F. Paul Wilson - By the Sword

But what about Dawn? He doubted she'd be going anywhere tonight either. He needed a way to get her out of there without endangering her.

His first thought was to call the cops. He could tell them that Dawn Pickering, a person of interest in a Forest Hills murder, was hiding in the Lodge. A warrant, a search, Dawn is discovered, tells the cops she'd been kidnapped and held prisoner: hot water for Hank and company.

Sounded perfect. The only problem he could see was the pervasiveness of Kickers. The most visible members hailed from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, but they existed at all levels. Undoubtedly some were in the criminal justice system. And somewhere along the tortuous course of obtaining a search warrant on a building owned by a group as connected as the Septimus Lodge, someone might very well raise a warning flag.

And then Dawn would disappear and Jack would be back to square one.

A one-man assault was out of the question. He needed help—willing or unwilling, witting or unwitting—and had an idea where he might find some.

He peeked over the edge of the roof and saw the watcher step onto the sidewalk below and start toward Allen Street.

Jack jumped up and ran for the roof door. He blasted through, pounded down six flights of stairs and burst onto the sidewalk at a run. He reached Allen Street in time to see the watcher hop into a cab. He spotted another a dozen feet away discharging a fare. He hopped in.

"Hate to say it, but follow that cab."

He expected a remark from the driver, a grizzled fellow with shiny black skin and a curly, gray beard, but he merely turned on the meter and shifted into drive.

The watcher led them to the southbound FDR all the way down to the ferry docks. There he got out and boarded a waiting ferry. Jack followed. It left promptly at ten thirty.

Staten Island, he thought. What the hell's on Staten Island?

The watcher stayed up front, as if urging the boat to go faster, so Jack hung around the stern, watching Lower Manhattan's bright skyline recede in the wake. Two tall, thin structures were missing from the view. Jack had always hated the Twin Towers, considering them irksome, unimaginative, incongruous eyesores. But now that they were gone, he missed them.

Twenty-five minutes later the ferry was nudging into the Staten Island docks. As soon as the gates opened, the watcher hopped off and trotted to one of the waiting cabs. Jack followed to another, and tried a variation on the dreaded phrase.

"See that cab? Follow it."

The driver looked over his shoulder. He was some kind of squat little Asian. His name on the license looked Thai— Prasopchai Narkhirunkanok . No way would Jack try to pronounce it. He'd never heard of anyone dislocating his tongue, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen.

"Follow that cab?" he said in accented English. "This is true?"

"That's what I said."

He laughed. "Okay. We follow that cab."

The ferry had landed at the northernmost tip of the island. They followed the watcher's cab along Victory Boulevard to the Staten Island Expressway, which was anything but express, even at this hour. They traveled east to the West Shore Expressway and then south to the landfill where the first cab exited.

The Fresh Kills landfill?

Jack didn't know much about it except that sometime in the middle of the last century New York City declared a couple of thousand acres of Staten Island its dumping ground. Over the ensuing decades it piled up huge mounds of garbage. The landfill closed around the turn of the century, but reopened long enough to accept World Trade Center debris.

"Any idea where he's going?"

The driver nodded. "I saw him. He look Japanese. I fear he is going to bad place."

"Bad place?"

"A temple where Kakureta Kao dwell."

"You've heard of them?"

Another nod. "They once known all over Asia. My grandmother used to scare me by saying she call the Kakureta Kao in Tokyo and they come and take me back to their temple and cut me up. After the war everyone thought they dead, but then they show up here."

"In a landfill?"

"No one want land where they stay. They can be alone there to perform foul rites."

Foul rites… he had to mean the self-mutilation Slater had mentioned. But why here? Why in the U.S.?

"There, you see?" he said, pointing ahead. "Kakureta Kao."

Jack saw the watcher's cab stop outside an oblong, two-story box of a building. Not exactly what he'd had in mind when he'd heard the word temple .

Someone who looked like a guard let him through the gate in the six-foot stone wall running the perimeter.

Guard?

"Slow down," Jack said. "Let the other cab pull away, then drive by—slowly."

The driver did as he was told. As they passed Jack got a glimpse of the guard in the glow of the single bulb over the gate. He was wearing a kimono and a hakama, like someone out of a chop-socky movie.

"Stop here and turn out your lights," Jack said as they reached the top of a rise.

"I drive you back now, yes?"

Jack dropped a couple of twenties on the front seat.

"Just park here a few minutes. I want to watch the place."

"I do not like it here," he said, but parked and doused his lights.

Jack looked around and could see why. To the west the Hidden Face building stood alone, isolated on a marshy flat. Half a mile or more away in the opposite direction he could see what looked like house lights. Down at the building he spotted a couple of commuter vans parked along the southern flank. Beyond and to the right of the temple rose the dirt-covered hills of the landfill. Like cyclopean burial mounds. In a way they were burial mounds—the final resting place of a half century's worth of debris from the urban civilization a few miles to the north.

He pointed to the biggest mound. "How tall do you think that is?"

"As tall as the Statue of Liberty. The Fresh Kills landfill is one of largest man-made structures on Earth. It can be seen from space."

It sounded rehearsed.

"You give tours?"

The driver shrugged. "I learn if I give interesting fact to fares, they give to me bigger tip."

Jack turned his attention back to the temple, trying to imagine what was going on in there. He hoped they were planning a raid on Kicker HQ.

Shiro tried to rein in his excitement as he approached the front entrance of the temple. He placed his cell phone in the galvanized, foam-lined, waterproof milk box outside the door. There it would rest among watches and flashlights and other phones.

He found the phone invaluable in the outside world—without it he would not have been able to call Yukio and tell him to maintain surveillance on the Kicker house while he returned to the temple—but useless when he needed to contact the temple. No technology from beyond the sixteenth century—the time of the Order's defeat of the Nobunaga Shogunate—was allowed inside. No radios or TVs or watches or guns. And worst of all, no air conditioners in the summer when the heat and humidity suffused the landfill area with the reek of old garbage and methane.

But no sacrifice was too great for the Order.

Minutes later Shiro was kneeling in his teacher's sparsely furnished quarters, bowing before him. He raised his head to speak.

"I saw them both, sensei —the woman and the sword!"

Akechi- sensei 's eyes narrowed to slits within the eyeholes of his mask as he studied Shiro. "You are sure of this? Absolutely sure?"

"She has changed her appearance, but I studied her through my field glasses and I have no doubt that her face is the same as in the photograph on the flyers."

His sensei closed his eyes and remained silent for what seemed like an eternity.