Floating City (61 page)

“I have here a
torinawa,”
Tanaka Gin said, taking the ceremonial cord and tying Akinaga’s hands behind his back. “I want all here to know you for the criminal you are.”

Akinaga stared bleakly into Tanaka Gin’s face, his heart full of hate. “What are you charging me with in this charade?”

“The extortion of the Daijin of MITI. You are also implicated in the deaths of Akira Chosa and Naohiro Ushiba.”

“Nonsense. They took their own lives.”

“Turn around and step out of the pool.”

Akinaga stood close to Tanaka Gin, his eyes boring into the prosecutor’s. “I don’t know what you think you’re up to, Gin, but I guarantee you my lawyers will have me home by midnight.”

“Not this time, I think.”

“Whatever evidence you’ve been given is trumped up. My lawyers will prove—”

“You’ll be convicted by your own words. Now step out of the pool.”

For a tension-filled moment Akinaga did nothing. Then he said, in a voice so low only Tanaka Gin could hear, “You have this one chance. I will accept the humiliation you have subjected me to in this room. But if this circus gets as far as the press, I cannot be responsible. I am warning you. There are mechanisms in place within your own department that will lead to your destruction. I give you this one last chance. Take the
torinawa
off me and leave with your people. Do it now and it will be as if this incident never occurred, I give you my word.”

With a shiver of recognition, Tanaka Gin recalled Chosa saying to him.
If it’s corruption you’re after, look to your own department, Prosecutor.
He thought of Ushiba, lying in a bloody pool in his office, released from the prison in which this man had incarcerated him, and he knew he could not waver from his purpose.

“Step out of the pool,” he said without another moment’s hesitation. “You are past due to meet your fate.”

There was no service ladder leading down from the horizontal shaft, and Croaker, Vesper, and Serman were obliged to use their hands and knees to descend. It was difficult work, especially since the air was rapidly becoming superheated as they approached the exhaust complex.

Serman was having the most difficulty. Twice he slipped along the line of his sweat, his weight sending Croaker headlong into Vesper before Croaker’s strength stopped their fall.

No one spoke; all their energy was going into movement. They had no way of knowing how far down they had come or how much farther they had to go. Serman was unsure how deep the exhaust shafts went before they ended at the vents.

Then, from just below him, Croaker heard Vesper breathe, “I can see the bottom.”

At that moment, Serman slipped again. Croaker was ready for him. As he crashed down onto Croaker’s shoulder, Croaker braced himself with both arms rigid. But at the same time Vesper was reaching up, trying to take some of the brunt of Serman’s fall. Her fingers inadvertently closed around Croaker’s left wrist, pulling it down.

He tumbled over, crashing into her, spilling a terrified Serman off his shoulder.

“Christ!” Croaker shouted as he made a grab for the scientist. But he had his own stability to think about, and Serman went through his grasp as his stainless-steel fingers drove into the metal of the shaft, holding him and Vesper aloft long enough for her to regain purchase with her knees.

“Serman?” he asked.

She was staring down and he saw her shake her head. “It looks like his neck is broken,” she said.

They reached him and the floor of the lower horizontal shaft a moment later. Serman was dead, all right.

They crouched over him for a moment. The whine of the turbines was very loud, and looking off to their right, they could see the huge exhaust vents. They had made it—they were at the end of the exhaust tunnel.

Croaker closed Serman’s eyes. “We only had a few hundred yards left.”

“Let’s go,” Vesper said, and he nodded.

They crept down the shaft in cramped, uncomfortable fashion. Croaker was impatient to reach the exhaust grates, but Vesper appeared to be taking her time.

“Wait a minute,” she whispered. Ahead of him he could see her stretched prone on the floor. “Take a look at this.”

He got down beside her. At first he could discern nothing in the gloom. Then, as he focused, he began to see tiny sparks in the air just above the level of the concrete shaft floor. They looked like nothing more than fireflies.

“What is it?” he asked, looking at the walls on either side. “A DARPA surveillance device?”

“Worse, I think.” Vesper turned over on her back, staring upward through the field of sparks. “Some kind of electrical field. I think it’s meant to discourage unauthorized intrusion, but this—or something a bit less sophisticated—could be the reason those poor bastards never made it out of here years ago.”

Croaker looked at her. “How the hell do you know all this?”

She pulled back from the verge of the field, turned over to face him.

When she made no reply, he said, “You know, I have the distinct feeling I haven’t the faintest idea who you are. If I’m right, neither do Margarite or Okami.”

She gave him an enigmatic smile, “Do you know why actors act, Lew? It’s because they love playing roles, yes, but it’s also because inside they are no one—or they can’t bear to let anyone see who they really are.”

“Is that how you are?”

She shrugged. “I have become a product of the world in which I live. I could have been anything, anyone. Instead, I chose to become no one—everyone. Do you understand?”

“I’m trying—but you’re chimerical.”

She seemed to come abruptly alive. “Yes, yes, that’s it precisely. And therein lies my power—the power that lies within all of us—men
and
women. It’s frightening and it most often gets beaten down to the point of disappearing, but I was trained to recognize it and use it.”

“Trained? By whom?”

She gave him another enigmatic smile. “We’d better find a way through this electrical field or we’ll never get out of here.”

They turned their attention to the field, Croaker somewhat reluctantly. He felt she had been on the verge of divulging a pivotal facet of her makeup. He wanted to pursue the subject of her past but knew this was neither the time not the place for it.

Vesper pointed to what appeared as three dark parallel lines indented into the concrete of the wall on their left. “Sensors. There’s a thermal component to the field.”

“You mean the sensor picks up a person’s body heat, a circuit is tripped, and the field fries said human being.”

Vesper nodded. “More or less that’s it.”

“How do we disable the thing?”

She continued to stare at it. “Once I got into it I know I could bypass the circuitry. Problem is getting close to it. Even the heat of my hand will set off the field.”

Croaker held up his biomechanical hand and grinned fiercely into the gloom. “But mine won’t.”

“Christ, you’re right! No flesh, no blood, no heat.” She looked from his hand to the sensor array. “Let’s just hope we judged distances right, otherwise while you’re reaching for the sensor, your wrist will set it off.”

“Let’s try it, then.” Croaker rolled over until his left shoulder was against the wall. Then he reached out with his biomechanical hand. The titanium and polycarbonate fingers passed through the dancing sparks, then the hand itself.

“Watch it!” Vesper said sharply. “Your wrist.” She shook her head. “The sensor is too far into the field. You’ll never—”

She stopped speaking as Croaker extruded the stainless-steel nails from the tips of his fingers until they passed across the array.

“Okay,” he said. “Now what?”

Vesper nodded, talking him through the procedure. First, he pried open the protective clear Plexiglas cover, then he inserted one nail into a small slot in the center of the array. At her behest he turned his nail to the right, then the left. The front of the array popped off. It was attached to the guts of the unit by three color-coded wires.

“We’re only going to have one chance,” Vesper said. “There’s a red, yellow, and white wire. We’ve got to cut the ground. That will short out the circuit into its fail-safe mode without tripping the field.”

Croaker could not even turn his head to look at her. “Do you know which one’s the ground?”

“Cut the red one.”

“Is that the ground?”

“Cut it!”

He did.

The field of dancing sparks disappeared, and Croaker put his head down on his outstretched arm.

Vesper let out a small sigh. “Thank God for the military mind. All the grounds at this base are red. I gambled—”

“You
gambled!”
Croaker picked his head up, stared at her.

She got up. “If you had a better gamble to take, you should have spoken up.”

He got to his feet. “I trusted you.”

That enigmatic smile again. “Good thing you did. We’re through.”

Croaker led the way past the now quiescent electronic field toward the huge grilles at the far end of the shaft. But they were only halfway there when they saw the vents being lifted off.

“I think we’ve had our allotment of fun today, Mr. Croaker.” Dedalus peered in at them. They could see his head and upper torso. He was holding a 9mm Beretta. “Out,” he ordered. “I’m quite the expert with this thing, you know.”

Vesper, crouched behind Croaker and hidden from the senator’s view, whispered, “It’s like ‘The Lady or the Tiger,’ only this ‘lady’ is toting a high-velocity weapon. Let’s back up out of here.”

“And go where?” Croaker hissed. “Back to the storeroom? Into the nuclear ventilation chamber? You heard what Serman told us about that.” He shook his head. “Not good enough. Besides, I have a plan.” It was wild, it was exceedingly dangerous, it meant gambling everything on one chance, but this box was too clever by half; this was the only way out of it.

“Look, you don’t know—”

“It’s do or die now. I’m going to get Dedalus before he gets us.”

“Impossible! The power he commands...”

“All his power is meaningless right now. Because I know what he wants more than anything else, and I’m going to give it to him.”

Vesper was abruptly wary. “What are you thinking of doing?” But she was a genius and she was already working it out. “You can’t.”

“I can and I will. Trust me, it’s our only option. We’ve got to give him the one thing we can’t afford to: the place where Mikio Okami is hiding.”

“If he thinks the two of us are up to something, he’ll eat us both for lunch.” She tossed her head. “Forget it. I know him, you don’t.”

“I know as much about him as I need to; I know what he wants most.”

He was right and she knew it. Perhaps it was a new feeling for this genius creature to acknowledge intelligence on her level in another person. She must be so used to dominating people easily, he was counting on her being intrigued by someone else’s manipulation of a man who was her enemy.

She signaled him by putting her hand on his back. “I must be mad to listen to a madman.”

“Mr. Croaker,” Dedalus called. “I’ve shown you quite enough of my patience for one day. Get down here and tell me what you’ve done with my nuclear theorist.”

“I’m afraid Dr. Serman is dead. He has met with an unfortunate accident,” Croaker said as he leaned back and, extruding his stainless-steel nails, slit open Serman’s wrist. “Smear yourself with the blood,” he whispered to Vesper. To Dedalus he said, “He fell down the vertical shaft. I’m having trouble bringing him down to you.”

“Forget him,” Dedalus said impatiently. “It’s you I want.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be as simple as that,” Croaker said, and turning, twisted Vesper’s arm behind her back. She cried out at the force of it which was the point. “Your agent Vesper is here with me, Senator. You don’t want her killed, do you?”

Dedalus, leaning farther into the shaft’s end, aimed the Beretta at them both. “Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about her. All my agents are expendable. It’s in their job description.”

“Nice old boy. I am dearly going to love this,” Croaker murmured under his breath. To Dedalus, he said, “I was expecting something like that from you, so here’s the deal—”

“No fucking deal, Mr. Croaker. Slide out of there now, with or without Vesper, it’s all the same to me.”

“The deal is you clear the area you’re in and I’ll come out—”

Dedalus barked a laugh.

“—and tell you where Mikio Okami is in hiding.”

Dedalus laughed louder. “Oh, Mr. Croaker, I already know Okami’s in London. In a matter of twenty-four hours his brains will be blown all over the map. Come out now and stop playing at James Bond.”

Croaker took a deep breath.
Here goes,
he thought. “Okami knows all about you and Leonforte and Akinaga, Senator. He’s not in London anymore, but I know where he’s gone.” It was a lie—a desperate one—and he could only hope that he was good enough to sell it to Dedalus, a born liar.

“My information—”

“Is out of date, Senator,” Croaker said. Timing was everything now. He must not allow Dedalus time to think. “I met with Okami in Holland Park. Shall I tell you exactly where? Near Bird Lawn, right where—”

“I don’t believe you.”

Jesus, he was sweating now. He was terrified it wouldn’t work and terrified it would. What a plan. No wonder Vesper had called him mad. And yet she had gone along with him; this gave him a modicum of hope. But as Ben Franklin wrote,
He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

“Why do you think I went to London? I was following a lead.”

“To Okami? You’re supposed to be investigating Dominic Goldoni’s murder.”

“Okay, Senator, let’s call a spade a spade. We both know Do Duc killed Goldoni and we both know who hired him: Leon Waxman, your man running Looking-Glass. But Waxman was Johnny Leonforte, a major oversight in your vetting process. In the course of that investigation I discovered that Goldoni and Okami were partners in a global business network. Do Duc was hired to murder Okami as well, but as we know, he failed and Okami disappeared. Are we beginning to speak the same language?”

“Perhaps.”

“You’ve been searching for Okami ever since, Senator. That’s why you didn’t throw me off the job the moment you met me. You figured since Goldoni’s murderer had been killed and my investigation was still running, I must be after Okami, just like you. And you were right. Only, unlike you, I didn’t lose track of him. I know where he is now.”