The Nicholas Linnear Novels (197 page)

Now, a week after that conversation, a week of frustrating surveillance, the Pack Rat found himself here at this Chinese restaurant.

At the moment Kusunda walked through the door, the man drinking the martini folded the paper, put it away in a slim alligator document case. He rose.

The two men greeted each other warmly, and the Pack Rat was indirectly introduced to Ken Oroshi, chairman of Nakano Industries.

“Oroshi-san,” Ikusa said, settling in, “how are your wife and children?”

“All are fine, Ikusa-san,” Oroshi said. “They send their greetings, and their blessings.”

It had been Oroshi, the Pack Rat observed, whose bow had been the deeper. For all of Nami’s power, that was unusual in someone of Ken Oroshi’s position, who was at least twenty years older than Ikusa. Custom—not to mention etiquette—demanded that Ikusa, as the junior man, bow that much deeper than Oroshi, to show his respect. Instead, the opposite had happened.

The two men began to talk about golf—the Japanese businessman’s mania. It had cost Ken Oroshi more than four million dollars to join Koganei Country Club, the most prestigious in the country, where greens fees were three thousand dollars a month, and then it was only because Ikusa sat on the club’s owners’ committee that Oroshi jumped the one-hundred-plus names on the waiting list.

The conversation drifted on with nothing out of the ordinary coming up. The Pack Rat allowed his attention to wander around the room, which was filled, for the most part, with serious-faced businessmen along with a spattering of tourists: thick-necked Americans and beefy, red-faced Germans.

The Pack Rat’s gaze fell upon a young woman—perhaps no more than a girl, really. Though she was dressed in the height of sophisticated, moneyed fashion, her utterly unlined face indicated that she was still in her teens.

She was, like the Pack Rat, sitting near Ikusa’s table. Ken Oroshi’s back was to her, and once, startlingly, the Pack Rat saw her eyes lock with Ikusa’s. Something akin to amusement played like a melody across the girl’s face, and she seemed abruptly more grown-up than the Pack Rat had given her credit for. Ikusa’s face showed nothing but polite attention directed at Ken Oroshi, but the flicker of his eyes in the girl’s direction caught the Pack Rat’s attention and he began to study the girl in earnest.

She wore a dramatic black and white pony pattern bolero jacket over a black rayon blouse. She wore a leather skirt of the same color with a wide gold belt. Gold sandals were on her feet.

Her thick, shimmering hair was stiff with gel, her lips small, bow-shaped, glossed a bright crimson. She had the kind of face, the Pack Rat decided, that devoid of its artful makeup would be, at best, plain. In any event, the eyes were filled with life and intelligence, and the Pack Rat noted this because it was more significant than how she dressed or was made-up.

Over steaming platters of gingered fish and abalone in black bean sauce, Ikusa steered the conversation away from golf. “I think I may have the answer to your fiscal problems.”

“As long as it will not expose our plight to the public,” Ken Oroshi said. “We have gone to great lengths to conceal our difficulties.”

“There is cause on both sides for secrecy,” Ikusa said, fastidiously extruding a translucent fishbone from between his lips. “This plan will also bring you the most important new technology in computer chips.”

“What is it,” Ken Oroshi said, laughing, “the Sphynx T-PRAM?”

“Yes,” Kusunda Ikusa said. “Precisely that.”

Ken Oroshi put his chopsticks down. “Do you mean to tell me that Nami has wrested control of that proprietary technology from Sphynx?”

“Not quite,” Ikusa said. “Not yet.” He cut himself another thick slab of fish, dexterously maneuvered it onto his plate. “Tanzan Nangi is under some immediate pressure. He must merge Sato International’s Sphynx computer-chip manufacturing
kobun.
In the course of these discussions, your name came up as a possible partner. I indicated Nami’s acceptance.”

“But Nangi-san is not in Sphynx alone. The T-PRAM technology isn’t even his. It comes from Tomkin Industries, which is owned by Nicholas Linnear. What about him? I doubt that he will approve the merger.”

“Linnear is not a factor in any of this,” Ikusa said, shoving the crisp fishtail in his mouth. “Your deal is with Tanzan Nangi.”

The conversation then turned to appointments with lawyers, points to keep in mind when drawing up the merger papers, and so on. The Pack Rat’s attention drifted back to the girl, who was sipping tea with the avidity of a lioness hunkering down to her fresh-killed meal.

This struck him as odd until he realized that her full concentration was on the exchange between the two men. Even when the terminology became excessively technical and esoteric, her interest never flagged. On the contrary, her face became suffused with the kind of glow normally only stage lights can provide.

Lunch was over, the tea had been drunk, the last pieces of business discussed. The men rose, bowing, but only Ken Oroshi left, hurrying out of the restaurant, his chic document case swinging at his side.

Kusunda Ikusa heaved himself back into his chair, sipped meditatively at his tea. The Pack Rat paid his check and, as he did so, he noticed the girl from the next table get up, start toward the door. Ikusa looked up sharply, a dark look on his face. His eyes flashed as they locked with the girl’s.

Was it the Pack Rat’s imagination or did the girl hesitate as she passed his table before heading for the door?

Five minutes later Ikusa paid the check and left. The Pack Rat followed.

He momentarily lost Ikusa in the lobby, then found him just outside. He was with the girl from the next table. She was smiling at him as she strode beside him.

The Pack Rat got out the miniaturized shotgun mike he had made himself, got his tape recorder going. Ikusa gave the girl a feral grin, a baring of the teeth typical of a jungle predator.

“I wish you wouldn’t persist in doing this kind of thing,” he said.

“It’s not prudent,” the girl said, in a passable imitation of his voice. She swung her head around.
“I’m
not prudent. I have you for that. Yin and yang, Kusunda. We must have a balance.”

One thing struck the Pack Rat immediately: how shockingly the girl used Ikusa’s first name.

“As far as I can see, there is nothing balanced about this relationship,” Kusunda Ikusa said. “It is based on mutual need, and need is never balanced.”

“Like riding the back of a dragon.”

“You thrive on danger, Killan. Sometimes I think that what you really want when you make these forays is for your father to turn around and recognize you.”

The Pack Rat’s heart was racing. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Ken Oroshi had three children—two boys, aged twenty, and a girl, aged eighteen. The girl, according to the Pack Rat’s computers, was named Killan. Now here she was in the flesh, entangled in some bizarre, clandestine way with Kusunda Ikusa. What was going on?

At that moment Ikusa broke away, and without a further word to Killan Oroshi, disappeared into the throng.

Black igneous rock, thrusting skyward in jagged, clawed might. How many eons ago had the earth thundered, spitting in fire and gas? From that raging inferno the Hodaka had emerged to be weathered by wind and snow and ice.

The massif of the Hodaka was perhaps the most perilous area in all of Japan. From Nishi in the west to Oku in the northeast, the Hodaka was a series of razor-thin, serpentine ridges between deep, black ravines crusted with ice and hoarfrost over lime-impregnated granite. Fissures created in groaning slippage through the severe winter months crisscrossed the succession of ridges like wounds in the corded arm of a veteran warrior.

The fissured wall known as Takidani, the Valley of the Waterfalls, had developed another name over the years, one which all climbers knew and used in memory of the number of their brethren who had perished in failed assaults: the Devil’s Graveyard.

Just beyond Takidani, rising like a brooding giant, remorseless and fearsome, was the Black Gendarme, a veil of absolutely perpendicular igneous rock, veined with black ice. Threatening, intimidating, the Cassandra of the Japanese Alps, it seemed to have been thrust in one culminating upheaval from the center of the earth’s core.

It was here that Nicholas had been brought as a teenager by Kansatsu-san to complete his training, to prove in Nicholas’s mind, at least, that he was better than Saigo.

And, perhaps, this was why he had died upon the Devil’s Graveyard, with the Black Gendarme mocking him from its lofty eminence.

He had not learned his lessons well; his arrogance had misled him into believing his mastery of
ninjutsu
was far more advanced than it actually was. His heart had not been pure. Instead of concentrating on reaching the state of mind/no mind that was the Void, the path to understanding, he had been intent upon besting Saigo again.

In a way, he saw now, he and Saigo had been alike in that. Their rivalry had become, for them, a monomania—as the Book of Five Rings had been for Miyamoto Musashi—infusing their study of the martial arts with a very personal motivation. Their hearts had been tainted, then warped by the same sin: hate.

The revelation shook him to the core, making him unsure whether he wanted to see this arduous journey through. In truth he had no idea how long ago the secret message had been written on Kyoki’s scroll, or even what it portended. Even if Genshi, the tanjian’s brother, had indeed lived within sight of the Black Gendarme, he might well be dead by now.

But Nicholas knew that if he did not go on, he would never know. There would certainly be no salvation for him, and he would lose everything—Justine, his family, Tomkin Industries—because he could detect like a menacing iceberg sliding through the water the slow disintegration of his own sense of himself.

With comprehension will come the certainty of despair.

Shiro Ninja.

The path from Nishi Peak to the Devil’s Graveyard was so arduous and hazardous that it had attracted far fewer climbers in recent years, after the disasters of 1981 and 1982, when ten people were lost there. And yet, within the community of professional mountaineers, there continued to be a fascination with the Hodaka and, in particular, with the Devil’s Graveyard.

In retrospect it seemed clear that Kansatsu, in selecting the Hodaka as the site of Nicholas’s graduation from the
ryu,
had meant to drive out of the boy all thought—conscious and unconscious—of his obsessive rivalry with Saigo. Nicholas could not imagine what other reason Kansatsu-san might have had for choosing it.

The Black Gendarme was a locus of death; it had no place in a teenage boy’s life.

It had been December, and even in ultraefficient Tokyo great drifts of snow, charcoaled from soot, rainbow-hued from car oil, lay against the sidewalks.

It had been the coldest winter in twenty years when Kansatsu took Nicholas northeast into the Hodaka. Snow lay hip deep like sand; the mountain had been transformed by nature into a desert of ice. Snow eaves sixteen feet wide overhung the passes and shoulders which they traversed, their breaths coming hard, the hot exhalations crystallizing instantly in the thin, frigid air. The sky, an almost painfully brilliant shade of blue-purple, seemed brittle, little more than an eggshell.

Nicholas had been barefoot because Kansatsu had said,
Ice and the fear of death are one and the same. Once you learn not to feel the one, you will not fear the other.

Nicholas remembered vividly how clear it had been on their ascent of the Hodaka. To this day he could not fathom where the storm had come from. But the range had mighty canyons, vast peaks like flying buttresses which acted like tunnels, directing the elements, magnifying their force, their virulence. Up here, when the sun shone, its rays could burn the skin off your face and hands; the same was true of an ice storm.

Nicholas had been in sight of the Black Gendarme when the storm hit. He had been perhaps halfway through the program of tests Kansatsu-san had devised for him. Perhaps—this was forever an enigma in Nicholas’s mind—the storm itself had been part of the examination.

In any event, a snow eave, perhaps twenty feet in length, was broken off by the rising wind whipping through the canyons between the peaks. Nicholas, who had been fighting just to breathe the thin air that the wind swept away from him, should have felt the solid arc of snow and ice dropping toward him, should have heard the echo of the crack as it was dislodged, even though the wind sucked the sound away into the storm.

The truth was that Nicholas was fighting
haragei,
the sixth sense Kansatsu had taught him to find within himself.
Haragei,
the precursor to
Getsumei no michi,
could be terrifying to the inexperienced. Controlling it was far more arduous than finding it. Nicholas did not fully know himself. Therefore, he was having difficulty manipulating
haragei;
it was, in part, controlling him.

Ice and snow dropping out of the sky crushed him beneath its weight. The storm was upon him, darkness and cold enveloping him all at once. The first thing he did was panic. He tried to breathe, and when he found that he could not, his mind dissolved into chaos.

Like a flash of lightning the panic quickly passed. Silence rang in his ears. He could hear the beating of his heart, the blood rushing through his veins, amplified in the dimensions of his tomb. Curiously, this revived him. I am alive, he thought.

Something—an ancient instinct, he believed—came to the fore, told him to center himself. And with centering came
haragei.
He reached out with his mind, and rediscovered the world outside. Immediately he became aware of Kansatsu’s presence and was comforted.

He began to dig. He used his skills. He could “see” Kansatsu pointing, showing him in which direction to dig, just as Nicholas imagined that Kansatsu himself was digging.

There was a finite amount of oxygen in the tomb, and it was fast giving out. Carbon dioxide burned his lungs. His body was on fire. Still he concentrated on the task before him, refusing to be distracted by fear. He did not feel the cold; he was not afraid to die.