Linnear 02 - The Miko (53 page)

TRANSMIT HOURLY UPDATES. WILL BE MOBILE SOON. WILL GIVE BACKUP WITHIN THIRTY-SIX HOURS. TERMINATE ‘SPEARFISH’ WHEN SITUATION STABILIZES AND YOU ARE CERTAIN OF TARGET VISIBILITY.

Then she went away to make her report.

Nicholas sat on the backless stone seat in Sato’s garden. He had been there for perhaps an hour, ever since his hosts had retired. He had made a show of going to his room so that they would not be obliged to share his insomnia. But he hadn’t even bothered to undress, merely waited fifteen minutes before returning to the now deserted garden.

With infinitesimal slowness, light came into the garden. In a way it was a shame, since before only cold moonglow had distinguished shadow and illumination, causing the flower scents to dominate. Now as vision took hold, the perfumes seemed to fade.

Nicholas became aware of the presence behind him the moment it crossed the threshold of Sato’s study and stepped down onto the glowing pebbles. The predawn atmosphere was aqueous with white mist. There was no sound save the waking of the birds.

He knew that it was Akiko without having to turn around or hear her voice. Their wa had locked hours before and that had been enough to mark her in his mind. The system was as primitive as it was sophisticated. As Akutagawa-san had said, urban life had bred it out of modern human beings.

Because of this, too, he knew that she was dangerous. He did not know in precisely what way or even if it was to him in particular. He knew she was sensei. Very few individuals would have been able to make that determination from mere visual observation and the imprint of her spiriteven other sensei without all of Nicholas’ skills and ability. But he was different.

“Nicholas-san.”

Her low voice shivered him and he willed himself to remain calm. Still his pulse beat hard in his temples and he felt a sudden rush of blood to his head.

“Where is your husband?”

“Snoring on his princely pallet.”

What was in her voice? Nicholas strained to hear all of the echoes and nuances, even those she might not know were present. Had he found derision there?

“Isn’t your place beside him?” It was the petulant comment of a jealous lover, and he cursed himself.

“My place,” she replied as if she heard no overtones, “is where I choose to be.” She paused as if uncertain whether to go on. “Do you think that unJapanese of me?”

He shook his head. “Untraditional, perhaps, but not unJapanese.”

In the ensuing silence she said, “Won’t you turn around and face me? Am I so difficult to look at?” .

Her words stirred the hair at the base of his neck and he wondered how carefully she had chosen them. Slowly, his heart beating faster than he would have wished, he turned toward her. He melted inside.

Just the first hint of dawn blushed her face in radiant light. She had changed into a pale yellow kimono with ice green and silver thread embroidered in the shape of stands of pine trees. A lone golden heron flew at full wing over her left breast. Her hair was down, a gleaming blueblack cascade stretching straight down her back. She wore no jewelry whatsoever. Her nails shone with clear lacquer but were cut short as would befit one of her training. He thought he could discern the slightest tremor in her face, a fleeting tic along the upper lid of one eye. Then both were gone and she was in control again.

“Was that so hard?” she breathed into the soft wind. Mist swirled at her back, danced around his shoulders.

“You are beautiful to look at, Akiko.” He had not meant to make any such admission. Immediately he felt as if he had lost a battle.

She came toward him, gliding along the pebble path. She seemed to him to be emerging from out of the ending of the night. “Why do I feel as if I have been with you before?”

What she said startled them both. It was as if, naked, they were embracing and Sato had walked in on them. Blood flooded Akiko’s face and her eyes flicked away from his face. The tremble was back within her.

All sense of reality had slipped from Nicholas’ mind. Lost within the white mist, he saw only her. Yukio rose before him, a kami who had been granted a second life. Then he, too, reached out for the stability of the Void, seeking an answer to the unanswerable. As if in a dream, he rose from the hard stone seat and came toward her until they were but a hand’s breadth apart. He fought with himself to say the words that had been roiling through his consciousness ever since she had slipped the fan from in front of her face. They were words he longed to say, words that would free him, perhaps, from his inner torment but which would also certainly make him vulnerable to her.

What to do? The moment was here. In Japanese society one had very few moments alone with another man’s wife. This moment would never have come but for Akiko. What did she want of him? Was she Yukio? Did she want to hear him call her name? If so, why was she torturing him so? He was assailed by questions which led to riddles which in turn brought him to enigmas. It seemed to him now that all his life had been an enigma, a fitfully understood succession of events from which he had constantly turned away.

“Who are you?” he said hoarsely. “I must know.”

Her eyes searched his. “Who do you think I am?” There was no coyness; rather he sensed a deeply buried desperation he could put no name to.

“I don’t know.”

Somehow the distance between them was closing. There seemed to be no conscious volition on either of their parts.

“Tell me,” she whispered. ‘Tell me.”

He could feel her breath on him, smell the scent of her, feel the heat of her flesh from beneath the silk kimono. Her eyes were half shut, her lips partly open as if some emotion inside her was on a runaway tear.

“Yukio…” Her name was torn from his heart like a tattered battle pennant. It was irrational that he should utter her name, irrational that he should think this was who stood before him. Yet he said it again, “Yukio, Yukio…,” seeing her eyes flutter closed as if in thrall, felt the melting of her upper body in against his, her head coming back, the long arch of her neck merging with the image, the memory he had carried with him for so many years.

There was a burning inside him as he reached for her, to embrace her or to stop her from falling he did not know. All his organs had turned to water and were boiling up. There was a fever in his brain. There was no control.

His lips came down over hers and he tasted her essence as he felt the dart of her tongue inside him.

For the first time in her life Akiko was open to the universe. Nothing in all her long, arduous training had caused this ignition inside of her.

She was so dizzy that she was doubly grateful for his strong arms about her. All breath had left her as he had uttered her name. And it was her name! How was that possible? But, oh, he tasted wonderful and, oh, how she ached for him! Her thighs were like water, unable to support her. She felt a kind of ecstasy at his touch she thought only possible in orgasm.

What was happening to her? Swept away, still a dark part of her mind yammered to be heard. What strange force had invaded her mind? What had turned her plans of vengeance inside out? What made her feel this way about a hated enemy? And why had she lied to him? She was not Yukio; she was Akiko.

And then with the power of his wa surrounding her, with her heart beating in her inner ear like thunder, with the press of his hard chest against her breasts, the answer exploded in her mind with the force of fireworks.

As Akiko she was nothing. She had come from nothing and nothing was her future. As Yukio she was someone. Here there was more for her than kyomu, that which Kyoki preached: nihility.

From the moment she had left Sun Hsiung’s loving tutelage she had felt herself to be doshi gatai, beyond salvation. Without any other anchor in her life what else could she expect?

Now, abruptly, with Nicholas Linnear’s appearance, Yukio had become a reality. She was no more idea, no more means to an end, no more two-dimensional schemata. She lived.

The force of Nicholas Linnear’s love for her had brought her back from the dead.

Justine saw him on her second day at the hotel. The first time was near the pool bar in the shade of the overhang and she thought that she must be mistaken. But the second time was at the crescent beach while she was wading out into the jade ocean, snorkel and mask in one hand, black fins on her feet. This time there was no doubt. It was Rick Millar.

At first she couldn’t believe it. After all, she was six thousand miles from New York on a rambling world-class resort in the midst of a 23,000-acre pineapple plantation. She was in West Maui, in one of the most remote areas on the island, far from the strip of highrise hotels at Kaanipali where most tourists to this paradisical spot stayed.

She watched, transfixed, the tide lapping around her waist as he headed into the surf toward her. His body was lean and trim, with narrow hips and wide shoulders. He did not have the wrist and chest development nor the overall muscle definition that Nicholas had. But then Rick was a tennis player, not a human killing machine.

Tears erupted through her quivering lids, stinging her eyes, and she turned away, out to sea and the hazy outline of Molokai.

“Justine”

“You’ve got some helluva nerve coming here.”

“I’d only heard about the famous Tobin temper before. Everything they said was an understatement to the real thing.” His voice was deliberately light, bantering.

“Did you give Mary Kate back her job?” She felt the pumping of her heart like a weight of granite hanging inside her.

“It wasn’t her job to give back, Justine.” He was closer to her than she wanted him to be. “I told you I had found the better person to fill it.”

She whirled on him, her eyes blazing. “You used me, you bastard!”

He remained calm. “You know, the trouble with you is that you’re a scared child in a woman’s body. Come off it, Justine. I didn’t use you any more than I’d use anyone else. It’s the wrong term. Mary Kate wasn’t working out. In the adult business world you don’t fire an executiveat any leveluntil you’ve hired his or her replacement. I’d be remiss in my duty to the company if I’d gone about it in any other way.”

“But we’re friends.”

“That’s incidental. But if it means anything to you, I’m sorry that had to enter into it.” He smiled, testing the waters. “There was nothing sinister in it, I assure you. I’d seen some of your freelance work, I spoke to several of my executives who’d used you over the past year. They all thought you were great.” He smiled again. “All of them warned me about your temper, by the way.”

“I see that didn’t deter you.” She wished now that she hadn’t been crying when he came up.

“I liked your work too much. You’ve got a singular mind when it comes to advertising concepts. That’s an invaluable quality.” He looked away for a moment and his expression gave him the appearance of a little boy. “Anyway, I thought I could tame you”. I saw it as a challenge.” His eyes swung back. “I’d give anything if we could start over from the beginning.”

“Is that why you followed me?”

He shook his head, standing his ground as a large wave made it through the coral reef out at the headland to the crescent bay, began to surge toward them. “Not really. I found that the office seemed very empty without you.”

When the wave hit, it rose the water up to chin level, knocking them sideways, forcing them together.

Nangi put his ruined legs up on the chaise as he settled back and stared out at the South China Sea as it ran up onto the pale yellow beach at Shek-O. He was on the south side of Hong Kong Island, nearer to Aberdeen than he was to Central District, the “downtown” and financial hub of the Crown Colony.

Shek-O was one of the four or five areas within Hong Kong reserved for the truly wealthy in this teeming city of enormous wealth and abject poverty.

But things had changed in the year and a half since he had been here.

For one, the beautiful old hotel at Repulse Bay had been torn down in order to erect another group of highrise houses. It was not solely that Nangi had spent many a glorious sun-spangled afternoon at tea, doing business on the expansive Colonial porch of that hotel, that he mourned its passing. It was just as much the thought of the old ways passing, the sunny, serene days transplanted by the lust for profits that the building boom had created during five or six years of the Crown Colony’s high-speed growth in the middle and late seventies.

That was what had ultimately brought him here. The collapse of that real estate boom. And in that light the destruction of the . Repulse Bay Hotel was even more bitter.

Now Nangi was alone in the tile and stucco villa watching a young nubile Chinese girl brave the pollution of the South China Sea as she ran down the beach and into the mild surf. No one else was about although a pitcher of iced tea and two tall glasses sat on a pebble glass-topped table at Nangi’s left elbow.

He saw the girl’s bobbing head in the water. She had not bothered to tie up her hair or to wear a cap. The dark tail of hair flung down her naked back, spreading out in the water like a sea anemone, tendrils waving on the tide.

Wu-Shing. The words kept intruding on his conscious thoughts and that was a problem. Three deaths; three questions to be answered. Nangi wondered what connection there could be between the Wu-Shing murders and Tenchi.

These days, when anything unexplainable occurred he immediately thought of Tenchi. That was logical enough. He knew the Russians would stop at nothing to wrest Tenchi from Japan… if they knew what Tenchi was. As for the Americans, he could imagine them attempting to sabotage the operation. Ever since the end of the war America had been dependent upon Japan to be its anti-Communist watchdog in the East. But America wanted Japan subservient so that, like a willow, it would bend to the will of the victorious country. And it was true that Japan was dependent on America.

But Tenchi would change all that. Nangi feared that if the Americans got wind of the operation they would move as quickly as the Soviets to short-circuit it. This could not be allowed.

For the first time in many decades Japan found itself totally alone and, oddly enough, it was a frightening experience. He was becoming increasingly aware that he could no longer cling to his dreams of what Japan had once been. All that was gone now, wiped out by the atomic sunshine and the period of high-speed growth in which he had played such a crucial role.