The Nicholas Linnear Novels (114 page)

He rose, nodding to Koten, and walked out of the room. The study was for contemplation and as such it had no telephone. Entering his office, he went around to the side of the desk and picked up the receiver.

“Yes? This is Seiichi Sato.”

“It is Phoenix, Sato-san.”

“Ah.” Sato’s heartbeat picked up considerably. “Just a moment.” He put down the phone and padded silently to the doorway to his office. Taking a quick look around the hallway, he closed the door, then returned to the receiver.

“What have you to report?”

“I’m afraid the news is not good.”

Sato’s stomach contracted. First the All-Asia Bank and now this. Big risk, big reward. Both he and Nangi had known this going in. And
Tenchi
would provide them with the biggest reward imaginable. But the downside was rushing to meet them with hellish speed.

“Kusunoki was murdered.”

“I already know that.” Sato was impatient; the risk he was taking made him so. And the thought of failure.

“But did you know that it was done by one of his own pupils?”

The line between Sato and Phoenix seemed to groan in agony as if many conversations were vying for control.

“I think you’d better tell me all of it,” Sato said, gritting his teeth in anticipation.

“Naturally, the
muhon-nin
found with him had been suspected of killing the
jonin.
It has now been determined that he did not. The Soviet spy lacked the prowess to accomplish such an unthinkable deed.”

“Then who
did
kill him?”

From out of the silence Phoenix said, “If we knew that, he would already be undergoing punishment.”

“Then it is likely that there is another…Soviet infiltrator.”

“I admit the possibility exists.”

Sato was abruptly furious. “You are the best there is. That is why I hired you to guard the secrets of
Tenchi.
If I wanted unthinking thugs I could have pulled them in from the Yakuza clan across town. Amida, what are you doing down there?”

“Have faith,” Phoenix said. “All is well. I am assigning myself to this matter personally.”

Phoenix, like Kusunoki, was a ninja
sensei.
Sato was mollified. “You
will
keep in touch.”

“Each day at this time I will call you at this number.”

“Excellent. I’ll make certain I am here.”

Sato replaced the receiver and, on the other side of the house, the miniature voice-activated tape machine connected to the listening device Koten had secreted in Sato’s office turned itself off, its store of information increased.

Nicholas and Allonge deplaned at Dulles International in Washington.

“Mr. Linnear?”

A handsome blonde with the slender spread-legged stance of an athlete.

“You
are
Nicholas Linnear?”

She had a European accent that should have been spiky but was not. She had somehow managed to soften the vowels, clear up the guttural slurring that would have been normal. He thought she must have gone to school for that.

“Yes.” The accent was definitely Eastern European, and immediately he began to catalog her facial structure.

She reached inside her Burberry, opened up a black lizard card case. “Would you come with me, please?”

“Was it your mother or father who came from Belorussiya?”

He saw that her eyes were sky blue, azure, really. They were quite intelligent. And she was superb at hiding things. He found that despite the inconvenience she was causing him he liked her.

He took her opened card case from her hand and peered down at it. “
Gospadja
Tanya Vladimova,
vstraychayetzye
Craig Allonge.
On rabotayet dla Tomkina Industrii.
”

The shock registered on her face even as she nodded at the mystified Allonge in response to the introduction. She brushed her thick hair back from the side of her face and he saw that her nails were square cut and clear lacquered. Obviously she worked with her hands, and this interested him.

“It was my father who was born in Belorussiya,” she said in the same language.

“Do you take after him in more ways than just looks?”

“He was a very dedicated man,” she said. “Extremely dogged when the occasion called for it. He was a rural policeman. My mother was from Birobidzhan.”

There was an immediate flash in her eyes, a kind of challenge and a hint of something more. Nicholas knew how it must have been for her family inside Russia. What with a White Russian for a father and a Russian Jew for a mother there must not have been many options open to them. Her father had taken one obvious one; had others in the family taken the other?

“How many of you were dissidents?” he said softly.

She gave him an odd searching look for a moment and he was made peculiarly uncomfortable. Then it was gone, her face had cleared, and like the blank face of a computer terminal, she began again. “Enough so that my father had a great deal of time to grieve.”

“Excuse me,” Craig Allonge interjected in English. “Nick, what’s going on?”

Nicholas smiled. “Nothing, really. Miss Vladimova is merely seeing that I fulfill a clause in Tomkin’s will before we jet off to Japan.” He put his hand on the other man’s shoulder and squeezed. “Take a break at the airport. Stretch your legs, get something real to eat. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”

“Mr. Linnear,” C. Gordon Minck said forty-five minutes later in a clear, crisp voice, “it’s good of you to come on such short notice. I know that you must have a great deal on your mind at the moment.”

Nicholas had been taken into a building along F Street, not far from the Virginia Avenue underpass. A private elevator had taken them up to a four-story-high arboretum. Nicholas had successfully hidden his surprise. A cubistic whitewashed brick structure crouched in the center of this unnatural indoor forest. Tanya had taken him inside with a complete absence of self-consciousness for this stagy and, to Nicholas’ way of thinking, needlessly indulgent construct.

“Tomkin’s will was quite specific on the matter.”

“Nevertheless, I’m delighted to see you.”

Nicholas smiled and the two men shook hands.

They went through the building, past numerous rooms, all with tile or wood floors. There were no carpets at all, and Nicholas was aware of the sounds they made when they moved.

“I’ve never heard of the Department of International Export Tariffs,” he said. “What do you do here?”

Minck laughed. “I’d be surprised if you
had
heard of us.” He shrugged. “We’re a bureaucratic backwater that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has somehow seen fit to keep going.” He gave Nicholas a genuine smile. “We issue overseas licenses and, in some isolated instances, revoke them.”

Nicholas realized that Minck had responded to his queries without actually answering them.

He was led out onto a glassed-in patio. Tanya was already there, pouring freshly squeezed orange juice into crystal stemware. Minck waved Nicholas into one of the comfortable-looking rattan chairs covered in Haitian batik. Potted palms, deep green sword plants, and dwarf palms were scattered about.

“This is an odd environment for a government bureau,” Nicholas said.

Minck lifted an arm. “Oh, this is nothing but a set. We get a lot of foreign dignitaries in here.” He smiled. “We like to make them feel at home.”

“Is that so?” Nicholas stood up. He watched Tanya and Minck as he moved about the patio. “It’s almost midnight, yet this building is as busy as if it were ten in the morning. I think if this department were what you claimed it was you’d be sitting behind a metal desk in a cubicle filled with fluorescent lighting. I think at this time of the night you’d be tucked safely into your bed. I’d like to know who you two are, where I really am, and what it is I’m doing here.”

Minck nodded. “All understandable concerns, Nicholas. May I call you Nicholas, by the way? Good.”

A phone rang, the sound muffled through the walls, and Tanya excused herself.

“Please sit down.” Minck unbuttoned his seersucker jacket. “This department—it goes by many names; the Department of International Export Tariffs is just one of them—costs about as much as an AWAC to build and maintain. That’s considerably less than the cost of a B-l bomber. Still, it took me six months of memo wars and threats to get this set built.” He smiled again. “Bureaucratic minds cannot conceive of such a necessity as this, but I can and do. This is the first sight a Russian defector sees after the wrapping comes off.”

“Spies?” Nicholas said, slightly incredulously. “Raphael Tomkin was involved with spies? I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?” Minck shrugged. “He was a patriot. And he was a close friend of my father’s.” He poured more juice for them both. “Let me explain. My father was one of the founders of the OSS. Tomkin was an explosives expert—learned his trade in the Marines, where the two of them met. He could take the wing off a finch without ruffling a feather on its breast.

“My father used him on several rather delicate, high-risk forays toward the end of the European campaign. Things were a bit desperate by then; a lot of last-ditch Nazi plots to contend with, along with clandestine work keeping the Russians in line. Anyway, this one mission was a real balls-up. From what I have been able to gather it was Tomkin’s fault, although my father would never say a bad word against him. The man simply lost his nerve and broke under the pressure. Three of the unit were inadvertently blown up when the packet detonated prematurely.”

Minck drained his glass. “Your ex-boss was a highly honorable man. I guess he blamed himself and, though my father erased him from the field roster, he remained tied to the, er, organization. My father did not want his friend shamed for what he considered a human error and Tomkin, I suppose, did not want to make the break.”

“So you inherited him.”

“So to speak.” Minck cleared his throat. “I’m not callous. In this regard, knowing the circumstances, I gave Tomkin the choice after my father died.”

There was a question that needed voicing before they went any further. “Tell me,” Nicholas said carefully, “was Tomkin Industries built with OSS money?”

“Good God, no.” Minck seemed genuinely shocked. “We have no stake in the corporation whatsoever. You can set your mind at ease on that score.”

Nicholas nodded and rose again. He went to the window-door, looked out. Because he was becoming increasingly uneasy about why Tomkin had insisted he come here, he was reluctant to pursue a direct course.

“What happens when they see this place?” he said. “The Russians, I mean.”

“They’re disoriented,” Minck replied. “You’d be surprised at how much current Western fiction they manage to read. Most of them expect to be taken to a colonial mansion somewhere out in the wilds of Virginia.” He laughed. “They seem disappointed when they’re not interviewed by Alec Guinness or what they perceive as his American equivalent.”

Minck stood up. So much for the easy part, he thought.

“The reason you’re here now,” he said, “has to do with your merger with Sato Petrochemicals.”

“Oh?” Nicholas turned to face him. “In what way?”

“It’s a matter,” Minck said, “of national security.”

Akiko had not slept since Nicholas had departed. There was a rhythm to her life, to all her actions, a rhythm that Kyōki had taught her to search for and to use, one that increased her power a thousandfold.

What was she to do now that Nicholas had returned to America? There were three possibilities but only one option because the first, to break off her plan entirely, was unthinkable, and because the second, to follow him to America, would be to put herself at the same disadvantage that Saigō had labored under.

She rolled over on the single
futon.
There were no intricately patterned coverlets here, no luxurious appointments. She might have been in a barracks in the seventeenth century save that there was no one else in the small room. Contrary to what she had told Sato, she had not gone to visit her aunt. That would have been an impossibility; she had no living relative.

Slowly she rose and, stretching, began her morning exercise ritual. Forty minutes later, after toweling off the running sweat, taking a quick cold shower to close the pores of her skin, she returned to her cubicle and commenced the slow, studied ritual of the tea ceremony.

This she did in solitary reflection each morning no matter where she was. It remained in her memory the only link with her mother; the only physical thing the woman had taught her. Akiko’s mother had been a
chano-yu sensei.

There was an almost religious fervor to the tiny, practiced movements. The element of perfection before the Void brought the concept of Zen concentration to the art of preparing tea as it did to many daily Japanese preparations, transforming them, lifting them from the mundane onto the plane of art, involving the spirit as well as the mind and the hand.

With the pale green tea a froth in the small handleless cup, Akiko arose and slid open the
fusuma.
Beyond the wide veranda was the reflection garden, its pure white pebbles dazzling in all light, its three black igneous rocks set in harmonious confluence along the perimeter.

And just to the right of center rose the branched trunk of the giant cedar. As Akiko slowly sipped her stingingly bitter tea, she allowed her eyes to pass over the fluted configurations of light and dark, shadow and sunlight dappling the textured needles. She was so long at it that when at last she returned to her starting point, the shapes had changed subtly with the angle of the sun.

Thus lost in the Void, her mind heard again the plangent double notes of the bamboo flute, elongated and sorrowful. This was the only music she heard—save for the birdsongs which accompanied the changing of the seasons—for all the long years of her stay with Kyōki.

The bittersweet song began at noontime just as she was serving Kyōki his tea, abasing herself before him, kowtowing in the ancient Chinese tradition on which he insisted. She could feel anew the chill of the stone flooring against her slightly parted lips—there were no
tatami
in the ancient castle.