Читать книгу Ice Blue - Anne Stuart - Страница 9

His holiness, the Shirosama of the True Realization Fellowship, sat in meditation, considering his options. His practice was a far cry from the traditional forms. When he freed his mind the visions would come, the plans would form and true enlightenment would beckon like a bright white light.

He knew what he had to do to attain that permanent state, and the thousands of faithful were well trained, well organized to follow in his ways. He had the best scientists, the best doctors, the best soldiers, and the supplies were stockpiled, ready to be used. Awaiting his signal.

The blindness was increasing, a sure sign that all would soon be ready. His eyes were a milky brown—he still needed the contact lenses, but not for long. His colorless skin had needed no ritual treatment, and he hadn’t had to bleach his hair for months. It had stopped growing, and what remained was the pure white he’d managed to achieve. His transformation was almost complete.

It was really all very clear to him. A simple matter of various forces coming into play, and he had learned to be patient over the years.

He knew his destiny. Karma had brought him to this place and time. It was his task to reunite people with their lost souls, reintegrate them into a new life past pain, suffering and need. He would bring them all to that place of white-light purity, leading the way, a beacon of truth and retribution. The more they suffered in the task of being set free, the greater the reward, and flinching from what needed to be done was unacceptable.

Pain and death were merely transitory states, to be moved through with as little fuss as possible, and those who weren’t willing to embrace the change would be helped along by his army of followers. The gift he offered was of immeasurable value—the gift of a cleansed soul and a new life in a new world.

His needs were simple, and had been met by divine providence. He needed followers, true believers who never questioned. He needed the strong and the young, the old and the wise. He needed disciples of unflinching character who would do what he asked, and never consider it morally repugnant. There were times when delivering death was the greatest gift of all, helping someone past his or her current state of greed and passion, into the next life of pure thought.

The Shirosama had the disciples. He had the tools, the toxins and the gases that would render the subway systems and train stations in every part of this world into instruments of disease and death. This method had been tried before and failed, due to the weakness of the followers, the lack of vision.

Or perhaps it would simply be his time. The others had tried, for all the wrong reasons, the wrong faith.

The hour was almost right. The Lunar New Year was fast approaching, and he knew that time was finally right. Year after year had passed, but now things were finally falling into place as it was ordained. He had the followers, the weapons, the plan.

All he needed now was the Hayashi Urn, the ice blue ceramic bowl that had been in the care of his family for hundreds of years. The urn that had once held the bones and ashes of his ancestor.

The year 1663 had been a time of upheaval in Edo period Japan. Amid the warring clans, the daimyos and their armies of samurai, and the battling priests, there had been one man, one god. The original Shirosama; the White Lord—the half-blind albino child of the Hayashi clan, first considered a demon and later recognized as a seer and a savior. He’d foretold the disasters that had befallen the modern world, the terrifying eclipse of power and the new worship of greed and possessions. But he had been too powerful, his vision too pure, and in the end he’d committed ritual suicide by order of the shogun. His body had been burned, his bones and ashes placed in the ice blue urn and set in the remains of his temple up in the mountains, guarded by members of the Hayashi clan.

The steps were clear, laid out by the original Shiro-sama in the scrolls kept hidden by his family. The bones and ashes would be reunited with the urn at the place of his death, and his spirit would enter a new vessel. His descendant.

And that would signal the conflagration that would cleanse the world. Armageddon, where only the pure souls would survive.

There were too many stumbling blocks. For years the present Shirosama had no idea what that crazy old woman had done with the family treasure, and once he found out that an American had it, it was proving almost impossible to get his hands on it.

He could blame the disastrous war that had ravaged his country and his family. Only the oldest male member of the Hayashi family knew the location of the ancient temple, and he’d died without passing that knowledge on to anyone but his young daughter. In an effort to safeguard the treasure, the bones and ashes had been removed from the urn and hidden in the family home, and Hana Hayashi had been sent to the country of their enemies with the priceless urn and the location of the temple ruins.

He knew it was one last test to prove his worth, and he accepted it with humility. Once his followers were able to bring him the woman and the urn, there was still the problem of locating the ruins of the original shrine. At least he had the bones and ashes of his ancestor. For the last seven years he’d been mixing the ashes with his tea, to ensure his transformation, but the chunks of whitened bones were still complete, and when they were placed in the urn and set at the site of his ancestor’s sacrifice, all would become as it should be. Even the original Shiro-sama had been a test run. It was his destiny to finish what his ancestor had started.

He sat, and let his let his eyes roll upward in his head, ignoring the scrape of the contact lenses against them. Soon.

In the end, Takashi O’Brien had settled for a small park in a run-down neighborhood, pulling the car off to the side of the road. There were probably addicts roaming around, looking for a score, and maybe gangbangers, but they’d be much more interested in his very expensive car than a woman sneaking off into the bushes. If by any chance they found Summer more interesting he could take care of that as well.

Because, of course, he watched. She shuffled into the bushes, the bedspread clutched around her, and made him solemnly promise not to look. Was she really that naive? So far she’d taken him at face value, and he could back up the Ministry of Antiquities story quite easily. He was very good at convincing people who and what he was—he often went undercover as Hispanic, Italian, Russian, Native American and any Asian background. Being a mongrel, or ainoko, as his grandfather would have termed him, gave Taka advantages. He looked different, but he could shift those differences to mirror any number of ethnic groups.

He was going to need to make a decision, fast, before the Fellowship made its move. Once he finished this job he could get the hell out of here, back to the tattered shreds of the normal life his interfering family was assembling for him. The proper Japanese bride, the proper future.

People who worked for the Committee didn’t live a normal life, though he could hardly explain that to his disapproving grandfather. His mother’s uncle, his mentor, had some idea that Takashi O’Brien’s work entailed more than his involvement with the Yakuza, Japan’s organized crime family, but he wisely never asked. As long as Taka completed the occasional duties assigned to him, no one asked questions, not even his crazy cousin Reno. Particularly when his great-uncle was head of one of the largest Yakuza families in Tokyo, a fact that filled his industrialist grandfather with horror.

Not that it mattered. Takashi could never find favor in his grandfather’s eyes no matter what he did. His blood was tainted by his American father and the eventual suicide of his beautiful, self-absorbed mother, and Shintaro Oda would never look upon his only descendent with anything but contempt.

Summer Hawthorne was heading back toward the car, her long hair dripping wet on her shoulders. He didn’t want to think about why he didn’t finish the job he’d started. He had an instinctive revulsion for drowning, even if she’d been unconscious at the time, and it could have raised unpleasant attention. That was the second tenet of working for the Committee. Do what had to be done, without flinching, without moral qualms or second-guessing. And do it discreetly.

She was shivering when she climbed back into the car, the bedspread clutched in her hands. He should have told her to toss it, but that might have given her a clue that she wasn’t going to be returning to her little bungalow anytime soon. If at all.

“I don’t suppose you brought shoes,” she said, not looking at him as she began to braid her long wet hair.

“Behind the seat.”

She reached around for them, brushing against him in the cramped front seat of the car, and something odd shivered through him. A tiny bit of awareness, which was impossible. He liked statuesque American women with endless legs, he liked delicate Japanese women with tiny breasts, he liked athletic English women and inventive French women. He liked beauty, and the drowned rat sitting beside him, even when she was done up for a museum reception, was never going to be a classic beauty.

Besides, she was a job, and he was adept at compartmentalizing his life. He did what needed to be done, and some of the things he’d had to do would make her shrink in revulsion. And he would do those things again, without question. To her.

“What’s next?” He could hear the strain in her voice, and he wondered when she’d break. He’d been expecting noisy tears anytime now, but she’d remained strangely stoic.

“My hotel in Little Tokyo, where you can sleep and I can decide what to do next.”

“Little Tokyo? Isn’t that the first place the Shirosama would be looking for you?”

“They’re not looking for me. They don’t know I exist.”

“But you’ve rescued me twice …” Her voice trailed off, suddenly uneasy, and he realized he had to calm her fears.

“The two men in the limo died in the crash—they never saw me. And I got you out of your house without anyone noticing.” That was highly unlikely if they’d been the ones who’d tried to drown her, but he was counting on her being too worn-out to put things together. By the time she was more rested he’d come up with a plausible answer. In the meantime he needed to stash her someplace safe where he didn’t have to think about her, and the small bungalow he rented inside the grounds of the hotel was as good a place as any.

“Besides, Little Tokyo is much too obvious a place to hide someone with a connection to a Japanese cultural treasure. It’s the last place they’d think to look, and no one’s going to know you’re there.”

She said nothing, simply nodded and leaned back in the leather seat. He expected her passivity was only going to last so long. He’d better be ready to move when she started asking the unanswerable questions.

The Matsura Hotel was a Los Angeles landmark. The entry was through a security laden torii gate; the landscaping was minimalist and yet preserving of everyone’s privacy. He made his unwitting hostage duck down when he drove past the security cameras, but once he’d parked the car behind the bungalow, no one had any chance of seeing her. He ushered her into the two-room building, trying not to think about how he was going to get her out again.

She stood in the middle of the living room, and he could see the raw edges of shock begin to close in on her. He wasn’t in the mood for noisy tears or awkward questions, so he simply took her arm and led her into the bedroom, ignoring her panicked start when he touched her. “You need to sleep,” he said.

She looked at him, the wary expression in her eyes like that of a cornered fox. Pretty blue eyes, he thought absently. She was past words, but he knew what she was thinking.

“I’ll be in the living room. I can sleep on the couch, but I’ll wake up if I hear even the slightest noise. You’ll be safe.” For now.

She still didn’t move, and he took her shoulders and turned her toward the bed. He didn’t want to start undressing her—she’d probably jump to the wrong conclusion and that would only make things more difficult. He had no interest in her soft, curvy body or her lush, vulnerable mouth. He just needed her to go to sleep and let him think.

“Yes,” she said in a rusty voice, reaching for the hem of the black sweatshirt he’d grabbed for her. It was huge—he assumed it had probably belonged to a former boyfriend, even though their intel had only come up with one, years prior—and she started pulling it over her head. The T-shirt came with it, which was his signal to leave before she was standing there in her underwear, with that same dazed look on her face.

“Call me if you need anything,” he said, getting the hell out of the room and closing the door before she could respond.

He stretched out on the sofa, closing his eyes and wishing to Christ he could afford to have something to drink. It had been a rough twenty-four hours, but he couldn’t take even the slightest of chances, not when things were so fucked. When this was over he could down a whole bottle of single malt Scotch, his drug of choice. And he suspected that was exactly what he was going to want to do.

He was going to have to face Madame Lambert sooner or later. He’d been ignoring her messages on his übermobile phone, but he couldn’t put it off for much longer. She was going to want to know why Summer Hawthorne wasn’t dead yet, and she wasn’t likely to accept any excuses. Nothing ever touched Isobel Lambert, marred the perfection of her beautiful face or clear, emotionless eyes. She was the epitome of what they all strived for—ruthless practicality and no weakness. She would have put a samurai to shame.

Taka wasn’t sure if it was wisdom or weakness that had stopped him tonight. He could hear Summer coughing behind the door to the bedroom. She’d swallowed more water in the hot tub than he’d thought, but he couldn’t very well have taken the time to do mouth to mouth on her with the Shirosama’s goons closing in. In the ordinary world he’d have taken her to a hospital, rather than risk a lung infection of some sort. In this world it was the best-case scenario—if she got some virulent pneumonia from her near drowning it would no longer be his job to … finish her.

Things were stable for the moment. The true Hayashi Urn was currently out of reach, though he was going to have to find out where, and damn soon. He had no idea how good a copy the urn at the Sansone was. If the brethren decided to go for it, then all hell might break loose.

Taka groaned, shoving a hand through his hair. They were going to want to know in London why he hadn’t taken care of things, and he wasn’t sure what he could give them for an answer when he didn’t know himself. He closed his eyes, listening to the sounds around him, identifying and then dismissing each noise—the traffic beyond the thick vegetation that surrounded the hotel; the sound of her breathing behind the closed door, slow and steady as she slept; the murmur of the wind; the steady beat of his own heart. He lay perfectly still, aware of absolutely everything. And then he let go, for a brief moment of respite.

Isobel Lambert stood in the window of her office, staring out into the breaking sunrise over London, a cigarette in one hand, a cell phone in the other. It was going to be another bleak, gray day, with a cold, biting rain that stung the skin and felt like ice. She hated January. But then, right now she hated everything.

She hated the small, elegant office in Kensington that she’d coveted for so long. She hated the cigarette in her hand. She hated London, but most of all she hated the Committee and the choices she had to make.

For that matter, she hated Peter Madsen. Her second in command was home in bed with his wife. He had someone to turn to to help wash away the stench of death and merciless decisions. A wife who knew too damn much, but there was nothing to be done about that. If Isobel needed Madsen—and she did—then Genevieve Spenser came with the bargain. And if Peter had complete faith in her, then so did Isobel, because Peter had complete faith in very few things.

She turned and stubbed out her cigarette, then cracked the window to try to air out the office before Peter got there. She hated smoking, had tried to quit a hundred times, but days like yesterday would send her right back. It could be worse, she supposed. People she’d started out with had turned to drink or drugs, or the kind of soulless abuse of power that Harry Thomason had wielded. It was a good thing her soul ached. The feeling proved she was still human beneath the hard shell she’d perfected.

The bitter wind swirled through her office, and she shivered, but made no attempt to close the window. She was ice inside; the temperature made no difference.

They’d argued about the girl, she and Peter, but in the end they both knew there was no choice in the matter. The young woman in Los Angeles was a liability of catastrophic proportions, and when hard choices had to be made, Madame Lambert could make them. Summer Hawthorne had no idea why she was so dangerous, and she’d have no idea why she had to die. It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference if she did.

Hana Hayashi had left the urn with her, and the knowledge of where the ancient ruins were located. The Shirosama needed both of those things to make his ritual complete. A crackpot ritual that would signal the onslaught of Armageddon, or as close to it as one powerful maniac and a hundred thousand followers could enact.

And history had already proved that that could be pretty bad.

They could trust Takashi O’Brien to do what needed to be done. He was just as much of a realist as the rest of them—you couldn’t survive in the twilight world of the Committee without being able to see things clearly, unemotionally, and make the hard choices. Summer Hawthorne was just one more in a history of hard choices, one that Taka would make without blinking.

These things took their toll eventually. Peter could no longer work in the field, while some operatives got deliberately careless, stepping in the way of a bullet. Others perfected their image as a cool, soulless automaton. No one—not even Peter Madsen—knew what roiled inside Isobel herself.

She smoothed her pale blond hair back from her perfect face. No one had any idea of her real age—in their line of work they used the best plastic surgeons—and she knew the image she presented to the outside world. A well-preserved beauty, anywhere between thirty-five and sixty, with the best face money could buy. If anyone saw her naked, her body would prove the lie, but no one ever did.

Right now she felt as if she were ninety years old, and as ugly as the turmoil inside her. She couldn’t go on like this. These decisions were part of her daily life; she couldn’t let them destroy her. Summer Hawthorne had to die—it was that simple.

Madame Isobel Lambert reached once more for her cigarettes, dry-eyed, practical, cool-headed. And if her hand shook slightly there was no one to see.

Summer never thought she would sleep, but she had, soundly. She had no idea what time it was when she woke up—her watch was somewhere back at her house and the darkened bedroom had no clock. Light was coming in from the clerestory windows overhead, muted, shadowy, and she didn’t know whether that had to do with the weather or the time of day. Her sense of reality was astonishing. It could be any time from five in the morning to five at night, and her body was giving her no signals whatsoever.

She pushed the sheets aside and climbed out of bed. She’d slept in her underwear, which in retrospect seemed ridiculous. She should have just stayed in her clothes—the baggy black T-shirt and jeans he’d brought from her house. At least he’d brought the fat jeans. She kept three sizes: fat jeans, which were miles too big for her, regular jeans and skinny ones. If he’d brought the skinny ones she would have been miserable; she needed to be ten pounds lighter to even begin to be comfortable in them. The fat jeans were way too loose, but right now she liked the extra folds of fabric around her, and she could have slept in them quite comfortably.

She didn’t remember when he’d left her in the room. Had he helped her get undressed? She didn’t think so; she’d remember if he put his hands on her. She wasn’t used to being touched by beautiful men. She wasn’t used to being touched at all, and she preferred it that way. She could remember almost nothing. At one point she’d been in his car, wrapped in her bedspread, in the next she was lying in her underwear in his bed.

She couldn’t say much for his taste in clothing, at least as far as she was concerned. While he was elegant bordering on fashion model, the clothes he’d brought her were baggy and too big, including the plain black granny panties and industrial bra circa the time she’d been on the pill and gone from a thirty-four C to a thirty-six D, thanks to hormones. He must have taken one look at her and decided she was a sloppy pudge. That shouldn’t bother her at all, given the circumstances. But it did.

A far more overriding concern was how absolutely famished she was. She hadn’t had time for dinner last night; she’d been too busy working on last-minute details for the museum reception. And during the party she’d been too caught up in circulating and trying to keep away from her mother’s slimy guru to eat. And of course, things had gone to hell in a handbasket right afterward, and she had sincerely thought she would never want to eat again.

Now she was starving.

She pulled on the baggy clothes, looking around for her shoes, then remembered she’d taken them off outside the bungalow. She needed those shoes.

The more Summer thought about it, the more she knew that getting away from her companion was as important as getting away from the Shirosama and his followers. She had no reason to doubt that it was His Plumpness who was after her, but she didn’t have any particular reason to trust her guardian angel, either. He might have snatched her from the jaws of death a couple of times, but she still couldn’t bring herself to put her life in his hands. Why would a Japanese bureaucrat appear out of nowhere like James Bond and rescue a hapless museum curator? It didn’t make sense.

The first thing she needed to do was get the hell away from him. But she couldn’t go back to her house, and she couldn’t turn to her beautiful, brainless mother, who’d probably just hand her over to her beloved master. Her stepfather, Ralph, let Lianne do whatever she wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with Summer’s half sister, Jilly. Summer had learned to take care of herself long before Lianne had met her third husband, and Summer’s mother and stepfather were hardly people to depend on. The best place was the house on Bainbridge Island—she could probably hide out there without anyone noticing until the Fellowship either stole the fake urn and disappeared, or gave up. She really didn’t care which, as long as the real ceramic bowl stayed hidden, out of greedy hands.

Summer had no purse, no identification, no money, which made escape a bit problematic. But not impossible. Once she got away from her rescuer there were a number of people she could contact. The head of the Sansone Museum, William Chatsworth, was a shameless glad-hander and publicity hound, but he would jump at the chance to get rid of her, including forking over money with no questions asked. And there was her assistant and best friend, Micah, who was more reliable. Her passport was in the desk drawer in her office, it was all the ID she’d need unless she wanted to rent a car.

If that failed, she could turn to her half sister, but that was a last resort. Sixteen-year-old Jilly Lovitz was a smart, cynical kid who loved her older sister unconditionally and harbored grave doubts about her mother’s good sense, but Summer didn’t want to put her in the middle of things or draw any attention to her. Last night with its danger and its violence didn’t seem quite real, but it was, and dragging her baby sister into this mess was the last thing Summer wanted to do. No, there had to be some other way.

But Micah would help her with no questions asked. And she didn’t need to worry about Jilly. Summer’s stepfather paid little attention to his wife’s enthusiasms, but he wouldn’t let anything happen to his teenage daughter, and Lianne probably knew that. She could offer up Summer without a qualm, but Jilly would be untouchable, thank God. And that was the most important thing in the world because Jilly was all that mattered.

She needed answers. What was so damn important about her porcelain bowl that people were willing to kidnap and kill for it? What exactly was the Hayashi Urn? And what the hell was going on?

But given the choice between getting out of there and getting answers, escape seemed the wiser choice. She really didn’t want to see her so-called rescuer again if she could help it. He stirred irrational things inside her, things she didn’t want to think about. She needed to get lost, fast, because too many people were out to get her.

And she had no guarantees that Mr. Takashi O’Brien, if that was really his name, wasn’t one of them.