Eric van lustbader nic.., p.38
Eric van Lustbader - Nicholas Linnear 03, page 38
had talked with the Pack Rat about the virus’s creator.
The Pack Rat had a weird sensation of déjà vu, as if he had come full circle: Nangi and the Scoundrel’s mantis, Nangi and Ikusa, Ikusa and Ken Oroshi, Ken Oroshi, Ikusa and Nangi, Ikusa and Killan.Oroshi, Killan Oroshi and the Scoundrel. There seemed a connection to be made in the odd and disparate interlocking of relationships but, maddeningly, he could not see it. He knew it was there, though, and his heart beat faster,. Nangi will know, he thought. He knew he had to get all of this to Nangi right away.
He was concentrating so hard that he at first failed to recognize the blossoming geometric shape cast upon the wall in front of him. Then, with a start, he saw that it was a lozenge of light that could only be made by the hallway light coming into the apartment through the front door. But he had been careful to close the door behind him when he first entered.
The lozenge of light winked out. Darkness, again, mitigated by blue moonlight. And the Pack Rat knew that someone was in the apartment with him.
He did not move; he scarcely breathed. He slowly pulled the ‘ears’ from around his head, letting the recorder continue monitoring the conversation from the next apartment through its umbilical cord suctioned to the wall.
His immediate environment was silent save for the tiny noises all apartment buildings manufacture, the sounds of the night-time street filtered through the cracks between the window sash and the glass. Nothing else.
And yet …
The brief crackle of newspaper underfoot, the sound as explosive to his ears as that of a match being lit in a warehouse full of gasoline.
Hurriedly, the Pack Rat placed his ‘ears’ against the wall, covered the paraphernalia with debris. He moved
away from it as a mother wren will from her chicks when she senses danger is near. Her instincts tell her to lure the danger away from her progeny; keeping them safe is her first priority. So, too, with the Pack Rat’s recording of events and meetings, the shadow world that Tanzan Nangi had hired him to penetrate and neutralize. He knew that he had to protect his evidence at all costs.
As he moved stealthily across the apartment, he withdrew a dagger with an eight-inch blade whose shape he had designed on the computer. It was thin enough to be easily concealed beneath clothes, yet wide enough to be lethal even on a cut that was slightly off the mark.
Shadows played along the walls and the floor, across the humped shapes of discarded laths, dried plaster and wall-boards, adder-like tangles of wires, exposed phone lines.
Hie Pack Rat heard it coming long before he saw it. The whistle of air being displaced, and the small hairs at the back of his neck stood up. He knew that sound, and he curled into a ball, launching himself forward, towards the direction of the attack, knowing that this was his only hope now.
What the Pack Rat recognized was the sound a tetsubo makes when it is wielded. A moment later, as if to confirm his suspicion, the area of the concrete floor on which he had been standing exploded in a choking shower of particles and dust.
Tetsubo-jutsu was a highly specialized form of the martial arts, primarily because the tetsubo itself – a solid iron bar, its working end covered with iron studs – was so heavy. The weapon had been developed centuries ago for armoured warfare. A warrior would wade into the enemy, swinging the iron bar, opening up their armour or breaking the legs of the mounted enemies’ horses.
Nowadays, tetsubo-jutsu was used for only one reason:
to crush an opponent. There were no half-way measures with such a weapon.
The Pack Rat came out of his curled position, struck immediately upwards. It was as if he had encountered a mountain. It took an exceptionally strong man, an enormous man, to use the tetsubo effectively. Without having seen his face, the Pack Rat knew who had followed him from the Nami offices into this vacant apartment: Kusunda Ikusa.
The Pack Rat’s blow was deflected, and he found himself thrown hard across the room. He hit the wall with a thud, bounced up immediately. Even so, he could hear the tetsubo humming in the air as it headed towards him. He ducked, and a chunk of the wall splintered, showering him in biting bits of lath and plaster.
To avoid the suki, the weaknesses in defence that could result from tetsubo-jutsu, Ikusa had to strike at the Pack Rat quickly and repeatedly. This could be tiring, even for such a sumo as Ikusa.
But the Pack Rat knew that he could not keep up the pace of evasion in such a constricted space. Eventually, he would duck the wrong way or take a wrong step and Ikusa would crush his skull.
Therefore, he did the only thing he could think of: he got as near to Ikusa as he could manage. He theorized that the iron club would lose much of its effectiveness at such close quarters.
Ikusa’s free arm came up, and the Pack Rat batted it aside, struck out with his knife, heard the sound of material being slit, felt the blade bury itself into flesh, and he knew he had a chance.
Ikusa dropped the tetsubo, made a grab for the Pack Rat. The Pack Rat was ready for bun, drove an elbow inwards in a powerful atemi. He whirled, crouching down, beginning his circular entering movement, and got his left hand on the iron club. He began the aikido
immobilization jo-waza, turning outwards, back the way he had come, feeling Ikusa’s weight coining forwards, beginning to unbalance as the Pack Rat used his momentum against him, and the Pack Rat thought, Now I have a chance.
Me slid his left leg forwards, shifting the axis upon which his body rotated, readying the completion of the jo-waza that would hurl Kusunda Ikusa’s enormous weight to the floor. At that moment a tremendous blow caught him in the side of his head.
He staggered, bis vision blurred. He struck out blindly with his blade, missed, overcompensated, spun helplessly around.
Then he heard the whistle, actually saw the iron bar coming at him, filling his vision. He tried to move his head, but nothing seemed to work.
A crack like thunder from the edge of the world. Time, like existence, as fragile as a candle’s flame, was snuffed out.
When Senjin touched Justine’s belly with the flat of his hand, he said to her, ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ He might have said, You’re dead, aren’t you? In fact, for the first split instant, that was what Justine thought he had said, but then she understood that what she was hearing was an echo of her own inner voice. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, collapsing against him, ‘I lied.’ Senjin let go of the silken cord, held her as delicately as if she were a fragile-boned bird with a broken wing. He saw the moonlight, slow and thick, falling across her face, illuminating one by one her features: mysterious eyes, strong nose, high cheekbones, full, partly-open lips; her hair in the semi-darkness a shroud rich with promise, below which her breasts rose and fell with her rapid, shallow breathing. The dense moonlight cast purple shadows, creating two other figures on the porch,
elongated, humanoid but certainly not human, winged but certainly not angels. .
This light had come a long way, slipping through the vast wasteland between the stafs, a prehistoric light, though of what alien civilization’s prehistory it was impossible to say. But Senjin recognized this light and the power its properties of immense distance and time represented.
‘I’ve lied to my husband all this time, and I lied to you when I said that I went to see Honi because I hated myself. I mean, I did hate myself. That much is true. But that’s not all of it, not nearly. I was – how can I put this so you’U understand? I didn’t want to grow up. I was afraid of growing up. I had lived my life with a mother sapped of life and of strength. It seemed clear to me that in giving birth to me and to my older sister, my mother had given us the juice of her flesh along with her milk.
‘She was dried up, desiccated, devoid of zest. She had bequeathed that to us, had used up her quota of youth and gusto in becoming a mother. She was old before her time, lined, forever tired, forever plagued by vague maladies – headaches, backaches, cramps -that often prevented her from participating in even the simplest family requirements. More often than not she had her meals hi her room, which by then was separate from where my father slept: she claimed the weight of his body on the mattress caused her calves to spasm in the middle of the night.
‘She rarely attended parties or family gatherings, never made it to our graduations from high school and college, but sent two trusted servants in her stead, as if believing that quantity would make up for her absence. Funerals were, of course, out of the question – they were too emotionally taxing – and she never went near a hospital until the day she died.
‘It was as if, along with her drying up, her giving
us her life fluids, her capacity to take on obligation had dissolved.
This, to me, was adulthood; all I could expect in the coming years. Can you imagine how I felt when I thought about having a baby of my own? All I could see in my mind’s eye was the image of my mother, grey-faced, bed-ridden, racked by the kinds of aches and pains only women twice her age start to experience.
‘ “You’re not your mother,” Honi assured me. It wasn’t enough. I worked hard to want to be an adult, a mother, but it wasn’t easy. My God, I tortured myself over it for years. I shed so many tears, you wouldn’t believe how many. Finally, I thought I had it down. I thought I knew that I wouldn’t turn into my mother. But then I came here to Japan.with my husband. I got pregnant and my little daughter died. I got through the hurt and the guilt just like an adult, I was proud of myself. I stood by my husband when he was in difficulty.
“Then I got pregnant again and everything burst apart. My whole life seemed turned upside down. It was as if I was back in Honi’s office, terrified of becoming a mother. I don’t know whether I want this baby. I don’t know whether I can handle the responsibility. I feel as if I am turning into my mother, that I’m simply incapable of doing it – being a mother – and I’m so ashamed and disgusted with myself I can’t stand it. And yet I don’t want to be like my mother. I don’t!’
Senjin, holding her, feeling her racked with sobs, was mute. I hated my mother, too, he thought. Only my sister knew that, and she didn’t understand until I explained it to her, not with words but with actions. My sister is a stubborn, strong-willed woman. So much so that she became used to getting what she wanted. Except from me. I tried to cure her of her excesses. Perhaps I was at least partially successful. But I had to stop correcting her. I saw that if I went too far she would break, rather
than bend. I would not change her spirit, though that spirit is imperfect, dangerous even. She is my sister, not my mother. I would have changed my mother, if I had been given a chance. My mother, like this woman, was weak, deficient. A cure, no matter how radical, would have been good for her in the end; anyone who knew her could see that. .
I think my whole life has been an effort to be strong in everything I do or say or think. I cannot allow myself even a momentary weakness, it’s too much to bear, the thought that I’m carrying some of her inside me. Can weakness be inherited in the genes or passed like poison through the umbilical cord?
With Justine’s lips against his neck, her breasts hard against his muscled chest, her thighs against his leg, Senjin thought he felt nothing, just as he felt nothing when he stared down at the nude body of Mariko, the dancer at The Silk Road; just as he felt nothing when he had sucked the innocence out of Tomi, using Tau-tau to seduce her in the office; just as he felt nothing when he had entered the myriad women who had populated his past like signposts in a distant terrain. Without thinking of Haha-san he had never felt even a fleeting atom of carnal desire at the touch of female flesh.
He had intellectually savoured each coupling with the avidity of a cryptographer tackling a new code. For the rest, the wolf in heat throwing his shaggy head back and howling at the night, there was nothing.
Then he heard, with a start, Justine whispering in his ear, ‘Save me. Oh, save me,’ and he began to tremble with despicable desire just as if she had said, Take me.
Because he thought of someone else: his sister, with whom he shared everything of importance: strength, sin, punishment, the terror of weakness, destiny. And a longing that was pain swept over him.
Justine was lying so close to him that he could feel the
press of her heavy breasts, feel the accelerated beating of her heart. Her face was upraised to his. Starlight picked out highlights in her hair, the waning moonlight coated the soft flesh of her neck.
That was when, with eyes of copper, Senjin again wrapped the silken cord around Justine’s neck, jerking her against him. He captured her hips with his powerful thighs. She tried to cry out, but could not. He saw her teeth, white in the moonlight. He imagined blood on them, an animal’s mouth thrown back and howling at the soft moon, and knew that he wanted to – needed to – make her as much like him as possible, to merge her being into his as he had pathetically tried to do and failed with Mariko when he devoured her susurrus at the moment of her death, as he had tried to do with the other women he had been with. To possess them in as full a meaning of the word as was imaginable.
Because he could no longer possess his sister in that unique way that, for him, filled the dread place inside him where even he would never venture, where pleasure was pain.
‘Pleasure and pain, yin and yang, the light and the dark,’ Senjin whispered hoarsely. “This is the world view, the false reality. Kshira showed me the truth: that pain and pleasure can be one, the width of a circle and, when they are, the result is otherworldly, leading to a state beyond even ecstasy.’ His breath hard and hot on her cheek. ‘I promised you an example. I want you to understand. Now …’
Senjin pulled up her skirt, roughly ripped her underclothes. The terror emanated from Justine’s wide-open eyes, filled her face like a river swollen to a torrent from spring fains. Her terror exuded from her pores like sweat, its peculiar scent making his nostrils twitch, his mouth water.
Senjin was so hard that he could barely feel his member.
It was stiff, it was numb; he thought of Haha-san. Now not only Justine. But his sister as well.
His sister and possession.
The cord around Justine’s neck was making the white flesh turn red and raw. Her neck began to swell as it bruised, as the blood filled it, as he pulled the cord tighter, as it was further abused. The sight made Senjin dizzy with desire and he almost collapsed into her.
He pulled on the cord, cutting off more oxygen, and her head went back, lolling as her eyes rolled up. Drool spilled from the corner of her mouth, her hips lurched inwards against him, against the quivering tip of him.
Senjin was overcome by desire. Never before in his life had its advance been so swift, so overpowering. He was delirious with sensation, about to thrust himself into her when, unbidden, he remembered that he needed her in another way, just as he had once needed Haha-san, and his hot, desperate seed spilled out of him in a paroxysm of need.
Senjin grunted like an animal. His head fell forwards on to her shoulder. With a sob, he released the cord from around Justine’s neck, seeing not her but his sister, Haha-san, his sister, they were all fused in his mind because he needed all three, hated himself for that need.
Then the three images became unstuck, drifted apart. Senjin tenderly kissed the already blackening welt, licking it with his tongue, tasting the salt on her skin, already associating it with her wound, the pain he had inflicted on her.
He held her head as she had before, to take away the pain. ‘You must tell me,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘I must know what the ninja did with the emeralds he took out of the box.’ But he could tell that Justine had not heard him, and he put his lips against her ear, said into it, ‘Think of the ninja, think pf your husband in his workout room, with the box in his hands. Now he has the emeralds, you
can see them sparkling in the light. What do you see him doing next? Tell me.’ Justine, her eyes only half-open, her mind benumbed with Tau-tau, said, ‘I remember … something ‘What? Wkat!’ But Seojin could see it was no good, she would not be able to dredge it up just yet. Not yet.
Staring at her white, sweat-slicked face in the moonlight.
But soon.
Leaving her there, untied in the moonlight, freed, but only for a time.
Shisei, dressed ever so fashionably in the Louis Feraud suit that Douglas Howe had bought her at Saks Jandel, locked the door to her borrowed brownstone just off Foxhall Road in Georgetown, skipped down the steps to the waiting black Jaguar sedan.
Branding himself was behind the wheel. Although he employed a driver to get him across town in rush hour traffic or out to the Pentagon while he did some work in the back seat, he preferred at other times to drive himself, taking pleasure in the purr and power of his own automobile.
‘You look tremendous!’ he said as she slid into the leather seat beside him. ‘I’ll be proud of you.’ ‘What have you planned for Howe?’ Shisei asked nervously. ‘Or for us?’ Branding laughed, swinging out into the Washington twilight. ‘You must know General Dickerson, Howe’s pet dog inside the Pentagon? Woof! Woof! Anyway, just about, oh, twenty minutes ago, while Howe was dressing for tonight’s dinner, the general called him at home. But, you know, the funny thing is that there’s a guy on my staff who does an amazingly accurate imitation of Dickerson’s voice. In any case, whoever it was who called, swore that there’s a security leak at the Johnson Institute. This
