Floating City (52 page)

“You look like a regiment of the Green Howards trod on your face. I told you to be careful, old son.” Tom Major, in tweed overcoat and porkpie hat, stood in the hospital room, looking at Croaker like a nanny whose charge has been extremely disobedient. A combination of concern and relief was on his face.

“So you did, dad.” Croaker threw the covers off his lower body. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and exert your influence to get me the hell out of here.” His body ached all over as if he had been thrown from a speeding semi, but his ribs had sustained no fracture, and all in all, he was in one piece.

“Already organized.” Major took Croaker’s clothes from the closet, handed them to him. “You’d bloody well make it quick. The hospital has had several inquiries after your health by people you’re not up to dealing with right now.”

Croaker, perched on the edge of the high bed, groaned as he lifted each leg to insert them into his trousers.

“Need any help, lad?” Major said jovially.

“Don’t you dare.” Croaker gingerly put on his shirt, then buckled his belt. “What kinds of inquiries are we speaking of?”

“The worst kind, I’m afraid.” Major shifted from one foot to another, either uncomfortable with the subject or anxious to be moving. “Lewis, you aren’t involved with someone in the American underworld, are you?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because I know at least one of the blokes who’s so concerned about your health.” Major held up Croaker’s overcoat so he could get into it easily. “He works for Caesare Leonforte, the same person who employed the man with whom you had your run-in in Holland Park.”

“Run-in?” That classic British understatement. “I killed the bloody bastard.”

“That you did.” Major led the way to the door, held it open. “But you must be getting old; in the process he almost did you in.”

They went down the quiet hallway, past open doors. You could smell the sickness along with the nauseatingly sweet scent of anesthetic. Major pressed the button for the elevator.

“What aren’t you telling me, Lewis?”

“Everything that might compromise you,” Croaker said, stepping into the vast elevator. A man on a gurney was being handled by an orderly. He was hooked up to blood and saline. Just coming down from surgery, Croaker surmised. He didn’t look in particularly great shape.

“Say no more,” Major said as the doors closed and they began to descend.

The elevator stopped at the recovery-room floor and the orderly rolled the gurney out. Two men stepped in. The doors closed.

Major stood with his back against the rear wall; the two men stood in front of the doors. Out of the corner of his eye Croaker saw Major’s hand unobtrusively disappear into the pocket of his tweed overcoat, and his attention concentrated on the two men. They were tall and broad-shouldered in tan winter Burberry storm coats with the cashmere linings showing around the collars. One had a bald spot much like a monk’s tonsure. They didn’t talk to one another, but stood silent, their hands jammed into their pockets.

Croaker was aware of an electrical charge in the air, he could feel the tension come into Major’s torso, and he silently extruded the stainless-steel nails in his biomechanical fingers. Major gazed straight ahead at the backs of then necks, as if he could bore a hole in their flesh.

The door opened on the main floor and the men got out. They did not turn around but headed straight for the exit. Croaker and Major followed at a discreet distance.

“Anyone you know?” Croaker asked.

“Just playing it safe,” Major said, relaxing somewhat. He signaled to several plainclothesmen with electronic earbuds in place.

Outside, traffic whizzed by. A dirty wind was gusting, and Croaker could hear a siren wailing as it came closer, and he was back again lying in Holland Park while the white-faced bobby said to him.
A police ambulance is on its way.

Two London City police cars were bracketing a shiny black Daimler. A uniformed driver held open the rear door for Croaker and Major. Heavy condensation occluded the windows, and the windshield wipers were on. Croaker could hear the sound over the street noise.

“I want to get into Malory Enterprises,” he said.

Major gave him a rueful smile. “Already been tried, old son. Afraid it’s a dead end. I wasn’t sitting idly by while you were in a faint. The offices house a legitimate import-export business. If anything funny’s going on there, we haven’t been able to find it.”

“I know there is. I have to—”

The siren was loud now as they climbed into the Daimler. Doors slammed and the driver went around and got in. He put the car in gear as the flanking police vehicles fired up their ignitions.

“You’re in danger here, old son,” Major said, settling back against the plush seat. “I don’t know what you’re really involved in, and something tells me I don’t want to know. My advice to you is to take the first flight home.”

Again, Croaker was torn. He was so close to finding Okami; the Kaisho was here in London, and London was where Torch would be detonated in the ides unless Nicholas could stop it from leaving Floating City.

But Croaker had lost Okami and knew it was not enough to know he was somewhere in London. Croaker had to know where within the city the Kaisho was hiding. Only Vesper knew that. And again he tried to get inside her mind. She represented an enigma so profound he was drawn inexorably toward its center. She was like a train wreck—a mortal disaster, at once horrifying and fascinating. She was cruel, omnivorous, heartless—and yet it seemed as if she cared about Margarite and Celeste even as she sought to manipulate them. And over it all loomed her relationship to Okami. Was she working for him or against him, as Dedalus’s mole inside Nishiki? Now that he knew she had direct access to the Kaisho, he had to get to her at all costs.

And yet at this moment she was on her way back to Washington to vet Serman at DARPA.

Major put a hand on his arm. “Lewis, you’ve got some very bad blokes on your back. I haven’t the time or the budget to baby-sit you while you’re here.”

If only Major knew the threat Bad Clams had made against Margarite, Croaker thought. He debated telling Major about Torch, but what good would it do? Major could mobilize all his forces—assuming he could get his superiors to believe in the threat—and still be unable to stop its detonation. In the process, the news would inevitably be leaked to the media and a full-scale panic would ensue. Besides, anything he told Major would detain him here and he was now desperate to find Vesper. He resigned himself to keeping silent on the subject.

He concentrated on keeping his voice level. “Perhaps you’re right.”

“Good lad. Let’s get you to Heathrow with all possible haste.”

The condensation had turned to a foggy drizzle. Through it, he could see the ambulance as it careened around a corner. It was heading for the emergency entrance and the police cars held back, waiting for it to pass. The Daimler’s driver had already nosed out into the street, and now he stood on the brakes in order not to get clipped.

Perhaps it was the squeal of the rubber on the slick tarmac that obscured the first burst of sound. Croaker saw the flashes as a hail of semiautomatic gunfire spewed out of the open rear of the ambulance.

Even as he threw himself sideways he saw the driver flung against the curbside door as clots of his blood shot against the inside of the Daimler’s roof. Croaker jammed his elbow against the door handle, grabbed it, jerked it open. He tumbled to the ground, scraping his knees as he reached up to haul Major out after him.

The car shot forward as the dead driver’s foot came off the brake pedal, and Croaker’s arm was almost wrenched out of its socket. But he had hold of Major’s tweed lapels with his biomechanical hand, and he torqued it with the movement of the car, knowing that if it had been flesh and blood, it would be fractured now. But the titanium and polycarbonate, both tough and flexible, did their job, and he managed to hold on to his friend as the Daimler shuddered, then with an almost human cry careened obliquely across the street, smashing into a pair of parked cars.

The ambulance was already gone, shooting around the far corner in a squeal of tires. One of the police cars was pulling out in pursuit; the other was blocked by the wreck the driverless Daimler had made of itself.

Croaker could hear the shouts of the policemen and the clatter of their running feet. The cold rain was soaking him, running down his collar and into his undershirt. He had turned Major over, saw the mess of blood right away.

“Ah, Christ,” he breathed. And then, lifting his head, shouted, “A doctor! We need a doctor!”

A crimson swath had been stitched across Major’s chest and right shoulder. Blood was seeping everywhere, flecks of it across his cheeks and in his hair.

Major’s eyes focused on Croaker; his lips moved. “I told you, old son.”

“Shut up!” Croaker said, holding him tight. “You look like the entire Green Howards trod on you.”

Major tried to smile. “Feels like it.” His chest was fluttering. “You do as I say now, old son. Get out of England before something serious happens.”

“I told you to shut up!” Major was cold, and Croaker held him tighter. Where the hell was a doctor? They were only yards from the hospital.

Major began to shudder.

“Just you bloody well hang on or I’ll—”

Major’s eyelids closed. A deep raling came from inside his chest.

“Tom! Tom!”

The fog obscured the rooftops, rain dripped dolefully from the bare tree branches, the smell was of scorched rubber, cordite, and death. Sirens sounded, the crackle of radios forming like lightning, the pounding of feet across the pavement.

“All right, it’s all right,” someone said as hands began to gently pry Croaker away from his friend. “Give him to us now.”

The day was hot and still. Out on the river, boats plied the brown water. Workers were hunched over the banana plants, their capable fingers feeling for mature hands of fruit. Somewhere, high up, a monkey began to chatter, setting the serpents to slithering over one another. Perhaps they scented it.

Nicholas had come down from the veranda lost in thought. Now he turned. Someone had emerged from the depths of one of the sheds. Several kraits scented her and became excited, writhing up the side of their bamboo cage before dropping again to the floor.

You must be healed.

In a sense, he knew who was waiting for him here. Just as he had been waiting for her
.

You must be healed.
He suspected that Dich had said the same thing to her. But now, at the edge of the abyss, he hesitated, wondering if he was prepared for this confrontation. And, come to think of it, how in hell had Dich known he would eventually wind up here? Was this also part of the Kaisho’s vast scheme, the consequence of, as Dich had said, pulling strings from the shadows of exile?

“Why do you hesitate?” said the voice from his past. “Does seeing me again seem so frightening?”

And then he knew that the manner in which he had arrived here was irrelevant. Kaisho’s scheming or mere happenstance, what did it matter so long as he was here? Her voice, so familiar to him, was like a strand of memory unaffected by time and circumstance. At once, he glimpsed again those cold autumn nights at the edge of a field where an owl hooted and they had shared an entire universe.

“Koei.”

She emerged from the shadows behind an aquarium of sea snakes. She seemed to have aged not at all, to have existed in another world for all the time they had been apart, and yet the girl had matured into the full flower of womanhood. The angles of her face were still unmistakable, though slightly softened. The luster of her huge eyes had only deepened.

A small, shy smile formed on the small bow of her lips. “I see your face, your expression, and all the dread in my heart evaporates. You do not hate me.”

“I have hated you, and then later, I hated all that you represented—that world.” For a moment he was so overcome he could not continue. Knowing that, she was wisely silent. Patience was a virtue it had taken her so long to master it had become as precious to her as rubies or pearls.

“Let me look at you,” he whispered. “I feel as if no time has passed.”

“But it has.” She took a step toward him, a look of concern on her face. “I can see it in your eyes. Your wife...”

“Dead. A car accident while I was away trying to protect Okami-san.”

“And you haven’t been able to forgive yourself.”

“Not for that so much as not being able to see that the paths of our lives never ran parallel.”

“But life runs two ways, Nicholas. If our time together has taught me anything, it is this. The two of you chose something together. What was the crime in that?”

Of course she was right. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t thought a dozen times since Justine’s death, but hearing another person—and especially this person—articulate what he had been feeling was a source of the most profound relief.

He nodded wordlessly.

“And now you’re here.” She reached out tentatively, touched his fingers with her own. With the contact, he felt a warmth wash over him, and it was as if the intervening years had turned transparent, and seeing the present through them, he could understand it all—everything that he had for so long buried deep in the dark recesses of his soul.

You must be healed,
Dich had said. Now Nicholas began the process.

“For the longest time I turned my back on the world of the Yakuza, because of my rage, because of the death that was needlessly...” His voice, thick with emotion, was a whisper on the wind coming in from the open windows. “But, in the end, I saw what had really happened. It was me I was angry with, not you, not the world of the Yakuza. The fact I could never face, until now, was that I had fallen in love not only with you but with that world. Just as my father had. I fought to bury it because it was inconsistent with my conception of honor and the rectitude of my martial arts.”

“You know, that was the one thing I could never understand. You—a ninja, who were society’s outcasts in their day—had every reason to be drawn to the world of the Yakuza, who are outcasts in much the same way. It seemed so natural, and yet...”