by Swigart, Rob
The wrought iron gate was standing open. The apartments were in complete darkness.
Chazz crouched down and peered low toward the Frenchmen’s car. “I can’t see anyone,” he said softly.
With a touch on Chazz’s shoulder, Cobb moved back, around the wall. Chazz followed him. “That way,” Cobb gestured, “is a papaya plantation. Other side of the condos is a small vacant lot used to store road construction material— sand, graders, that sort of thing— and to the north a series of small apartment complexes. Out there is big open field to the next cross street. Back toward the mountains there’s a network of dirt roads, irrigation access and trail maintenance. I don’t think there’s any development in there, but I can’t be sure. Those guys were watching the condo, and they followed us. What are they doing here? If Phoenix is dead, they shouldn’t be here. Unless he’s controlling them from beyond the grave.”
The moon floated from behind a cloud and painted the field to the south in broad silver strokes.
“I’ve got to get inside,” Chazz said. “We’re awfully exposed here, and Patria and Orli are in there.”
“I’ll boost you.” Cobb cupped his hands and Chazz stepped into it. He grunted as he went over the wall.
“You all right?”
“Ribs hurt a little.” Chazz’s voice came from the top of the wall. “Come on.” He reached down, and soon the smaller man was beside him. They listened.
A car came down the street, but they couldn’t see it from their position on the wall. They could hear it stop, though, and a car door open and close. Soon there were voices, speaking urgently in French.
They dropped inside the wall and moved to the front. Tree ferns and the drooping leaves of a banana tree rustled around them. Chazz reached out and slowly closed the gate. When it clicked shut the four men across the street looked up. The two men froze in place. After a moment the heated discussion continued.
Cobb and Chazz slipped across the entry walk and up the steps to the condo’s front door.
It was closed but unlocked. They went in.
Across the living room the curtains in front of the door to the lanai filled and deflated gently. A faint nimbus of moonlight reflected from the back garden wall turned them into ghosts. The nearly invisible outline of the sliding door was half open.
Chazz moved quickly to Orli’s room and opened the door. He disappeared inside as Cobb moved toward the sliding door. Before he could push the curtain aside Chazz was at his elbow. “She’s gone,” he whispered. “There’s no one here. Patria, Kimiko, gone.”
Cobb nodded. He moved the curtain and a dark form loomed up in front of them.
Takamura took a step back. The figure, the dark outline of a man, lurched toward them, bouncing his shoulder off the frame of the door as it stepped into the room.
Chazz moved sideways and dropped into a centered hanmi, his awareness flowing out, taking in the room, the sounds in the street, the soughing of the trade winds through the curtains. He listened to the breathing coming from this creature before him, slow; it was slow, slightly labored. There was no threat.
“Who are you?” Cobb Takamura asked in a quiet, conversational voice.
The figure stood, swaying slightly. Cobb reached out and took the man’s arm. There was no reaction. Gently he led him into the room. Beside the couch he said, “Sit,” and the man sat.
“Do we risk a light?” Chazz asked. “There are four people out there watching us. If they see it…”
“We’ll be ready for them, but there is no front window in Orli’s room. We can take him in there and close the door.”
They moved the man into the second bedroom, and Chazz snapped on the overhead light.
Vincent Meissner blinked once. Otherwise he gave no reaction.
“What the hell happened?” Chazz asked.
“Mr. Meissner?” Cobb maneuvered the heavy man to a straight-backed chair and sat him in it. Meissner stared straight ahead through blackened eyes and said nothing.
“He looks like the others, like that woman in Tahiti and Tracy Ann.”
Takamura nodded, bent over Meissner’s face. “You watch the door. We were wrong about Phoenix. It looks like he rose from his ashes after all.”
The four men in the street finished their discussion. The Algerian opened the trunk, and they quickly unzipped their dive bags. They removed the air tanks and laid them on the sidewalk, where they unscrewed the top halves of the tanks. They took an assortment of weapons from inside. The tanks were fitted together and the dive bags stowed in the trunk in under four minutes.
They crossed the street and fanned out, surrounding the complex. One tried the iron gate, found it locked, and signaled the others.
They went over the wall and slipped into the garden in uncanny silence. Two of them moved up the short flight of stairs to the lanai of 1A. In the bedroom, Cobb and Chazz were looking into Vincent Meissner’s eyes.
Chazz stepped back and moved to the bedroom door. Behind him Cobb said, “Someone’s blacked his eyes. I wonder…”
“Shh.” Chazz switched off the light. “On the lanai. Two. The others probably in front. I’ll cross to the kitchen.”
“All right,” Cobb murmured, drawing his automatic. “I don’t like guns, but I’ll make an exception this time.” He waited by the door. Chazz was plunging through the arch to the kitchen nook when the shooting began and the lanai door exploded in a fountain of glass. Sofa stuffing and splinters from the coffee table flew into the air and whirled around.
Behind Cobb, Vincent Meissner whimpered.
Two men plunged through the wreckage of the doors and split up, one to each side. They covered the room with machine pistols. A moment later, the lock on the front door blew away in another blast of noise and smoke, and two more men entered and split up. The four men, one in each corner, covered the room.
Chazz waited in the kitchen. In the bedroom opposite, Cobb stood immobile. The apartment was in darkness. The four men called to each other in brief, urgent whispers. They moved around, checking the room. As one of them entered the kitchen, Chazz seized the hand holding the weapon, swiveled his hips a half turn, flipped the wrist in a merciless kote-gaeshi reversal that rotated the gun in a swift arc across the ceiling. A line of holes stitched their way through the plaster toward one of the men near the lanai door before the man dropped the gun and followed it to the floor. Chazz flipped him over, dragged him deeper into the kitchen, and, straightening the man’s arm, leaned on his wrist while he scooped up the pistol.
One of the others was approaching the bedroom. When the gun went off, he turned toward the kitchen, lifting his weapon. Cobb Takamura hesitated a moment, considering the best method of painlessly and politely immobilizing him. Would it be best to point his weapon at the man and inform him of his disadvantage, or would that waste precious time and allow the others an opportunity to react? The man raised his weapon and aimed. He was about to fire, so Cobb Takamura shrugged, reversed his Smith and Wesson, and clobbered the man smartly on the right temple where a square of bandage peeked out from under his knit cap. The man fell with a short grunt and lay still.
The other two shouted at each other and fled through the broken glass, spraying bullets behind them. The curtains billowed, their footsteps clattered on the stairs, and they were gone.
In the kitchen, Chazz smiled. One of the men was limping.
The apartment was a shambles. Plaster filtered down from holes in the ceiling. Water was leaking from a ruptured pipe somewhere in the walls. No piece of furniture was undamaged.
“Let them go.” Cobb turned on the light and picked up the phone. “Dead,” he said.
“No.” The man on the kitchen floor groaned. “But you broke my arm, you bastard.” His accent was thick.
“I doubt it,” Chazz growled. “Where’re my wife and child?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. Get up.” He pointed the machine pistol at him. “I don’t really know how to use this thing, so
you’d better be careful. You might really end up dead. You tried to kill me once before, and I’m not feeling kindly.”
“I meant the telephone is dead,” Cobb said. “We’ll need a roadblock.” A car started up and screeched away. “Funny,” Cobb added. “You’d think they’d go back to the highway.”
“I don’t care where they go,” Chazz said. “Family’s more important.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS
“It says his name’s Chausseur, Stéphane,” Cobb was reading the man’s identification. “The unconscious one must be the Algerian. Looks like you hit him the same place I did.”
“Nasty. Very nasty. Too bad.”
“Yeah, too bad.”
The Algerian breathed loudly through his nose. Vincent Meissner was still in the straight-backed chair in Orli’s bedroom staring into space. Chausseur sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against the wall next to the television. Chazz had used the television cord to bind his hands behind him.
“French Military Intelligence,” Lieutenant Takamura concluded.
“I knew military intelligence was impossible. When you add French, you have a paradox. What’s that?” Chazz tilted his head, listening, then moved onto the lanai. “It’s Orli. Come on.”
“Perhaps I’d better stay here,” Cobb suggested drily. “For the moment.”
Chazz glanced at the Algerian. “Right.” He was gone.
In a few minutes he was back with the child in his arms.
Kimiko came in right behind him. She went to her husband and punched him on the arm. “What kept you?” she asked. Her voice was calm, but there were bright points of red on her cheeks. It was the only sign she was angry.
“Ah, Mrs. Takamura.”
“Don’t Mrs. Takamura me, Lieutenant. You were too late. They got Patria. They almost got me and the child.”
“Then we must find her, Mrs. Takamura.” Cobb took her elbow. She shook off his hand. He looked helplessly at Chazz, who frowned at him. He was carrying the baby back and forth, patting her on the back.
“Mrs. Takamura, I would like you to do something. I will remain here and guard these villains while you go up to the corner and use the pay phone to call the desk sergeant. Tell him I need traffic to look out for a tan Toyota sedan, Alamo rental, license 389LKJ.” He wrote it down on a slip of paper from his notebook. “Last seen in Kapaa, direction unknown. Then have the desk sergeant call Sergeant Handel at home. Have him come here immediately. Then I would appreciate it if you would also call Sammy Akeakamai. He might like to get a little exercise. And have them send an ambulance for Meissner here.” He looked at Chazz, sitting now in a chair with the baby.
Chazz shook his head. “We have to find them. The other two have gone to warn Phoenix, and he has Patria.”
“My thoughts exactly. Do you mind doing that for us, Mrs. Takamura?”
“I think I would prefer to hold that gun while you go. I am not afraid of guns, and you might think of something else to ask for on the way to the telephone.”
Cobb nodded. “Very well.” He handed his wife his Smith and Wesson and left the room.
“Tell me what happened,” Chazz said. He ignored the two French soldiers, although the Algerian was beginning to moan and roll his head back and forth.
Kimiko went through the events of the evening. When she was finished, she went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. She drank it, then drew another and gave it to Chazz. The bright spots on her cheeks were fading. She did not offer any water to Chausseur, and gave the moaning Algerian only a brief glance.
“Thanks,” Chazz said.
“Don’t mention it.”
“Do you have a theory?” Chazz asked her after a moment. Orli had fallen asleep, and was drooling lightly on his shoulder. He touched her hair.
“Ah. About the Phoenix, you mean? He is a demon, of course.”
“A demon?”
“An evil spirit who does only harm: that is a demon. He does evil, but he wants others to know he does it. So he rubs our noses in his work. He kills women. I’m very frightened for Patria.”
“You think he’s insane, not open to negotiation? How does he get these others to work for him?” Chazz gestured at the two men. The Algerian had stopped moaning and was looking at the ceiling with wide eyes.
“He has a power over them, or he’s convinced them he’s doing something good. I think they believe they are working for him and he is working for the government. But he isn’t.”
“No.”
They lapsed into silence. Chazz looked at his child and thought of his wife. He tried not to think too much about her, about just what he would say when he saw her. And what he would do to the man who took her.
He began to think about Shinawa, his teacher and his friend, an old man with a tranquility he could only envy.
Shinawa had said the worst kind of people were those who, because they were cruel, caused others to suffer. There were those who caused suffering to themselves as well, but Chazz did not believe Phoenix was suffering. There was no doubt he was cruel.
“What is your intent?” Shinawa had asked him.
He answered that his goal was to live a life of wisdom and kindness.
“That is the highest ethical goal of aikido. To protect yourself and your attacker. Do not forget, though, that the first goal is to protect yourself.” Shinawa had told him that, and Chazz was close to forgetting it, because he needed, above all else, to protect someone he loved. And he was afraid he was going to fail.
That fear could destroy him. If it did, it would also destroy Patria.
“There are those who are like letters written in running water. Anger and provocation pass by unnoticed. You are not there.” Shinawa had also said that, and Chazz admitted to himself that it was true: He was not there. He was angry and afraid.
The anger could destroy them.
He settled into himself. The room receded, grew dim, vanished. His awareness flowed out into the room and filled his own mind at the same time. He felt the Algerian breathing and dismissed it. He felt Kimiko, still wrapped around her own fading terror, seated and breathing softly. He felt Chausseur, twisting in his discomfort, looking for the moment when Chazz’s attention would lapse.
He let his own breath settle, grow limpid and continuous, without breaks between inhalation and exhalation, a continuous circuit into his body and through his hara and out into the universe again. He felt the night outside, the small clouds floating across the bright face of the moon.
He felt his anger, the hot point of it, shape itself into a weapon. And he felt himself set it aside. He did not throw it away, he did not get rid of his anger. He set it aside, within reach, for when he would need it. “The first goal is to protect yourself.” That included Patria, and Orli sleeping on the couch beside Kimiko Takamura.
He must purge himself of all intention. Then he would be there, in the place he must be, when he needed to be. He would not plan to do one thing or another. He would just be there.
He rose softly to his feet, almost languidly, and walked toward Chausseur, who had already pulled his own feet under him and was rising. Whatever he intended to do vanished, and he sat down again, his feet tucked under his thighs. He glared at Chazz, who did not seem to notice him as he passed by on his way to the kitchen.
Chazz opened the refrigerator and took out a formula bottle, set a pan of water on the stove, and set the bottle in it. He stood calmly as the metal ring on the stove grew hot and as the water developed small bubbles on the bottom and began to roil. After a few minutes, he took the formula out and tested it on his wrist.
By the time he had returned to the couch, Orli was awake. He picked her up and gave her the bottle, and she drank greedily without giving a cry.
Kimiko smiled. “That was amazing,” she said softly. “The timing.”
Chazz nodded but said nothing. He was looking into his child’s face.
Cobb Takamura entered. “Sammy’s on his way,
” he said.
“Why Sammy?” Kimiko asked. She watched Chazz shake the now-empty bottle before the baby’s eyes. Orli chuckled with delight, reaching for it.
“Sammy has the maps.”
“Oh. Thank you, Mr. Takamura, for illuminating me.”
“Ah, Mrs. Takamura. Sarcasm? The car of the other two members of this gang of four thugs did not return to the highway when it left here. Rather, it went to the west. There is nothing to the west except a papaya plantation. Do you understand?”
“I am not stupid, Mr. Takamura. There must be a building in the mountains somewhere. A hideout for the demon Phoenix.”
“Just so.” Takamura smiled broadly. “The traffic people will be looking for the car, but I believe it went to the nest of the Phoenix and there we shall find Patria.” He did not add, if she is still alive.
Chazz nodded and stood. “Kimiko, would you mind taking Orli to your house? She’ll be safe with you. She’ll sleep through the night, now, I think, and we are going to need the night.”
“Of course.”
Almost as soon as Kimiko had left, four officers arrived in a patrol car. Cobb sent two of them back with the prisoners. The others he sent out to check the surrounding streets, just in case. An ambulance took Meissner away, and Sergeant Handel arrived, looking tousled and grumpy.
“You took me away from an intimate situation, Lieutenant. The lady is mad at me.”
“Hazards of the job, Scottie. Believe it or not, there are even times Mrs. Takamura gets irritated with me.” He carefully avoided looking at Chazz.
“Okay. What’s up?”
As Cobb was briefing him, a heavy tread thudded up the wooden steps, and Sammy Akeakamai barged into the room. The ruins of a wooden toothpick jutted from the corner of his mouth, which was grinning wide enough to reveal about two-thirds of his widely spaced teeth. He carried a rolled bundle. A .38 revolver bulged the tails of a hideously colored Aloha shirt decorated with lovely topless wahinis with hibiscus in their hair. The girls displayed themselves provocatively on a sunny beach across his belly and back.