The Death and Life of Nicholas Linnear (4 page)

He brought out three hundred dollars, and she looked at it, saying, “It’s not enough.” Breathing it into him.

“What do you want?” Asking her
How much do you want?
was a Western mistake he would not make.

“A kiss.” She tilted her head up to him. “A real kiss.”

These girls did not kiss. Ever. This was a request of the highest honor and magnitude. In that instant, he knew she would find a way out for him. He drew her to him and they kissed for a very long time, until their tongues had explored every inch of their mouths.

She broke it off, as was right and correct. Nevertheless, he felt her reluctance, as well as her sorrow, and wished he could do more for her.

Opening the door, she looked down the hallway both ways before signaling to him. They ran, silently but swiftly, until they came to another staircase, this one even narrower and steeper than the first. They ascended, past a third story, climbing a vertical metal ladder from there. A metal fire door opened onto the tiled roof. Beyond, adjacent tiled roofs stretched away in every direction. The night air felt fresh and cool. It wove her night-black hair in tendrils around her cheeks.

It was only then, when he was safely outside, that she took the money he offered, leaving him without a backward glance. The fire door closed behind her and he found himself alone on the steeply slanted rooftop.

When the watched becomes the watcher the stakes are raised significantly. On the other hand, vital information stood to be gained. This was the situation in which Nicholas now found himself.

He had come off of the tiled roof of a building down the block from The Golden Lotus Club & Sauna. Working his way down the wall using fingertips and toeholds was no problem for him. He went at once in sight of the back alley, where the two sharkskin suits were conferring. It was clear from their demeanor that they had lost him. The one who had come in the front pulled out a mobile, made a call. It was short and sweet. He indicated to his compatriot to follow him, and they went to a sleek black SUV and climbed in.

Ducking into the car he had rented earlier, he followed them. Again, they went through the tunnel into Pudong, arriving at the edge of the old
hutong
he’d been to last night. Now he knew their destination. He parked his car while the SUV up ahead was still slowing and installed himself at a convenient observation post, amid deep shadows, across from the restaurant from which he had rescued Anna Song.

The two sharkskins arrived soon enough, looking both disgruntled and fearful, which meant that it was more than likely they were about to confront Baron Po with their failure. It would not go well for them.

They went into the restaurant’s front door. Nicholas got a partial view of the waiter he had seen last night, only now he was dressed as the others were. He nodded to the newcomers, and the door closed behind them, a blackout screen pulled down over the glass panel.

Nicholas was about to move out of the shadows when he saw a light flick on at ground floor level in the building just to the left of the restaurant. It contained what appeared to be a pearl merchant’s storefront, but the windows were oddly high up off of the ground so that passersby could not see in. Shadows of the two men passed across the ceiling, then vanished. Clearly, there must be a hidden passageway between the two buildings. Lights came on upstairs.

Moving to the end of the block, Nicholas headed down a side street so narrow that two people abreast would be rubbing shoulders. To his right was the alley behind the buildings—an even narrower space. He found the rear of the building that the two men had gone into.

He grasped the end of the iron fire escape, lifted himself off of the ground until he was level with the ground floor windows. The nearest one was, like its brothers, banded with a wire that must surely be attached to a security system. It took Nicholas only minutes to detach the wire from two sides of the window, whose lock was so old he had it open within seconds.

He slid feet first into the ground floor room. He found himself in a compact workroom of modest size, only half-painted, as if the painter had changed his mind midstream. Brushes, pans, metal rods, cans of paint and thinner were neatly stacked in one corner, patiently waiting for the painter to return to his original purpose.

But this wasn’t the shop of a jeweler. Canvas vests hung from a dowel running from wall to wall, like humble washing on a line. Directly below the vests a wide wooden trough containing open compartments filled with nails, ball bearings, screws, and the like hunkered on sturdy wooden legs. To one side was a countertop where the timing mechanisms were assembled. Though there were no explosives evident, this was most certainly a bomb-maker’s lab.

Selecting one of the metal poles, he crept cautiously out of the lab, into a large open area that appeared to take up all the remaining ground floor space. There was nothing in it—no furniture, no fixtures: rug, painting, or photograph. Apart from a single floor lamp throwing a pool of light onto the walls, floor, and ceiling, it was completely empty.

He stood in the center, turning slowly. Then he heard the voice: electronic, disembodied, emotionless: “Why have you invaded my territory?”

Baron Po.

“You know why,” Nicholas said.

There came a harsh sound, like the bark of a dog. Perhaps it was laughter. “What have you become after all these years since you left the Golden Triangle? Are you a businessman? If you are nothing more than a bureaucrat, that would be shameful enough. But you have become something far, far worse. You have strayed so very far from
kokoro
—the heart of the universe. Do you even still know what
kokoro
is? Perhaps not. Well, we will find out.”

At that, four men in sharkskin suits appeared at the four corners of the room. Each was armed with a SIG-Sauer handgun. Combat power,
shi
, in Sun Tzu’s estimation, was synonymous with the setting of a crossbow. Without thought, without intent, Nicholas emptied his mind, allowing his
shi
to rise. Setting himself, he swung the metal rod in a horizontal arc that smashed the light bulb and caused the lamp to crash to the floor.

Darkness and chaos: this was the terrain of the ninja, the locus within which he operated at peak efficiency. And, as every ninja is taught, in darkness there is death.

Gunshots—bullets crossing the spot where Nicholas had been standing; he was no longer there. He was already executing
tai-sabaki
—the sweeping circular movements, the serene gliding pivots that imbue the attack with the
bokken
or the
katana
—polished wood or ten thousand layers of steel, it didn’t matter which—with an inexorable power.

The
tai-sabaki
sweeps slammed the guns from two of the men, then the third, causing fractured hands or wrists. Nicholas felt the presence of the fourth man advancing toward him through the darkness; he could scent him as if they were predator and prey amid a confusing tangle of tree limbs and thorny underbrush. Nicholas deepened his stance and, as he did so, he descended into
kokoro
. He felt the universe all around him as if it were a series of concentric spheres, the forces and vectors within them reaching out to him like old friends.

The key to either offense or defense, Sun Tzu wrote, is designing them for impenetrability. Nicholas stood his ground as the fourth man came on. He had thrown his gun away; it was useless in the dark, with his three compatriots in possible lines of fire. In its stead, Nicholas scented oiled steel—a knife of some kind, possibly a
wakizashi
.

Now he had scented Nicholas as well, for he came rushing headlong at him. Nicholas allowed this, pivoting at the last possible second so that the man brushed past his right side. Continuing his pivot, Nicholas smashed the pole against the man’s spine and, as he arched backward, Nicholas relieved him of his weapon: it was indeed a samurai’s short sword.

The man, recovering, swung backward, making contact with Nicholas’s side, but reaching out, almost leisurely, Nicholas slipped the
wakizashi
between two of his ribs. Then he went after the other three men. One of them managed to whip a wire around Nicholas’s neck, jerking him backward, drawing a crescent of blood across his throat. Reversing the
wakizashi
, Nicholas stabbed him in the abdomen. As he fell away, the final two came at Nicholas from either side. The pole dispatched one, the hilt of the sword broke the other’s nose, then cracked his skull.

Nicholas heard the pounding of shoes down a staircase. He counted six, seven, eight pairs. Racing back to the bomb-maker’s lab, he upended the trough, sending the ball bearings, nails, and screws skittering into the larger space. Prying open the cans of paint and thinner, he set them alight. Then he exited the building through the same rear window by which he had entered.

The fire raged, the wooden structure, abetted by the accelerants, igniting like a bonfire of kiln-dried wood. Nicholas stood across the street watching the front door. Already, thick black smoke billowed out the windows in the upper stories that had been thrust open. One man, panicked and blinded, launched himself out of one of the windows, only to crack open his skull on the cement sidewalk.

He waited for Baron Po to appear, but the building was engulfed so quickly, the fire so fierce, no one had a prayer of escaping the inferno. He left while the fire engines were still maneuvering down the adjacent streets large enough to accommodate their size and bulk.

Sun Tzu had something important to say about handling an ally: First, to make him acquiesce to your desires by making him yield through disadvantages. Second, to urge him to act quickly through advantages.

Nicholas had cause to think about this as he lay in the fragrant tangle of Anna Song’s silk sheets. It was well past daybreak, but the wooden blinds in her enormous bedroom were still closed against the sunlight. He had come into her apartment in the Shanghai sky on the last tendrils of darkness. No one had seen him enter the building and he had made certain that he encountered no one in the hallways.

As he watched her emerge from the bathroom, slim, tall, naked, he considered that she had made every move correctly in accordance with Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
. Baron Po may not have been her enemy, but his patron in the Central Committee certainly was. How else to explain how Baron Po had suffered no consequences in ordering her abduction? Anna had an enemy in the Central Committee who was more powerful than she was. Now she had quite cleverly cut off her enemy’s main source of income. What would that do to his power? Only Anna could answer that question, but Nicholas suspected it would all but neuter him.

As she came toward him, her flawless skin streaked with the tiger stripes of sunlight coming through the slats, she lifted her arms, ran her fingers through her thick, lustrous hair. Her small, firm breasts were thrust into prominence, their nipples hard and quivering as she approached him.

Climbing onto the bed, she straddled him. “What a conflagration you set off,” she said softly. “I have confirmation that Baron Po and his cadre all perished in the blaze.” She ran a fingertip across his throat. “Still, he hurt you.”

“Not him. I never saw him.”

“And yet you managed to destroy him utterly.” She bent down, her nipples scoring his chest. “How you managed it I don’t know.” Her lips covered his as a way of telling him she didn’t care how he’d done it, just that he had.

There was no expression on her face, but her eyes were alight with lust. Nicholas suspected the word “passion” did not exist for her, except in the sphere of business, just as “love” did not exist for her at all.

Nevertheless, she was as adept a tactician in bed as she was behind a desk. That’s all that counted for her; sex wasn’t about anything other than power. For Nicholas, it was refreshing to make love to a woman who had no pretexts about what they were doing and why. Coming together, coupling, then drawing apart were a series of maneuvers that brought her pleasure rather than money and respect—though there was another form of pleasure in those things, as well.

He liked to hear her cry out at the end. It was the only time he ever heard her raise her voice. And, too, it was a different voice—hoarse, throaty, emanating from deep in her belly as her
chi
rose up for a moment to overwhelm her. In that instant, she was vulnerable, but only he possessed the insight to recognize it. Then, in the blink of an eye, it was snuffed out, like a candle in a wind rising before a storm.

“
Cha
,” she said, afterward. Tea. It was not a question, but the beginning of a complex ritual that followed sex. It was her way to physically restore the rigid order that had been shredded by animal chaos.

“Not yet,” Nicholas said as he rolled out of bed. “I’m taking a shower.”

“Shall I join you before or after you soap up?” she asked, intuiting his intent.

This was the only time she allowed herself to be playful. After the first sip of tea, that part of her would vanish as if it had never existed.

“I’ll leave it up to you.”

“How much time do you need to recover?” She said, with the last remnant of the throaty yell that presaged her orgasm. It was a question to which she already knew the answer.

He turned on the hot water, stepped into the shower. He had kept the bathroom door open. Through the shower’s translucent pebbled glass, he could see a slightly distorted image of her bounce out of bed, pad across the room, open the slatted blinds. Sunlight streamed into the room, blotting out her form.

He started to wash the accumulated sweat and grime off of his body. Halfway through, he saw her shadow come through the open doorway into the bathroom. Only it wasn’t Anna Song he was confronting, but Quilin, the man on the tanker.

In Quilin’s hands two daggers glistened with refracted light through the shower’s downpour. He was grinning at Nicholas as he thrust first one dagger, then the other into the space where Nicholas had been standing. That Nicholas had little room to maneuver meant little to him. As applied to martial arts,
haragei
—the invisible technique—meant he needed almost no space for defense or offense. The instant of
becoming
, when thought morphs into action, was intuitive and seamless.