Linnear 02 - The Miko (37 page)

Far below him he could see the bright white dazzle of sunlight off the water through the thick stands of pines and cryptomeria.

On his way up to the inner sanctuary Sato passed beneath the crimson-lacquered Myojin torii gate and, just beyond, paused to drop something in the offering box. Reaching just above it, he pulled the rope that rang the sacred bell which would awaken the resting kami who dwelled in this place and alert them of the presence of the arriving supplicant.

Inside the main sanctuary building, Sato knelt before the tables laden with offerings. Grouped around the tables were carved figures of sitting archers, spearmen, samurai wielding katana.

Before the closed doors of the inner chamber wherein the kami resided stood the Gohei, a wooden wand with bits of folded paper hanging in zigzag fashion from it. Beside it was the Haraigushi, the purification wand, a small branch from the sacred sakaki tree.

Above, banners depicting the clouds and the moon hung, indicating the presence of the kami. Draped from one of the standards which held the banners was a brocaded cloth in which were hung the sword and jewels as well as the shield and halberd of the shrine. These were symbols both of the power of the kami in matters of wisdom and justice, and of protection against evil.

Centered directly below the banners on the table was the sacred mirror which was perhaps the most important and certainly the most mysterious element in the Shinto religion. It was thought to reflect the cleanest light, to be able to reflect everything as it truly is and not how we would wish it to be.

Did not the Jinno Shotoki say that “the mirror hides nothing. It shines without a selfish mind. Everything good and bad, right and wrong, is reflected without fail.” Was not the Sun Goddess’s divine spirit captured in just such a mirror hung outside her cave.

Now Sato knelt before the mirror and, peering into its keen eye, was bathed in its clear light. And as he did so he wished for peace of mind and spirit, he wished for the deep and abiding sanctuary of thought symbolized by the gleaming lake far below. He summoned up the kami.

In moments, a peculiar kind of peacefulness stole over him that he had become accustomed to from his earliest days. And he felt as if a connective bridge had been spun out of the ether between his essence and that of his honored father. The elder Sato had come to this shrine almost every day of his life, and when Seiichi was old enough to walk his father had taken him, along with Gotaro.

Even as a young child Seiichi had been enraptured by this place. While his older brother had fidgeted and yawned by his side, Seiichi had begun to feel the presence of the place steal over him like a mantle of refracted light from the mirror.

And when his honored father had died, he had made his own pilgrimage after the funeral rites here, down the narrow rocky path which he and all the guests at his second wedding descended many years later, to the shore of the lake. Mist was still rising off it then so that it appeared as it must have eons ago at the dawn of Japanese history, prehistoric and pure.

It was only as he stared at the gently rippling skin of the lake that Seiichi had reconnected with his father’s kami. And so he came here regularly to be as close as he could come to the history of his family.

He needed all their accumulated wisdom now to see him through this maelstrom. It seemed as if all his world were collapsing around him. Thirty-seven years to create, and then in the span of little over a year they were on the verge of ruin. How had it happened? He could not say, even with the supposed help of aftersight. Perhaps they should never have become involved in Tenchi in the first place. But the government had made manifestly clear the potential rewards if the project were successful. With the keiretsu in the position it was in, just outside the charmed circle of Japan’s top seven companies, we could not resist, Sato thought now.

But even though the government was pouring the country’s money into Tenchi, still there were an enormous number of peripheral costs that the keiretsu was expected to absorb. It was their duty, and there was simply no question of charging them back to the government. Over sixty million dollars had been outlayed by the keiretsu in the space of fourteen months, a terrible drain on any corporation, no matter how large.

Tenchi, Sato supposed, was one of the major reasons Nangi had allowed their expansion into international banking in Hong Kong. Actually, Sato had been against such a move from the start. The thought of the vagaries of the Crown Colony’s financial fortunes filled him with trepidation. It was tantamount to putting your foot in a bear trap and waiting for it to spring shut.

But Nangi had insisted, and Sato had felt compelled to acquiesce to his will. After all, they did need an immediate infusion of money, both for Tenchi and to offset the loss of capital from their steel works. So many idle hands and nothing to do with them but pay them their wages and their benefits while the plant ran at 70 percent capacity. Now Sato was close to a deal to sell off the kobun. The price would give them only the most modest of profits, but at least they would be out from under that saddle.

But that might not be enough now. The Tomkin deal was in limbo until Linnear returned, and Sato had had the most awful feeling in the pit of his stomach ever since Nangi had gotten that call from the All-Asia Bank in Hong Kong. He had been most unforthcoming about the nature of the call, but his hurried trip to the Crown Colony boded ill.

Sato read the papers, he knew what the Communist Chinese’s repudiation of the treaty with Great Britain had meant to the Colony, and he had gritted his teeth as, day by day, his worst fears were borne out. Real estate and banking were the two mainstays of Hong Kong’s economy, and he knew once the first went, it was merely a matter of time before cracks began to show in the other.

Just how deeply has Tony Chin sunk us? he asked himself.Oh, Amida! I pray he has a cautious nature. I pray we are not caught in the bear trap.

But Sato knew that he and Nangi were already in one kind of trap and it was closing inexorably about them with frightening rapidity. What Linnear-san had called the Wu-Shing. Sato shuddered inwardly. Three deaths. Kagami-san, Mo, the tattoo; Yoshida-san, Yi, cutting off the nose; and now Masuto Ishii, found in the gymnasium with his feet cut off. Sato strained to recall. With a sickening lurch that set his gorge to rising, it came to him: Yueh. The ideogram was a merging of those of knife and foot.

What was happening to the kobun? The company was dying around him, and unless Linnear-san found a way to stop these murders he and Nangi would be finished. For there were two more murders left in the Wu-Shing ritual, and it did not take a genius to determine who the final targets would be.

Who wished to punish them, and why? Abruptly, within this place of moving shadows and ancient kami, Sato had the growing intuition that their pasthis and Nangi’shad somehow been resurrected and a shambling reanimated corpse, trailing rotting flesh in its wake, was making its relentless way toward them. Soon they would have no structure from which to carry out the final stages of Tenchi. What would happen then? He bent his head and prayed fervently for salvation or, at the very least, surcease from this terrible nightmare that had grown up around them, destroying the kobun’s most efficient executives, the very heart of the empire that he and Nangi had struggled for so long to achieve. He must not allow that to happen. Nothing must be allowed to delay Tenchi. Nothing. But there was a cold hand clenched around his heart, squeezing until his eyes filled with tears and the pain was hot in his mouth.

And he thought, Punish us for what? What have we done?

Viktor Protorov should have been in the Middle East. Three weeks ago his presence had been required in Southern Lebanon to put a stop to a dispute that had been going on so long now that it had taken on all the characteristics of a feud.

Yet he had not moved from Hokkaido, from the safe house he had spent four years creating for himself. When he was here no one in the Soviet Union knew where he was or could trace him. Protorov was quite certain of that. He had several of his best apparatchiks tunneled securely into the heirarchies of all eight other Directorates. They had tried numerous times at the behest of their respective leaders. All drew blanks.

As for the men of the Ninth Directorate who manned this safe

house, Protorov was just as certain of them. They were, to a man, loyal to him first, the Directorate second, and Mother Russia third. Of course he did not leave such vital matters to chance. Once every two weeks the staffas well as the operatives alive within the Japanese islandswere obliquely vetted in an ongoing program to ensure that the safe house was absolutely sterile.

Only one man was not thus spied upon by his own people, and that was because he was in such an enormously sensitive position. For him alone Protorov wished to see in person, to ensure his own safety and that the reports he was receiving were pure white. “White reports” were those containing highly sensitive information as well as being entirely free of disinformation.

In point of fact, white reports were rare. Protorov had been in the business of deception long enough to take for granted that a majority of all reports were to some degree gray. That is, they contained some disinformation. And it was for him to determine the wheat from the chaff, discarding the lies to uncover the truth. This was only one of his many specialized talents.

Japan was an exception that proved the rule. Many of the Ninth Directorate’s operatives were of such a fanatic nature that they invariably turned in white reports. The man Protorov was going to see now was one of those.

But the problems in Southern Lebanon had not gone away, and just this morning Protorov had dispatched one of his most trusted lieutenants to take care of the feud for him. Tenchi was too much a part of him now. As yet a nebulous concept, still, its siren song lured him onward with the promise of awesome reward.

But if the truth be known Protorov had not wanted to return to the baking dusty climate of Southern Lebanon. Always the stink of camel dung and heated machine oil was in the air. And how he had come to despise the Arabs! Oh yes, he had no doubt as to their usefulness to the Soviet Union. But their gullibilitytheir stupidity, reallythe key to their usefulnesswas what he could no longer tolerate. They were obscene barbarians, and he was far better off pursuing the specter of Tenchi than having to mediate a dispute between Arab and Russian.

Arrogance, Protorov thought now, was a quality the White Russians suffered from; hence their downfall. But the damnable Arabs had it as well. He was well away from them; he had been months getting the sand out of his clothes.

Koten’s great bulk descended off Shinjuku. Sato’s weekly pilgrimage had given him some free time. Shrines were no place for violence, Sato felt, and therefore would not allow Koten to accompany him.

The sumo took the green line four stops, where he changed for the blue line at Kudanshita, riding that to the huge Nihon-bashi station. He was stared at openly in the subways but he was used to that. Outwardly he ignored the attention even while his spirit expanded with pride. He had worked hard to move up the dan, and even though he no longer performed in public, still he spent a great deal of time staying in shape and even, from time to time, engaging in exhibition bouts. He had not been defeated in these five years.

He emerged on Eit-dori and turned right. The avenue was crowded with shoppers. Along the next block he waited for the light, then crossed the avenue and entered the Tokyu department store.

Inside, the place was as enormous and as varied as a city. One of his friends had gotten married here, another had purchased burial plots for himself and his family. But Koten was interested in neither of these services.

A white-gloved female attendant waved him onto the down escalator. He stared openly at her heavily made-up face until she turned her head away beneath the scrutiny.

In the basement, he idly watched cakes being prepared, sushi being rolled, tofu being fermented, bean paste being mixed and sugared. He made his lunch from the numerous free sample trays on the glass counters he passed.

When he had judged that he had eaten enough, he moved away toward the up escalator. Still there was an emptiness within his capacious stomach.

He ascended past myriad floors of designer clothing, house-wares, furniture, toys and games, theaters, medical and dental clinics, galleries filled with paintings and sculptures, classes on how to wear a kimono, how to serve tea, how to arrange flowers, and in between a plethora of restaurants.

There was a teahouse in the roof garden with red, black, and white rice-paper lanterns on wires dancing in the light wind. Amid the carefully manicured shrubbery was a small zoo attended by flocks of children, some of whose mothers were busy downstairs shopping.

Koten waded in among this lot to get a better look at the baboons and gibbons. Some distance away there were the smallish monkeys from the northern alps around Nagano. Koten edged closer to these though they were less exotic and therefore had less of an audience. Koten was from Nagano, and the sight of these symbols of home abruptly made him conscious of the fact that he had not been back for more than ten years.

“See something of interest?”

He did not need to turn his head to take in the small accountant’s body, the undistinguished face.

“These little ones chatter of home to me,” he said.

“Ah,” the drab man said. “The mountains. Those of us who were born in the mountains never fully adjust to being parted from them.”

Koten nodded slowly and made his report. When he was finished, he dutifully answered the drab man’s questions to the best of his ability.

“I have to get back,” he said. “Sato-san will be returning from his prayers soon.”

“Prayers,” said Viktor Protorov disdainfully, “are for the already vanquished.”

Three times “Tex” Bristol had had to abandon his plans to take out the Blue Monster, and it had more to do with Alix Logan than it did with her nocturnal guardian. After her suicide attempt the Blue Monster wasn’t taking any chances, and he had moved in with her at night.