The Kaisho (69 page)

“Killed.” In this context the word seemed obscene, even though in his line of work he had used it so many times he thought he had become inured to its effect. “As in murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Have you any proof?”

She smiled through her tears. “My detective, ever and always.”

“I can’t help it. That’s how I see the world.”

“One day, I’d very much like you to get to know my stepmother.”

There was a peculiar timber to her voice, and Croaker knew she said this as a way of acknowledging his statement.

“Then I’m sure I will.”

When he held her like this, he could not imagine ever leaving her. But it was a fantasy whose end made breathing painful.

Her thick hair brushed his cheek. “Hold me tighter.”

He did, his nostrils filled with her scent and her breathing. Cars hissed by outside, one, two, then the street was again gripped in a monumental silence.

There were mice running over railroad tracks.

Nangi lay in the cramped darkness, thinking.

Seiko and Goei.

Betrayed at home and abroad. Lord Jesus, he and Nicholas were done for.

The mice were running again, and he returned his attention to the sounds coming through the thin wall of the capsule, trying to make sense of them. They reminded him of the sound he had heard as a child of mice running over the rails of the tracks outside his house. These sounds in the darkness seemed as inexplicable as they had the first two times he had heard them, like bursts of static from an old-fashioned radio, the bleeps and squawks of machines in garbled conversation with one another.

He had spent hours following Seiko all over Tokyo before he came to the conclusion that she and Goei were too clever or too practiced to meet face-to-face.

That was when he switched his surveillance to Goei himself. At dusk, after his work was finished for the day, Goei had come here, to the Nakagin Capsule Tower in the neon jungle of the Ginza. The building was made up of modular capsule offices, eight by thirteen feet, so these modules could be transported by truck. The building’s configuration changed continually as tenants came and went, adding capsules to enlarge space or subtracting them to conserve it.

To take his mind off the enormity of Seiko’s betrayal, he went over for the thousandth time everything in the material the American Manny Mannheim had delivered to him this morning. But thoughts of Mannheim brought with them another wave of sorrow for the death of Harley Gaunt. Gaunt had been a first-rate administrator, both canny and compassionate. He had grasped what Nicholas and Nangi were involved in and had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the mysterious business of production and innovation for the future. He would be sorely missed.

The revelations of Gaunt’s material had been legion. The most alarming of them had been that the U.S. government—and that meant Sen. Rance Bane’s accursed committee—had pulled a so-called Chi clone out of the Asian black market and had concluded that the machine was using Hyrotech-inc.’s proprietary Hive technology. This, along with the copies of the coded faxes from Sato’s offices in Tokyo to Saigon, meant they had concrete evidence that, in their minds at least, linked Sato-Tomkin to the theft of Hive technology. Since Hive was the hardware chosen by the American government for use in all its agencies—even the top-secret ones—that theft could be considered treason.

Now it all became clear. The Hive technology, which Nicholas had quite rightly been eager to acquire, was the sole property of Hyrotech-inc., the American company with which Nicholas had been negotiating a buyout.

No wonder the American government had put that merger on ice—Nicholas had been right about that, as well. The Americans were out for Sato International’s blood, and they were going for the vulnerable spot: Sato-Tomkin, the American arm of the
keiretsu.
Except that Nicholas, Nangi, and Sato International were innocent of wrongdoing. It had been that bastard Vincent Tinh, whom Nangi had never trusted, who had engineered all of this.

Of course, Tinh could not have done it alone. Someone in headquarters had been in collusion with him to steal the breakthrough technology of the Chi’s neural-net computer, and Tinh had used his expertise, contacts, and most galling of all, Sato’s capital and facilities to get a prototype of the softwareless Chi ramped up and manufactured.

Someone high up in the Chi Project had helped him. Naturally, the Americans suspected Nicholas. He was in charge of Chi. And for many of them, he was a traitor the moment he merged Tomkin Industries with Sato International. And then to make matters worse he had abandoned Sato-Tomkin’s New York office to move to Tokyo.

Now Nangi had cause to mourn his myopic insistence that Nicholas stay in Tokyo to help educate the Japanese corporate leaders on how American business and government ran and how to deal successfully with their American counterparts. Nicholas, ever the seer, had perhaps foreseen this moment in time and had wanted to return to the States to argue his case for Japan, Inc. and corporate America to work hand in hand.

But according to Gaunt, there were elements within the government who had their own agenda. They were known as Looking-Glass and had been active for some time. The man whom Gaunt had gone to see, who had, it seemed clear, murdered him, was William Justice Lillehammer.

That name sounded oddly familiar to Nangi. Where had he heard it before? Hadn’t Okami mentioned it once? But in what regard? He racked his brain but could not recall the context of the conversation. An 8mm video Gaunt had enclosed with the material lay warm next to Nangi’s breast. He had viewed it once already, but was looking forward to studying it frame by frame.

The sounds were like bursts of energy, given off in the blackness, and in between, the silence of offices abandoned for the night. Nangi adjusted himself so that his ear was more firmly against the electronic eavesdropper. Unconsciously, he put one hand on his bad leg, rubbed it to invite warmth and better circulation. He smelled only plastic and the gummy dust of neglected machines. He held his nose to keep himself from sneezing.

How ironic, Nangi thought. Nicholas, the hero, was feared in Japan and reviled in America. Without him, Nangi wondered where Sato International would be now. Certainly not on the cutting edge of computer and telecommunications technology that would make the
keiretsu
one of Japan’s top three corporations in the 1990s. If it survived. From what Minister Ushiba had threatened, and from what Nangi now knew from the explosive allegations and evidence sent over from Harley Gaunt, Nangi seriously doubted they would survive.

Unless he discovered who was responsible for draining the Chi technology. Vincent Tinh, the mastermind, was dead at the hands, no doubt, of any one of his numerous unsavory enemies. Luckily, Nangi had found a first-rate private investigator and had hired him to go to Saigon immediately and find out the extent of what Tinh had been into, and who had killed him. The entire Sato Saigon complex was temporarily on hold while Nangi struggled to find a replacement for Tinh. As he had told Kisoko, there was, of course, a logical replacement already in the company.

Seiko.

But Seiko had been working for Tinh and was doing her best to destroy the
keiretsu.

The electronic gibberish from behind the capsule wall was coming in organized bursts. Part of Nangi’s brain had been working on the problem, and now he began making rapid mathematical calculations as he kept his eye on the luminous dial of his wrist chronometer. What did these organized eruptions most remind him of? He racked his brain. Right. It was like telemetry. Or coded faxes being sent off into the ether.

He put the flat of his hand against the eggshell-thin wall and thought,
If I put my fist to it, I will surely break through to the other side.

Who was in the capsule on the other side of the wall? Not Goei. He had only stayed a few minutes, then departed. Precisely seven minutes after he had left the building, the mice had begun walking across the rails.

Nangi took his ear from the listening device, rolled away from the wall. He rose with some difficulty and, ignoring the pain in his leg, limped out of the module. He was careful to pop the lock on the way out so that when he closed the door behind him, the office was once again sealed.

He went down the narrow corridor, lit by a single tube of fluorescent light. He adjusted the gloves on his hands as he stood outside the door to the office Goei had entered.

He could feel the measured beat of his heart, his accelerated pulse rate. He took several deep breaths, calming himself. Then he slid a thin metal tool with a hooked end into the lock in the center of the steel doorknob and began to probe for the interior ridges. One by one, he negotiated their contours. His other hand, on the knob itself, felt the resistance disappear, and he silently turned it as far as he could.

The door was open a crack and the telemetry or whatever it was became clearly audible in the dense silence of the corridor. Nangi slipped without a sound into the capsule, closing the door behind him in order to keep the level of ambient light from changing.

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. There was no one in the office. In fact, it wasn’t an office at all, but a bare space with only a fax machine and a telephone on separate lines to show that it wasn’t unrented.

Leaning on his cane, he lowered himself in front of the fax, took the sheets of paper out of the hopper. He turned them over in the light of the one black metal lamp. They were blank. Then, as he held them closer to the light, he saw the sparkles of metallic thread, pressed into a discernible pattern on the sheets.

Code.

He folded the sheets, put them in his pocket, and stared at the fax machine in the semidarkness.

The mice had completed their run across the tracks.

Transmission terminated.

The tolling of the bell was nowhere within the hivelike robotics factory. Electric blue arcs spilled across the interior cement, stainless-steel, and delicate copper-sheathed components, cold fire that ripped aside the veils of unconsciousness.

Still, Nicholas did not open his eyes. Instead, he kept his breathing deep, slow, and regular, as it would be if his brain were still deep in theta.

He listened to the tolling of the bell, far off, as if in another universe, and amid the chaos that awaited him just beyond the paper-thin perimeter of his closed eyelids, he held on to that deep, rhythmic sound as a drowning man will grasp for any piece of flotsam to keep himself from going down again into the ultimate stillness of the deep. It was not a conscious decision, but one made at some primitive level, at his core, in the no-thought of his training.

Even at the edge of death there was this. And only this.

The tolling of a nonexistent bell.

If he focused on anything else, the pain would overwhelm him, plunging him into an abyss of despair. The figure with his face had slowly and agonizingly inserted what felt like long needles, shining with liquid fire or black toxin, into his flesh. Deep, deep they went into the heart of his pain centers.

Except that they weren’t real, these long knives, these steel talons. They came from the mind of the Messulethe, invoking the dark side of the Tau-tau—Kshira. Nicholas had never before longed so profoundly for
koryoku,
the Illuminating Power, the pathway to Shuken, the dominion where Akshara and Kshira were safely integrated in one mind. It was clear that the dark side had destroyed the mind of the Messulethe.

As the pain grew, so did the irony, for it became clear that what the Messulethe wanted from Nicholas he could not give him even had he lost all the will to resist. There was a link between Okami and the American Mafia don Dominic Goldoni, a secret conduit code-named Nishiki feeding intelligence and incriminating evidence on friend and foe alike to the two men. Somehow the Messulethe had gotten the idea that Nicholas was Nishiki.

If he could have laughed, he would have, but death was all around him. Not the physical kind—that was not what the Messulethe planned—but a kind of mental disintegration, shock upon shock to the synapses of the brain until the whole turned to jelly. The exchange of faces had been only the very first volley. Then the burning needles had been pushed home by the mind of the Messulethe while Nicholas’s psyche, in shock, without recognition of place or of self was pinned in darkness like a moth to paper, unable to access Akshara, the defenses at
kokoro,
the heart of the universe. Nicholas’s mind was mute, paralyzed, cut off from any possibility of escape. This the Messulethe had planned for most assiduously and successfully.

Except for the tolling of the bell, which rang in echoes down the screaming synapses of his mind, a web glittering with endless pain.

If not for the tolling, resonant and steady, his mind would have been gone by now. Sanity was a sound he could identify and, on the edge of an abyss beyond imagining, desperately cling to.

He knew what the tolling was. At last, he was able to exert the energy that would connect one thought with another, as if he were an infant learning all over again how to think and, thinking, integrate thought with action. The veil of shock and paralysis was still firmly in place, but beneath it he had managed for an instant to stir.

In the face of the psychic barrage, he opened his
tanjian
eye, saw the color of the tolling, a clear, translucent green like the hillsides of Nara in springtime, and he felt her near him.

Celeste.

Celeste with the untapped power of her mind. This was the plan they had hit upon back in Paris when Nicholas had smelled the scent of the snare. She had tried to talk him out of it, had begged him, in fact, not to do this terrible thing: walk into the center of the snare. But what choice had he had? Could he have walked away from his oath to his father, his obligation to Okami? Another man, perhaps, whose terror so soaked his soul that he would forsake who he was to turn and run away. This was impossible for Nicholas. He could not turn, but only go forward, through the fire that surely was waiting for him.