The Miko - 02 (25 page)

Protorov’s gaze stripped him bare. “Then you
have
looked at these.”

“Sir, security regulations require that the O.D. bring all Passionate documents to me first for verification.”

“Passionate” was the rather ironic term Protorov had coined for highest-priority matter circulating within the Directorate. “Sneak peekies, you mean,” Protorov grumbled. He lifted a hand. “All right. I hope you do as well with the Americans if your day ever comes.”

“I am more frightened of you than of the Americans, sir.”

“Then learn to be frightened of them, Lieutenant.” His gaze lifted again. “Because they mean to destroy everything you and I hold dear.” But he was pleased with the young man; he had seen the only way out of the trap Protorov had set for him. He had even caught Protorov’s deliberate usage error.

Once the young man had left, he pored over the computer-generated satellite photos again.

But by the end of his second pass, he had been forced to admit defeat. There was no anomaly of any kind. Again. He did not know of course precisely what he was looking for, only had knowledge of its name:
Tenchi.
It was the Japanese word for “heaven and earth.”

Where are you? he thought now, staring impotently at the detailed pictures covering the graphs before him.
What
are you? And why are you so important to the Japanese?

Tenchi
had begun as just another routine report crossing his desk back in Moscow. Yet it had tantalized him, and once he had come out here and had immersed himself in the well of rumor, alleged fact, and outrageous fiction, he had found himself totally hooked. Until at this point he was obsessed with finding the answer. From what he had gleaned he was convinced
Tenchi
—even the knowledge of it—would give him the last of the leverage he needed for the coup back home.

How bitter it was to learn that Fedorin—one of the KGB’s own—was no better than all the rest of the career diplomats who had populated the Kremlin before him. Oh yes, at first he had seemed to be getting the sluggish leviathan that was Soviet Russia working again. Movement here and there could be discerned.

But in the end it had all been a sham, a self-serving political maneuver whose scope could not long conceal its sole purpose: to rid the Communist hierarchy of all those who might oppose the new premier.

But of course Protorov had held out no real hope that Fedorin—or anyone else in power for that matter—would grasp the one true key to awakening the USSR, the essential nature of the beast: and that was that Russia was not one country but an uneasy amalgam of many different Russias, all fiercely protective of their own part of the mother country. What did an Uzbek or a Kirghiz give a fig what was happening in Moscow anyway? Did a Belorussian or an Azerbaidzhani care how many missiles America had leveled at Vladivostok? And the Lithuanians, Estonians, Georgians—not to mention the non-Slavs such as the Tatars, Bashkirs, Mordvinians, Udmurts, or Komi—did they feel any differently? What was there to bind them together?

Protorov knew the answer to that one. Nothing.

The first step to putting Soviet Russia on the move lay in uniting all its divergent people. Because once that happened, the USSR would be unstoppable. No nation on earth—no coalition of nations—could stop her.

Fedorin had had a chance to get the new revolution underway. But he, like all the bureaucrats who ran the country, lacked the scope of vision necessary to make that one great leap, to cross the Rubicon into dangerous and unknown waters. Thus he had allowed the slothful giant to lapse back into somnolence.

Protorov knew only too well how long a time it could be between Soviet premiers. He was unwilling to wait his turn—or perhaps he was intelligent enough to understand that it might never come on its own. Therefore he had begun his own plans for cutting short the current premier’s term in office.

And now he believed that
Tenchi
was the wand of power he needed to persuade the cabal of militant generals and officers in the KGB to exert their influence at once.

A point of ignition had to be reached, Protorov knew. He must be the bridge between the traditionally feuding KGB and GRU. To that end he had spent more than six years cultivating a young GRU colonel. Powerful and ambitious, Yvgeny Mironenko would soon be in a position to also be a bridge between the factions.

For only by uniting these two mailed fists outside the Kremlin could Protorov be certain of the success of his coup. Without them, he was lost. And without him, Russia was lost. He lacked only the one element of power that would bring all of them into his palm.

And that one element was
Tenchi.

The intercom buzzed on his desk like an angry insect, and for a moment Protorov’s attention was deflected. He reached out one long finger. “Yes?”

“The subject is ready.”

“Good. Bring him in.” He reached out and extinguished the mauve light, plunging the room into utter darkness. There were no windows here and only one egress, its fifteen-inch steel door.

Protorov sat back in his chair and fought the urge to smoke. He compromised his restless hands by lacing his fingers. Presently he heard movement. The thick door sighed open pneumatically as three men crossed the threshold.

For just a moment the heavy light of the hallway streamed across the black rubberized flooring, then as the door swung shut, darkness swallowed the floating ribbons.

Without sight Protorov knew who had entered: the young lieutenant, the doctor, and the subject. Protorov and the doctor, who was a neuropharmacologica expert, had been at work on the subject for almost three days now. The American was a very stubborn man, Protorov had to give him that. He had not broken and, frankly, Protorov did not expect him to. He expected him to die.

In a way Protorov felt sorry for the man as he heard the semi-articulate babbling created by the multitude of sera the doctor had shot into the subject. This was not the way for a modern-day warrior to go, captured by the enemy, forcibly ejected into rapid-paced day-night continua so that weeks became compressed into hours until a state of body vertigo was induced. According to the prevalent theory, the body would do their work for them, breaking down the mind blockages through its own induced trauma.

Protorov believed none of it. These days there were ways to stop a ferret from talking when he did not want to: hypnosis, electronic implants. And if all else failed, he could self-destruct.

Sadness overwhelmed Protorov as the increasingly animated animal noises invaded his ears. This was not the way it should end for any of them. Better by far the fierce hand-to-hand struggle, the rising anima, the primal urges that came in the struggle to avoid death at all costs.

Protorov’s mind raced back to the first time he had felt the cold. “To feel the cold” was the KGB wet—meaning active in the field—directorates’ phrase for the kill. The first time for Protorov was indelibly etched into a corner of his mind. He had been a raw lieutenant then, well trained from the KGB complex outside Sevastopol. He thought he was a crackerjack, a world-beater. He had not reckoned on the field, which cut all men down to size.

They had sent him to Siberia. A top-secret series of experiments attempting to tap the perpetual gale-force winds in the north had been infiltrated by the Americans.

In Verkhoyansk, the coldest place in the world, he had ferreted out the infiltrator, made him bolt from his hole, and one after the other they had raced across the frozen tundra onto the ice fields. Two utter madmen.

Only the cold could win in Verkhoyansk. Man was nothing, a tiny mote in nature’s vast well of snow and ice. The snow. The snow. Always and forever the snow. It was blinding, chilling, numbing. It was death.

But all Protorov could think of was his first assignment. Oh, but he did not understand the meaning. Not at all. Singlemindedly he pursued his quarry, seeking to feel the cold.

Together they tumbled to the ice, skidding and sliding, froths of loose snow fountaining upward as they collided. Stupidly Protorov had decided on a gun with a silencer. But long since the elements, laughing, had frozen all the carefully oiled working parts. Similarly, his knife would not unfold. There was nothing left but his hands.

For almost half an hour they grappled indecisively in the ice and snow. The bulky clothes made hand-to-hand combat clumsy and difficult. Meanwhile the frost was sapping their energies and, later, Protorov would come to understand that it was only his stamina that had allowed him to prevail. He had not been smarter or stronger or quicker, all the things he had been taught to believe he was. Those were lies. He had just outlasted the American.

What little satisfaction he had found in grinding the dark, foreign head into the blood-pink snow while the breath slowed and, at last, stilled, stemmed from the knowledge that he, Protorov, was still alive, chest heaving, mouth dry, pulse thundering, and the bile rushing upward into his throat, bitter and searingly acidic.

All at once his extremities began to shake uncontrollably and all warmth left him. He stared down at the humped thing he straddled and thought, wonderingly, This was once a human being. An enemy of the State, they had told him. Yes, he reiterated, an enemy. An enemy.

“…time that’s left.”

With a start that no one could see, Protorov came out of his memories. “What’s that?” His voice was sharp, making certain the doctor understood that it was his fault Protorov had not heard what he had said.

“We’ve used up all the time that’s left, Comrade.”

“Do we have anything?” Protorov wanted to know. “Anything at all?”

“The tape machines have every word,” the doctor said and Protorov thought, I have your number, Comrade.

“There is one positive element.”

Protorov turned his attention to the young lieutenant, seeing something of himself in the younger man.

“We now know that the Americans are no closer to
Tenchi
than we are. In fact, I would venture a guess that we have more penetration at this moment.”

Protorov considered this. The lieutenant was, of course, correct. But Protorov also knew that there was a second positive element to this, and that was the subject himself. Or, more accurately, who the subject belonged to.

“All right,” Protorov said in his dismissive tone, “wrap up the corpse and deliver him back to his kennel on Honshu. I want the Americans made aware of their error immediately.”

When he was again alone in the odd windowless room, he turned on the powerful fans to rid the space of the cloying after-scents of drugs and death. Then he lit up.

Switching on his lamp, he once more pored over the readouts from Sakhov IV. He was closer to
Tenchi
now than he ever had been. He could feel it. His eyes roved the folded sheets. Was it already here? Why couldn’t he see it then?

With a deep growl of disgust, he swept the useless sheaf into the hopper beside his desk and turned the shredder to autofeed. The deep whine of scissoring steel teeth filled the air.

Thoughts of feeling the cold and the grisly package that would soon be delivered to the enemy’s doorstep led to his concern over Sakhov IV. Even with all its ultrasophisticated equipment, he had found it to be a dismal failure. But then again, it was only a machine; it could only do what men had programmed it to do. Nothing more. Or perhaps mere had been a malfunction somewhere within the miles of multimillion-dollar circuitry.

No matter. Protorov had his own human satellite, and it was still functioning perfectly.

“Now,” Akutagawa-san said from out of the mist, from out of Nicholas’ memory, “we will begin.”

“But how,” Nicholas said. “I can see nothing.”

“Did you never in Kansatsu’s
ryu
train with the blindfold?”

“Of course. But that was within the boundaries of the
dōjō.
The space was precise and uncluttered with trees, stones, and underbrush the configurations of which I am unfamiliar with.”

“This vapor,” Akutagawa-san continued as if Nicholas had not spoken, “is like the darkness but far more difficult to negotiate. In the darkness you may be guided by albescence, a sliver of moon, the patch of a household lantern, even the glitter of the stars. But here there is nothing but the mist.”

“I cannot even see you.”

“But you can hear me.”

“Yes. Quite well. You sound as if you are in my left ear but I shall discount the peculiar acoustics.”

“Never discount acoustics,” Akutagawa-san said. “Rather strive to understand them so that they will become another weapon in your arsenal.”

Nicholas said nothing, but tried to concentrate on gaining his bearings in the valley in Yoshino. Finally he decided that were it not for the
jonin
’s comforting presence he would be totally lost.

“You have heard, I imagine, that much of the
Kuji-kiri
derives its power from
jahō,
magic. Tell me, Nicholas, do you believe in ‘magic’?”

“I believe in what is,
sensei
, and discount what is not.”

For a time there was silence. “That is a very wise answer from such a young man. Now I want you to listen to me closely. There is, in all people, a layer—a middle layer of being—that lies between the conscious and the subconscious. It is a land where the imagination reigns. It is where daydreams originate, where quick, overblown fears are created. It is where day-to-day anxiety is manufactured.

“It is not magic, nor is it an extrasensory layer. Rather, its origins are quite primitive. Our early ancestors required the active assistance of this layer to heighten their perceptions in order for them to survive: against wild animals, marauding bands of other primitive men who sought their women or the shelter of their home caves.

“Oh, yes, caves. That is how far back in time I speak of now. But with the coming of so-called civilization this middle layer’s reason for existence slowly atrophied. With houses and apartments locked and bolted, with man’s utter dominance over all other life forms on the planet, what use was this layer?

“And yet it refused to die out. Instead it became the creator of small fears: anxieties at work, fear of dismissal, fear of rejection in love, petty jealousies regarding other workers, all blown up out of proportion, meant to keep the organism alert and functioning at peak efficiency for its survival. And yet survival is no longer the issue from day to day. Rather it is betterment. And so the supposed sharpness turns to anxiety, the modern ailment.