The Nicholas Linnear Novels (115 page)

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.”

Alix gave a little scream as he peeled what looked like an oval of skin from the man’s fingertip. He repeated this process nine more times then held the small pile in his palm.

“Know what these are, Alix?” She shook her head wildly. “They’re Idiots. Idiots are print changers. Very sophisticated stuff. I mean your average hood on the street’s light-years away from this kind of equipment.” He did not show it but his stomach had contracted painfully when his keen, eye had spotted the one Idiot beginning to flake off. At first he could not believe it, but now he was coming to understand that that was because he had not wanted to believe it.

Entering into a red sector with preconceived notions was just about the worst of the cardinal sins a detective could commit. And Croaker had to admit that that was what he had done from the outset. His mind had been so set on Tomkin being the villain that no other possibility had entered his mind.

But now with the evidence of the Idiots, the lack of other ID, added to the methodology these two jailers had been using, Croaker saw another possibility forming and he did not like the look of it at all.

“They’re disgusting,” Alix said. “Take them away, they look like slugs.”

He folded the Idiots away, came across the deck toward her. “Alix, who the hell are these guys?”

“I—I don’t know. I’m not—” She turned her head. “I’m confused. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong anymore.”

He saw the fear and shock in her eyes and he decided not to pursue it at once. It wasn’t doing her much good to be so close to the stiff. He weighed anchor, started up the engine, and swung the boat to starboard, heading in a flat arc back toward his own craft.

Once there, he set the engine in neutral, slung the anchor onto his boat to keep the two craft linked, and climbed over the rail after it. He turned and offered Alix his hand.

Slowly she unwound and as if in a trance came aboard his own boat. “Why don’t you go below and lie down,” he said, gently guiding her to the companionway. “Just relax for a bit.”

After she had disappeared he went to work, transferring the half-gallon plastic container of gas to Alix’s boat, going below-decks with it. When he returned, he took the Red Monster’s corpse and, using his fishing knife, cut out the barbed flechette of the spear. This he threw overboard. Then, manhandling the body, he draped it over the wheel.

Lastly, he took the fallen Magnum and returned belowdecks. There he fired three shots downward through the hull. Sea water began to ooze up through the rents. Then he uncapped the plastic container and drenched the cabin. He went back to the companionway and lit a match, barely escaping the sudden whoosh of the flames greedily eating up the oxygen.

Quickly he scrambled up onto the deck and drew the anchor back on board, wound the chain around the Red Monster’s ankles. He set the engine at full throttle, the rudder at a straight course, and, the container in one hand, jumped overboard.

It was an easy swim back to his own boat and, climbing on board, he stowed his scuba outfit along with the empty plastic container. Then he went belowdecks.

Alix was lying on one narrow berth, her right arm flung across her eyes. She heard his approach and her lips moved slightly. “I heard noises. They sounded a little like shots.”

“Your engine was backfiring.” There was no point in telling her any of it, and some danger in it as well.

“It’s gone.” She said it like a little girl of her favorite Teddy bear.

“It was part of the price of your freedom.”

Her arm came away from her face and she looked up at him. “Well, I never paid for it. It wasn’t mine anyway, I suppose.”

Croaker nodded and came to sit down beside her on the opposing bunk. “It’s about your friend, Angela Didion.”

“Yes.” Alix seemed to sigh. “It’s always about Angela.”

“I caught the squeal,” Croaker said. “I found her dead. And I want her killer.”

Alix’s eyes blinked. “Is that all there is to it?”

“Someone doesn’t want me to find the murderer. Bad.” He hesitated now, on the brink of the question that had haunted him for over a year, the question that had sent him to Matty the Mouth for information, the question that had led him down to Key West when he had been warned off the case by his captain.

His throat was dry and he felt as if his vocal chords were in spasm. So long a time on this one, such a dogged determination. And now the answers staring at him out of jade green eyes right in front of his face.

“Was it Raphael Tomkin who killed her?” It sounded like another’s voice but he knew it was his.

“Tomkin was there.”

“That’s not an answer.”

For a long time she stared at him, trying to make up her mind. The boat rocked gently beneath them in the swells and the vague scent of dried fish, weeks old, still lingered over the swabbed decks. At last she stirred, moving to a sitting position. “We’ll make a deal,” she whispered. “You get me out of Florida, you get me to a place where I know I’ll be safe—” She paused as if quivering on the last threshold. “And I’ll tell you everything I know about Angela Didion’s death.”

If Minck expected a reaction from his guest, he was sorely disappointed. Instead, Nicholas said, “This department is concerned with Soviet Russia. How does it come to be entangled with the Japanese?”

“It will come as no surprise to you that Japan has been our major bulwark against Communism in the Far East ever since the end of the war. We have been putting enormous amounts of pressure on them for years to increase their defense budget, which, I might add, they have been doing slowly but surely.” He shrugged. “That’s something. And this year they have agreed to allow us to install a hundred and fifty of our newest supersonic F-20 Tiger-shark jet fighters at the naval base at Misawa.”

This conversation had begun to have echoes of the one Nicholas had had with Tomkin last week.

“Our latest intelligence puts each of the Kuriles in the hands of a minimum of two divisions of mechanized Soviet infantry apiece. Twenty-eight thousand troops. And on one of them lies a Soviet command post capable of coordinating the activity of an entire army corps.”

Minck sat forward. “There’s been a great deal of coordinated activity going on there ever since the new MIGs arrived. But, personally, I don’t think it’s related to the supersonics. Those were merely brought in as defense against our F-20s.

“No, if our growing file of intelligence is correct, it’s far more serious than that. What our probing suggests is a confirmation of what a number of the more militant Joint Chiefs have been concerned about for a while.”

Minck took a sip of his drink. “We now feel that this troop buildup is part of a specific program to create a military curtain in that part of the globe behind which Russian submarines carrying long-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads capable of reaching the American mainland can operate without fear of intervention.”

Nicholas felt chilled despite himself. “What you’re talking about is madness. Global madness. We would all die in an instant without any recognition. Three-fourths of the human race gone.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe it. Even the dinosaurs did better than that.”

“The dinosaurs weren’t smart enough to split the atom,” Minck said ironically. “So you’d better begin believing it.” Nicholas could discern a spark of fire in his eyes now. “Because that’s precisely what our information indicates is happening.”

For a time Nicholas said nothing. The whir of the automatic sprinklers could be heard, doing the rain’s work.

“Surely this is ‘Eyes Only’ material,” he said, after a time. “Yet you’ve revealed it all to me, a civilian. Why?”

Minck rose, his legs unfolding like a crane’s. He stood next to a pair of the window doors, his hand on the white wood pillar separating them. His concentration seemed lost in the foliage.

“The Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security, known familiarly as the KGB, is comprised of nine directorates,” he began. His voice had changed timbre and Nicholas had the impression that his thoughts were still far away. “Each directorate serves its own purpose in the overall schemata. For instance, the First Directorate is in charge of internal affairs. If you’re ever inside Russia and picked up, it is to members of this directorate that you will be turned over once you reach the yellow brick building on Dzerzhinsky Square.” Here Minck paused as if he were a captive of his own thoughts. With an obvious effort, he continued.

“On the other hand, the Fourth Directorate handles all operations in Western Europe; the Sixth, North America; the Seventh, Asia.” He turned around abruptly. “I’m sure you get the picture.

“The Kuriles, with their close proximity to Japan, are and always have been under the control of the Seventh Directorate.”