Linnear 01 - The Ninja (30 page)

‘When she wakes up. Don’t worry.’

He hung up and hailed a cab, took it to Penn Station. Downstairs at the Long Island Rail Road counter he bought a ticket, found that he had twenty-five minutes to spare. He called Tomkin. There was a considerable delay. He stared out at the passing parade of people, scanning unconsciously. A pair of teenagers struggled with enormous knapsacks and, just behind them, a young woman stood against a pillar waiting impatiently to be met. He wondered whether it was her boss who was late.

‘Nicholas?’ The voice came crisply into his car.

‘Tomkin.’

‘I’m glad you called. Have you thought about my offer?’

Bastard, he thought. Bastard to bring Justine into it. But now he knew that Justine was a part of it. He hated to be in this position. Methodically, he calmed himself. ‘I’ve thought about it. I’ll start work for you today.’

‘Good. Why don’t you come up to the tower and -‘

“No. I’m at Penn Station. I’m taking the next train out to the Island.’

“I don’t understand -‘

‘There’s work to do out there. Justine’s out there.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ Nicholas said savagely. ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow.’

‘Nick -‘

The voice was cut off as he cradled the receiver.

The man was on the job. He had come to work for Lubin Bros over a week ago. He had been assigned to a construction site on Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn until Edwards had turned up sick and he had been transferred to the Park Avenue job. Tomkin was paying extra to make certain construction did not fall behind schedule and the management of Lubin Bros was doing everything in its power to keep things moving along. That included making sure there was always a full complement of workers.

The man worked tirelessly at every assignment he was given. He was a good worker and spoke very little; no one noticed him. When he reported that day, his mind had been filled with his work of the night before: early morning, that is. It was a way of thinking about today’s assignment. Some new wrinkles were needed, and while his forebrain was recounting last night’s work, the subconscious dissected the present problem.

It had been no trouble at all to gain access to the Actium House sub-basement parking lot; he had come in the empty back seat of a Lincoln Continental which had disgorged its passengers at the street-level entrance. Then it had simply been a matter of waiting.

Tomkin’s limo had come down the ramp at ten minutes past three in the morning. He was a notorious insomniac and spent the better part of each weekday night in his office at the new building.

The powerful headlights had scored the roof of the lot, then dipped as the limo came down the last part of the ramp. The motor thrummed quietly in the dark as the chauffeur rolled it to the parking space and slid in. The motor died.

The man knew by heart the next movements of the chauffeur, but even so he waited a full hour after the other had left. Time was one element that he had plenty of now. It could be the best of friends or the most implacable of enemies, thus he treated it with respect. It never paid to be hasty.

At last he uncoiled himself and moved towards the limo. It was like a shadow on the prowl. In seconds he had the back door of the car open and closed again. Inside, he used a pencil flash and a surgeon’s scalpel. Where the plush carpet met the edge of the rear seat, he scored a line with the scalpel. He made a second cut so that the two were in a T shape. Then he peeled back the small flaps and inserted a round object no more than half an inch in diameter and, using an odourless epoxy resin, he closed the flaps carefully. Next he turned his attention to the phone. He opened the box and, ignoring the receiver, placed a second disk on the inside wall of the box. He sat in the back seat precisely where he knew Tomkin sat and opened the box, looking down at the receiver. He could not see the disk. Satisfied, he closed the box. He turned off the pencil flash and let himself out of the limo. Within twenty seconds he was walking down Fifty-first Street, hunched over in his black nylon windbreaker. In all, he had been in the limo precisely nine minutes.

Now as he worked on the riveting in the atrium lobby of Tomkin Industries, the man worked on the problem of getting upstairs.

At lunchtime he took the outside cage elevator up as far as it would go, one floor below Tomkin’s office. Here the hallways were still raw plaster. Pencil marks were strewn about like engineering graffiti. The corridors were deserted but he was careful enough and there were numerous doorways to plunge into. Every so often he paused and, completely still, listened to the sounds of the building. He would know instantly if there was the slightest change.

He was not worried about his face. There was flesh-coloured putty on his cheeks and the bridge of his nose had been built up. Treated cotton rolls were placed in his mouth between gums and cheek. Too, his posture had changed from the man who had entered Terry Tanaka’s dojo. He had become slightly stoop-shouldered arid he walked with a noticeable limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. This was due to an inch lift in his right shoe. Disguising one’s face was all well and good but there were a myriad ways one could be identified by an expert. One had to be as meticulous about all parts of the body as one was about the face - the overall image. A disguise had to be total. One needed only the slightest alterations, however, because the idea was camouflage and it did not do to overdo specific characteristics.

He found the fire stairs, went carefully up to the top floor. Here there was much activity. Both workers and Tomkin’s staff were present. All the better, he thought.

Tomkin’s office, a full corner of the floor, was nine-tenths complete but it had priority because he was already working out of it. Therefore lunch breaks were not observed up here. The morning shift went down to eat while a swing shift arrived to continue the work. The man was just in time to join them. He walked past the steady gaze of Frank, who stood just inside the thick metal doors to the office. This was hardly the most difficult part. It was doing what he had to do in plain sight of everyone.

The answer, of course, was easy. He merely had to look as if he knew what he was doing and no one paid him the slightest attention. It might even have been amusing, the way in which he performed the most clandestine of movements out in the open like the living embodiment of ‘The Purloined Letter’, if he had allowed himself the luxury of feeling. That, however, was quite impossible for him in this context, thus it was merely an object of intellectual curiosity like a peculiarly striated rock brought home from a summer field trip.

He had, of course, to work in fits and starts: that is, to work on what was his own in between what he was given.

This presented no problems other than extending his time in the office.

He turned it, however, to his own advantage, as was his wont, by using the time to memorize the contours, the tiny nooks and crannies, the open spaces and the closed. He found where the wall was baffled and where it was bare beneath the paint and plaster; where the wiring went and the placement of all of the electrical outlets; where the circuit breakers were and where the auxiliary lighting. At the moment none of these things fitted in with his plans but one never knew when the knowledge might be crucial. Meticulous planning was essential; however, one always had to build into one’s plans a bit of leeway because events had a peculiar way of determining themselves and often, too often, a random element - an extra guard, a rainstorm, even an unexpected sound; a minute thing that could not be foreseen - slipped in. One never knew.

By one-thirty he was finished and, still under the jaundiced eye of Frank, he went out with the rest of the swing crew. Outside the metal doors, they turned to their right, heading towards the outside cage elevator one floor below. As he was turning the corner, the elevator at the end of the hallway sighed open and Tomkin, accompanied by Whistle, appeared.

The man paused for a moment, his dead eyes glittery. How easy it would be, he thought languidly, to take him out now. Whistle dead on his knees and the big man tumbling through the hot air to the unfinished pavement below. He liked it; it had a certain irony to it. But he did not admire it and that made all the difference in the world. It was not elegant, for one thing, and, for another, there would be little terror in it for Tomkin: just the brief moments he would be airborne, the hot wind in his face while the rubble of the sidewalk reached up for him. What would Tomkin think of in those instants, the man wondered. God? Oblivion? Hell? The man shrugged inwardly. It made little difference. He could understand none of these Western concepts. There was only karma for him. Karma and the \arni he would inhabit when he died, waiting the prescribed time until he returned in another body, in another life, carrying his karma.

This concept of life that was so basic, so fundamental, was, he knew, beyond the conception of men like Tomkin. This did not make him any easier to kill; the doing was just that much less absorbing. It was the mechanics of the penetration, the sowing of the terror which occupied part of his mind; the act of killing itself would mean as much to him as stepping on a cockroach. After all, that was what Tomkin was. He could never be called a civilized man.

As to the eventual escape, the man knew that on this assignment there was a possibility that it would not happen. It did not faze him in the least, for it was something towards which he had prepared all his life. To die as a warrior was life’s highest aspiration, after all, for history recorded the manner of one’s death and it was in this that one was remembered forever, not how one lived one’s life.

Not that he might ever be caught eliminating Tomkin. It was the other half of his plan: the part that made it all worthwhile. He was being paid a small fortune to take out Tomkin, but money meant very little to him. In fact, when he had arrived to take a look around - as he had put it to his then potential employers - he had not been certain he would take the assignment. But he had come upon something so startling, so irresistible that he could not refuse. He had learned early to take what life gave. He was being given something now that was so fantastic that he found himself salivating at the prospect. To turn away from such an opportunity would be a crime. The chance would never come again. The set-up would never be so sweet.

And this had been the second reason for not taking Tomkin out at this moment. Besides, it would, by necessity, have to be sloppy; this kind of total improvization went against his grain. He could do it and do it well but he resisted it. He hated to mop up all the loose ends after the fact. He liked things clean and neat; in another life he might have made a superb diamond cutter.

So it was that he just took a long, hard look at Tomkin as he strode down the hallway, unaware that death was at his left hand.

Then the man had moved on, down the unfinished corridor, ducking a loose loop of wire flex hanging from an open panel in the ceiling. In a moment he was through the door to the fire stairs, off the floor.

Once down in the atrium lobby, half in shadows, he poked a finger in his ear as if scratching an itch. In the canal was now placed a flesh-coloured plastic sphere, flattened on the outside. It was totally undetectable. He touched the top of it with the tip of his index finger and began to listen.

Nicholas felt it as he turned away from the line of shining chromium phones along one wall of the station: that premonitory tickle at the base of his neck. He began to walk calmly towards a bookstore, though he had had no intention of going in there. It was merely the way he was headed and he did not want to make any sudden alteration in his movements. He stood by the window, however, instead of going in at the open door. People passed him, going in and out. There was a short line at the cash register; there was a sale on, 20 per cent off the top ten paperback best sellers.

He stood at a slight angle, not looking inside-but using the plate glass as one would a mirror. He watched covertly a good section of the station behind him. Observation was made difficult by the poor refraction, the glare of the lights, the distortion of image caused by the glass itself. He accepted all of these and made allowances.

It was not good to stay here too long. He glanced at his watch. He still had fifteen minutes and he had no reason to sit for that time on the waiting train. Especially not now.

He walked away from the bookstore window, moving diagonally across the station. An old woman, her suitcase on wheels, crossed his path and two sailors in crisp whites passed him, one spinning the tail end of a lewd joke to the other. The young woman at the pillar was no longer there; either she had met her date or had given it up; three dark-haired children squired by a dour-looking woman scampered along, laughing and teasing each other. A man in a dark windbreaker stood by the bank of lockers, a lit cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. Opposite, a man in a camel-coloured suit flipped through the pages of the current Hustler, putting it down as a man with a tan briefcase came up to him. They shook hands and walked off.

Nicholas entered a Nedicks, wedged himself in next to a fat man devouring a slice of coconut cream pie. A dollar bill and some change were on the counter before him; his lips were dotted with pie crust and flecks of ersatz cream. The man ignored Nicholas as he sat down on a stool. He ordered a frank and an orange drink. The columns of the place were mirrored and Nicholas used these to continue his covert surveillance while he ate. He got his food, paid for it.

The feeling was still there, unmistakable. There was only one explanation. He was being observed by a haragei adept. The receiver was also a transmitter; there was no way to damp the two-way effect. This one had just come too close, that was all. Careless. And foolish.

Nicholas wiped his lips with the stiff napkin, took one last look in the mirror and went out. He had just over five minutes before the train left and in that time he would have to flush the adept. He had no thoughts now about missing the train; his overriding concern was for Justine. She was most assuredly in danger and he felt totally impotent being so far from her. It was one thing asking Doc Deerforth to look in on her once a day, quite another for him to be there when an emergency arose. Nicholas, rightly, trusted no one but himself in such a situation.