The Kaisho (70 page)

But I will not go unarmed,
he had told Celeste just before they had made their way to Montmartre.
You will be my secret weapon.

She had looked at him quizzically, then, understanding dawning on her, with an expression of mounting dread.

No,
she had said,
you can’t mean it. My mind is untrained
—for the love of God, I am afraid of what is inside me!

And Nicholas, opening his
tanjian
eye, enfolded her in his psyche, at once calming her and showing her the Way—the path of Akshara by which she could link herself physically with him and maintain that contact.

But won’t the Messulethe feel this connection?

No,
he said.
I am providing you with the pathway of Akshara. Everything comes from me, and that is all he will be aware of
—Akshara and my efforts to stop him. You with your untrained mind will become lost in the psychic mask of my defense.

The one danger, which he did not bother to tell her, was if for some reason she should lose the psychic link he was now establishing. He did not know whether she would have the discipline to reestablish it. In order to do that, she would have to confront her fear of herself, would have to sink into that fear, go through it, and coming out the other side, see in her mind how to find his psyche again.

This, then, was the tolling in his mind, the one link to sanity in the maelstrom of the Messulethe’s snare.

Celeste.

She was here, somewhere in the mad universe of magic and robotics, where faces were being stripped and reapplied like wrapping paper over raw flesh.

He stirred once more, exhausting himself in reassurance of the link between them, the psychic thread that might pull him through this.

And so was unprepared for the blast of psychic energy that plastered him back into utter paralysis. He sat, slack-jawed, a fly in amber, caged and figuratively beaten and bloodied beyond recognition, for he had Do Duc’s face, and his inquisitor, bending over him, placed his thumbs over his eyelids, gently at first, then more firmly as the chanting excited the membrane at
kokoro,
as the incantations made physical that which was moments before only a part of the transparent metaphysical world that enwrapped the reality that most men knew.

Pressing hard now on Nicholas’s eyeballs, Do Duc opened another door in the Six-Sided Gateway at
kokoro.
It was a gate shut for long centuries, forbidden even to those who came after the Messulethe and had learned their dark and tragic secrets. It was the Sixth Gate, the only one sealed by spells and incantations that even Zarathustra would not attempt to sunder.

But even Zarathustra had not chosen as his familiar the white magpie, the messenger of the gods, the harbinger of their eventual doom. And it was the white magpie upon whom Do Duc now called, incanting the words that he had squeezed from Ao’s mind, after the Nung shaman had foolishly refused to render them to him. What were the warnings of an old man, turned into a fearful woman by age, compared to the power he would unlock at the white magpie’s calling?

And so the forbidden Sixth Gate was opened, and Do Duc was bathed in the baleful radiance and fearful asymmetry that lay beyond it. He took one step toward it and heard the cawing cry of the white magpie as clearly as if he were back in the mountain wilderness of his home among the Nungs.

He could not make out what was before him until the white magpie, clutching his shoulder with powerful talons, spoke in his ear. Then he understood.

He saw the asymmetry for what it was—yet another reality that stretched out beyond the metaphysical cocoon within which the physical world resided.

And now, reaching out for it, he used it, plunging it like a sword from heaven, into his victim’s mind.

Nicholas, pinned by the sudden blast of psychic energy, intuited the outcome. He had been wrong. The switch of faces had not been merely for shock effect. The Messulethe had a far more terrifying motive in mind.

The pressure on his eyes became so intense that his pain receptors overloaded, shut down, and his whole face went numb. And then he was pierced by an awful radiance and he knew what was about to happen.

It wasn’t merely his face the Messulethe wanted—it was his very essence, drawn out of him by this connection, both physical and metaphysical, that was entering him now. And he would be gone, in a puff of smoke, leaving only a dead husk that would appear to anyone who found it to be the Messulethe himself.

Now, as the radiance streamed in through the Messulethe’s thumbs pressed hard against his eyes, he summoned his last ounce of energy and, opening his
tanjian
eye, began to reel in the shining thread, the lifeline Celeste was providing, the reserve of psychic energy he would need.

But then, in horror and despair, he stopped.

The tolling, the pure green translucent light, had vanished.

“Final instructions.”

“This man—Robert,” Lillehammer said. “You get him and bring him to me.”

“From Japan?” Croaker said. “What about the formalities?”

“There
are
no formalities when it comes to my people.”

The place stunk of stale cigarette smoke and fear, just like an interrogation room. But this was a small cubicle, one of the airline’s storage rooms at Washington National Airport, that Lillehammer had commandeered.

“So I bring him back.” Croaker said it again so there would be no mistake.

“Right.” Lillehammer squinted. “The messenger get you everything you need?”

“IDs, passports, currency in yen and dollars, tickets, and prepaid rooms at a Tokyo hotel. Everything.”

“What about armament?”

Always the soldier, Croaker thought. “I’ll take care of that myself,” he said, raising his titanium and polycarbonate hand, clicking the needlelike nails together.

Lillehammer nodded. “That’s it then.”

“I guess so.” Croaker turned way, then swung back as if drawn by an afterthought. “Just one thing. Why didn’t you tell me you knew who murdered Dominic Goldoni?”

Lillehammer, ever the cool customer, did not miss a beat. “Who have you been talking to?” he said quietly.

The atmosphere in the cubicle was really quite vile. Maybe the ventilation wasn’t working, Croaker thought.

“It doesn’t matter.” He put his face close to Lillehammer’s. “Did you think I was toothless? That I’d let all my contacts drift away?”

“None of this concerns you. I don’t know what’s got under your skin.”

Croaker took a step closer to the other man and pointed. “Tell me, was Do Duc the one who did that to you? Carve your face into a mask? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“That’s about enough of that,” Lillehammer said flatly. “Just shut up and do your job. Don’t fuck with me.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Then you’re stupid.”

“Not stupid. Just prepared.” Croaker gave Lillehammer a fierce grin. “You ever hear of walking backwards? No? We did it all the time in the NYPD, had to, otherwise you were liable to find a knife sticking out of your back. Not from the perps you were running down or you’d put away in times past, but from Internal Affairs, an asshole precinct captain, an overeager looie out to suck his way up the ladder, DAs with a political ax to grind, anyone and everyone who you worked with or for. Sure, we looked out for our own. But we also fucked our own six ways from Sunday. And let me tell you something, you never forget all the
very
nasty ways of keeping that knife from being stuck in your back.”

Lillehammer held up his hands. “Let’s back away from the precipice, shall we?” He looked away. “Ah, shit!” And swung his head back. “Okay, look, I need you to find this bastard for me. I didn’t lie to you about that. I
do
know him—from Nam. He was one of three people who put me into a cage, worked on me, yeah, did
this.”
He brushed his lips with his forefinger.

“One of the bastards was a crazy shit of a guy named Michael Leonforte. He’d gone native in Laos. I was sent out by my unit to get him back, but I was captured. Leonforte was commanding a group of Nungs—Chinese hill tribesmen. Then he recruited two more—a wacko named Rock and his buddy Do Duc.”

Lillehammer, brimming with the manic energy of memory, began to pace back and forth. “Rock worked on me while the others looked on, asked me questions I wouldn’t answer.” His eyes slid away from Croaker’s. “You know the drill.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, there was no cavalry that day. No one to save me. They carved me nicely and neatly, then wrapped me up and delivered me back to my people as a warning. A fucking warning.” He blew his breath out hard.

“That was a long time ago, but I never forgot.” He stamped his feet as if he were cold.

“Then Dominic gets whacked and I take one look at the mess and I know who did it. This bastard Do Duc, who’d been hired by Michael Leonforte’s brother, Caesare, Goldoni’s rival.”

“What’s really behind the vendetta between the Goldonis and the Leonfortes?”

“If I knew that, I’d be inside the mob.
Omert
à
,
get me? Anyway, Do Duc was an obvious choice. His allegiance to the Leonfortes goes all the way back to Nam.”

Lillehammer stopped pacing to face Croaker. “That fucking blue crescent Do Duc carved into the Morris girl was tattooed on all of Leonforte’s Nungs. Now I have number two on the line but not yet in my sights. For that I need you, because I know that Do Duc won’t let me get within a mile of him. He’d smell me as sure as we’re both standing here. He’s half-animal.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this from the beginning?”

“That it was personal? Would you have signed on?”

“I may be your Ishmael, but Do Duc’s your white whale.” Croaker showed his teeth. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“You see? I couldn’t take that chance.”

Croaker waited a moment. “That’s all of it?”

“The whole bloody thing.” Lillehammer glanced at his watch, then pulled open the cubicle door. “Now you’ll have to do some running in order to make your flight.”

The radiance came down like a veil from heaven. It was like watching yourself being eaten alive. Every muscle in Nicholas’s body was contracted with pain and fear. The mask from the other side of time was settling over him. In a moment, it would begin to slice up his essence like meat upon a butcher’s bloody table.

Frantically, he searched for Celeste—the shining thread by which he might pull himself loose from the settling of death, like radioactive rain, penetrating skin, flesh, bone, dissolving him from the inside out.

Where was she? What had happened? The psychic link had been broken and his one fear had come to pass: she was now unable to reestablish the link with him. Without the edge she provided, he knew he was finished.

The radiance, sinking deeper into him, provided an asymmetrical pulsation that upset the natural rhythms of his body. And with it, as if written in his own secretions, flaming runes of an incomprehensible language. The hideous cadence grew stronger, and as it did, his own diminished. In a moment, no thought would be left him, no essence, no life.

Then the pressure came off.

He felt it lift from his eye sockets, and immediately the radiance paled, the flow of incomprehensible language blurred. And in that moment, his
tanjian
eye snapped open. Freed from the paralysis that had gripped it, it shone straight through to
kokoro,
beating upon the membrane, summoning the energy that was thought and would now be action.

Nicholas opened his bleary eyes, saw the face that was his stretched in a grimace. The body of the Messulethe was arched backward, his hands at his neck. He was jammed back against the bars of the cage, and as Nicholas began to move, he saw the glint of the stainless-steel wire wound tightly around his neck, digging deep into the flesh of his throat.

He moved off his chair like a dead man reanimated, his arms and legs working in quick, spastic motions, his muscles jumping as he strove to reestablish brain-muscle coordination. The synapses of his brain were still on fire, but the rest of his body was free of pain. The physical connection with the Messulethe had been broken.

The man with his face gave out with a cry, his hands leaving the makeshift garrote, moving in a blur through the bars, grasping hair and flesh.

Celeste screamed.

Celeste!

And in an instant he saw what had happened. Sensing what was about to take place, she had taken the initiative, and the physical act of going after the Messulethe had caused her untrained mind to break the psychic connection.

The Messulethe had her head in his hands, and he slammed her forehead into the steel bars of the cage. Celeste staggered backward, her grip on the shining garrote easing, and the Messulethe pulled free. He unwound the bloody thing from his neck, threw it aside.

Celeste was on the floor just outside the cage. Was she conscious or...?

Nicholas felt as if he were wading through water. His thoughts came so slowly, an agonizing jet of pain every time he tried to string one thought after another.

A wind was rising around him, and the heat of a blazing furnace. He was thrown backward, head over heels, smashing into the chair on which he had been sitting, breaking it apart. The side of his head hit the bars of the far side of the cage, momentarily stunning him.

Nothing was working.

And here came the man with his face.

Then the tolling began, deep inside him, and the green pellucid light began to spread over him.

He opened his
tanjian
eye.

He connected with
kokoro
and began the basic litany of Akshara taught to him by Kansatsu, his Tau-tau
sensei,
his implacable enemy.

But the heat was rising again, the scent of white-hot cinders in his nostrils, his hair, crawling along his skin. The tolling, the translucent light, his connection to Celeste, his secret weapon, withering beneath the assault of the Messulethe.