Linnear 03 - White Ninja (21 page)

'Mr Linnear -'

The doors opened on the enormous lobby dominated by a sculpture composed of black rock, waterfall and foliage, and Nicholas strode purposefully out.

Tomi bent, snatched up the crumpled slip of paper. She had just a moment to glance at what was written on it before she hurried out after him. She caught up with Nicholas near the automatic doors. They were glazed a soft bronze colour so that the sunlight coming through them was devoid of heat.

'Mr Linnear, please - '

'Some other time, Sergeant Yazawa.' Nicholas went through the doors.

Out on the street, Tomi said forcefully, 'I must speak with you on a matter of life or death, Mr Linnear. Your life. Your death.' This gave him pause, and she took advantage of it. 'I wanted to tell you in a more politic manner, but you leave me no choice. According to a communiqu? we intercepted and decoded late yesterday, you have been marked for assassination by the Red Army one week from today. I have been - '

Tomi broke off as a scream reverberated against the mammoth facade of the skyrise. An instant later, the sun was momentarily blotted out as a shape hurtled to

the sidewalk not ten yards from where they were standing. 'Jesus!' Nicholas breathed. 'A jumper!'

Tomi had broken away from him, and was threading her way through the already gathering crowd. Nicholas went after her, saw her kneeling by the side of a male figure. He had landed on the small of his back, and his spine and legs were broken in so many places that his shape had already ceased to resemble anything human. Blood seeped along the sidewalk in a spiderweb pattern radiating out from the broken body. Bits of glass shimmered on the concrete, here and there pink and red and dark brown.

Gingerly, Tomi reached out, turned the head towards, them. The back was completely smashed in, but the face, though blood-streaked, was recognizable.

'God Almighty!' Nicholas said, and Tomi looked up.

'Do you know this man, Mr Linnear?'

Nicholas nodded. "That's Dr Hanami, the surgeon who operated on me.' He looked up, could see the darkness like an open mouth where the window to Dr Hanami's consulting office had been.

Tomi and Nicholas pushed their way through the gesticulating mob. Inside the building, Tomi showed her credentials to a uniformed attendant, told her what had happened, to call the police. Then they took the lift up.

'By all rights,' Tomi said, 'you shouldn't be coming with me. We have no idea what happened up there.'

Nicholas said nothing, looked at her.

'He could have jumped,' Tomi went on. 'Or he could have been pushed.'

'Why would someone want to murder a surgeon?' Nicholas asked.

'A grudge for malpractice?' Tomi shrugged. 'Why does the Red Army want you dead?'

Nicholas continued to look at her. 'You tell me. I haven't the faintest idea.'

'I'm allowing you to come with me,' Tomi said, continuing a previous thought, 'because I have been assigned as your bodyguard. I'm on the scene of a potential crime, so I've got to respond. You've got to accompany me.'

'Otherwise you would have stopped me?'

'Yes,' Tomi said. 'I would have stopped you.'

'How?' Nicholas leaned towards her. He was not in the mood for either idle bluffs or for tough talk from someone he didn't know.

The doors opened and they raced across the hall to Dr Hanami's office suite. They burst through the door to confront the white-faced receptionist who stared wide-eyed at them. She had her arms around a hunched woman, obviously a patient, who was sobbing in great, inconstant gasps.

'I've called the police,' the receptionist said to no one hi particular, but she nodded as Tomi identified herself. She pointed to a closed door to her right. 'In there. The doctor's inner office.'

'Who was the doctor's last patient?' Tomi asked.

'Well, he was,' the receptionist said, pointing to Nicholas.

'Was anyone with the doctor after Linnear-san left?'

'I don't know,' the receptionist said. "The doctor asked me to leave bun this hour free.'

'You saw no one go in there after Linnear-san left?'

'No.'

'Stay here,' Tomi said to Nicholas.

'Like hell,' he said but, seeing the gun in her hand, he kept well back.

Tomi turned the knob, threw the door wide open. Wind rattled the vertical metal blinds that had been ripped from their bottom moorings. To the left of the window was Dr Hanami's paper-strewn desk, his high-backed chair turned away from them as if he had leaped from it to the window. They saw that a side chair, leaning up against the sill, had

been used to break the glass of the sealed window.

'Well, one thing we know,' Nicholas said. 'It wasn't an accident.'

Tomi went across the small room to the door on the opposite side. 'What do we have here?'

She put her gun up, jerked the door open. 'This leads right out into the hallway,' she said, peering out. 'If Dr Hanami was murdered, this was how his murderer got in and out without being seen by the receptionist.'

Tomi closed the door, went over to the shattered window, looking for blood, a note or any other sign that might tell her whether Dr Hanami's death had been a suicide or a murder. She stared out of the ruptured window at the vaporous city below. 'God, it's a long way down.'

'Sergeant.'

Tomi started at Nicholas's voice which was not loud but nevertheless got her attention. She looked in the direction in which he was staring. From this angle, she could see Dr Hanami's high-backed chair in profile. There was a hand lying along the armrest.

Tomi took three quick steps, spun the chair around to face them. They saw a small, roly-poly man of middle-age in a grey pinstriped suit. His long, unruly hair stood up from his scalp as if he had been delivered an electric shock. Wire-rimmed glasses were perched on his pale forehead as if he were plunged deep in thought.

Tomi could not help but let out a gasp as the corpse's one blackened, ruined eye socket stared blankly at her.

'Jesus,' Nicholas said, 'who the hell is this?'

'What the hell happened to him?' Tomi was peering at the lethal wound. 'This is horrific.' Close to the corpse, there was an unmistakable smell of roasted flesh. 'He was burned with something small and very hot.'

'It must have had penetrating power,' Nicholas said.

Tomi moved back, took a pencil off the desk top, used it to lift up part of the corpse's unbuttoned jacket. Carefully, she extracted a wallet from the corpse's breast pocket. Dropping it on the desk, she opened it with the pencil point.

'Dr Jugo Muku,' she read from a driver's licence. She looked up. 'Wait a minute!' She took out the piece of paper Nicholas had thrown in the lift, and which she had picked up. Unfolding it again, she said, 'Linnear-san, you had Dr Muku's name when I first met you.' She looked at him.

'Dr Hanami gave it to me,' Nicholas said. He was staring at the mutilated face of Dr Muku. 'He was under the impression that I needed psychological help.'

'There's a phone number here,' Tomi said. 'And another number, but no address.'

'It's a suite number,' Nicholas said. 'Dr Muku's office is in this building.'

'I think we ought to take a look,' Tomi said. She went back past the window. As she did, she noticed something on one of the remaining shards of glass. She moved closer, stared hard at it.

'Linnear-san,' she said in a breathless voice, 'what colour was Dr Hanami's hair?' There had been too much blood and spattered brains to make such a determination from the corpse.

'Grey,' Nicholas said, coming closer. 'And he used some kind of hair cream.' He was looking at the spot that had caught Tomi's attention. Several strands of iron-grey hair, wet-looking, clung wretchedly to the sharp point of a glass shard. 'It looks like his.'

'Which could mean,' Tomi said, 'that he went through the window headfirst. No one would do that, not even a suicide.'

'You mean he might have been thrown?'

Tomi was busily gathering the evidence into a glassine

envelope. 'It's looking more and more likely. Then there's Dr Muku's death to con - '

She looked up as a shadow registered on the extreme periphery of her vision. She stared, open-mouthed, as if she were in one of those dreams where unthinkable calamity is about to strike and, shouting a warning, one finds that one's voice is gone.

The black form had coalesced into a distinct shape: that of a human figure. It was clothed completely in matt black so that Tomi could not see even its face. It rose up from outside the bottom lip of the window. Her brain was frozen in shock. The figure was on the outside of the building.

Such a thing was impossible, Tomi knew that. And yet her brain was reacting to w.hat her eyes were showing it. The figure appeared in a split-instant. Tomi felt her heart give a painful lurch. She felt as if she were in a lift in free-fall. Her stomach dropped, her bowels turned to water.

Even so, as the figure was silently swinging in towards her, part of her mind had given instructions for her right hand to grab her pistol, bring it up.

Time ran abruptly out. The figure crashed into her with such force that it drove all breath from her lungs. She flew backwards with barely a sound, tumbling over Dr Hanami's cypress-wood coffee table, dislodging its heavy glass top.

The top of her spine slammed against the side wall, her head snapped back and blue lights flashed, a jolt of pain causing her to cry out at last. But that sound was drowned out by the shattering of the table top. Groggy and nauseous, Tomi tried to get up, fell heavily back. She was fighting just to breathe.

All this had taken no more than a second or two. Time enough for the old Nicholas to have turned, assessed the situation, and begun a tactical strategy against the unknown assailant.

But this was another Nicholas entirely. His mind, unfocused, without the ability to 'sink in', without his beloved Getsumei no michi, was unable to react in any meaningful or coordinated way to the attack on Tomi.

He understood that whoever had murdered Dr Muku had probably thrown Dr Hanami out of the window. He understood that this individual had been hanging outside the shattered window, clinging to the concrete and steel of the skyrise's skin like a fly. He suspected, further, that from the deliberateness of the attack on Tomi the murderer seemed to have been waiting coolly for them.

There was nothing wrong with Nicholas's capacity for reasoning. It was his ability to translate the reasoning into action that had been taken from him.

Now he confronted the black-garbed figure and knew that he faced a ninja. Only a ninja could have planned out and executed two such bizarre murders. Only a ninja could have clung to the sheer side of a building twenty storeys up, swung in through a shattered window, taken out a trained and armed police officer with such ease.

Nicholas felt a resurgence of the cold fear slithering in his gut. It could be no coincidence, he knew, that just when he had lost his powers, he was confronting another ninja.

It was true, then. He was Shiro Ninja. Defenceless and under attack. Which meant that this figure was more than a ninja. Far more and far less.

Nicholas said a silent prayer.

The figure, which had been momentarily still and silent, erupted into a fury of motion. Dimly Nicholas recognized that this was something he had once been able to do.

He tried to prepare himself for the coming attack as best he could, but the figure was upon him before he could get his mind to function properly.

Pain exploded along nerve meridians in chest, abdomen and pelvis and, like a line of dominoes beginning to fall,

Nicholas felt first one section then another paralysed by short, vicious blows to various nexus points. The pain was not localized to the target of each strike; because of the nature of the blows it ripped through the interconnecting nerve network within his body.

His muscles bunched and knotted, betraying him at every turn, spasming with the bursts of nerve-pain, overlapping so that they began to have a cumulative effect on him, magnifying exponentially their debilitating impact.

The assault was methodical, almost scientific, in the way it dissected his body into quadrants. Nicholas knew without being able to do anything about it that he was being put out an inch at a time. To achieve victory was one thing; this was quite another. It was a clinical demonstration of total domination. Nicholas's spirit withered in utter despair at both his helplessness and the hopelessness of his plight. Unable to turn his back on nihjutsu, how was he ever going to live Shiro Ninjal

The answer was, of course, obvious. He wasn't going to live. He was going to die.

This was the ultimate lesson of this unrelenting assault.

Tomi was against the side wall, the effects of the figure's initial attack wearing off. Gasping, trying to shake off the dizziness that had gripped her, she became aware that she no longer held her pistol.

She was aware of the figure's attack on Nicholas, and desperately she searched for her gun. She found it, lying on the floor several yards away from her outstretched right hand. With a pain-filled groan she pushed herself from the wall, began to crawl towards the gun. Her hand touched it, then closed around the grips. An instant later, she was pointing it at the back of the figure's head. She was about to pull the trigger when she realized with a sickening lurch that she was aiming at Nicholas.