Linnear 03 - White Ninja (75 page)

That videotape, so villainously, treacherously procured, had stripped Ikusa of tatemae, his public image of honour and virtue. Without tatemae, which was so vital to him -and to Kami - he was without standing in the community, without face. The living dead.

As he shouldered smaller people aside, he remembered a song he had heard some time ago, part of one of actor Takakura Ken's most popular Yakuza films which seemed appropriate now to his own situation: My body drifts and wanders/But in the dim lights of home/I can see mother, but then she fades away,

Ikusa wept, as one often does at cherry blossom time, when beauty and sadness are epitomized by the fragility of a translucent blossom, so quickly bursting with life, so soon falling from the tree. From home.

How swiftly time passes, Ikusa thought. How abruptly power diminishes. How soon life ends.

Passing his reflection, distorted in a rain-streaked window, Ikusa was appalled at his tears. He had not wept since he was a child, after his first defeat in a martial arts competition. Certainly he had not thought of home for many years. He had lacked the time and also, he

had to confess, the inclination. As the infusion of power increased, making of him a new man, it had caused him to dismiss his past as unimportant. It was funny now, that was all he could think of.

In the Asakusa district, he came at last to the ferroconcrete building housing an anonymous cheap hotel. Upstairs, he went straight down the featureless hall to the room he wanted, and broke down the door. It was not a difficult task for a man of his size and strength.

Inside the room, there was no place to hide.

'I had you and that traitor, Kikoko, followed,' Ikusa said to the figure standing in the semi-darkness. 'But, in the end, it didn't really matter. I knew you would be hiding like an animal in the dark.'

'I thought I'd be safe here,' Killan Oroshi said.

'You're not safe with me around,' Ikusa said, advancing on her. 'You should know by now that you never were.'

'But I don't have the tape,' Killan said. 'I gave it to Seji, and he's taken it to the police."

'I don't care,' Ikusa said. 'This has gone beyond all that.' He came on, big as a tree in the confined space of the tiny hotel room.

Killan moved, her silhouette changing as her arm came up. 'Stop right there! I've got a gun!'

'A gun won't stop me, Killan. Nothing you can do can possibly stop me from doing what I've come here to do.' His voice was almost gentle, but it possessed a surety, a finality that caused her to bite her lip.

Her arms were extended, the elbows locked. Ikusa caught a glimpse of metal gleaming dully in the werelight. 'I mean it!'

'So do I,' he said.

The rain scratched like a live thing, desperately seeking entrance. The aluminium blinds rattled against the windows, allowing tiny sparks of light into the hotel room, miniature flashes of lightning.

'Stop!' Killan cried. 'You're pushing me to the edge!' The hammer of the gun clicked back, a stark, echoey sound. 'I know you murdered that man who was spying on us. You bashed him to bits, but I won't let you do that to me. You're not going to get that close.'

'You shouldn't have tried to blackmail me, Killan. That was your mistake. I was willing to put up with your tiresome revolutionary cant because I thought I could harness your extraordinary mind. I thought I could channel it into conventional paths. That was my mistake.'

'Your mistake was in trying to use me.' Killan's voice was filled with contempt. "That's all you know how to do. Use people. Well, how does it feel to be used yourself? You used my father, took his company put from under him, the company he helped my grandfather build from nothing. You destroyed his life, trampled him into the mud, all the while smiling like an innocent baby.'

Ikusa frowned. 'I thought you hated your father. Was that a lie, too?'

'You were too dense, too full of your own worth to see that I hated you more than I ever could have hated my father.' Killan laughed. 'You know, you actually did me a favour, you fucker. You made me see my father in a whole new light. With you, I saw his accomplishments, I saw what his company meant to him. In his defeat, his sorrow, I at last came to love him.'

'A poor consolation for your death,' Ikusa said.

'It's not me who's going to die.'

Ikusa lunged for her then. Killan pulled the trigger, and he staggered back a half-step. Then he came on. She fired a second time, and something in Ikusa's left hand struck her shoulder.

Killan cried out as she felt the hot pain run down her arm. Blood erupted through her clothes.

Ikusa, too, was bleeding. He had taken one bullet in the chest, another in his hip. But he ignored the pain,

his feet set firmly on the path ordained for him from the moment the first news of the scandal broke.

Killan had brought him to this sorry abyss. Stripped of his power, his face, his tatemae, he had understood that his sole transgression had been his relationship with her. His hubris had manifested itself in her mocking smile, her passionate embrace, her brilliant, deceiving mind. He had thought, in his arrogance, that he could, as she had said, ride the back of the dragon. But he knew now what he should have understood then: the dragon is too dangerous to be ridden at all.

And this is what he realized at the moment the scandal broke: if he could not ride the dragon, at least he could destroy it. That much power, at least, was left him.

He put his hands around her neck as she struck him across the face with the gun barrel. Blood flowed, blinding him. But he did not need his eyes to accomplish what he had come here to do.

Ikusa squeezed. Killan's scream of anguish was choked off, along with the air. Ikusa saw her jumping like a rag doll. Her muscles spasmed as if with a will of their own. She opened her mouth, then snapped it shut, her teeth clashing together.

Slowly, like a balloon - the balloon Ikusa had been -she was deflating, the air seeping out of her. Ikusa felt as heavy as lead. There was a roaring in his ears. His blood had turned to sludge, his pulse drumming in his ears in slow rhythm.

He saw her hands trembling, her face white and staring, and he wanted her to die more than he had ever wanted anything else. He saw the gun barrel, but did not believe she had strength enough to pull the trigger. He laughed in her face.

Killan snarled, adrenaline pouring into her system. She could hardly see or move. But that face - his face -laughing, deriding her, mocking her, filled her mind as a

harvest moon fills the night sky. She would not give him the satisfaction. She would not be defeated.

Her hands shook so much she did not think she could aim properly. She did the only thing she could do. She squeezed the trigger.

The explosion was very loud. The gun the Scoundrel had given her for protection bucked in her hands, and she was thrown violently backwards. She tried to scream but, as in a nightmare, was unable to utter a sound.

She was on her knees. Her right side was completely numb, and she felt wet as if she had soiled herself. Blood was everywhere, a great tree stump in front of her, staring sightlessly at the ceiling with black, button eyes.

Then Killan became aware of a keening in the room, as if a great knife-blade had been given the power of speech. Then there were people in the doorway. Familiar faces: the Scoundrel and Tomi Yazawa.

In a moment, Killan, so full of pain and dismay, became aware that the keening was coming from herself. She tried to stop it, but she had lost control. She stared upwards at them helplessly.

She felt herself being lifted, people speaking to her, but she could not understand what they were saving, did not want to understand. She wanted only to scream and scream and scream. So she did that.

The fire existed still in Senjin's mind: the dark, crackling flames, cleansing the foul air of calumny. They burned longer in his imagination, but did they burn brighter? He thought not.

It was Senjin's birthday. He was twenty-nine, but there was only one other to mark that date: Shisei. He had called her, left a message on her answering machine without giving his name. She was already late. He had expected her to be waiting for him in West Bay Bridge. Why hadn't she been there? He had been so certain that

he would see her face, grip her flesh, peer from mind to mind, merge as they had merged for so many years long ago.

He longed to gaze at the canvas he had made of her back while he lay with her, minds entwined, sharing as only they could share. A birthday present.

Senjin had never had his birthday celebrated; there had been no special family dinner, no gathering of friends, no present or even a card to set that day apart from all others of the year. When Senjin had first come upon the practice of gift-giving for a birthday he was already grown-up. He was astounded by the custom and he quickly came to hate it because it made him feel melancholy; instinctively he knew that this must be a weakness thrust upon him by Haha-san which he must fight.

But today, Senjin thought that at last he might give himself a birthday present.

Now was the beginning of the end, the last few steps on the road he had been born to tread. Sensei had trained him for this moment, though he could never have suspected it. His mind lacked the breadth, the scope of Senjin's own. Sensei might be tanjian, he might have the gift, but he was not a dorokusai, could not have even an idea what that might mean.

On the other hand, Senjin suspected that Haha-san would. He remembered a day when she took him into town with her. It was a tortuous journey, long and, to his mind, boring. He would have preferred to have been with sensei. But sensei was off on one of the mysterious journeys he undertook periodically, and Shisei was out running an errand for Haha-san.

In the village, Haha-san went to the bank. There, they were seated before a man with a stiff bearing and an even stiffer collar to his black suit. He asked Haha-san some questions about herself, writing down her answers on a square card. Then he gave her a long form to fill

out. Senjin watched. When she went to fill in the section marked date of birth, she wrote Senjin and Shisei's instead of her own.

Afterwards, out on the village street, Senjin asked her about this.

'Did I?' Haha-san said, almost dreamily. She smiled.

'Well, it was a natural mistake. Your birthdate was the

most vivid day of my life.'

It was only years later that Senjin realized what she meant. She had been so wrapped up in her children's rearing, in their lives, that they became her ikigai, the meaning of her own life. But as that happened, she invested them with distant, sharp-edged shards of her own personality, fragments of fear, rage, loneliness and agony: the weaknesses that had already overrun her life.

Senjin put his hand in his pocket, his fingers enclosing the carefully wrapped paper packet of emeralds. They were there, waiting, their power pulsing in his palm. They were six: a bad number, a dangerous, destabilizing number. He knew he was taking a chance carrying them around with him. Given time, they would create the Scorpion, one of the configurations of destruction. Only his own great mass of power made their danger manageable.

He needed to put all the emeralds together, to make the configuration of the nine. Only then would he fulfil his destiny. The last link with Eternity. Invincible, immortal, he would stride across the world, bending it to his whims.

Now, as Senjin studied the converted factory on Greene Street with the sea-green lacquered door, he knew that he must be close to the last of the mystic gems.

That was what he had come for, after all. That and to plunge Nicholas Linnear into a series of hells before he killed him.

But, at this moment, Senjin's mind was only peripherally aware of Nicholas. He was concentrating on Justine. It was Justine, he was sure, who would unlock the

whereabouts of the emeralds. He needed just ten minutes with her to prise the secret out of her brain. And then, when he was finished with her, he would pin her like an insect to a wall.

Obliterated by shadow, Senjin stood silent and unmoving. He.saw the apartment's owner, the squat, dangerous-looking Japanese, Conny Tanaka, emerge from the front door, turn right, walk up to Houston Street, where he hailed a cab, got hi.

Not ten minutes later, Nicholas Linnear opened the sea-green door, went lightly down the steps, headed south on foot. Senjin was momentarily torn. He thought it would be helpful to know where Nicholas was heading, but the building and what it now housed was too tempting a target. Two days ago, Senjin had seen Nicholas going into the front entrance to the Tomkin Industries' tower, then later at the Tanaka dojo.

Senjin knew of Nicholas's ties to the martial arts school, as well as his other New York hangouts; the Tokyo Metropolitan Police computer was extremely efficient, and what it couldn't provide, inter-service intelligence could.

It was Tanaka who had led Senjin home to this block, to this co-op that Nicholas and Justine were using as a base. Was this where the last cache of emeralds lay?

Now, three days after Nicholas and Justine had come to Manhattan from West Bay Bridge, Senjin was on his stakeout. He had taken a room in a midtown hotel but had never actually stayed there. It was the address he had given to Shisei when his plans had changed so suddenly. The fire had been lit, the flames had burned hard and high. There was nothing left for Nicholas in West Bay Bridge. Nothing, too, for Senjin.