The Nicholas Linnear Novels (95 page)

With a great groan and a violent heave, he pushed himself all the way into her. Akiko’s eyes opened so wide the whites showed all around. An engine of fire started up in her chest so that she could not breathe. She felt a fearful tearing in her loins, a great filling up, a pressure on her entrails as if she had stuffed herself with food.

She was overcome by sensation and she cried out wildly. Sato, misinterpreting her, lunged in even deeper, trying to establish an erotic rhythm.

Akiko’s mind was filled with black visions. All the myriad demons of hell seemed to be rising out of their moldy beds to dance in the firelight in her mind’s eye. Nights bound in the highland castle paraded in lurid detail before her like a shameless whore. Her head whipped back and forth, her long unbound hair slapping against Sato, enflaming him all the more.

Kyōki. The
sensei
of darkness.

His name made her moan and bite her lip against the unfurling memories like shrouds for the dead. For that was how she thought of herself now. Dead.

Like ships in the night on a storm-tossed tumultuous sea, they rocked to and fro, Akiko locked inside his embrace, allowing him this cruel dominance. There was foam on her lips, hatred in her heart. She had never before offered up her body unwillingly; she never wanted to again, though she knew that she must to preserve this marriage until its bloody end.

Yet she knew what to do; she could give pleasure without ever receiving it. This too was part of the role she had assigned herself. Weeping still, she reached back between her thighs, grasping his swinging sac. At the same time she clenched her inner muscles, working on the engorged head buried inside her slick channel. Her hips revolved in a rapid corkscrew motion. She squeezed lightly with her hand.

She heard his deep groan, felt his muscles trembling all around her, and knew that his orgasm was imminent. I cannot allow him to do it, she thought wildly. Tomorrow or the night after. But not now.

With a little cry, she pulled herself away from him, turning to slide her open lips over his moist, vibrating shaft, teasing him with the faintest of feathery touches until he grabbed at her flung hair and begged her for sweet release.

It was only then that she began to suck, hollowing her cheeks, urging him onward to completion with her fingers. Her other hand covered her pubic mound as if staunching a wound, her thighs close together.

She held herself all the firmer at the instant of his sexual convulsions, as a child caresses a deep hurt to ease the pain. And then she willed her new husband to sleep, watching him drift off, staring blindly down the lightless corridor of her own past at what she might have been.

Akiko rolled carefully over and silently rose from her nuptial bed. For a moment she stood naked, in utter quietude, staring down at the form of Seiichi Sato, slumbering and sated.

From the enigmatic look on her beautiful face it was impossible to tell what she was feeling. Perhaps it was true what Sun Hsiung had once told her, “You do not fully understand anything that you feel.” But if that were so, she told herself, I could never have learned what I have. I could never have gone beyond the
Kuji-kiri
and the
Kōbudera,
the arcane disciplines that Saigō had mastered. And, she thought triumphantly, I never could have killed that clever fox, Masashigi Kusunoki. She had used
jahō
and it had worked, masking the nature of her intent from even such an adept as he.

But her delight was short-lived. Shaking her head, her long unbound hair a blue-black cascade across her shoulder, down her back, she bent and retrieved her multicolored kimono. It was the one she had worn at the wedding reception earlier today.

She drew it about her as a child will wrap a bathrobe warm from the radiator around herself in order to ward off more than the chill of night. She had numbed herself in order to ward off what she thought of as an attack. It had been a time when, she told herself repeatedly, she had to retreat now in order to have her revenge. But there was a vile taste in her mouth, salty-sweet like blood. Her own blood.

Never before had she detested so intensely her
karma.
Her training should have protected her from these feelings, and it surprised and disconcerted her that she should feel so violated by one simple act. That it had been a necessary one did not seem to matter at all. She was weeping again in silent agony.

Barefoot, she left the bedroom, making her way through the dark house until she found the
futuma
that opened out onto the Zen garden.

It was always peaceful there. Above the one ancient cryptomeria the stars glittered hard and twinkling like the many teeth of some grinning nocturnal predator. For one long moment, she allowed the barriers to fall away from her. Thoughts of Nicholas entered her consciousness, seeping through her like woodsmoke. For just an instant an unfamiliar powerful emotion gyred, filling her up to the bursting point, and, her neck arched, her face turned heavenward, she allowed herself to yearn for surcease. Up there, a million miles from anything known, she could be free. Striding through the utter blackness of space, she might at last rest from the turmoil that beset her.

But the feeling only lasted a moment, then she was earthbound again. Her head came down and her dark eyes contemplated the precise grandeur of the garden. Less was more here, a uniquely Japanese esthetic.

The pebbles which covered the ground were hand picked for their size, shape, and color. They were carefully raked twice a day in order to maintain the precise symmetry the garden’s designer had labored so hard to create.

Three black, angular rocks jutted up from different parts of the garden. In contrast to the pebbles, each one was unique unto itself, its ridges and rills affecting the onlooker in varying ways, triggers for the evocation of disparate moods.

The place was tranquil and invigorating at the same time.

Akiko turned her head and sat on the cold stone bench, her legs tucked neatly under her. Her hands were folded in her lap, the fingers relaxed and slightly curved. The attitude was so wholly feminine that it was quite impossible to tell what unimaginable bursts of coordinated energy this body was capable of.

She was acutely aware of the arc of a shadow inside her, a demarcation between light and dark whose edge was as finely honed as the most masterfully forged
katana
blade. From this place of shade she felt the rippling of her hatred, her longing to wreak a horrendous vengeance. Her body trembled in anticipation, there was a low rumbling shaking her brain apart, making her moan as if she were in exquisite pain.

Then she felt a veil of wind caress her cheek, cooling her. Sweat dried along her hairline, the precise symmetry of the garden seized her, and she was altogether calm again. She sighed in the aftermath of a great storm and closed her eyes. Her head felt heavy, and as her pulsebeat slowed, she reviewed the events of the evening.

In the stillness of the Zen pebble garden, Akiko was thankful that she did not have to contend with a mother-in-law. For Sato’s mother, like all Japanese mothers, would rule this house. Wasn’t that why the central living section was called
omoya
by tradition: mother house. Akiko shuddered inwardly. How would she possibly be able to endure the orders of the
heramochi
, the one with the right to hold the spoon used to serve rice, the head of the household. No. Far better that she was dead and buried along with Sato’s war-hero brother.

Alone with only the cryptomeria, blacker even than the surrounding night, with the shadows of the Zen stones striking her in odd rippling patterns, Akiko stood up and, under the scrutiny of the pinpoint uncaring stars, threw off her kimono in one convulsive gesture.

Naked, the hard blue light vying with the pink neon excrescence from Shinjuku and the faraway Ginza, boulevards that never slept, she stepped out onto the precisely raked rows of pebbles. They felt so cold and smooth on her bare soles.

Between two of the jutting black rocks she spread herself, draped on the flat ground, curled and serpentine, half in light, half in shadow, and became one with all that surrounded her.

There was an acute irony in using Tanya against the Russians, an elliptical symmetry that affected Minck in just the same way as did gazing upon one of Thomas Hart Benton’s huge canvases: its very existence made life worth living.

After Moscow, Minck had needed elements to demonstrate to him in a direct fashion the nobler, the elegant and uplifting aspects of life. His incarceration had leeched that part of his memory away. In returning to America he had had to learn the positive aspects of the human race all over again.

He looked up now as he sensed Tanya’s approach. That was another consequence of his imprisonment. Some unseen layer of his mind had been rubbed away by the constant scrutiny he had been under, and like sandpaper taken to skin, what was revealed underneath was a hypersensitivity to human presence.

Minck stared into those cool blue eyes, dotted with gray. They were large and direct, and they were always the first things he saw when he looked at her. That was his own personal purgatory.

They were the eyes of Mikhail. Her brother’s eyes. Mikhail, the dissident, had been the reason for Minck’s infiltration into Moscow in the first place. Mikhail had sent a message into the West: he possessed information vital to the American secret service system. Minck had been chosen by computer—because of his facility with idiomatic Russian as well as his somatic matchup with the Slavic Caucasian type—and they had sent him in to pull Mikhail out or, if that were, as they put it, unfeasible, to extract the information from him.

But in pursuit of that knowledge, he had been traduced. Someone in Mikhail’s cell had been turned, and Minck’s rdv with the dissident had ended in a hail of submachine-gun fire literally tearing Mikhail in two, in spotlights picking Minck out of the shadows, the snow falling, falling. All sounds muffled, blood in the snow like chips of coal strewn in an explosion of malice, chain-wrapped tires clink-clink-clinking in his ears as he ran from the raised voices, the muzzles spewing red death hidden behind the angry glare of the spotlights. And running through the knifing cold, snowflakes riming his lashes, blinding him, making him think, oddly, of Kathy, his college sweetheart, his wife. How she loved the snow, holding out her delicate hand, laughing in delight as one by one the flakes landed on her flesh, melting only after giving up their secret to her, only her.

Slipping on the patch of ice, undone by the blanket of snow, his ankle wrenching, going down, and then strong arms binding him, lights in his face, the gassy smells of cabbage and borscht invading his nostrils, voices harsh and guttural,
“Gde bumagie! Kak vass zavoot!”
Where are your papers? What is your name? repeated over and over, life already reduced down to one dull fragment. Eight years ago.

“Carroll?”

She was the only one who knew what the C. stood for; the only one who would dare use it if it were known. It was the only outward manifestation he would permit of the powerful bond between them.

“Yes, Tanya.”

She glanced down at the brief he had been reading. “Is the file on Nicholas Linnear complete?”

“No file on a human being is ever complete, no matter how up to date it is. I want you to remember that.” He said this last needlessly since Tanya remembered everything.

Looking at her again, Minck was struck anew by how much she resembled Mikhail. Both had the finely chiseled, high-cheek-boned face of the purebred White Russian rather than the broad, coarse-structured visage of the Slav. Both had that thick, straight shock of hair, though in latter days Tanya had had hers dyed a deep-burnished blond because, she said, it helped dampen the memories.

After he had broken out of Lubyanka, a colonel’s blood on his trembling hands, with all of the considerable might of the
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnost
marshaled against him, with the militia out beating on dissident necks to extract information on his whereabouts, Tanya had led him out of Moscow and, eventually, Russia.

He owed her a lot, and it had incensed him when in the hands of the Family—in those days, of course, there was no Red Station—they had taken her away from him and, in a lightless cell, had begun on her what the KGB had worked on him. He soon put a stop to that, risking his own termination in the process. But that was only his first stumbling step to reclaiming a life that he thought had been cut away from him as surely and as professionally as a surgeon takes a scalpel to flesh.

Because of his incarceration, he was himself suspect at first. But when he delivered Mikhail’s information to them they saw reason and no longer suspected him of having been turned. He never let them know, however, that the information had come from Tanya long after Mikhail had died in the bloody Moscow fusillade, torn in frozen chunks from her throat during the long, bitter nights in hiding, so near the encroaching death drawing in all around them. He had had little strength after his ordeal and she had done his fighting for him, rising silently up out of their hiding places in cave or fen to cut down any soldier who strayed too close, a blood-drenched spectral figure returning to him after each lethal foray to lead him onward toward freedom. She was strong and she was hard and she had saved him many times, repaying him for taking her out of Lubyanka with him. And, he had quickly learned, her mind was as quick and powerful as was her body. Her memory had been the repository for all of Mikhail’s secrets, he being far too intelligent to commit anything so explosive to paper.

When, three years before, Minck, rising rapidly in the Family, had proposed the creation of the Red Station to deal with all the Russias, their satellites, and their global dealings, he was granted eighteen months in which to deliver what his presentation promised. It had only taken him eighteen weeks, and from then on a burgeoning slice of the Family’s annual budget was assured. He negotiated for his section much as a good attorney for a star baseball player will negotiate with a club president. His contract was airtight. If he continued to deliver. And Minck made certain of that.