while kneeling. It was impossible to make a threatening
gesture in such a position. And yet, Shaun Bell knew that in his Zen silence, immovable
as a rock, he was broadcasting an air of menace as thick as a curtain of
incense.

There
was only one more thing he needed to hear, and there it was, the sound of Pasco
jogging down the stairs and coming up behind Fournier. These lighter footsteps veered
off to the left behind him. Pasco sounded a little winded when he said, “I know
your motive, but what you don’t know is you’ve been killing the wrong people. I
have proof.” Bell let these syllables wash over him like birdsong, or the
barking of a dog. The sounds arose, vibrated the air molecules in the room, and
vanished into emptiness. There was nothing in them that could lure him off
balance, no wind in them that could stir the deep waters of his mindfulness.

There
were
katas
for every configuration of opponents, forms that began from
sitting, from kneeling, from standing, with opponents front and back, or at
angles, but all of the traditional forms were designed for use against
opponents who were themselves swordsmen, who would need to come in close to
strike. Now Bell was drawing two gunmen in close, and he expected that within
less than a minute he would be dead. There was a temptation to surrender to
this knowledge. If he died here now, he would not have to kill the boy.

But
expecting death and reconciling himself to death did not mean that he was
willing to
give
them his death. They would pay dearly for it because he
was a Spirit Warrior, and a samurai.

Bell
felt the latest inhalation reach the root of his central channel, then, rising
on the winged heels of its release, he spun around—a motion he had practiced
thousands of times in the days since he’d been a gangly teen in California: the
opening of the
kata Ushiro
. In one fluid motion the orientation of his
body changed, pivoting on the anchor point of his right knee, his left coming
up at a right angle to the floor as he stomped his foot forward, his blade
flashing through a high horizontal arc that sliced Fournier’s eyeball open like
a grape, then bisected the bridge of his nose where a ribbon of blood streamed
out in its wake. Accelerating again once freed from the minor resistance of
cartilage, the blade swung out to the uttermost limit of Bell’s reach where it
nicked Pasco’s wrist as he recoiled in a reflexive shielding gesture. It was a
fatal mistake for the second cop, who should have stepped back and fired, but
he’d been thrown off by the sudden need to dodge steel where less than a second
ago there had been only a kneeling man facing a wall.

Fournier
dropped his gun and staggered backward, half blind and howling, pressing his
hands against the gushing laceration on his face. Bell came up into a standing
pose, swinging the sword around in a whirling motion that in the
kata
would have been a blood throw, but now became a kind of rechambering, bringing
the blade overhead for a downward killing stroke.

Pasco
regained his balance and dropped into a stable shooting stance. Bell spun on
the ball of his anchored left foot and launched a side kick into Pasco’s gut, causing
him to buckle forward. The gun went off, punching a hole clean through Bell’s
still airborne calf, the bullet ricocheting off of the concrete floor with a
spark.

The
wound was painless at first, but Bell soon felt a scorching sensation spreading
through his leg as he brought the blade down. The kick that had caused Pasco to
buckle at the waist had also presented the back of his neck like a gift. Bell brought
his foot and blade down in synch, and sliced through it.

Pasco’s
head hit the floor before the rest of him. Twin jets of blood sprayed from the
severed neck as the body collapsed.

Fournier
was screaming. He had witnessed the decapitation with his good eye and was now
scrambling across the floor, trying to retrieve his gun with the hand that
wasn’t holding his sliced eyeball. Blood burbled over his trembling lip,
spattering out ahead of him onto the floor, propelled by his ragged shrieks. The
crawling man was an even easier target, and Bell took the second head off with
a leisurely sweep, sending it tumbling across the slick crimson floor, the hair
and mustache picking up thick arterial blood.

The
samurai surveyed the carnage and listened for the sound of sirens. The street
was quiet for now, but he k
new he would soon hear
them. Casting his gaze over the blood trail, he made eye contact with Pasco’s
lifeless head where it had rolled up against the wall and now stared into
eternity. What had the man said about killing the wrong people? Weren’t
all
victims the wrong people from a cop’s point of view? There was no time to linger
here. If one of them had called for backup, or if other police knew that they
had been heading to this address, the place would be swarming soon.

He
had to leave the house, had to get back to his car, back to the boy.

The
paper crane.

He
couldn’t just leave it here now for Sensei to find. The
kanji
would mean
nothing to the police at first, but it wouldn’t take long for that to change. It
was a coin toss now, who would arrive at this house first: Sensei or more
police.

Bell
limped to the workbench and popped the latch on the little metal first-aid kit.
He splashed some Betadine on the bullet hole in his calf and then pressed a
square of gauze against it. Blood poured down his leg, but it didn’t look like
Pasco had hit an artery or shattered the bone, and fortunately the slug had
gone straight through. He doused a second gauze pad with the disinfectant,
pressed it to the exit wound, where it adhered to his bloody skin. Forgoing
medical tape, he rummaged through a cardboard box of rags for a flannel shirtsleeve
to bind the dressing. The wound didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should
until he tied the rag tight.

He
walked to Fournier’s body, rolled it over, checked the pockets, and found a
cell phone in the fat man’s khakis. A quick scroll through the Recent Calls
list showed nothing within the past hour. Little reassurance, when the shots
might have been heard by a neighbor. Bell popped the battery out of the phone,
aware that he was leaving fingerprints but too hurried to care. His prints were
all over this house, and the game would soon be over. Moving to Pasco, he found
a notepad, another phone, and a folded sheet of printer paper in the inside
breast pocket of the man’s sport coat, along with an FBI card in a slim wallet.
In this phone’s memory, Bell found a more recent call to someone named Drelick.
Recent enough to have been made after Fournier fired the shots in the stairwell?
He didn’t know. This was a more expensive phone and the battery wasn’t
accessible, so he walked it over to the tidy little workbench in the corner
where two blows from a ball-peen hammer rendered it untrackable.

He
left the sword where it lay on the mat, stuffed the folded paper from Pasco’s
coat into his back pocket with the origami crane—the thing that had brought him
here in the first place and that he could no longer risk leaving behind—and
climbed the stairs.

There
was no sign of police on the street, and Bell didn’t think it would be subtle
when they arrived; they would come in howling and blazing.

I
have proof
,
Pasco had said.

Bell
couldn’t wait. He needed to know. He tugged the paper square from his pocket and
unfolded it. It was a printout of an obituary from a newspaper archive dated
December 6, 1953. Rear Admiral William Sterling “Deak” Parsons. Bell skimmed
over what he already knew: Parsons’ tenure in the Manhattan Project and his
role in the flight of the
Enola Gay
over Hiroshima on August 6, 1942. His
eye shot down to the last line of the article, which had been underlined in
wavering blue ink: “He is survived by his father, brother, half-brother and
sister, his wife Martha, and daughters Peggy and Clare.”

Daughters.
Only daughters. No son, no direct descendant to carry on the family name, no
connection to Phil Parsons, or Sandy or Lucas. The daughters, and any children
they may have borne, were the last branches of the Admiral’s family tree.

He
and Sensei had been pruning some
other
Parsons tree.

Sensei
had boasted about the years of research he had done, but for all Bell knew he
had selected his targets by flipping through the nearest phone book.

And
how carefully were the victims at Hiroshima chosen?
The women and
children who were grateful to drink the radioactive black rain to quench the
thirst in their roasted bodies. Hiroshima had been chosen over another city at
the last minute because the weather there was clearer. Better for the cameras. But
the United States
had
warned the local population, had urged them to
evacuate one of the last cities that hadn’t already been immolated in jellified
gasoline by a relentless flock of B-29s. Yes, he had studied the history, but
maybe he hadn’t read enough, and now he was out of time.

I
killed the wrong man.
Phil Parsons. He could see the man’s intestines
spilling out in a coil of bloody rope on the freshly cut grass, the look of
terror in his eyes like an animal cornered in a slaughterhouse. His own guts
twisted at the memory, but the fasting of recent days had left him with nothing
to vomit. He put his hand against a support pipe for balance, folded the paper
in his hand, and shoved it back into his pocket. He climbed the stairs, hurried
out the front door, and limped down the sidewalk to his waiting car, his mind
reeling, his breath accelerating. Was the Tibbets family that Sensei had
butchered in Ohio even related to the pilot, the man who, in naming the bomber
after his mother and in naming the bomb Little Boy, had once and forever
identified himself with the murder of eighty-thousand people? There was nothing
a Spirit Warrior could do to rival that act. No number of innocents slain by
the sword would ever stir the needle on that black scale.

Bell
pressed the button on the key fob and heard the mechanism in the door of the
black Saturn sedan turnover as he approached. Maybe it had been fate that led
the detective and the FBI agent to him and prevented him from leaving the crane.
He could still free Lucas Carmichael.

He
scanned the street, north and south. Nothing stirred. The warm air was silent,
the neighbors all at work or school. Listening for sirens, he could hear the
faint purr of an engine approaching; and taking cover behind a tree, looking at
the crest of the hill where a mirage of liquid vapors pooled on the pavement,
he saw a white car rising into view with a HERTZ frame around the license
plate. It slowed to make the turn into the driveway. Bell ducked into his own
car and slid down low, his head concealed by the seatback. He put the key in
the ignition, but wouldn’t dare start the engine until Sensei was inside the
house.

Only,
Sensei didn’t make the turn into the driveway. Watching the car in the side
mirror, Bell imagined the old master sniffing blood on the air, sensing some
wrongness in the scene. The white rental car crawled forward, leaving the house
and driveway behind. Without pausing to think, Bell cranked the key, revved his
engine, and gunned it out into the street ahead of the other car before it
could block him in.

Chapter 23

 “Mr.
Masahiro, it’s Desmond Carmichael. Thank you for helping me again. Forgive me
for being brusque, but have you seen the image yet?”

“Yes.
I heard about your son on the news. Do you think this
kanji
was sent by
his kidnapper?”

“I
do. Please don’t talk to anyone about it. It could be my only chance of finding
him.”

“Of
course. There are two words this time.
Castle
and
Maze
.”

“
Castle
and
maze
. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m
afraid I don’t know.”

“Okay.
Thank you. I have to go.”

“Good
luck finding your son.”

Desmond
paced the kitchen. He wanted to run out the door, wanted to get in his car and
burn rubber, wanted to punch something, anything, and break it. The restless
need to move, to overcome this ignorant impotence was too much for him. He had
to focus, had to think.
Castle
. He and Lucas called the playground “the
castle playground,” but that wasn’t the name on the sign. Still, their stalker
might know what they called it. Lucas might have even told him about the place.
If so, that was maybe a sign that Lucas was still alive. But what was the maze?
There was no maze at the playground.

“Where
is there a castle and a maze?” he said to the ceiling.

And
then a little miracle happened right there in the apartment kitchen, in the
deepest ditch of despair. His associative mind kicked in and started flashing
connections at him, the way it did when he was solving a problem in a book:
maze,
maize, corn, corn maze
. And a shadowy corner of memory was illuminated. He
had taken Lucas to a corn maze last year. They had almost gotten lost in it. It
had been around Halloween, at that old farm with the apple orchard and the
haunted house that Lucas was too young for.
Palace
. Pain Palace, or
something. And wasn’t
palace
another word for a
castle?
Now he
did start to run. He swept up his keys from the kitchen counter and bolted for
the front door but stopped short when he saw the sheathed
katana
poking
out of the old milk can that held their umbrella. An officer had returned the
sword to him shortly after the FBI agents had left. Now he stared at the cursed
thing. He had never cut so much as a watermelon with a sword. But this was the
only weapon in his possession. He would call the cops on his way to the farm,
but he needed to leave now.

He
wrapped his hand around the hilt. These people who had Lucas were trained, and
he was an overweight desk jockey who got winded when he mowed grass. But he
took the sword anyway because it was all he had, and he hoped that desperation
might trump skill when it mattered most.

He
was locking the door behind him with the sword nestled between his elbow and
torso when he heard the slow gravel crunch of a car rolling to a stop. He looked
up but didn’t recognize the vehicle: a little silver Scion. Then he saw the
veil of reddish-brown hair swinging around as the driver climbed out, and
there, striding briskly across his lawn, her white shirtsleeves rolled up to
the elbows and her gun at her hip, was Erin Drelick, taut determination in her
eyes. Desmond was surprised by the slight sexual charge he felt when she
stepped up close to him and her sapphire eyes pierced him. Maybe his
ruminations on vengeance had sparked an infusion of testosterone.

“Hey,
Joe,” she said, “Where you goin’ with that sword in your hand?” And Desmond
could hear the next line of that modified Hendrix song:
goin a kill my old
lady.
But he hadn’t killed his old lady with this sword, and she knew it.

“You
came back,” he said.

“I
changed my mind at the last minute.”

“Why?”

“I
think today is a significant date for the killers.”

“Killers…plural?”

“The
more I think about it, the more it makes sense that there are two of them. I
think one got everyone he was after in Ohio, but today is important to them, and
Lucas needs me here.”

“Follow
me,” Desmond said, unlocking his car.

“Seriously,
Desmond, where were you going with the sword?”

He
hesitated for a couple of heartbeats, but she was quicker than that. “They sent
you another message, didn’t they? Was it haiku, or calligraphy?”

“Calligraphy.
A clue about where Lucas is.”

“Where?
Where is he?”

“I
won’t let anyone tell me to let other people handle it. Not the cops, not you.”

She
looked at the sword. “We can ride together, but I can’t let you bring that.”

“Then
you’ll have to follow me, because I’m bringing it.”

She
sighed. “Desmond, you’ll get yourself killed. Have you ever cut anything with a
sword, like
ever?
”

“No,
but I’m not going unarmed.”

She
patted the sidearm at her hip. “Consider yourself armed.”

“Not
good enough.”

She
laughed. “Read much history? The gun beat the sword a while back.”

“I’m
going with a weapon. You can follow or not.”

She
squeezed his shoulder as he tried to step past her and looked him in the eye. “There
is no time for this,” she said. “I have information about what’s motivating
these people, and there’s a chance I can divide them against each other because
even by their own sick logic, they’ve made horrible mistakes. Now you can waste
precious time and risk Lucas’s life by keeping me at a distance, or we can ride
together and I’ll fill you in so you understand what you’re walking into. But
you have to leave the sword behind.”

Desmond
looked at the wretched thing. How many people had it killed in the war before
it came into his life? Now he wanted to kill the men who had taken Sandy with
it. Sandy, who had used the breath in her lungs and the blood in her veins to
do good, to nurture her child and support her dysfunctional husband and help
perfect strangers. Those men had taken her breath and blood and spilled them
out irretrievably into fathomless darkness for nothing. Desmond wanted more
than anything to kill them, and if they had taken Lucas from him too,
God
forbid the glimmer of that possibility
, if they had taken his son…then he
wanted them to take him too, and he didn’t need to be a samurai to charge into
death, he just needed to make them bleed before he followed his family over the
horizon.

“You’re
not a character in one of your books,” Drelick said. “This isn’t some hero’s
quest.”

She
was right. He wasn’t a hero. He was a sad, middle-aged man who had squandered
precious years with a family who loved him because he was off chasing windmills
in his imagination, and maybe he deserved to die for that. And maybe he’d get
to see Drelick pop one of the bastards before it happened. She pinched her left
pants leg and pulled it up to reveal another small gun strapped to her calf. “If
we’re in a firefight, I’ll arm you, but anything less than that I will handle
myself.”

Desmond
trotted up the steps, opened the door again and dropped the
katana
back
in the milk pail.

* * *

Shaun
Bell knew how easy it would be to get lost on the back roads where a dead end
could trap him. The low speed limits in this sleepy, hilly neighborhood where
small farms and schools were the only things to break up the long stretches of
wooded suburbia would draw attention to him if he sped through, and the last
thing he needed was a series of calls to the police with descriptions of his
car and partial plate numbers. With this in mind, he made his boldest maneuvers
right at the outset, hoping to lose the old man and then blend in on the longer
stretches of road. He raced through the first few empty residential blocks,
blowing the stop signs and pushing the pedal to stretch the distance between
his car and Sensei’s. Then, with a cut across a baseball field, he veered onto
the route that would take him east to a juncture where he would have to choose
between the Palace of Pain and the highway.

He
glanced at his eyes in the mirror: they were feral, electric. At least he had
an American face and no sword in the car. His sword was hidden in the corn
stalks, waiting. He felt sweat prickling in his armpits, and he marveled at how
none of these fight-or-flight reactions had plagued him while dispatching the
two cops. It was the presence of his master bearing down on him. The old man
wasn’t much of a driver, but he had more than enough reckless bravado to make
up for it. Bell could see him now, roaring out of the baseball field, dragging
a cloud of brown dust onto the pavement.

He
remembered that his driver’s license showed Sensei’s address. He fished his
wallet out of his jeans pocket, arching his back and pushing the accelerator
down in a burst of speed, then tossed the entire wallet out the window into the
trees. He crested a hill and, throwing caution to the wind, gunned the engine
into the trough, flying forward on a surge of gravity and gasoline.

The
juncture in the road was coming up at the yellow blinker a half-mile ahead, in
front of the fire station. Left to the old country road that would take him
over the river and out to the Jensen farm, or straight for another mile to the
I-95 entrance ramp. Was there any chance that he could make it all the way into
the back roads of rural Maine before the police discovered the bodies and
barricaded the interstates? He punched the radio on and scanned for news
channels. With a gas-station map and a little luck, he could burrow into the
woods two states away, break into a vacant cabin, and wait for things to settle
down while he plotted a course for the Canadian border.

The
radio was finding only music and letting the controls and the noise scatter his
attention wasn’t worth the trouble. He spun the dial down, slowed just a little
at the blinking light in case a cop with radar was hidden in the brush—slow but
not slow enough for Sensei to think he might be turning—and cruised straight through
the intersection, past the road to Lucas Carmichael, and on toward the highway.

His
hands were shaking on the steering wheel. Sensei had been close enough to see
that the boy wasn’t in the car, unless bound in the trunk. Bell watched the
mirror and almost ran off the road into the ferns and the litter-strewn gravel
gutter when he saw Sensei slow at the blinker and turn onto 110 toward the
bridge over the river, toward Heather Road, toward the maze where Lucas was
bound and waiting.

He
knew!
Just as he knew every feint, every strike and parry when they sparred, he knew
his apprentice and could anticipate Bell’s moves. “Don’t look at my blade,”
Sensei had taught him. “Look at my eyes and you will know where the blade is
going.” Bell gunned the gas and launched the little car forward, scanning the
trees for a turnaround.

* * *

The
morning humidity had gathered high in the darkening sky above the cornfield,
the thick, cloying air prescient of a storm. Ash-gray tatters of cloud trailed
down to touch the horizon in the north where it was already raining. When the
storm rolled in it would be driven by the lash of summer lightning, but for now
there was only a distant rumble of thunder like the rolling of
taiko
drums
droning under the sawing of cicadas in the sun-bleached stalks. No wind stirred
the corn until the two cars came roaring to the edge of the field, trailing
dust and startling the crows to flight.

Shaun
Bell sped past the maze entrance where his
katana
lay concealed in the
cornstalks. He hit the brakes; the car slewed sideways in the dirt and almost
crashed into the rickety porch where a neglected ticket-taker’s podium stood
wrapped in cobwebs both real and theatrical. Sensei’s car screeched to a halt a
few feet behind him. Within a heartbeat, the old man was out the driver’s door
and advancing with his sword drawn, the pale blade glowing in the diffuse
evening light.

Bell
stepped backwards toward the wooden arch that invited patrons to TOUR A WORLD
OF TERRORS. His other sword, not as good as the one in the corn, not as sharp
and maintained, was deep inside the building, in the Japan room where he’d used
it for his act. He might reach that sword before Sensei cut him down. It was a
slim chance but at least he would be drawing the old Spirit Warrior away from
the maze. Bell took a step backward onto the creaking boards of the farmhouse
porch. Sensei stepped forward slowly, matching him step for step, stalking with
the trance-inducing eye lock of a predatory beast. Neither man was dressed in
the traditional garb—no belts and skirts to hold scabbards. As Sensei
approached, he lowered his sword to waist level, the hilt pointed at his
target, the blade held at an oblique angle that made the killing edge difficult
for Bell to see. It could flash out at any angle, at any second.

“We’ve
been killing the wrong people,” Bell said.

Sensei’s
face—etched bronze framed by a curtain of silver and black hair—was impassive
yet menacing.