Linnear 03 - White Ninja (40 page)

Tomi spent the remainder of the afternoon in tedious phone work, trying to get a line on Hanami's friends and associates, trying to match them up with Muku's to see if there might be an overlap, a common ground from which to proceed. She had also asked for reports on the two men's families, not that she thought she might find something, but because she was well trained and was meticulous in her investigations.

All she knew so far was that Muku had been a widower, and that Hanami was survived by his wife. According to Hanami's widow they had been happily married. Neither doctor had progeny.

When Tomi's call list gave out (she was unable to reach more than a third of the people on it) she went to see Senjin. She needed advice on how to proceed. Besides, records showed that he had consulted Dr Muku several times concerning suspects since he had been in the Homicide division.

It was early evening. Most of the day watch had already gone, and the building was palpably quieter. Senjin, however, was in his office.

' "Psychopathy is not the face of evil", Dr Muku once told me,' Senjin said in response to her first question. ' "It is, rather, the beam emitted from a long forgotten lighthouse. Loneliness is the only companion a psychopath is able to tolerate." ' Senjin nodded. 'Yes, I remember Muku-san well. It is more than a pity that he is dead, it is a tragedy for the department. Because of his insights into the criminal mind I was able to identify, isolate and track down Kuramata, Shigeyuki and Toshiroh, three of our most wanted terrorists.'

'What was he like?' Tomi asked.

'Muku-san?' Senjin's forehead creased in concentration. 'Well, it is hard to say. He was brilliant, of course, but also, I would say, introspective. He did not actively seek the limelight; he was not, I would judge, a good public speaker. But, of course, he was by nature essentially a thinker.'

'From what I've been able to gather, he didn't seem to have many friends.'

'Frankly, I'd be surprised if he had any,' Senjin said. 'Muku-san, though brilliant, was opinionated, often quite stubborn. I doubt very much whether he'd have made an acceptable friend.'

'Is there anything else you can tell me?'

Senjin had come out from behind his desk. 'On a related matter, Nicholas Linnear has not returned to Tokyo?'

'Not to my knowledge,' Tomi said. 'In a way, I'm relieved. No one knows where he is. Surely he's safe from whatever attack the Red Army had planned for him?'

'Let us hope so,' Senjin said. 'Though I am not as comfortable as you are with him being outside the scope of our watchful eye, and I would think it rather important that you locate him as soon as possible.'

He was standing so close to her, she could feel him against her breasts. Tomi began to burn. She took a shuddering breath, taking his scent into her lungs, enjoying it as if it were nicotine-laden smoke. But she was ashamed, not because of her erotic thoughts, but because she had not immediately stepped away from him; this was not seemly behaviour in public. She did not move.

'How are you feeling, Tomi-san? You took quite a beating.'

She felt a little thrill pass down her spine as he used her first name. This, too, was unseemly behaviour, impolite in the intimacy it implied. Tomi found that she was not offended.

'I am feeling fit enough,' she said, aware of the slight tremolo in her voice. 'Except for some aches here and there.' She was having trouble catching her breath. Tve had several nightmares.' Her heart was hammering in her throat. 'Nothing hard work won't cure.'

'I see that I've been correctly worried about you.' Senjin put one finger beneath her chin, lifted her head up so that he could stare into her eyes. 'You are such a dedicated officer.'

When he touched her, Tomi felt her knees go weak. She prayed that she would not collapse. Had the office got abruptly hot? Then she ceased to breathe at all as his head came down and his lips grazed the side of her neck. Tomi's lips parted and her eyelids fluttered. She

heard him whisper her name as if from a great distance.

Then she heard him.say, 'Come with me.' Automatically, she obeyed, allowing him to steer her out of his office, down the half-deserted corridor and into a utility closet.

He shut the door behind them. Dim aqueous light filtered through a tiny window of translucent glass high up in one wall. Tomi felt shelving behind her back, pressing into her calves. Senjin was tight against her. With the two of them in there, the space was so tiny there was scarcely room to move, and none to turn around.

'Wh-what's happening?' Tomi asked, though her body knew, just as it had known of this inevitable end from the moment Senjin had come around from behind his desk.

She felt his lips on hers, felt her own mouth opening, almost dying of pleasure when their tongues met, searched, entangled. My God, she thought. It's happening and, oh, oh, I want it to happen.

Slowly she felt her skirt being lifted, felt his hands upon her thighs. Then he had sunk down on his knees. Tomi was so stunned that she could not utter a sound, not even the sob she felt welling up around her heart as his mouth sought out the spot between her thighs that most yearned to have him.

Tomi felt as if she were slowly slipping into a bath, her skin frictioned by heat, her muscles relaxed by heat, her bones melted by heat. Her mind was awash as if with a drug. Dimly, she remembered how often she had dreamed of this moment, never truly believing that it would ever be made real. And those dreams, like images perceived in dusty light, in a mirror cracked and peeling, added an almost insupportable'weight and urgency to the moment as reality merged with fantasy. How many nights had she lain sleepless, sightless, touching herself in a sad mockery of how Senjin was touching her now, imagining that he was beside her, above her, in her? Those imaginings were

all here with her now, a surrealistic pillow on which to rest her slowly working hips.

She felt a lightness of spirit in the tiny stifling closet. The smell of sweat - her sweat; the smell of arousal -her arousal; the smell of sex - her sex, was like the most delicate of perfumes, a mingling of scents that created a whole she breathed in with each shuddering breath, expelled with each muffled moan, each tiny cry of delight.

Until, her hips working faster and faster, the entire universe seemed to implode inwards. She gripped Senjin's sweat-soaked head, pushing him against her with great force, floating down from the heights slowly, slowly. And when she thought it was over, she was wrong because he was fully against her, his heat overwhelming, and then he was in her, and the sensation made what had come before as nothing.

Tomi needed more of his flesh. She tore frantically at his tie, unbuttoned his shirt all the way down to his navel. She licked his neck. She felt abraded skin as if from a wound, kissed it tenderly. Sweat ran into her eyes.

She wept into his chest as he thrust into her, thrusting back at him, biting his salty flesh as she encircled his hips with her legs, and in the claustrophobic space there were only the two of them, and then just one, aflame, melting, fused.

When it was over Tomi tasted his blood on her lips. She lay against him, encircled by his arms, encircling him with her legs, content just to listen to their two disparate heartbeats thumping in the darkness and the heat. She could not breathe, but she liked that, too. It was as if the engine they had created had sucked all the oxygen from the environment. She felt a pulse beating madly in the side of her head, and knew that whatever else might happen, a part of him was now hers, an emotion, a sensation, perhaps something altogether more ephemeral than that, who knew? This was not a time for definitions or even

for absolutes. It was a time of mystery and an acceptance of the unknown, acknowledging not only its existence but the idea that it existed wholly without answers.

And then like a thief in the night the thought came: what have we done?

She broke away from him; it was as if they had been pressed together with glue. Tomi found that she was panting as she voiced her question to herself, 'What have we done, Omukae-san?'

'Perhaps,' he said, 'we have saved each other.'

In the intimate space, under the intimate circumstances, it was such a shocking reply that she blurted, 'What do you mean?' even though a secret part of her knew very well that he might be right.

'It is no secret that you have been unhappy, Tomi,' he said gently.

'How did you - ? But I have told no one!'

He ignored her outburst. 'And I - ' He gave a little laugh. 'Of Omukae the stone there is little known, neh? That is because there is precious little to tell. My life is hollow, empty, meaningless save for my work.' He reached out to touch her, an electric contact, like a quick burst of lightning. 'Now I feel as if the universe has caught up with me at last. The stars shine in my corner of the world. There is a moon, even, I think, a sun.' He sighed. 'Tomi...'

'I - No!' She broke away from him and, with a little cry, thrust open the door, gasping in the cool air-conditioned air of the corridor as she ran out.

In the ladies' room she washed, splashed cold water on her face. She did not look in the mirror, as if she suspected that she might see his face instead of her own reflected there.

She was struck dumb by the thought of being involved with a man such as Senjin Omukae. While her attraction had been kept in the realm of fantasy she could ignore

the implications of someone who lived by his own rules, who lived most, uncomfortably within the rigid societal restraints of Japan.

It is no secret that you have been unhappy, Tomi. She heard again his voice echoing in the darkness, coiling around her throat like a plait of her own hair. How had he known? It was a secret, or so she had thought.

The reality shook her. How easily he seduced me, she thought. How well he must understand the desires of my spirit. How easily I can be led astray by him. I have sinned once, but not again. Does he understand how he has humiliated me by making me feel pleasure in such a proscribed act?

Probably not, she decided. Senjin Omukae was a loner, at his core a kind of rebel who, if brought into the full spotlight of his peers, would never be tolerated. This was why he was feared rather than admired by those in power in the Metropolitan Police Force. They chose to look the other way at Senjin the man because Senjin the Homicide division commander was so useful to them. And what if one day that changed? Tomi thought with a shudder. He would have nothing; he would be nothing.

She closed her mind to her newfound terror, rushed out of the ladies' room as hurriedly as she had entered it.

It happened that Kusunda Ikusa worked late every Thursday night. As such, that was the one night that the Pack Rat had not kept strict watch on him - there didn't seem to be any point to it.

Now he saw the enormity of his mistake. It was past nine o'clock and Ikusa was still in his office. Everyone else had gone home but lights were still burning in Nami's suite.

The Pack Rat was already inside, having entered the building during the afternoon as a civilian engineer, disappearing into the upper floors without a trace.

From his vantage point he saw Killan Oroshi coming

before Kusunda Ikusa did, and he began to set up his electronic 'ears'. Killan, wearing a suede skirt that came barely half-way down her thighs, a cream-coloured silk blouse, patent leather boots, and a floor-length python-print coat of some shiny synthetic, pushed open the door of the suite Nami used in the Nippon Keio Building two blocks off the Meiji-dori, in Nishi-Shinjuku, and went directly into Ikusa's office.

Outside, Tokyo shimmered like a jewel suspended in amber. Dusky lights glowered in the darkness like a beast's lambent eyes. Microscopic particles of petrochemical detritus hung in the air, outlining Shinjuku's massive office towers with Seurat's Impressionistic brushstrokes. It was art, after a fashion, if only a post-modern one that deserved the name industrial pointillism.

Kusunda Ikusa was not working; he was waiting for Killan. He put aside papers he had not really seen for hours.

'Why do you insist on being so foolishly indiscreet?' Ikusa asked, as she came through the door.

'If my father knew about us he'd have a heart attack, for sure,' Killan said. A kind of beatific smile suffused her face. 'That would be nice.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Kusunda Ikusa said. 'It would be nothing of the sort.'

'You don't have to live with him,' Killan retorted. 'He hates me almost as much as he hates Mother.'

'You're very precious to him.'

Killan gave Ikusa a twisted smile that somehow made the Pack Rat's stomach contract. 'You'd like to think so because that's why you fuck me.'

Ikusa said, 'Your sense of humour sometimes fails you, Killan.'

The smile became more twisted, and now it was disturbingly knife-like. 'But I wasn't joking. Of course you knew that, Kusunda. You know everything.'

'What is it I see in you, Killan?'

The girl reached beneath his desk. 'You know.' She looked like she was manipulating something. 'You know.'

'Yes,' Ikusa said thickly after some time. 'You are so very bad for me. How is it I know that much, yet I can do nothing about it?'

'Do you really want an answer,' Killan Oroshi asked, 'or is this another of your rhetorical questions?' When he made no response, she went on, 'You love fucking me because you're fucking my father at the same time. That's it, isn't it?' She shook her head, her expression perfectly sincere. 'No, I'm wrong, or at least that's not all of it.' Her features softened like wax, her lower lip jutted out; her tiny tongue appeared as if she were about to suck up a savoury sweet. 'The fact is, I'm the only one who can seduce you, Kusunda. You spend all your time lording it over others, and that's a strain. Oh, I know it's a strain you'd never admit to. But that's one of the beauties of our relationship. You don't have to admit anything to me. You don't need a priest and I have no aspirations to play the role.'