The Nicholas Linnear Novels (222 page)

Nicholas still looked doubtful, and Nangi said, “Hear me out, at least before you decide anything.”

Nicholas nodded.

Tomi glanced at the doorway. Several of the guards were close enough to overhear the conversation. “I think we should continue this discussion elsewhere,” she said.

Deeper inside the house, in the private areas where not even the police guards were allowed, Umi sat in a six-tatami room. When the three of them came in, she rose, made to leave them to their difficult, painful talk, but Nangi stayed her. “You are needed here,” was all he said, and Umi sat back down.

“Even before you encountered the
dorokusai
,” Nangi said to Nicholas when they had settled themselves on the tatami, “Umi had intimations of danger. She saw a darkness forming beyond the night. She felt the encroachment of emptiness and an evil so great, it threatened the stability of the world. She heard the voice of the Spider Woman of the Amerindian Hopi. She felt ice coming.

“The Hopi believe that the Spider Woman raises her voice only at the instigation of inordinate evil. In the Hopi myth of creation, the Spider Woman’s voice turned the second world—the one before this—to ice in order to destroy its evil inhabitants.”

Tomi was fascinated. “What does all this mean?”

Umi turned her beautiful, unlined face toward her, said, “The nemesis of the Spider Woman is awake and active. He threatens the fabric of life. I can hear his footsteps; they are the tolling of a bell.”

“Umi feels the
dorokusai
,” Nangi said. “She felt him that night; she feels him now. You see, Nicholas, all myth is intertwined like the branches of one tree, old, gnarled, sprung from one source. I suspected then that there was a relationship between the personal attack on you by the
dorokusai
and the imminent raid on Sato by Nami. If you were
Shiro Ninja,
then you were rendered helpless, therefore useless in a coming war. I was right.

“Nami has attacked us—Sato and Sphynx—in your absence. I don’t believe that to be a coincidence. Ikusa boxed me into a corner, and I was sure I had found a way to fox him. By taking in failing Nakano Industries, I felt sure I could appease Nami and still keep you as a partner. But the real lure was Nakano’s research and development department, which I’ve coveted for years. I thought I had found a way to gain control of Nakano through the exercising of an obscure warrants clause that was buried in the merger contract.

“Apparently that is just what Ikusa was counting on. Yesterday, I exercised those warrants. What I got was Nakano, all right, but Nakano’s now just a hollow shell with nothing of value in it. The R and D department was secretly switched several weeks ago into a holding company that had owned some rusting and outdated oil refineries. That holding company was not part of the merger. I don’t own it, and now I never will.”

“Then the whole deal was a setup,” Nicholas said.

Nangi nodded. “I was in a war and I didn’t even know it. Now I understand Nami’s involvement in Nakano Industries; it wasn’t merely good business practice to bail out a failing company with one asset too precious to allow to fall apart. Nami has used Nakano as bait to snare us, Nicholas-san.”

“But you own a majority stake in Nakano now,” Nicholas said.

“I own nothing of value,” Nangi said mournfully. “In fact, Nakano as Nami has set it up without the R and D department will be in the red this fiscal year for more than four hundred million yen. That, combined with the highly leveraged bonds I had to float in order to buy the worthless warrants, threatens the entire structure of Sato International and, because we are so tightly linked, Tomkin Industries as well. I’m afraid that unless we can come up with a solution, I’ll be forced to find someone to bail me out.”

“You mean Nami?”

Nangi nodded. “You can bet Nami stands ready, willing, and able to come to my rescue. Except it won’t be a rescue, but an out-and-out corporate takeover, just like what happened at Nakano.”

“Nonsense,” Nicholas said. “You can have access to Tomkin International’s assets. We can set up a loan. Structure it—”

But Nangi was already shaking his head. “Don’t you think Ikusa’s already considered that? There is a MITI prohibition against Japanese companies accepting loans from foreign firms or banks.” The Ministry of International Trade and Industry was, along with Nami, one of the two most powerful business entities in Japan, in effect setting economic foreign policy for the country. “Should the borrowing firms default, such an arrangement could lead to foreign takeovers of Japanese companies, something MITI—and, of course, Nami—is adamantly against. Unless we do something fast to stop the bleeding, both our companies are in jeopardy of being targeted for a massive leveraged buyout. Which, I see now, is just what Kusunda was after all along. He wants the secret of the Sphynx T-PRAM computer chip. But it’s proprietary, and not even Nami could get it from us. So Kusunda decided to buy us out. Once he owns us, he owns the secret of the T-PRAM.” Nangi exhaled deeply. “I am most sorry, Nicholas-san.”

“History,” Nicholas said, “is only profitable when one uses it as a lesson for the present.”

“Hai.”
Yes. Nangi bowed deeply. He was grateful for Nicholas’s understanding. The understanding of a Japanese. “The present is what must concern us now.”

“Pardon me, Nangi-san,” Tomi interjected, “but there is still the
dorokusai
to consider.”

“Yes,” Nangi said. “The
dorokusai.
We know quite a bit more about him than we did before you left, Nicholas.” He described their tour of The Silk Road and what they had found there—the link between the rape-murder of Mariko, the dancer, and Dr. Hanami, of how they suspected that the
dorokusai
had blackmailed the surgeon.

“You’re right,” Nicholas said, and told them what he had learned of his condition, of how the
dorokusai
had, in effect, poisoned his brain, or at least one tiny piece of it.

“There’s more,” Nangi said. “We know the identity of the
dorokusai.
He—”

At that moment a uniformed policeman hurried into the room. So agitated was he that he failed to observe the formalities. Instead he thrust a folded slip of paper into Tomi’s hand. When she read it, her face went white.

“What is it, Detective?” Nangi said.

“He’s gone, Nangi-san,” Tomi said, dismayed.

“Who are we talking about?” Nicholas asked.

“The
dorokusai
,” Tomi said.

“His name is Senjin Omukae,” Nangi said. “He is a division commander in the Metropolitan Police Force. At least he was up until his encounter with Justine. He did not report for work this morning. Something we don’t know about happened—”

“That tanjian is
a policeman
?” Nicholas was stunned.

“Yes,” Tomi said. “He was my boss. Which made it easy for him to forge that phony communication concerning your assassination by the Red Army.” She waved the message. “Now we know where he’s gone. He was spotted boarding a JAL flight late this morning. He used a phony passport, ID. With his abilities, it wasn’t particularly difficult.”

“Where was Omukae headed?” Nangi asked.

“The United States.” There was a kind of despair in her voice. “New York City.”

And Nicholas cried, “Justine!”

The Scoundrel held the artifact in his hand and wondered what he should do with it. He studied it with all the horrified fascination one displays toward a scorpion moving in one’s palm.

He thought of the object as an artifact because he had unearthed it, not from an archeological dig, but from the rubble in the apartment next door. He had found blood there, as dark and dry as wine, and bits of matter that might have been bone, but the Scoundrel could not be certain. His field was computers, not anatomy.

He had gotten the idea to take a peek into the apartment the night Killan had come by, when he had heard the loud
thunk!,
a thick, wet sound against the common wall with the adjacent apartment, something he had never heard before yet which seemed weirdly familiar. He knew no one should be in the apartment which was at the moment deserted. The rumor was that a Yakuza
oyabun
had bought the place for his daughter, had ordered extensive renovations, then had a falling out with the contractor. As a result, the apartment, stripped and unlivable, had been lying dormant for more than a month.

Killan had been in the bathroom, so she had not heard the sound, and the Scoundrel had said nothing about it to her. What was there to say? Besides, he needed time to decide what, if anything, he wanted to do about it. So what had made that noise,
thunk!,
a sound not unlike a melon hitting the sidewalk from a height?

A dream had woken the Scoundrel this morning. He did not remember all of it, only the sense of it.
Thunk!
The sound, given weight by his dream, had made him break out into a sweat.

Perhaps it was the dream that, in the end, decided him to take a look inside the apartment. But not until the next day, when Killan was gone, when the building was nearly empty, still as a Western church.

The front door was unlocked, which in itself was odd. The Scoundrel could imagine himself in a film, a detective on an important case: a girl in a black moire dress comes into his office, smokes a cigarette, asks him to tail the man who’s been trying to murder her. Now he’s trailed the man to his lair. Cue the sound effects, cue the music. Do
not
cue the villain.

Lath and broken sections of wallboard were strewn across the rough concrete underfloor. Bundles of wire starting nowhere, going nowhere, snaked over debris. Old cans of paint, crusted and beginning to rust. The stink of plaster dust—and something more. If this were a film, the Scoundrel thought, squinting through the gloom, this scene would be shot in black and white.

But unlike the hero of a film noir, he was very frightened. The beat of his heart seemed so loud to him that he imagined someone standing in the hall outside could hear it. In fact, he went back through the tiny apartment, peeked out the front door. The silent, deserted hallway yawned. He could not even hear the whine of the elevator. He was alone with his thoughts, frightened by his own imagination. That’s what I get for spending my youth in the movie theater, he told himself.

Back in the apartment, he concentrated on the section of the wall from which he had heard the thick wet noise, the
thunk!
that had haunted his dreams last night as if it were a person, not a sound.

The first thing he found was the dark stain: a spidery-looking shape. In its center the wallboard had been smashed inward. He bent closer. On the jagged filaments of the wallboard, and soaked into the insulation behind it, the Scoundrel could see what appeared to be tiny fragments of bone, skin, and some kind of tissue. Someone had been slammed,
thunk!,
into the wall here last night. That was what he had heard: a fight. But here, in a deserted apartment? Why?

There was a great deal of junk piled up against the wall, and the Scoundrel, though he was looking for more evidence of the extent of the fight or who its participants might have been, would have, missed (as Kusunda Ikusa had) the tiny tape recorder the Pack Rat had so carefully hidden inside an empty paint can, had he not stumbled over the stubby end of a two-by-four.

The two-by-four barked his shin and turned over the paint can hidden beneath crumpled, stained sheets of last month’s
Asahi Shimbun,
and out tumbled the artifact: the miniature tape recorder with its ultrasensitive suction cup for picking up conversations through walls. Staring at it, the Scoundrel thought, through
my
wall. He had scooped up the artifact and hurriedly slipped out of the apartment. But not before checking the hallway again to make certain he was unobserved.

Now, as he remembered once again how he had discovered the artifact and what it portended, the Scoundrel’s hand closed around the microrecorder. He knew that he should listen to what was on the tape, but he was afraid. His bosses at Nakano had briefed him, of course, on the astonishingly complex security measures at work in the office. They had similarly cautioned him against taking his most sensitive work—MANTIS—home, where it would not be protected by the Nakano security system. The Scoundrel, staring at the microrecorder now, felt a rising urge to throw it away and forget about it. It made the most sense. After all, what he was holding here was most probably an indictment against himself, a detailing of the many ways in which he had deliberately flaunted the well-outlined security measures he had a duty to uphold. What would his superiors do were they to become aware of his transgressions? They were fanatic about security. Time and again he had heard the phrase, “Breaches of security will not be tolerated at Nakano.” The trouble was, he had paid no attention; he had been busy with his work.

Yes, the Scoundrel thought, self-preservation uppermost in his mind, I will dispose of this as if I were a criminal destroying the evidence of his crime. How had he made the jump from detective to criminal in so short a time? he wondered. He was overwhelmed by self-disgust, and he went to throw the thing away, the sooner the better. He was sorry he had ever let his curiosity get the better of him.

Yet when the moment came, he could not throw the microrecorder away. He had to know what was on that tape. Shit, he thought. His finger hovered over the play button, then hesitated. If this recording had been made of him, then his apartment might still be under surveillance.

Stuffing the artifact in his trousers pocket, he went out, losing himself in Tokyo’s smoggy sprawl. He was headed for Ueno Park, then thought better of it. If his apartment were under surveillance, perhaps he was as well. It would not do to play the tape in public. Where to go, then?

He had no idea. In fact, he was in a bit of a panic. All of a sudden he had been thrust into the muzzle of a gun. People—he had no idea who—were watching him, bugging his conversations; for all he knew, they were following his every move. Why? Of course it must be the MANTIS virus program. The Scoundrel knew he did not want any part of this. He was a certified genius on the computer, and that was what he wanted to work with. He had already begun to work on the next phase of the program. According to Shisei, the Hive brain was so fast, its internal security program could still overwhelm MANTIS. Laser transistors composed of atomic layers—not of indium phosphide and aluminum gallium arsenide, but of a monocrystalline diamond film—were all well and good for high electron mobility (in fact, he was astounded that the Americans actually had perfected them), but, the Scoundrel knew, under the right circumstances they actually could work to his advantage. The very tunneling effect—turning the electrons that carried the data inside a computer into a light wave rather than separate particles—that made these transistors so fast, could be used to carry the MANTIS spirals more swiftly into its midst. What the Scoundrel had to do was modify his virus program to accommodate the Hive laser chips.