Satori - Don Winslow [80]
“Guibert” opened his eyes.
“Where are we?” Nicholai asked.
“You don’t need to know,” Yu answered.
The air, while cool, was still warm for winter, and the nanmu tree Nicholai could see through the window didn’t grow up north. The brief dialogue he had overheard as the attendants came in and out was unintelligible to him, not Han Chinese at all, so he guessed that it was some southern tribal dialect.
“Sichuan or Yunnan,” he said.
“Yunnan,” admitted Yu. “In the Wuliang hills.”
“Why?”
“Beijing was unhealthy for you.”
Nicholai remembered his manners. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“Gratitude is misplaced,” Yu answered. “I was doing my duty, Mr. Hel.”
88
“HOW LONG HAVE you known my real identity?” he asked Yu.
“Since before you entered Beijing,” Yu answered. He recited Nicholai’s history to him — his birth in Shanghai, his removal to Japan, his killing of Kishikawa, his torture and imprisonment by the Americans.
The Chinese seemed to know it all. Nicholai could only hope that they did not realize the depth of his connection to the late Yuri Voroshenin.
“Am I a prisoner?” Nicholai asked.
“I would prefer to call you a guest.”
“Can the guest get up and leave?”
“The question is academic in any case,” Yu answered. “The reality is that you cannot get up, much less walk. And, even if you could, you have no place to go. They are hunting for you everywhere, Mr. Hel. This might be the only place in the world where you are safe.”
A sadly accurate summation of the reality, Nicholai thought, since the moment I killed Kishikawa-sama. The locations and circumstances change, but the fact does not.
I am a prisoner.
He heard Kishikawa’s voice. If you have no options, then it is honorable to accept your imprisonment, although you might consider seppuku. But you have options.
What are they?
Nikko, you must find them yourself. Examine the go-kang. When you are trapped and can find no escape route, you must create one.
Again, please, how?
It is your kang, Nikko. No one else can play it for you.
“You wanted Voroshenin dead,” Nicholai said, probing.
“Obviously.”
“To create a rift with the Soviets.”
Yu nodded.
“And you rescued me from the American ambush because …”
“How often would we get a chance to obtain an American agent so motivated to cooperate?” Yu asked. “I’m sure you can tell us names, places, methods of operations. After all, you agreed to be rescued.”
Hel had understood the monk’s warning and signaled in turn that he understood, the act of a drowning man reaching out for the rope. Surely he knew it would come with a price.
Nicholai said, “I will tell you nothing.”
“The Americans betrayed you,” Yu answered. “Why would you hesitate to betray them in turn?”
“Their dishonor is their own,” Nicholai responded. “Mine would be mine.”
“How Japanese.”
“I accept the compliment,” Nicholai said. He tried to sit up, but the effort was painful and enervating. “I will not become an informer, but I will force the Americans to honor the arrangement they made with me.”
“And how will you do that?” Yu asked, amused at this wounded man who could barely support his own weight.
Yet there was something in Hel’s eyes that made Yu believe him.
89
“WHERE IS HE?” Singleton demanded.
“I don’t know,” admitted Haverford.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Alive?”
“Again …”
Diamond didn’t bother to conceal his smirk. Singleton frowned at him and then turned his attention back to Haverford. “You don’t know much.”
“I’m trying to find out.”
“Try harder.”
Haverford thought briefly of defending himself. Voroshenin was dead, apparently at Hel’s hands, and the Chinese and Russians were snapping at each other’s throats. And while Hel had possibly escaped, he hadn’t been found — not by Moscow or Beijing anyway —because there had been no blowback at all. Apparently no one had connected Voroshenin’s assassination to the Company.
“I want him found,” Singleton said. “Do you understand?”
“I do,” Diamond said, stressing the first-person pronoun and sounding like