Floating City (57 page)

The lure of his delirious reunion with Koei still exerted its magic on him, and it was almost too much to bear to part with her again. His only solace was that she had promised that she would go to Tokyo. He had told her to go to his friend and partner, Tanzan Nangi, and stay with him until Nicholas returned.

“It’s time I ended my exile here,” she had told him just before he had left with Van Kiet. “The truth is I’ve been terrified of Michael ever since I left him. There was a look in his eye...” She had broken off, shuddering, and Nicholas had held her.

“Mick Leonforte can’t touch you now,” he had said.

Koei had clung to him, not wanting him to go. “You don’t know him the way I do. He’s relentless, and so very clever. He always gets what he wants, in the end.”

Nicholas had made her look into his eyes. “Listen to me. When you get to Tokyo tell Nangi everything. He will know what precautions to take.” He had kissed her hard on the lips. “You’ll see me sooner than you think.”

Nicholas returned to the present. The jeep jounced along the rutted highway that stretched more or less straight north out of Saigon, which was already a half day’s travel behind them. Van Kiet was in a black mood. He had lost control the moment he had brought Nicholas to meet Huynh Van Dich, and he did not like that. Tachi was dead, and Nicholas knew the way into Floating City.

“When we get inside,” Van Kiet said, “you’ll leave Rock to me. I know how to handle his kind.”

Nicholas doubted that. Van Kiet was filled with rage, and that made for muddied thinking. Besides, he was hell-bent to blow away Rock and anyone else who got in his way. What Nicholas needed was answers. Why was Floating City so important to Akinaga and Chosa—and, he was beginning to suspect, to Mikio Okami as well? Rock and, for that matter, Mick Leonforte lying dead in the middle of their empire would do him no good at all.

“We need to consider our approach to Rock and Leonforte,” he said.

“This
is the only approach that won’t get us killed,” Van Kiet said, hefting a MAC-10 machine pistol.

“There’s another way.”

Van Kiet, accelerating, shook his head. “You don’t know these bastards. Tachi and I have been hunting them for more than two years.” He maneuvered past a pair of lumbering, rattletrap trucks spewing diesel exhaust into the greenish early evening. “There is only one way to deal with them. Talk is out of the question. Their ears are filled with the music of the spheres. What you or I say to them will mean as much as the wind through the trees. They—Buddha!”

The road opened up in front of them in a huge geyser of tarmac, stones, and flying chunks of concrete. The explosion’s shock wave tore the windshield off the jeep, and Van Kiet put his arms up, cried out as a fragment of metal struck him.

Scrambling over him, Nicholas stamped hard on the brakes, jerked the wheel hard over to the left. Fighting blowing ash and debris that pelted him like buckshot, he shoved Van Kiet out of the way. The jeep bucked heavily as it lurched toward the leading edge of the crater that had appeared through the violent windstorm explosion.

Nicholas, battling the headlong momentum of the jeep, saw they were going to go into the crater, and he stamped hard on the accelerator and, keeping the wheels straight, threw Van Kiet into the backseat behind him. Leaning hard over to his left, he felt the change in weight distribution in the jeep as it began to go over. The instant it lifted up on two tires, he compensated with the wheel, keeping them at this angle.

The jeep rolled on, skirting the gaping hole in the highway. He kept it skidding precariously on two wheels as he struggled to keep on the verge where the tires would have clear purchase.

He fanned the brakes as he drove the gears lower, until the jeep’s speed was reduced enough for it to bounce down on all four wheels.

“Who the hell—”

A second explosion upended the jeep.

Nicholas allowed instinct and his
tanjian
eye to take over. He let go of the wheel and leapt clear, relaxing his muscles, rolling on his side and shoulder as he hit the slope by the side of the highway. But a third explosion ripped apart the slope near him and he tumbled backward, his head cracking against the bole of a tree. He lay dazed for a moment, trying to bring the world back into focus.

A hundred yards away, he saw Van Kiet, bloody and shaking, climbing from the jeep, which lay on its side, steaming, its entire back end crumpled where it hadn’t been blown away altogether. Van Kiet had the MAC-10 out, and now Nicholas could see a giant of a man in jungle fatigues appearing over a heavily foliaged rise. Slung around one shoulder was a LAW-M72, a light antitank rocket launcher, art American weapon used extensively during the war. The man must be as strong as a quarter horse to carry it himself, Nicholas thought. He had a square, rugged face, tanned and fierce, dominated by oddly pale blue eyes. His blond hair was cropped short, in military style, but he bore no resemblance to any form of American military personnel Nicholas had ever seen. Rather, he moved like an Asian—that is, from the lower belly. He was centered, powerful mentally as well as physically. And his face was testimony that the war had exterminated from him any semblance of normal human emotion. As he aimed the weapon in Van Kiet’s direction, Nicholas knew he was looking at Rock, the emperor of Floating City. He was up and running toward Van Kiet.

“Get away from here!” Van Kiet screamed. “Are you insane? We have laws here.”

“You don’t get it, do you, you fucking slant cop,” Rock said, advancing. “You don’t give the orders here. I do.”

Nicholas shouted a warning, but Van Kiet wasn’t listening. His rage had gotten the better of him. He let go a burst from the machine pistol, but he had lost a lot of blood, and rocking on his feet, his aim was poor.

“Moron.” Rock kept advancing, and Nicholas changed course, heading obliquely toward him. “Fucking cretin. I would have taken care of you if you’d come aboard.”

“I can’t be bought,” Van Kiet shouted.

“But you can die.” Without any expression registering on his face, Rock pulled the trigger on the LAW, and Nicholas ducked down.

A great white-hot
whoosh!
spun in a tight trajectory, exploding so close to Van Kiet it lifted him fifty feet in the air. Rock had picked him off as cleanly as if he had used a sharpshooter’s rifle. Van Kiet, or what was left of him, came down in a shower of bits and pieces.

Rock was already striding through this viscous rain, sidestepping the mini-crater as he reloaded the deadly LAW, heading for Nicholas.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this, fucker.”

Nicholas was using Tau-tau to clear his head and bring his reactions back to normal level. “I was coming after you.”

Rock grunted. “We’ll see who’s coming after who when you’ve spent a couple of days in Floating City.” He waggled the LAW. “Come on. I’d like nothing better than for you to make a move.” He smirked. “No? You’ll probably regret it. It’s the fucking cage for you.”

Ushiba was thinking of Akira Chosa. Sitting in the Daijin’s grand office at MITI, he heard telephones ringing, the chatter of faxes coming through from all points on the globe, the hum of laser printers hard at work making hard copies of his policies for dissemination to other bureaus and the media. He had just finished a conference call with the prime minister and the minister of housing of which he had no memory. In twenty minutes he was due in the main hall to deliver his weekly press briefing with Tanaka Gin. He knew that because he was staring at his electronic calendar, which his assistant updated three times daily. But, today, the words meant nothing to him.

All his life he had striven to do what was right for Japan. He had trained, given up most of his childhood and all of his adolescence to worship at the shrine of
kanryodo,
the cult of the samurai-bureaucrat. For this privileged career he had dispensed with any meaningful personal life. This was as it should be; all warriors led a life of self-discipline and austerity. He had not questioned its validity until this moment.

As if in a trance, he rose from behind his desk and, walking to a burl credenza, poured himself a glass of ice water. Drinking it down, he returned to his desk, where he sat staring out the window at the neon-and-glass spires of Tokyo. But his gaze was turned inward, his mind far away.

At the moment he had heard that Chosa died by his own hand, what had been his first thought?

To die in one’s own way at one’s own time had about it a dignity impossible in other circumstances. To be at the mercy of one’s enemy, to have life reduced to the space of a barred cell, was unthinkable.

The continuing threat of the cancer he could live with; he had already resigned himself to carrying it around with him, sleeping or awake, for the rest of his days. In fact, he had come to think of it as a special friend, a visitor, perhaps, from another plane of existence. It served no purpose to rail against a condition one could not change.

But this was different. This was Tetsuo Akinaga. Akinaga, his enemy, who had bested him once and who now sought to lord it over him forever. It was unthinkable.

He blinked and his eyes focused on the contours of the city in which he had lived all his life. Tokyo was Japan—the soul of the new Japan, at least. He recognized rather belatedly that Chosa had been right about that, just as he had been right about the Americans. Like that of a parent with a frighteningly precocious child, the relationship between America and Japan had reached a new, unknowable stage. But like the ties that forever bind a child to its parent, the cord was severed only at the risk of jeopardizing the lives of both.

Chosa had been right to pursue his relationship with America. No matter what bad blood was stirred, resurrected, and waved like a flag by those who would see the ties cut, the relationship would endure. The Japanese needed the American diplomatic methodology and inventive ideas, and the Americans needed the Japanese work ethic, sense of efficiency, and its ability to refine and market new consumer products.

He had spent most of his adult life trying to keep the Americans out of Japan, and it had all but killed him. Why had it taken Chosa’s death to allow him to see the truth?

This was only one of many questions without an answer. But that was the nature of human existence, to ask, whether or not answers were forthcoming.

He turned, flicked on his intercom, and asked for Yukio Haji, the protégé to whom he had given money when he had needed it. The young man appeared in his office sixty seconds later. He stood in the doorway, bowing deeply.

“Come in and close the door, Haji-san.”

“Hai.”

As Haji crossed the room and sat in the same steel-frame chair he had occupied when he had come to his mentor to solve his temporary financial problem, Ushiba opened a drawer in his desk. He stared down at the locked metal case built into it. On the day his cancer had been diagnosed he had filled the box with several items he deemed necessary. He might never use them, or even open the box, he had thought on that day, but somehow their presence had provided a measure of comfort.

“How has work been these last few weeks, Haji-san? I’m afraid my busy schedule has not permitted me to keep track.”

“Everything is being dealt with. There are no problems,” Haji said somewhat nervously. One wasn’t called to a private audience with the Daijin every day. “Of course, the land-trust issue has yet to be resolved, and I am awaiting confirmation of the microchip pact from the Electronics Policy Section of the Machinery and Information Industries Bureau. The International Trade Section is, of course, involved, so the matter is not a simple one to resolve.”

“Yes, yes. Quite.” Ushiba was sad. Once this kind of talk would have thrilled him, as it obviously did Haji. But now he had other matters on his mind, and they seemed far more pressing than the quotidian workings of MITI. “As long as you are encountering no difficulties.”

“No, Daijin.”

“Excellent.” Ushiba lapsed into such a profound silence that it seemed he had ceased to breathe. At length, he reached down and, with a small brass key, opened the locked box. Inside was a neatly folded kimono of indigo and black. He removed this. Beneath it was a w
akizashi
—a long ceremonial dagger lying in its rayskin sheath.

“Please excuse me for a moment, Haji-san,” Ushiba said, rising. When he returned from his private file room, he was dressed in the kimono.

Haji jumped up, alarmed. “Daijin, no!”

“Your duty is to help me,” Ushiba said simply. “That is
kanryodo.”

A terrible look of grief passed across Haji’s face and was swiftly gone. He bowed his head. “Yes, Daijin.”

On bare feet, Ushiba moved to the center of the room where he knelt, arranging the folds of his kimono in precise, concentric circles. From beneath the folds of the garment he produced the
wakizashi.
He gestured to Haji, said softly to him, “Here is your last lesson. You must accept with your whole heart what must be done.”

“Yes, Daijin.” He knelt beside Ushiba.

“You must know it and you must believe it.”

“Yes, Daijin.”

Ushiba closed his eyes, preparing himself. It seemed vaguely ironic that he was about to take his life not to spare himself the indignity of the descent into the final stages of cancer, but to free himself from a cleverly designed man-made prison. The one he could accept far more readily than the other. He thought of Mikio Okami, and his heart was heavy that he had helped murder the one man who could have saved them all from the fiend Akinaga, hidden like a viper in their midst.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, Daijin.”

The last person he thought of was Tanaka Gin, and he experienced a profound sorrow at their parting. They had been like two wayfarers on a desolate mountain path far from home who come to one another’s aid for the sake of simple human compassion. Then his mind was filled only with poetry, and the simple images of haiku focused him. Thus surrounded by beauty, he thrust the
wakizashi
into his lower belly. Strangely, except for a momentary pain he felt nothing. Then his hands began to tremble, and leaning forward, Haji put his hands over the Daijin’s. Haji’s lips were moving as if in a prayer. Whom was he praying to? Ushiba wondered.