Floating City (64 page)
Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
Nicholas had already been given a precious gift. The past, he had been shown, was a living thing, affecting the present in ways most people could never imagine. As for the future, it would unfold in its own way. He was content now to allow that to happen.
The weeks after her return from Tokyo were busy ones for Vesper. For one thing, she was deeply involved in the Pentagon probe into Senator Dedalus’s dealings with DARPA as well as the internal investigation into Johnny Leonforte’s hiring as head of Looking-Glass. For another, instead of sleeping she spent her off-hours poring through the coded ledger she had scanned from Morgana’s offices.
She had not had the time to decipher it, but Croaker had. He had given it to her in Tokyo just before she and Nicholas had left for Venice.
Along about the fortieth hour she determined there was something decidedly odd about some of the entries. It was a word that translated as “Larva.” The first thing she did was check the ciphers to make certain she had decoded it correctly. It had no number attached to it, no price tag or shipment date, so it did not appear to be a weapon or a part of Morgana’s inventory at all. But, further on, filling a page with only the heading “Larva” on it, were monetary amounts that seemed to go on and on and which, when she added them up, went into the billions. Whoever or whatever Larva was, Dedalus had been draining Morgana’s accounts into it.
It was Celeste who provided Vesper with the first clue. They had rendezvoused as part of the Nishiki network, and Vesper had brought up the anomaly.
“It’s odd,” Celeste said, “because the Larva is one of the traditional Venetian masks. It’s usually white, but very rarely one sees one in black. It’s Latin for a specter or a ghost. The mask was also called a
volto.”
The second clue was provided back in Washington.
“What was this three-hundred-thousand-dollar expenditure for?” Vesper asked the Pentagon investigator who was part of the team taking apart Dedalus’s books for Looking-Glass.
“It seems Dedalus hired an outside firm to do the vetting of his staff for about eighteen months.”
“Isn’t that odd?”
“Not really. Budget shortfalls mean periodic layoffs of nonessential personnel. During this period Dedalus let his vetting staff go along with some bean counters and secretaries.”
“What was the name of the firm Dedalus hired?”
“Let’s see.” The investigator began leafing through pages of files. “Here it is. A company called National Security Services.”
Vesper went to her computer, pulled up NSS from the data banks. Nothing seemed out of place until she noticed that NSS was a wholly owned subsidiary of some entity called VEU. She switched screens, did a global search for VEU.
When she found it, her heart skipped a beat. She sat staring at the screen for some time allowing the message to sink in. VEU stood for Volto Enterprises Unlimited. Volto. Larva. The ghost in white... or black.
Tumblers began clicking into place in her mind, but the implications were so terrifying that for a moment she sat, paralyzed, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. All she could think of was the immortal Hydra with its hundred heads. Lop off one or two and another would take its place. Could it be that they had all been wrong about Dedalus, that he wasn’t the ultimate head of the Godaishu in America but was taking orders from someone else?
She found VEU’s corporate address, which was in West Palm Beach, Florida, but she could not bring up the names of any of its officers. Her mind alight with fear, she switched screens again. Her fingers were like ice as they pressed keys faster and faster until... there it was, her worst fear confirmed, the address of the corporate headquarters of VEU was the same as that of an enormous white stucco mansion overlooking the ocean owned by a shell corporation. This corporation, based in the Bahamas, had no tangible business nor, at the end of each fiscal year, any profits to declare. And yet the FBI believed that millions of dollars flowed through its offshore bank accounts.
The man who used that mansion in winter months, who it was believed controlled the shell corporation, was Caesare Leonforte.
Vesper sat back, breathless. If she was right, Bad Clams’s company had vetted Leon Waxman. No wonder they hadn’t discovered that he was Bad Clams’s father, Johnny. No wonder Johnny Leonforte had been welcomed as the new head of Looking-Glass. His son had masterminded it. And that meant Bad Clams had controlled Dedalus; he owned Morgana, Malory Enterprises, and Avalon Ltd. He was Larva, the ghost, the black
volto
hiding his identity. All along they had been fighting the Hydra.
So it’s not over,
Vesper thought. It’s
just beginning.
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Two warriors bound by blood, divided by honour... As a youth, Nicholas Linnear chose the path of the Ninja, placing tradition and honour above all. Many of his blood-brothers fell by the wayside – death has claimed them, as it claims all men. But one of his brothers abandoned this path to pursue a life of greed and corruption. Trained in the way of the shadow warrior, but lacking the code that guides the true Ninja. And this man has never forgotten Linnear...
Maybe a great magnet pulls
All souls towards the truth
Or maybe it is life itself
That feeds wisdom
To its youth
‘Constant Craving’
k.d. lang/Ben Mink
Until the day of his death,
no man can be sure
of his courage.
Jean Anouilh
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams
‘What is it that you’ve always wanted?’
Mick Leonforte stared across the table at the tall, elegant woman who sat unmoving as she slowly smoked a thin, black cigar. Giai Kurtz was Vietnamese, a daughter of one of Saigon’s elite families. She was married, of course, but that was part of the kick. Alone and unattached, she would not have seemed nearly as desirable. She was also the kind of woman Mick had wanted to be with since he had come to Asia more than twenty years ago. Even before that, if he were to be perfectly honest with himself.
Staring at the jewel-shaped face with its high cheekbones, unblemished skin the lush color of teak, the heavy cascade of blue-black hair, he understood that this exquisite creature – or someone very much like her – had inhabited his dreams before he had ever known the first thing about Asia. It was no wonder that having come in-country for the war, he had never returned home. Vietnam
was
his home.
‘Tell me,’ he said with the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. ‘Tell me and it’s yours.’
The woman smoked her cigar, letting the gray-brown smoke drift languidly from her partly opened lips, and if one was not as well versed in the peoples of Southeast Asia as Mick was, one could easily miss the metallic glitter of fear far back in her depthless eyes.
‘You know what I want,’ she said at last.
‘Anything,’ Mick said. ‘Anything but that.’
They were in the rearmost booth of Pull Marine, a chic French restaurant that Mick had bankrolled in the posh Roppongi district. It was one of many burgeoning businesses throughout Asia – legitimate and otherwise – that he controlled. Mick was involved in numerous such ventures that he had kept secret from his late, unlamented partner, Rock.
‘I want
you.’
No,
he thought,
that is what I want. At least what I want you to feel.
‘You have me,’ he said, spreading his hands wide. ‘See?’
In the opposite corner from where Mick and Giai sat, a rail-thin Vietnamese woman warbled the songs of Jacques Brel, filled with melancholy and the black sails of death. She expressed Brel’s profound sadness like the wounds of war; the room was burnished as much by her serpentine voice as it was by the low, artful lighting.
‘You know what I mean. I want us to be together always.’
‘But I won’t be here,’ he said with deliberate emphasis on each word, ‘always.’
The chanteuse was accompanied by a guitarist and a synth player who made his instrument sound, at times, like a cathedral organ. This churchlike overtone caused Mick to remember the many stories of Joan of Arc his father had told him. Apocryphal or not, they stayed with the young Mick, perhaps because they were so much a part of his father’s worldview; saints as warriors for righteous causes had been a major theme in Johnny Leonforte’s subconscious.
‘Then I will go with you wherever you go.’ She sucked on her cigar. ‘That’s what I want.”
Mick stared into her dark eyes for a long time, calculating. ‘All right,’ he said at length, as she smiled, smoke escaping from between her ripe lips.
The restaurant was a piece of Saigon reproduced whole-cloth in Tokyo, a reflection of Saigon’s deliberate air of change and newfound prosperity. Gold-leaf walls gleamed and sparked, a black marble floor reflected the midnight-blue domed ceiling. The candles on the tables gave off the faint incense of a temple’s interior. Bathed in the cool bluish wash of spotlights, a highly stylized mask fashioned out of crimson lacquer from a traditional Vietnamese design dominated one wall.
Smartly dressed waiters were overseen by Honniko, a spectacular bare-shouldered blonde in a golden velvet bustier and form-fitting raw-silk skirt that came down to just above her ankles. She spoke perfect French and Japanese. She also spoke Vietnamese, and her air of authority was absolute. Normally, at this time of night, one would have been impressed by her genuine warmth in greeting patrons and adeptly steering them to their candlelit tables, but tonight she stood immobile behind her bronze podium, gazing slit-eyed at the chanteuse. In truth, she had nothing else to do, since the couple in the far corner were her only customers. Behind her, the front door to the second-floor restaurant was locked, its lace curtains pulled tautly over the narrow cut-glass panes. Through the glass bubble of the terrace, the brilliant Roppongi night glittered like a shower of diadems.
A waiter, his face as cool and detached as a doctor’s, brought plates of fish
en croûte
and whole unshelled tiger prawns in a delicate garlic and cream sauce.
Without a word, Mick reached for his fork while Giai continued to draw on her cigar. ‘I wonder if you mean it,’ she said.
He began to eat with the relish of a man too long deprived of decent food. Giai watched him while two long fingernails lacquered the same color as the walls flicked against each other.
Click-click. Click-click.
Like beetles doing battle with a window screen.
‘Eat. Aren’t you hungry?’ Mick asked, though from his tone he seemed indifferent as to whether or not she would answer. ‘Personally, I’m starving.’
‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I’m well aware of your appetites.’ She regarded him with the scrutiny of an angel or a devil. She saw a man with a rugged, charismatic face fronted by a prominent Roman nose and odd gray and orange eyes that gave him a fierce and feral aspect. His salt-and-pepper hair was long and he wore a neatly cropped beard. It was a face born to give orders, the face of a man who harbored radical philosophies and dark secrets in equal number, whose personal worldview was iconoclastic and unshakable.
‘Where is it?’ she asked in a voice that with considerable effort managed to remain calm. ‘Show it to me.’
Of course he knew what she meant. ‘How do you know I have it with me?’ He popped the head of a prawn between his lips and crunched down on it.
‘I know you.’ She made to light another cigar, but he put his hand over hers, took it away. Momentarily startled, her eyes locked with his and something akin to a shudder could just be discerned in her shoulders. She nodded briefly, took up her fork, and obediently began to eat. But there was no gusto in her movements, merely a mechanical tempo. Mick thought it a shame she was so careful; he could not see the motion of her even, white teeth.
He found he very much needed to see those teeth, and he brought out from beneath the table the push dagger, holding it obliquely in the air so that the candlelight sent long glistening flashes along the black length of its Damascus-steel blade.
Giai was transfixed, her hand pausing in midair, flaky strata of fish sliding between the slick tines of her fork. Her nostrils flared like an animal scenting the fresh spoor of its prey.
‘Is that it?’ But of course she knew that it was. It was an odd-looking weapon, a bronze shield sculpted into the shape of a lotus leaf covering the top of his fist, a vertical bar attached to its underside from which the grip was formed, and two narrow, wicked blades seeming to bloom from the middle fingers of his fist.