The Nicholas Linnear Novels (192 page)

“Hello, David.” Manners were of the utmost importance to Douglas Howe. To him, they were synonymous with breeding, and since as a son of farmers he could never have the one, he was damned sure he would have the other.

Only rarely did it occur to him that part of his abiding enmity for Cotton Branding stemmed from the fact that the other man had everything that Howe coveted because he could never have it: Branding came from the right family, had graduated from the right school, had the right friends, the right contacts, and had entrée into the right clubs, the inner circles of power open to only those elite few born to money and to old-line families. These people—like Branding—had everything laid out for them from the moment they were born, while poor slobs like Howe had to slog uphill for every crumb, to curry favor to get even a brief moment of recognition. But the doors—the important doors to power, to the inner circle—were always closed.

Brisling nodded to Howe, fluttered some papers. “I think we’ve got what we wanted out of the Johnston Institute study.” He was speaking about the feasibility study that would give the go-ahead to the Hive Project: four billion dollars of the government’s money down the drain because of Cook Branding’s damnable Advanced Computer Research Agency bill. Chasing after the Holy Grail of a thinking, interactive computer, no matter its theoretical benefits, was all well and good for some privately funded organization. But to involve the government—to waste the taxpayer’s money on what, in Howe’s opinion, was nothing more than a pipe dream, went beyond the ludicrous—it was unconscionable.

“Read these.”

Howe, reluctant to put on his half glasses, said, “Just give me the digest version.”

What Brisling had unearthed were several questionable affiliations among two members of the fifteen-man Johnson Institute research team, including the director, Dr. Rudolph. This was just the kind of breakthrough Howe had been praying for: a way to derail the passage of the ASCRA bill. He knew he needed more facts, that he should hire a team of investigators to get them. Two factors dissuaded him. The first was that he did not want to involve himself personally in this investigation, in case it somehow backfired. Plausible deniability was, since Irangate, the watchword in Washington. The other was that he was innately impatient.

Patience was one of Cook Branding’s virtues, and since Howe could not discover within himself that particular resource, he hated Branding all the more for possessing it. It was Branding’s strategy to wait for his adversary—whomever that might be—to make a mistake, and then to pounce on it. It was a strategy that could only be successful if employed by a man who was both patient and faultless. For such a man, it proved a potent strategy, indeed. But should that man with the spotless reputation ever stumble—and should that stumble be brought into the public eye—then that man’s position would not only be jeopardized, but his entire career would come apart.

Such a man, in Douglas Howe’s opinion, was Cook Branding. And Howe meant to ensure that Branding would stumble hard.

Howe tapped the Johnson Institute flimsies. He smiled, said, “I’ve got to admit that you’ve done your job well, David.” Pitting Brisling against Branding was like letting loose a trained flea to bring down a raging bull. Which was perfectly acceptable, Howe thought, as long as the flea did not become aware of its status. He handed the flimsies back to his assistant. “Keep these,” he said. “Add them to the Branding file we’ve been amassing. And make certain the file’s in a safe place. It’s now strictly Eyes Only.”

Brisling nodded, pocketed the flimsies.

“Now I want you to find a way to work with this information. Dig deeper into the private lives of these scientists, see which ones will be most vulnerable to coercion.” Seeing the look in Brisling’s eyes, he added reassuringly, “Don’t worry, David. This is for a good cause. What we’re doing here will be ultimately redeemed when the ASCRA bill goes down to defeat.”

At that moment the maître d’ bustled up, plugged an extension phone into a nearby jack. “Telephone call for you, Senator Howe,” he said, placing the phone on the table.

Howe put the receiver to his ear, said “Yes?” into the mouthpiece.

“Have you begun to eat yet?” Shisei said from the other end of the line.

Howe smiled just as if she could see his expression. “No,” he said. “In fact, I’m contemplating a fast.”

“Fasting is my favorite purgative,” Shisei said, but he already knew that.

“Where are you?”

“In a phone booth,” she said, meaning the line was secure.

“How is your particular meal coming?” Howe asked her.

“Splendidly,” Shisei said.

“Good. I want you back here in forty-eight hours.”

“But you told me—”

Howe replaced the receiver in its cradle. He called for the waiter and, without bothering to ask Brisling if he was ready, began to order lunch. He had forgotten all about his resolution to fast.

Tomi Yazawa got to headquarters late, as she had since being released from the hospital. Someone was sitting beside her desk when she approached it. One of the uniforms told her that the man, Tanzan Nangi, had been waiting for her for over an hour.

She stopped at the communal hot plate, brewed two cups of tea, brought them over to her desk. She bowed as she introduced herself, apologized for keeping Nangi waiting. He accepted her offer of the tea, and they both drank in silence. Nangi inquired as to her health. They drank amid more silence.

After the requisite time, Tomi said, “How can I be of service, Mr. Nangi? Your insistence on waiting makes me think your mission is urgent.”

“I believe it is,” Nangi said, “but not in the way you mean. While Mr. Linnear is recuperating, I would very much like to gain as much information as is possible about the man you encountered in Dr. Hanami’s office.”

Tomi frowned. “But surely you’ve talked to Mr. Linnear. He must have provided you with the facts.”

Nangi nodded deferentially. “I have, of course, talked to Mr. Linnear regarding the incident. However, he was still somewhat in shock. Besides, he is not an individual trained to respond to memory the way a police officer—a detective such as yourself—is.”

Tomi said nothing for some time. She watched Nangi for some sense of what he might be after. Failing to find any clue in his words or his expression, she said, “May I ask to what use you will put this information?”

“I intend to discover the whereabouts of the individual.”

“Don’t you think that is best left to the Metropolitan Police, Mr. Nangi?”

“Not necessarily,” Nangi said. “This individual is a ninja. Furthermore, I believe that he is tanjian. Are you familiar with the term, Detective Yazawa? It is said by some that the tanjian were the precursors of ninja. They are adepts at arcane arts we cannot even imagine.”

“Come, come, Mr. Nangi.”

“Think back to the attack on Mr. Linnear and yourself, Detective Yazawa. Was there anything unusual about it? Were you overpowered with great difficulty or with relative ease? Think back to how the two doctors were murdered. Was there anything unusual about the methodology?”

“It was all unusual,” Tomi admitted. “But that is nothing new to me. I think you would be surprised at the oddities that cross my desk every day. It’s part of the job, Mr. Nangi.” She picked up a folder, opened it for him. “Look at this, for instance. A sad and bizarre chronicle of Mariko, a dancer at The Silk Road—you know, one of those
tokudashi
parlors. She was a young, beautiful girl—once. Now look at her.” She pointed to the forensic team’s brightly-lit photos of Mariko’s flayed corpse.

Perhaps because of her mood, or because she thought it preposterous that this lame, one-eyed gentleman should profess to want to track down her suspect, Tomi had picked this dossier—which, despite Senjin’s orders, she had been reluctant to file—in order to shock him.

To her surprise and subsequent chagrin, Nangi did not blink or flinch from the grisly photos. Instead he pointed to a section of her initial report.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s a transcription of a handwritten note we found stuffed into Mariko’s mouth. It said, ‘This could be your wife.’ It was written in her blood.”

“May I see the original?”

Tomi shrugged, flipped to the end of the report where the meager pieces of evidence were affixed in appendices. She handed him the sheet of paper, watched in mounting fascination as he turned the paper this way and that.

“There are holes in the sheet,” he said.

“I know that.”

“What I mean is, the paper was slit as the words were being written.” He pointed. “You see here…and here, on the downstroke. Interesting. One can see immediately that this was not written with a brush. Now it seems that a normal stylus was not used either.” He looked at her, his one-eyed gaze momentarily disconcerting her. “I believe that the same instrument used to skin this girl Mariko was used to write these words.”

“Yes?” Tomi could not see where this was leading.

Nangi put the paper carefully on the desk. “Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

He was silent for a moment, then he said, “Tell me, Detective Yazawa, what meaning does this sentence, ‘This could be your wife,’ have for you?”

“It is a message,” Tomi said. She had gone through this so many times, she spoke almost by rote. “Obviously for someone connected with Mariko.”

“Someone? Who?”

“We’ve…never been able to ascertain his identity. Clearly, though, it was someone Mariko was…seeing.”

“Ah,” Nangi said. “Now I see it all.”

“See what?” Tomi continued to be bewildered.

“A moment ago you called this bloody scrawl a message.”

Tomi nodded with the certitude of her police training. “And so it is.”

“No,” Nangi said. “It is a warning. ‘This could be your wife’ is written in blood, using a steel blade. What do you suppose is meant? The threat is there, and it is more than implied. I think—my apologies for saying this—that your focus has been wrong. The dancer, Mariko, is merely the victim in this crime—not the focus. Consider. Mariko was not killed in a fit of rage or jealousy. Her death was a calculated chess move—one part of a larger whole. This warning, ‘This could be your wife,’ was meant for only one person.
He
should be the focus of your investigation, Miss Yazawa. Mariko was just a pawn used to put pressure on this individual. Why?”

Slowly Tomi placed the blood note back into the dossier, closed the file. She was angry. Not with Tanzan Nangi, who had, after all, only pointed out the truth. She was angry with herself for not having seen what was, in retrospect, the obvious. She had been so wrapped up in the plight of poor, pitiable Mariko that she had failed to catch a glimpse of the larger picture. She had injected a piece of herself into the puzzle, turning the objective into the subjective.

In showing him the Mariko case, Tomi had planned to reveal to him his folly at trying to play detective. Instead, he had reversed her strategy, effectively convincing her of his intelligence and insight.

“As you wish,” Tomi said softly. Her aikido
sensei
had taught her to have respect for those who could beat her. She gave a little bow. “What is it exactly that you wish to know?”

Nicholas had known about the tanjian since he was a young boy, he had merely repressed their existence out of a deeply-rooted sense of self-preservation.

Years ago, when he was young, Cheong had said to her son, “Nicholas, my father, So-Peng, had many children. But, oddly, they were all male. I was three when he adopted me. I would have, in any case, felt special among all those males—there were seven brothers—but So-Peng made me feel special all by himself. He was a most unusual man.”

Nicholas listened with heightened attention. He knew by now that his mother was the master of the understatement. For her, “most unusual” was the ultimate superlative.

“Your grandfather was educated in many different places. He had schooled in Singapore, in Tokyo, in Peking. He spoke with an astonishing fluency every language and dialect extant in Asia.

“By the time I came to him, he had been a copra merchant in the Maldives, where he made his first fortune, and spent most of it battling the rhinoceros hunters in Borneo and the pirates in the waters off the Celebes; he had drilled for oil in Kalimantan, where he had made his second fortune; he had mined coal and gold in Sumatra, and owned virtually all the rubber plantations there, as well as extensive forests of teak, sandalwood, and ebony north of Singapore.

“But above all, he had a capacity for
understanding.
This was what made him truly unique. He did not view women as slaves or as inferior beings. As I was growing up I attributed this to his being so well-traveled. But when I was an adult, I realized that his understanding had evolved from within. He would have had it had he stayed in Singapore all his life.

“My education came mainly from him. The schools were inadequate where we lived, and in any case, So-Peng had his own curriculum to teach me. I could ask anything of him and he would gladly tell me. But one day I remember asking why all his children were males. He said nothing, but his face grew sad and lines I had never noticed before appeared.

“Many months later he said to me, ‘We are in a battle, you and I. To you, Cheong, I give everything of true worth. Not my oil fields or my rubber plantations or my export business or even my real estate. These are of no lasting import, and therefore can easily be managed by my sons, who are all clever and good judges of character.

“‘This battle we are engaged in will continue long after we are both dust. This is as it should be. It is, in any case, karma. Once I had daughters and I thought that they would join me in this battle, but now, sadly, they are gone. But I have you. You are my joy and my savior. You will continue the battle, as will your child.’

“I was a young girl. His words terrified me. ‘But Father,’ I said, ‘I wish to have many children. I am sure—I can feel it—that whomever I marry will want many children as well.’

“And So-Peng said, ‘You will fulfill your duty, Cheong. You will bear a child. You must content yourself with that, because he will be the one. The battle begun so long ago will end with him.’