Although they would never dare say it, most thought this diverting chapter in the Pasha’s life could only end in tragedy. Lights that burned too brightly within this palace tended to get snuffed out. There was but one sun permitted in this solar system.
In addition to defending the Pasha at the cost of their own lives, if necessary, and bearing him about daily in his chair, the four sumos had been schooling their new master in the fifteen-hundred-year-old sumo arts. Snay bin Wazir, heartless, powerful, and full of guile, was a willing and able student. Kato himself said that bin Wazir had already achieved such a level of proficiency as to make him competitive against the top ranks of rikishi in Japan. He had only to refine his techniques and one day he might rival them in grace and skill and artistry.
Snay had made it plain to the four rikishi that if he were ever able to defeat any one of them, the penalty was instant banishment from the palace. It was a fate only Ichi desired. No amount of wealth or women could salve Ichi’s broken heart. Night and day he longed for Michiko, an angel who’d come to earth to bless him with peace just before his abduction. While his honor forbade deliberate loss in the dohyo, in sumo parlance a feigned Tsuki dashi, it did not, he’d come to feel, forbid the death of a master who held him captive and whom he did not honor.
And so, every morning when the sun rose over the high palace walls, and the thin mountain air was crystalline with light made radiant by the snowy mountain peaks looming above him, Ichi would walk alone in the gardens, consult his heart, and listen carefully to the song of the splashing fountains. He waited for the pure and innocent voice of Michiko. Surely one day the waters might whisper the secret way in which Ichi might escape his prison and find his way back to her heart. And so return to the source of the sun.
Chapter Five
London
“ANOTHER PINT OF STOUT, THEN, CHIEF?” DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Ross Sutherland asked Congreve above the hubbub at the bar. The two men had dashed out of the Prince Edward Theatre, escaping before the final curtain had even touched the boards. They then made their way through a cold, drenching rain to the nearest pub in Old Compton Street. Ducking inside the Crown and Anchor, they were now more or less comfortably situated at the bar.
“No thank you. I really should be pushing off, Inspector,” Congreve told his companion, glancing at his watch. “Time to knit up the raveled sleeve of care, I believe.”
“Not your brand of poison, that musical, was it, Chief?”
Someone, Ambrose Congreve couldn’t for the life of him remember who—his pal, Fruity Metcalfe, perhaps— had recently told him he would enjoy an enormously popular musical entertainment called Mamma Mia.
He hadn’t.
“I’m aware that many actually enjoy the sort of thing we’ve just had the misfortune to witness. A blatant, sugar-coated confection, cynically calculated to appeal to the LCD.”
“LCD?”
“Lowest common denominator.”
“Shoe fits, I suppose. I rather enjoyed it, myself.”
“Rubbish! It was about a wedding, for God’s sakes, Sutherland. A wedding! How could anyone, now that I think about it, I think it was Sticky Rowland, suggest something about a bloody wedding? Confound it, man! Is there not an ounce of, of, what’s the word, left in this world?”
“Propriety?” the junior New Scotland Yard man said, not quite sure it was the word Congreve had been searching for.
“Propriety, exactly. Decency! It’s been only what, two weeks since the—since Victoria’s—wedding. Well. What’s a chap to do but turn to drink? I will have another pint if you don’t mind.”
Sutherland caught the eye of the Crown and Anchor’s portly barman. “Half of bitter, please, and another pint here,” he said, looking at Congreve out of the corner of his eye. The old boy was positively morose, he thought, putting another fiver down. Having caught his own reflection in the smoky mirror above the bar, Sutherland was startled to see how weary he himself appeared.
Inspector Sutherland, a man in his early thirties, was, like his companion, on semipermanent loan from the Yard to Alex Hawke. Ross Sutherland, a Scot from the Highlands north of Inverness, stood somewhere just short of six feet. He had a lean, lanky frame, with a healthy, ruddy complexion, a pair of keen grey eyes, and straw-colored hair kept close-cropped like his brush-cut American cousins at the CIA. Were it not for his broad Highland accent, and an occasional fondness for loose tweed jackets, the former Royal Navy flying officer turned Scotland Yard inspector might easily be mistaken for an American.
But the face he now saw reflected looked gaunt, even haggard. Hell, they’d all been through it. The horror of Vicky’s death, the outrageousness of it, had taken an enormous toll on anyone and everyone who cared for Alex Hawke.
Other than Hawke himself, Congreve seemed the hardest hit, both personally and professionally. MI5, MI6, and the Yard were all over it and doing all they could. To Congreve’s great chagrin, however, they had rebuffed his every effort to get involved.
“What exactly am I supposed to do about this, Sutherland,” Ambrose said now, ignoring his freshly arrived pint. “Sit on my bloody hands and do nothing? Good Lord!”
“Aye. It’s frustrating.”
“It’s a bleeding outrage, is what it is,” Congreve said, properly browned off now, “We both still work for Scotland Yard, unless I’m very much mistaken. Has someone from Victoria Street told you differently?”
Sutherland stared morosely into his half bitter, feeling every bit as frustrated as his superior. “Hmm. It would seem that we are surplus to the Yard’s requirements, Chief.”
Ross and Alex Hawke had a long history together. During the Gulf War, when Alex was flying sorties for the Royal Navy, Ross had been right behind him in the after cockpit, serving as Commander Hawke’s Navigation and Fire Control Officer. Kept the boss from getting lost in the desert and lit up the juiciest targets, basically.
Near the end of that conflict, after a particularly nasty skirmish in the skies over Baghdad, they’d been brought down by a SAM-7. Both men had ejected from the burning fighter, landing in open desert about thirty miles south of Saddam’s capital. Captured and imprisoned, they’d barely survived their treatment at the hands of the Iraqi guards. Sutherland, more than any other prisoner, had been beaten senseless during daily “interrogations.” Hawke, seeing his friend near death, saw no hope but escape from the makeshift hellhole.
That night, Hawke had killed a number of guards with his bare hands. They’d fled south across the desert, navigating by the stars, searching for the British or American lines. For days and nights on end, Hawke had carried Sutherland on his back. They were wandering in circles, staggering blindly over the sand-blasted dunes, when an American tank unit under the command of U.S. Army Captain Patrick “Brick” Kelly had finally spotted them.
The same Brick Kelly who was now U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James.
Sutherland sipped his half-pint and considered Congreve’s question. Why had they been rebuffed by the Yard at every turn? As one of Hawke’s inner circle, he wanted immediate action and he’d seen precious little.
“They won’t let us near it,” Ross finally said with a gallows grin, “because they think we’re too close to it.”
“Too close? Too bloody au fait?”
“Let me rephrase it, sir. They imagine our emotions might cloud our judgment.”
Ambrose Congreve scoffed at the very notion, picked up his pint and drank deeply. He looked past the patrons of this somewhat grim establishment to the sheeting rain swirling about the streetlamps and clawing at the windows.
“Not even allowed to inspect the crime scene? Turned back at the very edge of the woods where Stokely discovered the shooter’s lair?” he asked the air. “Me? Ambrose Congreve? Words fail me.”
“Aggro?”
“Beyond aggravation, Sutherland. Well and far beyond. Do you suppose the scene tape is down at this point?”
“We’re two weeks in.”
“Tape is down, then. Forensics and scene-of-crime officers will be long gone.”
