Floating City (55 page)

The ride out to Virginia calmed him down. He had slept fitfully during the transatlantic flight, and when he did, he dreamt of Major Tom’s blood floating in the air like pink clouds. He had awakened, the muffled roar of the jet engines sounding like the frightening sounds of the medical machines to which his friend had been hooked up on the way to surgery.

At the Knife River registration office, he was handed his credentials by a flinty-eyed blonde in a well-worn suede riding outfit and, apparently, a steel shaft up her spine. He was also fingerprinted and given a retinal scan by two burly men who might have been brothers but were probably only graduates of the same military academy.

He asked the blonde if anyone else within the last two days had clocked in to see Dr. Serman. No one had. He was then directed outside the academy building where a jeep with an iron-armed driver took him past corrals, riding rings with jumps and extensive stables, and what looked like barracks buildings. A rutted lane led down an embankment, across a trestle bridge that spanned what he took to be Knife River. They stopped at the edge of deep woods, where a group of men with hunting dogs and shotguns slung casually across their arms appeared and studied Croaker’s ID. They were waved on through, jouncing down the deeply rutted path carved into the woods.

At length, the trees gave way to scrub oak and brambles, and then they picked up speed across a meadow that would be beautiful in late spring and summer. Now it merely seemed barren and, wrapped in mist, melancholy.

The lab complex appeared, sitting on the east side of a succession of rolling wooded hills. Dogs barked, unseen, and Croaker wondered how much telemetry was homed in on them. The jeep let him off at the front entrance of a low, angular concrete structure with windows of black, reflective glass. It was no doubt meant to appear futuristic and forbidding. Instead, it merely looked governmental and dreary.

The recent history of the DARPA facility was clear in Croaker’s mind as he introduced himself to Douglas Serman, who, more than anything else, reminded him of a rodent in his precise, repetitive movements, his bright eyes, and his obviously anal retentive nature.

“Is there somewhere private we can speak?” Croaker said in his most neutral voice.

Serman, who seemed to make a habit of looking at everything out of the corner of his eye, said, “Is this an official visit? Do I need my logs and such?”

“Not at the moment,” Croaker said. “Doctor, is there a lounge or something?”

“Yes, of course.” Serman rubbed his hands together, ushered Croaker down a hallway that smelted of industrial-strength chemical cherry, as if it had just been converted from a mass urinal.

Serman pushed open a door that said
PRIVATE
with his shoulder. Croaker found himself in an unexpectedly homey suite of rooms that, with their frilly curtains and the chintz floral furniture fabric, seemed more appropriate for the public rooms at the riding academy.

Serman stood standing in the middle of the room as if he had had no experience with informality.

“You’re one of the senator’s people.” He meant Dedalus.

“Yes, but I’ve just come from London.”

Serman peered at him politely, his hands dry-washing themselves with all the energy of Lady Macbeth. “Never been there myself,” he said at last. Then he gave a small self-deprecating chuckle. “Haven’t been anywhere, really. Not in some years. They won’t let me outside the country, you see. Afraid I’ll be abducted.” Another dry chuckle. “As if I’m a national treasure.”

“In London I met a friend of yours. Vesper Arkham.”

Serman twitched like the subject of a Skinnerian psych project. Rat in a maze.

“Vesper who?” He was no good at this.

“Arkham, Doctor. Vesper Arkham.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“She’s your normal contact,” Croaker snapped, abruptly dropping the facade of cordiality. Serman was like a lake in spring: he was covered with a sheet of very thin ice. “And she’s very concerned about the updates you’ve stopped giving her.”

Serman blinked. “Updates?”

It was time, Croaker judged, to leave it to intuition and gamble everything. “Yes, Doctor. From the project you and Abramanov have been working on. What is it called?” A sick look was coming to Serman’s face, and Croaker felt a surge of triumph. “Ah, yes. Torch.”

Serman’s legs seemed to have turned to jelly. Croaker held him up by the elbows, directed him to one of the chintz-covered sofas.

“Are you all right, Doctor?”

Serman’s bluish lips moved. “Vesper promised me no one else would know about those reports,” he whispered.

Croaker was near the center, he could taste it on the electrically charged air. “What kind of deal did Vesper have going with you?”

Serman jumped up. “It was Vesper who allowed the transmission between me and Abramanov to keep up. Without her, it would have eventually been picked up by the special subcarrier tracker used here as an antibugging security measure. In return, she insisted on being kept up-to-date on our high-flux neutron project.”

Serman jammed his hands in his pockets, went to one of the curtained windows and stared out. “I want to make something clear. I’m not a traitor. I’ve worked for the government all my life. I’ve been a dedicated man. But dedication...” He turned around. “Such dedication needs to be rewarded, damnit! Instead, I’ve been entombed here. I can’t go anywhere, do anything, see anybody without forms to fill out, questions to be answered, suspicions raised. As far as the world at large is concerned I died five years ago. But, I’ll tell you, this is worse than death.”

“Why don’t you quit?”

Serman looked at him wide-eyed for a moment before bursting out into laughter that racked him so thoroughly tears spilled out of his eyes.

“Good God, man, look at where we are!” he gasped. “You don’t just walk away from a place like this. Your brain is too full of equations that impact national security.” He dabbed at the corners of his eyes with his sleeve. “This is a lifetime job. The fact that they never tell you that when you sign on is another matter entirely.”

Croaker felt little sympathy for Serman. “So staying had nothing to do with the high-flux neutron project.”

“Of course it did,” Serman said with the impenetrable logic of the scientist. “He said with my help he’d had a breakthrough. He’d been able to create a transuranic isotope that was stable. Do you know what a transuranic isotope is?”

“Yes, it’s a radioactive substance with an atomic number higher than uranium—that makes it potentially deadly to humans. And I also know that he’s taken this isotope and has made a devastatingly dangerous weapon out of it.”

“Torch.” Serman abruptly sat down. “Yes, I think I know what Abramanov did to create element 114m, but for some reason I haven’t been able to duplicate his success.” He stopped, put his head into his hands. “We had such hopes. An almost endless fuel, cheap to make, an end to the ongoing energy crisis. What a dreamt!” He looked up. “But that’s all it is, a dream. Abramanov has made the ultimate weapon out of it.” Serman looked bleakly at him. “Because so little of it is needed for a powerful explosion, its potential use lies in hand-held nuclear devices. In today’s world of terrorists and small ethnic wars, it fits all the criteria for the ultimate weapon: it’s portable, devastating, and clean.”

Croaker had an idea. “Can you contact Abramanov now?”

“No. All communication abruptly ceased five days ago. I have had no reply to my repeated queries.”

“How are you involved with the weapons being stolen from DARPA?”

“What are you talking about?”

He could see that Serman knew nothing about Vesper’s other activities inside DARPA. He had thought to bundle Serman off to the security office at the other end of the complex, but now he thought better of it. Somehow Croaker had to get Serman out of the DARPA facility and contact Nicholas. Now, more than ever, the Torch 315 detonation date must be stopped.

He had Serman fetch him one of the doctor’s white lab coats, then he pumped Serman in detail about the complex’s layout and the doctor’s daily route and routine.

Then he had Serman lead him back to his lab. He sat at the zinc countertop in the light of one lit Bunsen burner while Serman crouched beneath, hidden by shadows and the lab stool. It would have been easiest to change his plan and leave with Serman without waiting for Vesper to show up, but instinct told him that would be a mistake. He could not leave in place a mole planted so deeply inside the Nishiki network she had access to Okami himself. He had to take her down and do it now while he could have a degree of control over the killing ground. And yet something kept intruding, a tickle of intent at the periphery of his thoughts. Something Serman had said he had let slip through...

A shadowy figure slipped silently through the doorway.

“So you are here.”

He recognized her voice, Dedalus’s mole. He did not move, but he felt as if a laser beam was sighted between his eyes.

“Would you come with me. We have much to discuss.”

Croaker studied her face. She was taking it well, he thought There was not a trace of surprise on her face. That capped it: Dedalus had told her he was here. She was his mole—and she had access to Okami. No wonder his adversaries had found Okami in London. She had betrayed him.

“You’re a sight,” Croaker said, looking at this newest incarnation of Vesper Arkham. She wore black leggings and a quilted black jacket over a silk blouse. Her natural blond hair was pulled tightly back from her face, which was set in a troubled scowl. She had never looked more beautiful—or more deadly. “We do have much to discuss.” He smiled, raising his biomechanical hand, its stainless-steel nails fully extruded. “But this time I’m ready for you.”

“You idiot,” she said, stunning him to immobility. “Where the hell is Serman? I’ve got to get you both out of here before you’re shot dead!”

“Tachi Shidare is dead,” Tetsuo Akinaga said. “And now that Chosa has committed suicide, the inner council no longer exists.”

Ushiba said nothing. When he had received the message from Akinaga, he had actually considered postponing the meeting. He was exhausted unto death. The guilt he felt over Chosa’s death was only partially mitigated by the certain knowledge that it had been necessary. The security of the Godaishu had to be maintained at whatever cost.
You should get out before you make a fatal mistake and the force of your own politics runs you over,
Ken had told him. And he well understood the wisdom of his words because he had answered.
When the game becomes a
burden, the rules change and the hunter is most in danger of becoming the hunted.
He remembered his feeling of renewed power as he had said,
One is born smelling the blood.

That statement, so filled with the arrogance of youth, was simply not true. The blood was what had made him so certain that Chosa’s and Akinaga’s vision of the Godaishu was sound, that their diatribes against the despotism of the Kaisho had to be acted upon. Only now could he see how the bloodlust for power had blinded all of them.

With Chosa and Shidare gone he could not help thinking that they would not have come to these dire straits had they not made the tacit decision to do away with the Kaisho. Mikio Okami’s firm hand would have led them down an altogether different path. It was up to him, now, to steer a clear path for the Godaishu, and the council.

“What happened to the young
oyabun?”
he said now.

Akinaga shrugged. “It was not of my doing. Shidare was struck down by an assassin in Yoshino.”

“Yoshino? What was he doing there?”

The two men were sitting in the sparely furnished main room of Tomi, the obelisklike concrete structure Akinaga had built for himself as a retreat. It rose on a two-hundred-square-foot lot in the center of Tokyo. Tomi, from the word meaning a kind of watchtower that could command a wide view, was one of the
oyabun’s
various secretive quarters. Like a commander during wartime, he had many avenues of escape from the pressures of his world. A set of steep stone stairs rose from street level beside a narrow parking space. Above was the room they were in, along with a tiny kitchen. A black iron spiral staircase in one corner led up to the bedrooms and bath. Ushiba had never found it a comfortable space, but it was efficient in a manner befitting a Spartan commander.

Blocks of beautiful kiaki—the only wood in the room—had been carved into a low table at which they knelt. Tea and cakes had been laid out when Ushiba arrived. Certainly, Akinaga had not prepared them; it was his subtle way of bringing to Ushiba’s attention that there was someone else in the house, unseen but available if needed.

“Shidare was in Yoshino doing his job, one suspects,” Akinaga said. “Tracking down Nicholas Linnear in order to kill him. It seems that, like Tomoo Kozo, Shidare was unsuccessful.”

“Now we’re in for it,” Ushiba said. “If Linnear knows Shidare was Yakuza and, further, a member of the inner council, he cannot fail to know where to come next.”

“Don’t you find it interesting,” Akinaga said, shrewdly changing the subject, “that Linnear would be in Yoshino? Why? Perhaps that is where the Kaisho is in hiding.”

“Our first concern should be Linnear. Because of Chosa’s foolhardy act Linnear is sure to come to Tokyo looking for you. I can help with—”

“I think you have done just about enough, Daijin.”

Ushiba looked in mute disbelief at Akinaga.

“With Chosa and Shidare gone, there is only me, Chief Minister.” The
oyabun
leaned over the kiaki table. “Your position on the inner council was always of an advisory nature, but over the past year it has not been lost on me that your attendance, opinions, and influence have been on the rise. It began even before we drove Okami from the Kaisho’s position, and ever since then you seem bent on gaining power exponentially.” Akinaga’s face twisted. “You see, that’s what this little exercise has been in aid of.”

“What exercise?” A rime of ice was forming in Ushiba’s lower belly.

“I gave you Chosa on a platter, and much to my satisfaction you ate him whole.” Akinaga gave a booming laugh. “Imagine! I turned you against your friend! Amazing, really.”