Floating City (60 page)

He knew what he had to do, of course, but part of him was rebelling. He was not at all happy with the prospects and had to force his reluctance down into a deep hole. He kept the reverberations of
kokoro
echoing in his mind. He hoped it would be enough. He had to direct his mind from the coming pain as well as the fright. He had the added distraction of Kshira, the dark side of Tau-tau, twining its tendrils deeper and deeper through his Akshara training.

At the corner of his cage where the human bones were piled were desiccated feces. He squatted down, and while he urinated, he scooped up the dried material and smeared it along his right arm, shoulder, and that side of his chest. Then he rose and, pressing the smoldering cigar butt to his forearm, watched as the dried feces flared into flame and crackled and flickered up his arm.

He began to burn.

He dropped the butt and let out a piercing shout. But the guards, alerted by the initial flare-up, were on their way. One unlocked the cage while another stepped in to pull Nicholas out of there.

Sunk deep into Tau-tau, he felt the heat but not the pain. At first it was only the feces burning, then his hair caught fire, and below, the flesh began to curl and crisp.

He smashed an elbow into the solar plexus of the guard who had stepped inside the cage, then shoved his flaming arm into the face of the guard who had unlocked the door.

The first guard made a lunge for him from behind. Nicholas swiveled and, grabbing the man’s right wrist with his left hand, completed the circle, pulling the man’s upper torso out and down. He bent his knee, following the man down in the direction of the attack, using the man’s momentum against him, turning his wrist over in an
irimi.
The bone cracked and the guard collapsed.

The second guard, slapping at the sparks that had caught on his clothes, had pulled his handgun. Using the callused edge of his hand, Nicholas struck him at the point where the nerve bundle gathers at the side of the wrist. The guard dropped the gun, and Nicholas slammed the heel of his hand into the guard’s neck just beneath the chin, crushing the cricoid cartilage. The man went to his knees, unable to breathe.

All this happened in the space of a heartbeat. The remaining two guards were still heading toward the cage, but had not yet overcome the shock of their two fellow guards going down.

The third guard had his AK-47 leveled at Nicholas, but he was unprepared for his target to launch himself directly at him. His finger froze on the trigger as, at that instant, Nicholas stepped inside his defense and, pivoting on his lead foot, broke the guard’s ribs with a vicious kite.

The fourth guard, panicking, began to fire in rapid, irregular bursts. Nicholas grabbed the guard with the broken ribs and, using him as a shield, threw him into the line of fire while he ducked his head and shoulders and, rolling into a ball, made an oblique approach.

The firing continued until the fourth guard, realizing he was shooting his compatriot, abruptly pulled the muzzle of the AK-47 into the air. Nicholas’s foot smashed into the side of his leg, fracturing the kneecap. He went down just as Nicholas struck his collarbone with a teeth-rattling blow.

Nicholas scooped up the AK-47 and sprinted across the compound, pulling the burning feces off his arm. His roll across the packed earth had already put out most of the fire, and he continued to damp down his pain receptors while he tried to keep from inhaling the stench of his burned flesh.

As he zigzagged across the compound, he tried to figure out what Mick Leonforte’s motive might have been for leaving the lit cigar butt within his reach. He strongly doubted it could have been anything but deliberate. Had Mick wanted him to escape, and if so, why? He thought he had an inkling.

Up ahead, there was a storm of commotion. The AK-47 gunfire had not gone unnoticed, and what seemed an entire squad of men who had been loading the trucks were coming his way in double time. Nicholas ducked behind the corner of a thatched shed and, taking a bead on the last truck in line—the one nearest him—fired at the fuel tank.

The explosion rocked the compound, scattering the men who weren’t caught in the percussion. Nicholas darted from his hiding place and dashed for the doorway through which he had seen Mick disappear. He reached it while the echoes of the eruption were still thundering and plumes of black, oily smoke obscured the farthest buildings.

He had expected offices or sleeping quarters, but instead he found himself in a glass-walled anteroom overlooking what appeared to be a series of climate-controlled laboratories. He took a rough-concrete staircase down, then went through two metal doors. The atmosphere had changed radically. It was now noticeably cold; all the humidity had been sucked out, and he knew he was breathing recycled air.

Still in Tau-tau he recalled word for word the defecting scientist Niigata’s detailed description of the laboratory complex; he already had a complete image of this building’s layout in his mind, and he headed straight for Abramanov’s lab.

Two men armed with machine pistols raced around a corner. Nicholas, who had felt the vibrations of their psyches, headed into them. He kicked out, catching one in the groin. He slammed into the second. The machine pistol went off, showering them with shards of concrete and sparks. The lights in the corridor winked out. The man lifted his weapon high, intending to bring the butt down on Nicholas’s head. Nicholas raised one arm, gripping the machine pistol, bringing it back down in the arc the man had intended. As Nicholas did so, and seeming not to move at all, he shifted his upper torso out of the way. When the machine pistol was waist high, he jammed the heel of his other hand under the man’s left elbow, jerked it sharply upward. The man lost his balance and went over, and Nicholas used a kite against his windpipe.

He went inexorably on, knowing he was nearly at Abramanov’s lab. The steel door was just ahead of him, and he put his shoulder to it. It banged open and he raced inside.

There he found Abramanov. He was on his knees, and Nicholas, projecting his psyche, knew he was too late. He knelt beside the stricken Russian. He had been shot through the stomach; Rock had picked a particularly painful way for him to die.

“Abramanov.” Nicholas wrapped the Russian in Tau-tau. If he could not save his life, then he could at least make his last moments more tolerable.

The Russian gasped, perhaps with the release from the blinding pain. His watery eyes looked up as Nicholas supported him.

“Who—”

“Where is Torch?”

“Rock... Rock took it...” The Russian’s face was pale with the massive loss of blood. Nicholas could feel the life force fading, and he suppressed the pain receptors to their full limit. If he was not exactly inside Abramanov’s mind, he was close enough to feel the encroachment of death. Even Tau-tau had its limits.

“Where is Rock?”

“Outside... the compound.” Tears leaked out of Abramanov’s eyes and his nostrils flared. His lungs were filling with fluid. “The danger... you don’t know... There’s more than...”

Nicholas could hear in his mind the beating, as of the wings of an angel. Then Abramanov pitched forward into his arms.

Every Friday at precisely six
P
.
M
. Tetsuo Akinaga went to the
o-furo,
the public baths his father had erected decades ago. He took with him more than a dozen men, all of them armed, who swarmed through the
o-furo
with the thorough determination of carpenter ants before the
oyabun
set foot inside the bathhouse.

Akinaga was justifiably proud of the
o-furo
his father had built. Not that he himself was prone to such magnanimous gestures to the public weal; he did not have his father’s disagreeable penchant for wanting to be loved and admired. Akinaga reveled in his outcast status; he wanted no opportunity to wade in among the masses. This weekly pilgrimage to the
o-furo
was a rite of respect for the memory of his father that the members of his clan spoke of endlessly.

As he disrobed in the steamy cedar locker room, Akinaga thought it ironic that in life Tsunetomo had fatuously mismanaged clan affairs, but in death he had been elevated to a status close to that of the emperor. Deification was a natural concept to the Japanese, who were brought up to think of themselves as apart from the rest of the human race. Making a cult of Tsunetomo among the Shikei had been Akinaga’s idea; it increased his influence while securing his position as
oyabun.
Like the Tokugawa shogunate, which lasted two hundred years, Akinaga was determined that his familial line would endure as
oyabun
of the Shikei for decades to come. He would not allow a replay of the clever coup Mikio Okami had engineered within the Yamauchi, ousting Seizo and Mitsuba Yamauchi, replacing them with Tomoo Kozo, a man outside the traditional lineal descendants.

He stepped into the tiled shower room, sat on a low wooden stool while one of his men poured hot water over him from a cedar bucket. He soaped up, then was rinsed off, the water sluicing away through the aromatic cedar slats. No one, other than his own men, shared the shower room with him.

Then he rose and, accompanied by six of his men, entered the
o-furo
proper. Steam rose from the six tiled pools sunk into the floor. Laced with herbs, each had a different medicinal property.

Akinaga, as was his habit, entered the birch pool, which had been cleared of other bathers. From the surrounding pools, men with cloths over their heads to keep the sweat from the clean water watched furtively as the
oyabun
settled himself in the deliciously hot water. He spread his legs out, leaned back against the tiles, and closed his eyes to slits. He thought of a haiku and, with its imagery, Ushiba. It seemed to him a shame that the Daijin had proved such a disappointment. He had planned to utilize Ushiba’s influence inside MITI to solidify his economic position among the so-called reformers of the splintered Liberal Democratic Party. He recognized that Japan was changing, slowly, agonizingly becoming more Americanized, as Akira Chosa would have said.

In the purely pragmatic manner he missed Ushiba, he felt Chosa’s absence as well. Chosa had known the Americans; he would have proved invaluable in this changing environment. But Chosa had been determined to oppose Akinaga and that had sealed his fate.

Perhaps it didn’t matter. Money still spoke louder than rhetoric. Whatever lip service these so-called reformers were paying to ridding the political landscape of payoffs, mutual favors, and closed shops, the underlying realities would change little. Bidding for jobs would become more commonplace as a sop to the public outcry and to the railing of the Americans, but already Akinaga was putting in place a system of rigging that would return the fundamentals more or less to the way they had always been. Japan was a master of surface symbology, of seeming to change while doing just what it had always done decade after decade.

Akinaga’s head turned as he heard a disturbance. Two men dressed in suits had entered the
o-furo.
They began to sprint toward Akinaga’s pool. One of his men drew a pistol, and a shot boomed through the large tiled room. Water sloshed over the sides of the pools as bathers jumped.

Akinaga’s man fell across the top edge of the birch pool, his head in the fragrant water. His gun clattered on the tiles, skidding inches from where Akinaga’s hand lay. The
o-furo
was suddenly full of men in suits. Blood began to stain the water, beginning as a bright crimson lily, then floating outward in beautiful tendrils. Akinaga’s fingers twitched as his men held their position.

“Go ahead,” Tanaka Gin said, striding toward the birch-scented pool. “Pick it up.”

Akinaga glared at him with basilisk eyes. “What is the meaning of this extreme discourtesy, Prosecutor?”

Tanaka Gin reached down and, with a handkerchief, retrieved the gun from the fallen Yakuza. Without looking back, he handed it to a plainclothes detective who stood almost at attention behind his right shoulder. The
o-furo
was filled with policemen, some of whom had been delegated the task of clearing the room of innocent bystanders.

Tanaka Gin stared down without expression at the
oyabun.
“The media are outside, clamoring for an interview. It’s up to you whether you meet them dressed or wrapped in towels. Either way, I’m going to parade you in the street; I’m going to make a spectacle of you.”

Now Akinaga allowed himself a crafty smile. “Is this what you spend your time on, harassing citizens?”

“You’re no citizen.”

Akinaga raised his eyebrows. “That will come as news to my lawyers. I have harmed no one; I have broken no law. Ask your whipping boy, Yoshinori.”

“Yoshinori has said nothing of you or Chosa.”

“Then get out of here. You have already fouled my water.”

“Or Ushiba,” Tanaka Gin said implacably.

For the first time, Akinaga’s sangfroid appeared to slip momentarily. “The Daijin? I don’t understand.”

Tanaka Gin said nothing. He looked around. Cops had Akinaga’s men lined up against the tile wall, patting them down for weapons.

The blood was seeping through the water and Akinaga squirmed in the heat. He longed to get out of the bath, but he saw this as a loss of face, and he would not give the prosecutor the satisfaction.

“Is this why you have come here?” Akinaga said contemptuously. “On a bluff?”

“It’s no bluff.” Tanaka Gin gestured. “Stand up.”

“You can’t—”

“Do as I say!”

Tanaka Gin’s voice was so thunderous that those Yakuza closest to him started. Akinaga rose, the pink water dripping down his naked flesh. He was aware of the cops and his men staring at him, and he vowed to make the prosecutor pay for this humiliation. Tanaka Gin was grandstanding. First, taking Yoshinori into custody, and now this harassment. Akinaga knew there were measures he could take that...

All thought came to an abrupt halt as he stared at what Tanaka Gin had produced. A length of cord dangled against Akinaga’s chest beaded with water and perspiration.