"No talking now," she purred, and she bent down and kissed his forehead, then his eyes.
Slowly then, and with much gentleness, Kazuka began to give Carter a much different massage than the one Mariko had given him. This time, instead of relaxing his muscles, her purpose was to increase his pleasure, bringing him to readiness very slowly.
Her fingers and lips lingered at his ears and his neck, then around his nipples and down his stomach. She worked gently on his legs and thighs so that at one point his muscles began to jump. For a while then, she simply lay against him, her body warm and soft and soothing.
When he was calm and warm, she began again, with his fingers and toes and inner thighs.
As she continued, everything else seemed to be blotted out of Carter's awareness, only the pleasure of the moment and Kazuka's body next to his having any meaning.
His pleasure was building, slowly, a bit at a time until he thought he would explode, and then Kazuka took him in her mouth, and he was falling faster and faster, the pleasure seeming as if it would never end but would go on until there was nothing left of his body.
Carter woke with a start. The room was very dark, and he was warm and comfortable under a thick quilt. Kazuka was gone, but the feeling of her body against his still lingered.
He raised his arm and looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was a few minutes past eight. In the evening. He sat up. He had slept through the entire day.
Throwing the quilt back, Carter got up and padded across the room where he opened the door and looked out into the corridor. He could hear someone talking somewhere in the direction of the central room, and he could smell the marvelous odors of cooking food.
He found a light switch and flipped it on, and the sleeping room was bathed in a soft glow. His suitcase had been laid out, along with freshly pressed clothing. A sliding door at the far end of the room was open onto a Western-style bathroom where his shaving gear was laid out neatly on a shelf. Even his weapons had been cleaned and oiled, laid out in neat order on a small table.
Fifteen minutes later he was shaved and dressed, his ribs still sore but manageable, and he headed down the corridor back to the plant-filled central hall.
Mariko met him. "Ah, Carter-san," she said, bowing deeply.
"Where is everyone?"
"This way, please, Carter-san," the girl said.
Carter followed her down another wing of the house, where she slid back a rice-paper door, then stepped aside for him to enter.
Kazuka, dressed in a traditional silk kimono, sat at a low table across from a hard-looking old man with a wrinkled, leathery face and a wiry frame. They looked up when he came in.
"How do you feel, Nicholas?" Kazuka asked.
"Rested," Carter said.
Kazuka made the introductions, and Heido's lips broke into a gap-toothed grin.
"My daughters tell me mysterious things about your body, Carter-san," Heido said, laughing. "For instance, they say that you have been blessed with three balls and that you carry weapons to protect them."
Carter laughed, and took his place at the table. "An exaggeration, venerable sir," Carter replied in precise Japanese.
Heido nodded his approval. Carter understood that he had just passed some sort of test.
The sliding door opened and two of Heido's daughters came in with Carter's dinner: fish, rice, a meat dish, a lot of vegetables, warm sake, and cold beer. After they served him, they left the room.
"Kazuka tells me that you wish to see Svetlaya. She is very worried about such a trip," Heido said.
Carter ignored the Western silverware he had been given. Instead he used the chopsticks like an expert. He was ravenous and the food was delicious.
"How do you feel about it?" Carter asked.
"To Svetlaya itself by sea would be impossible. Their gunboats are everywhere. But we could get close to the coast to the south. What exactly is it that you wish to see?"
"The submarine pens."
Heido nodded thoughtfully. "You are perhaps tall, but we can make a Japanese fisherman of you…"
"There is more," Kazuka interrupted.
Heido's eyes narrowed. "Yes?"
"I also want to get onto the base," Carter said. "To the submarine pens themselves."
"Is it permitted for me to ask what purpose you wish to serve?"
"I need to steal something."
Heido smiled wanly. "Perhaps you want to steal a submarine. Is that it, Carter-san?"
"Something much smaller."
"To fit in a suitcase perhaps?" Heido asked.
Carter looked sharply at Kazuka.
"It came late this afternoon while you were sleeping," she said. "Hawk sent it over by military jet, and one of my people brought it up."
"How are things in Tokyo?"
"Tense. Everyone believes you are dead. It's even in the newspapers that an American businessman by the name of Nick Carter was murdered by unkown assailants."
"How about Major Rishiri?" Carter asked.
"Charlie didn't say."
Carter turned back to Heido. "When can we leave?"
"As soon as you are finished with your meal, Carter-san. My girls are making the boat ready."
Kazuka started to say something, but Carter cut her off.
"You are staying here. And that's an order!"
Mariko and Kim, the youngest of the five daughters, were to remain at the house with Kazuka, though they all came down to the dock.
It was pitch-black outside, and very cold. A stiff wind out of the northwest had blown in another front, bringing with it more snow.
They had used a walnut-seed soup to stain Carter's skin over his entire body, and had dressed him in traditional fishing clothes, consisting of wrapped leggings, a long quilted jacket, and felt boots beneath rubber sea boots. Considering the weather, the clothing wasn't very warm.
The black anodized aluminum suitcase was very heavy; Carter estimated it weighed about seventy pounds. It was mostly filled with batteries and other gear to keep the chip at a perfect temperature and humidity.
The girls had equipped the boat — a forty-two-foot fishing trawler — with plenty of food and fuel for the two-hundred-mile trip across and then the return, with plenty of reserve. At something around eight knots cruising speed — providing the weather didn't get worse, providing they were not spotted and stopped by a Russian gunboat, and providing there was no trouble with Heido's boat (which Carter thought looked older and more weather-worn than its owner) — it would take them twenty-four hours to make landfall on the Soviet coast.
They carried no weapons aboard other than Carter's personal arsenal.
"If they stop us and find no weapons, we will have provided one very good argument toward proving we are nothing other than simple fishermen," Heido said.
"Once they find the suitcase though, we will have lost that argument," Carter said.
Heido nodded stoically. He turned and went up to the wheelhouse to start the engines. His daughters waited at the bow and stern with the lines.
"Be careful, Nicholas," Kazuka said from the dock. "I want you to come back to me."
"When this is over we will have your uncle's house for a vacation."
The trawler's diesels started with a tremendous roar, making any further talk on deck impossible. Kazuka smiled and waved as the girls tossed the lines onto the dock, and Heido eased them away into the dark, windblown sea, the trawler rising up to meet each wave, then settling heavily with a huge splash into each trough.
Within a few minutes even the lights ashore were lost to the black night. Carter went up to the wheelhouse where Heido was turning over command of the boat to Mioshi, the eldest of his daughters. She seemed very competent and strong as she took the wheel, bracing herself expertly each time the boat pitched or rolled.