The Nicholas Linnear Novels (112 page)

But if the truth be known Protorov had not wanted to return to the baking dusty climate of Southern Lebanon. Always the stink of camel dung and heated machine oil was in the air. And how he had come to despise the Arabs! Oh yes, he had no doubt as to their usefulness to the Soviet Union. But their gullibility—their stupidity, really—the key to their usefulness—was what he could no longer tolerate. They were obscene barbarians, and he was far better off pursuing the specter of
Tenchi
than having to mediate a dispute between Arab and Russian.

Arrogance, Protorov thought now, was a quality the White Russians suffered from; hence their downfall. But the damnable Arabs had it as well. He was well away from them; he had been months getting the sand out of his clothes.

Koten’s great bulk descended off Shinjuku. Sato’s weekly pilgrimage had given him some free time. Shrines were no place for violence, Sato felt, and therefore would not allow Koten to accompany him.

The
sumō
took the green line four stops, where he changed for the blue line at Kudanshita, riding that to the huge Nihon-bashi station. He was stared at openly in the subways but he was used to that. Outwardly he ignored the attention even while his spirit expanded with pride. He had worked hard to move up the
dan
, and even though he no longer performed in public, still he spent a great deal of time staying in shape and even, from time to time, engaging in exhibition bouts. He had not been defeated in these five years.

He emerged on Eit-dōri and turned right. The avenue was crowded with shoppers. Along the next block he waited for the light, then crossed the avenue and entered the Tokyu department store.

Inside, the place was as enormous and as varied as a city. One of his friends had gotten married here, another had purchased burial plots for himself and his family. But Koten was interested in neither of these services.

A white-gloved female attendant waved him onto the down escalator. He stared openly at her heavily made-up face until she turned her head away beneath the scrutiny.

In the basement, he idly watched cakes being prepared,
sushi
being rolled, tofu being fermented, bean paste being mixed and sugared. He made his lunch from the numerous free sample trays on the glass counters he passed.

When he had judged that he had eaten enough, he moved away toward the up escalator. Still there was an emptiness within his capacious stomach.

He ascended past myriad floors of designer clothing, housewares, furniture, toys and games, theaters, medical and dental clinics, galleries filled with paintings and sculptures, classes on how to wear a kimono, how to serve tea, how to arrange flowers, and in between a plethora of restaurants.

There was a teahouse in the roof garden with red, black, and white rice-paper lanterns on wires dancing in the light wind. Amid the carefully manicured shrubbery was a small zoo attended by flocks of children, some of whose mothers were busy downstairs shopping.

Koten waded in among this lot to get a better look at the baboons and gibbons. Some distance away there were the smallish monkeys from the northern alps around Nagano. Koten edged closer to these though they were less exotic and therefore had less of an audience. Koten was from Nagano, and the sight of these symbols of home abruptly made him conscious of the fact that he had not been back for more than ten years.

“See something of interest?”

He did not need to turn his head to take in the small accountant’s body, the undistinguished face.

“These little ones chatter of home to me,” he said.

“Ah,” the drab man said. “The mountains. Those of us who were born in the mountains never fully adjust to being parted from them.”

Koten nodded slowly and made his report. When he was finished, he dutifully answered the drab man’s questions to the best of his ability.

“I have to get back,” he said. “Sato-san will be returning from his prayers soon.”

“Prayers,” said Viktor Protorov disdainfully, “are for the already vanquished.”

Three times “Tex” Bristol had had to abandon his plans to take out the Blue Monster, and it had more to do with Alix Logan than it did with her nocturnal guardian. After her suicide attempt the Blue Monster wasn’t taking any chances, and he had moved in with her at night.

Now the lights never went out in Alix’s apartment during the long nights as her keeper kept vigil with the most obvious tool. Light.

And light in the dead of night was not something Bristol had counted on. There was an element of surprise that was needed. It had come to his attention that Alix Logan’s monsters were not themselves ex-cops; they were far smarter than that. And they had a manner about them that was, well, almost military. Bristol had spent long hours baking in the sun, doing nothing more than watching Alix Logan from afar, except to wonder where the monsters got their training. Had Tomkin become smarter in his old age? Had he begun hiring a higher grade of gorilla to do his dirty work? That was the only explanation.

After the third aborted attempt to steal into Alix Logan’s apartment at night, Bristol reluctantly abandoned his first plan. You had to be plenty flexible in situations like these, he told himself continually. Every plan had to have a backup, and each backup had to have its own backup. That was the only way to be successful, because no situation involving people was ever static. You make that assumption and you might as well go into some other line of work.

So Bristol put into effect a plan he had hoped never to use. He loved to fish, he loved being on the water. But being
in
it, far out at sea, was something else again.

Still, he had rented the scuba equipment, had himself checked out by a pimply boy of no more than eighteen, the shop’s pro. He was a mite rusty—it had been some five years since he’d learned his diving—but the basics one never forgot, and after two hours of intensive work in the pink-tiled swimming pool of the beachfront hotel down the street from the shop, the pimply boy tapped him on the shoulder and gave him the thumbs-up signal.

Now Bristol had taken his gear onto his boat, which lay rocking in the oily swells dockside. He double-checked all his gear as he had been trained to do and was bent over fiddling with the regulator when he spied Alix out of the corner of his eye coming down the dock with the Red Monster just behind her.

Bristol’s heart beat faster as he saw her turn in toward her small boat. No pleasure cruise this afternoon with the same round of vacuous friends. It was just her and Red.

The Red Monster freed the aft and bow lines and stepped quickly into the rocking boat, his topsiders squeaking. Alix already had the engine throttled, blue haze of fumes rising from the bubbling aft pipe. She turned the wheel over hard, and they began to glide out of the harbor.

Bristol, his pulse still racing, waited patiently before firing his own engine. He tugged at the bill of his beaten-up cap and headed out after them, squinted his eyes against the fierce glare of sunlight dancing off the water. With his free hand he strung up a pair of dark glasses, wrapping the curled ends of the wire temples around his ears.

This plan was far simpler than his first one but it was also far more terrifying to him. It had taken him six months to work up the courage to take his first scuba lessons and finally only direct orders from above had set him in motion. He was a brave man in most respects. But not this.

His hands shook so much that he dropped the speargun twice after he had unwrapped it from its concealing cocoon. This was not an item he had rented. In fact, he had made a point of telling the salesman at the scuba shop that he had an abhorrence of such things when the man had asked if there was any other item he wanted to rent.

Bristol had bought the speargun in a shop in Boca Chica early one morning while Alix Logan still tossed in her bed. He paid cash, dressed in a ridiculous seersucker suit with an old-fashioned straw hat atop his head and a pair of dimestore glasses with mirror lenses masking his face nicely, blending right in with the bushy mustache he had glued on for the occasion.

On his way back south he had his pick of three chemical plants, most engaged in retrieving nitrates from guano, and choosing one, he broke in easily and took what he needed. He spent the rest of the day on his boat in distant view of the long pleasure craft Alix had chosen to climb aboard that day, working out the rest of his plan.

And now that it was time to implement it, he was as nervous as a rookie on his first day in the business. It didn’t look good, and with the bulk of the tanks settled between his shoulder blades, he paused, feet planted and spread on the rolling deck, trying to slow his breathing and calm his racing pulse.

But all the time his gaze ran away with him, slipping like an uncontrollable kid over the side, drinking in the long, deep swells and the infinite depth through which he would soon have to navigate. He put his hands out in front of him, saw the tremor there, and said, “The hell with it!” out loud as if he were blowing carbon dioxide from his system. He bent and retrieved the speargun, carefully examining the wickedly barbed flechette at its tip.

He stuck two sticks of shark repellent into his weighted belt, double-checked his wrist compass, working out the realignment of vectors now that Alix’s small boat had drifted a bit. He’d have to remember that and not rely solely on the compass.

He went to the railing of his boat and slipped on his powerful fiberglass fins. Then, bringing his regulator over his head and up to his mouth, he made certain the line was absolutely clear. Mentally he ticked off the list of items the pimply kid had gone over with him, partly for safety and partly to keep his mind occupied and off the abyss already lapping at his ankles.

He reached for his mask, washed it with sea water, and then spat heavily into it, smearing the liquid around so that the mask would not cloud up. Fitting it over his face, grabbing the faceplate, his mind a frozen blank, he slid over the side.

The coolness of the sea engulfed him. Even through the protection of the blue rubber scuba suit he could feel the suck of the cold, rising from the ocean’s depths like a physical creature.

Steady, schmuck, he told himself. The last thing you need now is for your imagination to run away with you. You’re safe and warm in your booties and mommie’s coming soon to tuck you in.

Bristol hung in the blue-green depths, going nowhere until he had settled his breathing and had gotten used again to the peculiar form of breathing one was obliged to use underwater.

Strands of sunlight filtered obliquely down from above, giving him the odd sensation of being in a cathedral, and he thought of the old days in Hell’s Kitchen before his father had been slaughtered in the filth and darkness of a neighborhood alleyway.

Then he made the mistake of looking down where the bands of light faded out and could not penetrate, blacker than anything he had ever seen and he realized what was below him, down, down, down.

Convulsively, he made himself look at his compass and orienting himself, he set off in the direction of Alix Logan’s boat. He swam slowly, almost lazily, but that appearance was deceiving for his enormous fins propelled him through the water in great long kicks. He was in excellent shape and he had no trouble, even with the tidal surge that could potentially become a diver’s worst enemy, creating a nausea so strong it could turn even the strongest diver into a mewling baby.

A third of the way there he forced himself toward the surface in order to take a visual fix. He did it in less than three seconds, up and down again into the depths. Checking his compass again, he saw that he was six or seven degrees off and adjusted his course. He plowed on, using the half-leg kick the pimply kid had told him was more economical and less taxing over a long haul than the one he had been originally taught.

He had just come down from his second visual and had again corrected his course slightly when his peripheral vision picked up the shadow almost directly below him. Immediately he ceased his kicking and hung motionless in the water. If it was a shark he did not want its acute vibrational sense picking him up.

But now ahead of him he could dimly make out the bulk of the underside of Alix’s boat and below that the taut fishing line. In reality he could not actually see the line but he was certain it was there. The Red Monster had caught a big one. And that was what Bristol saw.

The fish was hooked solidly, its body whipsawing back and forth. And that was the reason for the shadow cruising below him.

Silently, Bristol cursed the Red Monster. But now, as he glanced back downward, he saw how close the shark was to him. He was no expert but he knew a basking shark from a blue, a nurse from a tiger.

This one was about twelve feet long and, from its marking, was surely a tiger shark, one of the flesh eaters. It was there now because it could sense the blood drooling from the fish fighting the line more than a hundred yards away.

Bristol watched the spotted light play along the rough prehistoric hide of the creature as it wound its way upward. He could not tell whether the thing had sensed him or not but he did his best to parallel its course, keeping on top of it. At a certain point that would have to end and then he would have to see what the shark did.

The tiger rose lazily, almost indifferently, moving so slowly Bristol could make out the score lines crisscrossing its flank. Then, abruptly, it veered to port, launching itself through the green void like a missile. It turned, and now Bristol had no doubt. It had seen him.

His heart pounding painfully in his chest, he willed his body to be still. He hung, suspended, watching the tiny green plankton drift by him in oblique sheets. A strand of seaweed.

Food’s in the other direction, asshole. He spoke silently to the primitive creature. You don’t want any part of me. I’ll just bash your pea brain back into your spine.

The tiger was now turned so that it was head on to him and they faced each other like a pair of gladiators in a vast, surging arena filled with awful silence. The lens of the sea turned it monstrously large.