The Miko - 02 (24 page)

Nicholas might have stopped breathing.
Kuji-kiri
was the discipline with which Saigō had defeated him in Kumamoto the year before, defiling him and taking Yukio away from him, then disappearing with her as if the two of them had never existed.

His lips were dry and he had to try twice before he could articulate it successfully. “Yes.” It was a harsh sibilant whisper. “I have…heard of it.”

Akutagawa-san nodded. He was careful not to look directly at Nicholas and thus be exposed to the inner struggle of emotions, causing his student loss of face.

“Fukashigi-san suspected as much. He believes you may need this, er, unorthodox training in order to survive. And survival is what is taught here at the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu.
”

Akutagawa-san’s head turned, hawklike, and his obsidian eyes struck Nicholas with the force of a physical contact. It was not a blow as such, but the electricity of the force behind it caused all of Nicholas’ muscles to tense, the reflex of a more primitive and physically aware creature.

Oddly, his mind was at peace, perfectly clear for the first time since he had returned from his journey across the Straits of Shimonoseki, his river Styx, to seek out Saigō in the underworld of
Kan-aku na ninjutsu.

Akutagawa-san smiled slightly. “There are many Chinese origins here. But you know the Japanese. Everything must be altered, refined to fit their own cultured sensibilities.” This would be the only time that the
sennin
would ever speak this way to Nicholas or to anyone, a sign that he recognized their kinship: their mixed heritage.

“You now know the dangers, the risks. Fukashigi-san was quite adamant about giving you these caveats.”

“And you were not,” Nicholas said, responding to an ephemeral shading in the
sennin
’s tone.

“Do not think that I am not careful. Fukashigi-san and I think alike in many aspects. However, I did not believe you required these warnings.”

“You were correct.” Nicholas took a deep breath. “I want you to teach me,
sensei.
I am not frightened of the
Kuji-kiri.
”

“No,” Akutagawa-san said almost sadly, “but in time you will learn to be.” He reached out and took Nicholas’ hand. “Now come.” His voice altered. “Let darkness and death be your middle names forevermore.”

They went off the hillside. Soon the mist had swallowed them completely.

The monsters had needed designations. They were never with Alix Logan at the same time but rather spelled each other in twelve-hour shifts. The beefy one was on duty during the days and Bristol thought of him as Red. The other one, the thin, wiry, nocturnal monster with the long neck and beak of a nose, he dubbed Blue.

The first question he had asked himself when he had come upon them was: had they been in the car?

It had been many months since that dark night filled with rain and an evil wind that bent the high, thin palms of Key West almost to the ground. He had been doing forty-five on the highway when they came up on him very fast with their lights out.

He felt the fierce jolt forward, said, “What the hell!” to no one in particular and felt grateful for his seatbelt. They were close, and knowing that instinctively his eyes would move to his rear-view mirror after the ram, they turned on their brights.

In that moment of utter dazzle, they moved in for the kill. He knew in that flash just how clever they were, knew also from his years of experience that there would not be time to regain control of the situation: he was not James Bond and this was no movie. So he did the only thing he could. He concentrated on his own survival.

In the brief instant before they struck again, he unlocked the driver’s side door and opened it a crack. He unsnapped his seatbelt. He was no longer concerned with what they would do or how they would do it, he only knew that if he did not center all his concern on himself now, they would surely kill him.

When the second ram came, it was at just the right angle. They had hesitated long enough so that both cars were racing around a bend to the right. Beyond the low fence on the left, the land shot down in a sheer drop of perhaps seventy-five feet. The ground was not particularly hard. In fact, the recent rains had made a rather springy mat of it but there was very little purchase. It was a dangerous stretch, particularly in this storm, and every ten feet or so along the side of the road large signs dotted with ruby red reflector buttons flew by.

It was as if an enormous creature had taken a bite out of the car. The back end slewed right around and the wheel flew out of his hands. He let it go, working on keeping his equilibrium. Centrifugal force and the colliding momentums of the vehicles were working against him, and the darkness of the night only added to the sense of intense disorientation.

His hand flew to the partially open door and he had to will himself to stay put through the horrendous sounds of grinding and squealing metal, the frightening, out-of-control movement, and the sure knowledge that he was heading over the edge and down.

If he left the car before it went over, there’d be no point. The other car’s headlights would pick him up and they’d run him over while he was helpless.

But now the front end of the car had slammed into the low railing, the shriek of more metal tearing, flinging itself upward, bursting apart, and he lurched forward, having to brace the heels of his hands against the padded dash, remembering to flex his elbows slightly to help cushion the force so that he wouldn’t break his arms in half.

Then the nose of the car was thrusting upward, the seat springs rocking crazily. Rain sleeted in the partially open window drenching him, blinding him, and for that instant he felt a rising panic, afraid that they were going to succeed after all.

The car bucked forward as if kicked from behind, the front end lowering, the wheels spinning for purchase and finding none. He had long ago taken his foot off both the gas and the brake pedals. He left the car in gear, though it might have been better to throw it into neutral. He did not want to leave any traces of how he was going about saving himself, to feed to the investigators who would surely come and do their thorough job if the sea didn’t claim his coffin.

He wanted to be dead.

Now he began to tumble, leaving behind the short verge beyond the slick road. He heard the tearing of clods of earth above the noise of the engine and the car’s back wheels skidded sickeningly, slewing him again so that his shoulder slammed against the door post and he sucked in his breath. Another inch or so forward and he would have tumbled out the unlocked door on his head. All the way down, a broken neck and sightless eyes staring impotently up at the white, peering faces of his murderers.

None of that for him. He held on, and now there was only an eerie kind of silence, rushing in the aftermath of all the frenzy and sound. Wind whistled through the partially opened window and then the car took its first unsteady bump on the side of the sheer cliff. One side hit heavier than the other, and that started the oscillation. Soon, he knew, it would get so great—on the fourth or fifth landing perhaps—that the vehicle would flip over and then he would have no chance at all.

He could see nothing that would help him. He was in the tunnel of the night, a steel coffin, and he knew he must rely totally on sensation, the feeling in his stomach, his hands, his legs, his heart.

It was now or never.

He drew his legs up so that he was kneeling on the seat, so that there was no possibility that his feet would get caught in the well. Quickly now he moved onto his back, feet first toward the swinging door.

Out he went. Watched dizzily, detachedly, the shock and pain turning him into an unconcerned spectator, as the tumbling car hit the churning water hood first and sank into the deep without a trace.

Bristol did not think much about that night now except to speculate on who it was who’d tried to kill him. At first he was certain that it had been Frank, Raphael Tomkin’s man. But that was before he had come upon the monsters. Now he was not so sure.

He had come down to Key West to find Alix Logan. Now that he had found that she was already covered, he wondered, Who were they, these monsters who never let her out of their sight? Were they working for Tomkin? Were they all part of the cover-up of Tomkin’s murder of Angela Didion? There was no way Bristol could know that until he spoke to Alix Logan. Back in New York, Matty the Mouth had given him her name. Bristol had known there had been a witness to the murder and if he was going to nail Tomkin, he would have to find her. The contact had given him the name and the place for an unconscionably large amount of money. But it had been worth it. Now Bristol knew he was very close, and he had told Matty the Mouth to get out of town for a while. He owed the man that much.

Down in Key West, after his supposed death, after he had recovered from the fractured arm, he had set himself up on watch. He had plenty of idle time when he had nothing to do but wait. Movement or stillness. Dark and light. They were all that existed for him. And Alix Logan.

Staring at her often brought the thought of Gelda to mind but that was, of course, pointless. He could not contact her in any way. He must remain dead in order to stay buried near Alix Logan, undetected and unmolested. It was a difficult enough task to shadow someone; it was all but impossible to do it when someone was trying to ice you.

Bristol. How may times during those long, cramped hours of waiting had he worked the name around on his tongue. His real name had faded out, an image in an old and bleached photo album that was long ago and far away.

He had become “Tex” Bristol and that was how he thought of himself now, just as everyone around him who knew him did. There was only one person in the world who knew he had not died in the flaming car crash that night and she would never tell. He had had just enough money left to get him up to San Antonio. He had known Marie a long time ago in New York. They had been on opposite sides of the law then. Now, he was not so sure of where either of them stood.

But she was smart and tough and she knew everyone. She had provided him with medical service and the paraphernalia of his new identity: birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, even a passport, slightly worn, franked several times for Europe and Asia. He thought that a nice touch even though he didn’t think he’d need it. He’d taken the passport anyway, along with thirty thousand in cash.

Marie had asked no questions and when he had offered no explanations she went on to other matters. She even seemed pleased to see him. Back in New York they had worked each other to a Mexican standoff; it had been the first time for each of them and they had learned from it. You could even say they liked each other, after a fashion.

When he left, Bristol knew that he owed her more than he could ever repay.

“Sir?”

The penetrating ebon eyes lifted up into the pale mauve light, and shadows skittered about the bare walls of the room like kittens chasing each other.

“What is it?” The voice was more than brusque; it contained within its guttural growl a definite tinge of disdain that caused the young lieutenant who had come into the room to feel somehow diminished, as if he were in the presence of a being more than human.

It was a calculated tone but no less effective for that. Artifice, thought the man now as he accepted the young lieutenant’s presence, nodding him forward, ruled the world. A careful daily grooming of his voice kept things running smoothly at the safe house.

It was his experience that one could many times give the merest outline of fear and one’s adversary—whether it be this young lieutenant eager for promotion or one of the old guard back home—supplied all the rest. It left one free to pursue more pressing matters.

“The latest printouts from Sakhov IV, sir,” the young uniformed lieutenant said, handing over a sheaf of graph paper.

“And how many passes have we here, Lieutenant?” Viktor Protorov, head of the Ninth Directorate of the KGB, said.

“Just over a half dozen, sir.”

“I see.” Protorov’s gaze lowered to the sheaf. He could feel the slight relaxing of the man in front of him. “And what, if anything, does this mass hold for me, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Oh, come now.” Protorov looked up. He tapped the sheet with a rather long nail. “A new batch of highly classified printouts from Sakhov IV, what our government publicly calls a ‘digital imaging reconnaissance satellite,’ centering on that section of the Pacific Ocean between the Kuriles and where we are in the north of Hokkaido, an area we have been concentrating on for—how many months now?—”

“Seven since we moved from the aerodrome in Iturup.”

“—comes in. If you haven’t taken a good, hard look at these, Lieutenant, you’re either stupid or incompetent.” Protorov leaned back in his chair. “Tell me, are you either of these?”

For a moment the young man said nothing; he had begun to sweat beneath his superior’s intense gaze and questioning. “You put me in a most untenable position, sir. If I say yes, then my career in the Directorate is finished. If I say no, then it is obvious that I have deliberately lied to my superior.”

“Well, Lieutenant, if the day ever comes when you are captured by the Capitalist enemy, then you can be quite certain that they, too, will put you in an untenuous position.”

They had been conversing in English. “Excuse me, sir,” the young lieutenant said, “but that’s ‘untenable,’ not ‘untenuous.’”

“Answer the question,” Protorov said, beginning to sift through the visual data provided by Sakhov IV’s immensely powerful infrared video equipment. An involuntary chill went through him at the thought that the Americans might have such a potent weapon. He was only slightly cheered by the knowledge that his country’s land-based antisatellite lasers could—and had in recent days past—bring down the threat.

He got to the third sheet. “Time’s running out. It’s a sure bet the Americans won’t give you this long.”

“You won’t find what we’ve been looking for in those,” the lieutenant said at last, as if with one long breath all the air had gone out of his lungs.