Linnear 03 - White Ninja (71 page)

'Where's your lawyer?'

'Oh, he was here through the questioning,' Branding said. 'When they put me back in the holding cell, he went looking for a judge to sign a writ to get me out. I think he's still looking.' He laughed suddenly. 'I guess the

joke's on him.' He got up, looked at Shisei. 'You coining, or what?'

Shisei did not move. 'I want to tell you what happened.'

Branding looked at her. 'Why is it I wonder that you feel you have to lie to me?'

'I hate that Feraud suit I wore to the dinner,' Shisei said. 'I burned it after you left.'

Branding said nothing.

At last, Shisei lowered her eyes from his. 'I don't know,' she said in the smallest voice he had ever heard.

'Well,' Branding said, 'at least that's a start.'

This morning Kusunda Ikusa had no time for formalities. He walked up to Masuto Ishii and said, 'I have your money.' He fairly thrust the thick envelope at the little man. His contempt for the amount of money, so dear to Ishii, was clearly denned by the gesture.

Ishii opened the envelope; they were alone in the Imperial Palace East Garden, so it was all right. "Thank you, Ikusa-san. Thank you.' He could not stop bowing.

'Forget that,' Ikusa snapped. 'What do you have for me?' His nerves weren't what they were yesterday. But then yesterday that stupid spy was on the bottom of the Sumida River. What in the name of Buddha had caused him to surface? Ikusa wondered. Not that the police would find anything on him to link the body to Ikusa, but Ikusa was a believer in omens, and this was an evil one.

'You were right,' Ishii said, pocketing the envelope, 'Nangi-san is planning to move against you.' They began their walk circumnavigating the garden. It was a brilliant morning, sunshine drenching the last of the night's dew drops. To that end he is marshalling all the support he can from his ministerial cronies at MITI.'

'I knew it!' Ikusa said, triumphantly. On the one hand, he was dismayed that after so many years of being a ronin, Nangi still had such close ties to MITI. On the

other hand, he welcomed a showdown with the ministry. If he were to be honest with himself, this battle had been a long time in the making. Ikusa was well aware of the jealousy many MITI ministers felt towards Nami's burgeoning power. Especially now, since the new Emperor had taken power, he was making it known that Nami's important policy decisions had his imprimatur. This was especially galling to MITI which had many decades of smooth sailing in ramming its economic policies down the throat of the industrial sector.

Perhaps the time was right for Nami to put an end to the rivalry. After all, no ship of state could be steered successfully by two captains.

Well, all right, Ikusa vowed, if it's a fight Nangi wants,.that's just what he'll get. But I have the edge because I've got my pipeline into his strategy.

Ikusa said, 'What kind of operation, specifically, is Nangi mounting?'

'I would think financing,' Ishii said, struggling to keep up with the huge man. In his mounting fervour, Ikusa had quickened his step. 'Judging by the people he's brought in' - here he named four of MITI's top ministers - 'that has to be the route he's taking. All of them have ties to central banks. He's going to float his company on their backs.'

'And in return?' Ikusa asked.

'It's brilliant, really. He doesn't have to mortgage even one division of Sato International.' Ishii took a deep breath. 'He's offered them your head.'

The key. The key to what? Nangi had no idea.

'The first thing to do is to search the Pack Rat's apartment,' Tomi said, ever the methodical detective.

'It would be a waste of time,' Nangi said, turning the key over and over in his hand. "The Pack Rat never kept anything of importance at home. It was a matter of

security to him, and he never broke his own rules.'

'Still,' Tomi said, 'it would be poor procedure to assume the key didn't fit anything there.'

Three hours later, they had satisfied themselves that it didn't.

'Phew! This place is a pigsty,' Tomi said, looking around the cluttered space.

Outside, she said, 'There was no evidence that the Pack Rat had a safety deposit box.'

'He didn't,' Nangi assured her. 'In his line of business, that would never have occurred to him.'

'Just what was the Pack Rat's line of business?'

Nangi smiled. 'He was an information-gatherer. He was the best at it I'd ever met.'

'All right. The key opens nothing in his apartment; it's not for a safety deposit box. That makes sense. Obviously, considering what he did, he'd need twenty-four-hour access to everything important.' Tomi shook her head. 'So where does that leave us? Running down lockers in every train and bus depot in the city?'

'No,' Nangi said. 'The key has no number, it can't be to a public locker.'

"Then what does it open?'

Nangi considered. Something Tomi had said stuck in his head. What was it? Then he remembered, and it gave him an idea. 'Come on,' he said. 'We're going to play some pachinko.'

The Twenty-Four-Hour pachinko parlour was in the Ginza, gaudy, loud, smoke-filled, open, as its name said, day and night.

Nangi bought a token from the cashier and moved along the aisles of machines. He counted: seventh row, sixth machine. The machine the Pack Rat always played.

It was being expertly played by a kid of about eighteen with a foot-long Mohawk bristle of hair in flamingo colours down the centre of his skull, his head shaved on

either side. The kid wore shit-kicker boots with spurs, black jeans covered with metal studs, a short-waisted black leather jacket. Lengths of chains appended from the epaulettes clinked rhythmically as he worked the levers that flipped the ball-bearing through the maze of the pachinko field. The kid won big and was rewarded with a gush of tokens.

'This could take forever,' Nangi said.

Tomi flipped open her police credentials, hung them. hi front of the kid's face.

'Hey!' he said.

'Beat it,' Tomi said, 'before I run you in.'

'Yeah?' The kid sneered. 'For what?'

'Your hair's disturbing the peace, sonny,' Tomi said, showing him a glimpse of her gun. The kid beat it out of there.

'OK,' Tomi said. 'What's up?'

'We'll see in a minute,' Nangi said, handing her

the token. 'Here, go crazy.' '

Tomi slotted the token, began to play. Meanwhile, Nangi slipped around to the right side of the machine, bent over. There was the little door the Pack Rat had opened to get his tokens. His heart beat a little faster. There was a keyhole in the upper third of the door.

'What are you doing?' Tomi asked.

'When we last met, the Pack Rat insisted we do so here. Partly, it was security. So much noise makes even the most sophisticated electronics surveillance impossible. Partly, it was his hangout. He came here, he told me, when he needed to work out solutions. But he always played this one machine. I wondered why, until he opened a door back here where they keep the tokens.'

'Nice little scam,' Tomi said.

'Maybe,' Nangi said, 'it was a lot more than that.'

Tomi had said of the Pack Rat, Obviously, considering what he did, he'd need twenty-four-hour access to

everything important. That was what had jogged Nangi's memory of the Pack Rat's pachinko parlour, open all day and all night.

He took the key that had been taped to the Pack Rat's big toe and, reciting a prayer, inserted it into the hole. It fitted, sliding all the way in. Nangi tried to turn it to the right. Nothing happened; the key wouldn't move. His heart sank. Then, he tried it to the left.

The door fell open.

Nangi put his hand inside, felt around. And there it was, taped to the metal top of the receptacle that received the tokens. Nangi feverishly pulled it free, took it out and looked at it. It was an audio micro-cassette.

Jackpot!

Nicholas rocketed west along the Long Island Expressway at ninety-five. Justine was curled in the Corvette's passenger seat, the borrowed blanket still across her shoulders. Every so often, as Nicholas glanced at her, she twitched hi her steep and made a little crying sound. He put one hand protectively on her hip.

It was four-thirty in the morning, the sky the colour of the inside of an oyster shell. Clouds along the horizon hi the south were tinged pale orange.

Nicholas had the top down. The wind felt good ruffling his hair; it took the stink of the fire out of his nostrils.

He and Justine wore borrowed clothes; everything had been burned in the fire.

Every twenty seconds or so Nicholas glanced at the miniature radar detector hidden behind, the Corvette's sun visor, even though he knew its beeping would alert him to a police car waiting to pull over impatient drivers just like him. It gave him something to do besides stare at the ugly, featureless highway.

He made the trip back to New York from West Bay Bridge in an hour and fifteen minutes. Justine woke up

as he slowed for the toll for the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

'What time is it?' she asked, stretching.

'Too early for you to be up,' Nicholas said as they entered the tunnel. 'Go back to sleep.'

Justine rubbed her eyes. Too many dreams,' she said. 'Too many ghosts stalking me.' She looked over at him. 'Nick, I dreamt of Saigo. And then he turned into you.1

Nicholas shivered, thinking of Kansatsu-san saying, The Darkness is what you have shunned for all your life. And his own answer, That would mean that Saigo and I are the same. "This man Senjin is not Saigo,' Nicholas said, 'I want you to understand something. Saigo was evil. Senjin, this dorokusai, has transcended evil - or good, for that matter. The concept of morality is irrelevant to him. He lives or thinks he lives beyond such considerations.'

'Which is it?'

They had emerged into Manhattan, and Nicholas headed downtown.

'I'm not sure I know,' he said. 'But then again I don't know that it matters. What's important now is what's in Senjin's mind. When I know that, I'll know him.'

He went straight down Second Avenue all the way to Houston, then cut west. In SoHo, he turned on to Greene Street, pulled up in front of a line of industrial-looking buildings. Up until five or six years ago, they had been factories owned by dry-goods manufacturers and other companies of light industry. Now they had been converted into spacious, and all too often chicly-designed, co-op loft apartments.

Nicholas took Justine up to a metal door lacquered a deep sea green. Punched into it was a vertical line of three Medeco locks, surrounded by thick brass anti-crowbar plates. Beside the door was a series of buzzers below an intercom grille. High up, Justine could see the glass lens of a video camera.

Nicholas pressed a button that said, enigmatically,

Con Tower. In a moment, a buzz sounded, and the door popped open automatically.

The door closed behind them, and they were immersed in pitch blackness. A minute went by, another. Nicholas did not move, and neither did Justine. She knew better than to say anything. She could feel Nicholas relaxed beside her, and that was enough to reassure her.

Light popped on without warning, and Justine blinked. She saw them surrounded by images of themselves. The hallucinatory, almost vertiginous perspective changed only after a door cut flush into one of the mirrored panels opened inwards. Nicholas took her through.

Inside, Justine found herself in a large but warm space. The ceiling was as high as a cathedral's. The walls were curved, creating concave and convex spaces, untraditional, mysterious, which reminded Justine of the hills and dales of the human form. Enormous canvases hung on some walls, modern paintings of voluptuous sun-dappled countryside done in the post-Impressionist manner.

The space was furnished comfortably and eclectically in contemporary leather, chintzed antiques and functional copies of antiques, none of them Oriental. Scattered throughout was antique Japanese lacquerware, writing boxes. Against one concave wall stood a life-size statue of a Kabuki actor made up as a woman complete with wig and costume. In the centre of the room, a large lacquered and gilded wood Buddha on an ancient Buddhist plinth. Oddly, the place was not a jumble but, through some unknown magic, a harmonious whole.

There was a menacing-looking Japanese man standing in the middle of the room. Justine could feel his tension, realized that he was making no secret of it.

'You're here fast, Tik-Tik,' the Japanese said. 'Too fast.'

Then she recognized him. 'Conny?' she said. 'Conny Tanaka?'

'Hai!' Conny bowed, seemed at a bit of a loss when Justine rushed into his arms.

Nicholas laughed. 'You should see your face, Tanaka-san.'

Conny groaned.

This place is new,' Justine said. 'It's spectacular!'

'You haven't seen anything yet,' Nicholas told her.

Tik-Tik?' Conny was scowling. He glanced at Justine.

'Don't think I'm not happy to see you.' He kissed her,

then turned back to Nicholas. 'I read what you gave me,