Linnear 02 - The Miko (27 page)

He would have to take one of them out. Red or Blue, which would it be? Riding the waves, cerulean and a green the shade of translucent jade, Bristol thought it would be Blue.

He sat in a sway-backed canvas director’s chair that had seen better days, paying out his line, waiting for something to strike the bait twisting fifteen feet below. Not more than a hundred yards to port, the long sleek twinscrew pleasure boat carrying Alix Lo-gan, a half-dozen of her friends, and the Red Monster, who was doing his level best not to stick out like a sore thumb, sat in the water.

He had gone so far as to take off his shirt, which, Bristol thought, was a mistake because it only emphasized the paleness of the flesh on his chest, back, and upper arms. There was plenty of muscle, though, and Bristol took careful note. He wondered how Alix had introduced him to her friends.

The line went taut and the ratcheting of the set reel began. Bristol watched the end of the rod bending and quivering, and he began the reel-in. If it had been a toss-up he probably would have chosen the Red Monster to take out because he was even bigger than Bristol was, and after all this time Bristol was itching for a fight.

But as it was, there was no contest. In the months of his surveillance, he had come to hate the Blue Monster. For one thing, he had a way of looking at Alix that went beyond a strictly business interest. Somehow, over time, Blue had developed a proprietary absorption.

To the Red Monster she was just another piece of meat, an assignment like many others he had had before and would have again. Isolate and protect; he stuck to the letter of the command he had been giventhey had a Laundry List, an accounting of people in her life who had been checked out and were okay for her to associate with.

Blue, the night man, loved to look at her. He was allowed inside her apartment. Not for the entire night, of course, but just long enough when she returned home to check the place out thoroughly. Then the door would slam and he’d saunter down the concrete steps, a wooden toothpick twirling from one corner of his mouth to the other.

He’d cross the street, heading for the chrome and glass box of the fried chicken franchise less than a block away. He’d buy a pail of extra crispy that would feed a family of four and hunker down in an orange plastic seat. His lips full of grease, his cheeks flecked with bits of chicken skin, he’d stare at the lighted window square behind which Alix Logan was undressing for bed and lick his lips. Bristol did not think it had anything at all to do with the food.

A force jolted him, all the way down at the base of the rod, and things began to hot up. He pushed the soles of his worn topsiders against the aft coaming and hauled back mightily on the rod. The force of God was down there, and the answering twist almost pulled him out of his chair. What in Christ’s name had he lit onto? His back muscles tensed as he brought all his brawn to bear against the sea creature at the other end of his line.

A hundred yards away, across the diamondlike sparkle of the rolling sea, Alix and her friends were in their suits, their coppery skin shining with suntan oil, faces held up to the streaming sunlight, hair floating in the wind. Tops popped off iced cans of Bud, handed around. Laughter floated across the water.

Bristol fought the fish, even as his eyes were on the activity aboard the pleasure boat, even as his mind still turned over his feelings for the Blue Monster.

His great muscles corded and he felt the adrenaline pumping through him, exulting him. Damn, but it was good to be alive. The terror of the grave Tomkin wanted him in was an inconstant specter inside him. That night, the tumbling car, the uncontrollable motion, the soaring, stomach-wrenching free fall, the ground coming up, the overpowering darkness, the vertigo, the getout, and the searing fireball of his coffin, the triumphant shout of the flames licking near his cheek, and rolling, rolling, looking again and again with each rapid revolution into the face of death.

With a fierce grin, Bristol reeled in the line, feeling with every sense he possessed the skein of life flowing all around him. He felt the rhythmic rocking of the boat as it negotiated the deep sea swells, he breathed deeply of the clean salt air laced with the pungency of marine fuel, felt the hot bite of the sunlight on his arms and shoulders. The colors of the water flashed before him, now deep blue, then aquamarine, turquoise, even, far out, a thin feathery line of pale green.

But mostly, he felt the life at the other end of the line, the fight, the strategy of working the big fish closer, ever closer to

the boat’s side and the ultimate landing. During New York’s long, frigid winters he had dreamed of such moments, and now he was living them.

The fish was close now. He could see its frothy wake every so often as it neared the surface, knew that that was the time to brace himself, to let off the reel’s safety and allow the creature its head to plunge downward into the ocean’s depths. That would do nothing more than set the hook more firmly in its cheek but it only knew that it must get away, and instinctively it went down.

The reel screamed as the line payed out in a blur and he knew that if he were holding on to the line too tightly, it would snap under the enormous force of the fish’s dive.

And now it reached the end and, lifting the rod in a long smooth arc, he began to reel in the line, slowly, steadily, with a great deal of patience. It would be a long afternoon out here and he had nowhere else to go unless the skipper of the nearby pleasure boat decided to move on.

Always he had one eye on the other craft. It was important, he knew, not to become a passive observer. Most likely, you’d be put to sleep and you’d learn nothing. He had been taught to use stakeout time to actively learn about the subject. Moods as well as habits were important, because there would surely come : day when observer and subject would meet and in that confrontation the observer’s acquired knowledge often made the difference in establishing a dialogue.

The big fish was tiring, and as Bristol wound the line in more quickly now he saw Alix’s tall, lithe form detach itself from the pack and move with surefooted grace up along the deck forward. The Red Monster, drinking a beer, turned his head for a moment, catching the movement. Nothing was happening, so he went back to his quiet drinking.

Alix reached the tubular aluminum railing rising from the prow of the boat and stood leaning, her arms rigid, her long-fingered hands wrapped around the upper bars. For a long time she stared out to sea, at the long unbroken line of the horizon, blue on blue. Then her gaze dropped to the water lapping gently below her. Her eyes were fixed. She seemed mesmerized by something she saw down there in the clear water.

In one last burst of energy, the fish at the other end of Bristol’s line dove straight down and for just a moment his entire concentration was directed at not losing the creature.

When he looked up, Alix was gone. Bristol’s head whipped around. She was not on deck. Perhaps she had needed to use the head. Or the sun had got to be too much for her.

Bristol had a sinking feeling in his gut. That fixed look in her eyes, that staring. He had seen it before when he had first met Gelda. His gaze was drawn to the sea just in front of the pleasure boat’s prow. Caramel hair floating, a golden shoulder bobbing. Was she swimming or drowning?

The Red Monster glanced forward and didn’t see her. He put his beer can aside and got up. His mouth opened and he said something to the skipper. The other man shook his head in a negative, pointed toward the forward railing.

The Red Monster sprang upward and Bristol thought, He’d better be quick because Alix was drifting away from the boat and there seemed no doubt now. She was making no effort to stay within range and this far out with the current so strong it was as good as saying, “I give up.”

Running along the side deck, Red spotted her and he leaped overboard. His strong confident strokes brought him to her in minutes. On board the pleasure boat, the skipper was breaking out the inflatable rubber dinghy. Several of the oiled men were helping him. The women were gaping.

The skipper lowered the dinghy, and the Red Monster with one capable palm tucked beneath Alix’s chin swam slowly toward safety.

They were lifting Alix’s body up onto the deck as Bristol’s fish broke the surface. It was a marlin, and by all rights it should have whipped him out of his chair and into the sea during its fight for life.

Bristol watched the long arch of her golden body, raised like a rainbow being lifted into position. Her hair, darkened by the sea, hung down like seagrape, obscuring one shoulder.

Moments later, after the Red Monster had given her mouth-to-mouth, she rolled over. Sea water ran from her mouth in a torrent. Someone came over and put a baseball cap on her head to keep off the sun. The skipper draped a towel across her shoulders, and the Red Monster took her below.

Bristol looked down into the huge, glistening eye of the marlin. Its long body whipped, its tailfin sending a spray of cool water up into his face.

The fish was very close, and as Bristol leaned over the side with his landing hook at the ready he saw the marlin for what it really was: not a game fish, not a trophy stuffed over the mantel in his apartment, but another life.

He thought of the burning car, the fight he had had to put up in order to escape death, and he saw that the marlin’s desperate

battle had been no different. They were both gallant soldiers, and this creature deserved to die no more than Bristol did.

He stared once more into that round eye, so alien yet for all that so full of life. He could not take that away from the creature. Dropping his landing hook, he dug in his pocket for the knife. He used the blade to slash through the line just beyond the hook.

For just an instant the marlin lay there, close to the boat, floating, its eye on him. Then with a flash of its mighty tail, it leaped away, its blue-green-black body arcing, sunlight spinning off its scales, and then there was only a narrow foaming wake, a tiny incision in the skin of the sea to mark where it had once been.

Tengu was the name his sensei, as tradition dictated, had given him. He was another of Viktor Protorov’s agents inside the precincts of the Tenshin Shoden Katori ryu. As such he walked a fine line, and even his sleep had developed a crack in it upward to the more alert alpha layers so that he might never be caught off guard. As Tsutsumu had.

Always he was conscious of being in a hive filled with buzzing, angry bees. That anger, he knew very well, needed only one word of accusation to be leveled at him. Never had he experienced the kind of conglomerate emotional upheaval that had come from the unexpected and unexplained death of Masashigi Kusunoki, the erstwhile leader of this ninja ryu.

Tengu had come from a large rural family in Kyushu and he remembered the day his father had died. The family reunited silently, moving almost as a single unit. But even that display of togetherness could not compare with the singleminded will which apparently pervaded all levels of the society here. Jonin, leader-sensei, chunin, the tactical unit leaders, and genin, as well as the students such as himself were all affected to a frightening degree.

Something was happening within the dojo that Tengu did not understand, some unconscious whirlwind, some spiritual flashpoint of which he was not part. He triedand pretended to be a part to those around himbut he knew inwardly that it was useless. He was lost here and he could not say why. Had he been able to step outside of himself and observe the totality of the circumstances within which he found himself, he would have seen that he simply lacked the dedication, the intense concentration of energies that would have allowed him to become a part of the mourning, the renewed dedication of spirit that came with Kusunoki’s passing.

Tengu developed many fears during these volatile days when he was obliged to expend tremendous amounts of psychic energy in concealing his true mission at the Tenshin Shoden Katori from those about him. But none was as acute or as draining as the fear he developed of Phoenix.

Next to Kusunoki himself, Phoenix was the most powerful of the jonin. In fact, to Tengu’s way of thinking, Phoenix was more of a threat than Kusunoki ever had been. For one thing, he was younger, his vitality at the peak. For another, he was an explorer of pathways it seemed to Tengu that Kusunoki had long ago turned away from. Foolishly.

Too, Phoenix had always spent more time with the lowly genin than Kusunoki ever had, at least during Tengu’s tenure at the dojo. The old sensei had increasingly seemed to devote himself to quiet contemplation and the instruction of certain favored pupils, among them the lone female, Suijin.

So it was that just before dawn Tengu would slip silently back into his cubicle, exhausted and utterly drained after a night spent alternately hiding and searching, his heart pounding heavily every time he sensed the approach of another.

Terror stalked him. He lived in fear that Phoenix would become aware of his clandestine activities. The thought of coming under the scrutiny of that glowering countenance was too milch for him to contemplate for long. Better by far to die by his own hand than to be delivered up to the vengeance of such a one.

To Tengu, who had been brought up with all the superstition and ritualism of country folk, it was like trying to battle a kami.

Phoenix was a shade, something that Tengu could not understand. Seeing him, seeing the fiercely visaged tattooed tiger rampant across his shoulder and back, Tengu was gripped by a primal paralysis that he could not break. Therefore, despite what Protorov had advised, he kept his boldness in check, masking himself against discovery while he continued his recreancy.

When Nangi returned to the larger office suite his face was entirely composed. He had done all he could for the moment. It was now up to Allan Su and his staff to go through Anthony Chin’s books and ferret out just what had been done to All-Asia, to see if it was still a viable entity. Su had advised that they close their doors until the matter was determined but Nangi, knowing how rumors flew in the Colony, had decided to keep the bank open and to issue an immediate story about Anthony Chin’s dismissal for fiduciary improprieties to both the Chinese-and English-language newspapers. He had no compunction about ruining the career of the man who had brought his bank to the brink of financial destruction.