Free The Death and Life of Nicholas Linnear by Eric Van Lustbader

Shanghai, China
    The sound inside the coffin was akin to that of a vault door closing. The acoustics were eerie, as if the interior was a miniature theater, its unseen audience hushed and waiting for the curtain to rise and the lights to snap on.
    There were no lights, but the sound reverberated in the confined space, doubling and redoubling like pinballs crisscrossing each other.
    Nicholas Linnear lay, hands crossed over his chest, as he returned to consciousness. He was dressed in the midnight-blue tuxedo he had been wearing earlier, when he had been drinking Champagne, snacking on caviar, watching the diamond lights along the Bund.
    Sound was the first sense that returned to him, sight was the last. In the absolute darkness, there was nothing to see. He heard the functions of his body: his breathing, the blood pulsing through him. Then, moving outward, the sound and the smell of the coffin: the soft creak of wood so aromatic the scent caused his nostrils to flare. They had buried him in a raw pine box. Cheapskates. Then the shifting of the soil around the coffin, softer even than the pine.
    All of this gave him heart. Nevertheless, sweat crawled down the back of his neck, the indented center of his spine. The reptile brain that ruled his body’s autonomic nervous system knew it was in dire straits. The amount of oxygen he had to breathe was severely limited. He went into chi -breath, slowing his pulse, his metabolism, needing only minimal oxygen now.
    He could smell the life in the earth around him—and the death. It was as if he had found himself in a place where the two were equal, where what lay between hung in a delicate balance. He could live or he could die.
    Ever so slowly, his right hand moved to his trouser leg, to the ribbon of satin that ran vertically down the side. His fingertips found the small section of loose stitches, picked them open one by one. In the cramped space, in the darkness, this took some time, and all the while he was aware of the air inexorably draining away, however slowly he used it up.
    Finally, he felt the metal, warm from being against his skin. An old friend. The six-inch blade slithered out from its satin sheath. With his left hand, he probed the lid of the coffin until he found a seam between the boards. Inserting the point of the blade into the seam, he twisted it. The blade was made of Damascus steel, ten thousand layers, divided equally between pure steel for hardness and iron-rich steel for flexibility. Light and dark; yin and yang. It was a blade akin to those used by Japanese samurai to commit seppuku , ritual suicide, but more special. It had been a graduation gift from Ang, forged by his own hand. There was no other like it.
    Nicholas worked the blade back and forth until the soft pine splintered. A dusting of earth drifted down like snow. He repeated this process in two other spots along the same board. Then he turned on his side, jammed his shoulder against the board. It gave way.
    Pale earth poured in. Nicholas was ready for it. Deflecting the cascade with one hand, he worked on the second board. Now that he could sit up, he had better leverage with the boards on either side. The onrush of earth almost choked him. Grabbing a large piece of the first splintered board, he raised it vertically over his head, pushing through the loosely packed dirt, wriggling his way upward behind it.
    His lungs were near to bursting as he breached the surface, and he sucked in the humid night air. It had never felt so sweet to him. Four feet. The grave was shallow. They must have been in a hurry.
    Several hundred yards away, large ships were tied up to loading docks. The largest one—an LNG tanker the size of five city blocks, carrying 260,000 cubic meters of liquid natural gas—rose above the rest. The Justine —its name emblazoned in the arc lights.
    His ship.
    They had been waiting for him on the wide balcony off the crowded ballroom, densely packed with business tycoons and their