The Kaisho (47 page)

He closed down the computer, sat staring at the blank screen, thinking of how to get in. He translated the numerical sequence into letters of the Western alphabet, turned on the computer to try that.

The computer booted up, the screen changing. He had forgotten to take out the floppy from the A drive and the computer was reading it first instead of booting up from the C-drive hard disk. The screen prompted him for a numerical sequence and Nicholas typed in the one he’d found on the box of floppies.

He was presented with a directory of files. He called up the first one, had perhaps ten seconds to read what appeared on the screen: dates of delivery for shipments of Chinese F-type fighter planes, Russian Tupolev-22 M bombers, T-72 tanks, SAM-13 antiaircraft missiles, American F-15 fighters, Lockheed SR-71 supersonic jets, Badger computerized flamethrowers, Python-600 mortars, Deyrael hand-held antitank bazookas, the list seemed endless. It appeared as if Avalon Ltd. was a clearinghouse, a middleman between suppliers identified with numerical codes and buyers in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, the new ethnic battlefields of the world where bitter warfare was just beginning in earnest.

And then, at the end of the list, he saw a short line of curious icons. He pressed the
HELP
key and the icons resolved themselves into two words:
On order.
Meaning not yet available?

He scrolled to the end of the icons, pressed the ENTER key, and saw:
Torch 315.

What the hell was that?

Ten seconds and then his world came crashing in.

The collapse was soundless, a kind of psychic implosion, and he thought,
I didn’t sense him.

The Messulethe!

He had not heard the beating against the membrane of
kokoro,
had been reasonably certain that for the moment, at least, he was safe.

He staggered beneath the assault, swinging around, thrusting his
tanjian
eye this way and that in a vain attempt to discover the location of the Messulethe. As before, he believed his only chance to survive the encounter was to come within physical proximity of the Messulethe. Arm’s length would be preferable, but close enough to throw a live terminal at him would do.

But, as he had suspected, the Messulethe wasn’t about to allow that to happen. Nicholas groaned as he went down to his hands and knees. There was a black weight in his mind, freezing his synapses, robbing him of the ability to string two thoughts together. The world was reduced to chaos, and then, shrinking still further, was forged into a spike of gleaming steel whose point began to pierce the lobes of his brain.

He was going to die without even looking his antagonist full in the face. He did not know his name or who he was, could not even conjure a reason for this assault. But death was coming; that became the only surety in the closeness of his collapsed universe.

Nicholas!

He tried to center himself, to gather his forces at
kokoro,
but the path was blocked, strewn with barbed wire that repelled him as he tried to beat the drumhead at the center of the universe.

Akshara was inadequate, and again, the self-doubt crept through him, as insidious as a virus: Kansatsu’s training contained within its very essence the seed of Nicholas’s destruction. It would have been like Kansatsu, whose soul had been deformed by Kshira, to plan for the eventuality of defeat. Kansatsu had been the great deceiver, the spinner of schemes within schemes, and it would fit him to have devised a way to destroy Nicholas from beyond the grave.

Nicholas!

Akshara taught that there were seven paths to
kokoro.
All were blocked, and now the crushing pressure in his brain turned him blind and deaf. A great howling, as of a pack of hungry wolves, was making his ears bleed. Breath was coming hot in his lungs, as if he had been thrust into a furnace.

Red shapes moving against the black scrim of his maimed vision, eerie dreamscapes distorted as they were projected through his fevered brain, preternatural images from the dawn of man, race memory glimpsed through a forest of pain and crushing pressure.

Nicholas!

Water running, the bell-like tones, working their way through the howling, the rising windstorm. A filament of silence, iridescent and insubstantial as an insect’s wing. Blindly, he reached for it, missed, and the howling increased, the fury of the windstorm threatening to engulf him entirely, the cold hand of death laying its skeletal fingers on his breath, robbing him of…

Nicholas!

He heard her, understood its nature, spoke to her with his mind, though he was dizzy and sick unto death.

Here...
It was all he could muster.

And the filament came down, a lifeline in the chaos, running through the core of him, wrapping itself around him, brushing aside the skeleton’s grip, lessening the din of entropy, pulling him back from the abyss that had opened beneath him, the abyss beneath
kokoro.

And now he saw what his antagonist’s attack had blinded him to: he was directly underneath
kokoro.
This was why the seven pathways had been blocked, and he reached up, began the ritual tintinnabulation, setting the rhythm at the center of the universe that would transmogrify thought into action.

He allowed his
tanjian
eye to sleep, knowing now that the Messulethe’s psychic storm had rendered it dangerously unreliable. He opened his physical eyes and saw Celeste, crouched and shivering with terror, but there nonetheless, extending the psychic filament that had saved him.

And behind her, the Messulethe.

In this excruciating moment of crisis, the last facet of the truth he had been withholding from himself made itself manifest: he couldn’t let anything happen to her. He had been struck, crippled by love.

That was when his ears caught the susurrus, as if an insect were caught in a web. His attention diverted for an instant, his eyes picked up the bright flash, desperately transferring messages to his brain. And then the dagger, thrown directly at his chest, came hurtling out of the dark.

In all ways Renata Loti was an impressive woman. She was in her mid-seventies, tall, stately, evincing none of the outward infirmities that the years brought to other women her age. Her back was not bent, there was no tremor in her hands, no fragility in the way she moved. A slight but noticeable limp did nothing to deter her maneuverability or her stamina.

She’s smart
and
clever,
Delacroix, the arms dealer, had told him,
which is hard to find in anyone, let alone a woman. She’s an influence peddler of rare distinction who specializes in the Asian theater. She’s your man.

Gaunt met her on the corner of Constitution and Seventeenth Street, across from the Ellipse that fronted the White House. There was that odd sense, prevalent throughout the capital, of being in a countryside park rather than in the middle of an urban bustle, the broad, open spaces serving as a brilliant setting for Washington’s primary contrasting elements of sky and imposing stone and cast-iron edifices.

Behind him rose the Renaissance splendor of the OAS building with its triple-arched entrances, massive bronze gates, and curious statuary, a mishmash of the Americas, North and South, which served as a reminder of how essentially incompatible the two cultures were.

Renata Loti had the strong, determined face of a woman who knew her way around the corridors of power, who had a clear sense of herself and of her purpose in life. If she had ever lost her credulity to the disillusionment of reality, it would have been a great many years ago, but she evinced none of the world-weary cynicism or the unconvincing jingoism that pervaded Washington’s political circles. Her jutting nose, high cheekbones, deep-set cerulean eyes, and strong jawline made her a woman to be reckoned with wherever she went. She wore her hair in a short fringed cap. It was platinum, perhaps a touch wild for a woman her age, but certainly in keeping with her powerful personality.

She was dressed in a black, slubbed-silk suit, black alligator shoes and matching handbag, and was wrapped in a stylish, three-quarter-length black suede coat. She wore no jewelry save a glowing cabochon ruby ring on the finger where a wedding band would have been.

“Mr. Gaunt?”

He nodded, and she smiled, showing just a flash of tiny white teeth.

“It’s good of you to meet me at such short notice,” he said, shaking her hand.

“I knew your father. He was a man to be proud of.” She gave a little laugh. “Besides, I was at a very dull play. When you paged me, I was already thinking about leaving. This gave me a good excuse.” Her head cocked at an angle, a young girl sizing up the new boy in class. “You said you got my number from Timothy?”

“Timothy Delacroix, yes,” Gaunt said as they began to walk. Renata indicated that they should sit on a bench just outside the OAS gardens. “He said that you might be the only person in Washington able to help me.”

“How flattering.” But her face grew serious. “I’ve known Timothy a long time. He never exaggerates.”

Gaunt filled her in concerning Senator Bane’s interest in Tomkin Industries and Nicholas in particular. He ended up by saying, “Now Delacroix tells me he’s had dealings with Sato-Tomkin through our Saigon director, Vincent Tinh. If that’s true, if we’ve been involved in some way with arms shipments, then I suspect Bane’s committee already has proof of it. The company is a dead duck. And Nicholas is liable to wind up in a federal penitentiary for the rest of his life.”

“I know all about Tinh,” Renata said. “I thought it intriguing that he’d become the Saigon director of Sato-Tomkin and always wondered who set that up.”

Gaunt’s ears immediately pricked up. “What do you mean?”

“Tinh is very bad news—the worst, in fact. He’s slick, gets things done on time and right, which is impressive in Southeast Asia. But he’s a real entrepreneur in the worst sense—he’ll deal in anything and everything if he sees a profit in it.”

“For the company?”

“For himself.” Renata considered for a moment. “I don’t know Mr. Linnear personally, but you can imagine in my field I’ve heard a good deal about him from a great many people. They say he possesses what the Japanese samurai called
bushi no nasake,
the tenderness of a warrior.” Her eyes, which were clear and lustrous, their color unfaded by time, looked out at the traffic on Constitution as she gazed inward. “I am told he has excellent instincts. Do you agree, Mr. Gaunt?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

Renata nodded, as if receiving an answer already divined. “I find it unlikely he would have hired Tinh on his own—someone very good must have sold Tinh to him.”

“It’s interesting you’d say that,” Gaunt said excitedly. “I’ve had a suspicion all along that Nicholas and the company have been set up to be guillotined by Bane.”

“Rance Bane is like a cancer racing through a sick body. He’s a commanding force now, despite Senator Branding and the opposition’s best efforts to control him. He has an unshakable power base, which means even those who despise him are forced to defer to him, so I’d be careful whom you talk to and what you say. Bane has many friends in Washington at the moment, not all of them out in the open.”

Gaunt nodded. “Thanks for the warning, but I’m an old hand here. I know when to keep my mouth shut.”

“You’re still in danger if you are determined to pursue the Vincent Tinh angle. Timothy doesn’t know half of what Tinh’s been into. Stolen arms shipments is only the top stratum, if Tinh’s past is any indication. Drugs, banned chemical weapons, high-tech military secrets, he’s been involved in them all—and made a fortune at it.”

“If that’s the case,” Gaunt said, curious, “what was he doing taking a legit salaried job with Sato-Tomkin?”

“Undoubtedly opportunity. The legitimacy of the business and the setup work he’s doing for the company—and I would guess doing it quite well—would provide a perfect mask for his own business. These days it pays to be a bit less flamboyant with the kind of work Tinh loves best.”

“If someone set us up, I’ve got to find out who he is. That’s the only chance we have of getting out of this alive.”

Renata was silent for such a long time she started to make him nervous.

“What are you thinking?”

She sighed, turned to look at him. “I’m aware of too many eyes. Let’s take a walk.”

It had begun to rain, but Renata, buttoning her coat, seemed undeterred. They left the Ellipse behind them, crossed over Constitution into West Potomac Park. As the ground began to slope downward, Gaunt was aware that they were heading toward the black duolith of the Vietnam Memorial. He could scent the Tidal Basin, south of the Reflecting Pool, and it brought back all sorts of memories, good and bad, of his previous life in this city.

The hissing of traffic along the wide avenue on their right gradually gave way to the night wind whispering in the last of the leaves on the trees. Beside him, Renata Loti had no difficulty negotiating the incline. On the contrary, she clearly enjoyed the exercise, and they moved at a steady pace. Underfoot, the mulch of dead leaves provided a comforting susurrus that made him think of wet autumn days, steam coming off the ground, mixing with the layers of burnt-orange and gold leaves to create a unique confluence of earthy odors.

He thought of his dead father, his stature in this city, knowing that he had beaten this place before it had risen up to beat him. There was a kind of solace in that knowledge, and for the first time since returning here, he was grateful that fate had dictated that he return, against his will.

Renata, her head down, her hands jammed in her pockets, seemed totally lost in thought. Droplets of rain glittered in her hair like diamonds. At last, she said, “It seems to me that in your case, taking the most direct route may be the only way for you to find out who touted Nicholas on Vincent Tinh.” She paused, and he could see the breath steaming from between her half-opened lips. “The problem is it’s also the most dangerous.”