Second Skin (27 page)

Out on the Belt Parkway, with the cassette deck cranked up, cruising easily under the speed limit, he passed a fleet of blue-and-white cop cars, top lights revolving, sirens screaming, heading for the Golden Gate Inn.

‘So long, suckas,’ Paul Chiaramonte called over Brian Wilson’s choirboy voice singing ‘Don’t Worry Baby.’

Nicholas met Tanaka Gin in Kappa Watanabe’s hospital room. The cyber tech looked like hell. His skin, pulled tight against his bones, had been tainted an alarming greenish yellow by the Banh Tom nerve toxin. A ventilator was assisting his breathing, and a plethora of plastic tubes snaked in and out of him. His heart and pulse rate were being monitored, and a nurse stood by his side, adjusting the levels of the many chemicals being pumped into him.

‘You may have five minutes with him, no more,’ the obviously annoyed physician had told them in the corridor just outside. ‘He’s still very weak, so don’t upset him in any way.’

‘We appreciate the assist,’ Tanaka Gin had said as he bowed respectfully.

Inside, however, he was brisk, all business, as he quickly introduced himself to Watanabe. ‘This is a criminal investigation,’ he concluded, ignoring the nurse’s silent disapproval. ‘Your involvement has put you at great risk, as you must already have guessed. But if and when you get out of here, I am authorized to tell you that you will be charged with multiple counts of espionage, piracy, and grand larceny. Other charges are currently being drawn up as the investigation continues.’ Tanaka Gin stared down at Watanabe’s yellow eyes as he waved away the increasingly frantic motions of the nurse. Judging by the noises from the monitors, the cyber tech’s vital signs were becoming elevated. As Tanaka Gin and Nicholas had discussed, now was the time to press him even harder. ‘Watanabe-san, you have willfully stolen copyrighted and proprietary material from Sato International. I am afraid that all you have to look forward to is a lifetime in jail. If you don’t die in here, that is.’

‘Just a moment,’ Nicholas said, adhering to their prepared script. ‘I have an idea, Gin-san, an alternative.’

‘There
is
no alternative,’ Tanaka Gin said, his steely eyes boring into Watanabe’s wide-apart eyes.

‘At least hear me out. What if Watanabe-san makes a full confession and cooperates fully with this investigation?’

‘Yes,’ Watanabe said in a wan but desperate tone. ‘Yes.’

Tanaka Gin snorted. ‘Linnear-san, this man is a thief. He tried to bankrupt you. I cannot believe you are defending him.’

‘Not defending. But I want to get to the bottom of this. Don’t you see? I am convinced by the evidence we have so far that Watanabe-san did not steal the CyberNet data on his own. If he can lead us to the others, I am not interested in prosecuting him.’

‘You may not be, but I certainly am!’ Tanaka Gin thundered so loudly that even the nurse cowered into her corner. ‘By God, the Tokyo Prosecutor’s Office will not tolerate industrial espionage. Damn it, it’s a matter of national security.’

Watanabe was trembling and his heart rate was going crazy. ‘But I have the information, Linnear-san,’ he pleaded. ‘I can never forgive myself for what I have done, but at least I can try to make amends.’

‘No deals!’ Tanaka Gin’s voice rose to a crescendo.

‘I don’t want him in jail if he helps us,’ Nicholas said. ‘You know what it’s like inside. He’ll never survive.’

Now Watanabe was goggling at them both. Terror such as he’d never known filled his very soul. And he struggled to get everything out at once.

At that moment, the door swung open and the doctor strode in. ‘What in the name of heaven is going on here? I told you –’

‘This is official business,’ Tanaka Gin said, pinning the doctor with that patented steely glare. ‘Out until I tell you otherwise.’

‘You can’t talk to me that way. I am in charge here.’

‘When I’m finished, you are.’ Tanaka Gin drew out a folded sheet. ‘Otherwise I am authorized to remove your patient to the medical facility in Metropolitan Prison. Is that your wish, Doctor?’

The doctor stared at Tanaka Gin for a moment to allow himself to regain some face with the nurse, then he let the door close.

Tanaka Gin, with a quick glance at Nicholas, turned back to Watanabe just in time to see Nicholas bending over him. ‘It’s going to be all right, Watanabe-san, I promise you.’

And with a great deal of satisfaction, Tanaka Gin heard Watanabe squeak, ‘I am prepared, Linnear-san. It is quite clear in my mind. I want to tell you everything I know.’

Tanaka Gin flipped on a pocket recorder, spoke into it the date, time, location, and those present. Then he set the recorder down in the swinging tray in front of Watanabe’s mouth, and Watanabe said he was making this statement of his own free will.

‘You admit to making an unauthorized copy of Sato International’s TransRim CyberNet data?’ Tanaka Gin began.

‘I do.’

‘And you acknowledge knowing that said data were the sole property of Sato International?’

‘I do.’

‘Did you perpetrate this crime on your own?’

‘No. I was approached by a man named Nguyen Van Truc. He’s the vice president of national marketing for Minh Telekom, a Vietnamese company.’

‘Just a moment,’ Nicholas interjected. ‘You weren’t approached by the American Cord McKnight?’

‘No. As I told you, it was Van Truc.’

‘But you made the data transfer with McKnight,’ Nicholas said.

‘As far as I know, he was just an intermediary. A cutout so Van Truc could keep his hands clean.’ Watanabe put his head back on the pillow. His hair was shiny with the sweat of exertion.

‘Let me get you some water,’ Nicholas said. They watched as Watanabe sucked ice water through a straw, his eyes closed with the intense pleasure of a child.

‘Tell us a bit more about the Vietnamese,’ Tanaka Gin said.

Watanabe nodded. ‘Van Truc works for Minh, as I said. But he was being paid by someone else. An industrialist I’d heard of named Kurtz.’

Tanaka Gin and Nicholas exchanged glances. ‘Rodney Kurtz?’ Nicholas asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How could you know this?’ Tanaka Gin said. ‘By your own admission, these people were extremely careful. Van Truc used McKnight as a cutout.’

‘Yes, yes. But, you see, Van Truc had to use something of sufficient value to entice me to steal the CyberNet data. What he offered me was my own R&D lab with Sterngold Associates. I did some digging and discovered that Sterngold is one of half a dozen companies in Asia owned by Rodney Kurtz. How else would a vice president of marketing of a Vietnamese telecommunications company be offering me such a plum job unless Kurtz was financing the whole thing?’

‘You should have come to me with all of this before the fact,’ Nicholas said. ‘I would have helped you and you wouldn’t be lying here now, poisoned by the people who hired you.’

Watanabe, who was clearly exhausted by his ordeal, closed his eyes. His hands were trembling and the nurse seemed truly alarmed by the readings coming off the monitor.

‘I might have,’ he said in a voice that had become thin and reedy, ‘because everyone at Sato talks about how kind and intuitive you are. But you weren’t around, were you?’

In a
kissaten,
a coffee shop nearby the hospital, Nicholas and Tanaka Gin sat staring out the window at the rest of the world rushing home to dinner and TV. Cars and buses clogged the street to the point of immobility, and a sea of pedestrians spooled by as if on moving walkways.

‘Are you okay?’ Tanaka Gin asked. ‘You look almost as bad as Watanabe.’

‘I’m fine,’ Nicholas said, sipping his coffee.

‘Well, I’m not.’ Tanaka Gin rubbed his eyes with the pads of his thumbs. ‘Just before we met at the hospital, I got word that Tetsuo Akinaga’s lawyers sprung him.’

‘You mean the charges have been dropped?’ The thought of the Yakuza
oyabun
who was Okami’s most powerful and implacable enemy being set free was unthinkable. ‘But he was awaiting trial.’

‘Akinaga’s lawyers claimed there were irregularities in my prosecutorial brief and apparently they were right.’ Tanaka Gin shook his head. ‘The brief was sabotaged, Linnear-san. As I told you, I had been warned of corruption within my department. Now I am seeing direct evidence of it.’

‘I will make some inquiries in areas off limits to you.’

Tanaka Gin bowed formally. ‘Thank you, Linnear-san. I am in your debt.’

They ordered more coffee and stared out at the traffic and the rain. The slick sidewalks seemed lacquered with neon reflections.

‘I sure would like a word with Nguyen Van Truc,’ Tanaka Gin mused, ‘but it’s as if he fell off the face of the earth. Neither his company nor his relatives have heard from him since the night of the CyberNet launch dinner, and Immigration informs me he hasn’t tried to leave the country. So where the hell is he?’

Nicholas stared at the rush-hour traffic and said nothing.

‘You were right about Kurtz,’ he said at last. ‘Sterngold Associates appears on the list of the CyberNet’s Denwa Partners.’

‘But why would Kurtz want to steal data from a project he’d just invested in?’

‘Interesting question,’ Nicholas said. ‘It also puts a whole new spin on Kurtz’s murder.’

‘How so?’

‘Look at it this way. Kurtz was incredibly reclusive from a business perspective. He never let any of his businesses go public, even though it’s a matter of public record from numerous stories in
Stern, Time,
and
Forbes,
to name just three, that his accountants, lawyers, and business associates had been urging him to do just that and make a killing on the international markets. He was something of a genius. People would fall all over themselves to buy into the Kurtz empire.’

‘Yes. So what?’

‘So all his holdings are personal,’ Nicholas said. ‘If he dies, his wife inherits them. And if she dies...’

‘They had no children.’

‘No.’ Nicholas drained the rest of his coffee. ‘So Kurtz likes the CyberNet prospects so much he buys into Denwa Partners. Two weeks later, he’s murdered, and the next day his widow is killed by a hit-and-run. Cosmic coincidence or hidden connection?’

‘I don’t believe in coincidences where murder is concerned. I think I’d better find out who gets the estate now that both principals are deceased.’

Tanaka Gin threw some bills on the table. ‘Linnear-san, about what happened last night at the Kurtzes’, I know that in some way your Tau-tau allowed you to feel the presence of the killer. Have you any more impressions of who he might be? I have to discount your sensation of looking into a mirror and seeing yourself. You didn’t kill Kurtz.’

‘No, of course not. I –’

The world canted over and was sliding into a rain-puckered ocean. Red and blue mixed, becoming magenta columns rising out of the
kissaten’
s floor, a forest of taffy. He heard his heartbeat, quick and fast, filling up his ears with pulsing fluid. He looked down, felt himself sinking through the floor, passing through solid objects as if they were made of ether.

A roaring colored the fluid in his ears, the massed buzzing of ten million bees, a hive of kinetic activity that made him wince as he fell and kept right on falling...

‘–near-san! Linnear-san!’

Someone was shouting, trying to drown out the bees’ cross-pollinated conversations. Quiet, please!

‘Linnear-san!’

It was Tanaka Gin’s familiar face close by as he pulled Nicholas off the floor.

Nicholas put his hand to his throbbing head. The columns had disappeared and the floor seemed solid enough, but there was still the aftermath of the bees to contend with. ‘What happened?’

‘You tell me,’ Tanaka Gin said. ‘You suddenly went white and slid off your chair.’

Nicholas thought of the end of his lunch with Honniko. Those damned bees buzzing in his head, trying to be heard.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

Out in the rain-dark streets, it seemed quieter. The incessant crowds, the familiar chirping of the crosswalk units for the blind, provided a sense of continuity and lulled him back into reality.

‘Linnear-san?’

‘I slipped.’

‘Slipped? I saw you in a Tau-tau trance at the Kurtz house, and that was no normal slip.’

‘You’re right,’ Nicholas said bleakly. ‘I’m very much afraid it was a slip from one reality to another.’

Bad Clams had a forty-foot Cigarette – one of those ultrafast, ultraslim power boats so coveted in Florida. Its hull was painted the color of the ocean at night, a muddy shade in sunlight, but by moonlight it virtually disappeared. Of course, that was the point. Cigarettes were smugglers’ boats.

Caesare’s Cigarette was fast, even by the souped-up standards of the craft. Vesper’s skin turned to gooseflesh within minutes of taking off from the dock in West Palm, and she had to hold on to the railing for support. The noise was almost insupportable, like being in the center of a jet engine. Her white-knuckle grip was secure on the gunwale as it had been as a kid on roller coasters that took her breath away just like this. Craning her neck, she saw the front of the boat was on plane, all the way out of the water, spray caroming off the sleek sides, hard and solid as hail.

‘You need a sweater, babe? I think there’s a couple stowed away below,’ Bad Clams shouted over the roar of the wind and the gigantic twin engines.

Vesper, her body vibrating with the throb of the engines, shook her head. ‘How fast are we going?’

‘Faster than anything else afloat,’ Bad Clams confided, ‘and that includes those Coast Guard dicks.’

It was just past seven and he still seemed agitated. He had been pacing the floor, looking at the phone, and when it had rung, he almost broke his hip lunging for it. He’d seemed initially disappointed, as if this business call was not the one he’d been waiting for. Nevertheless, he’d told her to get dressed as he hung up. ‘I got too much energy to stay in,’ he’d told her. He was jumpy and elated all at once, and she wondered what had happened.

As she tumbled out of bed, she wondered how Croaker was making out with Wade Forrest, the head of the Leonforte unit of the Anti-Cartel Task Force. Had it been crazy to involve Croaker? He was tough and smart, but she knew the ambitious Forrest very well, and if Croaker didn’t handle himself just right, Forrest would blow him off without a second thought. She did not want that. She had come to be quite fond of him. Being with him was like hanging around a Robert Mitchum film character. She’d always been a sucker for Mitchum.