Linnear 01 - The Ninja (47 page)

Tomkin was on the phone for another ten minutes. During that time there was no movement in the office. In the brief

silences, Nicholas could hear the gentle hiss of the central air-conditioning. Frank was immobile near the closed doors.

Nicholas got up and, skirting the conversation pit, went back to the library. There was an old-fashioned rolltop desk to one side that he hadn’t noticed before. On it he saw several pictures in silver frames that looked Mexican. There were a number of colour shots of the same women at ages varying from perhaps sixteen to late twenties. One was Justine; the other, he surmised, must be Gelda. They were both quite beautiful in very different ways, yet they seemed linked by a hidden quality that defined both. He saw only one photo in which the sisters appeared together. It was a black and white shot, torn at one corner. The two girls stood on a lawn. In the background he could just make out the corner of a building, brick-faced, ivy-covered. It appeared to be part of an estate house. They were ten and seven year old. Justine held up a painted egg. At her feet was a tiny wicker basket. She was smiling at the camera. Gelda, a step behind her, taller and a good deal heavier, had been caught looking off to her left. There seemed, even at that young age, a peculiar gulf between the two, as if one had no cognizance of the presence of the other. They might have been pasted together from different pictures for all the relationship they bore to one another.

‘Nicholas?’

Nicholas turned and walked back to the side of the desk. Tomkin stood up, came round. He wore a fox-coloured silk suit, deep yellow-and-white-striped shirt with solid yellow collar and cuffs and a brown silk tie. He extended a hand. It was thick, the back dark with curling hair. He wore a ring of white gold or platinum on his right ring finger; his left hand bore no jewellery at all.

‘Glad to see you,’ he said. His blue eyes seemed to have a touch of grey to them today. ‘I was wondering when you’d show up. What did you find out?”

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Information, Nicholas.’ He formed the words slowly as if trying to capture the attention of a retarded child. ‘You went out to West Bay Bridge because you thought the ninja might be there. At least, that’s what you told me over the phone.”

‘He wasn’t there.’

‘Is Justine all right?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘I don’t like your tone of voice.’

‘You’re not paying me to like my tone of voice, merely to protect you.”

‘I have been wondering how you were doing that from Long Island. Remote control, I suppose.’

Nicholas laughed shortly. His eyes were steely. ‘Let’s cut the crap, Tomkin. You don’t have to like me, just be cooperative. Otherwise, I can’t do my job.”

‘But I do like you, Nicholas. Whatever gave you the idea that I didn’t?’ Affable now, he guided Nicholas down into the living area. They sat on the couch. It was chocolate brown and luxuriously comfortable.

‘Surely you’re not surprised to find that I’m - curious, shall we say - about your methodology. After all, Frank here never leaves my side. He gives me a great deal of comfort.’

‘Frank is useless,’ Nicholas said, ‘when it comes to the ninja. He’ll get through Frank as if he’s not there.’

Tomkin smiled thinly. ‘He may get through Frank but if he does, he’ll do so with a couple of .45 bullets in him.’

Nicholas shrugged. ‘If you choose to take this matter lightly -‘

‘I assure you, I am not taking this lightly. At all. Else I would not have hired you, understand? Now’ - he slapped his thick thigh - ‘tell me what you’re up to.’

‘I’m expecting Abe Russo any minute.’

‘What the hell we need him up here for? He’s got his hands full keeping to our deadline.’

‘The ninja’s hall-mark is infiltration,’ Nicholas said quietly. ‘He won’t try to kill you by … remote control, as you say.’ He grinned. ‘He’s got to come right up to you - do it himself from arm’s length. When Abe gets here, we’ll find out if he’s in the tower building.’

‘Here? But how?’

“The most likely probability is as a worker. He’d be anonymous, have the run of the place. It’s only logical.’

At that moment there was a knock on the door and Frank

let Abe Russo in. He carried a sheaf of computer printout paper in one hand. His clothing was rumpled and he wiped a stray lock of sandy hair from his forehead.

‘Here it is,’ he said, dropping the paper on the coffee table in front of them. ‘I’ve circled all the oriental males. There’s thirty-one of ‘em,’ he continued as they both began to look over the list.

‘What are you looking for?’ Tomkin said. ‘You know his name?’

Nicholas shook his head. ‘Even if I did, he’d never use it here.” It was a long shot to expect to find the name Hideoshi on this list but it would have been foolish to have ignored the obvious. ‘This it?’ he said to Russo.

The other nodded. ‘Yeah. Every one. Twenty-five are on the day shift, the rest are on at night.’

‘All twenty-five here today?’ Nicholas asked. ‘None called in sick?’

‘None sick. They’re all here as far as I can tell.’

‘And no one knows about this?’

‘Not a one,’ Russo said. ‘I worked on it alone.’

‘Okay,’ Nicholas said. ‘Let’s go.’ He stood up.

‘What’s happening?’ Tomkin said.

Nicholas rolled up the paper into a tube. I’m going to see all of these men face to face. Every one’s a candidate for our ninja.’

Russo took him through the labyrinth of the building and, one by one, the men on the list were interviewed and crossed off the list.

The thirteenth name was Richard Yao. Russo didn’t know precisely where he was working at this time of day, so they sought out his unit foreman. They found him supervising the welding going on in one section of the bottom of the atrium lobby. He was a heavy-set man with almost no hair and close-set eyes.

‘You just missed him, Abe.’ He took a thick cigar stub out of his mouth, used it to point over his shoulder. ‘He split.’

‘What for?’ Russo asked.

‘Said he was sick.’ He put the cold stub back into his mouth. ‘Didn’t look too good neither.’

‘How long ago did this happen,’ Nicholas said.

‘Oh, I’d say fifteen - maybe twenty minutes ago. Like I said, you just missed him.’ He looked at Russd. ‘Anything wrong? He’s a good worker.’

Russo’s eyes flickered briefly in Nicholas’s direction before he shook his head negatively. “Thanks, Mike. You need another man down here?’

‘I could use one.’

‘Okay. I’ll see to it then.’

On the way back up to the top of the tower, he said, ‘What do you think, Mr Linnear?’

‘I think,’ Nicholas said, ‘that we have our man.’

‘Well, hey, give me this for a sec -‘ He took the sheaf of paper from Nicholas’s grasp, leafed through the accordion sheets. ‘Here!’ His forefinger stabbed at the sheet. ‘Here’s his address, 547 - hey, wait a minute I That address is too far west. It’s a phony!’

‘I’m not surprised.’

The doors opened and Nicholas sprinted down the corridor, leaving the other behind, staring at him. He pushed past Frank. Tomkin was on the phone, behind his desk. He put a palm over the moudipiece. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what gives? Did you find-‘

But Nicholas was already at the verge of the desk, his fingertips moving quickly but surely around the rim of die. top.

‘What the hell -‘

‘Hang up,’ Nicholas said. He was circling the desk, probing. His fingertips never left the surface of the oiled wood.

Tomkin stared down at Nicholas’s hands as if they were disembodied entities. He lifted the receiver to his ear, mumbled a few words and hung up.

‘Good,’ Nicholas said, still moving. ‘I’d like to talk to you -‘

‘About what happened downstairs. Yeah. Yeah.’ His blue eyes were open wide as he watched. Across the room, Russo had come in. He stood quietly next to Frank, looking on.

‘Right. About what happened downstairs.’ Nicholas knelt, began to search under the desk. He spoke as he worked. ‘I dunk we found our man.” Wiring and computer modules. ‘The diir-teendi. A man named Richard Yao. He was transferred here from a Rubin Bros site in Brooklyn.’ Ridged templates: the

computer grid. More wiring. ‘Not too long ago.’ As thick as a rat’s nest, colour-coded for easy repair. ‘Quite a good worker, so his foreman says.’

‘Yeah, so what?’ Tomkin’s deep-set eyes never left Nicholas’s hands. ‘What’s it to me?’

‘He’s our man. He split just after I made the call to Russo requesting the list of oriental male workers here at the tower.’ One ridge higher than the other and he backtracked with the tips of his fingers just to make certain. He gave a little pull. ‘Russo didn’t speak to anyone about this little job and there was no time for anyone to get a peek.’ Fingers still in darkness with their minuscule prize. ‘Just Russo and me and’ - he lifted it into the light at last, deposited on the gleaming desk top in front of Tomkin, a bright bit of plastic and metal, thin as a wafer, less than an inch in diameter - ‘of course, the telephone.’

Tomkin’s face had gone red and his head seemed to tremble somewhat. He reached out one forefinger, pushed hesitantly at the thing as if he thought it might bite him. ‘Goddamn it I’ he cried. ‘Goddamn it! Under my own nose!’ He pounded the table, looked up. ‘Frank, you sonovabitch! How’d you let mat cocksucker in here? I’ll kill you!’

Frank stood rooted to the spot, bewildered.

‘It’s not his fault,’ Nicholas said quietly. ‘He couldn’t know what to look for.’

But Tomkin was beyond calming words. He moved out from behind his desk, the forefinger that had touched the electronic bug waving in the air at his bodyguard. ‘Is this what I pay you for, you asshole? That - dial shit was in here, prowling around! Where the fuck were you? Tell me that! Where the fuck were you?’

‘I was here all the time, Mr Tomkin,’ Frank said hastily. ‘Even when you were out to lunch, I was here. I never left, you gotta believe me. This guy must have busted in here at night, after you and me were gone. I don’t -‘

Tomkin soared forward, slammed Frank with the back of his hand. ‘Nobody broke in here, you schmuck - not without my knowing about it the next day.’ He watched the bright red stain on Frank’s cheek; he could almost feel how hot the skin was. ‘No, he was here all right, under our noses. You were just too stupid to have seen him.’

‘But I didn’t, even know who to look for,’ Frank said.

‘Shut up I Just shut up, will you?’ Tomkin turned his back on him. ‘Christ, you sound like a baby crying.’

Nicholas had been moving in a half-crouch outwards from the epicentre of the desk in a tight spiral. It took him ten minutes of intensive search but he found a second bug under one section of the chocolate couch. No one said anything until he was finished.

‘I think,’ Nicholas said, dusting off his hands, ‘that under the circumstances we’d better go downstairs.’

‘What for?’ Tomkin looked puzzled. ‘The room’s secure now, isn’t it?’

Nicholas nodded. He was already moving towards the door to the corridor. ‘Tell you on the way down, okay?’

Tomkin’s heavy voice broke the whirring silence of their descent. ‘I don’t mind telling you that was a good piece of work you did up there, Nick. Damned fine. Thanks.’ He sighed. ‘You know I regularly have my office and homes electronically vacuumed every six months to weed out surveillance but, Christ, I haven’t even moved in here officially.’ He ran his fingers through his iron-grey brush of hair. ‘Sweet Jesus, when I think of what he might have overheard over those lines! I’d like to rip his throat out!’

The doors slid open and they stepped out into the atrium.

‘You don’t think the bastard’s here somewhere, do you?’ Tomkin’s head moved from side to side.

‘No chance,’ Nicholas said, guiding the other man along the lobby. ‘He knew security had been broken the minute he overheard my conversation with Russo. He’s split. For the time being.’

They went out into the hot sunshine on Park Avenue. Like stepping out onto the surface of a bloated, slowly turning planet, the burning atmosphere so thick it felt like gravity; locked in a pressure chamber.

As they approached the car, the thin, bony chauffeur got out, stood waiting on the broken sidewalk, one hand grasping the door handle.

Nicholas stopped them midway along the plank walkway.

The jarring sound of the jackhammers filled the air like a battery of dentists’ drills. Tomkin had to lean close in order to hear what Nicholas was saying. He nodded and they climbed into the dim, cool interior of the limo.

They started up immediately, nosing out into the traffic flow. Nicholas began to work. He went to the phone first, unscrewing both ends of the receiver, drew a blank. It had to be a place of easy access, he reasoned. The ninja might have been able to take his time in Tomkin’s office but certainly not here. He looked into the well where the receiver was placed; very little room. He used one finger all around the sides. And came up with it. He depressed a button and an inch of window slid silently down. He threw the bug out. The window sighed up.

‘Clear?’ Tomkin asked.

He held up his hand, inspected all the obvious places; nothing.

‘All right.’ He sat back up in the seat. ‘We’re secure.’

‘Good.’ Tomkin’s face relaxed visibly. ‘All this has given me (he creeps because it’s come at the worst time imaginable.’ He leaned forward, depressed a hidden stud. A smoked-glass panel slid upwards, cutting them off from the front of the car. Nicholas saw the cross-hatching of the wire mesh embedded within the glass. ‘I’m in the middle of one of the biggest deals I’ve ever made. It takes in corporations on three continents. The amount of money involved, well, it’s incalculable. Christ, what I need now is not to be disturbed, so I get this - asshole-hanging around my neck.’ He chuckled, his mood shifting abruptly. ‘Well, I shouldn’t complain, really. This idea originated with the Japanese. Only they were far too timid; they refused to go all the way with it even after I outlined the perfect methodology. Scared, is all. So we had a falling out - of sorts.’ He laughed. ‘I stole the idea. Shit, they were going to just sit on it for a while, “study” the sampling they already had.’ He snorted. ‘No one’d get rich that way. Then they wanted back in after I had it running. Can you imagine? I told them to fuck off. They had lost a lot of face by then - too much, I guess. So they’ve sent the ninja.’