Satori

lives.

Now he was in a new war – a jihad to save his people. If killing helped to achieve that, then so be it. He would do it and if it was God’s will that he survive and come home to his family, then inshallah. If not, at least he knew that the ulama would not let his family starve. A brother would marry his widow and take care of his children.

Comforted by that thought, Wu gave himself over to prayer, and the ritual, as always, felt good to him. Old, solid, and reliable. There was joy in pure worship, peace in the repetition of the ancient words as he chanted, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.”

40

A BLEARY-EYED LEOTOV stood in front of Voroshenin’s desk.

He had worked all night and now Voroshenin didn’t as much as offer him a glass of tea, although he sipped his own, the white sugar sitting at the bottom of the glass like sand under a lake at one of the vacation dachas that Voroshenin could use but Leotov couldn’t.

“So?” Voroshenin asked.

Leotov started with Guibert.

It all seemed to check out. The Guiberts were indeed a Languedoc family of arms merchants with loose ties to the French Communist Party. Papa Guibert opened a Hong Kong office to take advantage of the business opportunities presented by the incessant warfare between Chinese warlords following the 1911 Revolution. He appeared to have ceased operations during the Japanese occupation, owing his survival to that discretion and to the Vichy French status as noncombatants. There were rumors, however, that he continued to work, with American collusion, with Vietnamese rebels fighting against the Japanese, especially but not exclusively Ho Chi Minh and that lot.

His leftist ideology appeared to be somewhat flexible, as, after the war, he dealt with both Nationalists and Communists in China, as well as with independence movements in French Indochina.

“Connections with L’ Union Corse?” Voroshenin asked, citing the Corsican mafia that controlled the drugs and arms between France and its Southeast Asian colonies.

“Naturally,” Leotov answered, “although Guibert isn’t Corsican, so the relationship is strictly business. Certainly he dealt with La Corse during the war.”

“What about the son?” Voroshenin asked.

“Michel?”

Voroshenin sighed. “Yes.”

Again, all appeared to be as it seemed. Leotov laid some grainy photographs on the desk. The son was born in Montpellier but raised in Hong Kong, hence his fluent Cantonese. He had the reputation of a gambler, womanizer, and ne’er-do-well, out of his father’s favor until after the war and the auto accident.

“The what?”

“There was a car crash in” – Leotov checked his notes – “the summer of ‘50, in Monaco. Michel had apparently dropped a bundle at the casino, drowned his sorrows, and crashed the car halfway through a wicked S-curve.”

Apparently it was touch and go for a while, and Guibert fils needed extensive surgery to repair his face. The surgeries seemed to have accomplished a character transplant of a sort – the son emerged a changed, more serious man, eager to take his place in the family business.

“That’s interesting,” Voroshenin said.

Leotov shrugged. He really didn’t see what was so interesting about it.

Voroshenin did. He hadn’t survived the Stalinist purges by being tone deaf, and this auto accident struck a discordant note. Reconstructive facial surgery followed by a moral metamorphosis?

“Where is the father now?” he asked. “Do we know?”

“I suppose in Hong Kong.”

“You suppose? Find out.”

“Yes, Comrade.”

“All right, what about Ivanovna?”

“I have a full report.” Leotov started to recite his findings.

“Leave it.”

“But there are -”

“I said to leave it.”

Leotov set the file on the desk and left.

Voroshenin opened the desk drawer. He had a feeling he would need a stiff drink to read this file.

41

THE GREAT WALL certainly is, Nicholai thought.

A monumental, as it were, achievement of architecture and organization. But, like a static Go defense, it never fulfilled its function of keeping out an invader. There is no point building a wall when the gatekeepers can be purchased.

Still, the wall was a marvel to see, as it stretched along the rises and falls of the ridges and hills, flexible as a giant snake, its stones resembling the scales of a reptile. Or a dragon, perhaps, Nicholai thought, in the Chinese zoological cosmology.

No, he decided, the Go analogy is more apt. The wall was like a thin long line of stones, vulnerable by its very length, unsupported by defensive depth.

A lesson to be had there, certainly.

Chen fell asleep on the drive back to Beijing, sparing Nicholai the necessity to make small talk. Instead he began to prepare his mind for the task at hand, and as he thought about it, he realized that he was soon to become a professional assassin.

He had killed three men in his young life – nothing by the standards of his generation, which had endured the slaughters of the war.

His first had been Kishikawa, his father figure, and he had done it to spare his mentor shame. So it was a matter of filial duty, almost as if he had assisted the general in committing seppuku.

The next two had tried to kill him first, so they were acts of self-defense.

But this would be an intentional act of murder for profit. He could rationalize it by thinking that he was reclaiming his own life, and Solange’s, but the fact remained that he was about to take another’s life to benefit his own, and moral evasions were as useful as the towers of the Great Wall.

Yet the monetary compensation from the Americans was almost irrelevant.

This was a matter of honor.

Voroshenin was not just another man, another human life.

Shortly before she died, Nicholai’s mother had told him the story of what happened between her and Yuri Voroshenin.

Petrograd was frozen and fast running out of fuel.

The winter of 1922 was unusually harsh, the small supply of coal had already dwindled, and the Communists were tearing down private homes for firewood. The famed lindens of Taurichesky Gardens had been stripped of the branches for firewood, and the trees looked like execution stakes.

It was a miracle – no, not a miracle but a testament to her iron will – that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna’s family house, occupying half a block on Kirochnaya Street, still stood, although the Soviet Petrograd had forced her to turn most of it into a kpmmunalka, housing several dozen workers’ families.

Well, workers in theory, anyway – the lack of fuel and materials and the hyperinflation brought on by Western financial assaults on the ruble had closed many of Petrograd’s factories. The workers were freezing and