The kaisho, p.1
The Kaisho, page 1
ERIC VAN LUSTBADER
has carried on the tradition of Robert Ludlum’s™ Jason Bourne thrillers, honoring the late suspense master with these stunning New York Times bestsellers
The Bourne Legacy • The Bourne Betrayal
The Bourne Sanction • The Bourne Deception
. . . and here’s what critics are saying:
“Like watching a James Bond film. . . . Slickly paced . . . all-consuming.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Twisted, dark, and exciting.”
—The Oklahoman
“Breathless writing that makes the pages fly.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A fun thriller.”
—Chicago Tribune
Acclaim for Eric Van Lustbader’s thrillers that immerse readers in the world of Eastern philosophy, martial arts, and unrelenting Ninja action—including
The Kaisho • Floating City • Second Skin
“What sets Eric Van Lustbader apart is his profound understanding of Eastern life and thought.”
—Cosmopolitan
“Action, intrigue, Oriental philosophy, and romance. . . . Lustbader is a clever wordsmith who can paint vivid pictures.”
—USA Today
“ ‘Good, solid entertainment. . . . The plot keeps on surprising. . . . It’s great to get hold of a book that consumes your imagination, filling your head with a myriad of visual images and anticipation—like Cinerama in the mind.”
—The Memphis Commercial Appeal
“Another round of Far East villainy.”
—New York Daily News
“A story of meeting one’s own dark side. . . . Lustbader can leave the reader exhilarated.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The plot is coiled and deadly. . . . A penetrating look into drugs, nuclear weaponry, and industrial espionage. . . . Lustbader is a stunning writer whose words flow strikingly from page to page.”
—The Southern Pines Pilot (NC)
“Lustbader has honed the brooding sensation of sudden, violent death . . . into a unique art form.”
—Los Angeles Times
“High-intensity action and intrigue. . . . Lustbader possesses enormous powers of both sensory and sensual detail. . . . He is decidedly not predictable, another fine gift.”
—South Bend Tribune
“A powerful, erotic story . . . nearly impossible to put down.”
—Houston Chronicle
“An author of authentic and engrossing Oriental intrigue second to none.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A fast-moving thriller. . . . Here again he proves himself a master storyteller.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A typhoon of storytelling. . . .”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Swiftly paced and fascinating . . . an intricately designed puzzle.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Potent . . . powerful.”
—Publishing News (Great Britain)
“Confirms Eric Van Lustbader as the Master of the Orient.”
—The Press Syndicate
Thank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
For Mike
My brother-in-law, my friend, who died too soon.
He is remembered here, and always.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all at the Hotel Montalembert, Paris; the Gritti Palace, Venice, for all their assistance.
Thanks to Rosalind Andrews for her insight into the workings of WITSEC.
Nicholas Linnear’s air transportation is scheduled exclusively by Bob Kunikoff, Mark Allen Travel, NYC.
Most of all, to Victoria, for her sage advice and skillful editing.
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
—W. H. AUDEN
I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can be a woman in it.
—MARILYN MONROE
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
You can’t say that civilizations don’t advance, for in every war they kill you a new way.
—WILL ROGERS
Hollywood • New York
Autumn
His name was Do Duc Fujiru, but everyone who knew him in Hollywood, Florida, called him Donald Truc because all the forged papers he was using identified him by his name. Do Duc, a physically intimidating man, claimed that while his muscles came from his father, a Vietnamese martial arts expert, his inner spirit came from his mother. Not that anyone in Hollywood was that interested in his inner spirit or anyone else’s for that matter. At least, no one at the auto mechanic shop where he worked. In fact, Do Duc’s father was not Vietnamese at all.
At thirty-eight, he was the oldest mechanic there. While the younger mechanics all surfed in their spare time, Do Duc worked out at a gym and a martial arts dojo that, by his standards, was woefully inadequate, but better than nothing at all.
He was an exceedingly handsome man in a dark, exotic manner, charismatic to women, frightening to other men. He had thick blue-black hair and bold, explorer’s eyes. The sharp planes of his face gave him an aura he could intensify from deep inside himself when he deemed it necessary. What he was doing wasting his time in an auto shop was anyone’s guess, save for the fact that he quite obviously had an extraordinary affinity for vehicular devices. He could remake engines of any kind so that they far outperformed their factory specs.
In fact, Do Duc had chosen Hollywood because he could blend into the ethnic stew, could most easily remain anonymous within the grid of the bleak postmodern metroscape of endless strip malls, nearly identical housing developments, and shoreline freeways.
He had been married for the past two years to a beautiful all-American woman named Hope. She was a tall, lithe, blue-eyed blonde who had been born and raised in Ft. Lauderdale. Besides adoring Do Duc, she was deeply in love with fast cars, fast food, and life without responsibilities.
To Do Duc, who had been raised to treat the myriad responsibilities of adulthood with care and respect, she was like some gorgeous alien creature, unfathomable, a curiosity from a zoo whom he took to bed as often as he liked. In those moments, when her screams of ecstasy echoed in his ears, when her strong, firm body arched up uncontrollably beneath him, Do Duc came closest to finding life in America bearable.
But, in truth, those moments were fleeting.
He was in the bedroom of his ranch house, pulling on his oil-and grease-smeared overalls, when the front doorbell rang. It was a clear, hot late-October morning, the sunlight already so strong it would have made a Northerner’s eye sockets ache with the glare. He looked first at his wife, lying asleep on her stomach amid the rumpled bedclothes. He was abruptly overcome by a sense of distaste, all eroticism drained from the sight of her naked buttocks.
This feeling was not new to him. It was more like a toothache, if not constant, then recurring when one bit down on a roll. The sound of the doorbell came again, more insistent this time, but the woman did not stir.
Making a hissing sound in the back of his throat, Do Duc padded in his bare feet down the hall, through the kitchen and the living room to open the front door.
There, a young Federal Express agent bade him sign his name on a clipboard, then handed him a small package. As the agent did so, he caught a glimpse of the image tattooed on the inside of Do Duc’s left wrist. It was a human face. The left side was skin colored, its eye open; the right side was blue with dye, and where the eye should have been was a vertical crescent.
The agent gave an involuntary start, then recovered himself and hurried off. Do Duc turned the package over. He saw that it had come from a store in London called Avalon Ltd. He offered a strange smile to the already insubstantial house around him.
With the door closed behind him, he unwrapped the package. Inside was a dark blue matte box within which he found a pair of socks swaddled in hunter green tissue paper. The socks, green and white striped, had what seemed to be a pattern running down their outsides. Do Duc stepped into the kitchen where the sunlight slanted in through the largest eastern-facing window.
It was then that he saw the words emerging from the pattern. They were in a vertical strip down the outside of each sock. Primo Zanni they said.
The packaging dropped from Do Duc’s hand, and he felt the slow thud of his heartbeat. He sat on an aluminum and plastic chair while he donned the green-and-white socks. Then he walked through the house, looking around each room as he passed through it, fixing them all in his mind.
At length, he returned to the bedroom. He went to his closet, pulled down his dusty overnight bag, thrust into it what he needed from the closet and his dresser drawers. He found it wasn’t much. In the bathroom, he did the same.
Back in the bedroom, he gave one swift glance toward his still-sleeping wife before moving his dresser to one side. He took out a folding pocket knife, inserted the blade beneath the exposed edge of the carpet, pried it up.
He removed two lengths of floorboard he had sawn through when he had first moved into the house, before he had met Hope, and removed the old olive metal ammo box. He opened this, pushed aside the cushioning wads of unmarked bills, plucked out a mask. It was a remarkable item. It appeared old and was hand-painted i n rich, burnished black, with accents of green and gold on the cheeks, over the eyeholes and the lips. Constructed of papier-mâché, it depicted a man with a rather large nose, prominent brows and cheekbones, and a crowned forehead in the shape of a vee. The mask ended just above where a person’s mouth would be. Do Duc held the mask as tenderly as he would the body of an infant.
“What’s that?”
He started, looking around to find Hope sitting naked on the corner of the bed.
“What are you doing?” She ran a hand through her long blond hair, stretching in that sinuous manner she had.
“It’s nothing,” he said, hurriedly thrusting the mask back into its incongruous container.
“It’s not nothing, Donald,” Hope said, standing up. “Don’t tell me that. You know I hate secrets.” She came across to where he was still crouched.
He saw her with the morning sun firing the tiny pale hairs along the curve of her arm, and the air around her exploded in a rainbow hue of arcs. The aura emanated from her, seemed to pulsate with the beat of her heart or the firing of the nerve synapses in her brain. Do Duc’s lips opened just a bit, as if he wanted to taste this aura with his tongue.
A sly smile spread across Hope’s face. “We’re supposed to tell each other everything. Didn’t we promise—”
Do Duc drove the blade of the pocket knife into Hope’s lower belly and, using the strength coming up through the soles of his feet, ripped the knife upward through her flesh and muscle and reached her heart.
He watched with a trembling of intensity as surprise, disbelief, confusion, and terror chased each other across her face. It was a veritable smorgasbord of delicious emotions that he sopped up with his soul.
He stepped quickly back from the bright fountain of blood that erupted. A foul stench filled the bedroom.
Silence. Not even a scream. He had been trained to kill in this manner.
Do Duc looked down, staring at his wife’s viscera, which gleamed dully in the morning light. Steam came off it. The iridescent coils seemed to him beautiful in both pattern and texture, speaking to him in a language that had no rules, no name.
The sight and the smell, familiar as old companions, reminded him of where, soon, he would be headed.
On the plane ride up to New York, Do Duc had time to think. He drew out the strip of color head shots of himself he had taken in an automated booth in a mall where he had stopped on his way to the airport in Lauderdale. Then he put it away, along with his ticket stub, which was made out in the name of Robert Ashuko, and opened a copy of Forbes. While he stared at the text, he pulled out of memory the information he had memorized just after he had moved to Hollywood. It had been sent to him in a book of John Singer Sargent’s paintings, remarkable for the extraordinary sensuality of their women, the lushness of their landscapes.
The information was contained on a page on which was printed a full-length photo of Sargent’s magnificent painting Madame X, which seemed to Do Duc to secure the imperious eroticism that smoldered in these female creatures of another age.
He had decoded the information, memorized it, then had burned it, flushing what ashes remained down the toilet. The book he had kept to gaze at again and again. It was the one item he regretted leaving behind, but it was far too large and cumbersome to take with him on this particular journey.
Deplaning at Kennedy Airport, Do Duc went immediately to the wall of lockers in the main terminal. There he produced a key with a number stamped into it. He inserted it into the appropriate lock and removed the contents of the locker, which consisted of what appeared to be a physician’s black bag.
Do Duc rented a car. He used a false driver’s license and a protected credit card, one that could not be traced to him and would not show up on a hot sheet. He had spent some time in New York and so had no trouble finding the Belt Parkway even through the tricky maze of the airport grounds. Some miles east, in Nassau County, the highway became the Southern State Parkway.
It was heading toward evening, and traffic was barely moving. A Mack truck loaded with gravel heading west had jumped the divider and plowed head-on into, first, a VW Bug, then a Toyota MR2, and finally a Chevy Citation. Do Duc didn’t mind the slow going; he had time to kill, and besides, the vectors of the disaster interested him. By the degree of the carnage he began calculating the speeds of the respective vehicles. Then he commenced to imagine what it must have been like inside them.
Death, whether quick or drawn out, was his meat, and he was never sated.
He could hear a howling filling his ears, flooding his mind until his fingers resonated to its frequency. Feral lights danced before his eyes like forest sprites, and every manifestation of civilization dropped away. Time, thus naked, turned primeval, and Do Duc, a beast in the forest, was fearless, omnipotent. He thought briefly of Hope, not of her life, but of her death, and he feasted on it all over again.
Do Duc took the Wantagh State Parkway exit and headed north for two exits. He was now on Old Country Road. By this time, the world had reverted to normal, except for the slight aura visible to him around each person he passed.
Old Country Road took him into Hicksville, where he came upon the sprawling Lilco building on his right. At first glance, it could have passed for a school: a two-story red-brick structure. He pulled over, unfolded a hand-drawn map of the building’s interior. Everything he needed to know was clearly marked. He memorized the map, put a lit match to one corner, watched it burn into his fingertips. He mashed what ashes remained into the car’s ashtray, then got out and went quickly across Old Country Road.
He was in and out within seven minutes, having retrieved boots, overalls, shirt, webbed utility belt, and most important, an official laminated clip-on ID. The photo of the man, Roger Burke, looked nothing like Do Duc, but it made no difference.
Three miles from the building, Do Duc stopped the car and changed into the Lilco uniform. Working with an artist’s knife, provided for him in the capacious doctor’s satchel, he pried up the outer layer of lamination. He cut one of his photos from the strip he had taken outside Lauderdale, glued it over Burke’s black countenance, replaced the lamination. The result would fool no one for long, but Do Duc didn’t need long.
He looked at his watch: just after seven. Dinnertime. He found a Chinese take-out restaurant, ordered, brought the loaded plastic bag back to the car. He broke open several cardboard containers, extended the first and second fingers of his right hand. With this utensil, he shoveled into his mouth cold rice lacquered with a glutinous fish sauce. He washed this down with drafts of strong black tea. Refreshed, he was ready to go.
He made his way back to the packed northbound Wantagh Parkway, which soon turned into the Northern State Parkway heading west. The first exit was Post Avenue, and he took this north. Just after he crossed Jericho Turnpike he found himself in the tony suburb of Old Westbury. He went under the Long Island Expressway, made a left onto the north service road. Just past the Old Westbury Police Station, he made a right onto Wheatley Road. Here, in stark contrast with the industrial clutter of Hicksville, he cruised slowly past large old-money estates, complete with white-brick walls, stately oaks, winding driveways, and massive brick or fieldstone houses with whitewashed porticos or columned porte cocheres.
The house he was looking for stood well back from the road, behind a ten-foot-high, serpentine red-brick wall. It had a black wrought-iron gate and an electronic-security squawk box. Do Duc pulled up to it.
“Roger Burke, Lilco,” he said into the grille set into the metal box, in response to a thin, electronicized voice. He had to put his head and shoulders out the window of his car to do it, and this afforded him an excellent view between the posts of the gate, along the wide crushed-clamshell drive that swept up to the white-and-dark-green house. He noted a large black-and-tan rottweiler bounding through the thick privet hedges. Dangerous beasts, they had originally been Roman cattle dogs centuries ago. Nowadays, they were most popular as police and guard dogs because of their ferociousness and their strength.
He gave Burke’s Lilco ID number and a line about having to check the feeder cables because of a dangerous outage in the area. The simplest lies were the most believable, he had been taught, and the risk of raw electricity made even the most stouthearted people nervous. A moment later, he heard electronic servos start up, and the gates began to swing slowly inward.
