The Miko - 02 Read Online Free

from the women they loved the most in life.
    He took a deep breath now, felt the change in pressure, the ozoned air, so thin and dry it clung to the back of the nose.
    The 747-SP was banking to the left in a slow, lazy arc, chasing the streaking cloud layer until pale green fields, striped with perfectly regimented furrows, began to appear. Then, in the distance, the snow-capped crown of Fuji-yama, majestic and immutable. He was home again.
    Then they were into the heavy smog layer, lying like a pall over a festive party, drifting in an ever-widening circle from the intensely industrialized areas of the swarming metropolis.
    “Christ,” the stocky-muscled man beside him said, craning his neck for a better look, “I should’ve brought my goddamned gas mask.” A pudgy finger stabbed out at what lay beyond the Perspex window. “They’ve got an inversion layer worse than the San Fernando Valley.”
    His lined, aggressive face was absorbed in the disappearance of the rising landscape outside. He had the eyes, Nicholas thought, of a seasoned Roman general, canny and weary at the same time. Both were a result of hard-fought experience, battles on two arenas, the huns in front and the political infighting behind.
    The man’s hair was short cropped, a gunmetal gray; he was dressed in a handmade lightweight business suit of a conservative cut. He was a man who over the years had become accustomed to a measured degree of luxury, but the twist of his nose, the thickness of the lips indicated that such had not always been the case. He had not been born to money, Raphael Tomkin, millionaire industrialist for whom Nicholas now worked. He was the man whom Saigō had been paid to kill; and though Nicholas had protected him, defeating Saigō, this was the same man who, Nicholas was certain, had ordered the death of Detective Lieutenant Lew Croaker, Nicholas’ best friend.
    Nicholas watched the profile of Tomkin’s powerful face without seeming to. American power, Nicholas had come to learn, was often merely skin deep, and for him to incise beneath that layer to the soft interior was not difficult. But Tomkin was atypical of his fellow board chairmen. His wa was very strong indeed, proof of his inner determination and rock solidness.
    This interested Nicholas intensely because his vow to himself and to the kami of his dead friend was to gain access to the interior of this man and, once having possession of that knowledge, sow the seeds of his slow destruction.
    He recalled his thoughts on learning that Tomkin had ordered Croaker’s seemingly accidental death in a car crash just outside Key West. Croaker had been there on his own time, and only Nicholas also knew that he had been running down the one solid lead in the Angela Didion homicide. She had been a high-fashion model who had once been Raphael Tomkin’s mistress.
    A modern rendering of a well-known tactic of Ieyasu Tokugawa, greatest of all of Japan’s Shōgun, whose family ruled for more than a thousand years, keeping tradition alive, safe from dilution from the West: To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend. And once you become his friend, all his defenses come down. Then can you choose the most fitting method of his demise.
    Nicholas’ vow of revenge had led him, despite Justine’s fervent arguments, to accept Tomkin’s offer of employment a year ago. And from the first day on the job, all their energies had been directed toward this moment. Tomkin had been brewing this proposed merger of one of his divisions with that of one of Sato Petrochemicals’ kobun. Any deal with the Japanese was a difficult enough task, but this kind of complex merger of two highly sophisticated entities was utterly exhausting. Tomkin had admitted that he needed help desperately. And who better than Nicholas Linnear, half-Oriental, born and raised in Japan, to render that assistance.
    The wheels bumped briefly against the tarmac and they were down, feeling the drag as the