Second Skin (10 page)

Putting his growing personal animosity firmly aside, Nicholas said, ‘Nangi-san is acting oddly. He seems cold, distant. Also, he was supposed to have informed me of the CyberNet partners’ agreement but he did not. Have you any idea why?’

‘Perhaps the heart attack has changed him. I have read this sometimes happens.’ Having delivered this fleshless answer in a clipped manner, Tōrin stood erect as a soldier, his free hand placed demurely at the small of his back. Again, this slick mask of the loyal manservant was delivered with the artistry of a No performer.

Nicholas waited a beat while he scanned Tōrin’s blank face, before continuing, ‘Have you any opinions of your own?’

‘Any personal opinions would be presumptuous of me.’

Nicholas, who had begun to get the measure of him, said, ‘I take that to mean that you
do
have an opinion of Nangi-san’s condition. If that is so, I’d be very much obliged if you would share it with me.’

‘As you wish, sir.’ Tōrin cleared his throat. He seemed more relaxed now, perhaps only intent on what he was about to say, but also because the interview was going in the direction he had set it on. ‘My opinion is that over the course of the past year Nangi-san has suffered a series of – I don’t know what – mini-strokes.’

Again, Nicholas felt a clutch of fear. Life without his mentor seemed impossible. ‘Is there any medical evidence to support this theory?’

‘No, sir. There is not.’ Tōrin’s head swiveled as he tracked the movements of two men who came abreast of them and then, in a double halo of black umbrellas, walked past. ‘And it is just a personal opinion. Frankly, I would not repeat it to anyone other than you.’

‘That’s very good of you, Tōrin-san.’ Nicholas nodded, hiding how disturbed he was by this news. ‘That will be all. Oh, and I want all pertinent particulars on the Denwa Partners as soon as possible.’

Tōrin, appearing as obedient as ever, nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’ With his hand on the limo’s door handle, Tōrin turned back to Nicholas. ‘If I may ask, sir...’

‘By all means.’

‘Nangi-san spoke to me of the theft of the TransRim data. May I inquire as to how you could leave the stolen material in the hands of someone you have identified? Would it not have been more prudent to take her – and the data – into custody?’

Nicholas spent a moment reassessing the acuity of this young man. He had asked a very pertinent question, and it was imperative that Nicholas allay any suspicions he might harbor. ‘The material would be safe, that’s true,’ Nicholas said carefully. ‘But we would know nothing of the people who have stolen it. And, sooner or later, they would try again and we might not be so lucky that time.’

‘I see.’ Tōrin nodded like a student absorbing a beloved professor’s theories. He opened the car door and furled his umbrella. Drizzle turned his slicked-back hair shiny as a samurai’s helmet. With impeccable timing, he said, ‘By the way, Nangi-san wished me to tell you that he has called in a favor on our behalf. A member of the Tokyo prosecutor’s office – a man named Tanaka Gin – will join you on this investigation.’

‘I don’t need a Tokyo prosecutor or anyone else for that matter. I work best alone. Nangi-san knows that.’

‘I am sure he does.’ The ghost of a smile lingered on the corners of Tōrin’s mouth as he climbed into the limo. ‘I am the messenger in this matter, nothing more.’

Before Nicholas had a chance to reply, Tōrin slammed shut the armor-plated door and the Mercedes nosed out into traffic, rain sizzling on its highly polished surface.

‘We’re closed.’

Nicholas eyed Honniko. She was dressed in a lustrous green-gray Tokuko Maeda suit of
shingosen,
a new Japanese synthetic that was highly tactile, could be manufactured to have any texture imaginable. This one appeared to be a cross between silk and linen. It also covered her gray heels. Her pale blond hair was done in a short bob, and her lips, a frosted bow, were painted the palest pink. She wore a wide cuff of incised, brushed gold on her left wrist but was otherwise devoid of jewelry. She looked slim and elegant, just what you would expect from the hostess of a restaurant like Pull Marine.

The interior walls were a muted gold-leaf, except for the bar, which was copper-topped, reflecting the light in distorted sections. A small stage projected from one corner, and each table had on it a thick, saffron-scented candle. There were so many Vietnamese artifacts the place looked like any of the new upscale restaurants sprouting up in newly affluent Saigon.

‘I’m not here to eat,’ Nicholas said. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the room appeared to curve, much like the shell of a nautilus.

Honniko was perhaps thirty, but her dark, slightly almond eyes seemed older than that. She possessed a sweetness that was leavened by a no-nonsense air that made you believe she knew her way around demanding people and thorny situations.

‘You don’t look like a salesman and we’re not appreciably behind in any payments, so you can’t be a process server.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Are you a cop?’

‘Now why would a cop come in here?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘I’d like a drink.’ He stood in the doorway, filling it up in spirit rather than in bulk.

‘Beer all right?’ she asked, leaving her podium and going behind the bar. She was smart enough to figure out she wasn’t going to get rid of him any other way.

‘Suits me.’ He pulled up a barstool, watching her long, slender fingers as she pulled the bottles of Kirin Ichiban out of the ice chest, popped the tops. Instead of drinking hers, she made water rings on the bartop with the bottle.

‘Been here long?’

She looked up. ‘Are you speaking of the restaurant or of me?’

‘Why don’t you choose?’

‘Three months for the place, but of course it’s been under construction for a year before that.’

‘Your place?’

She laughed, a soft, throaty sound. ‘Hardly. But I can’t complain. I get my piece.’

‘I suppose it isn’t enough.’

‘What a curious thing to say.’ Her lips pursed and she could not help keeping the smile on her face. ‘But, you’re right. It’s never enough.’

‘You know a man named Van Truc? Nguyen Van Truc.’

‘That’s a Vietnamese name.’

‘It is.’

Her brows furrowed as she made a show of searching her memory. ‘We have a couple of Vietnamese who come in on a regular basis, but none with that name.’

‘Are you sure? Nguyen’s the Vietnamese equivalent of Joe Smith.’

‘Still, it’s not familiar to me.’ She pushed her Kirin away. ‘You
are
a cop.’

‘Van Truc owes me money. I’ve followed him all the way from Saigon to get it back.’

Behind him, the door swung open and a delivery-man wheeled in a cart of soft drinks. Honniko excused herself, signed the manifest, then called to the back of the restaurant. A bent-backed Japanese emerged in rolled-up sleeves and a dirty apron and took possession of the shipment.

‘If this man comes in here, I will be certain to tell him you are looking for him.’ Honniko turned back to Nicholas. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘You move with the relaxed grace of the true geisha.’ He saw that he had astonished her. He had given her the highest compliment and she knew it.

‘Thank you.’

He slid off the barstool. ‘What do I owe you?’

‘On the house.’ She smiled, but something dark was swimming far back in her eyes. Perhaps it was curiosity. ‘What are you, part American?’

‘Brit, actually. My father served with MacArthur.’

‘My father was an MP stationed here after the war. We never went home.’

There was a moment then between them when the unspoken bond of their oriental mothers passed between them like DNA from cell to cell. Perhaps she was about to say something, but at that moment, the phone rang. He bowed as she spoke briefly into the cordless receiver, giving her a traditional Japanese farewell. Putting down the phone, she seemed about to say something, then giving in to protocol, she bowed him out the door.

The white sun was at its zenith in Palm Beach, the full blast of its light spread across the water. The royal palms clattered in the heat. It was just past one in the afternoon, but Vesper Arkham and Lew Croaker had been hard at work since three-thirty the previous morning.

In fact, for Vesper, the work had begun years before. Originally spying clandestinely for the Kaisho, Mikio Okami, Vesper had been inserted into Looking-Glass, the top-secret federal espionage and assassination bureau. While there, she had discovered that someone was stealing ultra-high-tech weaponry from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and selling it on the worldwide black market. This was very bad news for America as a whole and the Pentagon in particular. The thought of the US’s most highly advanced experimental weaponry in the hands of Saddam Hussein or the Colombian drug cartel was nothing short of terrifying. And it became even more so when Vesper discovered that the leak within DARPA appeared to lead back to someone inside Looking-Glass.

Ever since she had discovered that Leon Waxman, the late head of Looking-Glass, had been Johnny Leonforte, she had been trying to discover whether it had been the Leonfortes who were behind the consistent theft out of DARPA. DARPA was black-budgeted, which meant that Congress did not vote on appropriations for it. In fact, officially DARPA did not exist. And yet, someone had breached its defenses and was selecting plum weapons from its arsenal.

Caesare Leonforte? Vesper suspected as much. It made sense, since Caesare’s father, Johnny Leonforte, had had access to DARPA through Looking-Glass. If the elder Leonforte had been Caesare’s entrée into DARPA, Caesare was smart and clever enough to maintain the pipeline through bribes or extortion or both to keep it going even though Johnny was dead.

In Vesper’s mind, the need to plug the leak in national security, to bring Caesare to justice, had turned into something of an obsession. She had been conned by Johnny Leonforte, just like everyone else at Looking-Glass, and she was determined to make the son pay for the sins of his father, along with those of his own evil making.

To that end, she had gotten herself reassigned within the federal government, into the Anti-Cartel Task Force, and had asked to have Lew Croaker hired as an independent field operative assigned to her. This was not so difficult as outsiders might think. For one thing, the federal agencies were a labyrinth of overworked, under-motivated bureaucrats handling a mare’s nest of paperwork each day. If you knew which routings to use, assignments with the proper signatures could be manipulated without undue strain. Vesper’s old boss, Leon Waxman – Johnny Leonforte – was dead. And Vesper herself had an extensive network of supporters – shadowy people for whom an operative with her abilities was an invaluable asset. These men were so high up in government their word was akin to God’s.

Once outside the ACTF, she had quickly discovered that it had already targeted a company named Volto Enterprises Unlimited. It was a Bahamian shell corporation that the ACTF believed was a conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars annually of IGG, ill-gotten gains. And the man getting filthy rich from the IGG, the man behind Volto itself, Vesper had read with a certain quickening of her pulse, was believed to be Caesare Leonforte, Johnny’s son.

That’s when it all came together for Vesper. She had always wondered how Johnny Leonforte had successfully masqueraded as Leon Waxman. It was true that Johnny had obtained a superbly forged legend – official documents such as a birth certificate, high school and college records, credit history, even Army records, and for verisimilitude, a divorce decree from the State of Virginia. He’d also had extensive plastic surgery performed on his face overseas. Still, Vesper had asked herself, how had Leonforte passed the sophisticated vetting set up by Looking-Glass?

A little digging gave her the answer. During the time of Leonforte’s hiring the entire federal government was on one of its periodic austerity kicks. Squadrons of lower-echelon workers were laid off, including the vetting staff, who only worked part-time anyway. In their place, he hired National Security Services, an independent security vetting service. Scouring a maze of computer records, Vesper had subsequently discovered that NSS was a wholly owned subsidiary of Volto Enterprises Unlimited. No wonder Johnny Leonforte had beaten the elaborate security system. In effect, he’d cleverly short-circuited it: he’d been ‘vetted’ by his own son!

And still the pieces of the puzzle kept fitting together. Lew Croaker had told her how Nicholas Linnear, who was also working with Mikio Okami, had stolen highly classified computer data from Avalon Ltd, one of the most notorious international arms-dealing organizations, that showed hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Volto.

And last year, Avalon Ltd had somehow gotten hold of Torch, an antipersonnel nuclear device shot out of a handheld rocket launcher that had been developed by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Then she had unearthed the fact that Caesare Leonforte owned Avalon.

That someone had to have access to the most secret documents in Looking-Glass. Now that she’d unraveled the puzzle. Vesper had to admire how beautifully it was put together. Caesare put Johnny in place; perhaps he had been the one who provided Johnny his bogus bona fides as Leon Waxman. In return, it looked likely that Johnny gave Caesare the information he needed to infiltrate DARPA’s security system and plunder its riches. Now it looked as if Caesare was using Volto to launder and warehouse the enormous profits from illicit arms trading he made through Avalon.

Vesper and Croaker had had the white mansion in West Palm under surveillance for a week. During that time, she had made careful note of everyone who had come and gone: the suits, the sentries, the lawyers, the businessmen visitors, the gangster-type visitors, the party girls – and, interestingly, boys. Then there were the regular services: daily deliveries of rolls and bread from La Petite Bakery, fresh flower arrangements by Amazonia, twice weekly pool maintenance by Blue Grotto, weekly pest control, tree and lawn care, the list went on for two single-spaced pages.