Second Skin (64 page)

‘You could say that.’

Kawa inclined his head. ‘You going up there?’ He meant Pull Marine.

‘I’ve got no choice.’ Nicholas reached out, pressed the single button, and they could hear the whir of machinery over the hiss and pop of the kitchen.

‘Coming down,’ Kawa said.

The door opened and Nicholas stepped in. When he turned around to face the closing door, he saw the Nihonin with one thumb upraised.

‘Hey,’ Kawa said. ‘Blood tonight.’

The door shut and Nicholas rode up in darkness. The tiny cabin smelled faintly of a woman’s spicy-sweet perfume and a gamy, masculine odor. Whatever lights the elevator had weren’t working. Nicholas had not pressed a button but he was ascending. Was the elevator on automatic, rising and descending between the coffee bar and Pull Marine like the tide?

Nicholas felt a whiff of air on his cheek. Were they passing vents in the shaft? Unlikely in this maze of three interlinked buildings. His eyes seemed to go out of focus and he lost his balance.

Kshira?

But no, he did not hear the telltale buzzing of ten thousand bees in his head. In fact, his mind seemed completely unruffled, still as a summer pond, devoid of volition and decision.

His last thought, disconnected, as out of context as a down at a funeral, was the word
gas.

Then the world dropped far and fast into a pit of utter blackness.

Caesare pushed away a pile of accumulated dirt, silt, sand, and rotting leaves that was rapidly decomposing into humus. The far end of the PVC pipe debouched more than a city block away from the house, beside a private dock on Lake Worth. He wriggled out, brushing off a dark coating of detritus and insects, then turned back and gave Vesper a hand.

While Caesare climbed into the Cigarette, Vesper looked back at the compound, which now looked like the grounds of a military training exercise. The moment the fed copter had touched down, the agents had dismounted from its landing struts, a voice over an amplified loudspeaker had cautioned those inside the compound to lay down their arms and stand still with their hands in the air.

Vesper, wondering about her friends, said, ‘Aren’t you the least bit interested in what’s going on there?’

Caesare, having made sure the tank was topped off, cast off the bow line. ‘If my life has taught me anything, it is never to look back.’

‘But these are your people. They put their lives on the line for you. Don’t you owe them something?’

Caesare glanced at her. ‘To a man they’re greedy and stupid and, essentially, lazy.’

‘But they’re loyal.’

Caesare raised a hand. ‘I could getta dog t’do that.’ He gestured. ‘C’mon, c’mon. An’ cast off the stern line as you come aboard.’

A moment later, he had started the engine and they eased out of the dock, swinging first east, then south in a perfect arc, their wake churning white and foamy. When they were past the small island that housed the US Coast Guard Reservation, he put on speed. The Cigarette went up onto plane, the huge arcing wake forming almost immediately, the sound booming across the lake, and soon they had left the lights and sounds of encroaching chaos far behind.

Wade Forrest came off the copter with his heart beating fast. He was dressed in full cammo and he held a machine pistol in his right hand. He had lifted off the moment he had received the electronic signal from Croaker’s homing device.

Already his people were rounding up these Italian goons, who stood awestruck at the firepower of the United States government. Forrest, bent over and squinting against the rotor’s wash, spoke authoritatively into the headset built into his helmet. In truth, he felt overlarge and bulky in his bulletproof clothes, but regs were regs and he was not about to make an exception. He had spoken to his daughter yesterday. He had interrupted her birthday party, could hear the music and the noise in the background, and he had felt a certain sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. They had talked for five minutes, but after he had hung up, he realized he couldn’t remember a thing she’d said to him. He’d been too busy wishing he’d been there, wishing he’d been to even one of the milestones in his daughters’ lives. But his job being what it was, he hadn’t made any. And now he didn’t even have this snippet of conversation to keep with him. On impulse, he’d called back, but his daughter was somewhere outside. A friend promised to retrieve her, but after five minutes of listening to music and bursts of laughter and nothing else, he’d hung up. Anyway, he’d had a great deal of work to do.

Now he was busy deploying his men. He strode through the grounds of the compound like Lee at Chancellorsville, an armed aide at his side. Men were pouring out of the main house under armed guard, others were being led from the perimeter of the fencing where they had been hiding or trying to make a run for it. Not a shot had been fired.

On the other hand, there was no sign of Caesare Leonforte, and Forrest ordered an immediate thorough search of the main house. He found Croaker in the guesthouse, where he had subdued three men who had been guarding a handsome but disheveled woman with dark hair and light eyes. Forrest recognized her immediately. She was standing with her arm around a girl of eighteen or so, her daughter, Forrest guessed. There was another man in the room, whom Forrest didn’t know and didn’t care about.

‘Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo,’ he said in the formal voice he had learned to evoke in the Virginia academy where he had received his advanced training, ‘you are hereby charged with the murder of one Franco “the Fish” Bondini.’ He took out the cuffs. ‘Three separate eyewitnesses have identified you as the woman who shot Mr Bondini dead on Park Avenue and –’

‘What?’ Margarite had a stunned look on her face. ‘But that was self-defense.’

‘Maybe, maybe not.’ Forrest snapped the cuffs on her, read her her Miranda rights.

‘But I’m not guilty!’ Margarite cried. She looked from Forrest to Croaker. ‘Lew,’ she implored.

Croaker, who was in the midst of ditching the rest of his prostheses, said, ‘Forrest, what the hell d’you think you’re doing? This is utter bullshit and you know it. They killed her driver –’

‘Bodyguard.’ Forrest leered. ‘What kind of business d’you think she’s in?’

Croaker took a step toward the fed. ‘They shot to death the man standing beside her and were about to execute her.’ Light glinted off his makeup. ‘No jury in this country will convict. In fact, no DA will charge. Under the law, she’s entitled to defend herself if she’s in fear for her life. It’s just like she said, self-defense.’

‘You’ve done your bit, now kindly let me do mine. Get the hell out of my face.’

‘Like hell I will.’

‘Look, Croaker, I have a federal mandate to make cases against the remaining Families and she’s Goldoni.’

‘This isn’t a case, it’s a farce. Do you really believe the government will allow itself to end up with egg on its face? They’re gonna need a patsy, and you are it. Your fast-track career’s going in the shitter.’

The cords on the sides of Forrest’s bull neck were popping. ‘Like I said, get the hell out of my way.’

Croaker took another step toward Forrest, lowered his voice. ‘For God’s sake, take the cuffs off her, man. She’s been through hell here. Bad Clams had her and her daughter kidnapped.’

Forrest’s eyes flickered like a house-of-horrors exhibit. ‘Step aside, I tell you, or by God I’ll arrest you along with Mrs DeCamillo.’ He reached out, grabbed the chain between the cuffs, jerked it so that Margarite stumbled forward.

‘Mom!’

‘Easy, kid.’ Paul tried to hold her, but Francie ducked her shoulder and broke past him on an end run. She slammed into Forrest, her arms flailing.

‘Get her off me, will ya?’ Forrest cried, but before the other feds could act, Croaker snatched her up and whispered in her ear, ‘Stop it. This won’t do any good.’

Francie was crying, turning in Croaker’s arms until she had buried her face in the crook of his shoulder. He saw that Margarite’s heart was breaking, and his with it. Had she ever contemplated the physical reality of being arrested? he wondered. If she had, she had certainly never considered the possibility of its happening in front of her daughter. After making it this far, Margarite almost lost it as Forrest led her out the door into the secured compound.

Nicholas heard a humming, but it was coming from a long way off. The humming went on, a disembodied sound that gradually became a melody wafting in darkness. The melody unfurled like a black sail, complex and strangely familiar. Nicholas had heard it before. It was a piece of Gustav Mahler’s
Das Lied von der Erde.

Coming up like a skin diver from the depths, he felt an enormous need to take a breath. He tried to do so but nothing happened. His lungs refused to work. He tried to focus his mind, to open his
tanjian
eye, but something was holding him back, like the web of a spider, and he could not find
kokoro,
the center of all things. His mind felt encased in amber. Putting one thought after another was enormously difficult.

His lids felt glued shut and he opened his eyes with some difficulty. He found himself in a bare room and he had a moment of blind panic. Then he realized he was hanging upside down. His heart thudded heavily in his chest. Across from him, against the opposite wall, Mikio Okami hung from a chain in what he assumed was an identical position. An IV dripped into the inside of Okami’s left wrist, and by turning his head just slightly Nicholas could see a similar contraption dripping liquid into his own vein. In this position, he could see the wall at a right angle to him, saw a third chain and an IV rig. This spot was, however, empty.

‘Okami-san,’ he whispered, and then more urgently: ‘Okami-san!’

The Kaisho opened eyes turned rheumy. He blinked several times, like an owl in bright light.

‘Linnear-san.’ He sighed heavily, his words slurred by drugs. ‘Caught in the same trap.’

‘Don’t give up hope. We’ll get out of this.’

The look Okami gave him sent a shiver down his spine.

‘Death waits for all of us,’ the Kaisho said slowly. ‘Our sole duty is to see that it has meaning.’

‘There will be no death here,’ Nicholas vowed.

Mikio Okami tried to smile. ‘Give it meaning,’ he rasped, his eyelids already closing in drug-induced stupor.

‘Okami-san!’

There was no response. Nicholas himself was struggling with thought. What had happened? He had been in the S&M club Both Ends Burning, Hatta had been knifed by Jōchi, and Nicholas had taken off in pursuit. Corridors, sounds, bright lights, shadows shifting, the rich smell of coffee brewing – all these and more were a jumble in his mind. Then, like a flare in the darkness, he remembered ascending in the coffinlike elevator, the whiff of air brushing his cheek. He’d been gassed; it had been a trap. Honniko, Kawa, Suta, were they all in on it?

Flash of Kawa’s grinning face, his thumbs-up sign, and his enigmatic farewell,
Blood tonight.

The German Lied recommenced, and now Nicholas became aware of someone else in the room. This person was moving, working busily and humming industriously all the while. At that precise moment, the figure turned and stared directly into Nicholas’s face. He came over, lifted Nicholas’s head by the hair.

‘Had a nice nap?’ He rattled Nicholas’s IV. ‘Comfy in our little den?’

A shaft of pale light filtering down from above picked out features on the figure’s face, and Nicholas recognized Mick Leonforte.

‘And it
is
our little den. This is Tenki, the old
toruko
where Colonel Linnear spun his busy little spiderwebs just after the war.’ Mick was grinning. ‘Quite an odyssey you took getting here, I must say.’ He pursed his lips in mock sorrow and shook his head. ‘Too bad unlike Odysseus you didn’t have a goddess to advise you.’ He spread his arms. ‘There’s no Athena here, no one to get you out of this. So here you will stay while I make my bloodless coup against your vast, far-flung empire.’ He stroked the side of Nicholas’s face. ‘Sweet, sweet revenge.’

The hand withdrew, and abruptly, his tone changed, becoming declamatory. ‘I must say you’ve done well by yourself. Marrying into money and power and Tomkin Industries, merging it with Sato at just the right time, expanding from computer chips to hardware design, to fiber optics, moving into every emerging market you could stick your fingers into. And then there’s your crowning achievement: the TransRim CyberNet.’ Mick nodded. ‘Oh, yes, you’ve done well indeed. Almost as well as I would have done had I not been forced into the shadows to escape the long arm of the law.’ He guffawed. ‘What law? What am I thinking of?
I
am the law.’

He let Nicholas’s head go. ‘But you overextended.’ He nodded toward Okami. ‘And then you get caught up in old grandpa’s own nightmare, and guarding him against assassins took you out of the Sato program for fifteen months. Too long in this day and age. Hell, in your business two
months
is too long to be away. You lose the feel, the flow of the changes. You forget your abilities, your predictive capacities become impaired.’ He grinned again, adjusting something on the IV. ‘You created your own soft spot, Nicky boy, and I sank my jaws into it like the predatory animal I am.

‘It felt good, but...’ Mick frowned. ‘I must say it was something I had to get used to. In a way it was like getting myself bloody. You and me, you know, we have a special bond. And why? Because our fathers fucked with one another’s lives. They toyed and tinkered and brought each other such misery. Just like I am doing with you. I slept with your woman, over and over and over, and no matter what she tells you, she enjoyed it.’

He snapped his fingers. ‘Hey, but don’t take my word for it.’ He turned, rummaging around before pulling out a portable tape recorder. He popped in a cassette, pressed the play button, and put the machine next to Nicholas’s ear.

‘Listen...’

Nicholas tried to turn his mind away, to blank it out, but the drug was all through his system now, and he had had no time to try to hypermetabolize it out. Besides, more was entering his open vein with every drip of the IV. So he heard in agony the pants and moans, the whispered endearments, and then the slow, obscene crescendo of moans, cries, and screams. Was that Koei’s voice? How could he know through the distortion of the tape and the drugs? But it might be, and that was what Mick intended and it was enough.