The Kaisho (34 page)

Only one path to tread, and he was on it now: searching for Davis Munch.

He found him, eventually, hiding out in a Vietnamese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia. After a contact at the Pentagon had told him that Munch had logged out to State for the afternoon, Gaunt had looked up an old acquaintance of his, Josie Rand, who worked for one of State’s myriad deputy assistants. She was able to determine that Munch had a meeting with the assistant secretary of East Asian and Pacific affairs, but as far as she could determine the two were not in the building.

It had taken Gaunt a good twenty minutes to work out his approach to the assistant secretary’s office and make his preparations. State was like a tiny medieval fiefdom, the momentary solons jealously guarding both their power and their perquisites. Outsiders were invariably treated with either derision or suspicion or both.

The assistant secretary’s junior assistant was a young man, fair-haired and fresh-faced, who was just learning which ropes would swing him across the quicksand and which would bring him down into it. He was just the man for Gaunt, who approached him in that manner only someone who had been inside the corridors of power could summon up. He remembered to put that slightly Southern drawl he had all but lost during his time in New York back into his voice.

“Brock Peters, presidential attaché,” Gaunt said, thrusting out his hand to the junior assistant while giving him a steely eye. He had patted a battered briefcase he had borrowed from Josie Rand. “Papers from the POTUS for the assistant secretary.” POTUS, an acronym for president of the United States, was used only by White House staff and those closest to the president.

The junior assistant had jumped up with such alacrity that Gaunt, had had to stifle a grin.

“The... the assistant secretary is currently unavailable,” the young man stammered. “If you’ll log in, I’ll take possession of the material.”

That steely eye from Gaunt froze the junior assistant in his tracks. “Son, these papers are Eyes Only. Scare up the assistant secretary for me pronto.”

The junior assistant swallowed hard. “But the assistant secretary’s not currently in the building. I’ve had no call from the White House alerting me—”

“To Eyes Only documents?” Gaunt sneered. “Don’t be ridiculous, son. The White House is not in the habit of broadcasting dissemination of Eyes Only material.”

The junior assistant was all but standing at military attention now. He was very frightened. “Yes, sir. But I don’t—”

“Son, you’d better get this through that thick skill of yours. When the POTUS sends out Eyes Only material, he expects it to be read. Immediately. Do I make myself clear?”

Gaunt had. Within fifteen seconds he had been given the name and address of the Vietnamese restaurant at which the assistant secretary was being treated to lunch by Davis Munch.

The place, a vine-covered stone building that had once been some kind of mill, was situated in a picturesque setting amid linden and alder trees. A brook burbled merrily, hidden behind the trees, but the top of a wooden water-wheel was visible above a low wall of arborvitae. The path from the parking area to the restaurant was lined with oleander and clematis.

Inside, the restaurant was unnaturally dark with a low, beamed ceiling and a heavy stone floor. Buddhas and other Vietnamese artifacts peppered the walls.

The Vietnamese maître d’ glided up and Gaunt asked for Munch, who he imagined had made the reservation. It was well after the prime lunch hour, when almost all the diners were on coffee or just bullshitting while the tables were cleared.

“I am so sorry. Mr. Munch cannot be disturbed,” the maître d’ said portentously in a heavy accent. He did not look as if he were in the least sorry.

“He’ll see me,” Gaunt said, slipping the maître d’ a fifty-dollar bill.

“Ah, of course,” the Vietnamese said, smiling. He nodded toward a table in the far left corner, then promptly disappeared into the kitchen.

Gaunt stopped at the bar, ordered a beer, stood drinking it for a time while he watched the two men at the table. The assistant secretary was easy to spot. He had that polished look so coveted at State, a tall man with close-cut, graying hair, a hawk nose, and the blue eyes of a patrician. His companion—David Munch—was short and dark, with the body and mien of a prizefighter. His shoulders were hunched, his head stuck forward as he spoke. The intensity he emitted was apparently to Gaunt halfway across the room. Gaunt thought he would much rather have to take on the assistant secretary.

He waited, patient as the Buddha sitting cross-legged on a wall niche not far from where the two men talked. Once, the assistant secretary reached into his attaché case, pulled out a sheaf of onion-skin paper with the telltale blue filaments running vertically through it. Eyes Only documents. He pushed the sheaf across the table to the investigator, who scanned them quickly. Apparently at the assistant secretary’s instigation, Munch stopped at the fourth sheet, read it more carefully. In a moment, the assistant secretary began to answer a battery of questions.

At last the lunch was over. Munch put the sheaf of onionskins away, called for the check. He paid in cash, asked for a receipt. The two men rose, shook hands. The assistant secretary went off to the men’s room, and Munch went out to find his car.

Gaunt followed him out the front door. Halfway down the path, he called to him. Munch stopped, turned to look at Gaunt as he came unhurriedly down the path.

Gaunt introduced himself. His name brought a smile to Munch’s thin lips.

“What brings you to Washington a week before the Committee sits in judgment of you, Gaunt?”

Gaunt could see that Munch wasn’t going to make it easy for him. But then why should he? He was in the business of rubbing people’s noses in their own shit. He probably thought of it as a perk of the job.

“Talking to you would be one of the reasons,” Gaunt said.

Munch grunted, turned, and began to hurry down the path. “Bad timing, I’m afraid. I’m on my way back to a high-level meeting at the Pentagon. You should’ve gone through my office.”

“That would be fruitless. Your assistant said you were permanently in a meeting.”

“You would have done well to listen to him.” The parking lot was still and quiet. Not a breath of air was stirring, and a kind of heavy somnolence had invaded the late autumn, as if time had reversed itself and summer had returned. But there was no sound of insects or birds, and this lack gave the whole a peculiar surreal quality.

“But I didn’t and I’m here now.”

“I’m wondering how you pulled off that particular trick, but no matter.” Munch took out the keys to his government-issue Ford. “I have nothing to say to you, except that you pulled a losing hand this time.”

He inserted the key, opened the door. Leaning past him, Gaunt slammed the door shut.

“Get out of my face,” Munch said.

Gaunt put himself between the investigator and the Ford. “Not until I get some answers from you.”

“Ready to take me on?” Munch said, taking a stance. “I was Golden Gloves champ in the service.”

“If I have to, I will. But I’d rather buy you a beer.”

Munch came in low, leading with a left jab, and Gaunt blocked it, felt a numbing pain in his lower forearm. He countered with a quick uppercut that snapped Munch’s head back and he was cheered.

That was before Munch made a helluva feint to the right, lashed a counterpunch to his ribs. Gaunt felt the breath whoosh out of him, but he battled on, landing a soft, ineffectual punch on Munch’s shoulder while missing entirely Munch’s movement inside his guard. The next moment he found himself on his back, looking up at Munch. He had no memory of the blow that had landed him there, but there was a pain in his jaw.

Munch laughed, relaxing suddenly. He offered his strong, callused hand, pulled Gaunt slowly to his feet. “Yeah, well, what the hell,” Munch said, “I’m out here five minutes and I’m already thirsty.”

Inside, at the bar, he said, “I’ll tell you something, Gaunt, it’s been a long time since I found someone willing to stand up to me. Believe it or not, these days the government’s full of pussies.”

Gaunt rubbed the side of his jaw, which was still somewhat numb. “Not like when I was in harness here.”

“White House staff, right?”

Gaunt nodded, winced at the resultant pain, as they poured their beers. “I liked it well enough until I got caught in the gears and couldn’t see it for what it was.”

“I know what you mean. My sister was in the Navy. Got caught up with a bunch of drunk Tailhooks, got slapped around, groped, God knows what else by a gauntlet of the Navy’s finest.” Munch gave a harsh laugh. “She got caught in the gears, too. A real career-killer. Nobody likes a whistle-blower.”

They downed long drafts, were silent for some time. The sounds of the waiters and busboys going about their duties hardly intruded.

Gaunt felt a sudden pain in the side of his jaw where he supposed Munch’s knockout punch had landed and, feeling around in there, discovered he was bleeding. He excused himself, went to the men’s room to wash out his mouth and take a look in the mirror. It looked like the gum, not a tooth.

“You okay?” Munch asked on his return.

“Just a little bleeding.” Gaunt gingerly touched his cheek. “Nothing to worry about.”

“If you say so.” Munch ordered them another round of beers. “I know why you came to see me. I wasn’t going to tell you dick, but we have something in common, you and I, and because of that I’m going to tell you to turn tail and get the hell out of your company now, while you can get clear.” He held up a hand. “No, don’t interrupt me, I won’t answer questions.” He finished off his beer, sat staring straight ahead at a photo of Saigon as it had been in the 1950s.

“Here’s what I can tell you. We’d heard persistent rumors that a version of the Hive computer that your company and Hyrotech-inc. were working on had begun to appear on the black market in Taiwan, Bangkok, Singapore. We were able to get our hands on one, and I traced the item back to Saigon, where it was manufactured. There, I lost the trail. I don’t have the contacts I need there—no one in this fucked-up government does. One of our problems.”

He saw Gaunt still worrying the side of the jaw where he had hit him, handed over a handkerchief: “Press it against the bleeding.” Then, “Anyway, we’ve vetted everyone at Hyrotech-inc.—it’s a small concern, so no trouble there. It was a waste of time and I knew it. Hyrotech-inc. doesn’t have the capacity or capital to manufacture these computers here, and especially, in Southeast Asia where it has no presence at all. That left Sato-Tomkin which opened facilities in Saigon.”

“Opened a year ago,” Gaunt said. “Hardly enough time to ramp up any computer to market—let alone something as technologically advanced as a Hive clone.”

The investigator ignored him. “This meeting I just had with the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs at State was the clincher. He provided me with copies of coded faxes from the Sato-Tomkin HQ in Saigon to the home office in Tokyo. State spent six days breaking the code. All the faxes concern the Hive clones, which Sato-Tomkin has dubbed the Chi Project.”

Now he turned to look at Gaunt, said, “I don’t need you to confirm what I already know: that the Chi Project is under the sole control of Nicholas Linnear.”

The head sat upon an eighteenth-century Palladian armoire, its dark, intelligent eyes staring straight at the man who stood, slightly stooped over, hands in his pockets, studying the object.

“Dominic Goldoni,” Leon Waxman said, allowing a bit of awe to creep into his voice. “Madonna, I’ve dreamed of seeing you like this: so quiet, drained of fluids, embalmed like a trophy—by God, you
are
a trophy! Dominic, if only you could see the Gim, the sacred crescent in the center of your forehead!” His laughter shivered off the walls of the hotel room.

“You taught me all about the Gim, Do Duc, when you defected, came in from the jungles of Laos where Michael and Rock were reaping what should have been mine! When I became head of Looking-Glass, I thought I could finally regain control of those deserters.” Waxman was silent for a moment, but his body shook dangerously with emotion. “But Michael and Rock are still out there, running things in their floating city. Even you can’t find them.” He bit his lower lip.

“I had a hell of a time getting it here,” Do Duc Fujiru said, indicating the head. He wanted to get off the subject of his failures. “It was ironic, really. I set the thing in a bed of nails—one of many such crates in a shipment of construction materials.”

Waxman turned and a slow, strange smile crept over his face. “Primo Zanni. Dominic would have appreciated the name I gave you—the clever, chameleonesque Venetian servant. Yet another reflection of Looking-Glass.”

It was a curious thing, Waxman’s face, like an artifact one discovers quite by accident in a long-lost temple. The wide, round eyes were so deep set they seemed ringed with purple flesh. Above a shallow, sloping forehead, a widow’s peak, dark as night, thrust as aggressively as the jaw at the opposite end of the face.

“I see Florida was good for you—all that sun and surf and American girls. After what you’ve been through, you deserved the R and R.”

“I’d rather have been in Laos.”

“Yes. You did leave rather a mess behind in Hollywood.”

Despite its obvious age, there was nothing brittle about Waxman’s face, nothing dried up or slack. But for all the strength there, it was a grotesque face, lopsided with severed nerves in one cheek and under one eye.

“The woman I married was cover. I did what was necessary.”

Waxman seemed to accept the explanation. “You had no trouble getting to Goldoni?”

“As it happens, it was simple.”

“When it came to Dominic Goldoni, nothing was ever simple.” Waxman’s eyes opened wide for a moment. “You’d do well to remember that.”

“Why? He’s dead and it’s over.” Do Duc lounged against an overwrought Louis XV credenza that fairly dripped gilt. The extreme luxury of this hotel suite made him uneasy.

“Dead, yes. But it’s not over yet, not until I have access to the power he possessed.” Waxman reached out a hand, and as he did so, his naked wrist slid out from the cuff of his shirt. On its inner side was a tattoo of a human face, the left side skin-colored with its eye open, the right side blue with a vertical crescent where the eye should be.