The Nicholas Linnear Novels (183 page)

“Dr. Jugo Muku,” she read from a driver’s license. She looked up. “Wait a minute!” She took out the piece of paper Nicholas had thrown in the elevator and which she had picked up. Unfolding it again, she said, “Linnear-san, you had Dr. Muku’s name when I first met you.” She looked at him.

“Dr. Hanami gave it to me,” Nicholas said. He was staring at the mutilated face of Dr. Muku. “He was under the impression that I needed psychological help.”

“There’s a phone number here,” Tomi said. “And another number, but no address.”

“It’s a suite number,” Nicholas said. “Dr. Muku’s office is in this building.”

“I think we ought to take a look,” Tomi said. She went back past the window. As she did, she noticed something on one of the remaining shards of glass. She moved closer, stared hard at it.

“Linnear-san,” she said in a breathless voice, “what color was Dr. Hanami’s hair?” There had been too much blood and spattered brains to make such a determination from the corpse.

“Gray,” Nicholas said, coming closer. “And he used some kind of hair cream.” He was looking at the spot that had caught Tomi’s attention. Several strands of iron-gray hair, wet-looking, clung wretchedly to the sharp point of a glass shard. “It looks like his.”

“Which could mean,” Tomi said, “that he went through the window headfirst. No one would do that, even a suicide.”

“You mean he might have been thrown.”

Tomi was busily gathering the evidence into a glassine envelope. “It’s looking more and more likely. Then there’s Dr. Muku’s death to con—”

She looked up as a shadow registered on the extreme periphery of her vision. She stared, open-mouthed, as if she were in one of those dreams where unthinkable calamity is about to strike and, shouting a warning, one finds that one’s voice is gone.

The black form had coalesced into a distinct shape: that of a human figure. It was clothed completely in matte black, so that Tomi could not see even its face. It rose up from outside the bottom lip of the window. Her brain was frozen in shock. The figure was on the
outside
of the building.

Such a thing was impossible, Tomi knew that. And yet her brain was reacting to what her eyes were showing it. The figure appeared in a split instant. Tomi felt her heart give a painful lurch. She felt as if she were in an elevator in free-fall. Her stomach dropped, her bowels turned to water.

Even so, as the figure was silently swinging in toward her, part of her mind had given instructions for her right hand to grab her pistol, bring it up.

Time ran abruptly out. The figure crashed into her with such force that it drove all breath from her lungs. She flew backward with barely a sound, tumbling over Dr. Hanami’s cypress-wood coffee table, dislodging its heavy glass top.

The top of her spine slammed against the side wall, her head snapped back and blue lights flashed, a jolt of pain causing her to cry out at last. But that sound was drowned out by the shattering of the tabletop. Groggy and nauseous, Tomi tried to get up, fell heavily back. She was fighting just to breathe.

All this had taken no more than a second or two. Time enough for the old Nicholas to have turned, assessed the situation, and begun a tactical strategy against the unknown assailant.

But this was another Nicholas entirely. His mind, unfocused, without the ability to “sink in,” without his beloved
Getsumei no michi,
was unable to react in any meaningful or coordinated way to the attack on Tomi.

He understood that whoever had murdered Dr. Muku had probably thrown Dr. Hanami out the window. He understood that this individual had been hanging outside the shattered window, clinging to the concrete and steel of the sky-rise’s skin like a fly. He suspected, further, that from the deliberateness of the attack on Tomi, the murderer seemed to have been waiting coolly for them.

There was nothing wrong with Nicholas’s capacity for
reasoning.
It was his ability to translate the reasoning into action that had been taken from him.

Now he confronted the black-garbed figure and knew that he faced a ninja. Only a ninja could have planned out and executed two such bizarre murders. Only a ninja could have clung to the sheer side of a building twenty stories up, swung in through a shattered window, taken out a trained and armed police officer with such ease.

Nicholas felt a resurgence of the cold fear slithering in his gut. It could be no coincidence, he knew, that just when he had lost his powers, he was confronting another ninja.

It was true, then. He was
Shiro Ninja.
Defenseless and under attack. Which meant that this figure was more than a ninja. Far more and far less.

Nicholas said a silent prayer.

The figure, which had been momentarily still and silent, erupted into a fury of motion. Dimly Nicholas recognized that this was something he had once been able to do.

He tried to prepare himself for the coming attack as best he could, but the figure was upon him before he could get his mind to function properly.

Pain exploded along nerve meridians in chest, abdomen, and pelvis, and like a line of dominoes beginning to fall, Nicholas felt first one section, then another paralyzed by short, vicious blows to various nexus points. The pain was not localized to the target of each strike; because of the nature of the blows, it ripped through the interconnecting nerve network within his body.

His muscles bunched and knotted, betraying him at every turn, spasming with the bursts of nerve pain, overlapping so that they began to have a cumulative effect on him, magnifying exponentially their debilitating impact.

The assault was methodical, almost scientific in the way it dissected his body into quadrants. Nicholas knew without being able to do anything about it that he was being put out an inch at a time. To achieve victory was one thing; this was quite another. It was a clinical demonstration of total domination. Nicholas’s spirit withered in utter despair at both his helplessness and the hopelessness of his plight. Unable to turn his back on
ninjutsu,
how was he ever going to live
Shiro Ninja
?

The answer was, of course, obvious. He wasn’t going to live. He was going to die.

This was the ultimate lesson of this unrelenting assault.

Tomi was against the side wall, the effects of the figure’s initial attack wearing off. Gasping, trying to shake off the dizziness that had gripped her, she became aware that she no longer held her pistol.

She was aware of the figure’s attack on Nicholas, and desperately she searched for her gun. She found it lying on the floor several yards away from her outstretched right hand. With a pain-filled groan she pushed herself from the wall, began to crawl toward the gun. Her hand touched it, then closed around the grips. An instant later she was pointing it at the back of the figure’s head. She was about to pull the trigger when she realized with a sickening lurch that she was aiming at Nicholas.

“Shit,” she said under her breath, and trying a bluff, shouted, “Get off him or I’ll shoot!”

The figure turned so that Nicholas’s head and upper torso were between him and Tomi. “Go ahead.” It was a rasp of a voice, a chilling sound much like fingernails being scratched down a blackboard. “Shoot me. Or will it be him?”

Tomi got a sudden intuition that made the short hairs at the back of her neck stand up. She knew the figure was laughing at her behind his mask.

Then she saw the glint of a tiny blade at Nicholas’s throat. “Put down the weapon,” the raspy voice said, “or I’ll kill him now.” As a demonstration of his determination, he drew blood.

Tomi put down her gun.

“Kick it away from you,” the voice instructed.

She did as she was told, and was instantly sorry. She saw as if in slow motion the figure release Nicholas. It rose up eerily, spectrally, just as it had from beyond the window. Without appearing to have moved at all, its shape ballooned out.

Tomi realized that it crossed the space between them in some manner totally unknown to her. She felt herself drawn up by a power beyond her comprehension. Then the top of her head was jammed against the wall. Her cry of astonishment and pain was swiftly cut off as she lost consciousness.

The figure dropped her in a heap and turned. Nicholas was crawling toward where Tomi had kicked her gun. It was a measure of his extreme despair that he had forsaken the arsenal of weapons within himself in an effort to lunge at a mechanical one.

In one fluid motion the figure lifted Nicholas as easily as an instant before it had lifted Tomi and threw him headlong across the room. Nicholas crashed into the desktop, sliding across its surface, his near-paralyzed body collapsing onto the floor between the desk and the ruined window.

The figure came around the desk, moving easily, deliberately, but without hurry. It picked Nicholas up and headed with him toward the window.

Nicholas divined his intent and did the only thing he could. He spread-eagled his body in order to stop the figure from maneuvering him through the opening of the window.

He could hear the figure laughing. It was an awful sound, like a mass of pinpricks on the skin. “Do you think that will save you?”

Nicholas gave a low groan as a high-percussion blow landed on his right shoulder. His arm went numb, dropped to his side. With the next blow to his left shoulder, Nicholas bit his lower lip to stop himself from crying out with the pain. His right leg was next, then his left leg. He was going through the window.

Still, he struggled, as the organism must when it senses the end of its existence being thrust rudely upon it. Numbed as he was, Nicholas flailed and thrashed, struggling inch by inch to hold on to the window frame.

Using his shoulders and buttocks, he wedged himself in, defying the figure to push him through the last part of the opening. Heavy strikes landed on his upper arms, his thighs. He ignored them, set his mind on remaining immobile.

Then he was struck on the side of his head, close to the spot that was still healing. It was too much. His body, stretched beyond its tolerance, slumped in the aperture, and he was pushed all the way through.

The sky-rises of Tokyo, smoky and somehow unreal, were tilting, coming up to meet him. Nicholas could feel his heart thumping heavily in his chest. The roar of his pulse was like the sighing of the wind in his ears.

For what seemed an endless moment he hung suspended twenty stories above the street. He could imagine the next instant, the plunge through the air, tumbling slowly head over heels, the pavement rushing up to meet him. He would be inside his recurring dream, falling through the vapor, endlessly falling. Only this time he would not wake up.

Staring down into the heat of Shinjuku, Nicholas heard the last pitiful cry of his daughter. He prepared himself to die.

Then, almost before he knew it, he was pulled back inside the building. The figure’s hooded face was very close to his. “If you die now, if you die too easily,” the figure said, “you will never understand. And with comprehension will come the certainty of despair. That will crush you far more thoroughly than defeat ever will.”

The figure delivered a blow, short, concise, and accurate, to the side of Nicholas’s neck.

Vapor curling like an adder’s tongue, hiding in its midst secrets too horrifying to endure.

Blackness.

After a brief stay at the hospital, after giving as complete a statement to the police as he could muster, after Justine had arrived with Nangi, she white-faced but with her panic, thankfully, under control, after spending a restless, pain-laced night in the hospital, after deflecting for the moment Justine and Nangi’s queries, Nicholas came home.

He had seen Tomi in the hospital, discovered that she was just badly shaken up, that the CAT scan had shown no sign of concussion in her as it had done in him.

Because of the mild concussion, the hospital had insisted that he stay a week to receive a battery of further tests and to be monitored. Nicholas insisted on leaving right away. They compromised with an overnight stay, during which he was given a second CAT scan. Apparently, that had shown no further complications, because Nicholas found himself home by noon the following day.

Justine said that Tomi had already been in to see him twice while he had been asleep. She had told Justine to call her when she got Nicholas home and that she would come out to see him.

At home he went straight into his workout room. With an effort that set his head pounding, he pushed aside the padded post. Beneath it he took up a tatami mat, used his fingernails to remove a small door set flush with the underfloor boards.

Beneath was a small steel-reinforced chamber that Nicholas had built himself just after he and Justine had moved in. Now he lifted out a copper box. On it was lacquered the brothers dragon and tiger, the gift that his grandfather So-Peng had given to Colonel Denis Linnear and which now belonged to Nicholas.

With trembling fingers Nicholas opened the box. Inside were sixteen indentations in the dark blue velvet, one for each mystic emerald. One emerald had been used by the Colonel to buy his house in Japan.

Remember, Nicholas,
he heard his mother say to him,
there must never be less than nine emeralds in here.

“Ahh…”

There was such relief in Nicholas’s voice that Justine came running. “Nick, what is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

“The fifteen emeralds are still here,” Nicholas breathed. Then he looked up at her, as he locked the box away. “Justine, you must never tell anyone—not even Nangi—what you have just seen. These emeralds are special—mystical. They are a legacy from my grandfather So-Peng, and must never be used or spoken of.” He pushed the tatami back into place, drew the post over them. “Promise me, Justine!”

“I promise.”

Nicholas rose, a bit unsteadily, the words of his attacker echoing inside him,
If you die now, if you die too easily, you will never understand.

Why didn’t he kill me when he had the chance? Nicholas asked himself. What fate has he saved me for?