Part 25 (1/2)

”Buddha, yes, of course. It's what he wants to believe. The others as well. It's in their own best interests to believe you. How could they know that we desire control of Kam Sang for more than its desalinization plant?” White-Eye Kao grunted. ”You had only to watch hiseyes to see that he's already blinded by the fantasy of money and power you've served up to him.”

Bluestone sat back down, swiveled in his chair. He stared again into the extraordinary translucence of the Qing vase. ”I wonder,” he thought aloud, ”what our friend Mr. Nolin-Kelly would say if he knew he was making an enormous financial contribution to the furtherance of the Soviet Union in Hong Kong?”

In the blackness of the tunnel all public conversation was drawn to a muted hush. The smell of charcoal dust was strong until, with a rush that was almost euphoric, the trolly burst out onto Mayakovsky Square and, rumbling past the Hotel Peking, braked to a halt in front of the Moscow Planetarium. Mikhail Carelin liked this place especially, he said, because it was just across the street from a little place that seemed squeezed in between its neighbors, the home of Anton Chekhov, now turned into a memorial museum.

Inside, comets spun into the twinkling darkness, their lighted vapor trails sparkling like diamond dust in Daniella's thick hair. They pa.s.sed up a slide-show lecture on the Sayut that they knew to be overblown, almost stridently patriotic for the benefit of the many tourists who crowded through the doors.

Outside it was gray, raining instead of snowing, which was at least a change of a sort. Here, it was almost possible to believe that one was part of the weightless, airless, extraterrestrial nonatmosphere of s.p.a.ce. One had the sense of spinning in orbit so high up, so detached that one saw the entire world revolve serenely at a distance vast enough to reduce all tension, all worry. In the cosmos there was no anxiety.

Daniella was worrying what to do about Maluta. Time was running out on her. She had done all she could behind his back. She was terrified that he would somehow get wind of her operation with Sir John Bluestone and take that over. Now that she finally knew the vast extent of s.h.i.+ Zilin's yuhn-hyun, she understood why he had gone to such lengths to hide its true nature from her.

MitreBluestonehad finally come through. And Daniella now knew that elements in Hong Kong and Beijing were in collusion. She was stunned at the thought of the resulting economic and political colossus that was being created. She knew that it was not enough now to have burrowed her way inside the yuhn-hyun; she must either control it outrightor destroy it completely.

She was certain that should Maluta ever get his hands on thisintelligence he would take the Chinese operation away from her. This she could not allow. But how to defeat a man who terrified her so? His dossier was as clean as virgin snow.

”What is it?” Carelin said, tracing the furrows in the flesh above her nose. ”Maluta?”

She nodded. ”I fear that I have destroyed us, Mikhail. Maluta has us both in a vise. You cannot go to Genachev. That would destroy you utterly, given how he feels about personal morals. And if Maluta threatens to expose us?”

Carelin stirred uneasily. ”He hasn't yet, has he?”

”No,” Daniella admitted. ”But only because he has a use for me. And, who knows, for you as well.”

The comet, its tail green-and-red fire, came arcing down the sky overhead, pa.s.sing behind Daniella's left ear. For a moment, her cheek was blushed by the simulated starlight, then it fell back into shadow. Carelin felt his heart lurch. His eyes were filled up with her, his body expanded. When he was with her, there was a heaviness between his legs that never went away.

”Is there something you're not telling me, Da.n.u.shka?”

The blackness of s.p.a.ce abruptly seemed lonely and desolate, more than any place on earth could possibly be. ”He has made me his stalking horse,” she whispered hoa.r.s.ely. ”I am carrying out his directives but everything is in my name. If anything goes wrong, I will be pilloried and he will remain blameless.”

”What is it precisely that he wants you to do?”

It had been a dangerous line that she had been walking all afternoon and now she did not know which way to go. Certainly it would be easiest just to put her head back and tell him everything, continue his role as her priest-confessor. She was tired of the web of lies within which she was enmeshed. Each new lie she was compelled to utter seemingly enervated her more. She was like a patient with a degenerative illness, sinking further and further away from the world of normalcy and light. She was ill and without a cure.

She took several steps away from him, into the pale lavender light of Jupiter. Its ethereal aura flooded her features with the kind of illumination one only finds on a clear summer's night, deep within a densely foliaged forest. In a clearing. Moonlight filtered by treetops, the engirding atmospheric layers, 485 kilometers of s.p.a.ce.

Carelin thought again of Circe and felt himself ensorcelled by this extraordinary woman. He knew from the first that his affair with herwas stupid and, worse, dangerous. But nevertheless he persisted. It was as if he was split in two. One side of him protested this liaison, the other did not care, and ignored all dangers.

Then, six months ago, the high-speed scrambled transmission had come in and he had been undone. SELENE. The activation code. Selene. G.o.ddess of the moon. Is that why he had thought of the moonlit glade?

”It'san operation centering on Hong Kong,” Daniella lied, and something inside her gave off a long sigh. The patient dying another death. ”Maluta has usurped Mitre, my a.s.set in Asia.” The best lies, she thought, always contained a core of truthor a version of it. ”Maluta's taking over my operation there.” Almost told him the truth. Almost mentioned Kam Sang. What a disaster that would have been! He would have gone straight to Genachev with word of what Jake Maroc could tell them about Kam Sang and both of them would have been dead from that moment.

Maluta would have known the origin of the leak and the evidence of the murder and their adulterous affair would have surfaced. Finis for both of them.

She knew Carelin well enough. His sense of fairness was acute; as was his sense of loyalty. He was a fanatic about both, in fact. His firsthis only reaction would be to run to Genachev. Never considering the consequences for both of them.

Time. That was what Daniella needed most. Time to find a way to defuse Maluta. But Maluta wanted Jake Maroc dead now.

Aware of the ethereal light on her face, she began to move away from him, into the shadows, but Carelin took her arm and held her fast.

”Don't do that,” he said. ”I want to see you.”

Mary, Mother of G.o.d, she thought, don't let him find out the truth. Her mind raced. It was up to her to save them both.

He pulled her close against him so that her scent came to him and a wave of her thick honey hair brushed his cheek.

Because he wouldn't let her out of the light and the light revealed what was behind her eyes, she let her head go forward so that her forehead was pressed against his chest. ”Oh, Mikhail, he's going to take all my power away from me. I can't allow him to do this to me, Mikhail. It will destroy me.”

”You've still got Chimera,” he pointed out.

Daniella nodded. ”I never suspected that he would rise to the levelhe has,” she acknowledged. ”But even an a.s.set of Chimera's caliber will not save me now, Mikhail. Perhaps I'll just shoot Maluta and be done with it.”

”Bang! Bang! Just the way Mickey Spillane writes *em, eh?”

”Stop making fun of me!” she cried.

”Then stop acting like a child. Problems are not solved with a gun. You, of all people, should know that.”

Daniella raised her head. ”But Maluta's got a spotless file. There's nothing in his past to make him vulnerable.” A wave of despair washed over her. What was the point, she thought, leaning against him, of describing how debilitating it was to be under Maluta's thumb; of being the subject of his scrutiny?

He put his arms around her, his face was lost in the fragrant mane of her hair. Never, he thought, had he loved a human being as he loved her. ”Perhaps I can find a way to take you with me when I go to Geneva with Genachev next month,” he said.

”What made you think of Geneva?”

Carelin shrugged. ”I don't know.” He looked around. ”Perhaps it was this place. One does not feel that one is even in Moscow here. It made me think of the Geneva trip, a foreign place, away from Maluta's prying eyes, his veiled threats; away from all the intrigues.”

It made Daniella want to weep, this small kindness in the midst of Maluta's monstrously labyrinthine intrigue. Hers, as well, she realized dully. She had done nothing but lie to Carelin.

”Standing here at the edge of Jupiter's...o...b..t,” Carelin went on, unawares, ”made me think that to us even Geneva might seem like the ends of the earth.”

For an instant, Daniella drew a blank. Like a sleeper awaking from a tomb of dreams, remembering dreaming but nothing more, she heard a reverberation inside her head. What was it?

a the ends of the earth.

Then she had it: Maluta saying in his sardonic, superior tones, Imagine! They would have gone to the ends of the earth for you. They sold their souls to you, bowed their heads before you, conferring to you on bended knee all that made them powerful. For this His cold hands upon her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, squeezing joylessly. And this. And inward against her mons.

But now, oddly, in this atmosphere that detached her from the earth, his words held another meaning. Bowed their heads before you a on bended knee. Why had he used such terms? Did he pull them out of a hat? The hat of his subconscious?

Daniella wondered now what it was in life for which Maluta would travel to the ends of the earth. Bowed their heads before you a on bended knee. Like a G.o.ddess, or a sorceress like Carelin's Circe. In that case, hadn't Maluta already conferred upon her some kind of power? Did he in fact fear her? Is that where his contempt and hate stemmed from?

What, really, did Maluta see in her? What powers, imaginary or real, did he suspect that she possessed? And, finally, how could that power be used against him?

Turning their conversation around again in her mind, Daniella vowed to find out, even if it meant that she must do what she most feared: plunge into that fearful dark star that sucked in all power, that negated all life, Oleg Alexeevitch Maluta.

The fish stared at him with an eye the color of gold leaf. It was a great red tuna, lying on its side. Just below its head, a square paper sticker denoting size and weight was pasted over the scales.

The tuna was one of many at Tsukiji, Tokyo's vast fish market on the banks of the Sumida River.

It was a quarter to five in the morning. A light wind was gusting across an oyster-colored sky. Much of the city lay shadowed, sleeping. In the distance the great steel-and-gla.s.s towers of s.h.i.+njuku thrust upward into the low sky, their silvery tips partially obscured by cloud.

In Tsukiji, the tuna were just being brought in off the boats and trucks for, oddly enough, some of them had been flown in over the pole from Montauk, Long Island. Jake could remember a week during one summer when he had stood on the pier at the most eastern tip of the Island watching the j.a.panese trading representatives frantically bidding for the tuna as the deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng boats docked in the late afternoon.