The Nicholas Linnear Novels (211 page)

The Pack Rat heard Killan’s laugh. “Listen to you. You’re a genius in the lab. But in the real world, forget it. When you first told me about this, you weren’t even going to get a piece of the action.”

“That’s right,” the Scoundrel said, sounding defensive. “I was told the MANTIS project was strictly for governmental use.”

“And I said, fuck the government,” Killan said. “I said, let’s take this shit and go private. We’ll make a fortune. Do you know how many Western conglomerates will deliver a year’s assets in order to get an edge on their competitors? Jesus, the American market alone for this virus will make us millionaires!”

“If we live long enough,” the Scoundrel said. “Which we might not. I’m not so sure we’re doing the right thing, Killan. This is the real world. Besides, MANTIS isn’t perfected yet.”

“Real world. My God, listen to us!” Killan said. “Next thing we’ll be discussing is getting married, having kids, which brand of diapers and rash ointment to buy. We’ll be dead! Or something even worse: entombed by
kata,
the rigid rules of our society.”

“Ah, Killan the eternal revolutionary,” the Scoundrel said in a gently chiding voice. “Revolutions are great to think about. But they don’t exist, not in our world. Anyway, there were only two revolutions that meant anything, one in America, the other in France. The others were jokes, parodies that exchanged one form of dictatorship for another. They don’t even deserve the name.”

The Pack Rat was paying no attention to the talk of revolution; he let his machines soak up the conversation for him. He was fully concentrated on the fact that this friend of Killan Oroshi’s, this platinum-haired postpunk computer genius, the Scoundrel, who worked for Nakano Industries, Killan’s father’s company, was working on a supercomputer virus. Just the kind that had attacked Sato International’s computer banks. Could it have been the Scoundrel’s MANTIS being tested out? he asked himself. He knew there were tons of viruses being born daily, but according to Mickey, the expert to whom he had given the record of the virus’s attack, this particular one was a mole virus, not a destroyer like most others. Was MANTIS that kind? The Scoundrel had called it a borer. Did that mean it was meant as a communication device? The Pack Rat did not yet know. On the other hand, the Scoundrel was just the kind of genius Mickey had described when she had talked with the Pack Rat about the virus’s creator.

The Pack Rat had a weird sensation of déjà vu, as if he had come full circle: Nangi and the Scoundrel’s MANTIS; Nangi and Ikusa; Ikusa and Ken Oroshi; Ken Oroshi, Ikusa, and Nangi; Ikusa and Killan Oroshi; Killan Oroshi and the Scoundrel. There seemed a connection to be made in the odd and disparate interlocking of relationships, but, maddeningly, he could not see it. He knew it was there, though, and his heart beat faster. Nangi will know, he thought. He knew he had to get all of this to Nangi right away.

He was concentrating so hard that he at first failed to recognize the blossoming geometric shape cast upon the wall in front of him. Then, with a start, he saw that it was a lozenge of light that could only be made by the hallway light coming into the apartment through the front door. But he had been careful to close the door behind him when he first entered.

The lozenge of light winked out. Darkness, again, mitigated by blue moonlight. And the Pack Rat knew that someone was in the apartment with him.

He did not move; he scarcely breathed. He slowly pulled the “ears” from around his head, letting the recorder continue monitoring the conversation from the next apartment through its umbilical suctioned to the wall.

His immediate environment was silent save for the tiny noises all apartment buildings manufacture, the sounds of the nighttime street filtered through the cracks between the window sash and the glass. Nothing else.

And yet…

The brief crackle of newspaper underfoot, the sound as explosive to his ears as that of a match being lighted in a warehouse full of gasoline.

Hurriedly, the Pack Rat placed his “ears” against the wall, covered the paraphernalia with debris. He moved away from it as a mother wren will from her chicks when she senses danger is near. Her instincts tell her to lure the danger away from her progeny; keeping them safe is her first priority. So, too, with the Pack Rat’s recording of events and meetings, the shadow world that Tanzan Nangi had hired him to penetrate and neutralize. He knew that he had to protect his evidence at all costs.

As he moved stealthily across the apartment, he withdrew a dagger with an eight-inch blade whose shape he had designed on the computer. It was thin enough to be easily concealed beneath clothes, yet wide enough to be lethal even on a cut that was slightly off the mark.

Shadows played along the walls and the floor, across the humped shapes of discarded lathe, dried spackling compound, and wallboard, adderlike tangles of wires, exposed phone lines.

The Pack Rat heard it coming long before he saw it. The whistle of air being displaced, and the small hairs at the back of his neck stood up. He knew that sound, and he curled into a ball, launching himself forward,
toward
the direction of the attack, knowing that this was his only hope now.

What the Pack Rat recognized was the sound a
tetsubo
makes when it is wielded. A moment later, as if to confirm his suspicion, the area of the concrete floor on which he had been standing exploded in a choking shower of particles and dust.

Tetsubo-jutsu was a highly specialized form of the martial arts primarily because the
tetsubo
itself—a solid iron bar, its working end covered with iron studs—was so heavy. The weapon had been developed centuries ago for armored warfare. A warrior would wade into the enemy, swinging the iron bar, opening up their armor or breaking the legs of the mounted enemies’ horses.

Nowadays, tetsubo-jutsu was used for only one reason: to crush an opponent. There were no halfway measures with such a weapon.

The Pack Rat came out of his curled position, struck immediately upward. It was as if he had encountered a mountain. It took an exceptionally strong man, an enormous man, to effectively use the
tetsubo.
Without having seen his face, the Pack Rat knew who had followed him from the Nami offices into this vacant apartment: Kusunda Ikusa.

The Pack Rat’s blow was deflected, and he found himself thrown hard across the room. He hit the wall with a thud, bounced up immediately. Even so, he could hear the
tetsubo
humming in the air as it headed toward him. He ducked, and a chunk of the wall splintered, showering him in biting bits of lathe and plaster.

To avoid the
suki,
the weaknesses in defense that could result from tetsubo-jutsu, Ikusa had to strike at the Pack Rat quickly and repeatedly. This could be tiring, even for such a sumo as Ikusa.

But the Pack Rat knew that he could not keep up the pace of evasion in such a constricted space. Eventually he would duck the wrong way or make a misstep and Ikusa would crush his skull.

Therefore, he did the only thing he could think of—he got as near to Ikusa as he could manage. He theorized that the iron club would lose much of its effectiveness at such close quarters.

Ikusa’s free arm came up, and the Pack Rat batted it aside, struck out with his knife, heard the sound of material being slit, felt the blade bury itself into flesh, and he knew he had a chance.

Ikusa dropped the
tetsubo,
made a grab for the Pack Rat. The Pack Rat was ready for him, drove an elbow inward in a powerful
atemi.
He whirled, crouching down, beginning his circular entering movement, and got his left hand on the iron club. He began the aikido immobilization
jo-waza,
turning outward, back the way he had come, feeling Ikusa’s weight coming forward, beginning to unbalance as the Pack Rat used his momentum against him, and the Pack Rat thought, Now I have a chance.

He slid his left leg forward, shifting the axis upon which his body rotated, readying the completion of the
jo-waza
that would hurl Kusunda Ikusa’s enormous weight to the floor. At that moment a tremendous blow caught him in the side of his head.

He staggered, his vision blurred. He struck out blindly with his blade, missed, overcompensated, spun helplessly around.

Then he heard the whistle, actually saw the iron bar coming at him, filling his vision. He tried to move his head, but nothing seemed to work.

A crack like thunder from the edge of the world. Time, like existence, as fragile as a candle's flame, was snuffed out.

When Senjin touched Justine’s belly with the flat of his hand, he said to her, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

He might have said, You’re dead, aren’t you? In fact, for the first split instant, that was what Justine thought he had said, but then she understood that what she was hearing was an echo of her own inner voice.

“Oh, God,” she said, collapsing against him, “I lied.”

Senjin let go of the silken cord, held her as delicately as if she were a fragile-boned bird with a broken wing. He saw the moonlight, slow and thick, falling across her face, illuminating one by one her features: mysterious eyes, strong nose, high cheekbones, full, partly-open lips; her hair in the semidarkness a shroud rich with promise, below which her breasts rose and fell with her rapid, shallow breathing. The dense moonlight cast purple shadows, creating two other figures on the porch, elongated, humanoid but certainly not human, winged but certainly not angels.

This light had come a long way, slipping through the vast wasteland between the stars, a prehistoric light, though of what alien civilization’s prehistory, it was impossible to say. But Senjin recognized this light and the power its properties of immense distance and time represented.

“I’ve lied to my husband all this time, and I lied to you when I said that I went to see Honi because I hated myself. I mean, I
did
hate myself. That much is true. But that’s not all of it, not nearly. I was—how can I put this so you’ll understand? I didn’t want to grow up. I was afraid of growing up. I had lived my life with a mother sapped of life and of strength. It seemed clear to me that in giving birth to me and to my older sister, my mother had given us the juice of her flesh along with her milk.

“She was dried up, desiccated, devoid of zest. She had bequeathed that to us, had used up her quota of youth and gusto in becoming a mother. She was old before her time, lined, forever tired, forever plagued by vague maladies—headaches, backaches, cramps—that often prevented her from participating in even the simplest family requirements. More often than not she had her meals in her room, which by then was separate from where my father slept—she claimed the weight of his body on the mattress caused her calves to spasm in the middle of the night.

“She rarely attended parties or family gatherings, never made it to our graduations from high school and college, but sent two trusted servants in her stead, as if believing that quantity would make up for her absence. Funerals were, of course, out of the question—they were too emotionally taxing—and she never went near a hospital until the day she died.

“It was as if, along with her drying up, her giving us her life fluids, her capacity to take on obligation had dissolved.

“This, to me, was adulthood—all I could expect in the coming years. Can you imagine how I felt when I thought about having a baby of my own? All I could see in my mind’s eye was the image of my mother, gray-faced, bedridden, racked by the kinds of aches and pains women twice her age only start to experience.

“‘You’re not your mother,’ Honi assured me. It wasn’t enough. I worked hard to want to be an adult, a mother, but it wasn’t easy. My God, I tortured myself over it for years. I shed so many tears, you wouldn’t believe how many. Finally I thought I had it down. I thought I knew that I wouldn’t turn into my mother. But then I came here to Japan with my husband. I got pregnant and my little daughter died. I got through the hurt and the guilt just like an adult. I was proud of myself. I stood by my husband when he was in difficulty.

“Then I got pregnant again and everything burst apart. My whole life seemed turned upside down. It was as if I was back in Honi’s office, terrified of becoming my mother. I don’t know whether I want this baby. I don’t know whether I can handle the responsibility. I feel as if I aw turning into my mother, that I’m simply incapable of doing it—being a mother—and I’m so ashamed and disgusted with myself I can’t stand it. And yet I don’t want to be like my mother. I don’t!”

Senjin, holding her, feeling her racked with sobs, was mute. I hated my mother, too, he thought. Only my sister knew that, and she didn’t understand until I explained it to her, not with words, but with actions. My sister is a stubborn, strong-willed woman. So much so that she became used to getting what she wanted. Except from me. I tried to cure her of her excesses. Perhaps I was at least partially successful. But I had to stop correcting her. I saw that if I went too far she would break, rather than bend. I would not change her spirit, though that spirit is imperfect, dangerous even. She is my sister, not my mother. I would have changed my mother if I had been given a chance. My mother, like this woman, was weak, deficient. A cure, no matter how radical, would have been good for her in the end, anyone who knew her could see that.

I think my whole life has been an effort to be strong in everything I do or say or think. I cannot allow myself even a momentary weakness, it’s too much to bear, the thought that I’m carrying some of her inside me. Can weakness be inherited in the genes or passed like poison through the umbilical?

With Justine’s lips against his neck, her breasts hard against his muscled chest, her thighs against his leg, Senjin thought he felt nothing, just as he felt nothing when he stared down at the nude body of Mariko, the dancer at The Silk Road, just as he felt nothing when he had sucked the innocence out of Tomi, using Tau-tau to seduce her in the office, just as he felt nothing when he had entered the myriad women who had populated his past like signposts in a distant terrain. Without thinking of Haha-san, he had never felt even a fleeting atom of carnal desire at the touch of female flesh.