Part 34 (1/2)

At last the old man's fingers uncurled and Bliss took the opal from his palm. It was warm from his heat. ”Do you know where the Container Terminal is?” he said.

”Along Hoi Bun Road? At Kai Tak.” Kwun Tong, a mainly industrial district near the airport in Kowloon.

The Monkey Man nodded. ”The best time's just before dawn, I'm told.” He looked so morose that Bliss reached out and stroked his unlovely cheek. ”If you're hurt, your father will kill me.”

Bliss laughed again. ”You were always a worrier. I am my father's daughter. What will Fung the Skeleton dare do to me?”

The Monkey Man said nothing, but as she left Bliss noticed that he had switched from tea to Johnnie Walker Red.

Mikhail Carelin lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling. It was an unlovely sight, being as it was water-stained, uneven, the paint so old it was patinaed. Plaster peeled in abstract patterns. When he contemplated this ceiling what he saw was a landscape: the abstract patterns of peeling plaster became continents rising up from a sea of spiderweb cracks and whorls.

Though the bed was comfortable, though there was a well-supplied bath through a partially opened door not five meters away, he was not in his apartment. Rather he was within the crenellated walls of the Kremlin in a suite adjacent to his office, a steamy, noise-wracked s.p.a.ce in winter. In the summer it was stifling. It was next to the great corner office in which Fyodor Leninin Genachev conducted much of his business.

Genachev liked the night. In darkness, he would say, is peace. The peaceful times, Mikhail, are for working. Even in the middle of the most atrocious cacophony one has time to dream.

Carelin, too, preferred the night. But for other reasons. Nights were a time for listening. In the semidarkness of the Kremlin's labyrinthine corridors one could hear the cipher machines, the pockets of night crews manning the worldwide networks of power. Genachev, who was unusally not fond of cliches, was guilty of using one: Somewhere in the world, he would say, it is always daytime. Therefore, there is work to be done.

The night, Carelin knew, was the time for clandestine a.s.signations, suborning of apparatchiki, bribe-taking. Venality was sp.a.w.ning in the darkness and there it fed like a city rat gorging itself on garbage and excrement.

Selene.

Always he was brought back to Selene.

His activation code. He had required nothing more of his source. His mission had been preset, the contingencies outlined, the objective absolutely clear.

And yet a So many things had changed since he had been given the mission's parameters. So many years in the darkness. He had a fondness for the nighttime, looking out windows, so many different windows, but mainly the one in his pink stone house on Gorky Street. There, in another room, his wife dreamed while his world was just awakening. Treachery, deceit, the calm face of the ferret sniffing down holes filled at their far ends with sensitive secrets.

The lights of Moscow at night, winking and glittering, as far off as stars. Like the ceiling at his Kremlin office, he created out of those lights his own landscape.

No man, he had found, was content without a country. He had been deprived of one almost all his life so he played a game with himself, a game of deadly seriousness. He had built his own land, outof the darkness and the strings of lights arcing across the Moskva or along Kuznetsov Prospekt. Muscovites snug in their beds, exhaling the fumes of vodka and cabbage, creating fat, laughing women out of dreamstuff. While Carelin returned to the land of his own creation. Like Dracula rising each night to live again a certain kind of life.

So it was with Mikhail Carelin.

Until his source had beamed him the one word code: Selene, and everything had changed.

He had been trained to lie in the darkness and wait, to take in the night that which did not belong to him and to transmit it far across the sea. He had been trained to kill as well.

With a grunt, Carelin levered himself off the bed. In bare feet he padded across the cold floor. In the bath, he ran the cold-water tap and put his head under the gus.h.i.+ng water.

Snorted as he dried off, slung the towel across his bare shoulders. He glanced at his watch. Three thirty-five in the morning. Genachev was still on the phone with Was.h.i.+ngton. Carelin knew this because Genachev would buzz him as soon as he broke the connection.

At the window, he looked out at the onion domes of St. Basil's, pale and golden in the illumination from the floods. It was not enough, he thought, to say that everything changed when he received the Selene code. It had altered drastically afterward, too. When he had discovered that his source had been killed.

Carelin had only been under discipline to one man. When he was gone Carelin found that he was in limbo. Who could he contact? There was a mole in the organization to which he reported; a mole in such a position at Central that he could not take the chance of contacting anyone else there.

He thought fleetingly about getting out. Letting Selene crumble into dust alongside its creator. But he held no abiding love for Russia though he had been born there. It was only his work that made life bearable. He had understood then that he had no choice, that he must continue as a ferret or he would dry up and blow away like a paper bag.

But a ferret without a Control was nothing.

Who then to contact?

Jake Maroc had been the logical choice. The only choice open to Carelin. As an ex-operative, Jake knew the Quarry inside and out. Based in Hong Kong, no longer connected to Central, he was safe from Chimera, the only man in the world Carelin could trust.

And there was one more thing. Maroc had been Henry Wunderman's best friend; more, Wunderman had been his mentor. Maroc deserved to know the truth. So Carelin had made contact and that had been that.

Until, of course, he realized that he had fallen in love with Daniella.

Now he was G.o.d. To destroy or to create, that was the question. And until this very moment, he had not understood how agonizing the decisions G.o.d must make could be.

From the open door to his office not far away he heard the strident sound of the buzzer, Genachev's call to Was.h.i.+ngton was over. He was wanted.

Took one last look at the nighttime lights of Moscow. If the answer was not there, where would he find it?

The buzzer sounded again and he got out of there. But his mind would not let him be.

Jin Kanzhe was on his way through the portals of heaven when it hit him. He was with the Acrobat. She had a name, of course, but it was more exciting in his mind to think of her as the Acrobat.

He had met her backstage after a particularly compelling performance of the Dazhalen Acrobatic Troupe to which Huaishan Han had dragged him. The old man had fallen asleep in his seat almost before the lights had dimmed, a not uncommon occurrence and one which Jin Kanzhe could predict with frightening accuracy.

Nevertheless, he had quite enjoyed himself. The troupe was nothing short of spectacular. They liked, rather artily, he thought, to t.i.tle each routine. During one called ”Straw Houses,” he noticed the suppleness of body, the feline face that spoke of Northern climes. One woman among many darting about the stage. Yet something about her cut him to the quick. She had, in retrospect, a way of moving over the stage that transcended grace. She moved from her hips; this excited him immensely. He found, in fact, at the end of ”Straw Houses” that he had a rather painful erection.

At intermission, he had the car take the somnolent Huaishan Han home. At performance's end he used his official I.D. to get backstage. That made him something of an instant celebrity, which he liked.

He did not see the Acrobat right away. Lights and sweat, rounds of tea and champagnewhich someone tried to keep him from seeing; he laughed inside at that. A sea of faces, half-shadowed in the odd, overhead theatrical spots turned into corners. Nothing of much interest, really.

He had just about made up his mind that she had beat a hastyretreat when he found her. His heart rolled over, and he could not catch his breath. News of his presence had already spread throughout the backstage area. She seemed prepared for him, flas.h.i.+ng that smile he had seen from the other side of the footlights, and he was lost.

Now, as he entered the soft, moist portals of heaven he heard her groan beneath him. She liked to be vocal and Jin Kanzhe, unused to such a thing in anyone, let alone a female, could not stop himself from coming when she let go like that.

The Acrobat was in the most extraordinary position beneath him. Her oiled flesh, so firm and smooth, rippled like the sea. He watched her ankles part as she moved again, her long legs high in the air near her shoulders. This did something to the contours of her jade gate, raised, presented to him like a sacred offering, that increased their pleasure tenfold. The sides of her calves grazed his neck; his loins began to melt.

He was all the way inside her. Her heat was incredible; he felt as if he had walked into a furnace. He was engulfed in a pool of liquid fire. Her depths, too, were prodigious; she took him in and in and in. Jin Kanzhe felt so inside.

Her hips were dazzling in their movements. She was a human rubber band. He could not believe what his eyes told him was real. He gasped air out of his lungs and she groaned.

He began to shoot heavily inside her and this increased her vocalizing. She heaved like the ocean, the sounds of ecstasy were like the wind in his ears. The smell of their mingled musk was overpowering.

They had been making love for a long time. To Jin Kanzhe it was like walking across rooftops: delicate, dangerous, terribly exciting; in the air, above the hurried stream of everyday life; apart; beyond.

Spurted and spurted into her. And thought of Huaishan Han.

Well, not exactly the old man. It was so odd, he s.h.i.+vered. Abruptly, he felt the strain of their contorted position on his arms. His biceps began to jump and quiver. Sweat ran down the center of his forehead, dripped from the end of his nose onto the burnished flesh between her small firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The Acrobat, herself in the midst of the clouds and the rain, was oblivious. Her face was contorted; she ground up against him, sealing her jade gate onto the base of his still rigid member. Flipped her hips, once, twice, three times. And gave a little yelp.

Jin Kanzhe was unmoved. The image that had risen to the surface of his mind expanded by pleasure clamored for his attention. He could see the study in Huaishan Han's villa. It was nightprecisely whichnight he could not remember. They had gotten drunk together, talking about old timesthe old man running on about s.h.i.+ Zilin, Jin Kanzhe immersing both of them in the h.e.l.l that was Cambodia.

He must have dozed off. In his dreams he heard the sonorous ticking of the old man's clock. Heavy lids, grainy with alcohol, opened to slits. Enough to see the old man staring at him. A shaded lamp caused the hard glitter of those eyes to strike Jin Kanzhe like a physical blow.

Then the old man reached out and pinched Jin Kanzhe. ”Are you awake?” he whispered.