The Nicholas Linnear Novels (111 page)

This was in her mind as she came across the polished floorboards, feeling their supple springiness beneath her white socks. She had left sandals and cloak at the door, after first locking it from the inside. No one else was here, no one would come; there was only the two of them now.

Ishii became aware of her only when she was very close. The particular
irimi
he was working on had been one whose perfect execution had eluded him even after months of the most diligent practice. Still, he was not frustrated, nor was he angry at himself. He had just come to a decision to pass on to another variation when his break in concentration revealed Akiko.

His head came up, sweat sparkling like dew across his black, close-cropped hair. He bowed immediately, voicing the traditional greeting, “
Ikagadesuka,
Oku-san.”

Somewhat distantly, Akiko returned it.
“Hai. Okagesamade. Arigatogozaimasu.
” It was schoolgirl’s rote, that was all. “Tell me,” she said, “are you as assiduous in your work on the merger as you are at
aikido
?”

“I do what is asked of me, Oku-san.”

Akiko gave the top of his head a bleak smile. She could see his scalp, burnished as brass. “And that is all that you do?”

At the last upward inflection, Ishii’s head lifted and his deceptively soft brown eyes gathered her in. For an instant Akiko felt like an image upon a plate, developing. Then he blinked and the sense was gone. “I am not a robot, if that is your meaning,” he said deliberately. “I create for the company as well as serve it.”

“In what way?”

“With my mind.”

“You are an impudent man,” she said coldly.

“My apologies, Oku-san.” He bowed again. “Please forgive me.

Her lips curled upward and she held out a hand, closing her fingers around the stave. She pulled, and he took a halting step closer to her. She made him aware of her as a woman in the way she stood, in the attitude of her head; her expression recalled the moment of his searching look on her wedding day. She melted into him.

“This is what you want, isn’t it,” she whispered into his ear.

She felt how startled he was at her aggressive stance and laughed to herself. He was pulled by the conventions of his mind, drawn by her heat. It was his moment of indecision.

Using that, she broke the stave across his right shoulder with a variation of the
iai
draw, too swift to see clearly. His mind was stunned, his body immobilized at the same time.

Now a part of her felt sorry for him. Kneeling, bent and broken before her, without even uttering one animal mewl of protest, where was his maleness, his traditional superiority? He was nothing now: not an image or an icon, not a protector or a provider; he was, she saw, not even an enemy. He was merely a means to an end.

His face was raised toward her. His skin was covered in pristine beads: the sweat of pain. His ragged breath broke from his partly open mouth like the sigh of an engine winding down.

For a long time Akiko stared down at him while all manner of thought flung itself like rain in her mind. Then she withdrew her blade, seeing its long, gleaming length mirrored in his eyes. She felt his terror and thought, There are no more warriors left in the world.

Then, with neat precise swipes of her
katana
, she cut off his feet.

When the long black Mercedes slid to a halt, the driver came around, opened the rear door, and Seiichi Sato emerged into a morning sparkling with dew. There were two other men with him besides the chauffeur; as was the custom with all VIPs in Japan, he never went anywhere without them. This time, though, he bade them stay where they were inside the car.

Alone, he walked slowly up the pine-needle-strewn path into the precincts of the Shinto shrine where he had gotten married. This was part of his weekly pilgrimage. If he was in Tokyo, no matter the weather, he would make the trek to the lakeside.

Far below him he could see the bright white dazzle of sunlight off the water through the thick stands of pines and cryptomeria.

On his way up to the inner sanctuary Sato passed beneath the crimson-lacquered
Myōjin torii
gate and, just beyond, paused to drop something in the offering box. Reaching just above it, he pulled the rope that rang the sacred bell which would awaken the resting
kami
who dwelled in this place and alert them of the presence of the arriving supplicant.

Inside the main sanctuary building, Sato knelt before the tables laden with offerings. Grouped around the tables were carved figures of sitting archers, spearmen,
samurai
wielding
katana.

Before the closed doors of the inner chamber wherein the
kami
resided stood the
Gohei
, a wooden wand with bits of folded paper hanging in zigzag fashion from it. Beside it was the
Haraigushi,
the purification wand, a small branch from the sacred
sakaki
tree.

Above, banners depicting the clouds and the moon hung, indicating the presence of the
kami.
Draped from one of the standards which held the banners was a brocaded cloth in which were hung the sword and jewels as well as the shield and halberd of the shrine. These were symbols both of the power of the
kami
in matters of wisdom and justice, and of protection against evil.

Centered directly below the banners on the table was the sacred mirror which was perhaps the most important and certainly the most mysterious element in the Shinto religion. It was thought to reflect the cleanest light, to be able to reflect everything as it truly is and not how we would wish it to be.

Did not the
Jinno Shōtōki
say that “the mirror hides nothing. It shines without a selfish mind. Everything good and bad, right and wrong, is reflected without fail.” Was not the Sun Goddess’s divine spirit captured in just such a mirror hung outside her cave.

Now Sato knelt before the mirror and, peering into its keen eye, was bathed in its clear light. And as he did so he wished for peace of mind and spirit, he wished for the deep and abiding sanctuary of thought symbolized by the gleaming lake far below. He summoned up the
kami.

In moments, a peculiar kind of peacefulness stole over him that he had become accustomed to from his earliest days. And he felt as if a connective bridge had been spun out of the ether between his essence and that of his honored father. The elder Sato had come to this shrine almost every day of his life, and when Seiichi was old enough to walk his father had taken him, along with Gōtarō.

Even as a young child Seiichi had been enraptured by this place. While his older brother had fidgeted and yawned by his side, Seiichi had begun to feel the presence of the place steal over him like a mantle of refracted light from the mirror.

And when his honored father had died, he had made his own pilgrimage after the funeral rites here, down the narrow rocky path which he and all the guests at his second wedding descended many years later, to the shore of the lake. Mist was still rising off it then so that it appeared as it must have eons ago at the dawn of Japanese history, prehistoric and pure.

It was only as he stared at the gently rippling skin of the lake that Seiichi had reconnected with his father’s
kami.
And so he came here regularly to be as close as he could come to the history of his family.

He needed all their accumulated wisdom now to see him through this maelstrom. It seemed as if all his world were collapsing around him. Thirty-seven years to create, and then in the span of little over a year they were on the verge of ruin. How had it happened? He could not say, even with the supposed help of aftersight. Perhaps they should never have become involved in
Tenchi
in the first place. But the government had made manifestly clear the potential rewards if the project were successful. With the
keiretsu
in the position it was in, just outside the charmed circle of Japan’s top seven companies, we could not resist, Sato thought now.

But even though the government was pouring the country’s money into
Tenchi
, still there were an enormous number of peripheral costs that the
keiretsu
was expected to absorb. It was their duty, and there was simply no question of charging them back to the government. Over sixty million dollars had been outlayed by the
keiretsu
in the space of fourteen months, a terrible drain on any corporation, no matter how large.

Tenchi
, Sato supposed, was one of the major reasons Nangi had allowed their expansion into international banking in Hong Kong. Actually, Sato had been against such a move from the start. The thought of the vagaries of the Crown Colony’s financial fortunes filled him with trepidation. It was tantamount to putting your foot in a bear trap and waiting for it to spring shut.

But Nangi had insisted, and Sato had felt compelled to acquiesce to his will. After all, they did need an immediate infusion of money, both for
Tenchi
and to offset the loss of capital from their steel works. So many idle hands and nothing to do with them but pay them their wages and their benefits while the plant ran at 70 percent capacity. Now Sato was close to a deal to sell off the
kobun.
The price would give them only the most modest of profits, but at least they would be out from under that saddle.

But that might not be enough now. The Tomkin deal was in limbo until Linnear returned, and Sato had had the most awful feeling in the pit of his stomach ever since Nangi had gotten that call from the All-Asia Bank in Hong Kong. He had been most unforthcoming about the nature of the call, but his hurried trip to the Crown Colony boded ill.

Sato read the papers, he knew what the Communist Chinese’s repudiation of the treaty with Great Britain had meant to the Colony, and he had gritted his teeth as, day by day, his worst fears were borne out. Real estate and banking were the two mainstays of Hong Kong’s economy, and he knew once the first went, it was merely a matter of time before cracks began to show in the other.

Just how deeply has Tony Chin sunk us? he asked himself. Oh, Amida! I pray he has a cautious nature. I pray we are not caught in the bear trap.

But Sato knew that he and Nangi were already in one kind of trap and it was closing inexorably about them with frightening rapidity. What Linnear-san had called the
Wu-Shing.
Sato shuddered inwardly. Three deaths. Kagami-san,
Mo,
the tattoo; Yoshida-san,
Yi
, cutting off the nose; and now Masuto Ishii, found in the gymnasium with his feet cut off. Sato strained to recall. With a sickening lurch that set his gorge to rising, it came to him:
Yueh.
The ideogram was a merging of those of knife and foot.

What was happening to the
kobun
? The company was dying around him, and unless Linnear-san found a way to stop these murders he and Nangi would be finished. For there were two more murders left in the
Wu-Shing
ritual, and it did not take a genius to determine who the final targets would be.

Who wished to punish them, and why? Abruptly, within this place of moving shadows and ancient
kami
, Sato had the growing intuition that their past—his and Nangi’s—had somehow been resurrected and a shambling reanimated corpse, trailing rotting flesh in its wake, was making its relentless way toward them. Soon they would have no structure from which to carry out the final stages of
Tenchi.
What would happen then? He bent his head and prayed fervently for salvation or, at the very least, surcease from this terrible nightmare that had grown up around them, destroying the
kobun
’s most efficient executives, the very heart of the empire that he and Nangi had struggled for so long to achieve. He must not allow that to happen. Nothing must be allowed to delay
Tenchi.
Nothing. But there was a cold hand clenched around his heart, squeezing until his eyes filled with tears and the pain was hot in his mouth.

And he thought, Punish us for what? What have we done?

Viktor Protorov should have been in the Middle East. Three weeks ago his presence had been required in Southern Lebanon to put a stop to a dispute that had been going on so long now that it had taken on all the characteristics of a feud.

Yet he had not moved from Hokkaido, from the safe house he had spent four years creating for himself. When he was here no one in the Soviet Union knew where he was or could trace him. Protorov was quite certain of that. He had several of his best apparatchiks tunneled securely into the hierarchies of all eight other Directorates. They had tried numerous times at the behest of their respective leaders. All drew blanks.

As for the men of the Ninth Directorate who manned this safe house, Protorov was just as certain of them. They were, to a man, loyal to him first, the Directorate second, and Mother Russia third. Of course he did not leave such vital matters to chance. Once every two weeks the staff—as well as the operatives alive within the Japanese islands—were obliquely vetted in an ongoing program to ensure that the safe house was absolutely sterile.

Only one man was not thus spied upon by his own people, and that was because he was in such an enormously sensitive position. For him alone Protorov wished to see in person, to ensure his own safety and that the reports he was receiving were pure white. “White reports” were those containing highly sensitive information as well as being entirely free of disinformation.

In point of fact, white reports were rare. Protorov had been in the business of deception long enough to take for granted that a majority of all reports were to some degree gray. That is, they contained some disinformation. And it was for him to determine the wheat from the chaff, discarding the lies to uncover the truth. This was only one of his many specialized talents.

Japan was an exception that proved the rule. Many of the Ninth Directorate’s operatives were of such a fanatic nature that they invariably turned in white reports. The man Protorov was going to see now was one of those.

But the problems in Southern Lebanon had not gone away, and just this morning Protorov had dispatched one of his most trusted lieutenants to take care of the feud for him.
Tenchi
was too much a part of him now. As yet a nebulous concept, still, its siren song lured him onward with the promise of awesome reward.