The Nicholas Linnear Novels (147 page)

Saw the glint of reflection off an eyeball and this was his silent greeting with Third Cousin Tok. He was a wide-shouldered man, younger than Nangi had surmised for someone of his exalted rank, with a scarred, dangerous face. Nangi saw no resemblance whatsoever between the cousins.

Crouching down, they approached Third Cousin Tok, who, when they were near, moved away. Nangi saw that he clutched a black-bodied Nikon with a 135mm lens.

There was a door between the bedrooms and it was open just a sliver. Nangi could make out whisperings and, peering over Fortuitous Chiu’s shoulder, eyed the next bedroom.

He saw a slice of window, the shoulder of a teak dresser laden on top with small crystal perfume bottles, several lipstick canisters. A frame was on the wall, the print or picture itself out of his line of sight.

A bed with pink satin covers, yellow sheets. Piles of pillows. And two bodies. Both were quite naked. They contrasted badly in the same way the color scheme did. Succulent Pien lying languorously with her yellow-toned flesh gleaming in the shaded lamplight.

Beside her, appearing enormous and grossly overwhelming, was the pinkish flesh, hairy in some places, ruddy in others, hairy
and
ruddy in still others, of a Westerner’s body.

It was not Liu at all sharing her bed but a Caucasian well over six feet, Nangi judged, with thick ginger-colored hair, a rather high forehead, neat mustache, and clear, intelligent blue eyes.

Now where have I seen that face before? Nangi asked himself. At the moment, no one else could supply the needed information. He settled down to watch and listen. They were speaking in English.

“They will be bringing three-quarters of a ton across next Tuesday,” Succulent Pien was saying. “As usual, it will be Liu’s task to guide the property through into the Colony.”

“Can we intercept it?” the ginger-haired man said. “It’s only been six weeks since the last raid.”

“There is more than bullion on this one.” Succulent Pien’s eyes were sparkling. “Information is to be relayed as well. Very secret information.”

“What on?”

She giggled and stroked his hairy thigh. “How badly would you like to know?”

“Me? I don’t care one way or another.” It dawned on Nangi that the man spoke with a decidedly Scottish burr.

“Then it doesn’t matter that I cannot tell you.” Succulent Pien’s voice was a rich purr now as her fingers moved down off the muscled ridge of his bare thigh. She cupped him in the palm of her hand. “I am sworn to secrecy.”

The ginger-haired man’s eyes were half closed. “Though I don’t care a fig, my darling, Her Majesty’s Government might have some small interest in this very secret information.”

Her fingers were stroking lightly. “But what am I to do, stuck on the horns of dilemma this way? I cannot betray a trust.”

The ginger-haired man gave a low groan. “Since you’ve sought my help, my darling, I think you should tell me,” he said through teeth gritted in pleasure.

“It’s so big.” Succulent Pien’s gaze had dropped. “It constantly amazes me how big you get.” Her head came up. “Because this is so, I will tell you.”

Nangi saw that this was all a sexual game between them. She had every intention of telling him from the outset. So this was how Succulent Pien supplemented her income, he thought. A confidante of the most powerful Communist Chinese in the Crown Colony, she then selectively betrayed him to the other side.

She was stroking more strongly now. Her eyes never left her work. “The information contains new assignments for over half of the upper-echelon Communist operatives secreted within the Crown Colony’s government, police department, and security services.”

“God in Heaven!”

It was unclear to Nangi whether the ginger-haired man was reacting to the news or to Succulent Pien’s ministrations. He was beginning to understand the reason for her name.

With a throaty laugh, the Chinese girl swung herself atop the prone figure, inserting his rigid length into her with one swift movement. Closing her eyes, she pushed herself against his pubic mound, shuddering deeply at the contact.

“Pull on my nipples,” she gasped. “I love it when you do that.”

His hands raised obediently and she cried out shrilly. Meanwhile, in the adjoining room, Third Cousin Tok was snapping away with the black-bodied Nikon, the telephoto lens ensuring him of clear and exacting shots of the participants’ faces as well as their joined sweating bodies. Beside him, Fortuitous Chiu raised the volume on the micro tape recorder with its extended narrow-dispersion microphone.

On the pink and yellow bed the ginger-haired man’s buttocks were bucking upward in a ragged rhythm as if he wished to dislodge his rider, which he most assuredly did not. But he was not yet far enough gone to lose track of priorities. “I don’t want to compromise Liu. You understand that.”

Succulent Pien was gasping and moaning. “I know it…Ohhh!…and he knows it as well. He has arranged everything perfectly.” Her voice rose to a scream. “Oh, now, now, now, my great stallion! Fill me all up!”

Gradually, after that, Nangi and Fortuitous Chiu crept away, back the way they had come. In the hallway of the basement the same two Green Pang were deep into their Fan Tan.

Outside, in the filthy alleyway, Nangi wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “It’s not her at all,” he said. “It’s Liu himself! He’s working both sides of the street. Madonna, he’s sure to get himself killed!”

“He hasn’t so far.” Fortuitous Chiu grinned hugely. “He’s a very smart man…as well as being a very nasty one.”

Nangi was doing his best to keep the elation he was feeling out of his mind; it was far too busy for such an extraneous and potentially dangerous emotion.

He sensed the tides turning for real now and he was thinking furiously. He had to be certain, and he needed help for that. “Fortuitous Chiu,” he said, “how can we be certain that what the woman fed this man is not Communist disinformation?”

“Normally there would be no way,” the young Chinese said. “Certainly my sources among the Communists are not good, and you can imagine that Third Cousin Tok might fare no better on that avenue.” He was grinning again and Nangi wondered what it was that was so hilarious. He was about to find out.

“But in this case we need no outside verification,” the young man went on. “Because, you see, the foreign devil locked in the embrace of Succulent Pien is Charles Percy Redman himself. And no one in Hong Kong, least of all Succulent Pien, would dare risk feeding him false information of this sort. He’s so well plugged in he’d know in a shot and she would never see the light of dawn.”

Nangi, his hand in his breast pocket, touched the glossy surface of the red envelope Liu had given him, thus causing him to lose enormous face. Now he allowed his elation full rein.

“What do you mean you can’t read it?”

“Just that, Protorov-san,” Koten said.

“It’s Japanese, isn’t it?” Protorov, who had never bothered to learn the difficult and time-consuming Japanese language, could nevertheless not understand that failing in anyone else.

“It is and it isn’t.”

“I don’t pay you to give me riddles.”

“I did what I was ordered,” the immense
sumō
champion said. “I infiltrated Sato’s
kobun
, I worked with your Lieutenant Russilov at the
rotenburo
, and as a consequence we lost your last spy. I have done my duty.”

“Your duty,” Viktor Protorov said, “is precisely what I tell you it is. You must read the papers from the Tenshin Shoden Katori. Your very life depends upon it.”

“Then I must surely die, Protorov-san, for I cannot translate this paper. True, it is based on Chinese ideograms on which, also, my own language is based. However, it uses ideograms that
kanji
discarded as being, perhaps, too complex, difficult, or open to misinterpretation.” He spread his pudgy-fingered hands. “This might as well be Arabic as far as I am concerned. There is no doubt that this is the
ryu
’s code. If you had allowed me to handle matters at the
rotenburo
, your spy would now be here instead of six feet underground. No doubt he could have translated this.” His shoulders lifted, fell. “But now—”

Protorov slammed the tabletop, grabbed up the sheets of paper in his fist. It was so unfair! Here was the secret to
Tenchi
literally in the palm of his hand, the fruition of the most important clandestine operation he had ever mounted, the sword he needed to dazzle the GRU generals, to galvanize the Red Army, to begin his coup, and he could not read it. It was unbelievable!

For a moment he thought he might go mad with frustration. Then he took several deep breaths to calm his racing pulse. One, two, three. Set his mind to working.

“Linnear is ninja,” Koten said softly. “He got his training at the Tenshin Shodien Katori. It is conceivable…” He allowed his voice to trail off.

Hope exploded like a lightning flash across Protorov’s mind. Yes. Linnear was his only hope now. It had been many years since he had lived at the
ryu
but still, traditions in Japan rarely die. Protorov knew that there was at least some chance that the code would be the same. On the surface it seemed a desperate gamble, but he was now working under a severe time element. Mironenko was gathering the generals. In six days’ time they would meet and he had to be there to present his plan to them; he had to deliver
Tenchi
to them or lose them forever. With the Neanderthals who inhabited the GRU there could never be another opening; not, at least, for the KGB.

Protorov spun and strode from the small room, calling for the doctor and his magic needle.

“I need to speak with the subject now,” he said to the bespectacled physician.

“Now?” The doctor’s eyes were round and startled behind his thick lenses. “But you told me you were giving me forty-eight hours for the softening-up process.”

“I no longer have the time,” Protorov snapped. “The real world, Doctor, is infinitely mutable. You must get used to these sudden changes.”

“But I don’t know how much I can do on this short a notice,” the doctor said, falling into step with Protorov. “I’m getting erratic readings from the cerebral cortex; I can’t make head nor tail of them. I can’t guarantee how far he’s under, if at all.”

“Then double the dose,” Protorov ordered. “Triple it, I don’t care. Just so long as he talks now.”

The doctor was frantic. “But that strength will surely kill him in fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside.”

Protorov nodded. “That’s all the time I’ll need, Doctor. Please go to work on him at once.”

“His name is Gordon Minck and he came down to Key West every so often to be with me.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘be with me.’”

“He loved the way I went down on him,” Alix Logan said somewhat nastily. “Does that answer your question?”

“I think it does,” Croaker said.

They were in the car, heading through the fumy innards of the Lincoln Tunnel on their way to Matty the Mouth’s place.

He considered the nature of her response for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know that was a sore spot.”

Alix put her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. Her thick blond hair spread like sea foam around her cheeks. “What do you think? A guy who’s strong and handsome, powerful in an—oh, I don’t know—interior sort of way, goes all googley-eyed over me. He’s a dangerous man, you can see that on his face like a scar or a ridge of pockmarks.

“‘I should have you killed,’ he tells me, ‘but I can’t. I don’t ever want to think I’ll never see that face again.’”

“Oh, very cute,” Croaker cut in. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Shut up,” Alix snapped. “I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

Fluorescent light and shadow fell over them in a rhythmic pattern, like notes controlled by a metronome.

“‘I don’t want to lose you,’ he said, ‘but I’m in a business where I can’t afford to make a mistake.’ He looked at me in a way that made my insides go cold. ‘Will you be a mistake, Alix?’

“‘No, I won’t,’ I told him. ‘Is that a promise?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, and I meant it.” She began to cry. “And now look what I’ve done.” Sobbing fully. “It’s all your fault.” It was the wail of a lost and confused child.

Croaker didn’t think he needed to refute that; it was too irrational. Instead, he changed the subject slightly. “So who’s this mystery man Minck.”

“Minck,” Alix Logan said. “Minck, Minck, Minck.” It was like a new toy which she did not want to give up. Then she decided. “Gordon Minck is the man who killed Angela Didion.”

Almost drove the car into the side of the tunnel.
“What?”
His head began to ache and there was a fearful red light behind his eyes. “You must be mistaken.” His voice was a dry rustle, no more than a whisper. It was all he could muster at the moment. But what if she’s right? he asked himself. All these months hiding, living in fear of discovery. He was a pariah at the New York City Police Department; he no longer even existed save as “Tex” Bristol. He had lied, stolen, gone beyond the law he had so many long years ago sworn to uphold and protect. What had happened to him? What madness had possessed him? He felt like a malaria victim who had just awakened from an endless fever through which he had been raving. He had believed so mightily in this truth: that Raphael Tomkin had murdered Angela Didion in cold blood. He had been so sure. All the facts had pointed to it. Now they darted like tiny frightened fish, weaving away from him as he sought again to compile them, to reassure himself that he was right and Alix was wrong.

Alix sniffed, wiped at her nose. “It’s like this,” she said, ignoring his interruption. “Tomkin made the mistake of talking to Angela about his connection with Minck, and Angela, the bitch, had a memory as deep as the ocean floor. She remembered
everything.
That was part of her scam, how she could get whatever she wanted from almost everyone. She remembered what they did not want known.

“So of course there came a day when she threw this knowledge up at Tomkin. I don’t really know why. Perhaps there was a diamond she wanted that he wouldn’t give her; maybe he wasn’t coming by enough, or maybe he was dropping in
too
much. You could never tell with Angela, she blew so hot and cold.