Satori - Don Winslow [6]
“I assure you that I will lie perfectly still,” Nicholai answered. Through the slits that were his eyes he could now see her preparing the syringe. She was a Celtic-looking healthy type, all pale skin, freckles, rusty hair, and thick forearms. He exhaled, relaxed his hands, and slipped them through the bonds.
The nurse looked terribly annoyed. “Are you going to make me call the doctor?”
“Do what you think you must.”
The doctor came in a few minutes later. He made a show of checking the bandages that covered Nicholai’s face, clucked with the satisfaction of a hen that has just laid a splendid egg, and then said, “The surgeries went very well. I expect a successful result.”
Nicholai didn’t bother with a concurring banality.
“Keep your hands off your face,” the doctor said to him. Turning to the nurse, he added, “If he doesn’t want anything for the pain, he doesn’t want anything for the pain. When he gets tired of playing the stoic, he’ll call you. Take your time getting there if you want a small measure of revenge.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“I do good work,” the doctor said to Nicholai. “You’re going to have to beat the women off with a stick.”
It took Nicholai quite a while to work through the idiom.
“There will be some minor paralysis of some small facial muscles, I’m afraid,” the doctor added, “but nothing you can’t live with. It will help you keep that indifferent front of yours.”
Nicholai never did call for the shot.
Nor did he move.
4
CAMOUFLAGED BY NIGHT and the monsoon’s slashing rain, the one they call the Cobra squatted perfectly still.
The Cobra watched the man’s feet plop down in the mud and slosh onto the trail that led toward the bushes where he would do his personal business. It was his routine, so the Cobra was expecting him. The assassin had sat and waited many nights to learn the prey’s habits.
The man came closer, just a few feet now from where the Cobra waited in the bamboo beside the narrow footpath. Intent on his destination, the man saw nothing as he wiped a sluice of rain from his face.
The Cobra chose that moment to uncoil and strike. The blade — silver like the rain — shot out and slashed the man’s thigh. The victim felt the odd pain, looked down, and pressed his hand to the bloody tear in his pants leg. But it was too late — the femoral artery was severed and the blood poured around his hand and through his fingers. Already in shock, he sat down and watched his life flow into the puddle that quickly formed around him.
The Cobra was already gone.
5
IF MAJOR DIAMOND was pleased that Nicholai Hel had accepted the deal, he wasn’t overly demonstrative in his enthusiasm.
“Hel’s a half-Nippo nut job,” Diamond said, “with scrambled brains.”
“Yes,” Haverford answered, “you had something to do with scrambling them, didn’t you?”
“He was a Commie agent.” Diamond shrugged. Sure, he’d roughed Hel up a little, used him as a guinea pig for some of the new pharmaceutical techniques. So what? They were at war with the Communist bloc and it was a dirty war. Besides, Hel was an arrogant young shit — that superior, condescending attitude of his just made you want to hurt him.
Diamond thought he’d left him far behind when he transferred to the new CIA and left Japan for the Southeast Asian assignment, but the troubling Hel was like a kite tail. They should have executed him when they had the chance — now they were going to use him as an asset?
It was just like that pansy-ass pinko Haverford, another over-educated, know-it-all little prick. Shit, Haverford had fought with the Viet Minh during the war, and what the hell kind of name is Ellis, anyway?
Now Haverford said, “Hel was not a Communist agent, a Soviet agent, or an agent of any kind. As your ‘interrogation’ of him proved, by the way.”
Haverford despised Diamond, from his looks to the core of his alleged soul. The man resembled nothing more than an overstrung guitar with a pair of thin lips and drooping eyelids, and the inner man was even uglier.