The Miko - 02 (41 page)

“Mr. Linnear,” C. Gordon Minck said forty-five minutes later in a clear, crisp voice, “it’s good of you to come on such short notice. I know that you must have a great deal on your mind at the moment.”

Nicholas had been taken into a building along F Street, not far from the Virginia Avenue underpass. A private elevator had taken them up to a four-story-high arboretum. Nicholas had successfully hidden his surprise. A cubistic whitewashed brick structure crouched in the center of this unnatural indoor forest. Tanya had taken him inside with a complete absence of self-consciousness for this stagy and, to Nicholas’ way of thinking, needlessly indulgent construct.

“Tomkin’s will was quite specific on the matter.”

“Nevertheless, I’m delighted to see you.”

Nicholas smiled and the two men shook hands.

They went through the building, past numerous rooms, all with tile or wood floors. There were no carpets at all, and Nicholas was aware of the sounds they made when they moved.

“I’ve never heard of the Department of International Export Tariffs,” he said. “What do you do here?”

Minck laughed. “I’d be surprised if you
had
heard of us.” He shrugged. “We’re a bureaucratic backwater that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has somehow seen fit to keep going.” He gave Nicholas a genuine smile. “We issue overseas licenses and, in some isolated instances, revoke them.”

Nicholas realized that Minck had responded to his queries without actually answering them.

He was led out onto a glassed-in patio. Tanya was already there, pouring freshly squeezed orange juice into crystal stemware. Minck waved Nicholas into one of the comfortable-looking rattan chairs covered in Haitian batik. Potted palms, deep green sword plants, and dwarf palms were scattered about.

“This is an odd environment for a government bureau,” Nicholas said.

Minck lifted an arm. “Oh, this is nothing but a set. We get a lot of foreign dignitaries in here.” He smiled. “We like to make them feel at home.”

“Is that so?” Nicholas stood up. He watched Tanya and Minck as he moved about the patio. “It’s almost midnight, yet this building is as busy as if it were ten in the morning. I think if this department were what you claimed it was you’d be sitting behind a metal desk in a cubicle filled with fluorescent lighting. I think at this time of the night you’d be tucked safely into your bed. I’d like to know who you two are, where I really am, and what it is I’m doing here.”

Minck nodded. “All understandable concerns, Nicholas. May I call you Nicholas, by the way? Good.”

A phone rang, the sound muffled through the walls, and Tanya excused herself.

“Please sit down.” Minck unbuttoned his seersucker jacket. “This department—it goes by many names; the Department of International Export Tariffs is just one of them—costs about as much as an AWAC to build and maintain. That’s considerably less than the cost of a B-l bomber. Still, it took me six months of memo wars and threats to get this set built.” He smiled again. “Bureaucratic minds cannot conceive of such a necessity as this, but I can and do. This is the first sight a Russian defector sees after the wrapping comes off.”

“Spies?” Nicholas said, slightly incredulously. “Raphael Tomkin was involved with spies? I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?” Minck shrugged. “He was a patriot. And he was a close friend of my father’s.” He poured more juice for them both. “Let me explain. My father was one of the founders of the OSS. Tomkin was an explosives expert—learned his trade in the Marines, where the two of them met. He could take the wing off a finch without ruffling a feather on its breast.

“My father used him on several rather delicate, high-risk forays toward the end of the European campaign. Things were a bit desperate by then; a lot of last-ditch Nazi plots to contend with, along with clandestine work keeping the Russians in line. Anyway, this one mission was a real balls-up. From what I have been able to gather it was Tomkin’s fault, although my father would never say a bad word against him. The man simply lost his nerve and broke under the pressure. Three of the unit were inadvertently blown up when the packet detonated prematurely.”

Minck drained his glass. “Your ex-boss was a highly honorable man. I guess he blamed himself and, though my father erased him from the field roster, he remained tied to the, er, organization. My father did not want his friend shamed for what he considered a human error and Tomkin, I suppose, did not want to make the break.”

“So you inherited him.”

“So to speak.” Minck cleared his throat. “I’m not callous. In this regard, knowing the circumstances, I gave Tomkin the choice after my father died.”

There was a question that needed voicing before they went any further. “Tell me,” Nicholas said carefully, “was Tomkin Industries built with OSS money?”

“Good God, no.” Minck seemed genuinely shocked. “We have no stake in the corporation whatsoever. You can set your mind at ease on that score.”

Nicholas nodded and rose again. He went to the window-door, looked out. Because he was becoming increasingly uneasy about why Tomkin had insisted he come here, he was reluctant to pursue a direct course.

“What happens when they see this place?” he said. “The Russians, I mean.”

“They’re disoriented,” Minck replied. “You’d be surprised at how much current Western fiction they manage to read. Most of them expect to be taken to a colonial mansion somewhere out in the wilds of Virginia.” He laughed. “They seem disappointed when they’re not interviewed by Alec Guinness or what they perceive as his American equivalent.”

Minck stood up. So much for the easy part, he thought.

“The reason you’re here now,” he said, “has to do with your merger with Sato Petrochemicals.”

“Oh?” Nicholas turned to face him. “In what way?”

“It’s a matter,” Minck said, “of national security.”

Akiko had not slept since Nicholas had departed. There was a rhythm to her life, to all her actions, a rhythm that Kyōki had taught her to search for and to use, one that increased her power a thousandfold.

What was she to do now that Nicholas had returned to America? There were three possibilities but only one option because the first, to break off her plan entirely, was unthinkable, and because the second, to follow him to America, would be to put herself at the same disadvantage that Saigō had labored under.

She rolled over on the single
futon.
There were no intricately patterned coverlets here, no luxurious appointments. She might have been in a barracks in the seventeenth century save that there was no one else in the small room. Contrary to what she had told Sato, she had not gone to visit her aunt. That would have been an impossibility; she had no living relative.

Slowly she rose and, stretching, began her morning exercise ritual. Forty minutes later, after toweling off the running sweat, taking a quick cold shower to close the pores of her skin, she returned to her cubicle and commenced the slow, studied ritual of the tea ceremony.

This she did in solitary reflection each morning no matter where she was. It remained in her memory the only link with her mother; the only physical thing the woman had taught her. Akiko’s mother had been a
chano-yu sensei.

There was an almost religious fervor to the tiny, practiced movements. The element of perfection before the Void brought the concept of Zen concentration to the art of preparing tea as it did to many daily Japanese preparations, transforming them, lifting them from the mundane onto the plane of art, involving the spirit as well as the mind and the hand.

With the pale green tea a froth in the small handleless cup, Akiko arose and slid open the
fusuma.
Beyond the wide veranda was the reflection garden, its pure white pebbles dazzling in all light, its three black igneous rocks set in harmonious confluence along the perimeter.

And just to the right of center rose the branched trunk of the giant cedar. As Akiko slowly sipped her stingingly bitter tea, she allowed her eyes to pass over the fluted configurations of light and dark, shadow and sunlight dappling the textured needles. She was so long at it that when at last she returned to her starting point, the shapes had changed subtly with the angle of the sun.

Thus lost in the Void, her mind heard again the plangent double notes of the bamboo flute, elongated and sorrowful. This was the only music she heard—save for the birdsongs which accompanied the changing of the seasons—for all the long years of her stay with Kyōki.

The bittersweet song began at noontime just as she was serving Kyōki his tea, abasing herself before him, kowtowing in the ancient Chinese tradition on which he insisted. She could feel anew the chill of the stone flooring against her slightly parted lips—there were no
tatami
in the ancient castle.

Often, in the afternoon, between studies, she would peer through the heavy latticework of greenery beyond the slit windows carved into the thick stone walls on the off chance that she would catch a glimpse of the player. He was a
komuso,
a follower of the Fuke sect of Buddhism. He would have a straw basket upturned over his head, garbed in a simple striped robe, wooden
geta
on his feet. A musician of such consummate skill that often she would find herself weeping for no discernable reason other than the tender cruelty of the notes, dropping one by one through the atmosphere like dissolving snowflakes.

Clever girl that she was, she never allowed Kyōki to see her tears. Had he suspected her of weeping he would surely have punished her. That was Kyōki’s way: the battle commander.

High on the castle’s ramparts flapped the
sashimono
—the ancient battle standard—that he had fashioned. As tradition dictated it was dominated by the commander’s seal, in this case a depiction of a stylized
mempo
—a battle mask of hinged steel. They came in many styles and shapes. Kyōki’s was the most feared, the
akuryo
: an evil demon’s visage on a black field.

During the day, Kyōki always positioned Akiko so that the
sashimono
was in her line of vision. She was never free from it, for at night she could hear the heavy snap of the cloth in the wind even in her sleep.

And terror rode on her back for so long that she secretly suspected that Kyōki had stolen into her chamber while she slumbered, sectioned out her heart, and, with the dust of some arcane spell, had replaced it with an organ of crystal into which he could peer whenever it pleased him.

Akiko’s eyes snapped open and she looked downward at the cup she held tightly in both hands. Tears had stirred the dregs of the leaves, whorling them into new patterns.

She blinked heavily and exhaled a long stream of carbon dioxide she had been unconsciously holding in her lungs. Beyond the opened
fusuma,
beyond the pebble garden where the spreading pine swayed in a gathering wind, she could see the gray wall past which lay the lushly wooded slopes and mist-filled valleys of Yoshino.

Alix was moving away from him. Her green eyes were opened wide so that he could see the whites all around. Her hands were up in front of her in a defensive gesture, and when the backs of her legs hit the gunwale she was so startled he thought she was going to tumble over backward into the ocean.

He made a lunge toward her and she screamed, twisting away from him, slipping on the deck in the process, skinning her knee.

“Get away from me!” she cried. There was a tinge of hysteria in her voice. “Who in the name of Christ are you?”

“I already told you.” There was a weariness to his voice he did not bother to hide. “Lewis Croaker, NYPD.” He sat on the opposite gunwale, his stomach quietening.

“You threw up all over my boat.” And then as if it were an afterthought, “You killed a man.”

He looked at her as if she were crazy. “He would have killed me first if I’d given him the chance.” He pointed at a spot on the deck somewhere between them. The Red Monster’s pistol lay there like a gleaming fish. “He wanted to blow my brains out.”

“The smell’s terrible,” she said, turning away.

“Death’s like that,” Croaker said archly, but he reached for the bailing bucket and washed his vomit down the scuppers with sea water. Then he picked up the .357 Magnum and studied it. There were no markings and the serial number had been filed off. It was virgin and therefore untraceable.

She began to shiver now, her arms crossed over her breasts, her fingers clutching her shoulders with such force they turned white. Her lips were working as if she might be praying.

He dropped his mask and flippers on deck, got out of his gear, resting the heavy air tank against the railing. “What are you going to do now that you’re free?” he said softly.

Alix was still shivering. “What—” She seemed to choke on her words and, swallowing hard, had to begin again. “What are you going to do with him?” She inclined her head but did not look at the corpse.

“He’s going down with the boat.” And when she gave him a sharp look, he nodded. “The boat’s a write-off now, there’s no other way.”

“There’s still the other one.” Her voice was very small.

Croaker knew she was talking about the Blue Monster. “The sinking’ll throw him off long enough for you to get out of the state.”

It was obvious that she had been listening closely because she turned around now and looked him full in the face. “You said ‘me’ not ‘we.’” He nodded. “How come?”

“You’ve already been in prison long enough. I’m not going to extend your stay.”

“But you want something from me, that’s simple enough to figure out. It’s why I’m here with…them. It’s why you came after me.” Her eyes watched his face.

Croaker looked away. “You know who these two are?” She shook her head silently. “Where they’re from?” She shook her head. “Who’s protecting you?”

“No.”

“But you
do
know what it is you’re not supposed to divulge.” There was that acid tone again. He grunted when he got no response, and went through the boat very methodically. When he came back on deck, she had not moved.

He pointed to the Red Monster. “This guy’s got no name, no ID, no nothing. He’s as clean as a pig in shit.” He looked at her for any kind of reaction. Then, reaching down for one of the Red Monster’s hands, said, “Except for this.”