Free The Kaisho by Eric Van Lustbader Page A

later, Nicholas had hurled into this lake.
    He could feel Iss-hogai now, just as he could see it as it struck the water so many years ago, plunging vertically to the bottom. And now, as past and present began to collide, it seemed so close to him that he could reach out and touch it.
    He had thought he was quits with it then, that he had no more need of its power to inflict death, but like his past with his father, like his present with Justine, there was an essential element, unknown, as yet unwritten, that remained unresolved.
    The Colonel, whom Nicholas loved and revered, had nevertheless had a secret life wholly apart from Nicholas and Cheong. Nicholas had discovered years after the Colonel’s death that he had murdered a dangerous political radical named Satsugai. He was the husband of Nicholas’s aunt, Itami, and though she despised him, still she was his wife. The Colonel’s action had had the profoundest effect on Nicholas’s life when Satsugai’s son, Saigo, had sought to murder Nicholas in revenge.
    The phone call from Mikio Okami had stirred waters that, for a long time, had remained unruffled.
    The Colonel’s secret life. What had he been up to with Mikio Okami? Why had he made friends with a Yakuza oyabun? Nicholas had no answers to these questions. He only knew that, in seeking them, he was being drawn once again toward his father—and toward the unknown past.
    At last, he rose, went as silently as he had come, returning through forest and glade, past dreaming gardens, along stone paths laid centuries ago, to the kitchen of his house.
    For the longest time he stood looking out the window at the cryptomeria and the cut-leaf maples whose boughs were dancing in the wind he had only moments before felt against his flesh.
    At last, he turned to the counter, reached for a cup, measuring out the macha, the finely cut green tea leaf.
    He took up the reed whisk, waiting for the water to boil.
    Harley Gaunt was in the middle of a crisis of Brobdingnagian proportions. Bad enough that Tomkin-Sato Industries was losing accounts, pressured no doubt by retrocessive Democrats espousing pernicious isolationist economics with the feverish zeal of born-again Christians, but now the corporate headquarters here in Manhattan was literally under siege by consumers incensed by what placards on the street below misidentified as “consorting with the enemy.”
    All chickens eventually come home to roost, Gaunt thought as he stared gloomily out his office window at the gathering demonstration. As he watched like a hawk in its aerie, he saw a CNN remote TV truck pull up. Within minutes, the local TV stations were represented, then the networks, as usual dead last.
    Christ, he thought, I need Nicholas over here. We’ve ridden the economic roller coaster of our merger with Sato International all the way up to the top of the loop, and from where I’m sitting the ride down is going to be scary as hell.
    His intercom buzzed, and he answered curtly, “Suzie, is that Mr. Linnear on the line?”
    “I’m afraid not, Mr. Gaunt,” his secretary’s voice spoke out of thin air, “but your ten-o’clock appointment is here.”
    “What ten-o’clock appointment?”
    “You remember, he called late yesterday. I told you I put it on your calendar just before I left for the day.”
    “I don’t…” But Gaunt was already turning from the stomach-churning scene out his window, his eye catching the hastily scribbled notation on the calendar section of his computer terminal.
    “Who the hell is Edward Minton?”
    “He’s from Washington,” Suzie said, as if that solved the riddle. “He flew in first thing this morning on the shuttle to see you.”
    Gaunt’s stomach knotted. He didn’t like the sound of that. Those Democrats on the Hill were positively incendiary on the subject of the Japanese. According to them, an economic war was brewing, and all Americans required the benevolent protection of the Democratic Party in order to avoid