Floating City (63 page)

The idea and the action were almost simultaneous. Surely, Torch was at this moment falling back to earth. When it detonated, he and Mick and everyone else in the area would be obliterated.

He let go his grip on the rope and, bending his knees, leapt outward over the steep mountain’s edge. He grazed the edge of the waterfall and began to tumble. Tau-tau protected him as he flew down like an arrow loosed from a bow. He was fully extended when he hit the river and was instantly carried under. Torch was ripped from his grasp by the fierce current as it catapulted him downriver, faster than he could run, faster than the truck could travel, a projectile traveling in the deep.

A moment later, in a lurid flash of greenish gold that was almost beautiful, Torch came to earth no more than a hundred yards from where Rock had fired it. The detonation seemed almost soundless, but the percussion of the fission chain reaction shook the mountain to its core.

In the blink of an eye, Floating City was obliterated, excised as with a surgeon’s scalpel. The shock wave caught the speeding truck, lifting it off the road, spilling it, end over end, down a rocky embankment that in the next instant had ceased to exist. It plummeted, its rear end torn away, only to break apart entirely on the teeth of rocks and trees far below.

On a night
when the moon
shines as brightly as this,
the unspoken thoughts
of even the most discreet heart might be seen.

—Izumi Shikibu

Tau-tau and the deep waters had protected Nicholas. He had felt nothing, but he had been aware of the moment of detonation, and with a spasmodic contraction of his soul he had felt the instant withering of life. He had been far enough away from ground zero so that when, miles away, he emerged exhausted from the river, he did not have to worry about fallout.

By the time he made his way back home to Tokyo, Croaker was there with Vesper. They spent all afternoon and part of the evening in his house filling each other in on the events of the last three days when they had been out of touch.

“Christ,” Croaker said, “after what Serman told us, I can’t imagine the devastation Torch created when it went off.”

“Luckily, Floating City was in such a remote spot that only the people left in it were killed,” Nicholas said. “Still, a team of nuclear experts will have to be brought in to assess the potential radiation spread. And they’ll have to dredge the river for the second Torch.”

Vesper shuddered. “It was a terrible lesson to learn about playing with nuclear weapons.” The two men sat while she stood, moving about the living room. Nicholas noticed her nervousness after dinner. He had gone to change the bandages on his right arm where the fire had seared his skin and had heard her on the phone.

They all went to bed early, but Nicholas was unable to sleep. He kept seeing in his mind the fall to earth of Torch. He saw himself underwater and, far above him, Mick Leonforte in the careening truck, his foot pushing the accelerator to the floor. In an odd way he wanted to know Mick’s end. It seemed clear now that he had saved Nicholas from the cage. Perhaps it was merely so Nicholas could finish the severing of the partnership with Rock, which, from Mick’s perspective, had outlived its usefulness. And, in an ironic way, Nicholas had done his best to save Mick’s life when Rock had aimed Torch at them.

A shadow in the hall caused him to turn his head.

“Nicholas? May I come in?”

It was Vesper.

He rolled over on his futon, turned on a rice-paper and lacquered-wood lamp. She padded silently into his bedroom and knelt with her knees together. She pushed her hair back from her face.

“I know you want to spend some time with your friend.”

“To tell you the truth, for the moment that’s all I want.”

She was silent for some time. “I have orders to bring you to Venice.”

“Venice? What for?”

“I think you know.”

“Okami?”

She nodded. “He needs to see you.”

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to tell her that he had spent these last months desperately trying to find the Kaisho, and now here he was being summoned into the presence. As easy as that. But he knew it couldn’t be easy for Okami, still living under a death threat. Who wanted him dead? The inner council was no more; they had canceled one another out. Dedalus was dead. Who was left?

Staring into her cornflower blue eyes he almost told her no. But he soon realized that was merely because in Venice he would see Celeste again, and after his reunion with Koei, he didn’t know whether he could face that.

“We can leave in the morning,” he said instead.

“I agreed to protect you, but that’s all,” Nicholas said thirty hours later. “Neither Lew Croaker nor I are required to condone what you’re up to.”

Mikio Okami seemed unconcerned. He looked fit and not at all a man of some ninety-plus years. They were sitting two blocks from the Rialto in a wonderful restaurant that catered to fishermen and local families. Vesper had spent just enough time in Venice to deliver Nicholas to Okami personally before flying home to Washington via London.

Okami sipped his espresso. “You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but I’m curious. How can you condemn what I’m doing without knowing what it is?”

“You’re Yakuza. Your partner was Dominic Goldoni, one of the Mafia’s top bosses. That’s all I need to know.”

“Is it? Then try redefining the players in this game. You’re attracted to two women. One is from a Yakuza family, the other is Dom’s sister, who you know is involved with me. If that isn’t enough, try this: your father was my best friend—and partner.”

For a moment, the silence was so deafening that Nicholas thought he heard peals of thunder. But, outside, Venice lay in sun-drenched splendor. Then he realized he was hearing the pounding of his pulse.

“Did you say
partner?”
he said in a voice that had lost all timbre. Okami had told him he needed to redefine the players, but this revelation required more—it meant reinventing the game.

“Who do you think originally thought up the concept of the Godaishu? Colonel Denis Linnear.”

“Good God! What must he have been thinking of?”

“He was a genius, a true visionary. I became his disciple. When the Colonel died, I continued the vision—a global partnership that took advantage of that part of the world only criminals inhabited. He’d worked with the Yakuza— his job had required him to do so. But he saw in us what even we did not fully appreciate—our loyalty and bravery. He envisioned a partnership between business, government, and the Yakuza—all the power players working in concert toward one goal.”

“But it could never work.”

“Of course it could. In fact, it did. The Japanese economic miracle is reality. In the space of three decades we rose from a broken nation, stripped of power and effective government, on the verge of collapse from inflation, unemployment, and a sense of guilt, to a modern-day economic colossus.”

Had Mick Leonforte told the truth? Nicholas asked himself. To Okami, he said, “Was my father responsible for the merging of MCI with BOT to create the Ministry of International Trade and Industry?”

“Where did you hear this?”

“From Mick Leonforte. He said that he had made a study of my father.”

Okami grunted. “Then it’s a good thing he perished in the Torch detonation.” He took a sip of his espresso as he considered how to proceed. “The mechanisms—the outward maneuverings—were necessarily done by Japanese, Yoshida and Shirasu. But the Colonel was behind them. In fact, when their last remaining foes in MCI sent a young man named Nagayama to spy for them, it was your father who brought him into the Yoshida camp. A year later, Nagayama became the first head of the MITI secretariat, and the Godaishu was on its way.”

“But how could all these forces work together? They’d be at each other’s throats.”

“I told you the Colonel was a visionary. He saw in all of them the one common denominator that defined them: they were all rabid capitalists. Making money was their overriding dream, and he used that to forge an alliance: the Godaishu. Toward that end, he came up with the concept of the Liberal Democratic Party. He was a great student of history, your father, and he knew the danger of complete chaos was a very real one for us then. He intuited what Japan needed at that moment was a strong, firm hand on the tiller that would stay in place for decades to come. What he did, in effect, was propose we take a page from our own history.

“When Iyeyasu Tokugawa, the first and greatest of the Tokugawa shoguns, came to power in the beginning of the seventeenth century, he tamed a feudal, fractionalized country teetering on the verge of anarchy. He ruled with an iron hand, yes, and his law could be at times cruel, but he deemed it all necessary to stabilize the country, to focus it on one vision.

“This was how the Colonel counseled us—the core of politicians, bureaucratic ministers, and Yakuza
oyabun.
He saw the LDP and the Godaishu as the modern-day equivalent of the two-hundred-year Tokugawa shogunate: a lens to focus the people on the job at hand—the building of a new Japan—while keeping them safe from the dangers of the very active Socialists and Communists.”

Okami wisely paused here, ordered another espresso while Nicholas sat stunned and utterly enthralled at the thought that his father had been, more or less, the architect of modern-day Japan. How had he done it, and what unforeseen ramifications had come of his visionary actions? Nicholas was in a frenzy to find out.

Knowing this, Okami continued, “Over the decades, human nature had its way, as it inevitably will. Corruption set in. Your father was extraordinary in many ways, Nicholas, but never more so than in the elegant manner in which he was able to handle power.

“As I was obliged to expand the Godaishu’s role and to bring in more
oyabun,
it, too, slowly became corrupted, until I knew that it had attained its own life—that I was no longer its guiding force. Its power had gone beyond even my abilities to handle. That is when I knew I needed to destroy it. Like a colossus out of control, it had begun to lurch into areas of terrible decay—Floating City, for one. Once Rock and Mick Leonforte became full partners, the Godaishu in its present form became a threat of catastrophic proportions. I knew they would carry Chosa, Kozo, and Akinaga’s perversion to its logical conclusion: a global economic network controlled by men who cared only about amassing more and more power. They would slowly corner legitimate markets as Floating City had already done with drugs and illegal arms. The ramifications were unthinkable.”

The lunch crowd had departed, leaving the white-jacketed waiters to clear tables and gossip among themselves. One of the chef’s assistants replaced the shaved ice in the trays where the fresh fish were displayed. No one bothered the two men at their table.

“Imagine how I felt having to call upon you to help me,” Okami continued, “knowing how you hated the Yakuza and the secret within me that your father had been my partner and my mentor. I knew you would honor your duty to your father. But I also knew something else. From Koei, I knew the love you had for one another, no matter how the relationship ended so long ago.”

You must be healed,
Dich had said, and now Nicholas understood the full nature of what he had meant.

“When you came to me here last year and I saw how full of hate you still were, I could find no way to tell you the truth. In fact, I was convinced it would have been a disaster to do so. You would have called me a liar and reneged on your promise to your father. Because, in the end, I summoned you not to protect me—you have seen that I am well capable of doing that with my own resources. That was merely the pretext, the trigger to begin the process of understanding the truth that lay behind his carefully composed facade. And to accept that truth. It was time that you continue the work your father and I planned together.

“You see, you came to me poisoned—by your youthful love affair, by forces neither you nor Koei could then control or understand. But that first night when Celeste brought you to me in my palazzo, I saw immediately that you had been profoundly damaged in a way that your father could never have imagined. You were useless to me in that state—useless to yourself.

“I confess I must take some of the responsibility for that. I had to rectify the mistake I had made so many years ago in keeping away from you, in not protecting you from the terrible damage the world of the Yakuza can inflict. I had to find a way for you to see Koei again. To do that, I had to withhold the truth from you—about me, Celeste and Margarite, Vesper. And especially about your father.

“Years ago, your father wanted me to meet you, spend time with you, but I kept fending him off. I was unhappy in those days, I drank a great deal—in fact, in that regard, I’m certain the Colonel saved my life. I could scarcely control myself, let alone the emotions of a teenager. For better or for worse, he chose Tsunetomo Akinaga. And so you met Koei. Karma, Nick-san.”

They paid the bill and left the restaurant. It was a fine afternoon. The ochers, golds, and burnt umbers of the palazzi shone as if freshly painted. The Grand Canal was filled with traffic, and the cafés along the
riva
were opening their quayside tables for spring. A gondolier sang a snippet of an aria.

There was so much Nicholas needed to know, so many questions that needed answering. But one thought overrode all his doubts and concerns.
With that one stroke of genius the Colonel set in motion countless events that continue their impact to this day,
Mick had said. Now Nicholas knew he was beginning to glimpse the nature of that genius. He breathed in the sweet air of Venice and was glad to be alive. He was even looking forward to his dinner tonight with Celeste.

Elation coursed through him. The Kaisho wanted him to continue the evolution of the Colonel’s “stroke of genius.” He was being given the chance to work with Mikio Okami, who, like Tachi, possessed
koryoku
and had promised to teach him the secret of the Illuminating Power; he was being given a unique opportunity to enter a whole new world. Not the world of the Yakuza, which he had shunned, but the secret life Denis Linnear had painstakingly created moment by moment. How could he refuse? Yes, he would have to get certain assurances from Okami, and he could not forget his duty to Tanzan Nangi and their company, Sato-Tomkin, but he would make certain he did not give that up. He had the distinct feeling that this was what his father had wanted for him all along; perhaps it was why he had made Nicholas promise to come to the Kaisho’s aid should he ever ask for it.