Free Temple of Fear by Nick Carter Page B

that I have declared my own private little war on the Chinese Commies. My daughter told you of this?"
    "A little," said Nick. "Not too much. She said you would clear up everything. I wish you would. There is a lot that puzzles me."
    The room was well proportioned, the furnishings in the Japanese style. Straw mats, a low table on the
tatami,
flowers on the rice paper wall, soft cushions around the table. On the table were small cups and a bottle of saki.
    Matu pointed to a cushion. "You will have to sit on the floor, my old friend. But first — did you bring my medallion? I value it highly and I want it with me when I die." It was a simple statement of fact without sentimentality.
    Nick fished the medallion out of a pocket and handed it to him. But for Tonaka he would have forgotten it. She had told him: "The old man will 3sk for it."
    Matu took the gold and jade disc and put it away in a table drawer. He sank down across the table from Nick and reached for the saki bottle. "We will not stand on ceremony, my old friend, but there is time for a little drink to remember all the yesterdays. It was good of you to come."
    Nick smiled. "I had very little choice, Kunizo. Did she tell you how she and her Girl Scout friends got me here?"
    "She told me. She is a most obedient daughter — yet I had not really meant for her to go to such extremes. It may be that I was a little overenthusiastic in my instructions. I merely hoped that she could
convince
you." He poured saki into the eggshell cups.
    Nick Carter shrugged. "She convinced me. Forget it. Kunizo. I would have come anyway, once I understood the seriousness of the matter. It is just that I may have a little trouble explaining things to my boss."
    "David Hawk?" Matu handed him a cup of saki.
    "You know that?"
    Matu nodded and drank saki. He was still built like a
sumo
wrestler, but now the fat draped him in robes of flabbiness and his features were too sharp. His eyes were deep set, with huge pouches under them, and they burned with fever and with something else that was consuming him.
    He nodded again. "I always knew a great deal more than you suspected, Nick. About you and AXE. You knew me as a friend, and as your karate and judo teacher. I was working for Japanese Intelligience."
    "So Tonaka told me."
    "Yes. I told her that at last. What she could not tell you, because she does not know — very few people do — is that I was a double agent all those years. I also worked for the British. For MI5."
    Nick sipped at his saki. He was not particularly surprised, though it was news to him. He kept his eye on the stubby Swedish K machine gun that Matu had been carrying — it was on the table — and said nothing. Matu had brought him many thousands of miles to talk. When he was ready he would. Nick waited.
    Matu was not yet ready to get down to cases. He stared at the saki bottle. Rain played a tinny ragtime on the roof. Someone coughed somewhere in the house. Nick cocked an ear and looked at the big man.
    "A servant. A good boy. We can trust him."
    Nick refilled his cup with saki and lit a cigarette. Matu refused. "My doctor does not permit it. He is a liar and says that I will live a long time." He tapped his huge belly. "I know better. This cancer is eating me alive. My daughter mentioned this?"
    "Something of it." The doctor
was
a liar. Killmaster knew death when it was written on a man's face.
    Kunizo Matu sighed. "I give myself six months. It is not much time to do the things I would like. A pity. But then I suppose it is always like that — one stalls and delays and puts off, and then one day Death is there and the time is all gone. I..."
    Gently, very gently, Nick prodded him. "I understand some of it, Kunizo. Some of it I do not. About your people and how you have come back to them, the
Burakumin,
and that things are not well with you and your daughter. I know you are trying to make amends before you die. You have all my sympathy, Kunizo, and you know that in our profession