High Flight

by David Hagberg

  “Just tea?”

  Yamagata helped her with her chair. “Just tea,” he assured her.

  They got their coats and headed down one of the paths. Chance could scarcely believe that she was going along with him. But whatever Yamagata was, she didn’t think he was a rapist. She was a big girl, fascinated but not befuddled. She had a good husband who was simply going through a bad time. She was not going to jeopardize her marriage.

  “Humility, cleanliness, and simplicity, these are very important to a Japanese,” Yamagata explained. “Everything springs from these three virtues. From these comes beauty, elegance, and the courage to live not only the present but to face the future.”

  “You’re different from us,” Chance said foolishly.

  Yamagata took her arm as they neared the cabin, which was a chalet-type structure with a sharply sloping roof. The smell of wood smoke drifted on the still night air. Small yellow lights softly illuminated the path, which had been swept clean of snow. “You cannot imagine how different. But after tonight you will understand some things about us for the first time.”

  A few yards from the chalet’s front deck, Chance pulled up short, beginning to wonder if this situation was getting out of control. Not only had the path been cleared, but the snow on either side of the path for as far as she could see into the darkness had been meticulously raked into patterns of gentle swirls and graceful ridges that caught the light from each lantern and reflected it at lovely angles.

  “I’m pleased that you notice,” Yamagata said, watching her. “Humility springs from simple labors, the results of which are cleanliness and simplicity not only of surroundings but of one’s inner self.”

  “It could have snowed again and covered your work. Or the wind could have destroyed it.”

  “Then I would have begun again.”

  Inside, he hung up their coats and had her take off her shoes, which he put with her purse and his shoes out of sight. A small table in the entry hall held a broad earthenware bowl filled with water. To the left were two white cloths and to the right a beautiful arrangement of flowers.

  “First we cleanse our fingers,” Yamagata said, showing her how to dip her hands into the water, then dry them.

  The short carpeted corridor opened to the living room, a fire burning on the grate the only light. Normally the room was furnished with sectional couches, chairs, coffee tables, television and stereo, and a dining-room arrangement. But all of the furniture had been removed. The only items in the big room were a very low table placed in front of the fireplace in the center of a five-by-eight tatami. The table held a cast-iron pot of water simmering on an intricately fashioned charcoal brazier, a porcelain pot, a tiny handleless cup, a bamboo spoon and bamboo whisk, and a small lacquered box.

  The wooden floor gleamed richly in the flickering firelight, and the entire room, walls, rafters, ceiling, every single surface was spotlessly clean. The effect was overwhelming. Intimidating on one hand, strangely reassuring, even comforting on the other. Yamagata, or someone he had hired, had gone to a great deal of effort to make everything perfect. But he’d said simple labors made for humility, and that he’d worked two days on the preparations. He did all this, and Chance was impressed. Yet the overall effect was alien. Different. Non-Western.

  She stepped back, stumbling into his arms. “Oh.” She looked up into his eyes, her heart beginning to pound.

  “Cha-no-yu,” he said, reassuringly. “I think you are beginning to understand. But wait.”

  He led her to the low table where she had to hike up her dress to sit on the mat. He gracefully lowered himself across from her. She was mesmerized by him, by the surroundings. Everything within her wanted to get up and leave, but she could not.

  “I ask if you would like to take tea, and you reply that it would be a great honor, but I should not go to any trouble.”

  “It would be a great honor,” Chance said. The words wanted to catch in her throat. “But please don’t go to any trouble for me.”

  “It is no trouble. It is my honor.”

  His voice was soft, his motions slow and precise. She could believe that each movement had been practiced often. He opened the lacquered tea caddy and using the bamboo spoon placed a measure of green tea powder into the cup. Replacing the spoon to its precise position, he poured hot water into the cup, replaced the iron pot on the brazier, and using the whisk delicately mixed the powder and water. Next he added a spoon of cold water from the porcelain pot, stirred the mixture again, and replaced the spoon as before.

  He picked up the cup in both hands, bowed to Chance, and offered it to her.

  “Return my bow, take the cup, and drink three times. Delicately. Leaving just a little.”

  She did as she was instructed. The tea was at perfect drinking temperature, but tasted odd. Like flowers, with a hint of some unidentifiable spice or spices, not unpleasant. She looked up.

  “Finish it, and return the cup to me.”

  She did so, languidly as if in a dream, and he repeated the ritual, making a second cup of tea that he again offered to her.

  “Refuse. Tell me that I should taste the tea myself,” Yamagata said.

  She complied, and he studied the contents of the cup for a long moment before he sipped three times, rested for a few seconds, the expression on his face serene, and finished the tea.

  He made a third cup in precisely the same fashion as the first two, which Chance took, and a fourth cup, which he drank.

  She was floating. The odors of the fireplace, the charcoal brazier, and the tea were distinct and separate in her senses, wonderfully soothing. Sensual. She was beginning to understand.

  Yamagata helped her away from the table and undressed her, his movements just as slow and precise as they had been making tea.

  He was seated naked in front of her, and he brushed rose petals against the erect nipples of her breasts. The effect was hypnotizing. She was seduced into a gently swirling whirlpool. Warmth. Pleasure. Caressing her body, pulling her beyond anything she had ever experienced or dreamed of.

  They were sitting, half reclining, side by side, and he was inside her from behind, motionless, yet waves of sexual pleasure coursed through her body. She began to understand that he was increasing and decreasing the size of his penis, rhythmically, and she began to contract the muscles of her vagina in sync with him.

  “I love it,” she murmured. She did not want to break the spell. She never wanted it to end.

  He kissed her neck, increasing her pleasure tenfold.

  Then his fingers found her clitoris and in consort with everything else, even with the music that seemed to be playing somewhere, he teased and played with her until she did understand. Everything.

  She never wanted it to end. “I love it,” she said again.

  “Talk to me, Chance,” Yamagata said into her ear. “I will listen.”

  Louis Zerkel had become increasingly nervous over the past twenty-four hours. He had diverted his attention from testing the heat monitor subassembly until he’d finished the repeaters and the closed-circuit television shunt Mueller had requested. The Faraday cage had been completed, and the monitor they had stolen from InterTech along with one of the repeaters was safely protected within its electromagnetic confines. Whatever signals were generated by the system would remain within the system. No one wanted an uncontrolled repeat of the Dulles crash.

  Louis had not figured out what the extra circuitry in the CPU was used for. All of his diagnostic tests had come up with nothing. He’d hoped that by having the actual unit to test, figuring out what was going on would be easy. But it still made no sense to him, and his inability to accomplish something he thought was little more than basic electronics was frustrating him.

  He’d expected to see a modified signal coming from the monitor when the keying pulse was sent, decoded, and processed. A reversal in polarity of some of the critical temperature-monitoring sensors, for example, would cause the engine to rapidly overheat and destroy
itself while sending indications to the Flight Management Computer in the cockpit that engine temperatures were well within parameters. But there were no feedback signals into that section of the subassembly.

  “How much longer?” Mueller asked.

  “I don’t know,” Louis admitted. “I’ll know better after this test. The entire system is on line this time.” Louis had set up his Faraday cage and subassembly test breadboard in the basement. Extra lights had been strung up, and some of his test instruments had been brought down along with a computer terminal connected to his mainframe upstairs. Wires snaked across the dirty concrete floor, indicators blinked, the audio-pulse generator connected to the encoding sequencer warbled and beeped, and a white-noise generator that protected the low-frequency sections of the subassembly hissed like a radio tuned off station. But something was missing, Louis thought. Some critical part of the destructive me chanism.

  “When will you finish this test?” Mueller asked.

  Louis flipped on the computer monitor and watched as the encoding multiplexer homed in on the correct pulse, and seconds later locked on. The heat monitor subassembly was cocked.

  “Now,” he said.

  Mueller stepped aside. Reid was in Washington, and Glen was asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It was just the two of them down here.

  Louis adjusted the oscilloscope connected to the input and output sections of the CPU, timing it against the subassembly’s GO-One clock, then keyed the walkie-talkie shunted directly to one of the repeaters.

  “Boom,” he said into the mike. After a short phase delay the CPU delivered a modulated spike to the extra ground wire. Louis stared at the scope. The output signal was less than ten milliseconds duration, but information had been piggybacked onto it. A message had been sent to the engine sensor frame.

  “Was that it?” Mueller asked.

  Louis continued to stare at the scope.

  “Does it work?”

  The system was incomplete, Louis thought. One more test. He had to make absolutely certain. He needed to know one more thing for sure. There could be no room for error.

  He turned to the German. “You have to go back to San Francisco, or Portland. I need the engine sensor frame and wiring harness.”

  Mueller’s expression was unreadable. “Is this necessary?”

  “Yes,” Louis said.

  “Then I will wake your brother and we’ll get it for you.”

  Louis turned his gaze to the monitor. “What do you think about that?” he mumbled.

  “Who do you work for?” McGarvey asked.

  “Does it matter?” Eto responded.

  They were headed out of the mountains to Narita Airport. McGarvey’s bag was in the trunk. His passport had been exit-stamped with today’s date. They had thought of everything, their organization spectacularly smooth and extremely effective. It would be no use to fight them here and now. Later, on a battleground of his own choosing, he would even the odds. Whatever Kamiya had arranged to neutralize him would be good. But nothing or no one was impossible to break.

  “Out of curiosity—MITI or Mintori Assurance?”

  “If I told you, I don’t think you would comprehend.”

  “Try me,” McGarvey insisted.

  Eto was exasperated. “I am bushido—”

  McGarvey chuckled. “You’re another Mishima fanatic, is that it, Eto-san? Have you and your pals formed a Shield Society of your own? Is that what bullshit you people are trying again?”

  The chauffeur looked at them in the rearview mirror. McGarvey caught his gaze. The big Japanese was scowling. Throw a rock into a pack of dogs and the one that gets hit yelps.

  Eto’s lips compressed as he fought for control. “You said that you did not want to be my enemy. But you are. When I have delivered you to the airport my obligation for your safety will end. Do not return to Tokyo.”

  “Wakarimashita,” I understand, McGarvey said. “But the next time I see Kamiya-san, I shall kill him. O-wakari desu ka?” Do you understand?

  “Hai,” Eto said through clenched teeth.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “You come as something of a surprise, Mr. McGarvey,” Sir Malcolm O’Toole said.”Did young Kennedy send you over?”

  “I’m here on my own. I wanted to talk to you.”

  The Rolls-Royce chief design engineer eyed him speculatively. “If this has to do with the crash I don’t think it’s appropriate at our level.”

  “Hear me out, and afterward you can do whatever you want. But not here. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Very well,” O’Toole said after a heavy silence.

  It was a cool, overcast day as they walked along a narrow path away from the company’s Barnoldswick, Yorkshire, design and manufacturing facility. A weather front was coming down from the Scottish highlands, and McGarvey hunched up his coat collar against the wind. He was sure he was being followed at Narita, so at the last possible moment he had switched flights from Seattle to London. He’d taken the train directly up here. “Have you sent the engine to the NTSB?”

  “Yes, and a pair to Portland. But you must know that we’re under increasing pressure to put a hold on all engine deliveries.”

  “Including the hydrogen burner?”

  They headed toward a line of trees a few hundred yards distant. A pair of large ravens rose up, cawing raucously. Somewhere a dog was barking. With their backs to the Rolls complex they could have been in any North English countryside.

  “Why did you come here, Mr. McGarvey? And why the skullduggery?”

  “Because I have something to tell you, and because there is a possibility that your office has been bugged.”

  Sir Malcolm stopped short. “You mean hidden microphones, and all that rubbish?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “By whom?”

  “The Japanese.”

  “Good heavens.” Sir Malcolm glanced over his shoulder. “Is it the government?”

  “I don’t think so, but the group involved may have the tacit approval of someone at higher levels. Perhaps the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.”

  “I really don’t think I should be talking to you.”

  “I’m talking about saving Guerin and Rolls and possibly a lot of lives.”

  Sir Malcolm looked wan. “Do you believe that our engine failure at Dulles was caused by sabotage?”

  “Yes, and the one in ’90. A safety-board pathologist found an extra body in that wreckage. The board ruled that the plane fell on the poor bastard.”

  “Not likely out in the open.”

  “The doctor was murdered a few months later, and all his crash records destroyed.”

  “Anything like that at Dulles? I hadn’t heard.”

  “No. But what are the chances of the same type of malfunction occurring?”

  “Reasonable, but happening to the engine on the same side of the aircraft—well, it would be fifty-fifty, I suppose. Not a long shot.”

  “But you’ve no evidence of sabotage.”

  “Not to my engine. But then we found nothing to indicate that such a failure should occur either. We’ve pushed those blades well beyond the most extreme safety parameters, and they’ve not failed. Not once.”

  “But two airplanes fell out of the sky for the same apparent nonreason. The first was a test, or maybe an accident in timing. And the second an attempt to stop Guerin from dealing with the Russians.”

  “I see what you mean,” Sir Malcolm said. They started toward the trees again. “It’s monstrous if it’s true. What would they have to gain by ruining us and Guerin?”

  “I’ve just come from Tokyo. The man I talked to said ruining you and Guerin is just the tip of an iceberg. He seemed pretty sure of himself. He’s got the money, the organization, and the connections to make it happen. At the very least, make it damned uncomfortable for us.”

  “Go to your government with it. I’m told you’re well placed in certain circles.”

  “I was set up. I don’t think
my word is going to carry much weight just now.”

  “So you’ve come to me. Marshalling your forces.”

  “Something like that. Your engines did not fail of themselves. And it’ll happen again, fairly soon, I think. So you’ll need to protect yourself.”

  “How?”

  “By being aware of the situation.”

  “Possible situation,” Sir Malcolm corrected. “Why should I believe you? I mean good heavens, sabotage, and hidden microphones, and some nefarious plot by the yellow hordes, what?”

  “The Japanese military is the fastest-growing war machine in the world. Submarines are not defensive weapons. And theirs are good.”

  “Fastest growing perhaps, but still tiny by comparison to yours, ours, or the French, or any number of other nations I could mention.”

  “You’re right. But the Japanese will occupy Subic Bay before long. They have a fully operational rocket launch facility on Tanegashima Island. And they’ve been rumbling about the development of nuclear capability.”

  “Because of the threat from North Korea.”

  “If they go nuclear they’ll become a formidable force on that side of the Pacific, whatever the reason.”

  Sir Malcolm rummaged in his pockets for his pipe and tobacco. He took his time getting it lit. It was a pipe smoker’s gambit to gain thinking time. “Even if they were to start this instant, it would take them six or seven years to develop weapons. Assuming that all your wild speculations are true—and mind you that’s exactly what I think you’ve come here with—where would sabotaging airplane engines come into the scheme?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey admitted. “But these are confident people.”

  “History is filled with confident, and competent, people who’ve failed,” Sir Malcolm said. “You say that your word may no longer carry any weight with your government. Bring me proof that sabotage occurred, or will occur again, and I will take it to my government.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  Sir Malcolm stopped. “You have proof?”

  “You’re going to find the proof. You’ve told me how the engine failure could not have happened. You’re sure of your test results?”