The Nicholas Linnear Novels (237 page)

“But now he knows where the last of So-Peng’s emeralds are.” Nicholas put his head back against the bare wall. “I can’t let him leave here.”

Conny looked at Nicholas, at his myriad reflections scattered like stars all around him. “It occurs to me that you never had that intention,” he said softly.

Nicholas nodded. “You’re right, of course. I just didn’t want to have to face it, not if there was a chance it could end differently. Now I know that I must kill him or he will kill me.”

“How badly are you hurt?”

“I’ll survive,” Nicholas said. “For now.” He glanced up the stairwell. It was unnaturally quiet in the building. “What’s he doing up there, I wonder?” But he could already feel the dark reverberations at
kokoro,
and knew that he was finished. He had so little experience with the tanjian membrane, that in that theater of war, Senjin would surely defeat him. For Nicholas that was the death ground, and he must at all costs stay clear of it. There must be some other way, he thought.

“Okay.” Conny rubbed his hands together. “What’s Plan B?”

Nicholas looked at his friend, gave him a bleak smile. “There isn’t any. I’m out of ideas. This bastard’s not going to give up, and I don’t think I can stop him.”

“You need to rest,” Conny said.

“If he gets to me,” Nicholas said, “I’ll have all the time in the world to rest.”

Conny came closer, gave Nicholas some cold tea. “Something happened while you two were at it,” Conny said. “I got a call from your friend, Tanzan Nangi. He had a great deal to tell me.”

Conny poured more tea, watched as Nicholas drank it down. There was no point in telling Nicholas of the herbs he had stirred into the tea. They would give him strength while they slowed his metabolism, facilitating meditation and the formulation of strategy. He would feel their effects soon enough.

“First of all, Kusunda Ikusa is dead. And they found the tape the Pack Rat made of Ikusa, Killan Oroshi, and this genius, the Scoundrel. It seemed as if the Scoundrel created a supervirus, a computer program that rides piggyback on a software’s security program. It gets into the software core and acts as a mole, broadcasting otherwise classified information back to its originator.

“You and Nangi, I’m told, thought that Nami wanted into Sato because of the Sphynx T-PRAM computer chip. To them that was just the gravy. What they really wanted was to be inside the Hive Project. Sato and Tomkin have just signed a deal with Hydrotech-inc for manufacture of certain components for the American Hive Project. Well, according to the Scoundrel, once Nami got control of Sato, they would secrete the Scoundrel’s MANTIS supervirus into the components. It would act like a time bomb, inactive until given a prearranged, seemingly innocuous electronic signal. MANTIS would come alive, burrow into the core of the Hive computer and begin sending key data back to Nami.”

Nicholas stared at his friend. “Good God. The Hive Project is going to be installed in every section of the United States government: the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the CIA, State Department, FBI, you name it. That would mean Nami would have access to all the secret data this administration has.”

Conny nodded. “Pretty neat, huh? Talk about your ultimate mole. The leak would never be found. American security would be irreparably damaged.” Conny took a little tea himself. “But here’s the real kicker. Nami hired two people to help in their scheme. One is upstairs now, probably bleeding all over my couch. It was his job to disable you permanently so that you wouldn’t be able to interfere. Nami was scared to death of you.

“The other person, working the opposite end of the pipeline, is this bastard’s twin sister. Her name is Shisei. She was sent over here to somehow link up with the senator—his name’s Branding—who’s shepherding the Hive Project through the Senate, to make sure the project’s funding bill was passed by Congress.”

Nicholas nodded, a thoughtful look on his face. “That explains a lot. Most everything, in fact, except why Senjin didn’t kill me when he could have the first time we met. If Nami hired him to get rid of me, he had his chance and didn’t take it. Why?”

If you die now, if you die too easily, you will never understand.
That was what Senjin had said to him in Dr. Hanami’s office. Understand what? Nicholas did not know. Except it was clear that Senjin harbored a personal enmity against Nicholas. But Nicholas was certain that he did not know this man, had never met him before the violent encounter in Dr. Hanami’s office.

As he probed deeper into the mystery, Nicholas sank into
Getsumei no michi.
He thought about Senjin’s strategy:
Shiro Ninja,
the murder of Dr. Hanami, the surgeon he had coerced into allowing him entrée into the operation on Nicholas’s tumor; the murder of Dr. Muku, a clinical psychiatrist who logically might have discovered what Senjin had done to that small piece of Nicholas’s brain; the murder of Kyoki, the tanjian who could have helped Nicholas.

None of this fit the profile of an independent ninja operative hired to take out an enemy who might otherwise thwart the greatest international espionage coup ever attempted. This was the strategy of a man driven by a torrent of hate, a strategy meant to disable, to destroy by increments another human being.

Nicholas thanked the great good fortune that had led him to Kansatsu. It was fortuitous karma indeed that Senjin had no knowledge of Kyoki’s brother, living high up in the Alps, in sight of the Black Gendarme.

But Senjin’s strategy contained another element besides Nicholas’s destruction: the possession of So-Peng’s mystic emeralds. Are they the connection between us? Nicholas wondered. How he wished he knew more about his grandfather.

He felt Conny’s hand on his shoulder and opened his eyes.

“Nick, are you all right?” Conny asked. “I thought for a minute you’d stopped breathing.”

“Someone’s coming,” Nicholas said, rising.

Conny glanced up the staircase.

“Not there,” Nicholas said, walking to the front door. He opened it, looked into the exquisite face.

“Hello, Shisei. I am Nicholas Linnear,” he said, his will still expanding outward. “But I suppose you already know that.”

Shisei looked up into Nicholas’s face. “So long the enemy,” she said. “I thought my heart would cease to beat when I met you.”

They both spoke Japanese, out of some instinct that communication on several levels was essential.

“Come in,” Nicholas said. He did not turn his back on her. Over his shoulder he made the introductions with Conny.

Conny cursed in gutter Japanese. “You know who she is, Nick? Why’d you let her in here?”

“I don’t think I could have kept her out.” Nicholas had not once let go of her eyes with his. “Conny, we’re all out of tea.”

When they were alone, Nicholas said, “Now you see that you have looked upon the face of the Medusa and you still live.”

Neither of them had ceased to move. They circled each other slowly, crunching the glass shards, their images picked up and fired in the crucible of tiny mirrors at their feet.

“Circumstances have changed,” Shisei said. “I have not come here to destroy you, or even, I think, to help my brother.”

“Then why have you come?” Nicholas asked softly.

“To save myself,” Shisei said.

There was more than mere conversation passing between them. Within the interstices of the words, sentences, tiny pauses, silences, their wills met in the center of the room, creating a kind of psychic whirlpool, so that when Conny returned with the tea, he felt so vertiginous he almost dropped the tray he was carrying.

Nicholas heard the clatter, like silverware trembling in an earthquake, and he said, “Stay away, Conny. Leave the tea, but don’t come back into this room until it’s over.”

“But Nick—”

“Do as I tell you, my friend,” Nicholas said. “I don’t want Justine alone now.”

“He’s a good friend,” Shisei said when Conny had gone. “I envy you.”

“I wish we had time to know one another.”

“A pity,” Shisei agreed. “But there is only time enough to reach some form of accord. I hear the echoes of
kokoro,
the reverberations are strong. It will not be long now before my brother gains all the power he has been yearning for.”

“He has stolen six of my emeralds.”

“When he gets all of them,” Shisei said, “he will truly be invincible. He will create the configuration of the nine. Power beyond imagining will be his. The earth will shudder. He will be one with Eternity, he will walk with the gods. This is what he has wanted all along.” She was moving, moving, her body as restless as her psyche. Nicholas wondered whether it was he she did not trust or herself. “But then these emeralds have a history of being stolen. First by So-Peng—”

“My grandfather never stole anything in his life!”

“Perhaps,” Shisei said. “Perhaps not. The truth, now, does not matter. What matters is what is in my brother’s mind. He and I are descendants of Zhao Hsia, the man whom So-Peng drowned at the base of the waterfall near Gunung Muntahak mountain a century ago.”

“I am being attacked by a past I do not know.”

“My brother has been taken hostage by that same past.”

“You don’t expect me to pity him.”

“No,” Shisei said. “But understanding is essential now. It will not be enough, I think, to meet him in Tau-tau. He has gone beyond even Tau-tau. He has created his own system of magic, most of which even I am unfamiliar with.”

“Does he frighten you the way he does me?” Then Nicholas felt the dark pulse, a ripple in the projection of her will, and knew that Senjin frightened his sister. He said, “How can you love that which you fear so?”

“I cannot help myself.” Shisei was near to tears. “He is my twin. His flesh is my flesh.”

“But his mind is not yours.”

“We are like two crystal lanterns,” Shisei said, “burning in the darkness. We are the same, yet so very different. This I did not fully realize until today.”

“Oh, I think you realized it long before this,” Nicholas said. “It took you this long to accept it.”

Shisei and Nicholas continued to be locked within the width of the circle they traversed. Yin and yang, dark and light, male and female, soft and hard, but now the definitions were becoming more and more blurred.

“Can you tell me why he kills?” Nicholas asked. “Does it delight him in some unfathomable way?”

“Murder is another means to his end,” Shisei said. “When he kills, he does so in the ritualistic way he was taught. The constant reiteration of meditative chants, of ritualized action. This is why he skins his victims. The action combines with the chanting to affect the membrane
kokoro
most powerfully. It is how he draws his strength, why it continues to grow.”

Nicholas shuddered. “He must be stopped, Shisei,” he said. “There is no other course.”

“So that is why I am here.”

Nicholas said, “I am a novice at Tau-tau. Without your help, your brother will surely defeat me.”

“I know.”

Shisei stopped and turned so that her back was to him. She unbuttoned her blouse, let it fall to her waist. She was wearing nothing underneath.

“This is what I am,” she said, revealing the great spider. “This is what my brother did to me. This is what he fears. The Demon Woman.”

Nicholas went to the tray Conny had left, brought them both tea. They sat cross-legged, facing one another, and drank, silent for only a moment. But the pause was significant, marking a new phase of their engagement.

Nicholas put down his empty cup. “You must go with me, then, to meet Senjin.”

“No,” Shisei said. “That is for you, and you alone. I can no longer think only of myself now. I have someone more important whom I must protect.”

Nicholas did not ask who that person might be. He did not have to. He was contained in the projection of her will: Cotton Branding.

“I must tell you,” Nicholas said, “that Nami is finished. Kusunda Ikusa is dead. The MANTIS virus is no longer under his control.”

He felt the sense of relief, more profound than words, flooding through her.

“Come here,” she said.

When Nicholas was very close to her, Shisei opened her handbag, took out her implements. Swiftly, surely, she set about making up his face. She held in her mind the image she had of the Demon Woman as she strode the storm-swept coastline in search of revenge against not only her men, but all men who in their baseness had treated her as if she were nothing more than an animal. But what also came to her was the visage of her only friend, Kiku, as she had been that night of the moon-viewing festival when she became the Samurai, when Shisei had fallen in love with the perfect male that Kiku had become.

When she was finished, she said, “You look beautiful; you look terrifying. But your hair is wrong. It is a man’s hairstyle.”

“Wait here,” Nicholas said. He disappeared for perhaps thirty seconds.

When he returned, he was dressed in the costume from Conny’s Kabuki actor. He carried the elaborate wig. He sat again in front of Shisei, who placed the wig on his head, adjusted it to her satisfaction. When she was finished, she held up a pocket mirror, showed him what he had become.

“It’s perfect,” Nicholas said, stunned. “Where did you learn this?”

“Do you know Golden Cloud?”

“‘Kiyoku Utsukushiku Kanzan,’”
Nicholas recited. “Yes, I know of it.” He stared at his reflection. “You have indeed made me Pure, Beautiful, Perfect.”

The rolling tones, like a bell around the neck of an approaching itinerant priest, were reaching a crescendo.

“He is coming,” Nicholas said. “I must go.”

“Now you know what it is he fears,” Shisei said. But she had not yet fully betrayed him, her other half, her dark self, her love, her captor, her death, and she knew it. But if she did nothing now, she knew that her coming here was for nothing. Not for her to sit and observe. Her days and nights in her brother’s hotel room had told her that.

As Nicholas turned to go, she stopped him with her mind. “Now there is something else,” she said, one hand clasping the other. “Something I must give you, something besides my knowledge and my skill, because now I can feel that these things alone will not stop my brother. He is already too strong.”