The Kaisho (45 page)

He knew that whichever scenario turned out to be the truth, McNaughton was right in urging him to walk away from Sato-Tomkin and his ties to Nicholas. Of course, he was already technically in the mess since the Committee had served him with a subpoena, but he was an old political hand and he could decipher McNaughton’s code. If he walked away now, McNaughton could still save him. There was still a limited amount of time for him to flex his political muscles before the Committee sat at its first session at the beginning of next week. After that, Gaunt would be strictly on his own. Once the Committee got to him, there was no string McNaughton could pull that would be sufficient. Gaunt would, as McNaughton had said, go down with the ship.

Gaunt, who had been diligently watching the front door, did not see the figure until it slipped into his booth.

“They make emergency exits for people like me,” the figure said to him.

“Timothy Delacroix?”

“That’s me.” The man sitting at right angles to him did not offer his hand, but then again neither did Gaunt. He was a sandy-haired man in his midforties who at some time or other had gotten more than his fair dose of sun and wind. As a result, the skin of his nose, cheeks, and forehead seemed permanently flayed, red and deeply lined as would be flesh that had been wounded many times over without having had time to properly heal. Delacroix’s eyes were so pale as to appear colorless, and he licked his lips incessantly. His face possessed a great deal of character, like T. E. Lawrence’s, not hard, but reconstructed by curious and scarifying adventures.

“You’re a friend of Munch’s,” Delacroix said.

“We know each other.”

“Whatever.” Delacroix shrugged. “He told you to ring me, so you must be in bad fuckin’ shape.”

Halfway back to Washington his gum had started to bleed again, and Gaunt had reached into his pocket for the handkerchief Munch had given him to stanch the flow. Something had dropped out, onto the floor of the car.

He had not been able to pull over onto the shoulder of the road until he was in the city. Then he had bent down, retrieved a scrap of paper with a name and a phone number scribbled on it: Delacroix’s. Well, what do you know, he had thought, the investigator’s more sentimental than he let on.

“Okay,” Delacroix said now as he tapped the none-too-clean tabletop with his forefinger and licked his peeling lips, “I get distress calls like yours ’bout seven or eight times a year—more’n you thought, huh?” He winked. “Well, don’t you worry. Assuming you’ve got the shekels, I can do anything, and I do mean anything. You need transpo no one can catch? Believe it or not, I’ve got a mint-condition Lockheed SR-71. Hits Mach three while other jets are still on the runway. Or how about an F-15? You heard me right. An F-fucking-15! You got an East Asian dignitary flying into Bangkok you want blown out of the sky, you need to break into some concrete and lead-lined cache somewhere in Africa, you want to keep a local uprising in Eastern Europe going”—he spread his hands wide—“I’m your man.”

“Pardon me?” Gaunt said, abruptly disoriented.

Delacroix was waving his hands as if he expected to take off any minute. “Okay, not your scene. I get it. Something more subtle is required here. I can do that, too. You need a Python-600 hand-held mortar, a Badger laser-sighted, infrared, lock-on flamethrower? What?”

“What in the name of creation do you do, anyway?”

“You mean Munch didn’t clue you in?” Delacroix looked offended, his yellow teeth playing with the skin on his lips. “I don’t get it. Everyone else he sends me knows who I am. They’re only too happy to pay for my services.” He grunted unhappily. “It’s not like people in my line grow on trees, you know.”

“And your line is…?” Gaunt asked hopefully. His mouth was throbbing again and he held it tight, tasting his blood.

“Christ, man, I have it all. I have access to any weapon or machine of war imaginable—within some limits, of course. I can’t get a Stealth bomber, but neither, I guarantee, can my competition, despite their claims to the contrary.”

“But I don’t need—” Gaunt stopped, trying to reason it out.

“Oh, great,” Delacroix said, throwing up his hands in disgust. “I suppose I won’t even get a free dinner out of this.”

“Don’t worry,” Gaunt said hastily. “We’ll go wherever you want that’s open this late. It’s on me.”

“Jeez, I don’t know,” Delacroix said, pointedly looking at his watch. “In a trade like mine, time is money.”

“I have money,” Gaunt said, swirling some Jack Daniel’s around his wounded gum. “Now I just have to figure out how you’re going to earn it.”

He ordered a Jack Daniel’s for Delacroix, and they finished their drinks together.

“First things first,” Delacroix said pragmatically when they had settled themselves into a Chinese restaurant two blocks away where everyone appeared to treat him like a long-lost brother. “Just what is the nature of your problem?”

Without waiting for an answer, he then turned to an expectant waiter and proceeded to spew out a long stream of what might have sounded like invective except that it was Cantonese. Had Gaunt not just seen these two men treat each other as intimates, he could have mistaken this conversation for an argument.

“We’re having whatever’s fresh—that had better suit you,” Delacroix said as the waiter scuttled away and he turned back to Gaunt.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not hungry.”

The hands flew. “While you’re at my table, you’ll eat.”

Gaunt would have pointed out that he was paying for this meal, but this man’s enthusiasm seemed to have gotten to him. Somewhere between here and the bar his depression had lifted.

He said, “The problem is this: I have four days to figure out if my boss is masterminding a huge computer swindle—which, I will admit, I cannot believe.”

Those waving hands again. “Fuck what you believe or don’t believe. You have this problem—you’re probably in a position to know dick about what he’s doing.”

Gaunt hated to admit it, but Delacroix was right. “The other possibility is that someone—probably someone high up in the U.S. government—is trying to railroad my boss by planting false info for others to find.”

“That it?”

“Stripped to its bare bones, yes.”

“Um-hmm.” Delacroix sat with his head on a pedestal made from his fists. “You don’t need me. You need some kind of wizard investigator, which I’m not, though I’ve got to say in all honesty there was that time in the Sudan when—” The hands again, whirring in the air. “But that’s neither here nor there. See, this isn’t my thing. I’m into more of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of thing, know what I mean?”

“Firepower.”

“Yeah. Right. I deal in nice little wars. The breakup of the Communist bloc’s meant a bonanza for people like me. All these ethnic minorities chafing to flex their ethnic and religious muscle, ready to bash the other guy over the head with whatever’s available. That’s where I come in. I make sure the weapons of war and destruction are on hand. For instance, I got this computer-guided gunship. I’m talking state-of-the-fucking-art, Persian Gulf War in-your-face kind of thing. None of that surplus Nam stuff my competition’s running specials on. I mean, man, this baby’s loaded with weapons that can put some mean
hurt
on you.”

“Given that,” Gaunt said, stepping in before Delacroix gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse, “I’m trying to figure out why Munch gave me your number.”

The food came, looking wet, gooey, and not very appetizing. Smelled good, though, Gaunt thought.

Delacroix was busy spooning what looked like blue-backed crabs in some kind of thick white sauce onto two plates. “You mean he didn’t say?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then for Christ’s sake stop dicking around and ask him!”

“Not possible,” Gaunt said, watching his plate fill up with scallops, squid, and sticky rice. “If he’d been able to tell me, I’m sure he would have. No, he’s on the opposition side. I’ve got to figure it out on my own.”

At Delacroix’s behest, beer came, a whole copper cooler full, at least a dozen bottles of “44” stuck in shaved ice.

Delacroix popped a couple of bottles and waded into his food. “That boss you were talking about, he in deep shit with the feds?”

“You could say that.” Gaunt stared at his plate, daunted. “In four days a Sen. Rance Bane’s committee will convene in a session that could convict him of treason and shut down the entire American division of Tomkin Industries.”

Delacroix picked his head up. His lips were greasy and a tip of blue-crab claw was sticking out of his mouth. He spit it out hastily. “You mean Tomkin as in Sato-Tomkin?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Delacroix’s pale eyes were big and round as he goggled. “Christ, I deal with those people all the time. That’s fucking why.”

Night. A glaucous fog descending like the gauzy wings of an angel. The threat of rain, bringing with it the intensified odors of automobile exhaust and soot.

Below him, Nicholas could see the horse chestnut trees sheared into the shape of the letter
L
at the four corners of the Place des Vosges. He looked up into the Parisian sky, filled with garish fire from streetlights along the wide boulevards and circles, the spotlights around the Eiffel Tower reflecting off the low-hanging clouds like smears of rouge on a tart’s overmade-up face.

The rain, when it came, was a friend because it helped hide him, but it was also an enemy because it made the patinated copper tiles of the mansard roof treacherously slick.

In the midst of taking a cautious step he froze, crouched down in low profile as, below him, a cop car made its slow circuit of the square. At the corner bistro, there was more activity now than there had been during the day, young people spilling out into the colonnade and beyond, onto the street. Some of them could see him if they looked upward. He must give them no cause to do so.

The roof was at a forty-five-degree angle, good for keeping the inside of the building dry, but extremely difficult to negotiate without a roofer’s secured platform.

Directly ahead and slightly below him was the dormer window, his entrance to the building that housed Avalon Ltd. The problem was that the window was closer to the square side of the roof than he would like. He calculated he would need perhaps twenty to thirty seconds to get the window open and lever himself in, more if there was an alarm system. During that time he would be fully exposed to those passing below in the Place des Vosges. It would be foolhardy to assume that no one would chance to look upward during that time; in fact, he was going under the assumption that someone would. The trick was to present a silhouette that would cause no questions to be raised.

Nicholas was dressed all in matte black. Before he had left the hotel room he had confiscated Celeste’s kohl, and now he applied it to his cheeks, nose, forehead, and the edges of his ears, the backs of his hands. From his pocket he drew out two objects he fitted over his palms. These
nekode,
which he had designed and made himself, were a kind of lightweight ridged chain-mail that covered his palms, allowed him to grip slick surfaces.

Then he stretched headfirst along the roof and, placing his palms firmly against the roofing, began to edge his way down.

Rain pattered on the copper, spitting bright bits upward into the glare of lights. The brittle tang of the metal was in his nostrils. He moved as he had been taught as a young boy, in a motion known as Kagiri Nishiki, where only one limb was moving at any time. Distance was crossed in painfully slow fashion because breathing was prolonged to meditation rhythm, the entire body going slack for stretches of time. In this state, the prone human form, already distorted by the shadows of the night and the angle of the roof, appeared to dissolve, the parts flowing in different directions, so that it lost the aspect of a human form altogether.

Anyone glancing up on the roof would need to stare fixedly for quite some time at the spot where Nicholas lay in order to discern movement. Even then, that movement would most likely be mistaken for pigeons huddling out of the wet weather or rain sizzling off the copper roof.

Time ceased to have any meaning for Nicholas. He was in the semiconscious state that Tibetan holy men attained when walking on fire or nails, when the conscious mind was pulled inward, sensation dulled throughout the body.

In this fashion, he reached the corner of the dormer without incident. A tendril of his mind pulled free of its centrism as his right hand explored the face of the dormer where the frame of the window met the sash of the dormer itself, and he was immediately alerted.

Wire.

An alarm system. But now, a blind man in the dark, he could feel a frayed edge of the insulation and, just a bit farther on, a break that had been ineptly mended to make it appear as if the system were still intact. The two ends had come apart, and now Nicholas was certain that whatever connection had once been made was broken.

Using a
shuriken,
a thin sliver of edged steel, he popped the old-fashioned semicircular lock. For a long moment, he lay still. He heard the city sounds all around him: the drift of voices from the bistro across the Place, the crunch of footsteps on gravel, the hiss of passing cars from beyond the enclosure of the square, and closer, the intermittent coo of roosting pigeons.

He lifted the window a centimeter at a time, then slithered toward it. His head and shoulders were already in when his peripheral vision caught a bright flash and he froze.

He stayed that way, allowing his pupils to adjust to the darkness. He moved his eyes toward the left and picked up the flash again as if it were reflected off the curvature of his iris, and then he knew.

His chin was three centimeters from a wire-thin laser beam, more sensitive and reliable than infrared. If any part of him intercepted it, an alarm would sound. No wonder the occupants had allowed the outmoded wire alarm to deteriorate.

Below him, the sill dropped away three feet to the wooden floor; he could see the dusty board gleaming in reflection from the ambient streetlight filtering through the dormer. If he could get down to the floor and could drop to a prone position, he’d be underneath the laser wire. The problem was he had no room in which to maneuver—he was right up against the wire.