Fatigue insisted. Languidly he brushed his teeth. He'd relieved himself before taking his shower. All that remained was to shut off the lamp and slump onto the futon. In the dark, he saw faint light through the wall beside him, Rachel's shadow moving. Then the light was extinguished, and he heard her settling onto her mattress.
He stared at the murky ceiling, preoccupied by what had brought them here, what possibly awaited them tomorrow, and what their chances were of surviving.
No option, he thought. We have to take the risk. We're compelled to go forward. And if we do survive, what will happen between Rachel and me? Does she just need to feel secure, to have someone devoted to her protection?
Or is that a definition of love? Doesn't everyone want to feel secure? And don't forget, she had the chance to leave. She's putting herself at risk to be here, to be with you.
So what's your problem? What's bugging you?
I'm afraid if I fall any harder in love … When she realizes her protector's only human, with flaws like anyone else, it might be she'll move on.
He shook his head. Don't think so much. What is it Rachel keeps saying? Abraham believed by virtue of the absurd. Faith is absurd, and so is love. You've got to trust.
Don't worry about the future. Now is what matters.
On the futon, he turned toward the wall that separated him from Rachel. He suddenly realized that Akira had arranged for Rachel's futon to be set directly against the other side of the wall just as Savage's was directly against this side. If it weren't for the wall, he'd be able to reach over and touch her.
The wall. His pulse quickened as he understood how truly delicate Akira had been. Rather than raise the indiscreet issue of whether they preferred two rooms or one, he'd left the choice for them to make in private. All Savage had to do was …
Reaching over, he slid a section of the wall to one side. He saw the contour of her body beneath the quilt. She was three feet away, and his vision had adjusted to the darkness sufficiently for him to see that she lay on her side, her face to him.
Her eyes were open. She smiled.
His soul ached. He lifted his quilt. She shifted from beneath her own and joined him. When he lowered the quilt to cover their heads, he felt as if they were in a sleeping bag in a tent.
Her mouth found his. His heart pounded faster. They held each other, pressing, squirming. He was on her, then she on him. Their kiss became more insistent. They tugged at each other's pajama bottoms, soft cotton sliding down over thighs, knees, and ankles. He drew his fingers up her leg, stroked her stomach, cupped a breast.
“Please,” she murmured.
With his head beneath the quilt, he raised her pajama top, kissing her nipples, their hardness increasing, swelling between his lips.
“Please,” she whispered.
When he entered her, she gasped. He shuddered, gently stroking, wanting to slide so deeply within her that he'd be one with her. She dug her fingernails into his back. She clutched his hair. At once she kissed him again, mouth open, tongue probing as if she wanted to enter, to be one with, him.
As they climaxed, their kiss became so full that Akira couldn't possibly have heard them, for they swallowed each other's moans.
6
Savage woke in greater darkness. The lamps in the hallway and in other parts of the house had been turned off, their glow no longer penetrating the paper walls of his room. The house was silent. Rachel lay next to him, an arm across his chest, her head against his. He smelled the scent of her hair, the sweetness of her skin. The memory of their lovemaking made him smile. He felt privileged to have her beside him and more than that, fulfilled.
Stretching his legs, enjoying the comfort of the futon, he studied the luminous numbers on his watch. Seventeen minutes after three. He'd slept more than six hours. Normally that would have been sufficient for him, but after the exhausting flight from America and the languor he'd experienced after Rachel and he finished making love, he was surprised that he hadn't slept longer. Maybe his body clock hadn't adjusted to the change in time zones, he thought. Maybe he subconsciously felt it was morning in America instead of the middle of the night in Japan.
Rachel sighed in her sleep and nuzzled against him. He smiled again. Go back to sleep, he told himself. Get all the rest you can. While you can. Surrendering to the warmth of the quilt, he yawned and closed his eyes.
But at once he reopened them.
To his left, toward the back of the house, possibly outside the house, he heard a muffled cough. Tense, he almost sat up. Then he realized that the cough must have come from Churi, who was standing guard outside the house.
Straining to listen, Savage waited five minutes but didn't hear another cough. Relax, he told himself. But he wondered if Churi, who'd been trained by Akira, would have allowed himself to cough or if his body absolutely insisted, to cough with sufficient force to be heard inside the house. Akira would have told him, don't do anything to reveal your position.
Still, Akira had mentioned that Churi wasn't fully trained. It could be that Churi's discipline had momentarily failed.
Savage shrugged off his apprehension and snuggled closer to Rachel, absorbing her warmth. Abruptly he jerked his head up.
The faint dry scrape of rice straw, of something applying gradual pressure to the woven fibers of a tatami mat, made him stare toward the wall that led to the corridor.
When he heard a second subtle scrape, he had no doubt —they were footsteps. Carefully placed. Slow and cautious. From bare or stockinged feet. If not for the paper-thin wall, they'd have been undetectable.
Akira going to the bathroom?
No, Savage instantly decided. There'd been no sound of a section of wall being opened.
Churi patrolling the corridor?
Why? The interior was guarded by intrusion sensors. Churi was useful only if he watched from outside.
Eko? Perhaps she'd wakened early, as elderly people often did, and decided to perform some necessary chore, possibly preparations for a special breakfast.
No, Savage thought. Although her room was farther along the corridor, toward the back, he was sure he'd have heard a section of the wall slide open when she entered the corridor.
Besides, the delicate footsteps weren't toward the rear of the house, where the kitchen and the bathroom were, but directly between Akira's room and Savage's.
He almost touched Rachel to wake and warn her. Pulse rushing, he decided not to. Even if he pressed a hand to her mouth, she might make a sound that would alert whoever was in the corridor. Warily, silently, he raised the quilt, doubling it over her. His nervous system quivered. Adrenaline flooded through him. Blood surged from his extremities toward his stomach, burning. He contracted his chest muscles, controlling the reflexive urge to breathe rapidly, and stealthily rose to a crouch.
But he didn't dare move from the futon. If he stepped on the mats, he'd make the same subtle noise the intruder had and warn him. He had to stay immobile, his reflexes primed, till circumstances forced him into action.
He didn't have a handgun. Prior to reaching Dulles Airport, Akira and he had thrown their .45s down a sewer because they couldn't hope to get the weapons past the X-ray machines and metal detectors at the airport's security gates. If the intruder entered Savage's room, Savage would have to get close enough to fight with him hand to hand.
His muscles hardened. He stared toward the dark wall, hearing a slight scratch—a section of wall being gingerly opened.
Not Savage's wall. Beyond it. On the other side of the corridor, someone was entering Akira's room.
Now. Savage had to act before Akira was taken by surprise.
Stomach on fire, he took a step, and suddenly flinched as the wall to his room burst inward, wood and paper flying, two figures hurtling toward the floor. They landed so hard that the figure on the bottom grunted from the impact, breath knocked out of him.
Two men.
Savage recognized Akira's silhouette on top, chopping the edge of his hand
toward the other man's face. The intruder was dressed completely in black, a dark hood over his head. As he grunted again, this time from Akira's blow, he fired a pistol equipped with a silencer. The spitting bullet struck the ceiling, and Savage dove.
But not straight ahead to help Akira. He assumed that Akira could control the threat. Instead he dove to the right, over Rachel, landing beside her, dragging her into the adjacent room. She'd woken, screaming, when the wall burst inward and the men slammed onto the floor. She screamed again as Savage tugged her, desperate to remove her from the intruder's line of fire.
The intruder shot again despite repeated blows from Akira.
The bullet struck the wall near Savage and Rachel.
She was too breathless from shock to scream now. Whimpering, she followed Savage's lead and surged to a running crouch. Desperate, disoriented in the blackness of the unfamiliar house, she reached the next wall before she realized, and unable to control her momentum in time to tug at a section of the wall, she crashed through it, sprawling in a frenzy on the mats of a farther room.
Savage dragged her to her feet and pushed. “Keep going. Get to the front of the house. Stay low.”
The instant she stumbled away from him, he spun to rush back to Akira. As he did, his temples throbbed when he realized where he was—the room in which Akira had shown Rachel and him the samurai swords. Savage charged toward the wall on which they hung, grabbed one, unsheathed it, and surprised by how long it felt, pointed it toward the ceiling lest he cut himself, and hurried through the gap in the wall.
The intruder's pistol spat again. The bullet punctured a wall as Savage rushed through Rachel's room into his own. Desperate, he saw Akira chop the side of his hand against the intruder's face yet again, and the man lay still.
Savage exhaled.
But at once he shouted, “Akira, behind you!”
Another dark figure loomed, filling the hole in the wall, arm extended, aiming.
Akira rolled.
With a muffled whump, the assassin's bullet missed Akira's back and struck the motionless man on the floor.
Savage still held the sword so it was pointed toward the ceiling. Using both hands to grip its handle, mustering the full strength of his arms, he whipped the blade down. At the same time, he released his grip and hurtled the sword toward the man in the corridor.
He'd aimed the blade's tip toward the intruder's chest. In the dark, he couldn't see the sword flying. Hoping to hear cloth tear, flesh being sliced, instead he heard the clang of metal against metal.
The blade had struck the intruder's pistol.
The handgun thumped on the floor.
The intruder pivoted, his murky silhouette disappearing. Footsteps charged along the corridor toward the back of the house.
Savage heard bodies collide, Eko gasping, someone falling. He rushed toward the hole in the wall.
Akira got there before him, stooping, fumbling for something. “Where's the gun?” He barked a Japanese expletive when his pawing hands failed to find it. Cursing again, he grabbed the sword and lunged through the hole in the wall.
Savage followed in time to glimpse the intruder stoop beside a body, pick up another sword, and rush through the open back door.
The body on the floor in the doorway was Churi, who lay on his chest with his legs toward the porch.
With a wail of outrage, Akira, too, leaped over him, landed warily, ready with his sword in case the intruder was hiding in wait for him, then scurried off the porch into the blackness of the garden.
About to race down the corridor and join the pursuit, Savage suddenly paused when his foot struck an object. The handgun Akira had been searching for. He scooped it up and ran.
Eko staggered from her room, shaken by the intruder's impact against her.
Savage pivoted sideways, frantically passed her, saw a dark stain on Churi's back as he leaped over him, and crouched on the porch, aiming the pistol toward the garden.
From the handgun's shape, Savage knew that it was a Beretta 9 mm, the sidearm for NATO and the U.S. armed forces. A silencer projected from its barrel. Its magazine held fifteen rounds.
He shifted nervously toward the shelter of the steps that led to the hot tub and continued staring toward the garden, aiming the Beretta. A three-quarter moon and the spill of streetlights from beyond the garden's wall made the garden less murky than the house's interior. He saw the shadows of rocks and shrubs on the golden sand. He was even able to see the dark curves of the rake marks in the sand.
And two sets of widely spaced footprints that showed where Akira had chased the intruder toward the greater blackness of the rear of the garden.
Though Savage strained his vision, he couldn't see farther than thirty paces beyond the porch. Toward the back, a dark cloud seemed to have settled. He heard traffic beyond the wall, a distant car horn, a faraway squeal of brakes, and abruptly amid the darkness at the rear of the garden, steel clanged against steel, a sharp, hard, high-pitched reverberation: swords colliding.
Another clang instantly followed. And another, fierce and urgent.
Savage sprang from behind the steps. Chest tight, he raced toward the garden. The sand was cold, his bare feet sinking into it as he scrambled past a rock, then a shrub. The closer he sped toward the rear of the garden, the better he could see. Moonlight flashed off swords. The clang of their impacts intensified. He jerked to a stop, startled by a dark figure rushing backward toward him, sword raised, blocking a thrust, darting to the right, striking in return.
The flurry of movement was so unexpected, a blur in the night, that Savage couldn't tell if the figure was Akira or the intruder. He raised the Beretta, prepared to fire the moment he had an unambiguous target. The two figures circled each other, both hands gripping their swords, the blades on an upward angle.
Akira! Savage recognized him.
Akira had been the figure who'd abruptly appeared, rushing backward. Savage aimed the Beretta, but before he could shoot Akira's opponent, the two men struck at each other, parried, darted sideways, struck yet again, and rapidly circled.
Savage concentrated, focusing along the Beretta's sights. Sweat streamed off his forehead. His trigger finger was tensely poised. If they'd just stop moving, he thought. Stand still for a second! That's all I need! A second! No more! Just time for one clean shot!
But the figures kept striking, darting, exchanging positions. The intruder lunged into Savage's line of fire. Before there was time to shoot, Akira replaced the intruder.
The swords collided more rapidly.
Savage kept aiming.
“Stay out of this, Savage! He's mine! For Churi!”
Reluctant, Savage lowered the handgun. If he shot the intruder, if he denied Akira the chance to maintain his honor by avenging his student, Akira would never forgive him.
Stepping back from the fight, Savage watched in dismay. Helplessness soured his stomach.
Akira's blade flashed toward the intruder's chest. The intruder twisted away and struck at Akira's head. Or seemed to, for the movement was a feint. As Akira thrust to block the sword, the intruder twisted again and swung with stunning speed toward Akira's right thigh.
The force of the blow would have severed Akira's leg. But breathing fiercely, Akira leaped backward. The moment he hit the sand, he dodged to the left, avoiding a further eyeblink-rapid strike. While the blade hissed past him, Akira swung. Lunged. Swung again, forcing his opponent to retreat. Lunged and swung again, anticipating that his opponent would dodge to the left.
The intruder reversed his direction and thrust. Akira veered nimbly, attacking with a flurry of blows—upward, sideways, downward—all the while advancing, his speed and grace astonishing.
Abruptly he pivoted sideways and crooked his left arm in front of his chest. Resting the flat of his blade on his forearm, gripping the sword with his other hand, directing the tip of the blade straight ahead, he took short, smooth, relentless steps toward his opponent.
The opponent ba
cked away.
Akira kept advancing.
The opponent continued his retreat, unexpectedly shifted to the left, and began to circle Akira, who stopped his advance and turned in place, remaining eye to eye with his circling enemy.
The intruder attacked. As Akira dodged, he slipped on the sand, lurched backward, and bumped against a rock. His blink of surprise made Savage moan.
Heart swollen, Savage jerked the Beretta up, aiming.
The intruder slashed toward Akira.
Akira darted sideways. The intruder's sword whacked chips from the rock, and Akira swung upward, slicing his enemy's torso from the lower left to the upper right. With the sound of a zipper being opened, Akira severed the intruder's intestines, stomach, and rib cage.
Blood fountained. Organs cascaded. Wheezing, the intruder dropped his sword, stumbled backward, jerked grotesquely, and toppled into what looked like a black pit behind him.
The pit was a pond. The intruder splashed heavily, water erupting. As the waves subsided, he floated, face up, eyes wide, motionless.
Numb, Savage approached. In the night, he couldn't see the crimson that tainted the water, but he imagined it. Intestines floated. Despite his years of witnessing death, he wanted to vomit.
Akira stared at the corpse. His chest heaved. Swallowing audibly, he turned to Savage. “I thank you for not interfering.”
“It took all my self-control.”
“But I knew that I could depend on you.” Sweat glistened, reflecting moonlight, on Akira's face.
“Listen,” Savage said. “In the house. I didn't try to help you right away because—”
“You had to see to our principal's safety first.”
“Right. Our principal. The reflex was automatic. It had nothing to do with the way I feel about her.”
“And if she hadn't been our principal but simply the woman you love?” Akira asked.
Savage didn't know the answer.
“In that case, I think it's fortunate,” Akira said, “that the woman you love is our principal.”
“Yes,” Savage said, distressed, at the same time grateful that Akira had absolved him. “Extremely fortunate.”
The Fifth Profession Page 30