Linnear 03 - White Ninja (35 page)

How unfair of him to leave her this way, disappear into the night. Hadn't she always been there for him, right by his side when he was most vulnerable? But men expected that from their women; did that mean women had no right to expect the same consideration from their men? Were the roles of the two sexes so immutably different?

She hated Nicholas now for abandoning her when she needed him the most. She could not help it, just as she could not stop the tears from forming, from flowing down her cheeks. I can't make it alone, she thought. My world is breaking apart, spinning out of control.

Her mind was filled with funeral orations, the cloying scent of chequerboard bouquets of flowers, the smell of rain in the air, and newly-turned earth, gleaming caskets being lowered into the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the muffled sobs of the mourners, death hanging in the air like a suffocating shroud.

She tried to turn her mind away from death and could not; could not stop the prayer from forming on her lips.

'Dear God,' she whispered, 'save me from myself.'

Douglas Howe had a residence on Seventeenth Street in theheart of the northwest district of Washington. It was a Federal style building of four storeys. The first floor served as offices, the second as quarters, when needed, for visiting notables. The third and fourth floors were devoted exclusively to Douglas Howe.

The residence, which was now worth a small fortune, was just down the block from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, whose glorious facade was eternally guarded by its brace of sleeping stone lions. The Corcoran was once described by Frank Lloyd Wright as 'the best designed building in Washington'. As such, Howe had decided that it was a fitting place to be near, both chic and immune to the incomprehensible whims of Washington fashion.

Shisei approached Howe's residence with a good deal of trepidation. Her time with Cotton Branding had made her feel a good deal less sanguine about what she had been hired to do. Only once before had she been affected by a man in the way Cook Branding affected her - and that time clearly did not count.

Shisei had been trained to emit emotion much as a television set emits images: in order to attract the attention of others. To accomplish such a feat with any degree of success, one had, of course, to train oneself to feel nothing. Objectivity rather than subjectivity was the rule, the law.

With Branding, Shisei had crossed the line, broken the law. Unwittingly at first, to be sure, but cross the line she had. Now she was entangled in her own emotions, and that was dangerous, especially with Douglas Howe, to whom emotions were like poker chips to be hoarded and used at the proper moments.

An aide opened the door to her knock and, recognizing her, ushered her into the library which abutted Howe's office suite.

'The senator will be with you shortly,' the aide said, before leaving her alone with the great minds of man's history. She idly let her fingers play along the expanse of leather-bound spines. She took out a volume of Nietzsche, read passages at random, thinking of the apologists for Nazism plundering poor Nietzsche, a man who denounced as pernicious the state, especially the German state, warping his concept of the moral superman into their physical one.

Shisei knew that she had picked up the book in order not to think of Cook Branding. It was Branding, she thought, who should have a taste for Nietzsche because the two were such pure moralists. But Cook was horrified by the German philosopher's search for moral perfection, believing that such perfection belonged solely to God. In this way - as in a surprisingly large number of others -Cook was quite Eastern. The Japanese, too, knew that perfection was beyond the human condition, preferring the myriad pleasures afforded by the journey to the anticipation of the journey's end.

Then she came across a sentence that startled her. 'All idealism is falsehood,' Nietzsche wrote, 'in the face of necessity.' This was quintessential Douglas Howe. It reminded her of a quote from the French philosopher of materialism, Denis Diderot, that was one of Howe's favourites: 'There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.'

She put the book back, searched in vain for the Tao. In truth, she had not expected to find it. She had too firm a grip on Howe's psyche to expect that he would be open to the mystical Tao. Yes, Nietzsche and Diderot were more his meat: solid, definite, Western; most of all, rational and pragmatic.

She turned at the sound of a door opening, and saw David Brisling, Howe's assistant. "The senator will see you now.' Brisling's voice was cold, aloof.

Shisei smiled her actor's smile. Everything, she thought, was simple when I felt nothing. Amid the brambles of her newly-exposed emotions, possibilities multiplied like reflections in facing mirrors.

She was wearing a short white silk skirt, a sleeveless black crepe de Chine blouse with a high mandarin collar. Around her waist was a wide velvet belt with an oversized red-gold buckle in an abstract shape. Brisling looked right through her.

Howe was waiting for her in his office. It was teak-panelled, with brass lamps, a large, overly-masculine leather club sofa against one wall, an overly-large carved English walnut desk behind which stood a matching cre-denza. A pair of black antique English chairs lurked like guardian Sphinxes. An excellent Robert Motherwell painting hung on the wall above the sofa.

Shisei duplicated Howe's dazzling hollow smile, reflecting it back at him, just like a television image. And like a television image she came across the room, kilowatts in her eyes.

She made certain the door into the outer office where Brisling had retreated in glowering silence was left ajar. She sat in one of the black English chairs, sorting out in her mind what it was he needed to hear, what she wanted to reveal, most importantly, how much she needed to tell him in order for him to be satisfied.

'You're late,' Howe said without consulting his watch. 'I expected you sooner than this.'

Shisei shrugged. 'When one is involved, one's time is not one's own.'

'Save the act for someone who'll appreciate it. How deeply is Branding involved?' Douglas Howe said in the same tone of voice he used to order one of his staff to get a Joint Chief on the phone.

'He's in love with me,' Shisei said truthfully. 'He is fascinated by me, consumed by me.' Her eyes glowed

until they were almost the colour of prehistoric amber.

'But does he trust you?' Howe asked.

He knows how to get at the heart of the matter, Shisei thought. She said, 'Trust does not come easily to a politician, especially one who is locked in a life-and-death battle with his worst enemy.'

Howe scowled. 'Does he suspect that I hired you?'

'He does not suspect me, no,' Shisei said, again truthfully. 'But the possibility has crossed his mind.'

Howe's scowl deepened. 'How do you know that?'

'He told me.'

'He told you?' Howe was incredulous. 'Then he's an idiot!'

Shisei said nothing.

Howe tapped a pen meditatively against his lips. 'In which quarter does he plan to attack me?'

'I don't know.'

'What have you been up to, then?'

"The creation of an obsession,' Shisei said, 'is accomplished only with patience and determination. No one responds to haste; they mistake it for insincerity.'

"That's unhelpful,' Howe said sharply. Time is the one commodity I have very tittle of,' he said, busy chewing on his pen. 'I hired you to burrow inside Branding, to get me information. I don't give a shit whether he loves you or just has the hots for you, as long as you get me information I can use against him.

'You say Branding is consumed by you. Let me clue you in. While you've been playing Mata Hari, Branding has been a busy little boy.' He made her aware that he was throwing her own words back in her face. 'He's been burning up the phone lines, calling in markers, political favours; he's made deals all over Capitol Hill. He's blocked me at every turn. He's going to get that fucking Ascra bill passed, despite my contacts. The Hive Project is very much alive and well and threatening to eat

our Federal Budget whole. Unless you can bring Cotton Branding down by the end of the month, when his bill gets on to the Senate floor, the Advanced Computer Research Agency will have the Federal Government by the balls, and Cotton Branding will have enough power to run for the President of the United States in two years and win.'

Howe was baleful when he was in this sort of mood. He could work himself up into a kind of trembling rage that often required a full-scale explosion to dissipate it.

'Do you know what that would mean?' Only too well, Shisei thought, but, dutifully, she said nothing. 'I know how far the Hive Project has come. They've already perfected the goddamned computer. Branding would have the entire government switch over to the Hive computer. I mean everyone: the NSC, the CIA, every fucking secret this country possesses will be in the Hive memory banks.

'Poor blind Branding has become dangerous to the security of this country. He doesn't see the risk inherent in the system and neither do very many other people. Everything we know, every secret thing we've amassed on foreign powers, on what we're secretly working on, would be fed into the Hive. Of course. It could solve our problems of defence, create initiatives one thousand times faster than any of our current inefficient think tanks or bureaucracies. But the Hive Project has enormous drawbacks. No one knows whether it can be penetrated. Its technology is so new, so revolutionary, that everyone assumes its so-called invulnerable defences will be impenetrable. Branding is so sure of the technology he's championing. But think of what could happen to the United States if a program run by an unfriendly power could worm its way inside the Hive computer. It would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It would undermine the very foundations of this country, putting everyone and everything we stand for in jeopardy.'

Howe's eyes were blazing. 'Goddamnit, we have to stop

Branding!' His shoulders assumed the powerful, compact hunch of the street fighter. 'God, I hate that moneyed, privileged bastard! Look what his family has given him. He's an insider here because he's a Branding, because of his old-boy contacts. And what am I? The perennial outsider, the poor boy, the hick fanner's son,'the nobody, clawing and scratching for every contact I make.' All of a sudden, he realized how worked up he had become. He snapped his jaw shut, whirled, poured himself a shot of Bourbon. When he turned back to Shisei, he was calm again.

'If only Branding's wife had not died in that senseless accident,' he said. 'We would have caught him up in a sex scandal that would have finished him right now.'

Shisei studied him for some time. At length, she said, "There's something I need to know. Where is the boundary? How far are you willing to take this in order to bring Branding down?'

Howe was again shaking with rage. 'Isn't it clear to you yet?' he said. Til do whatever I have to in order to destroy him utterly. This isn't a game I'm playing with Branding. I think you understand.'

'Of course.'

'Then tell me what it is you understand. Tell me what I want to know.' He leaned towards her. 'Enlighten me as to why I should continue to employ you when I have Brisling running an operation to discredit the people at the Johnson Institute involved in the Hive Project?'

Shisei laughed. "That's a dead end. Those people are clean. And if you manufacture a scandal, Branding will make it backfire on you.'

'Not me,' Howe said. 'I've distanced myself from the operation. It's strictly Brisling's baby. I've got plausible deniability.'

'Still, you're wasting your time with it.'

'I'm not paying you to be a critic,' Howe said acidly. 'So kindly tell me how I won't waste my time.'

Shisei felt nothing. She was comforted by the fact that she had so effortlessly slipped back into her methodology. She no longer felt confused, vulnerable, entangled. Everything was again clear, the normality of the Void encircled her like the arm of a loving parent.

'Well, we agree about one thing,' she said. 'Brisling's expendable. You know, of course, about the dinner at the end of the month?' She was referring to the State dinner for the West German chancellor that Branding mentioned to her over lunch. 'I will make sure Branding takes me.' She looked at Howe. 'You must do one thing. Convince Brisling that he has to act against me. It won't be difficult; I'll give him an incentive. Do whatever you have to, but make sure he breaks into my house the night of the dinner. I want him in the house just after I leave.'

Howe stared at her for a long time. 'You'll find the way, won't you? You understand that I must destroy Cotton Branding, Shisei, or the Hive Project will go through.' He shook his head. 'Christ, but you're cutting it close. The dinner is only a few days away from when Branding's Ascra bill makes it on to the Senate floor.' His low voice was full of menace. 'It's my last chance to destroy him.'

Howe did not show it, but he was pleased. As usual, he had found that his bullying tactics worked. People did their jobs more effectively, he had found, when they were firmly shown their place. Everyone wanted recognition more than anything else. But if you gave them too much, they became lazy, complacent. You had to keep employees on their toes, keep them in obedience school in order to keep them performing at peak efficiency.