Linnear 03 - White Ninja (36 page)

In that light, Howe decided that Shisei had earned her reward. He gestured, and she saw the Louis Feraud suit

draped elegantly over the back of a chair. She stared at it, entranced.

'It's yours,' he said. 'I reward employees who perform for me.'

Shisei touched the suit. For a moment, she luxuriated in the feel of the superior wool. Then her fingers encountered the fox trim, and she experienced a wave of revulsion so powerful that she felt her gorge rise. How typical of this man to buy her so expensive a present because it was what he admired, what he thought she should wear. He had, as usual, been oblivious to her own preferences, ignoring her distaste for the killing of animals for such a reason.

She excused herself, went to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror, tried to see herself as Douglas Howe saw her. She thought he might be dangerous if he ever started thinking for himself.

She cursed the day she had come to Washington, ingratiating herself slowly into Howe's confidence. Necessity and obligation, giri, these were always uppermost in her mind. But too often Douglas Howe had a way of making painful the performance of one's duty.

Unlike Cook Branding. .

She had wanted to take this time to work out why her mind was again filled with Cook Branding. She had returned to that disturbing state of entanglement, her objective edge blunted by emotion. At the sink she stared at herself in the mirror. What is wrong with me? she asked herself.

She pushed the troubling questions aside for the moment, concentrating on how happy she was at what she was about to do. She was committed now; her feet were firmly set upon the path. There was no turning back.

Kusunda Ikusa had a vaguely humiliating weakness for Chinese food; he also had an affinity for a certain restaurant in Shinjuku.

Both facts were in the Pack Rat's computer. When he entered the Toh-Li restaurant at the top of the fifty-storey Nomura Securities Building, he was unrecognizable as the man who had met Nangi in Akihabara. The Pack Rat looked every inch the paradigm of ministerial Japan. His dark suit was impeccably cut, his shirt a blinding white, his brogues polished to a mirror shine.

It happened that the ma?tre d' was a friend of a friend, and the Pack Rat was seated at a table just behind the one which Kusunda Ikusa had reserved.

Ikusa was not yet at the restaurant, but a small, powerful-looking man had already made himself at home. He was sipping a martini while reading today's copy of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

The Pack Rat did not recognize him. It did not matter. The Pack Rat was in seventh heaven. He lived for danger; it was his way of ridding himself of the rigid hierarchical strata of responsibilities that made up life in Japan.

When Tanzan Nangi had given him the directive to compromise Kusunda Ikusa somehow, the Pack Rat had been unfazed. Rather, he relished such an assignment which carried with it the heavy burden of danger. The Pack Rat was like Atlas: the more weight he was asked to bear, the better he liked it.

When he and Nangi had parted company hi the Akihabara, he had spent the next forty-five minutes checking and rechecking the vicinity in ever-expanding squares that eventually took in the entire district. When he was certain that the environment was clean, he had gone to find Han Kawado.

Han Kawado was one of the Pack Rat's most reliable 'team members', as he liked to think of them. But the Pack Rat also loved the young man. He had picked Kawado to keep track, as Tanzan Nangi also wanted, of Justine Linnear's movements.

The Pack Rat had found Han Kawado making out the last of his report on the Kawabana affair at the back of the zinc-topped bar in Mania's.

'I'm looking for the key to this guy,' the Pack Rat had said to Han Kawado, as he slid on to a stool beside him. He was referring to Kusunda Ikusa. 'Unfortunately, what I need isn't a key, but a crowbar. Ikusa-san's gate is not to be delicately opened but prised off its hinges. Only then will one find his weakness.'

'Prying is a dangerous activity,' Han Kawado had observed. 'It's said that Ikusa-san does not even trust his own mother! Can you imagine such a thing!' Han Kawado shook his head.

The Pack Rat was looking at the calligraphy on a scroll hanging behind the bar. The clouds/With no mortal weight/Disappear like man/Thought remains.

Han Kawado had rubbed his face. 'What do you know of Kusunda Ikusa's psyche?'

'My computer bank holds facts, not psychology,' the Pack Rat had said. 'All it tells me is that he's so goddamned virtuous, he's invulnerable to coercion. But I don't need a computer to tell me what I already know of Kusunda Ikusa. He's a young man, an arrogant man, engorged with the aphrodisiac of power. Therefore, he's vulnerable.'

Now, a week after that conversation, a week of frustrating surveillance, the Pack Rat found himself here at this Chinese restaurant.

At the moment Kusunda walked through the door, the man drinking the martini folded the paper, put it away in a slim alligator document case. He rose.

The two men greeted each other warmly, and the Pack Rat was indirectly introduced to Ken Oroshi, Chairman of Nakano Industries.

'Oroshi-san,' Ikusa said, settling in, 'how are your wife and children?'

'All are fine, Ikusa-san,' Oroshi said. 'They send their greetings, and their blessings.'

It had been Oroshi, the Pack Rat observed, whose bow had been the deeper. For all of Nami's power, that was unusual in someone of Ken Oroshi's position, who was at least twenty years older than Ikusa. Custom - not to mention etiquette - demanded that Ikusa, as the junior man, bow that much deeper than Oroshi, to show his respect. Instead, the opposite had happened.

The two men began to talk about golf - the Japanese businessman's mania. It had cost Ken Oroshi more than four million dollars to join Koganei Country Club, the most prestigious in the country, where green fees were three thousand dollars-a-month, and then it was only because Ikusa sat on the club's owners' committee that Oroshi jumped the one-hundred-plus names on the waiting list.

The conversation drifted on with nothing out of the ordinary coming up. The Pack Rat allowed his attention to wander around the room, which was filled, for the most part, with serious faced businessmen along with a spattering of tourists: thick-necked Americans and beefy, red-faced Germans.

The Pack Rat's gaze fell upon a young woman, perhaps no more than a girl, really. Though she was dressed in the height of sophisticated, moneyed fashion, her utterly unlined face indicated that she was still in her teens.

She was, like the Pack Rat, sitting near Ikusa's table. Ken Oroshi's back was to her, and once, startlingly, the Pack Rat saw her eyes lock with Ikusa's. Something akin to amusement played like a melody across the girl's face, and she seemed abruptly more grown-up than the Pack Rat had given her credit for. Ikusa's face showed nothing but polite attention directed at Ken Oroshi, but the flicker of his eyes in the girl's direction caught the Pack Rat's attention, and he began to study the girl in earnest.

She wore a dramatic black and white pony pattern bolero jacket over a black rayon blouse. She wore a leather skirt of the same colour with a wide gold belt. Gold sandals were on her feet.

Her thick, shimmering hair was stiff with gel, her lips were small, bow-shaped, glossed a bright crimson. She had the kind of face, the Pack Rat decided, that devoid of its artful make-up would be, at best, plain. In any event, the eyes were filled with life and intelligence, and the Pack Rat noted this because it was more significant than, how she dressed or was made-up:

Over steaming platters of gingered fish and abalone in black bean sauce, Ikusa steered the conversation away from golf. 'I think I may have the answer to your fiscal problems.'

'As long as it will not expose our plight to the public,' Ken Oroshi said. 'We have gone to great lengths to conceal our difficulties.'

'There is cause on both sides for-secrecy,' Ikusa said, fastidiously extruding a translucent fish bone from between his lips. 'This plan will also bring you the most important new technology in computer chips.'

'What is it,' Ken Oroshi said, laughing, 'the Sphynx t-pram?'

'Yes,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'Precisely that.'

Ken Oroshi put his chopsticks down. 'Do you mean to tell me that Kami has wrested control of that proprietary technology from Sphynx?'

'Not quite,' Ikusa said. 'Not yet.' He cut himself another thick slab of fish, dexterously manoeuvred it on to his plate. Tanzan Nangi is under some immediate pressure. He must merge Sato International's Sphynx computer chip manufacturing kobun. In the course of these discussions, your name came up as a possible partner. I indicated Nami's acceptance.' ^

'But Nangi-san is not in Sphynx alone. The t-pram

technology isn't even his. It comes from Tomkin Industries, which is owned by Nicholas Linnear. What about him? I doubt that he will approve the merger.'

'Linnear is not a factor in any of this,' Ikusa said, shoving the crisp fish tail in his mouth. 'Your deal is with Tanzan Nangi.'

The conversation then turned to appointments with lawyers, points to keep in mind when drawing up the merger papers, and so on. The Pack Rat's attention drifted back to the girl who was sipping tea with the avidity of a lioness hunkering down to her fresh-killed meal.

This struck him as odd until he realized that her full concentration was on the exchange between the two men. Even when the terminology became excessively technical and esoteric her interest never flagged. On the contrary, her face became suffused with the kind of glow normally only stage lights can provide.

Lunch was over, the tea had been drunk, the last pieces of business discussed. The men rose, bowing, but only Ken Oroshi left, hurrying out of the restaurant, his chic document case swinging at his side.

Kusunda Ikusa heaved himself back into his chair, sipped meditatively at his tea. The Pack Rat paid his bill and, as he did so, he noticed the girl from the next table get up, start towards the door. Ikusa looked up sharply, a dark look on his face. His eyes flashed as they locked with the girl's.

Was it the Pack Rat's imagination or did the girl hesitate as she passed his table before heading for the door? ,

Five minutes later, Ikusa paid the bill and left. The Pack Rat followed.

He momentarily lost Ikusa in the lobby, then found him just outside. He was with the girl from the next table. She was smiling at him as she strode beside him.

The Pack Rat got out the miniaturized shotgun mike he had made himself, got his tape recorder going. Ikusa gave the girl a feral grin, a baring of the teeth typical of a jungle predator.

'I wish you wouldn't persist in doing this kind of thing,' he said.

'It's not prudent,' the girl said, in a passable imitation of his voice. She swung her head around. 'I'm not prudent. I have you for that. Yin andyang, Kusunda. We must have a balance.'

One thing struck the Pack Rat immediately: how shockingly the girl used Ikusa's first name.

'As far as I can see, there is nothing balanced about this relationship,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'It is based on mutual need, and need is never balanced.'

'Like riding the back of a dragon.'

'You thrive on danger, Killan. Sometimes I think that what you really want when you make these forays is for your father to turn around and recognize you.'

The Pack Rat's heart was racing. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Ken Oroshi had three children - two boys, aged twenty and a girl, aged eighteen. The girl, according to the Pack Rat's computers, was named Killan. Now here she was in the flesh, entangled in some bizarre, clandestine way with Kusunda Ikusa. What was going on?

At that moment, Ikusa broke away and, without a further word to Killan Oroshi, disappeared into the throng.

Black igneous rock, thrusting skyward in jagged, clawed might. How many aeons ago had the earth thundered, spitting in fire and gas? From that raging inferno the Hodaka had emerged to be weathered by wind and snow and ice. The massif of the Hodaka was perhaps the most

perilous area ia all of Japan. From Nisfai in the west to Oku in the north-east, the Hodaka was a series of razor-thin, serpentine ridges between deep, black ravines crusted with ice and hoar-frost over lime-impregnated granite. Fissures created in groaning slippage through the severe winter months crisscrossed the succession of ridges like wounds in the corded arm of a veteran warrior.

The fissured wall known as Takidanr, the Valley of. the Waterfalls, had developed another name over the years, one which all climbers knew and used in memory of the number of their brethren who had perished in failed assaults: the Devil's Graveyard.

Just beyond Takidani, rising like a brooding giant, remorseless and fearsome, was the Black Gendarme, a veil of absolutely perpendicular igneous rock, veined with black ice. Threatening, intimidating, the Cassandra of the Japanese Alps, it seemed to have been thrust in one culminating upheaval from the centre of the earth's core.

It was here that Nicholas had been brought as a teenager by Kansatsu-san to complete his training, to prove in Nicholas's mind, at least, that he was better than Saigo.

And, perhaps, this was why he had died upon the Devil's Graveyard, with the Black Gendarme mocking him from its lofty eminence.