Noda had worked his fingers more fully under the cord, his chin now resting safely on the knuckles of both hands. He countered the drag of his own body weight with the force of his biceps, which bulged under the strain. He began to maneuver his head back and forth, easing the hangman’s noose fractionally forward with each movement.
“If there’s any chance,” I said, thinking that the okami-san hadn’t seen a body.
“We took him alive,” the man in black said.
“They don’t take hostages,” Noda said. “Stay back.”
His warning was steeped in everything there was to fear, but images of Mori’s wife, her stomach rounded and swelling, smothered my resistance.
I stooped down to hear the reply.
“Where?” I asked again.
“Dead,” he said, grinning. “Like you.”
With what must have sent spasms of pain rolling down his spine, he tried to raise his arm. It twitched and a gun I hadn’t seen rolled away from his paralyzed fingers.
“You did this,” he hissed.
I picked up the gun and pointed it vaguely in his direction. The linguist
was
dead. The fragile thread of hope I’d held on to snapped. My soul sagged and something inexplicably sad dropped into my heart.
The gunman laughed coldly. “And we’ll get you too. Sooner than you think.”
I ignored him, thinking only of the horse-faced Mrs. Mori with her forgiving look and her otherworldly demeanor. The gunman opened his mouth to speak again, but Noda pressed the barrel of his gun to the man’s head.
“Stay very quiet,” the chief detective growled through clenched teeth. With his free hand, Noda rummaged through a duffel bag and came up with a pair of socks. The socks went into the fallen fighter’s mouth. Next, Noda wound a shirt around the man’s head, knotting it to secure the makeshift gag. He used a second shirt to bind the hands.
“I was hoping to talk to this one,” I said.
“No time. Gotta go.”
The words echoed in my ears. I stumbled sideways.
“Brodie?”
I fell forward onto my knees and felt the dampness of the ground cover seep through my pants. A wave of nausea rolled through me. I began to shiver.
“Something’s wrong,” I heard myself say.
“Drop the gun,” Noda said.
“What?”
Noda kicked the weapon from of my hand, then knelt down and smelled it.
“Poison,” he said. “One-way weapons, remember?”
He pried open my hand. A blue ointment streaked my palm and fingers. The fragrance of magnolia drifted by. Clawing the ground, Noda grabbed a fistful of damp soil and ground it into my palm, brushed
it off, and repeated the action, using the earth as a blotter to suck the poison from my pores.
“Brodie?”
A cold sweat wrapped itself around my body and hot flashes raced up my face and neck. Blinking and shaking my head to stave off dizziness, I vomited into a clutch of fiddlehead ferns.
“Look, Brodie, there’s no time. Hold this and whatever you do, stay conscious.”
He slapped a handful of moist topsoil into my palm and curled my fingers around it.
Fired up on adrenaline, Noda strapped on the night-vision goggles I’d slung aside, grabbed a second pair from the body he’d shot out of the tree, then slung me over his shoulder and began running down the path faster than I would have thought possible.
He left the duffel bags behind.
CHAPTER 37
N
ODA
hauled me down the steep bank and cooled my fever in the river. He made me drink a lot of water, but the moist soil is what saved me. It leached away the residual poison before a full dosage could seep through my skin. Still, the potion took its toll. I felt drained. Depleted. And equally damaging: humiliated. I’d failed. Despite all I’d learned before, during, and after the attack in our room, I’d been duped by the very man I took down.
We rested a minute, then donned the night-vision goggles and moved silently downstream, listening for the slightest ripple, the faintest break of water ahead or behind. We scanned the ridges of the gorge overhead for more attackers, all the while hugging the bank as the innkeeper advised.
With the goggles our world took on an eerie, electric green glow, enlivened by the occasional green-white hot spot when an owl or other night creature came within range. But more than high-tech accoutrements, we relied on Mother Nature. As long as the crickets and frogs on the overhanging banks sang, our safety was assured. So, an ear cocked to the fauna’s late-night revelries, Noda and I moved silently through the shallows. Any cessation would signal Soga’s arrival and, in my weakened condition—our quick death.
As we waded forward the crickets continued to saw, and the frogs to croak. The forest canopy, layered now with birch, covered our retreat. Underfoot were water, mud, and stone. Up ahead, a night bird plucked a small trout from the water.
I cringed. That could have been us earlier this evening.
The ravine was sculpted from granite and sandstone. In places it towered thirty feet above the river. Among the boulders on the banks, the snakes, nocturnal and venomous, protected our flanks.
In my diminished state, our progress was torturously slow, but each bend in the river took us farther from the village. As I trudged through the knee-high water, my movements were listless, and my thoughts plagued with imaginary scenarios of Mori’s last moments. Twice I stumbled and fell, and Noda had to backtrack and haul me forward, a steadying arm at my waist.
Before long the mosquitoes found us. They flew at our cheeks and eyes and ears, buzzing with an eagerness in proportion to the potential of their unexpected feast. Without thinking, I swatted one and the sound of my hand slapping flesh echoed down the corridor of stone.
“Don’t do that,” Noda hissed. “The noise carries.”
“They’ll eat us alive.”
“There’s worse ways to go.”
And right on cue, the worst materialized. Simultaneously, the cricket and frog song ceased. Noda and I heard the deafening silence at the same instant. Noda brought a finger to his lips and pointed down. The next moment, he slid into the water without a sound until all but his face was submerged. Following suit, I immersed myself in the shallow flow, lying on the riverbed, my body absorbing the chill of the water with a shiver of revulsion.
Seconds later, a head peered over the edge of the ravine. Through the night-vision goggles we watched him scan the river. With incremental head movements, he parsed the night scene before him.
His search was methodical and efficient. Anchored to the riverbed with a clawlike grip, I held my position under the Soga fighter’s steady inspection as frigid water rolled over me, draining off my body heat. To counter the numbing chill and encroaching drowsiness, I periodically loosened my right hand from the muddy bottom and dug a fingernail into my thigh.
Three minutes after the head appeared, it withdrew. Noda whispered, “Wait,” and a minute later the head reemerged twenty yards downriver and repeated the process. His glances were briefer this time, his head movements more rapid. Clearly, he was culling the landscape
for two vertical figures. The hazy green light of his night goggles was an imprecise filter, but it was the cold water damping the telltale warmth of our bodies that saved us.
Once more, the head withdrew. Loosening my grip, I allowed my body to float alongside Noda and pointed downstream. When he nodded, I withdrew my fingers from the mud, and the current tugged me gently forward, feetfirst. Using my hands as rudders, I directed my course. When the soles of my feet nudged up against a submerged boulder, I flapped one hand or the other and floated around the obstruction.
Noda followed my lead, and in this manner we traversed the next half mile. After the first three hundred yards, I veered toward the center of the river and picked up speed. Five hundred yards farther, we redirected our course to the side until we were once more in the shallows, where we sat up and paused to listen. The songs of the forest were hearty and confident.
Noda rose and signaled me to follow him. Again, we dragged ourselves forward through knee-deep water as our bodies slowly thawed. This time I let the mosquitoes bite. Though noticeably subdued with a cooler fare, they nevertheless feasted on arms, neck, and face. They preferred the fleshier parts, but there were those that did not make the distinction. One settled comfortably on my forehead above my right eyebrow. I flicked it away and three more took its place.
We remained tense and watchful, constantly monitoring the cricket and frog song as our eyes roamed back and forth across the ravine’s upper reaches.
Two hours later, our nerves frayed, our bodies shivering, and our reserve strength nearly depleted, we scaled the steep slopes of the ravine and hiked through scrub to the darkened Nissan Bluebird, where a sleeping George and civilization as practiced by the rest of the world waited.
CHAPTER 38
T
HE
visit to Soga had opened a whole new world of pain, and I thrashed around in the Nissan like a trout in a net. Some of my discomfort was the residual poison working its way out of my system. Most of it was not.
My heart slammed against my ribs with the insistence of a Soga drum, its message bleak:
What the hell are we going to do?
In the murky backwaters of Shiga Prefecture, we nearly perished—twice. Now, hurtling back toward Tokyo in the relative safety of our car, I could not get my mind around what Noda and I had encountered in that isolated river valley.
Knives were one thing, but
poison and hanging
?
Nothing Noda had told me prepared me for what we had witnessed. It was beyond fathomable. We had awakened the devil. There was no denying it. We’d escaped this time, but now what? Soga was out there. And we had no way to evade its next attack, or even identify a potential assailant until he or she or it was upon us.
Beside me, Noda handled the encounter in his own way, driving with fierce intensity, racing over the unending blacktop, eyes glued to the narrow tunnel of brightness the headlights carved from the dense country darkness.
We spent the first hour of our return trip in silence, after which Noda said, “We’ve seen the worst there is.”
I stared out the window, muddy rice paddies throwing back the gleam of the headlights as George slept in the backseat.
“Wish I hadn’t.”
“You can drop it, you want to.”
“You mean head back to the States, take my daughter away for a while?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t think I’m up to it?”
“Most people aren’t. And you’re green.”
As usual, Noda called it as he saw it.
The chief detective added, “Some people would say leaving now’s the smart move.”
I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes.
The smart move
. When I’d wrapped up my apprenticeship at Bristol Antiques to open my own shop, I’d drawn a line. Based on values instilled long ago, plus lifestyle decisions about independence and not buckling under. About being able to stand my ground and look at myself in the mirror every morning with a free and unbridled conscience. When I’d committed to Brodie Security, I’d brought along the same ideals. It was also how my father had conducted his life. Fought for every case, for every inch of freedom. In my formative years, when we showered together, he showed me how he “scrubbed off the grime” and told me about the day’s cases. The good, the bad, and the slimy. “No matter what,” he’d say, “stand tall. For the little guy—and for yourself.” It wasn’t until he died last October, still estranged, that I fully understood that my underlying code came from a fiercely independent man who made a new home for himself halfway around the world on his own terms, against the hardest odds.
All of that mattered to me. Noda might see similarities, but he knew nothing of my personal preferences as I never spoke of them. So he was testing me.
To move forward on the case, we’d taken what we believed were acceptable risks. We’d underestimated the situation to the extreme, yet survived. But what we uncovered threatened to destroy us—utterly and without prejudice. Yes, we had escaped, but we were in deeper than ever. Inescapably entangled. We could no more turn away from Soga than we could turn our backs on a snarling lion into whose cage we’d accidentally stepped.
Even if dropping the case were an option, I couldn’t do so without reneging on the promise I’d made to Renna. And then there was Mieko.
Soga had taken her from me. Stolen her, and in the process ripped my life apart. All the days of anguish, all the sleepless nights, all the ongoing loneliness—I owed to Soga.
For me there was no smart move, or dumb move.
There was only one move.
On the far side of Shizuoka, I said, “Not going to drop this one.”
A flicker of a smile crossed Noda’s lips. “Didn’t think you would but had to ask.”
“And now you have.”
This time Noda tempered his glance. “Time like this, there is only knowing and instinct. Your instincts were good. Very good.”
A wave of pleasure swept through me, though I kept it to myself. “Why didn’t you kill the fourth guy?”
“Not a threat anymore. We’re not them.”
“So now what?”
“Now we know more.”
“And the more we know, the easier it’ll gets?”
“Yeah.”
“If we survive.”
“Point still stands.”
“Not a lot of flexibility in your plan.”
He shrugged. “That’s all there is. Do or die.”
There was a darkness to Noda I could never penetrate. “When your friends went down, did they know what they were up against?”
“Not a clue.”
“Did they know about the kanji?”
“No.”
I sensed a hesitation in his clipped replies. What was he holding back?
“Noda?”
He tightened his grip on the wheel. “I lost a friend . . . and my brother.”
There it was. Like the rest of us, Noda had scars. In the Oriental mind, revenge was a timeless entity. Going underground, the forty-seven ronin had bided their time for two years. Noda had subdued his urges for five.
“I’m sorry,” I said.