The Nicholas Linnear Novels (157 page)

He saw her down there. Her tiny oval face leaped up to him through the jumble of debris—rent rocks, split trees, and the like.

“Nicholas.”

He saw those eyes, luminous still. Yukio’s eyes. He moved forward toward her and felt the earth begin to give way beneath his chest. Dirt crumbled away from him in a torrent and she screamed.

Head cast down into that stygian gloom, he inched carefully backward. His eyes roved for another way down to her. Perhaps that tree just above her. But he could not see its underpinning and if he was wrong, if it would not hold his weight, she would be instantly crushed by its descent.

“Nicholas!”

Something in her voice drew his attention back to her. He peered down. No. It was her voice itself. It seemed to have changed not only pitch but timbre as well.

“Don’t move,” he cautioned her. “I can’t take a chance on coming down myself. There’s too much instability within the fissure. I’m going to find vines I can weave into a rope that will hold you.”

“No!”

The amount of anguish in her cry froze him.

“Don’t leave me, Nicholas. Not again!”

A rumbling had begun, deeper this time as if truly it were emanating from the bowels of the earth. Had he heard right? Nicholas asked himself. Had she said, “Not again”?

“Then I’m coming down after you!” he called.

“No, no! Amida, no!” He saw her face limned by starlight which was somehow stronger now after the quake. It was as if the universe were awakening from a deep slumber. “You’ll be killed!” There was movement from down there. He had already lowered himself halfway into the fissure, his bare toes searching for a substantial hold.

He saw Akiko reach for the bottom of the tree substructure, a massive tangle of roots like the Gordian knot. But she had no magic sword and could not unravel it.

The rumbling reached a crescendo and Nicholas heard the awful grinding of the world pulling itself apart. Deep below him, plates shifted, the pressure shooting upward. The fissure walls trembled and slid farther open. Even the sky seemed to judder in pain, the starlight winking out, as the earth heaved in exquisite agony.

Nicholas could hear nothing above the rush of noise that filled his ears to overflowing. He thought their drums might burst with the intensity of the vibration. He saw the tree shifting downward. He opened his mouth to scream, then he was obliged to turn his full attention on raising himself out of the lethal pit before he was cast down.

When he was able to look again, it was as if he gazed upon an entirely different world. There was no tree, no split rocks, none of the rills and valleys that he had recorded in his mind preparatory to his attempted descent.

Like a fragrant, fertile valley re-formed out of sere desert, all that he had first gazed upon was gone. And Akiko with it.

The first familiar person Nicholas saw when he left Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo was Tanya Vladimova. He was not particularly surprised to see her. He had never bothered to call Minck.

She was coming out of an elevator along the same bank in front of which Nicholas stood at the Okura.

“What happened to you?” she said, checking herself in mid-stride.

Nicholas’ elevator came and she got in with him. “You look like somebody put you through the meat grinder and forgot to turn the thing off.”

“Were you here for the quake?” It was the best he could do at the moment, and was not as inane a question as it seemed on the surface.

“Oh, yes.” Her head nodded. “It was quite frightening, I must say. The Japanese took it with just a bit more equanimity.” She was evincing a light tone and forcing it. Nicholas wondered why. “How about you?”

“No,” he said. “I missed the worst of it.”

She waited patiently while he opened the door to his room. “I was in L.A. once when a minor quake hit,” she said conversationally. “It was like here, really, though this one, I’m told, was far worse. No one paid the slightest attention to it. It was as if it did not exist.”

“That’s not at all how the Japanese view it,” Nicholas said as he went into the bathroom and turned on the taps, the shower. He was obliged to raise his voice over the sound of all the rushing water. “They accept earthquakes as part of nature. To Californians it’s like death: they’d rather not think about it.”

Fifteen minutes later, after a long, steaming shower followed by an icy one, he emerged, wreathed in towels. He stripped off the plastic bag used to keep his newly bandaged fingers dry. “I’m glad you’re here, actually.”

“Oh, good,” she said, staring at his hand. “I’ve come as Minck’s messenger girl, really. The focus of our hunt has shifted since your meeting with him last week. Away from Protorov, toward
Tenchi.
”

Perhaps it was the fatigue that gripped him or else Akiko was still on his mind: how wholly she had become Yukio or some semblance of Yukio that he still held sacrosanct and pristine in his memory. Perhaps it was only his imagination but it was his decided feeling that the
kami
of his first beloved had somehow taken hold of her lookalike at the end, filling her heart with love and compassion where before there had been only hate and a burning need for revenge. In the end, that might have been foolish of him, but he did not think so. He was too aware of the intertwining of life and death.

In any event, he missed the falseness to her voice that normally he might have picked up. He was not fully attuned to this conversation; his thoughts were elsewhere. Relaxing his overworked muscles he was diffused, without concentration, and therefore vulnerable.

“That’s just as well,” he said, turning away from her to rummage through his dresser for fresh clothes, “because Protorov has ceased to be a threat to anyone.”

“What do you mean?” Tanya said, though she knew very well.

“I mean,” Nicholas said, “that I killed him.” He turned back in time to see the surprise in her eyes when he said, “I’ve also broken
Tenchi
wide open.”

Tanya felt as if she had been struck by lightning. After Russilov’s terrible news, she had lost much of her hope. With Protorov gone, what chance did they now have for the KGB-GRU summit. She, too, knew Mironenko. In fact, he had been her first lover. Thus had she brought him into Protorov’s axis. This had been just before her graduation from the academy in the Urals. Mironenko and several other up-and-coming GRU officers had been given a three-day tour of the premises and facilities.

Of all the visitors, Protorov judged Mironenko to be of the most use to him in the future; that had been the reason for extending him an invitation in the first place.

Protorov had sent Tanya into his room at night. She had been sex-starved, the passion of her emotions mingling with her physical needs. The combination had proved irresistible to Mironenko—as it would have been for almost any man.

Tanya was his first link with Protorov. After the visit he did not want to give her up and, in fact, their affair lasted through the spring and into the summer.

But summer meant Tanya’s graduation, and because he had another assignment for her, one far more risky, one that only she could perform, Protorov contrived to have Mironenko’s wife become aware of his passion. Chastened, he left Tanya’s side. But, partially because Protorov’s subsequent intervention saved his marriage—and his career as well—and partially because his own political bent was similar, he moved into Protorov’s camp.

In the meantime, Protorov had moved Tanya out of the academy, allowing her to find her own way into the midst of her brother’s, Mikhail’s dissident apparatus. Prom his own point of view there was no risk, of course. He knew quite well that Tanya’s heart belonged to her father; that she had seen Mikhail’s behavior as a betrayal to the family. He had had his instructors work on that angle in oblique manners during her schooling.

Mikhail, for his part, was overjoyed to see her. To him it meant that she had matured. It simply was inconceivable to him that she might be a KGB apparatchik.

Now, as hope returned to Tanya, she automatically abandoned her backup plan to kill Nicholas and, reporting back to Minck in Washington, put a bullet through his brain. With
Tenchi
’s secret safe inside her mind, she would contact Russilov to initiate an escape route for her.

Of course she would not tell him of her discovery. Rather let him think that she was returning to Central a disgrace, having been blown by Linnear. After what had transpired in the safe house in Hokkaido, he’d have no trouble swallowing that.

Then across the frontier, through the Kurile chain, to Mironenko. There was still time to make the summit deadline, and she wished to have no eager ambitious male trying to share her triumph. No, she alone would address the KGB-GRU summit as Viktor Protorov’s handpicked successor. The coup would take place. The dream had not died after all.

Trying with all her will to control the fluttering she felt in her chest, she said, “The sooner you tell me about it, the sooner I can send a signal to Minck and we can put this to bed once and for all.”

Dressed, Nicholas was counting out money into a new wallet. “Thankfully, no action will be needed on our part. I’m quite sure of that. But it would have been a full-fledged disaster had the Soviets been successful in penetrating it.”

Tanya ground her teeth in anticipation. She could barely contain her anxiety. She moved with him as he walked back into the bathroom to brush his hair, standing just outside the door as he flicked on the hairdryer.

“
Tenchi
is an apt code name,” he began. “It means ‘heaven and earth.’
Tenchi
is, in fact, a super-robot.”

“What?” Tanya cried. “What is this, a science-fiction film?”

“Let me begin at the beginning. Three years ago the
Hare Maru,
a Japanese tanker loaded with radioactive waste, was lost in a typhoon while crossing the Nemuro Straits between Hokkaido and the southernmost tip of the Kuriles.

“It was a disaster of the greatest magnitude, and one which the Japanese Government, as you can imagine, did not want made public.

“Salvage operations were begun as soon as fair weather returned. The radioactive wastes, as it turned out, had not broken through their sealed containers, and the operation proceeded without a hitch.

“But on the third day, divers using an enormously powerful vacuum pump that must be anchored on the ocean floor discovered that the vibrations of the mechanism had opened up a hairline fissure. Out of it a black, viscous substance had begun to leak.

“They had accidentally discovered oil off the coast of Japan where, it had been determined by a host of geologists, none could exist.

“Excitement rose to a fever pitch as the divers rose with their news and the information was transmitted back to the Prime Minister.

“Oceanographers as well as geologists were sent into the area. What they came back with three weeks later was unimaginable. It looked as if this pocket of fossil oil was set very deep. Also, it was vast. If the government could find a way of extracting it, they might never have to buy a barrel of crude again. Japan would be self-sufficient. It was an answer to many prayers.

“But the thorn was getting it out of the rock. Conventional methods of offshore drilling were useless because of the type of rock and its formation. Besides, they were not all that far from a known ocean fault, and they were terrified that any undue activity in the area might cause a major earthquake.

“And so
Tenchi
was born. It has eight articulated arms and legs. It can move over any kind of terrain no matter how rough. It can see, hear, even smell. It can—and will—extract the oil from the bottom of the sea, the first conduit into which billions of barrels of fuel will be pumped on its way up to the surface and a line of waiting tankers via fathoms of pipeline.”

“But why all this secrecy?” Tanya asked. “Surely it could have been developed in the light of day.”

“Perhaps,” Nicholas conceded. “However, the oil reservoir is not only on Japanese soil, though
they
think it is.”

“What are you saying?” Tanya said, her heart in her throat.

“The Kuriles are a source of dispute between Russia and Japan. You know that, it’s elementary. The real question is, who owns the oil, Japan or Russia? You’ll get two different answers depending on whether you speak to a Japanese or a Russian.” He turned away from the mirror. “Now you see why Protorov was so anxious to penetrate the operation. The Russians could also have been self-sufficient.”

He came out of the bathroom and looked around. But Tanya had already gone.

Moments later he was on his way out to the Shinjuku Suiryū Building, the offices of Sato Petrochemicals, when his phone buzzed. He picked it up. “Yeah?”

“The weather was great in Key West, buddy,” the voice said in his ear, “but the company was lousy.”

“Croaker!” Like air being let out of a balloon. His knees felt weak and he had to sit down. “Lew, it can’t be you!”

“Can, buddy-boy, and is. I’m in the lobby. I didn’t want to give you a heart attack by coming to your door unannounced. Can I come up?”

“I’m just on my way out. I’ll meet you downstairs.” A thousand questions chased each other through his mind. Lew Croaker alive! How was it possible?

“Nah. With what I got, I’d better come on up.”

“Okay. Sure.”

There was a pause. “How you been, anyway?” The voice had gone gruff.

“Nothing’s the same,” Nicholas said. “But then it never is.”

“Hah! Tell me about it. I’ll be right there.”

He was a bit leaner, certainly tanner, his Robert Mitchum face seemingly far more deeply lined. Still, he looked fine to Nicholas.

They embraced like brothers, and this time Croaker did not mind the contact. He was amazed at just how much he had missed his friend.

He pointed. “What’s with the bandages?”

“Later,” Nicholas said. “Now tell me all.”

And Croaker did, from the moment the mysterious car had rammed him off the road in Key West, to Alix Logan’s revelations.

“So Minck sanctioned Angela Didion’s death,” Nicholas said, wonderingly. “It wasn’t Tomkin at all.”

“He only knew about it,” Croaker sneered. “He only let the killers into her apartment. I suppose that absolves him of guilt.”