A weak green signal from below rose up to the image of Fiddleback, then the monster's icon vanished. Looking back toward the island, she saw the green sphere begin to dull. As its color faded, she saw a light that matched the cufflinks. Sinclair is there, and they are going to kill him.
Fighting the wrenching sensation of nausea, she forced herself back into her body. She tugged a pair of jeans on, stepped into some sneakers and darted out of her room without giving thought to calling the others or even taking the new leather jacket Natch had talked her into buying. She hit the button summoning the elevator, but after waiting impatiently for 15 seconds, she took the stairs and raced down five floors to the street level.
Dashing through the lobby, she turned sideways and squeezed through the slowly opening automatic glass doors. A liveried doorman stared at her with surprise on his face, then composed himself. He turned and pointed to a taxi, then summoned it when Rajani nodded.
The taxi pulled up beside her, and the doors slid open on a cushion of air. The little green light on the dashboard turned red as she climbed in. From the back seat she pointed out toward the bay. "That way, the island, go!"
The old driver looked at her, then off where she was pointing. "Kimpunshima, hai?"
"Go, go!" She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of crumpled yen-notes and dolmarks and threw them down into his lap. "Go!"
She barely noticed the wave of happiness pouring off the man as the taxi lurched forward. She didn't hear the squeal of rubber as he took off, nor did she feel the beaded seatcovers as the G-forces pressed her back into the seat. The garish neon lights strobing past made no impression on her because she had retreated deep inside and had deadened her external senses to concentrate on the cufflinks and their connection to Sinclair MacNeal.
Holding them in her hands, and pressing her hands tight between her knees, she focused her consciousness down and pushed it through the cufflinks and out again. As she did so, she visualized an ethereal thread winding aimlessly through the city. Shooting energy into it, she brightened it and forced it to become more substantial. Like an empty hose with water being pumped through it, the thread plumped and straightened out.
Filling it full, she made contact.
At once she felt elated and frustrated. The link worked to let her know where he was and what he was feeling, but she could not communicate directly with him. She remembered one time when Dr. Chandra had showed her how to build a telephone with two paper cups, two buttons and string. While the makeshift device did transmit sound, it was not sturdy enough for serious communication.
At least he's safe right now! She took heart in that and anchored her end of the link in the back of her mind. Opening her eyes, she looked out and, between shoreline warehouses, saw the brooding island that dominated the harbor. "There!"
"Hai, Kimpunshima, hai." The driver steered his hack to the right, cutting off a lane of traffic and popped down a side street. Turning to the left, he raced through rows of warehouses. He deftly dodged weathered crates and trash piles. All the while he laughed aloud and kept up a running commentary of which Rajani caught little and understood even less.
A feeling of doubt, of hesitant confusion, shot down the link. Too little information came through for her to decipher it, but she did pick out the image of a telephone. Yes, call. Then it struck her that even if he did call, there would be no one there to answer it.
She pounded her fist on the top of the front seat. "Faster, faster."
The cab took a right on two wheels and merged via the shoulder lane onto the Kimpunshima bridge. Tall sodium lamps sank the whole bridge into a pinkish gray. The cabbie shouted curses at other drivers and swerved wildly in and out of traffic. Finally, he broke clear of the pack and punched the accelerator. Reaching the far end of the bridge, he hit his brakes enough to bring his speed back into the low hundreds of kilometers per hour and steered into the heart of Kimpunshima.
To Rajani, the only difference between the island and the city of Tokyo itself was the intensity of feelings she had coming through the link. Danger! She slapped the passenger-side window. "This way! We're close now. Hurry!"
The driver dutifully took the next right and came to a screeching halt as the dozen members of a bosozoku biker gang ran their big American motorcycles around in a circle in the middle of the street. Clad in black leather and chromed chains, they called derisively to pedestrians and brandished chains to threaten the cars they had stopped.
The sensation of fear sizzling down the link nearly overwhelmed Rajani. She tore at the door handle and opened the cab's rear door just in time to flatten one of the bikers. Stepping on the stunned man's chest, she vaulted from the cab and ran down the street. She heard people yelling at her and the sound of motorcycle engines being gunned, but they meant nothing as fear and surprise invaded her through the link.
Running as fast as she could, Rajani cut through alleys and vaulted fences. She chose her path unconsciously, letting the growing strength of the link reel her in. Through it she gained a sense of water, so she cut toward the shoreline. As she came out of an alley and into the grassy wedge of a park, she saw a jeep-like security vehicle pull up beside a cinderblock wall.
A woman got out of the vehicle with a rifle in hand and climbed up onto the hood. From there she stepped onto the roof, then jumped over to the top of the wall. Rajani heard gunshots, then saw the woman crouch and bring what the Blood Crips had shown her to be an AKM up to her shoulder.
"Sinclair!" she screamed as foot-long flames shot from the automatic rifle's muzzle. Rajani saw a secondary spark, then the woman flew back off the wall. She landed hard on the car's roof, then bounced off and lay dead in the street. He got her!
The moment of triumph Rajani felt in that died as shock and pain crashed in on her through the link. It pounded at her. It would have driven her to her knees, but she caught herself on the security vehicle's open doorway. Despair and resignation flowed through the link like blood through a sliced artery in the pain's wake. «No, I won't let you die!»
Rajani scooped up the AKM and cleared the damaged clip. She picked another one up from the ground where they had spilled from the woman's ammo pouch and jammed it home. Cranking the charging lever back and letting it snap forward, she leaped up onto the hood, clambered onto the roof, then made the short leap to the cinderblock wall.
Gunsmoke filled the courtyard below her. Off to her left, she saw a blocky mass of bricks and Sinclair MacNeal. Opposing him, nestled in an office building, she saw four men. One, radiating confidence like heat pouring from a bonfire, sighted down the thick tube he had resting on the windowsill.
"Clear!" he yelled. "I'm going to smoke the bastard!"
Clutching the gun at waist level the way the Blood Crips had done when talking about their combats, Rajani yanked back on the trigger. Still selected for fully automatic fire, the AKM kicked out all 30 of the bullets loaded in the clip. Impressive muzzle flashes lit the patio as the hail of bullets raked their way through the unbroken panes in the conference-room window.
All the field stripping and dry firing she'd done with the Blood Crips hadn't prepared her for recoil. The AKM's muzzle tracked up through the sky and twisted her around the right, flinging her off the wall. Crashing onto her back on the vehicle's roof, she somersaulted over her head and landed hard on the ground. Her head smacked the sidewalk and the smoking AKM bounced off toward the rear of the vehicle.
Stars burst in front of her eyes, then a secondary explosion ripped through her, complete with thunder and smoke. A red fireball shot into the air and transformed itself into a greasy black cloud, then chunks of debris started pelting her and the jeep. The windscreen cracked as half a cinderblock punched through it. Smaller pieces of concrete pinged and clinked off the vehicle, then a hissing sand-rain condensed out of the smoke and splashed gritty sheets over her.
Rajani shook her head and rolled over onto her stomach. Pushing off the ground, she stood and leaned heavily against the j
eep. Two more gunshots prompted her to duck, then she saw the figure of a man limping and firing back through the hole. She started to run toward him, then stopped instantly as he shifted the gun to cover her.
"Who the hell are you?"
"I am Rajani." She dug in her pocket and held her left hand out to him. "I have your cufflinks."
"Hell of a valet service the hotel has." He snarled as he hopped toward the jeep and leaned on the hood. "Can you drive? No, wait, I saw you shoot." He hopped around to the driver side and slid into the driver's seat, then bashed out the rest of the windscreen. "Well? C'mon."
Rajani ran to the passenger side and tossed the cinderblock clear of her seat. She barely settled into it when Sinclair, letting his left leg hang out of the driver-side opening, shifted into drive and stomped down on the accelerator. "Don't know who you are, but thank you. You saved my life back there."
"I am here with Hal Garrett." Rajani braced herself as Sin swerved around a couple of bicycles. "We were worried about you when you were not at your hotel."
Sin winced and pressed his head back onto the headrest. "So, you black-bagged my room and kept my cufflinks for a prize?" His breath hissed out through clenched teeth, and Rajani felt white-hot pain stab through the link. "How'd you find me? I left no clues to where I was going to be."
Rajani could sense, through Sin's pain, that he was in no shape to understand any explanation she would give him. She also knew that he might black out at any second and, given the speed they were traveling, that would be dangerous. "This alley. Turn right and stop the car."
"Are you nuts?"
"I found you, and I stopped them from killing you. Trust me. Stop the car."
Reluctance pulsing through the link, he did as she asked. "Now, stay there," she commanded. Swinging out of the jeep, she ran around through the twin headlight cones and squatted down near his bloody shin. "This may hurt."
"You mean it might hurt worse?"
With the gold nail on her right index finger she sliced down through the fabric of his trousers, then peeled the cloth back. The dark, meaty wound brimmed with half-coagulated blood. She saw flecks of white in it, and she thought most of them were little chips of stones.
She started to reach around behind his leg, but Sin shook his head. "There's an exit wound, it's through and through, it feels like a lightning storm knotted up down there."
Rajani looked up and made eye contact with him. She caught his shock as he finally saw her slitted gold pupils. Her eyes—they're not natural!
«As natural as yours are, Sinclair.» Rajani reinforced the old link with him and pushed on through the stronger link. As she had with Hal Garrett, she sent a message to portions of his brain, spurring them into action to help him heal. She also triggered the production of endorphic painkillers to dull the throbbing from his leg. A wave of contentment passed over him, causing her to smile as she withdrew from his mind.
Sin stared at her and blinked his eyes. "Lady, have you any idea what you did?" He blushed and shook his head. "Christ, you're better than morphine."
"Is that good?"
"In this case, that's great." Sin slid himself forward and out of the jeep. "C'mon, they'll be tracking this thing. We'd better abandon it."
Rajani frowned. "How do you know that?"
"I don't." Sin winked at her. "But that's what I'd be doing if I were running their operation. And the two of us are going to be damned conspicuous on the street." He limped over to a storm-drain grating. "You've got a suit on. Do you swim?"
"They have an Olympic-sized pool at the hotel." She hooked a thumb through her suit's shoulder strap. "I used it today."
"Well, let's go down into the hole then." He pulled the grate up and waved her toward the dark opening. "You won't get any gold for swimming down here, but chances are you won't get any lead, either."
Coyote stared at the Yidam as the creature reached up and unfastened the gold cloak clasp at its throat. The heavy, dark garment fell to the floor, for the first time affording Coyote an unobstructed view of his opponent. "My God, what are you?"
The reason for the Yidam's extraordinary height was the second shoulder girdle and pair of arms located a foot beneath the first pair. Set slightly back, the long, slender arms ended in long-fingered hands capped with gold talons, but they were not identical to the upper pair. They did not have its bulging musculature, nor did they possess the slender gold lines tracing from the talons up along the arms and over the shoulders. Coyote also noticed similar piping running from the gold claws on the creature's feet up its legs to the yak-hide loincloth and around to its back.
Moving more swiftly than he could imagine anything that size moving, the Yidam closed. Its upper hands grabbed his wrists and pulled his arms out straight from his sides. Lower jaw agape, its lower arms came up and took hold of either side of his head. "You did not slay me when you had the chance in Storm. Now I will see if you are what you believe yourself to be."
Their eyes met, and Coyote recoiled as the Yidam's ice-pick consciousness pierced his brain. Coyote felt like a lock with a crude pick jammed into it. He tried to fight him, but found himself unable to grapple with the alien mind. Though powerless, Coyote tried to pull away from the contact, but succeeded only in encysting part of his conscious mind.
The Yidam used no finesse to sort through his mind—he just pounded on in. He sorted through memories like a detective pulling all the clothes from a dresser drawer and tossing them over his shoulder. Coyote watched as the two months he could remember of his life were examined and then discarded casually. It seemed to Coyote that all he had done as Tycho Caine to thwart Fiddleback in Phoenix only heightened the Yidam's distrust.
As the claustrophobic memory of waking up in a body bag enfolded Coyote, he felt the first slowing of the Yidam's probe. The creature hesitated as it came up against a wall. Coyote knew this was the drug-induced amnesia his predecessor had subjected him to. You even anticipated something like this, he thought to himself in a mental salute to the man who had made him into Coyote.
«You expect a biochemical barrier to stop me?» The Yidam's contemptuous laughter echoed through Coyote's skull, making his brain feel like the clapper in a giant bell. «Behold, your body betrays you.»
Coyote suddenly saw his own mind as a complex, three-dimensional network of interconnected neurons and synapses. The blocked areas comprised an egg-shaped area outlined in red. Each nexus point into that area had a small, hard, red dot glowing on it. They pulsed angrily like hot coals beneath the kiss of a bellows.
Other areas of that neural net began to glow under the Yidam's direct influence. In turn, Coyote felt other parts of his body respond and flood his bloodstream with hormones and chemicals. As they coursed up into his brain, he watched the embers dull, then the first of them winked out.
Coyote screamed as the Yidam burst through that first roadblock. Suddenly, instead of being trapped in the small world comprised of two memory months, Coyote emerged like a snake from an egg. He found himself in a dark world that slowly expanded as the chemicals the Yidam had started his body manufacturing dissolved the barriers. The Yidam, preceding him and drawing him along in his wake, gleefully threw memories at him.
Like a spectator watching someone else, Coyote saw who he had been in random snippets of his life. He saw himself as a child studying detailed anatomical texts and working with cadavers. He caught glimpses of martial arts exercises in which human bones were substituted for the wooden boards others would have been instructed to break. He relived hours and hours spent in dim chemistry labs preparing poisons and explosives.
As each nexus opened up, Coyote rebuilt his cognitive network. Cohesive bits of information linked up to form new connections both within the previously sealed area and out again to his more conscious memory. He did not feel reincorporated with what and who he had been in the past, and he took efforts to maintain that distance as more bizarre and curious events sizzled through his mind.
He watched himself
study a victim through the telescopic sight of a custom-built, .50-caliber sniper rifle. At the same moment he realized he had built the weapon himself and had hand-crafted the slug, he felt his right index finger twitch. The woman's head exploded like a balloon filled with red oatmeal. In the emotions that flickered past, he sought remorse or regret and he found it, but only that he'd clearly wasted three grains of powder in the shell that killed her.
Coyote went cold as he realized he had to be a sociopathic personality. Yet the second he made that judgment he rejected it because of the things he had done since he became Coyote. A sociopath has no conscience and thinks only of himself. An amnesiac, while possessing no memory of his past, still operates within the boundary of his normal personality. It follows that I have something of a conscience, a loyalty to something, that guides me and that I was able to transfer over to Coyote and his mission.
The Yidam continued his ruthless sorting through Coyote's lifetime. «There is, Coyote, there is. I will find it, and then you will see what you really are.» The Yidam increased his pace, probing memories for bare milliseconds before discarding them.
As the world of Coyote's past swelled, he began to visualize details in the darkness. Little stars began to glow in the night sky, but a dim haze made it difficult to see all of them. Below him, the world began to take shape. Off in the distance he saw the great curve of China's coast outlined in gold. Beyond it, Korea's dagger-like peninsula stabbed down into the black ocean and toward the islands of Japan.
Coyote began to feel vibrations from the haze. He realized it must have been the monks' chanting about the same time he saw he had centered himself above the lamasery. He also knew, as he looked east again, that he had spent most of his life in Japan. He quickly chided himself because he had known that fact from the file his predecessor had prepared on him, but now he knew it and, somehow, that felt far more significant.
Then, as the Yidam cried out triumphantly, Coyote saw a green-ringed pulsar rising where the sun should have been. As its burning pupil swept around, a bolt of light impaled Japan. The pupil passed twice more, its pace increasing, then it spun up to the point where it became a green band encircling the sphere's oasis.
Evil Ascending Page 21
