Enzan: The Far Mountain (7 page)

No matter. The North Koreans.
Not good
.

“ISTG, Collins,” the voice on the phone said. The tone was all business.

I stood outside on the corner of Fifty-Ninth and Tenth Avenue. “Owen? It’s Connor Burke. Let me in, will you?”

John Jay College is awash with students coming in and out, but I knew I’d need an escort to get into the Institute for the Study of Terrorist Groups. Owen Collins was going to be my ticket in.

A few minutes later he bounded out the door, big and broad and smiling. He was one of the better of a crop of young kendo students I had worked with at a seminar some time ago. Thick neck, square head with deep copper-colored hair. He had hands like catcher’s mitts. When you sparred with him and he did the head strike known as the
men-uchi
cut, it felt like he was driving a nail into your brain.

I gave him a quick rundown of what I needed. I avoided mentioning my recent breaking-and-entering activities with Alejandro. Owen’s a good guy, and he’s working on a doctorate in criminal justice. He might feel somehow compelled to protest if I implicated him in a crime. But he pretty much saw right through me.

“So,” he said. “You’re working on a missing persons case and this laptop might have some clues?” I nodded. But his eyes were suspicious. “I don’t suppose I need to ask how you got hold of it?”

I shrugged. “It’s her boyfriend’s.”

“You take it from him?”

“No.”
Not exactly.

He could hear the evasion in my voice. “Is she in danger?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said. At least that was honest.

Owen looked around. “You know, there’s something called the affirmative defense of necessity …” I looked blankly at him, and he sighed. “It means sometimes you might do a bad thing to prevent something worse.”

“Does it work? As a defense, I mean.”

Owen smiled. “Depends on the jury. If things get that far.” He turned back toward the building. He’d gotten even bigger and broader since the last time I’d seen him. Any larger and he’d start to blot out the sun. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got an ‘in’ with the computer forensics people.”

For a big man, Owen’s movements were precise, and he approached the examination of Lim’s computer with fastidious professionalism. We sat in a small office ringed with computer screens and wires and various types of gear. Small diode lights glowed green or red. He set the laptop down in the center of the desk. He didn’t open it. He didn’t touch it any more than he needed to. He quietly asked me what I knew about it. I told him about the screen shots that appeared to indicate it was running a surveillance program.

Owen nodded and slipped a piece of chewing gum into his mouth. He stood up and flicked a few switches, then ran a USB cable from a wall unit toward Lim’s computer. He took a breath.

“OK,” he told me, “let’s see what’s up with this puppy.” He was moving quickly at this point. He connected Lim’s laptop to the cable and typed some commands on a keyboard unit connected to a grey box. A display popped up on a flat screen.

“What’s that?”

“Solo-4 Forensic Capture Unit,” he said. But he didn’t stop working. Owen lifted the laptop’s screen upright and the sleeping computer blinked on. Owen grunted, removed the gum from his mouth, and stuck it over something along the screen edge. “Built-in camera here,” he grunted. “Now the machine is blind.”

There was whirring. Owen watched his own computer’s screen and the displays from the Solo-4. His eyes shifted to Lim’s laptop, noting that the drive unit light was flickering. “Come on,” he whispered, his eyes tracking back and forth from one screen to another.

“What’s happening?”

He held up a hand. “Shhh.”

I heard the CD drive start spinning on the laptop. Owen’s eyes were locked on the progress bar on his flat screen monitor. “Yes!” he breathed. He severed the USB cord connection. Lim’s computer was growling with activity.

“What did you do to it?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He swiveled his chair over to the laptop, tapped some keys, and grunted. “Slick,” he said. “Someone’s logged on remotely. They’re wiping the memory on the laptop.” He saw the look on my face. “Don’t worry. I mirrored the drive.” He gestured toward the flat screen display. “We’ve got an exact replica. And now …” Owen slid over to his computer and began tapping. A rapid succession of windows opened and closed. Lines of text scrolled down the screen. It went on for some time, and I began to lose interest. Finally, he shoved himself back from the keyboard, a satisfied grin on his face.

“OK. I’ve disabled the security measures. They had a few nice touches: an open-source antitheft client named Adeona. A remote webcam security application …”

“That’s what I saw?”

He nodded. “Something called Yoics. It’s a bit complicated to install, but it can stream images from a webcam to a remote location and store the images on the home computer drive. Whoever set this one up did a nice job. They had a motion sensor feature installed, and when it’s triggered, it sends an email notification along with the image.”

I thought of how the attacker at Lim’s apartment had appeared so unexpectedly. “Can you find out where it was sent?”

Owen nodded thoughtfully. “Sure. There’s a logs and auditing function on the data capture unit. May take some time, but I can do it.”

“That might be important,” I told him. Then I had another thought. “Could the messages have been sent to more than one location?”

“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “But it’s going to take more time to figure out than we have right now. The forensics guys aren’t crazy about people playing with their toys.”

“But you can do it, right?”

Again the shrug. “Sure. Whattaya have in mind?”

At that moment, I had ideas rushing around so fast that they felt like they were polishing the inside of my skull. It was a wild flock of hints and suppositions and questions. But I could sense that the swirling was beginning to take on a pattern.

I looked at Owen and smiled. “You and I are going to have dinner with a map librarian.”

Chapter 7

Voices again. Distant chanting like the murmur of disgruntled ghosts. I sat in the stillness of the Zen master’s office, awaiting his arrival. I looked out the window at a line of pines along the hilltop, a dark smudge amid the grey-blue of hardwood trees that stood, cold and empty-armed, in the winter afternoon. I shivered.

Another dawn and the internal call had come to me again. The bell-like chime of warning. It wasn’t simply the effect of the information I had gleaned or the suspicions that were developing. The summons was too clear for me to deny it any further. I hurried through the day’s teaching, turned the dojo over to a senior student for the evening class, and began the trip north out of the city just ahead of rush hour.

I had to see Yamashita.

The
roshi
, the master of the monastery, arrived in a bustle of robes and a flurry of apologies. I could feel the cold streaming off his clothing. He had been outside, brushing the latest dusting of snow from the slate steps leading to a garden.

James Seki Roshi was somewhere in his sixties, a tall man with broad shoulders, bushy eyebrows, a shaved head, and a long face that got longer when he smiled. He smiled often.

“Connor,” he said, beaming and reaching out to hug me. The roshi was notoriously exuberant and was famous for his laughing question: “How can we embrace dharma if we are afraid to embrace each other?” Over the years, as Yamashita has spent more and more time at the monastery, the roshi and I had nurtured a friendship based on our mutual concern for my sensei. Now, he settled me in a chair and plugged in an electric kettle to brew tea.

“No coffee, I’m afraid,” he apologized. He usually teased me about this when I came for a visit.

I waived the inconvenience away. “I had a cup on the road,” I said, “but it must be hard on Yamashita.”

The roshi cocked his head. “It’s funny, sometimes, how it’s the little attachments that are hardest to give up. I, for instance, crave pretzels.”

“So the origin of suffering is … pretzels?” I joked. The second truth of Buddhism is that attachment leads to suffering. But the roshi knew himself well enough not to take offense.

“The human gift for creating attachment is both a blessing and a curse, as you know, Connor.” His expression was still pleasant, but his eyes were serious. He was watching me.

How do they do it? How do they get inside you like that? Is it intuition? Perception? Luck?
I wasn’t sure, but I felt my face flush with the implications of the roshi’s seemingly offhand comment. It was as if he had some knowledge of what I was involved in.

“How is he?” I asked.

A slow nod. “At peace, I think. You’d think it would be otherwise.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“For someone like your teacher, age is often not welcomed. And, truth be told, he continues to insist on sword practice. It’s hard on him, because he knows his skills are going …”

I thought about the familiar feel of a practice sword in my hands, the comforting warmth of used muscles. What would it be like when your hands grow stiff and your body forgets? “It’s a big part of our life,” I acknowledged.

“Yes. But if your sensei is not willing to totally give it up…” he paused to correct himself, to find the right words and smiled as he found them. “If he is not mellowing, he is nonetheless seeking wisdom in new ways.” The kettle’s bell rang and the roshi poured water into a ceramic teapot. He looked up at me from under those bushy eyebrows. “A life of such discipline has its benefits, after all. He is a fierce student of the dharma.”

I smiled at the mental image the roshi had conjured up of a swordsman in the meditation hall. Yamashita would be fierce, no matter what he was doing.

The priest settled into his own chair and waited in silence, seemingly content to let the tea steep. His lips were closed in a small half-smile. But his eyes never left me. After a time, I stirred.

“Can I see him?”

The roshi reached out and poured carefully, the pale liquid gurgling into small, handleless cups. “Unfortunately,” he began, “your teacher has entered a period of meditative seclusion. A
seigan
.”

Seigan
—vow training. I knew the concept. It meant Yamashita had committed himself to a retreat that could not be interrupted except under the direst circumstances. I sagged back into my chair, and a long breath seeped out of me in frustration.

“I really need to see him,” I said. I felt like a kid wheedling at a parent.

He nodded. “I am sure. And you will see him. At the end of the
seigan
in three days’ time.” The roshi regarded me for a moment, noting my disappointment. “You know, Connor, part of what I do sometimes is to set uncomfortable boundaries for people. But it’s for a good reason.”

I still wanted to see Yamashita. But the roshi had said no. I looked at him, sitting there, calm, certain, unwavering. I wondered what effort and what pain must have filled his life to bring him to this point. I wondered if I’d ever have the courage to replicate that effort. And then I buckled under the sheer force of the man, knowing he was right and I was wrong.

We sat for a time in the quiet of his study. I sipped at my cup of tea, but it had grown cold and bitter.

Finally, he spoke. “You understand?”

“I do.” It sounded like a sigh.

“Good. It’s more than I can say for yesterday’s visitor.”

He caught me off guard with that comment. “What do you mean?”

His eyes crinkled. “It’s been a busy week here. Two men, arriving one after the other, both wanting to see the same broken down old martial arts sensei.”

I set the cup down on the table between us, sitting forward. “Someone else came?”

The roshi nodded. “He was a young Japanese man. He said his name was Makiyama. He claimed to be from the Japanese consulate. But I’m not really sure I believed him.”

“What did he want?”

“To see Yamashita Sensei. He claimed he had important information for him.” The roshi stood up, arranging his robes. He walked over to the window and stared out at the darkening woods. “I told him your sensei was unavailable.” He grimaced at the memory. “He was very upset with me.” A shrug. “It is not unusual for someone like that. The anger.” He turned to face me. “I thought at one point he might actually hit me, Connor.” He said this with fascination, not fear, like a man examining a new, curious thing.

“What happened?”

“Oh,” he said, “the impetuous are often as easily pacified as they are excited. I managed to calm him down. Assured him I would deliver whatever message he brought. But it would have to wait until the
seigan
had ended.” The roshi walked over to a bookcase and slipped a slim package from between some books. “It is here. He made me promise to deliver it as soon as possible.”

The word impetuous clinched it for me. I described Goro, the Miyazaki henchman, to the roshi. “Could that have been the man?”

He nodded. “You describe him well, Connor. You have a knack for observation.”

I shrugged. “I know the type.”

“And is he a representative from the consulate?”

“Not exactly,” I began.

The roshi’s eyebrows came up in interest. He gestured back to the chairs. “Ha! I knew it.” He smiled in triumph. “But how interesting. Perhaps you’d like to tell me more?”

So I did.

By the time I was done, night had blanketed the distant hills and the roshi moved around the room, switching on lights as he thought through the details of my story. The lights came on in slow succession, shedding a soft, warm glow that was a welcome counter to the cold rattle of the wind outside. “You are going to find this woman for them?” he asked. He sounded surprised.

“I am,” I said. But he caught the reservation in my voice and smiled.

“You have something up your sleeve, don’t you, Connor?”

I shrugged. “Why not? I get the sense they’re not playing fair with me. Besides, she sounds like she needs some help.”

“Yes. And I’m not sure her family sounds like a good place to get it.”

“True. But there have to be some other options. You’ve got to admit she’s screwed up. The drugs. The nymphomania …”

He leaned forward. “In my previous life I was a therapist. Did you know that?”

I shook my head. “What happened?”

The roshi smiled, the long jaw dropping and the eyes crinkling. “I don’t know. I suppose I found out that looking for explanations was not the same thing as looking for meaning.” He stood up and began to pace the room, his fingers working on a string of
mala
, the prayer beads Buddhists use to keep track of the repetition of sutras. The beads clicked rhythmically as he fingered them.

“They don’t usually refer to it as nymphomania anymore, you know,” he began. “Now I think it’s called ‘hypersexuality’ in the professional literature.”

“Does it make a difference?”

He looked up. “Not to the people afflicted.” He slowed down and closed his eyes. “It’s a compulsive disorder. An obsession.”

“Attachment again,” I ventured.

He nodded, eyes still closed. “Indeed. The possible causes are many: chemical imbalances in the brain, hormonal, or neural issues. It’s commonly associated with a history of drug problems as well as abuse.”

“Physical? Sexual?”

The roshi sighed. “Either. Both. Sometimes the history of abuse can create a dynamic where the distinction between sex and affection becomes blurred. In those cases, the sufferer conceives of sex as the only way to create and sustain relationships. It’s not about pleasure anymore. It becomes a compulsion, since it’s the only way you know of to relate to people in an intimate way.”

I had a distant memory of things I’d read by Freud. “In some ways, it’s like a case of arrested development.”

He nodded. “In some ways, yes. The complex range of emotional relationships available to a normal adult is not available to someone like this.”

“But the physical capacity is.”

“Precisely. A fully adult body. And the sex act is used as a way to ensure affection. Acceptance.”

I considered what I knew of Chie’s history. “I always thought of promiscuity as a type of rebellion.”

The roshi opened his eyes. “Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. Perhaps both.”

“How very Zen of you.”

He smiled tightly. “Yes. But, really, this condition is not so simple. It’s possible that Chie exhibits hypersexuality as a type of rebellion at the same time that she uses it for acceptance, to create the sort of emotional bond she desperately needed and never received in the past.” He sat down again.

“She needs help,” I said. “Probably more than I can give.”

The roshi tilted his head and thought for a minute. “If you find her, what will you do?”

“I don’t think she needs to be back with her family,” I told him, “but I don’t think her boyfriend’s doing her any favors either.”

“And you see yourself as a third alternative?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t gotten that far.” The roshi’s look of disappointment told me I should have. I looked down at my hands. “In the beginning, I just wanted them to leave Yamashita alone. It was a debt of some kind that needed paying.”

“And you would pay it for him?”

“Of course.”

“But what has changed now?”

I picked my way carefully through my thoughts. The memory of the surreal sound of Yamashita’s psychic summons still pealed in my head. But I was hesitant to speak of it to the roshi. “I dunno,” I began evasively. “Nothing in some ways. But there’s the sense that there’s more here than meets the eye. That I’m getting played …”

“And?” he prompted, leaning forward.

“Well,” I finally said, “I don’t like that. It seems to me a call to honor should be respected. I feel …” I shrugged. “Insulted.”

He leaned back and regarded me. “You’ve grown more Japanese than you know, Connor.” He looked over at his bookcase, a casual glance like a man admiring his reading collection. His movements were slow and his voice was almost soothing. It belied the seriousness of the conversation.

“Is that all that’s going on here?” he prompted, his head still turned away from me.

I fidgeted. “No, I suppose not.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding, his attention back on me. I could see the shadow of the therapist he had been. He waited in silence and I continued.

“Well, she’s not a package is she? She’s a person. A screwed-up person who maybe needs some help.”

“And you can offer her what, exactly?”

I laughed silently. “I can get her out of the clutches of the creep she’s with. That’s for sure. Get her away somewhere where she can think.”

“The knight errant storming a castle and saving the fair damsel?” His face wore a smile, but the words were pointed enough.

“Maybe get her to a place where she can ask herself what she really wants,” I offered.

“Ah,” he sat back in his chair. “Compassion. This is good. In Buddhism, we often say there are two important qualities to develop. One is wisdom. The other is compassion.” The roshi stood up and went again to the bookcase, where Goro’s packet lay. “I am not sure your getting involved in this situation is terribly wise, Connor.” He turned to me, peering out from under his eyebrows. “But who am I to argue with the urgings of compassion?”

He gestured to the dark window. “Come. You’ll spend the night as our guest. Perhaps you’ll think more about this little mystery you’ve involved yourself in.” I followed after him down a hall and upstairs to the dormitory. “Think about desire, Connor. About the things we want. Of the people we wish to please. Of those we wish to help. How the things that bind us together can also hurt us.”

“Are you talking about Chie?”

Again the enigmatic smile. “Yes. And no.”

I stopped suddenly in the hallway, holding a hand to my ear. “Hey,” I said with some urgency. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

I smiled at him. “The sound of one hand clapping.” It formed a part of one of the more famous Zen sayings:
What is the sound of one hand clapping?

“Very funny,” the roshi said. “But seriously. Think on these things.” He pushed open a door and ushered me into a spartan bedroom. “If you manage to find Chie, I may be able to help in some way. I know some people who could perhaps work with her on her issues.” I nodded. Then the roshi drew something from the deep folds of his robe and placed it in my hands: Goro’s package. I looked at him in surprise.