The Angel peered out from behind the car in the next parking slot—it was a late model Ford of some sort, and she approved much more of its lack of ostentation and relative utility than she did of the conspicuous and consumptive SUV—and watched as the Allumbrado, suddenly frowning, make a complicated set of hand gestures as the SUV bore down on him.
He finished with his left hand clenched into a fist, held chest high. His right hand was next to it, palm open. He pushed that hand out, extending his right arm fast, like he was throwing some kind of open-handed punch at the SUV, which was now almost upon him.
A wall of force met the SUV head-on. Its front end crumpled as if it had hit an invisible fence and it rebounded backwards right at the Angel as a sudden wind buffeted her, stirring her long, thick hair in its passing.
Her heart pounded with desire. She wanted nothing more than to stay and fight this man, but she knew that there was a chance, however slim, that he and his companions might overpower her and prevent her from getting her message to The Hand. She scuttled back among the parked cars as her opponent threw another force wave in her general direction, setting off numerous car alarms as the vehicles in the wave’s pathway rocked as if in an earthquake.
The message was foremost in her mind as she slipped away in the darkness.
The Cardinal has come. And he has brought aces with him.
But also, not so far buried, was an image of the man who accompanied the Cardinal. The handsome, strong-looking one.
There, she thought, was a proper foe.
Or perhaps, something else entirely.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Hokkaido, Japan
It was two in the morning, about an hour and a half before the unsui would strike the sounding board with his wooden mallet, waking everyone for the start of the long monastery day, but Fortunato was already awake.
He’d been having trouble sleeping lately. Not even lengthy recitation of the Heart Sutra, which by virtue of its hypnotic repetitiveness was supposed to pacify the chanter by affording him a glimpse into his true nature, could lull him to sleep. It never had, and Fortunato was beginning to suspect it never would. He was having trouble sleeping because he was beginning to suspect that he had made a mistake.
I’m sixty-two years old, Fortunato thought.
The zendo, the hall where the monks practiced zazen and which also doubled as their sleeping quarters, was pitch dark. It was silent but for the various rustlings, snortings, and snorings of the other fifty-some monks who slept fitfully or soundly on their tatami.
He envied them their slumber.
He realized that part of his problem was physical. After sixteen years of a fairly rigorous vegetarian diet, Fortunato was even leaner than he’d been as a pleasure-loving ace in New York City. The temple’s harsh physical discipline helped keep him fit, but he’d developed arthritis a couple of years back, presumably from sleeping on a hard, cold floor on only a thin straw mat wrapped in a single blanket. It had settled in his neck and shoulders and was getting worse with every passing month. Now he was even occasionally feeling biting pain in his long, thin, fingers. Pain was something to be endured as part of monastic life, as there were few drugs in the monastery’s frugal medicine cabinet, except for aspirin for fevers and colds, tiger balm for sore muscles and joints, and Preparation H for the hemorrhoids brought on by hours and hours of sitting on a hard floor in the lotus position.
Worse yet, the brief Hokkaido summer had barely started and the season would turn again all too soon. Fortunato did not look forward to the change. In Hokkaido the winter came early and lingered long. The winter winds were razor sharp and the snowfall was measured in feet, not inches. He had a single quilted blanket from which the mice had already been stealing stuffing. He couldn’t in all good conscience blame them for taking the cotton batting to line their nests against the terrible cold.
Lately Fortunato had been beginning to suspect that this portion of his life, the ascetic self-denial of pleasure, was as much of a dead end as his earlier years spent reveling in Tantric sex, drugs, and the sheer gusto of life as one of the most powerful aces in the world, a life he’d turned his back on in a quest to find his true nature in the way of a Zen monk.
Dogen, his Zen roshi and head of the small monastery, had told him when he’d first asked to join, “If you want to live in the world you must admit your power. If you want to feed your spirit you must leave the world.”
Only, Fortunato thought as he lay staring into the indecipherable darkness, his spirit was as hungry as ever. Have I actually progressed down the Tao this last decade and a half, he wondered, or become petrified, congealed in an unbreakable lump of amber closed off from the world? Is that what I’d really wanted?
He wondered why.
There was a sudden disturbance in the zendo, as a fully-dressed figure made his way among the sleeping monks. Fortunato recognized Dogen’s secretary and chief assistant. Fortunato had disliked the man ever since he’d entered the monastery, and the feeling was mutual. He had a sour look on his face, as if he’d been up all night sucking lemons, as he nudged Fortunato with his tabi-covered foot.
“Wake up,” he said in a voice loud enough so that those next to Fortunato stirred, grumbling in their sleep. “Dogen wants to see you.”
Fortunato didn’t question him, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of offering useless answers. He rose silently on stiff joints, and followed him out of the room. They went wordlessly down dark and silent corridors, Fortunato wondering what Dogen wanted at such an unlikely hour. This wasn’t the first time he’d been summoned to the abbot’s private quarters. He’d gone there plenty of times for instruction, to receive a new koan to meditate upon, or even for conversation about his varied experiences in the outside world. He’d even been summoned into the abbot’s presence once or twice for disciplinary measures.
But, Fortunato reflected, not for the latter reason for years. The last time had been after Tachyon’s visit. Fortunato had gone over the wall after the little alien Fauntleroy had left and spent a week drunk in the village at the base of the mountain. But those days had passed. He couldn’t even begin to guess why Dogen wanted to see him now.
Dogen nodded as his assistant led Fortunato to the open doorway of his small, austere office.
“Leave us,” he said as Fortunato stared at the man sitting uncomfortably cross-legged on the mat before Dogen’s low desk. The man smiled up at him like they were long-lost friends.
“Hey, Fortunato,” Digger Downs said. “Long time, no see.”
Fortunato looked from the star reporter of Aces! magazine back to Dogen, mystified.
“Indeed,” he said, and entered the room, bowing to the abbot. He looked back at Downs. Downs was a small, lean, brown-haired, brown-eyed man pushing a well-preserved fifty. Fortunato hadn’t seen him since he’d entered the monastery. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by,” Digger said with a smile much too bright for so early in the morning.
“You were in the neighborhood at two o’clock in the morning?” Fortunato asked in disbelief.
“Well,” Digger allowed. “It did take me awhile to get here from Tokyo. I left as soon as the news broke. I wanted to be the first to get your reaction, and,” he added with some satisfaction, “it looks as if I am.”
Fortunato sighed and closed his eyes. He had no reason to like Digger Downs. The man was, at best, an obnoxious pest. But over the years he’d tried to learn how to put such feelings away. He opened his eyes to see Dogen observing him with silent reproof. His master knew that he was letting himself get caught up in a swirl of unpleasant emotion. Yet again.