Giri (15 page)

He did. And was almost crippled for life.

The fight was action from start to finish, with each man trying to be the first to score three points, theoretically three killing blows. When time ran out, a referee and four judges had the match even, two points apiece. Both men then fought two overtimes; it was in the final overtime that Robbie dropped Decker to the mat with a vicious sweep, taking both legs out from under him, before connecting with a stomach punch, then
accidentally
falling on Decker’s right knee.
And breaking it.

Victory to Robbie. And agony for Decker, who heard and felt the ligaments and tendons rip in his knee and screamed before passing out from the pain. At the hospital, two doctors told him he would never run again. He would always walk with a limp. Karate, or any sport for that matter, was out of the question. Forever.

The fear returned.

And then he thought of Ran Dobson.
First and only rule: Don’t bother unless you want it bad. Real bad.
Ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

In his hospital bed, a drugged Decker, his right leg in traction, slowly punched the air in front of him. When he had done that twenty times, he lifted his left leg in short, slow kicking motions. Training again, Ran. Dog’s fighting back.

It was eleven months before he returned to Nick and Grace Harper’s West Side dojo. By then he had strengthened his knee with weights, therapy, running. In weeks he was training hard. He learned to dodge and shift faster, using lateral movements rather than putting pressure on his knee by moving back to evade attacks. He improved his timing, increasing his speed so that he could get the jump on opponents without having to move much. His hand speed was now the best it had ever been.

He ran daily, jumped rope, lifted weights to keep the knee strong. But it would never be as strong as it had been before the
accident.
Still, there were those who thought he was better than the old Manny Decker.

Robbie Ambrose had deliberately broken his knee and Decker knew it. Robbie hadn’t forgotten their last encounter in Saigon, when Decker, at gunpoint, had prevented him, Sparrowhawk and Dorian Raymond from walking off with fifty thousand dollars of CIA money. Everyone else saw the broken knee as an accident. Decker, however, knew better.

To retain his newly regained confidence, he pushed all thoughts of Robbie Ambrose into his subconscious. And in time, Decker almost forgot that he still feared him.

Fear. Because of it Decker made love to Romaine in darkness, afraid to see her face and not wanting her to see his. By allowing her to love him, he had become responsible for her. Sex had drawn him to Romaine; her need for love had complicated the arrangement. Who was tonight’s mercy fuck really for? Romaine? Michi? Decker’s career?

Romaine wanted Decker. But the one thing he had to give, himself, was no longer his to give. It belonged to another.

In the darkness she said, “Let’s go away this weekend. I’ve got the money.”

“Can’t,” he lied. “Have a tournament coming up. I’m refereeing and putting on a demonstration.”

“Oh. Well, maybe some other weekend.”

“Maybe. How’d you get so rich, all of a sudden?”

“Dorian. He gave me almost a thousand dollars.”

“Still getting lucky at Atlantic City?”

“No. We had lunch. He wants to get back together again and he told me he’s working on some kind of deal that’s going to make him rich for life.”

Decker held her hand, hating himself. “What kind of a deal makes a man rich for life?”

“He wouldn’t say. He likes to brag, but he kept quiet for a change. He did tell me about some new opening last night he’d gone to. Some auditorium or arena out on Long Island. Lots of celebrities, big names.”

She sat up in bed. “You’re not going to believe this, but you know what he said? He said the auditorium doesn’t have the right number of seats. Some lawyer for the auditorium, some Greek guy, came up with some scheme to cut down on the number of seats but nobody’s supposed to know about it. Dorian thinks it’s real smart what the Greek guy did. He likes those kind of flashy people, Dorian. Me, I think you can be too clever sometimes.”

Decker said, “I’ll go along with that. Sly little devils, these lawyers. And you say this one’s Greek?”

T
REVOR SPARROWHAWK FELT EXHILARATED,
as he always did when the hunt was on. This morning he stepped from a chauffeured limousine and, whistling a bit of Haydn’s “The Seasons,” walked into a Wall Street office building near the Federal Reserve Bank. Minutes from now he would know a bit more about his quarry, the physically adept Michelle Asama.

In the lobby he headed toward a private elevator being held for him by an attendant in a beige and yellow uniform. The elevator serviced only Management Systems Consultants, located on the top four floors of the forty-four-story building. The lobby directory, however, did not list the security firms or the names of any of its officers. An MSC guard, dressed as an elevator attendant, prevented anyone without the necessary coded identification from boarding the elevator.

In the early days of the firm’s existence there had been some discussion as to whether or not the elevator guard should be armed. Was it good or bad public relations? Would potential clients be alarmed or somehow reassured to know that the finger that pressed the starter button could in seconds wrap itself about a trigger?

Sparrowhawk claimed the last word. “Violence, dear friends, is the rhetoric of our day, unfortunately. As for those of you who feel that an armed guard in the lobby is extreme, let me join William Blake in noting that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I say there is nothing wrong if potential clients view an armed guard as a symbol of distrust on our part. Distrust, gentlemen, is our only protection against treachery.”

Thus the attendant/guard, who greeted Sparrowhawk before closing the elevator doors behind him, wore under his knee-length coat an Ingram M-11, a machine pistol that weighed less than four pounds and fired fourteen shots per second. As an added security precaution the guard, via a hidden beeper and using a code changed daily, checked in hourly with an upstairs supervisor.

On the forty-fourth floor Sparrowhawk stepped from the elevator still whistling Haydn, but faster now. A wave of the hand to the uniformed guards on either side of the elevator and then he was in the reception area of his office. “Mrs. Rosebery,” he said in crisp greeting to his secretary. Twenty minutes ago she had reached him on the car phone to report the arrival of the information he had requested on Michelle Asama.

Damned efficient, Mrs. Rosebery. Sixtyish, a long-faced Yorkshire widow in tweed suits and sensible shoes and with an unwavering belief that the world had slipped into darkness with the death of beloved King Edward VII in 1910. She claimed to be a descendant of Spencer Perceval, the only British prime minister ever to be assassinated. She herself had toiled for two prime ministers and had turned down a salary of twenty-five thousand pounds a year from a banker in the City to follow Sparrowhawk to America.

Sparrowhawk, after telling Mrs. Rosebery to hold all calls and messages, closed the door to his private office, a comfortable room of paneled walls, shelves of hand-bound books, copies of impressionist paintings and for a desk, a Louis XV commode veneered in tulipwood and kingwood and mounted in ormolu. He opened the drapes. Magnificent Manhattan lay at his feet as London never had. The view was heart stopping. Cloudless blue sky over the Hudson River; tugboats towing ships into West Side piers; thousands of skyscraper windows on fire with fiery sunlight; and on the street below, slow-moving specks that were people, cars, buses. Invigorating, all of it.

He clapped his hands. To work.

Behind his desk, bifocals resting on the tip of his long nose, he read about Michelle Asama.

The source of his information: Management Systems Consultants, its worldwide investigative connections and computers. The cream of former law enforcement personnel made up the company’s board of directors, its roster of officers, its chief investigators. CIA, FBI, the Justice Department Strike Force, New York Police Department, Israel’s Mossad, Interpol, New Scotland Yard, U.S. State Department, the French Surety, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the security division of top American multinational corporations. Men who had once worked in these organizations now worked for MSC because it paid the highest salaries in the private intelligence field.

Money, naturally, was a factor in luring top talent; Sparrowhawk received $750,000 a year, plus bonuses and expenses. But pulling down three times the average law enforcement salary wasn’t the only reason that former policemen, spies and investigators brought valuable files, expertise and contacts to MSC. Those who came here or to other private security companies were
players,
men hooked on the game, who could not live without intrigue or dirty tricks or investigations.

Sparrowhawk had assembled a formidable staff, one quite capable of relieving Michelle Asama and anyone else of the burden of their secrets.

On to Miss Asama.

Early records missing. Sparrowhawk frowned. Convenient. The absence of verifiable fact always allowed speculation to run rampant. Born in Saigon, but information on much of her life destroyed or lost in Communist takeover in 1975. Spent time in Tokyo, where available records claim she entered the world on August 29, 1953. Father was Japanese shipowner, mother the daughter of French importer. Parents died in Singapore hotel fire when she was fourteen. Thereafter she divided her time between Saigon and father’s relatives in Tokyo.

Educated in Tokyo and Paris, with business courses in America (UCLA). Unmarried, no children, no criminal record. No available hospital records, indicating no major illnesses. She owned one-third of Pantheon Diamonds, money having been left to her by her father. A Japanese conglomerate, whose name Sparrowhawk recognized, owned the other two-thirds. So far, nothing out of the ordinary about the lady. Clean as the proverbial hound’s tooth.

Sparrowhawk sipped tea and continued reading. Pantheon dealt primarily in gems, rarely buying industrial diamonds. Miss Asama was known to the Diamond Trading Company, an organization that handled sales for the world’s principal diamond producers. Ten times a year the DTC invited buyers to sales, known as sights, held in London, Lucerne, Johannesburg, Antwerp, Tel Aviv. Only 230 customers a year qualified to attend the sights, no easy matter since South African syndicates, which controlled the diamond trade, had to approve each name. Miss Asama had qualified with ease.

Pantheon sold to the best-known jewelry designers in the world, as well as to exclusive shops in a dozen countries. The three-year-old company was a profit maker and apparently Miss Asama was the reason; her grasp of the business ranged from a knowledge of marketing to the cutting and polishing of stones. She was highly paid and was no figurehead. She actually ran the company.

Sparrowhawk paused to light a Turkish cigarette. Rare that a woman, and a young woman at that, rose so fast and so high in the Japanese business world, a totally male preserve. The Englishman used his gold pen to make a check mark on the report. Either the lady was setting records for efficiency, or she had friends in high places. She would not be the first woman to trade her favors for a boost up the corporate ladder.

And this too caught his eye: Michelle Asama had no personal credit cards. Not one. Company credit cards and a company expense account, but zero in the way of personal credit cards. Personal purchases apparently paid for in cash. Another check here.

Neither Sparrowhawk nor his wife Unity had personal credit cards. It was a protection against prying eyes, a way of keeping out of the computers of credit bureaus and banks, who too easily turned over information to anyone who asked for it.

MSC clients paid in cash, too. Along with oral agreements, this was a safety measure to keep information on security matters from falling into the wrong hands. Cash, for the most part, was untraceable. That made it a protection, one more brick in the wall of secrecy around Sparrowhawk and the people who hired him to guard their lives and property. Did this mean that Michelle Asama had something to hide?

Records indicated she had no trouble with U.S. Immigration, taxes, police or their Japanese counterparts. And yet …

Major.
One word. How much of life had turned on just one word.

Nor could Sparrowhawk erase from his mind eyewitness accounts of her disposal of those two American halfwits a few days ago.

“A woman against two men?” Robbie had said. “No doubt about it, the lady’s good.”

“When you say good, how many years of practice are we talking about?”

“Well, major, I’d say at least five years. That’s how long it takes to learn basic karate techniques. And that’s if you practice three times a week minimum. You get your confidence from experience, no other way, and that lady sure sounds confident to me. I mean from what you tell me she could have killed those clowns, really done a number on them. But she did just enough, know what I mean? Now that’s cool. That’s really being in charge.”

He paused. Then, “If what those three girls told you is true, especially the part about the
kiai,
the lady, whoever she is, is really into karate.”

Sparrowhawk said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but would you say that her
kiai,
as you call it, indicates a deep commitment to this karate business? Does it make her special in any way?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Would it make her some sort of samurai? Remember, she could have seriously harmed those louts, but didn’t. From what I can gather, samurai have some sort of higher calling in the martial arts. Or are supposed to have.”

“Hey, anything’s possible. I mean you’re right, she could be a samurai or related to one, I suppose. In the old days Japan had a lot of women samurai. They killed, too. Just like men. Sometimes they were better. They could get close to a man where another man couldn’t, know what I mean?”