Eric van Lustbader - Nicholas Linnear 05, page 32
Rock pulled Abramanov off his feet with such abrupt force the Russian’s teeth clacked together painfully. The viselike grip of Rock’s huge paws held him fast. “Doctor, I didn’t save your life, retrieve your precious cargo, get you everything you wanted, just so you could fuck with me now.”
“But I had no idea then how dirty element 114m is. I would not have -“
“Spare me your sanctimonious bullshit, Doctor, I’ve heard all the rationalizations the petty human mind can dream up, and they’re all drivel. You’d have done the same thing you’re doing right now, and d’you know why? Because you love it here in your scientific womb. I’ve given you your heart’s desire. Your former Soviet masters didn’t do that. They belittled you and held you down because you’re a Jew. If you’d made it to the States instead of crashing off the coast of Vietnam, the U.S. government would have spent a year picking apart your brain, and even then they never would have fully trusted you. You know you’re best off here. Me, I don’t give a shit what you are. You’re a fucking genius and that’s all that matters to me.”
“But I have nightmares. This project has terrible ramifications -“
Rock abruptly turned away. “Get it done any way you see fit. Just get it done. Otherwise, all this - your dream playland - will disappear. Is that what you want?”
“I -” Abramanov hung his head. “No.”
People are so pathetic, and so easily manipulated, Rock, thought with satisfaction. “Torch will be detonated ten days from now,” he said. “I’ve never yet reneged on a promised delivery date, and I don’t plan to start.”
Rock left Abramanov to work on the final stage of Torch. He went out of the hot-cell observatory, down two flights of stairs, and across the compound. Various outbuildings, barracks, storehouses, guard posts, and the like fanned out from this nexus point, all enclosed by twenty-foot-high walls of interlocking cut trees of massive girth, anchored in six feet of cement footings. The tremendous number of heavily armed men gave the impression of being inside a military installation.
Rock paused beside the cage. It was six feet high, four feet by four feet, painstakingly constructed from Viet Cong design. He had made it of fire-hardened bamboo lashed together with nylon cord reinforced with art almost unbreakable monofilament. It was currently occupied by a man who was slowly wasting away from lack of water and food. He had been caught trying to smuggle a kilo of half-refined, opium out of Floating City, having reported it ruined by an excess of sulfuric acid.
Rock watched him slumped on the hard-packed earth, no longer strong enough even to stand on his feet. The foul stench coming from him had turned him feral, and there was a look of madness in his eyes that Rock could appreciate. He had been taught the nature of torture by Do Duc. They had shared many things, rituals, murder, intimate knowledge that few men could understand. But Do Duc was dead, killed by Nicholas Linnear. Do Duc had been as dear to him as a wife or a best friend, though neither had been able to acknowledge their relationship; they had merely accepted it as fact. When Rock thought of Nicholas Linnear, ideas, irrational and profane, forested his mind. These ideas lay in the peculiar penumbra between him and death that, together, he and Do Duc had for years explored, plumbed, and finally, mastered. He knew how dangerous Nicholas was, but this made these ideas all the more stimulating to him.
Squatting down by the side of the cage, Rock pushed one arm through the bamboo bars, took the emaciated man by the throat so he could drink in the growing madness, confront its ragged edge, and so feel close again to Do Duc.
At length, he rose and continued across the compound, entering a building that faced the laboratory. He went into his office and sank into his leather swivel chair. It was a relief to be out of the air-conditioning. Almost two decades in the jungle had thinned his blood. He turned on the stereo. The Pink Floyd flooded the room with psychedelic rock. “Arnold Layne.” The early stuff, Rock thought, was always the best. He sang happily along.
“You’re having trouble with him,” the familiar voice said from a corner of his office.
“Who?”
“Abramanov.”
Rock swiveled in his leather chair. Years ago, a four-star general had sat in this chair and had given orders that made no sense in an insane war. Now it was Rock’s chair; he figured he was making better use of it than the four-star ever had.
“Abramanov will get it done,” he said.
“On time?”
“Yes.”
“We have clients I don’t want to disappoint.”
“I needn’t remind you we have one particular client we can’t afford to disappoint,” Rock told him. “Don’t worry. We won’t disappoint any of them.”
There was silence for a long time. In the brief space between album tracks a wild bird called from the forest beyond the vast citylike compound. Tropical sunlight filtered through the wide bamboo awnings over each window, striping the interior of the office tike a tiger’s back. The room smelled of oil and sweat.
“I think you’re getting soft,” the man said from the shadows.
Rock peered into the corner at the figure who, over the years, had become more familiar to him than any of the girls he slept with. He smiled. “You’re full of shit.”
“Think so? You let Niigata go.”
“I didn’t let him go; he got himself out of here. But by that time he was mad. He was dying of radiation poisoning. Why should I have wasted my time going after him? He couldn’t have gotten far. His bones have long ago been picked clean out there in the jungle.”
The figure shifted. “You shouldn’t have meddled in the rendezvous at the Cu Chi tunnels.”
“That bitch. D’you know what Bay means? Seven. She was the seventh child, the unlucky one. She was fucking that bastard Vincent Tinh. She deserved to die.”
The figure clicked his fingers. “Her death hooked Linnear, he took it personally, as I warned you he would. Then, to compound your error, you used Delacroix - a client - to try to put Linnear away.”
Rock turned up the volume on the Floyd. “A client was the perfect choice. Like a cutout, only better, because he’s freelance, he doesn’t work for us so he can’t be traced back to us. What are you getting at, you signed off on the hit.”
“It was a mistake.”
Rock shot forward, a sudden rush of blood making his scars go white beneath his tan. “Bullshit! Now it’s a mistake because it failed. Don’t try your revisionist crap with me, it won’t wash.”
“The locals take to it well enough.”
“They’re uninformed and uneducated,” Rock said contemptuously. “Bugs Bunny could brainwash them.”
“In any case, deconstructing the past is not brainwashing. It’s merely the freedom to express an opinion.”
“History is not opinion, my friend,” Rock said flatly. “It’s memory and fact.”
“Really? I wonder whether the recollections of the general in whose chair you’re now sitting would jibe with yours when it comes to the war in Nam.”
Rock waved a hand. “I’m not going to debate this with you. It’s giving credence to something that is without merit.” He stood up. “We’re going to string up another one.”
“Another? My, I guess I’d better get out my lead-lined pajamas.”
Rock glowered darkly into the shadows where the figure lounged. “That’s right, make a joke of it.”
“I don’t like the idea of Timothy Defacrok hanging around Saigon.”
“Don’t worry, he’s not going to be talking, to anyone.”
“What did you do, sew his lips together? That would be your style.”
Rock took up a coil of rope and his ever-present LAW, then paused. “You know, I hardly recognize you anymore. When I first met you, I was sure you’d gone completely native, but I see now I was wrong. It’s those fucking French philosophers, those crypto-Nazis you read all the time. They’ve got your head screwed on the wrong way.” He shrugged. “What the hell. I guess we’ve both changed since those long-ago days in the Laotian bush.”
“Not you. You know what your problem is?” The figure reached over to turn off the stereo. “You’re stuck in a time-warp. Still the Wild Boy, living in the seventies. Wake up, buddy boy, it’s the nineties now. It’s a whole new ball game out there.”
At the doorway, Rock turned back, grinned over his shoulder. He began to whistle the first few bars of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Then, in a surprisingly well-modulated voice, he took up the lyrics, “War, children, it’s just a shot away, shot away…”
Eaton Square was as still as a tomb this hour of the night. The sleet clattered against the sidewalk, drummed on the top of the unmarked car on loan from Major as Croaker pulled up on the King’s Road. His headlights had been off for a block and a half.
Croaker’s concern over Vesper had now reached full tide. If she was managing Morgana, Inc., she must be deeply involved with the Godaishu. This was yet another confirmation that Dedalus was the Godaishu’s mainstay in America, since Vesper was so closely tied with him.
He turned the corner onto Eaton Square and, hurrying through the evil weather, came to the five-story white town house with its formal quoined façade. He hesitated only a moment, then went up the stairs beneath the protection of the columned portico and rang the brass bell.
Major had used his computer to search for the owner, who turned out to be an elderly woman who had moved to the country to ease her emphysema. The place was on the market, but according to the Realtor whom Major had roused on his pager, it was currently vacant. There seemed no point in disabusing him of that notion.
After what seemed a long time, the door opened a wedge. A young woman with bright eyes and short hair peered out at him quizzically.
“May I help you?” Behind her he could make out a slice of a marble-floored vestibule and the crystal facets of a chandelier.
“Ah, I believe I’m lost,” he said in a rush. “I’m looking for” - he pulled out a map of London - “uh, Eaton Terrace.”
“You’ve been given duff directions, I’m afraid. This is Eaton Square.”
“Oh, damn.” He glanced anxiously at his watch. “Is it far from here? I’m terribly late for an appointment.”
“No. D’you have transport?”
“A car, you mean? No. A taxi dropped me off.” He looked out at the sleet. “I wonder if I could ask you to phone for another taxi?”
Those bright eyes regarded him for some time as if he needed to pass some test. “Wait here,” the woman said, and affixing a short chain to the door sash, left him.
As he heard the click-click of her heels over the marble flooring, he quickly pulled out a roll of electrician’s tape Major had given him and, stripping off a piece, ran it over the latch on the edge of the front door, so that it could not lock,
She returned a moment later. “Your taxi will be here shortly.”
“Thanks so much, Ms. -” But the door had already been shut in his face.
He went back down the steps, hunched his shoulders, and waited for the taxi He did not know whether the woman with the bright eyes was watching him now, but he could not take the risk that she was. When the cab came, he climbed in and told the driver to take him to Eaton Terrace. But within a block, he had paid his fare and was hurrying through the clattering sleet up the street. When he reached the head of Eaton Square, he kept to the shadows, slipping under the portico of the white house.
Holding his breath, he turned the knob on the front door. As he slipped silently inside, he stripped the tape off the latch.
He moved through the vestibule, listening for anyone, including the woman with the bright eyes. The place was not at all what he had imagined from the outside. No overstuffed furniture, Victorian sconces, or ornate fireplaces here. Instead, the entire interior was cold and modem, painted in black, white, and an icy shade of gray. Everything had clean lines, precise angles. Everything was geometric and symmetrical. Two of everything, wherever it was possible. Identical mirror images. It made you want to rearrange or steal something just to restore the natural random order of nature.
He crossed to the foot of a circular, black, wrought-iron staircase. He could hear a clock ticking, then muffled voices coming from upstairs. He took off his shoes, went up the metal treads that would magnify even the smallest sound.
The voices became clearer: two women. He paused at the head of the stairs, looking at the hallway, which branched in two directions, four doors each way, perfectly symmetrical. Light streamed into the hallway from the last door on the right.
He crept down the hallway, chose the door on his left just before the end. The room was dark, and he took a moment to allow his eyes to adjust. He saw a bed, dresser, night table, and a door on the wall closest to the room with the light. He went through this, found himself in a vast bathroom. Marble blocks and mirrors everywhere. On the far side of the bathroom was a connecting door to the far room. He went to it, put his ear against it. Then, his hand on the knob, he turned it, allowed the door to open a fraction at a time until a sliver of the lit room beyond was revealed.
Someone crossed in front of the tamp. Vesper? No, someone else; a flash of a face that was instantly familiar.
Croaker could see her shadow moving on the wall. Then, in two strides, she had reached the bathroom door and had pulled it open. Margarite’s sister, Celeste.
12
Yoshino
Yoshino was a sacred place. It was where, over the centuries, heroes had been forged in blood and sacrifice, where yamabushi made arduous pilgrimages across the steep mountain fastness, where Shugendo, the syncretic and vibrant amalgam of Shintoism and Buddhism, still survived, despite the best efforts of the two-hundred-year reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate to stamp it out. The Tokugawa, obsessed with power and the abasement of all perceived enemies, real and imagined, had favored Buddhism’s formality. If all Japanese were Buddhists, the shoguns reasoned, they would be registered at their neighborhood temples and, therefore, be easy to keep track of. Shintoism made no such demands on its followers. Its only tenets were those dictated by the seasons and by the kami - the spirit - of the area where the Shinto shrine was built. For Shinto, there is no God, no Buddha, but, rather, the spirit guardians who dwelled in every atom of the universe.
The slopes of Yoshino’s mountains were covered by, it was said, one hundred thousand cherry trees, whose splendid blossoms of the palest pink were, for three days in the spring, the most magnificent and moving sight in all of Japan. It was to Yoshino that a profusion of Japan’s emperors over the centuries had made pilgrimages in order to worship the mountains’ kami, and it was here the information provided by the Yakuza underoyabun Kine Oto, also known as Zao, had brought Nicholas and Tachi.
“Zao took V. I. Pavlov to see a man here named Niigata,” Nicholas said as they headed up the narrow mountain road. This time of the year, Yoshino was shrouded in mist so deeply one had the impression that the mountain rose to a level just below heaven.
“According to Zao, this Niigata is something of a recluse and has become a Shugendo monk.”
“I take it that means he used to be something else,” Tachi said.
Nicholas nodded, noting that Tachi had only sketchy recall of the interrogation of Zao. What had the invocation of Shuken done to him? “Yes. A nuclear physicist. If that sounds odd, it gets more so. Niigata returned to Japan six months ago after a lengthy stay in Vietnam.”
Tachi’s neck cracked as he turned from watching the road to glance at Nicholas. The car jounced violently into a rut and out again, and Nicholas said, “Watch it, Tachi!”
“Vietnam,” the oyabun said. “He wouldn’t have had contact with Floating City?”
“Zao didn’t know. But he knew that Pavlov and Niigata talked about Abramanov.”
“We’ve got our connection to Rock!” Tachi said triumphantly as he pulled into a narrow ramped driveway in front of the ryokan where they planned to stay the night.
Blue mist gathered around the slopes of the mountains with such tenacity that they had virtually no view from the windows in their rooms. The place was one of those new-style ryokan where everything that had once been wood was now either tile or plastic. There was a TV in the room’s tokonoma instead of a vase with a fresh flower. One paid for it by feeding coins into a slot to view half-hour intervals. The walls were papered green instead of being hand-painted, and the hallways to the toilets were lined with vending machines dispensing everything from hot sake to iced cappuccino. It was not a restful place and had none of the rustic charm that made traditional ryokan desirable places to stay.
This supremely practical side of modern-day Japan was often tough to take. There seemed no connection at all with the culture that turned the manufacture of even everyday items such as combs and hairpins into high art, until one understood that Japan was a country of facades. Like lacquered walls, paper screens, translucent noren, which hung in open doorways, there was in all things Japanese the impression that something else lay just beneath the gauzy layer one had come through; if one sensed the truth was beyond the next layer, it was an illusion, and the cultural imperative to project secrets inward had accomplished its purpose.
According to Zao’s information, Niigata lived at the bottom of a deep valley that lay between two Yoshino hills. They ate a quick meal, then left the ryokan, walking up the main street of the village, ascending toward the main Shugendo shrine where, it was said, dwelled the remains of the rebel emperor Go-Daigo, who in the fourteenth century set up a southern imperial court here.
The road forked at the foot of the steps to the shrine, and they took the right-hand route that led down an increasingly narrow street, past isolated stores and residential houses until it petered out at the edge of a flight of steeply winding steps overarched by a procession of vermilion torii gates.
They had been driving almost all day, and they were tired. It was nearing evening, and the twilight turned the heavy mist to jewel tones. As they descended, the light became aqueous and a chill emanated from the forest floor, seeping through the lichen, moss, and ferns. Tachi shivered, pulling his coat closer around him as they descended the seemingly endless stone stairway.
