George Chesbro - Two Songs This Archangel Sings

What I was getting from this man was nothing; too much of nothing.

He had not reacted at all to my sudden appearance. The winter eyes had revealed nothing but keen intelligence and-perhaps-a hint of bemusement behind a thick scrim of control. I put his age at around thirty-five. His hair was a light brown, cut short. To me he looked more European or American than Oriental-but then, only one of Loan Ka's informants had suggested that the man might be Asiatic. He had a rather triangular face, with a high, broad forehead tapering into shallow cheekbones, thin lips, and a surprisingly narrow chin for such a big man.

He was slumped in his seat, leaning to his left at an awkward angle, as if favoring a stiff neck or sore back. He held the magazine with his fingertips, and when he turned the pages it was with quick, nervous movements. His legs were crossed, and he would occasionally tap his right foot nervously against a brown cowhide attache case he had placed on the floor by his seat. The image he projected was of a well-dressed and, despite his size, slightly effeminate businessman or accountant.

But "projected" was the key word, and I had the distinctly unnerving feeling that the man was playing games with me, enjoying a private joke at my expense. Of course, I had to take into account the possibility that he was a slightly effeminate businessman or accountant, and not the man who had been following me. But the blue Ford had been parked at the airport, and my seatmate was the only fellow passenger who came even close to fitting the description Loan Ka had given me.

I recalled the many conversations Veil and I had had regarding the ninja art of "psychological disguise"-meaning, in the case of the ninja , that a person did not have to be truly terrible to be truly terrifying, and vice versa. The point, always, was to lull and coax your enemy, or quarry, into perceiving you as you wanted him to perceive you. What and who you really are, Veil had always said, was nowhere nearly as important as what others thought you were. This was the axiom that the ninja used to create a desired reality from illusion.

It was a set of skills I had, of necessity, used all my life, without ever having a label for what I was doing. Now I suspected that these same skills were being used against me in an attempt to disarm and beguile.

I knew I had made a mistake in confronting this man. I had hoped at least to shake him, to gauge him as an opponent, and, if I got lucky, perhaps to learn something that would be useful to me in my search for Veil. But in trying to inflate my small advantage, I had seen it blow up in my face; I was the one who was shaken, thoroughly intimidated by the man's physical size and psychological control. All I had accomplished with my stunt was to drive my tracker even deeper into the deadly shadows at my back.

Responding to a very real sensation of queasiness in the pit of my stomach, I indulged in a little psychological disguise of my own; I removed the airsickness bag from the pouch on the back of the seat in front of me and cradled it in my lap, then closed my eyes and pretended to fall asleep. I felt like the village idiot.

Garth heartily concurred.

"What are you, the fucking village idiot?!"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," I replied lamely, reaching across the kitchen table for another doughnut. Garth's shift didn't begin until one in the afternoon, and we were enjoying a late breakfast while we considered together what I had-and hadn't-learned from the Hmong in Seattle. "I wanted to see if I could get some kind of line on the guy."

"You got a line on him, all right. Now he knows you're on to him."

"Not necessarily," I said without conviction. "There were enough people on the plane to make it seem reasonable for me to choose to sit next to him purely by chance."

"You still acted like the village idiot. You should have taken up the Hmong on his offer to have the man taken out."

"No. They'd just have sent somebody else."

"Yeah, but probably a smaller edition. This big guy sounds really spooky."

"That's a pretty good description."

"And we still don't know who's behind him."

"True, but it's interesting that they've decided to follow instead of kill me. These people aren't stupid."

Garth nodded in agreement as he took a bite out of a doughnut and washed it down with black coffee. In the morning light his skin seemed to have a greenish pallor, which I didn't like. He'd lost weight, and it occurred to me that he hadn't looked well for weeks. It bothered me.

"They tried to kill you in the beginning because they figured you as a loose end that could be chopped off quickly," Garth said when he had finished chewing. "Their main concern was in catching up with Kendry, but they quickly learned that finding Kendry wasn't going to be as easy as they'd thought. He was playing games with them, mostly hide and seek. Then two of the front-line players lost their lives and their right thumbs, so they decided that it might be easier to let you find Kendry for them. They're using you as a stalking horse." Garth paused, smiled thinly. "After all, you're the one whom Kendry's considerate enough to leave clues for."

"Yeah."

"Your friend Kendry is a real prick, Mongo. He's tied you across the mouth of a cannon. He's using you as a stalking horse, too."

"It does look that way. It seems like he needs me to gather evidence that will indict a person or persons unknown."

"Damn it, he's the evidence!"

"No, not evidence; he's the story, and it has to be corroborated."

"Well, he should have told you the story. Kendry damn well knows who wants to kill him, and it would have been nice for him to share the information with you before he sucked you into a situation where you almost got your ass cooked and could still end up with bullets where your brains used to be. Nobody else might have believed him, but you would have. He not only put you out in front of him, the son-of-a-bitch left you blindfolded on a killing ground."

"We've played this number, Garth, and there's no sense in doing it again," I said with some impatience. "Before we can pass judgment on Veil's methods, we have to find out who's trying to kill him, and why. When I found out that Liu Sakh Po was involved in this thing, it crossed my mind that he was the man we were after; after that last series of articles on him appeared in the Times, he could have started worrying about the loss of his low profile and wanted to erase links to his past. Or he could have feared that Veil would find out where he was and come gunning for him."

Garth looked skeptical. "You said the articles appeared six months ago."

"Precisely; too much time between events. If it is Po who's gunning for Veil, it wasn't the articles that triggered him. But I don't think it is Po. The men who tried to cremate me and the big guy on the plane aren't Po's type of people. Po's a low-class thug, and he uses other low-class thugs. The thugs I keep bumping into are nothing if not high-class. Still, the good colonel most certainly knows things we want to know, which is why I'm going to take a spin up the Thruway to see him."

"Dumb idea, Mongo; seriously dumb. There's no way he's going to talk to you about anything, much less about things he wants kept hidden. You'll just end up with low-class thugs chasing you along with the high-class ones."

"You're probably right. But I have to follow the bread crumbs wherever they lead, and right now Colonel Po is standing right in the middle of the trail. How can I go around him? He was one of the three men in the helicopter that came to take Veil away from the Hmong village, and he'll know the names and functions of the other two. He may know who wants Veil dead; it could be the man whose blood was on Veil's uniform."