Linnear 01 - The Ninja (68 page)

This is precisely the trap he had set for himself and one into which he had neatly fallen, otherwise he never would have been grazed by that bullet.

Hearing was still a problem and he scrambled away from the epicentre of the commotion. He needed some time to recover.

Movement to the left and in front of him as he lay at an oblique angle within the building’s interior. Above him, the partially completed atrium swept away in a narrowing pattern of dim light and deep shadow, the dark air hovering above him like a column of water, heavy and oppressive.

For the first time he considered the depressing possibility that he had seriously underestimated his foes. He felt helpless and terribly alone as he had that night of the howling winds upon the Straits, carving out a part of him into the deep with dry eyes and

Satsugai had taken him over completely from a very early stage. His life had been an extension of his father’s and there had been, it seemed, no time at all, to discover what it was about life that Saigo himself could come to enjoy. Now he knew that there was nothing about life he enjoyed: merely the knowledge of unfinished business which drove him onward towards its inevitable conclusion.

He no longer felt alone and afraid. The drug coursed through his system, heightening his senses. His muscles tingled with suppressed energy. It was time to move.

Out from the shadows, he encountered another policeman with a submachine-gun at the ready. They saw each other at the same time. The muzzle of the submachine-gun swung up, centring on Saigo’s chest. His finger began to squeeze on the trigger; he stared into Saigo’s eyes; his finger froze in place.

Still as a statue, he made no reaction as Saigo raised a blunt, black stick from waist level. The man’s eyes seemed blank. Saigo depressed a hidden stud and with a whisper of sound a steel spike four inches long shot into the plainclothesman’s gaping mouth, through the roof, puncturing the brain. He spun around, his finger convulsed on the trigger of his weapon so that it erupted in a short burst, a brief deadly arc.

Saigo was already moving away from the area as the man fell heavily to the patterned tiles of the atrium floor. He could hear the pounding of running feet, the hoarse shouts of the remaining policeman, the static of a walkie-talkie.

He skirted the area overseen by the second long gun, though this was one element which still made him somewhat uneasy. The sniper was potentially as mobile as he was. Haragei would protect him from direct assault and, in near-silence, it could negate much of the long gun’s threat. But in this commotion, he felt cut off from many of his unnatural senses and haragei was useless for the kind of distances involved.

He wanted to get upstairs now, but he knew he would not until he had nullified that last threat.

In a leap, he gained the catwalk half way up to the mezzanine. Two shots in rapid succession spun off the metal close by his left side and had he not been moving he would certainly have been hit at least once.

He ran along the catwalk, his forebrain concentrating on what was directly before him as he let his subconscious work out the location of the sniper from the double flashes dial had registered on the periphery of his vision.

He ceded conscious control of his body to this part of him, quartering in on the location. All the while, he watched for any movement.

Up ahead were two patches, of light with a length of deep shadow in between. To circumvent them would mean to return to ground level. This he did not wish to do, for in doing so he would relinquish his growing advantage over the sniper.

He paused six feet from the first patch of light and, standing perfectly still, surveyed the topography directly in front of him.

He took three deep breaths and sprang forward. One step,

two, and he was in the air, his legs jack-knifed into a diver’s tuck so that he passed through the first patch of light as a rotating ball.

He was already arcing downwards when he heard the report of the long gun. In the midst of tumbling, he could not tell how close the sniper had come to him, but he took no chances. Barely had his feet touched the metal catwalk when he had re-launched himself through the air. But now the atmosphere around him seemed thick and humid, as turbulent as cloud turned to smoke.

Automatically he ceased to inhale. Briefly, as he turned over in mid-air, he saw the dull Sash of the metal canister rolling along the catwalk in the pool of light. He counted the spang and whine of four bullets, a quick heat sear along one calf, and then he was in darkness again, on his feet, hurtling down the catwalk towards the sniper. He ignored the pain in his right leg, compartmentalizing and thus trivializing the nerve shock, the disruption to his thirstily questing senses.

The sniper, seeing at last the full outline of the onrushing figure, did not drop to one knee and aim but turned his rifle crosswise across his body, using it as one might an ancient long-staff. He jammed the heavy stock forward in an attempt to wreck the figure’s momentum, felt a jarring crash as it hit a protrusion, the figure’s elbow perhaps.

He took one step back and to the side, bringing the muzzle end forward and down in an oblique slash. Saigo struck it away and down with his forearm while extending his leading leg. This brought him within intimate range and he used a kite, the edge on his hand as hard as a block of concrete. The entire right side of the sniper’s rib cage collapsed like an eggshell.

The man had time only to grunt once, as if in surprise. As his head and torso came forward, Saigo kicked high, catching him on the bridge of the nose. Skin ripped away and cartilage tore itself from its tendon foundations. Blood gouted and, spinning, the sniper followed his useless weapon, cart wheeling over the side of the catwalk.

Leaping, Saigo was away, racing towards the stairs. At his side, he gripped his scabbarded katana.

‘They got him. Listen to all that noise.’

He meant the firing.

Tomkin stood behind his desk, torso canted forward at the hips, the way an athlete might hold himself. The columns of his thick arms were rigid, his fists against the desktop.

The sounds of the machine-guns had come like an echoing roll of thunder, amplified and hurled upwards by the vast core of air in the atrium.

Nicholas, at his post near the double metal doors, had not moved at all.

‘What do you think, Nick?’

He wondered at Tomkin’s sudden nerves. He had been as cool and relaxed as a man about to leave on a long vacation the last time he had seen him. Now he seemed on edge.

Across the room, faced with the reality of the situation, Tom-kin was sweating. He was having serious second thoughts about his deal with the ninja. There seemed to be an inordinate amount of activity down there. He knew just how many men Croaker had deployed and with what armaments. Had they got him? It sounded like a world war down there. What if he made it up her?? What if I can’t trust him? My God, Linnear is my last line of defence and I’ve sacrificed him.

Tomkin opened his mouth to speak, bit back the words at the last minute. He could not tell Nicholas what he had done, no matter what. He put his shaking hand inside his suit jacket and felt his fingers slip in sweat against the warm edge of his gun. He felt wildly out of place, a piranha stripped of its teedi, watching the shark as it swam ever closer. The feeling did not sit well with him. He enjoyed being in control - at his desk, in the boardroom in the midst of proxy fights, overseas taming recalcitrant buyers - while others hung precariously on to the twists and turns of a destiny he was creating. Now, for this moment, others controlled his life and he felt a brief stab of a fear he had not known since one sun-drenched day sixteen years ago; the house on Gin Lane, the summer’s heat, the sound the wind made as it raced through the high beach grass, the dryness of the sand like beads of glass, sounds on the sigh of the wind, a rising and falling tide, moaning, and movement and - Gelda. My God, Gelda.Geldal

His heart pounded in his chest as upon an anvil and something sat astride his intestines, racing up from his genitals, squeezing, squeezing.

‘… better sit down and do as I told you.’

4 What? What?’

‘Sit down, Tomkin. He’ll be coming soon now.’

‘Coming? Who?’

‘Saigo. The ninja.’

Tomkin’s face was shiny in the half-light coming in through the wall of windows to his left. All the lights were off on that floor.

‘They didn’t get him?’

‘I think not.’

‘What about all those men - down there?’ He was thinking of them as lines of his defence. They could not all be crumbling, so quickly, so easily.

Nicholas misunderstood him. I’m surprised you care. This wasn’t my idea. It should just have been me and you - and him. They’re all innocents down there.’

‘Meaning,’ Tomkin said, moving a little towards the windows, wondering if Nicholas would follow him as the ninja had suggested he might, ‘that we - you and me and the cop -are not.’

Nicholas might have been a statue. ‘No. Up here on Olympus morality has little meaning. When you get used to watching people from such a lofty distance their features blur, becoming at last so indistinct that they become as interchangeable as ants - and as insignificant. What does one less ant mean to the course of history ? It’s too insignificant even to think about.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Tomkin said. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’ The trouble is, he thought, I do know what he’s talking about. He pressed his hands against his temples, squeezing his eyes shut against the sun-dazzle tumble of images limned against his eyelids. Gelda and another girl. How his pulse raced? Now the hatred sluiced like venom through his veins. His head pulsed as if being blown up like a balloon. How could she have … He’d meted out retribution all right. Deservedly so. His thoughts began to race dangerously.

Where had the days of innocence got to? he asked himself. The Easter egg hunts in Connecticut, the school dances, the

easy, laughing summers when the girls would come in from the surf like two brown-skinned mermaids.

Caught in faded photographs, irretrievably caught between Kodak paper and photographic chemicals, as real as Coleridge’s dream of Xanadu; gone up in smoke like an addict’s hopes.

‘You said he’s coming.’ Tomkin’s voice was clotted with emotion and he had to clear his throat before he could continue. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Sit down,’ Nicholas said. ‘I want you away from the windows.’

‘I want to know 1’ Tomkin shouted. ‘It’s my life I’

‘Sit down, Tomkin.’ Nicholas’s voice was even lower than it had been a moment before. ‘Keep yelling and you will guide him right to you.’

Tomkin glared at him for a long moment. His chest heaved beneath his suit jacket. Then, abruptly, he collapsed into his chair.

Nicholas turned his head towards the rear of the office. Next to the open door of the bathroom was a narrow hallway leading first to the electrical and air-conditioning circuits for the floor and then to the offices on the far side of the floor.

He did not believe that Saigo would come through the front doors. For one thing, they were bulky and slow-moving. Too much time and effort was involved in opening them. He could not, of course, discount the ledge outside the windows but, as in the manner of most newer, centrally temperature-controlled buildings, these windows could not be opened. Certainly they were easily breached but that also would take time and, worse, an inordinate amount of sound.

It was logical, then, to expect the attack from the rear of the office. He thought briefly about positioning himself more advantageously, in the air-conditioning alcove, perhaps. But if Saigo chose another way in, he might take too long recovering and he could not chance that.

That Saigo was at this moment on his way up he had no doubt.

It was quiet now, just the gentle white-noise hissing in the inner ear, as of the aftermath of a violent tornado. With the front doors secured, no sound seeped in from the street; all

the glass was in place here.

He could hear the sound of Tomkin’s heavy breathing, as if he were an asthmatic with his mouth partly open. Where he sat, behind his desk, he was in total shadow.

‘Move a bit to your right,’ Nicholas said softly. ‘No, with the chair. That’s right.’ He turned his head. ‘Now keep still.’ A bar of light shone over a portion of the steel-grey hair, quartering the head.

The place was alive with them.

But, of course, that was to be expected.

Two at the entrance to the stairwell, three more guarding the cage elevator. He had not even considered using the main elevator bank.

The easiest thing would have been to use hypnosis. The .plan was practical as well as amusing. The idea of having one of those plainclothesmen shepherding him skyward in the elevator appealed to him. But that would depend on a very specific set of circumstances. Given time, he had no doubt that he could execute them. He did not, at this point, think that he had the time. They would have begun to sort things out down there. They’d turn on the lights, tot up the casualty figures and send for reinforcements. He did not want to risk a get-out through a cordon of a score of men all on the hair-trigger lookout for one thing and one thing alone.

Not that he could not do it but it was foolish to take such risks when there was absolutely no need to.

In the shadows, he reached out four pads from his belt. These he carefully tied, one on each soft-soled shoe and over the palm of each hand. He slung his katana obliquely across his back. He could take no step now without attracting attention, for sprouting from the outer side of the pads were two-inch steel spikes set in a complex pattern.