Zero. Part 31

"And karma, I suppose, killed Hiroshi." n.o.buo shook his head. "No. You killed your eldest brother, despite all your protestations to the contrary. And now that you are oyabun, I am allied with you. But it wasn't Hiroshi's murder that created our alliance. You know what it is. You have taken my granddaughter. I will hate you to the day I die for what you have done."

"I?" Masashi asked innocently. "But what have I done except put together an extremely efficient machine? More efficient than even my father could have imagined. Why look so glum, n.o.buo? You are part of history. With what you are helping me to build, we will soon rule the new j.a.pan."

Or, n.o.buo thought, we will be wiped from the face of the earth, along with every man, woman and child in j.a.pan.

Birds sang in a glade rippling with light. Golden beams, thick as slabs, slanting through the gaps in the trees. The murmur of a brook as it meandered its way down a gentle slope, insects thrumming.

And Eliane walking toward him, looking only at him. She smiled. Coming toward him, slowly, deliberately, confidently.

A crack as of a rifle shot, and Michael screaming her name as she disappeared from view along with the collapsing mountain ledge. Hurled into the valley's shadowed abyss.

The echo of the ledge shattering, rumbling on and on.

Michael awoke knowing that the name he had screamed was not Eliane's but Seyoko's.

A profound depression swept over him. In the darkness, he heard a railing. His own breath. For a moment he could not remember where he was. Eliane's house.

He must have slept all day.

He rose and padded into the bathroom. Turned on the tap and stepped into a cold shower. Three minutes later, he emerged and toweled off. He did not turn on a light, but with the towel wrapped around his waist, he went out onto the lanai that ran the length of the house.

Michael heard the wind moving through the palm fronds. Small lights illuminated the garden path so close he could reach out and brush the foliage.

Beyond, in their eternal vigil, the mountains rose. The night smelled of plumeria and pineapple.

It's tomorrow already, he thought. Where did Ude escape to? He did not know, but he knew where he must look: Tokyo. Tokyo was where he would find Audrey, where he would find out who killed his father and why.

The Shuji Shuriken.

He squatted down and began his slow breathing. His voice whispered the chant: "U." Being. "Mu." Nonbeing. "Sui-getsu." Moonlight on the water. "Jo." Inner sincerity. "Shin." Master of the mind. "Sen." Thought precedes action.

"Shin-myoken." Where the tip of the sword settles. "Kara." The void. "Zero."

Where the Way has no power.

Suigetsu. Moonlight on the water was a phrase that meant deception. Everything you absorb here, Tsuyo had said, is based on deception. In Shintoism, the deception that becomes truth is called shimpo, mystery. It is said this shimpo causes people to have faith, simply because it is hidden. In the Way of the warrior, shimpo is known as strategy. As an example, let us say you pretend that your right hand is hurt, and by that method you draw your opponent out, you change his own strategy, and by so doing, you defeat him. Can you not say that your deception has become truth!

When you can alter the way your opponent perceives his environment, you have mastered the art of strategy.Was Eliane practicing shimpo? Was she deliberately cloaking herself in mystery, or was she really the pure elemental she presented herself as being?

Michael remembered his graduation from Tsuyo's school again. How easy it had seemed then to divine his sensei's motives. And his father had told him, later, First you must recognize evil. Then you must combat it. Finally, you must guard against becoming evil yourself. Knowing these things for certain gets harder the older you grow.

The house slept on, devoid of answers.

The Way is truth, Michael thought. It is tendo.

He abruptly rose, went inside. In the kitchen, he went to the phone, dialed the airport at Kahului. He made his niter- island reservation, then called the number for Honolulu International Airport.

Then he dialed Jonas's private line.

Jonas picked up after the first ring.

"Uncle Sammy?"

"Michael. How are you?"

Michael had called Jonas the moment he and Eliane had gotten back to her house from Fat Boy Ichimada's. Yesterday? Michael had told Jonas everything that had transpired since he had landed on Maui.

"Is there any news of Audrey?" he had asked.

"Nothing yet. But don't give up hope. We're doing everything we can." And to take Michael's mind off the subject of his sister, Jonas said, "I've seen to the Feds on Maui. You won't be involved in any investigation into the ma.s.sacre at Ichimada's."

"I think your hunch about our own investigation leading back to j.a.pan was right," Michael said. "I'm taking the first flight out to Tokyo later this morning."

"Do what you have to do, son," Jonas said. "I have a crisis here that looks as if it will be impossible to handle. After spending over a year negotiating a mutual import-export agreement with the United States, j.a.pan has shifted its att.i.tude. The j.a.panese prime minister informed the president yesterday that all existing individual trade agreements between us and j.a.pan have been declared null and void. No explanation was given for this action. And there seems no hope of a resumption of talks.

"I've been up all night at Capitol Hill. The Congress has retaliated by pa.s.sing an export-tariff act similar to the Smoot-Hawley bill of decades ago.

I tell you, son, ten years ago America might have been able to withstand such a blow. But not today. No one here seems to give a d.a.m.n about the severe economic depression that will result from this protectionist trade bill."

"It sounds as if you have your hands full," Michael said.

"As if that weren't enough," Jonas said, "there's a possibility that BITE will be out of business permanently." He told Michael about the report that Lillian had shown him and what it meant.

"Uncle Sammy," Michael said, hearing something in the other man's voice, "are you all right?"

"To tell you the truth, son," Jonas said, "for the first time, I'm beginning to think that we're not going to win this one."

When Michael hung up the phone, he was more disturbed than ever. He returned to the lanai. Being here in lao Valley was like standing in the keep of the most formidable of castles.

He heard a noise and turned. Eliane had come out of the gla.s.s doors that led to her bedroom. She looked at him in the moonlight. She was dressed in jeans and a man-tailored long-sleeved shirt.

"I heard you out here," she said.

"I didn't mean to wake you."

"I was already up." She turned her head to look out across the valley. "The nights are so beautiful here," she said, moving along the lanai. "Even more so than the days, if that's possible."

"With that full moon," Michael said, "you can see every inch of the valley."

"Not all of it," Eliane said. "There are places in there that haven't beenexplored in centuries."

"Because they're so overgrown?"

"No," she said. "Because no one will enter them. They are sacred places, points in time as well as s.p.a.ce. The old G.o.ds still inhabit those places. Or so the Hawaiians believe."

He saw that she was quite serious. He was not much of a skeptic. Tsuyo had said, Physicists tell us that gravity-or the lack of it-rules the universe.

But faith rules the mind. In any event, there are certainly places where faith, not physical principles, is the ruler. These are places which you will find, in time, either with my help or on your own.

"Will you show me one of these places," he said now, "where the G.o.ds of Hawaii still live?"

He watched her face, knowing that she was working out whether or not he was making fan of her.

"All right," she said after a time. "But the place is high up. It's a long climb."

Michael hesitated, remembering his dream, the accident in Yoshino at Tsuyo's school. He remembered Eliane disappearing into the abyss, and calling out Seyoko's name. It all gave this an eerie ring.

"I don't mind," he said, not altogether truthfully. But he recognized in the fluttering of her movements an element of his own restlessness. It would be hours before he could board his flight to Honolulu.

Were they fated to go on this hike? he wondered. Was he fated to see her die in the same way Seyoko died? What an idiotic idea, he told himself.

She followed him inside, watched as he pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt.

Starlight seeped into the room like a billion unfulfilled wishes. Eliane moved about the room as if uncomfortable within its confining s.p.a.ce.

"Here," she said, handing him a pair of powerful field gla.s.ses. "The views from where we're going are spectacular, even at night."

She led him out of the house, down a winding path that quickly petered out into gra.s.s between rocks and foliage. The cicadas were calling. There was a symphony of infinitesimal sounds.

They went across the valley. Eliane had taken a flashlight, but between the moon- and starlight, it wasn't needed. Then they began to ascend into the mountains that had reared up from the ocean's floor in one lunatic spasm centuries before.

Fifteen hundred feet up, they took a rest. Michael got out the field gla.s.ses, had a look around. In the starlight, the world was stark, flat, hard as granite, but no less beautiful for that. In fact there was an added sense of wonder, a slow accretion of knowledge of the distance in time between man's lifespan and that of the earth. Now, without color, depth or the distraction of any fauna, Michael thought, there was no escape from coming face to face with the humbling grandeur of the world.

"What do you see?" Eliane asked him.

"Myself," he said.

"If only mirrors could tell us what we need to know about ourselves," she said.

She stared at him for a long time with a peculiar intensity. It was as if, he thought, she were trying to drink in the essence of him. As if she were trying to inhale his spirit.

At last, she said, "When I was little, there was a prayer I said before I went to sleep each night. It was taught to me when I was a small child, by a friend of my mother's. He told me to say it only when I was alone and to tell no one that I knew it. Not even my mother. It went, 'Yes is a wish. No is a dream.

Having no other means of crossing this life, I must use yes and no. Allow me to keep hidden the wish and the dream so that someday I may be strong enough to do without them both.' "

The moonlight draped her in silver. The cool blue light cascaded over the strong features of her face. It simultaneously drained her of her natural color and infused her with an energy possible only from the concentration ofmonochromatic illumination.

"Michael," she said, "I've done terrible things in my life."

"We've all done things we aren't proud of, Eliane." He put aside the binoculars.

"Not like these."

He came close to her. "Then why did you do them?"

"Because," she said, "I was afraid not to. I was afraid that if I did nothing, the anarchy-remember that blank canvas?- would overwhelm me. I was afraid that I would be nothing."

"You're intelligent," he said. "You're clever, adept and powerful." He smiled.

"You're also beautiful."

Her face was impa.s.sive. He had wanted to make her smile. "In a word," she said, "I'm perfect."

"I didn't say that."

"Oh, but you did. And you're hardly alone. I've been told I was perfect ever since I can remember. It was required that I be perfect. I had no choice. I could no more throw off the responsibility engendered by perfection than I could renounce being a female. That terrible responsibility robbed me of my childhood. I have been an adult all my life, Michael, because if I wasn't, I knew that my whole life would fall apart."

He watched her, a mixture of sadness and anger welling up in him: the one emotion for her, the other at those who forced the lie on her. "You really believed that?"

She nodded. "I still do. Because, in the end, that rigid responsibility came to be the one and only thing that defined my existence. What was I if I was not this? Nothing. Anarchy, again. An anarchy that I could not face."

He shook his head. "But you are something." He held out his hand. "Come on.

Let's go."

It seemed a long time before her fingers touched his.

"That stupid Ichimada," Ude said, finishing his report. He was in a phone booth outside of Wailuku. His skin was covered in volcanic dust. "He had big plans. They did not include you." Every few seconds he glanced over to the car, where Audrey was bound and gagged, lying on the floor in the back. "He had hired a pair of locals who were looking for the Katei doc.u.ment. I found them. They didn't have it. They didn't know who did. But I got something out of them that Philip Doss meant to leave for his son. A piece of dark-red braided cord. Does it mean anything to you?"

Masashi thought a moment. "No," he said.

"Greed turns into stupidity like food turns into s.h.i.t," Ude said. "Ichimada's stupidity caused him to become vulnerable.

Not only to me-that would have been a bad enough loss of face. But to an itekil" He meant a barbarian-a Westerner: Michael Doss. "This iteki infiltrated Ichimada's vaunted compound."

"Did it ever occur to you," Masashi said, "that Fat Boy Ichimada wanted to meet Michael Doss? How do you think he knew where to send the Hawaiians to look for the braided cord? Philip Doss must have telephoned him."

"I hadn't thought of that," Ude said.

"Do you know where Michael Doss is now?"

"Yes. He's with Eliane Yamamoto."

"Is he?" Masashi said neutrally. Ude wondered why Masashi didn't seem interested in that incredible bit of news. "I want you to send his sister, Audrey, here to me in j.a.pan."

"That won't be easy," Ude said. "With Michael Doss around and the Feds up in arms over the Ichimada thing, I'm working under a handicap."

"Don't worry. I'll send my private jet. Everything will be prepared for you at the airport. She'll go out in a crate of machine parts. You know the drill, you've done it a dozen times before. But it will be about eight hours before I can get the plane to Maui."

"I'll need the time to prepare."

"Right. I'll make some calls, set you up with some of my people locally. Isthere a place where they can reach you?"

Ude gave Masashi the name of the bar he had been in when he was following the Hawaiians. "It's in Wailuku," he said. "They'll know it. It's too early for it to be open, so tell them I'll be in the car across the street." Ude thought a minute. "Tell them I'll also need some hardware."

"They can get whatever you need," Masashi a.s.sured him. "Did you find out who killed Philip Doss?"

"It wasn't Ichimada."