The Nicholas Linnear Novels (196 page)

Then she came across a sentence that startled her. “All idealism is falsehood,” Nietzsche wrote, “in the face of necessity.” This was quintessential Douglas Howe. It reminded her of a quote from the French philosopher of materialism, Denis Diderot, that was one of Howe’s favorites: “There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.”

She put the book back, searched in vain for the Tao. In truth, she had not expected to find it. She had too firm a grip on Howe’s psyche to expect that he would be open to the mystical Tao. Yes, Nietzsche and Diderot were more his meat, solid, definite, Western—most of all, rational and pragmatic.

She turned at the sound of a door opening and saw David Brisling, Howe’s assistant. “The senator will see you now.” Brisling’s voice was cold, aloof.

Shisei smiled her actor’s smile. Everything, she thought, was simple when I felt nothing. Amid the brambles of her newly-exposed emotions, possibilities multiplied like reflections in facing mirrors.

She was wearing a short white silk skirt, a sleeveless black crepe de chine blouse with a high mandarin collar. Around her waist was a wide velvet belt with an oversized red-gold buckle in an abstract shape. Brisling looked right through her.

Howe was waiting for her in his office. It was teak-paneled, with brass lamps, a large, overly masculine leather club sofa against one wall, an overly large carved English walnut desk behind which stood a matching credenza. A pair of black antique English chairs lurked like guardian Sphinxes. An excellent Robert Motherwell painting hung on the wall above the sofa.

Shisei duplicated Howe’s dazzling hollow smile, reflecting it back at him, just like a television image. And like a television image she came across the room, kilowatts in her eyes.

She made certain the door into the outer office where Brisling had retreated in glowering silence was left ajar. She sat in one of the black English chairs, sorting out in her mind what it was he needed to hear, what she wanted to reveal, most importantly, how much she needed to tell him in order for him to be satisfied.

“You’re late,” Howe said without consulting his watch. “I expected you sooner than this.”

Shisei shrugged. “When one is involved, one’s time is not one’s own.”

“Save the act for someone who’ll appreciate it. How deeply is Branding involved?” Douglas Howe said in the same tone of voice he used to order one of his staff to get a Joint Chief on the phone.

“He’s in love with me,” Shisei said truthfully. “He is fascinated by me, consumed by me.” Her eyes glowed until they were almost the color of prehistoric amber.

“But does he trust you?” Howe asked.

He knows how to get at the heart of the matter, Shisei thought. She said, “Trust does not come easily to a politician, especially one who is locked in a life-and-death battle with his worst enemy.”

Howe scowled. “Does he suspect that I hired you?”

“He does not suspect me, no,” Shisei said, again truthfully. “But the possibility has crossed his mind.”

Howe’s scowl deepened. “How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“He told you?” Howe was incredulous. “Then he’s an idiot!”

Shisei said nothing.

Howe tapped a pen meditatively against his lips. “In which quarter does he plan to attack me?”

“I don’t know.”

“What have you been up to, then?”

“The creation of an obsession,” Shisei said, “is accomplished only with patience and determination. No one responds to haste; they mistake it for insincerity.”

“That’s unhelpful,” Howe said sharply. “Time is the one commodity I have very little of,” he said, busy chewing on his pen. “I hired you to burrow inside Branding, to get me information. I don’t give a shit whether he loves you or just has the hots for you, as long as you get me information I can use against him.

“You say Branding is consumed by you. Let me clue you in. While you’ve been playing Mata Hari, Branding has been a busy little boy.” He made her aware that he was throwing her own words back in her face. “He’s been burning up the phone lines, calling in markers, political favors; he’s made deals all over Capitol Hill. He’s blocked me at every turn. He’s going to get that fucking ASCRA bill passed, despite my contacts. The Hive Project is very much alive and well and threatening to eat our federal budget whole. Unless you can bring Cotton Branding down by the end of the month, when his bill gets onto the Senate floor, the Advanced Computer Research Agency will have the federal government by the balls, and Cotton Branding will have enough power to run for the President of the United States in two years and win.”

Howe was baleful when he was in this sort of mood. He could work himself up into a kind of trembling rage that often required a full-scale explosion to dissipate it.

“Do you know what that would mean?” Only too well, Shisei thought, but, dutifully, she said nothing. “I know how far the Hive Project has come. They’ve already perfected the goddamned computer. Branding would have the entire government switch over to the Hive computer. I mean everyone: the NSC, the CIA, every fucking secret this country possesses will be in the Hive memory banks.

“Poor blind Branding has become dangerous to the security of this country. He doesn’t see the risk inherent in the system, and neither do very many other people. Everything we know, every secret thing we’ve amassed on foreign powers, on what we’re secretly working on, would be fed into the Hive. Of course. It could solve our problems of defense, create initiatives one thousand times faster than any of our current inefficient think tanks or bureaucracies. But the Hive Project has enormous drawbacks. No one knows whether it can be penetrated. Its technology is so new, so revolutionary, that everyone assumes its so-called invulnerable defenses will be impenetrable. Branding is so sure of the technology he’s championing. But think of what could happen to the United States if a program run by an unfriendly power could worm its way inside the Hive computer. It would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It would undermine the very foundations of this country, putting everyone and everything we stand for in jeopardy.”

Howe’s eyes were blazing. “Goddamnit, we have to stop Branding!” His shoulders assumed the powerful, compact hunch of the street fighter. “God, I hate that monied, privileged bastard! Look what his family has given him. He’s an insider here because he’s a Branding, because of his old-boy contacts. And what am I? The perennial outsider, the poor boy, the hick farmer’s son, the nobody, clawing and scratching for every contact I make.” All of a sudden he realized how worked up he had become. He snapped his jaw shut, whirled, poured himself a shot of bourbon. When he turned back to Shisei, he was calm again.

“If only Branding’s wife had not died in that senseless accident,” he said. “We would have caught him up in a sex scandal that would have finished him right now.”

Shisei studied him for some time. At length she said, “There’s something I need to know. Where is the boundary? How far are you willing to take this in order to bring Branding down?”

Howe was again shaking with rage. “Isn’t it clear to you yet?” he said. “I’ll do whatever I have to in order to destroy him utterly. This isn’t a game I’m playing with Branding. I think you understand.”

“Of course.”

“Then tell me what it is you understand. Tell me what I want to know.” He leaned toward her. “Enlighten me as to why I should continue to employ you when I have Brisling running an operation to discredit the people at the Johnson Institute involved in the Hive Project?”

Shisei laughed. “That’s a dead end. Those people are clean. And if you manufacture a scandal, Branding will make it backfire back at you.”

“Not me,” Howe said. “I’ve distanced myself from the operation. It’s strictly Brisling’s baby. I’ve got plausible deniability.”

“Still, you’re wasting your time with it.”

“I’m not paying you to be a critic,” Howe said acidly. “So kindly tell me how I
won’t
waste my time.”

Shisei felt nothing. She was comforted by the fact that she had so effortlessly slipped back into her methodology. She no longer felt confused, vulnerable, entangled. Everything was again clear; the normality of the Void encircled her like the arm of a loving parent.

“Well, we agree about one thing,” she said. “Brisling’s expendable. You know, of course, about the dinner at the end of the month?” She was referring to the State dinner for the West German chancellor that Branding mentioned to her over lunch. “I will make sure Branding takes me.” She looked at Howe. “You must do one thing. Convince Brisling that he has to act against me. It won’t be difficult; I’ll give him an incentive. Do whatever you have to, but make sure he breaks into my house the night of the dinner. I want him in the house just after I leave.”

Howe stared at her for a long time. “You’ll find the way, won’t you? You understand that I must destroy Cotton Branding, Shisei, or the Hive Project will go through.” He shook his head. “Christ, but you’re cutting it close. The dinner is only a few days away from when Branding’s ASCRA bill makes it onto the Senate floor.” His low voice was full of menace. “It’s my last chance to destroy him.”

Howe did not show it, but he was pleased. As usual, he had found that his bullying tactics worked. People did their jobs more effectively, he had found, when they were firmly shown their place. Everyone wanted recognition more than anything else. But if you gave them too much, they became lazy, complacent. You had to keep employees on their toes, keep them in obedience school in order to keep them performing at peak efficiency.

In that light, Howe decided that Shisei had earned her reward. He gestured, and she saw the Louis Feraud suit draped elegantly over the back of a chair. She stared at it, entranced.

“It’s yours,” he said. “I reward employees who perform for me.”

Shisei touched the suit. For a moment she luxuriated in the feel of the superior wool. Then her fingers encountered the fox trim and she experienced a wave of revulsion so powerful that she felt her gorge rise. How typical of this man to buy her so expensive a present because it was what
he
admired, what he thought she should wear. He had, as usual, been oblivious to her own preferences, ignoring her distaste for the killing of animals for such a reason.

She excused herself, went to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror, tried to see herself as Douglas Howe saw her. She thought he might be dangerous if he ever started thinking for himself.

She cursed the day she came to Washington, ingratiating herself slowly into Howe’s confidence. Necessity and obligation,
giri,
these were always uppermost in her mind. But too often Douglas Howe had a way of making painful the performance of one’s duty.

Unlike Cook Branding.

She had wanted to take this time to figure out why her mind was again filled with Cook Branding. She had returned to that disturbing state of entanglement, her objective edge blunted by emotion. At the sink she stared at herself in the mirror. What is wrong with me? she asked herself.

She pushed the troubling questions aside for the moment, concentrating on how happy she was at what she was about to do. She was committed now; her feet were firmly set upon the path. There was no turning back.

Kusunda Ikusa had a vaguely humiliating weakness for Chinese food; he also had an affinity for a certain restaurant in Shinjuku.

Both facts were in the Pack Rat’s computer. When he entered the Toh-Li restaurant at the top of the fifty-story Nomura Securities Building, he was unrecognizable as the man who had met Nangi in Akihabara. The Pack Rat looked every inch the paradigm of ministerial Japan. His dark suit was impeccably cut, his shirt a blinding white, his brogues polished to a mirror shine.

It happened that the maître d’ was a friend of a friend, and the Pack Rat was seated at a table just behind the one that Kusunda Ikusa had reserved.

Ikusa was not yet at the restaurant, but a small, powerful-looking man had already made himself at home. He was sipping a martini while reading today’s copy of the
Asahi Shimbun
newspaper.

The Pack Rat did not recognize him. It did not matter. The Pack Rat was in seventh heaven. He lived for danger; it was his way of ridding himself of the rigid hierarchical strata of responsibilities that made up life in Japan.

When Tanzan Nangi had given him the directive to compromise Kusunda Ikusa somehow, the Pack Rat had been unfazed. Rather, he relished such an assignment, which carried with it the heavy burden of danger. The Pack Rat was like Atlas: the more weight he was asked to bear, the better he liked it.

When he and Nangi had parted company in the Akihabara, he had spent the next forty-five minutes checking and rechecking the vicinity in ever-expanding squares that eventually took in the entire district. When he was certain that the environment was clean, he had gone to find Han Kawado.

Han Kawado was one of the Pack Rat’s most reliable “team members,” as he liked to think of them. But the Pack Rat also loved the young man. He had picked Kawado to keep track, as Tanzan Nangi also wanted, of Justine Linnear’s movements.

The Pack Rat had found Han Kawado making out the last of his report on the Kawabana affair at the back of the zinc-topped bar in Mama’s.

“I’m looking for the key to this guy,” the Pack Rat had said to Han Kawado as he slid onto a stool beside him. He was referring to Kusunda Ikusa. “Unfortunately, what I need isn’t a key, but a crowbar. Ikusa-san’s gate is not to be delicately opened, but pried off its hinges. Only then will one find his weakness.”

“Prying is a dangerous activity,” Han Kawado had observed. “It’s said that Ikusa-san does not even trust his own mother! Can you imagine such a thing!” Han Kawado shook his head.

The Pack Rat was looking at the calligraphy on a scroll hanging behind the bar.
The clouds/With no mortal weight/Disappear like man/Thought remains.

Han Kawado had rubbed his face. “What do you know of Kusunda Ikusa’s psyche?”

“My computer bank holds facts, not psychology,” the Pack Rat had said. “All it tells me is that he’s so goddamned virtuous, he’s invulnerable to coercion. But I don’t need a computer to tell me what I already know of Kusunda Ikusa. He’s a young man, an arrogant man, engorged with the aphrodisiac of power. Therefore, he’s vulnerable.”