Satori - Don Winslow [58]
Voroshenin felt his own throat tighten. “Is this Hel in our custody?”
“No, the Americans took him. We were happy to see him go, believe me.”
“Do we know what happened to him?”
“I don’t,” Gorbatov said. “Glad to wash my hands of it. Very spooky, the whole thing, if you ask me. On which subject, why are you asking, Yuri?”
“A favor, Piotr?” Voroshenin asked. “Forget I called?”
He hung up the phone.
45
NICHOLAI PUSHED A CHAIR against the wall to create some space in his room, then he stripped down to his shorts and did twenty repetitions of the demanding hoda korosu “Caged Leopard” kata.
He selected this particular form because it stressed close-in fighting — precise strikes that demanded the buildup of force at short range. Starting with the entire room, he performed the kata in increasingly smaller circles, until by the end he barely moved his feet as he fought in the tightening bamboo cage of his imagination.
Although the form included brutal elbow and knee strikes, its principal feature was its unique “leopard paw” hand posture, the fingers bent at the second knuckle but not closed to make a complete fist. The striking surface was therefore thin, just the second knuckles, intended to penetrate a narrow space.
Precision was key.
That, and the concentration of force, and Nicholai practiced until he could generate explosive power in a strike that traveled just two inches before striking its target. He thought he might have as much as six inches to two feet in the actual situation, but didn’t want to allow himself the mental leisure of that luxury.
Physically exhausted but mentally invigorated when he finished, Nicholai sat on the floor, pulled himself into a rigid meditation posture, and envisioned the plan of the Zhengyici Opera House.
He had the floor plan perfectly in mind, and now he worked from the box Voroshenin had reserved, out the hallway, and down a set of stairs. A left turn would take him into the main part of the theater, then into the lobby and out the main doors. But a right turn at the bottom of the stairs led to another short corridor and a door that would lead to the backstage area.
At that point, he could turn right to go backstage or left into the alley behind the theater.
So there it was, and he mentally walked through the escape route. Out of the box, left down the hallway, down the stairs, right down the hallway, left out of the building. He “walked” it twenty times in his mind before adding the next mental level.
Obstacles.
First would be Voroshenin’s guards, but if he performed the strike properly, they would not know anything was wrong for another crucial minute. But he had to consider the possibility of having to fight his way out. There was no way to know how the guards would be positioned, so that would have to be improvised on the spot. But that was the purpose of kata, to train the body to react instantly to any threat, without the fatal necessity of thought.
So he dismissed the guards from his mind.
The hallway outside the boxes should pose no problems. There might be Chinese police, but if the killing of Voroshenin raised no outcry, he should simply be able to walk past them on his “way to the toilet.”
But he mentally slowed his pace, “walking” casually, not as a man who has just killed, but as one who simply needed to empty his bladder.
He walked down the stairs and took a right. At the end of the hallway was a door to the backstage, and there would almost certainly be an employee of the theater, a doorman, to bar the way of adoring fans.
Killing the man would be easy.
But killing the innocent doorman would be a shameful dishonor, out of the question, so now Nicholai mentally rehearsed a nonlethal blow to the side of the neck, to the carotid artery, to disable but not kill. He threw the strike, lowered the man to the floor, and opened the door.
The next door was just to his left, and he stepped out into the cold night air.
Simple, he thought, then chuckled at his self-delusion.
Simple, if you get within lethal proximity