Linnear 03 - White Ninja (16 page)

Cotton Branding and Shisei ate lobsters he cooked on the gas grill, stir-fried vegetables that Shisei sizzled in an electric wok she found, a salad of local greens, and thick chunks of Italian bread. She arranged it all so artfully it made Branding want to take a picture of it. The stunning visual display somehow made the food taste all the better.

They went through a six-pack of beer,' and he was returning to the refrigerator for a second six-pack before he realized it.

Branding knew that he was besotted - with sex, with food, with the beer - but, mostly, with Shisei. He did not ever want her to leave. He thought that he might be content going with her from bedroom to kitchen and back again for the rest of his life. It was a dream, of course, but a happy dream, an ecstatic dream, and Branding revelled in it.

They spoke of many things. Branding, lolling on the great porch, feeling the wet mist rolling in off the water, hearing it muffle the constant pounding of the surf, contrived to speak as little as possible. He was fairly far gone, but not so far that a tiny central piece of him had not stopped testing her.

During all this long afternoon and evening, Branding, happier than he had ever been since the early days of his marriage to Mary, before the birth of his daughter, whom he loved but who created with her dyslexia an unimaginable chaos and grief, had been more or less waiting for Shisei to bring up the topic of his work and, especially, his upcoming political battle with his personal nemesis, Douglas Howe.

Shisei was, frankly, too good to be true. The fact that she had come into his life at just this moment had embedded itself in his psyche and, like a pearl growing inside an oyster, had festered, prodding him back to reality when the dazzling sheen of his ecstasy had begun to wear off.

It was no wonder that he was becoming paranoid. Branding suspected that Douglas Howe, and Howe's dogged persistence in opposing Branding's Ascra bill, was finally getting to him. Acting on the findings of a five-year report commissioned by the Washington-based Johnson Institute, the Defense Department's Advanced Strategic Computer Research Agency had petitioned Capitol Hill for a four-billion-dollar funding over five years in order to finance the Hive Project. Branding, as Chairman of the Senate Fiscal Oversight Committee, had been the first to see the report, and the first to act on it.

The Hive Project involved constructing a computer that was based not on a single processor, like conventional computers were, but rather on an interconnecting neural network of a complexity not unlike that in the brain of a bee - hence the project name.

This computer would, in effect, be able to think. Using radar, sonar and Loran, it and subsequent versions, so the Johnson Institute report showed, could distinguish between friend or foe; it could choose a weapon's path, and change it instantaneously to suit incoming intelligence from the field; it could recognize, and respond to, human speech. The applications seemed endless.

Douglas Howe, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was dead set against Branding's Ascra bill. His argument was that he did not want to foster another disaster on the order of the recent Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Four hundred million dollars had been allocated for a fever-pitch run at constructing a 'cognitive artificial brain'. So much money had been dropped in the

researchers' laps at once that they did not know what to do with it and, consequently, great chunks of the funding disappeared down an unknown drain. But Branding knew that Howe's reasoning was only skin deep.

The fight, which had long been simmering, now threatened to boil over into what many people on Capitol Hill saw as a personal vendetta, as Howe sought to destroy or, at the very least, cripple Branding's enormous influence in the Senate. This influence was now symbolized by the Ascra bill.

The increasingly bitter conflict had become something more than Democrat versus Republican or even liberal versus conservative. It had about it now something of a pitched battle, with the combatants dug in on both sides, armed to the teeth, and determined that only one would survive the final assault.

But Shisei had continued to surprise him, just as she had ever since they had met at Tippy North's masque. Rather than ask questions about his work, she spoke of those subjects about which she seemed the most passionate: ecology and sex. Branding, beginning to understand Shisei's personality, saw that she was obsessed with health: a healthy world, a healthy life. To her, a vigorous sex life was as integral to a healthy life as eating the right foods or daily exercise.

And again Branding was struck by the essentially childlike qualities lurking beneath the woman's glowing skin. She possessed a kind of naivety - a straightforwardness of purpose - that to Branding was as exciting as it was refreshing.

From inside the house, George Shearing interpreted 'Mood Indigo' in a typically lush arrangement. Branding's eyes closed dreamily. He half-heard Shisei say she was going to take a shower.

He felt her passing by him. Then he was alone on the porch with the night, the sea and the music. He inhaled

deeply of the heavy, salt air, luxuriating in its purity.

George Shearing disappeared in mid-note and, a moment later, Grace Jones's sinewy vocals were imprinting themselves on the even-tempoed surf. Branding was reminded of the long afternoon's session of ecstatic lovemaking. Surprisingly, he felt himself stirring, becoming aroused all over again. He imagined Shisei's body spread upon his bed, and he felt lust clotting his veins as if it were a drug.

He rose, aware that his loose white cotton trousers were already tented at the crotch. He pushed open the screen door, and Grace Jones's voice washed over him. Memories writhed in his head.

He went past the kitchen, through the living-room, down the hall. The music followed him, twisting along the corridor as if it were his companion. He could hear the sound of the water spray, and opened the door to the bathroom.

It was steamy and hot inside. Branding undid his trousers, stepped out of them. He stripped off his voile shirt. He could see Shisei's body, a dark shape moving behind the translucent shower curtain. Her back was to him, her arms upstretched into the curving spray, her hands encircling the shower head as, before, they had encircled him.

He was very hard. He could feel the throbbing between his legs, and sucked in his breath. He felt like a sex machine. He felt twenty-five again.

As he watched Shisei washing herself, Branding smiled, remembering that she had not wanted to turn her back to him, that now he could take her from behind, coupling as animals did, as Branding had never done with his wife or with any of the women he had been ultimate with before Mary.

He was trembling with desire, fired by the sight of her, hazy and indistinct behind the thin curtain, one filmy

layer, a storm of painted violets swaying, rivulets of water running through them...

Branding grasped the shower curtain and, in one quick gesture, drew it aside. And stood transfixed, staring at Shisei's back.

It was one of those moments in one's life that did not last more than a tenth of a second but which seemed to last a lifetime - image imprinted upon the retina, burned upon the brain for all time. It was akin to the moment when Branding had learned that his daughter was dyslexic; when it had become clear to him that Mary, the woman he loved, did not particularly enjoy sex. They were infinitesimal moments in one's life; yet charged with such power that they irrevocably changed one's life.

And like all such moments, this one was chaotic. Branding stared at Shisei's back, at, more properly, the perfectly hideous detailed tattoo there, of a spider. It was gigantic, covering the entire area of her back, the obscene cluster of eight red eyes atop its small head, the two pairs of spread appendages from which venom is secreted to paralyse and liquefy its prey, its eight hairy, articulated legs stretching from one shoulder-blade to the other, from the top of one buttock to the other.

And then Shisei reacted. Her head jerked around, looking back over her shoulder. Her torso moved and, with the play of her back muscles, the spider moved, dancing in nauseating cadence to the sinuous drift of Grace Jones's vocals.

Branding screamed.

I must be going crazy, Tomi thought. With the night had come the rain, like a curtain coming down on the last tableau held by actors upon a stage. It was a red rain, or a blue rain depending on which glowing sign one was passing. Masses of umbrellas held at an acute angle to keep

the wind from inverting them clogged Tokyo, turning the streets into fields filled with disquieting black flowers, storm-tossed, beading moisture down the stretched nylon and rice-paper.

Headlights washed like klieg lights across these thick swathes of living matter, highlighting faces and hands as if they were segments of one vast millipede making its laborious way across the city.

Tomi, on her way home from work, ducked into a brilliantly lit pachinko parlour. Her feet and legs were wet, and she was tired of being herded into puddles by the twists and turns of the ceaselessly moving millipede on the streets.

She had tried to find Nicholas Linnear's whereabouts. She had first called his office at Sato International, but they had no idea where he might be. His home number went unanswered. She had dialled Sato International again, asked to speak to a vice-president. This time, she had learned the cause of Nicholas's absence and, on a hunch, asked for the name of his surgeon. Then she called the surgeon's office and had a bit more luck. They informed her that he had an appointment with Dr Hanami at ten the next morning. Tomi had decided to meet him there.

In truth, however, Nicholas Linnear was not uppermost in her mind. Senjin Omukae was. That individual was rapidly assuming dominance over the policewoman, and this fact in and of itself was disturbing to Tomi. If only that were the end of it, she felt perhaps she could, in time, handle what seemed to her a dereliction of her duty.

The fact that her individuality was asserting itself over the figure of Senjin had her really frightened. Senjin Omukae was not only her commander and, therefore, forbidden, he was Senjin the individualist, the Opaque Man. This was his nickname among those outside the Homicide

division. He was - other than heroic - an unknown quantity. He was feared; even, it was rumoured, by those who had elevated bun to division commander.

That she should be drawn to this man was a source of growing unease for Tomi. Which was why, on this rainy night, she decided to go to see the Scoundrel.

The Scoundrel, otherwise known as Seji Hikoko, was her best friend. They had met in school and it had been the Scoundrel who had supported her when she had made her traumatic break with her family, with her entire way of life. In this way, he was like Senjin. He saw and appreciated her for what she was, not merely a woman to be kept in her place. In response, it had been Tomi who had tutored the Scoundrel in his advanced level philosophy tutorials when he was in danger of failing those courses.

As a result, there was an intimate bond between the two that Tomi had never had with anyone else, even -especially! - a member of her own family.

The Scoundrel had a usagigoya - literally a rabbit hutch - what the Japanese called a modern Tokyo apartment: tiny, cramped, virtually airless. Still, it was a place to sleep.

The Scoundrel's usagigoya was in Asakusa, where he often rubbed elbows with Kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers. It was Tomi's favourite part of town, but it made her melancholy as well, for it reminded her of her lowly station in life. As a police sergeant she could not afford to live here, even in a place as minuscule as a rabbit hutch.

The Scoundrel was home. But then he was always home at this hour, tinkering with his portable computer terminal, which now ran two to three times faster than it had when, he had traded for it. The Scoundrel never bought anything when he could barter for it. In the privacy of his home he liked to improve upon what others did. In this way he could assert his genius without exerting ego.

It was a Zen exercise, Tomi knew, a way to achieve the same kind of mind/no mind she strove for in her martial arts training. Hers was the more physical discipline, she knew, but hardly the more demanding.

She heard the careening music of Billy Idol as she went down the hall. And when the Scoundrel opened the door, the blast of rock 'n' roll almost bowled her over.

'Good God, how can you think with all that sound and fury?' she yelled, putting aside her umbrella and her shoes.

'Because it signifies nothing.' The Scoundrel grinned, pulled her inside, shut the door behind her. 'I can concentrate with it on.'

The music boomed from a pair of three-thousand-dollar speakers the Scoundrel had souped up, and Tomi felt as if she had encountered a g-force lift-off. She had to brace herself against the kineticism. She felt trapped within a huge pachinko game.

The place was, as usual, a mess. Masses of computer hardware were strewn like corpses upon a battlefield in seemingly random piles across the floor, the chairs, the small sofa, the top of the VCR. The TV screen was filled up with the image of Harrison Ford prowling the futuristic Los Angeles cityscape, searching for murderous replicants in Blade Runner.

The stereo glowed with a profusion of red and green pinpoints, waxing and waning with the volume of Billy Idol's vocals And, like Billy Idol, the Scoundrel had dyed his hair platinum. It stood up from his scalp like a bristly forest, longer on top, shorter on the sides. He was, like Tomi, in his early thirties. But while she had matured from the wispy teenager she had once been, he had retained the reedy, almost unformed shape of youth. He was like an oversized exuberant puppy, sloppy in his habits but lovable for all that.