The Death and Life of Nicholas Linnear (5 page)

As the knife blades flashed past on either side of him, as Quilin leaned forward, weight on his right foot, Nicholas struck him with the edge of his hand. Quilin scarcely winced. The tip of one of the knives scored a red line across Nicholas’s thigh. The second knife was flashing in toward the side of his neck.

Quilin expected him to either advance or retreat against the rear tiles, but he did neither. Instead, he shoved the bar of soap into Quilin’s mouth and thrust it down his throat. Quilin, choking, backed off, but his heels struck the rim of the shower stall. As he rocked back, Nicholas punched him over the heart with such force the percussion interrupted the electrical pulses, and his heart ceased to beat. Quilin collapsed, his breath stilled.

Nicholas stared at him for long moments, seeing him, seeing into him, and seeing through him. He bent down. Stepping over him, he wrapped a towel around his waist; more to sop up the blood leaking from his wound than for modesty. The shower was still on full, the spray coming through the open shower door in tiny patters, forming a puddle on the tile floor.

Anna Song, half-dressed, sitting on the corner of the bed, leaning on one hand, could not keep the surprise off of her face. For a split instant Nicholas was given access to her true emotions, then she locked them down again.

“Baron Po didn’t try to have me buried alive,” he said. “That was you, Commissioner Song.”

His switch to formal address was not lost on her. Her eyes hardened infinitesimally, becoming opaque.

“Quilin didn’t work for Baron Po, he worked for you.”

“Worked?” She had picked up on his use of the past tense.

“You know me so well, Commissioner Song. You knew I wouldn’t die, even though you ordered me buried alive.”

“If I had wanted you dead then,” she said evenly, “I would have put you in a steel coffin, not a pine box.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

Her eyes hardened further but she held her head perfectly still. “I don’t believe you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

Her fingers had crawled beneath the bed sheets until her hand was no longer visible.

“You wanted me to live, to seek revenge against the man who supposedly sought my death. You wanted me to do what you yourself could not: find Baron Po and kill him.” He glanced around the room, as if unmindful of the position of her hidden hand and what it most surely held. “You have an enemy you needed to weaken. You used me—an ally—to do it for you.”

“Did you mind? No, you did not.” She cocked her head. “I think you had fun—more fun than you’ve had in a long while.” She pursed her lips. “You saved me; I brought you amusement. Now we’re even.”

Hardly, he thought. Anna Song never played on an even field. The odds always had to be tipped in her favor.

“Did Baron Po really abduct you or were they your men disguised as his?”

“I won’t tell,” she said, and brought the gun out from beneath the sheets. It was aimed at his chest. “And now you’ll never know.”

He’d been right about her. She had been using the principles outlined by Sun Tzu, he just hadn’t taken her strategy far enough: she had been near when she pretended to be far away. Classic Sun Tzu.

“I want your LNG business. I need it; I’ve been losing ground on the Committee. I had to do something major, something significant to make the others sit up and notice, to give me back my footing.” She waggled the gun slightly. “I know what you’re thinking, but I can handle Joji; he’ll work with me. You wouldn’t. I knew that going in.”

Her finger curled around the trigger. “Goodbye, Nicholas.” She began to squeeze it. “Our relationship has outlasted its usefulness.”

But Nicholas was already on the move, inside her defenses before she could fire. Wrenching her wrist, he forced her to drop the gun.

“That’s enough,” he said.

Her empty gun hand rose up, grabbed him by the throat in a death grip.

“Anna, don’t make me do this.”

A gleam of triumph lightened her eyes, as he reverted to the intimate address. Then her knee slammed into the spot where blood from his knife wound had stained the towel.

“Hurt? Does it hurt, Nicholas?” she whispered.

They were locked together, body-to-body, eye-to-eye. Anyone observing them would be hard put to say whether they were making war or making love. Sometimes, there is no demarcation. The known morphs into the unknown. The
becoming
arises like a creature of terrible substance, but without form. She kept firm hold of his windpipe. Her knee struck his wound again and again, a battering ram at the imagined weak point in his defenses.

He saw into her now—saw the animus for the men who had tirelessly sought to minimize her influence, to diminish her, to punish her for her unforgiveable rudeness in penetrating their inner sanctum of power. He saw the loneliness of her life, the desperation. He saw her love for him. And he saw the end—the only end for her life.

“Stop,” he whispered. “Stop.”

But she wouldn’t. He knew she wouldn’t. Staring into his eyes, she tightened her hold on his throat, completely cutting off his ability to breath.

“Anna,” he gasped.

Her lips were so close to his they almost touched. He saw it in her eyes: what she wanted, what she needed him to do. What she was forcing him to do.

“
Jiu Ming
.” Her whisper was like a reed stirred by a summer breeze. Save me.

He took her head in his hands and as swiftly as a cheetah lunges at its prey, broke her neck.

He carried her into the bathroom, arranging everything so the forensic team would believe that she and Quilin had killed each other. He sanitized the apartment of both his fingerprints and his DNA. He’d have to take the sheets and pillowcases with him when he left. There was no helping it; sometimes in life things worked out in a distasteful manner. This was one of them.

Later, he would make the time to contemplate what had happened here, and why. He would also have to figure out what to do with Joji. Death was not always the most useful consequence of betrayal.

Dressed, with his silk bundle over one shoulder, he opened the slider and stepped out onto the terrace. Peering over the side, he saw Ko standing by his car, meditating as he waited. Seemingly endless ripples of terraces were below him; an easy descent. It was a long way down, but not nearly as far as Anna Song had fallen.