The Nicholas Linnear Novels (137 page)

He twisted and turned through the tunnellike labyrinth of the
rotenburo
’s corridors, sliding and sometimes crawling on his belly, always mindful of breaking up any rhythm to his movements. Twice he heard the buzzing passage of
shuriken
quite near him and he redoubled his efforts, knowing from the sounds that he was closing in.

But it was a bad situation and growing worse all the time. Where was Sato? His absence was a constant distraction and any kind of distraction was dangerous in battle.

He skidded around the end of a row of metal lockers thinking about getting to his locker and his
dai-katana
, and felt a blow strike his shoulder, numbing it momentarily. He cursed himself mightily as he slid forward, seeming to skid out of control on the damp floor. The bulk of the oncoming shadow careened past him, just above.

Nicholas torqued his torso, lifting his right arm in a blur, the elbow locked, the heel of his hand leading, crashing into flesh and bone. He heard a heavy grunt and, simultaneously, felt the crash of a weight to his left. He twisted, using his knees and ankles, using the chrysanthemum to bring power back into his frame. He rained blows onto the form which crouched in the darkness in the lee of the lockers.

He felt the satisfying smack of flesh against flesh and began a series of interlocking strikes. Abruptly there was a blow to the side of his head and when he reached out again, the form was gone.

He rose to his feet, swaying, his senses questing. Went instinctively into
getsumei no michi
and found the spirit of the ninja. He was moving
away
from Nicholas. Why?

Then he had the answer and his heart constricted in anxiety. Loosing the
kiai
shout that rocked the walls of the
rotenburo
, Nicholas raced through the darkened interior, tearing after terror.

Sato had found the interior of the
rotenburo
deserted. Where was Koten? Where was the
muhon-nin
? Anger burned through him like a sun. He gritted his teeth, the deep feeling of betrayal powering him, feeding adrenaline into him.

He burst out into the night filled with swirling rain. No one was about, not even the proprietors. Koten! he wanted to cry out. I’m going to kill you; slowly so that I can watch your face as life ebbs out of you.

Into the parking lot he ran. Two or three cars remained beneath the lights. He wiped at his eyes to clear them. All the cars were empty. Then his gaze came to rest on the rented vehicle they had used to drive here from the airport.

Koten!

Sitting in kingly silence, dry beneath the opening heavens. Unthinking, Sato ran toward the car, skidding once on the slick tarmac, almost wrenching his back. All breath went out of him for a moment. Then, with a grunt, he lifted himself off one knee and loped the rest of the way to the dripping car.

Now he shouted. “Koten!” Reaching for the chrome handle, wrenching the door open. There was a sharp click, as distinct as a dry twig cracking on a forest floor, and the night erupted into a fireball of orange and crimson flames. The car ballooned outward, coming apart in hot, twisting shards of metal and pinpoint fragments of sprayed safety glass. The ignition instantly disintegrated the rubberized mannikin in the front seat.

A sharp report like a cannon shot and men a trailer of dense black smoke, oily and twisting, ascending into the full force of the storm.

The body looked enormous, a lumped animal, throwing a deep shadow across the surrounding stone. All about it shards of glass glittered like stars, arcing tiny rainbows into the cold overhead illumination.

Three uniformed men from the Raleigh City Police stood around taking notes while the fourth, half in, half out of one of the squad cars, was on the two-way radio.

A pair of backup units squealed to a halt beside him and the cops inside emerged and began to set up sawhorse barriers against the growing knots of curious onlookers.

Harry Saunders, the sergeant on the two-way, wrapped up his conversation with his captain and threw the mike on the car seat as he backed out of the unit. His face was set in hard lines as he ambled slowly back to his three buddies.

“Might as well burn those pads,” he told them as he approached. “Ain’t gonna be any use, those notes.”

“How d’you mean?” Bob Santini said, still scribbling in his flip-up pad.

“Someone coming any minute now to take over. Captain says this isn’t any’ve our business now.”

Santini’s head came up and he glowered at Saunders. “You mean a man is killed and we just walk away from it?”

Saunders shrugged. “Funny you should say that, ’cause I asked the Captain the self-same question.” He screwed up his face. “Know what he told me? Wouldn’t do no good no matter
what
we did.” His finger stabbed out in the general direction of the corpse. “This poor sumbitch’s got no prints, got no history at all. He’s a nothing, a big, fat zero.”

“A spook,” Ed Baine said. “Now that’s interesting.”

“Well, you just take your interest somewhere else,” Saunders said, “’cause after we break up here not even our wives or, in your case, Baine, your g.f., are supposed to know anything that went on here.”

“Oh, shit,” Spinelli said with mock disgust, “no pillow talk. Now what’m I supposed to do afterwards?”

“Do what you always do, shithead,” Baine said. “Roll over and go to sleep.”

Saunders’ head turned. “Sit on it, you clowns,” he said
sotto voce
, “we got company.”

They all turned their heads, saw a trenchcoated figure coming down the corridor. None of them liked what they saw.

“Oh, holy Christ,” Spinelli said under his breath, “it’s a fuckin’ woman.”

“Gentlemen,” she said as she came up, “who’s in charge here?”

“Detective Sergeant Harry Saunders, ma’am,” Saunders said, taking a step forward.

“At ease, Sergeant,” she said with a straight face, “I’m not about to make a grab for your clusters.” She took a quick look around. “Anything been touched here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“He’s just as you found him? Exactly?”

Saunders nodded and then swallowed, angry at himself for being dry-mouthed in front of this woman. “Can I ask what your, er, affiliation is?”

She turned away from him, running her gaze carefully across the area immediately surrounding the body. “You may ask your captain that, Sergeant Saunders. He may be more willing to assuage your curiosity.”

Saunders clenched his teeth, biting back a sour comment while Spinelli smirked at him from a distance.

“Sergeant.” She was kneeling down now beside the corpse. “I won’t need your help anymore. Why don’t you and your men retire to the barricades and assist with crowd control. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Saunders said with exaggerated politeness and, turning sharply, jerked his head at the other three, who followed him silently down the faintly echoing corridor of the mall to where their units, red lights flashing, were parked.

When they were gone, Tanya Vladimova confirmed her initial I.D. The body was, indeed, that of Jesse James. Quickly, she opened up a small kit and set about taking a set of prints off the bloody glass shard that still pierced James’ chest. For the first time she allowed herself to think of what had gone wrong. But she knew the answer without having to go through any process at all.

It had been foolish to allow Alix Logan to live. Foolish and, from a security point of view, sloppy. But men were weak, she thought now, even a man as powerful and intelligent as C. Gordon Minck. It had been Minck, after all, who had insisted she be kept alive, over Tanya’s vigorous protests.

And not for any humanitarian reasons, but because he had been making love to her on a regular basis, flying into Key West on clandestine weekends when he was supposed to be sailing his boat on the Chesapeake. Like Scheherazade, Alix Logan had wrapped Minck up and in so doing had stayed the date of her execution.

“Pajalsta zameretse no myeste, Gospadin Linnear.”
Please stay where you are, Mr. Linnear.

He saw the gun muzzle looming dark and impossibly large.

“If you make a move I will shoot you dead.”

Nicholas was not giving away any knowledge he had of the language so he took a step in the direction of the gun. The night exploded for a second time and a clot of asphalt screamed upward, erupting in flying fragments so close they stung his ankles and calves.

“I know you can understand me,
Gospadin
Linnear. The next shot will take off the top of your head.”

To his left the twisted remains of the rental car lay partially on its side. Smoke coiled about its stark sculpture like a loosed cage of serpents.

Nicholas’ body had twitched when he had heard the muffled explosion, the reaction of an animal in flight for its life. Skidding out into the night, he had confronted the dying flames of the initial fireball. Blackened parts of Seiichi Sato lay smoldering in three separate spots on the tarmac. Rain pounded it all—charred flesh and scorched metal—into rivulets black against the black of the parking lot.

Immediately he had ducked back into the concealing shadows of the
rotenburo
’s cedar eaves. The Russian, with a sharp eye and even sharper ear, had found him anyway. Nicholas suspected that this had been the one who had executed Phoenix after Koten had incapacitated him.

He was carrying one of the newest of the Kalishnikovs, the AKL-1000, a short doublebarreled shotgun that threw anti-personnel projectiles. It was so compact it could be used with one hand. There was absolutely nothing Nicholas could do against it.

So he came out into the night and was pelted by the rain.

“That’s better,” the voice said, still speaking Russian. “Now I don’t have to guess where you are.”

“With that thing all you need is a guess,” Nicholas said.

“Precisely.”

Nicholas could see him now, a tall square-shouldered man—most probably a soldier, judging by his bearing and gait—in a long, black-belted raincoat. He wore no hat and Nicholas could see his face clearly in the harsh spill of the overhead lights: beak of a nose below brows that would in middle age become beetling and would dominate his rather handsome face. Now that face was dominated by wide-apart pale blue eyes.

The Russian smiled thinly. “I am interested in intelligent men…no matter what their ideological perversion.” His head gave a formal nod. “Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov.”

“I was expecting Protorov.” He had only words to work with at the moment and he intended to make the most of them.

Russilov’s face closed down, his amiable expression wiped away. “What do you know of Protorov?”

“How did you know I spoke Russian?” Nicholas countered. “Let’s have an exchange of information.”

The Russian spat, gestured with the AKL-1000. “You’re in no position to bargain. Move out farther into the light.”

Nicholas did as he was told. He sensed movement behind him in the doorway to the building, and a moment later Koten emerged. He looked transformed. In the bad light it appeared as if his already considerable girth had been added to, his shoulders enormously wide, humped with unnatural muscle. Then, as he came out from beneath the dripping eaves, Nicholas saw that he had a body slung across his shoulders.

Using a short stepping trot he moved easily with his burden, keeping away from Russilov’s line of sight, finally depositing the body at the Russian’s feet like a retriever.

“The ninja is beyond reclamation.” It was odd to hear him speaking Russian. “That one”—he shrugged in Nicholas’ direction—“hit him once too often.”

Russilov did not even glance downward. “Did you find it?”

Koten held up a tightly rolled oilskin pouch. It looked minuscule in his huge fist. “It came out of him when he died.” And then he laughed, a high-pitched squeak, seeing the Russian’s hesitation. “Go on, take it.” He proffered the thing in his open palm. It looked no less tiny. “The rain’s washed it clean.”

Quickly, with his free hand, Russilov pocketed the cylinder. And there goes
Tenchi
, Nicholas thought. He remembered Sato’s words,
They have the power to destroy us
—
all of us
—
if they discover
Tenchi. What
was Tenchi
that its infiltration by a foreign power could ignite a world war? Nicholas knew that he must find out. And soon.

Koten’s dark eyes slid toward Nicholas. “Shall I take care of him now?”

“Keep away from him,” Russilov said sharply. Koten glowered at him.

“You’ve just lost him face, Pyotr Alexandrovitch,” Nicholas said.

“The two of you are far too dangerous to pit one against the other.”

“Really?” This exchange was beginning to interest him. How in the world did this KGB operative know so much about him? “Surely you can’t have a file on me. I’m a private citizen.”

“Oh?” Russilov’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Then what are you doing here?”

“Sato-san and I are—were—friends as well as business partners.”

“And that’s all.” The Russian’s voice was brimming with irony.

There was no point in keeping things at this level. “That car bomb couldn’t’ve been meant only for Sato. There’s no way you could have been certain that just he would be at the car when he opened the door.”

“If you went, so much the better. As long as we got this”—he patted the pocket where he had dropped the packet—“we didn’t need either of you. If our agent had been intercepted—”

“By Phoenix or myself.”

“Oh, I believe Koten here would have found some way to deter you. But as I was saying, had our agent been intercepted, we would have brought you in.”

“If you want to live,” Nicholas observed, “you’d do well to shoot me now.”

“I plan to.”

“Then you’ll never know the modifications we recently made in
Tenchi.
”

“We?” For the first time Russilov seemed uncertain.

“Why do you think Tomkin Industries is merging one of its companies with Sato Petrochemicals? Not for the sheer pleasure of it, I assure you.”

“You’re lying,” the Russian said. “I don’t know anything about this.”

Of course you don’t, Nicholas thought. But you can’t be sure. And if you don’t get me to Protorov it might be a grave error. Time is short; this is no time to blunder.