She looked at her watch—3:15—and mulled over the idea of going to the clinic. She knew she should — but nobody, least of all a wife and working mom of two teenagers, had time for that. Besides, she’d just had her forty-year checkup and been deemed, as her brother-in-law the doc joked, fit as a thirty-nine-year-old.
What she needed was a good, long sleep.
She saw the first sore when she reached to put the aspirin back in the cabinet. Gritting her teeth, she raised her arm to look in the mirror. A swollen red boil stared back like an angry eye. Two more bumps, red but in earlier stages, dotted her armpit.
“This is going to suck,” she muttered as she dabbed at the boils, feeling the fevered tenderness and tight pink skin. She hadn’t gone in the room with Rick when he’d had his treated the day before. The whole process of lancing a boil was just too medieval for her. She’d had her own experience with it shortly after the girls were born. That one had been much lower and more intimate than Rick’s. It involved an extremely painful and incredibly embarrassing procedure she’d hoped never to repeat — lying naked from the waist down, facedown on the table, while the doctor lanced and pinched her butt cheek to drain the awful thing. She remembered vividly the dull ache in her jaw from gritting her teeth and the perfect sweat imprint of her body on the paper cover of the exam table.
By the time Marta made it back to bed, Rick sounded as if he was trying to breathe through a clogged snorkel. She rolled up next to him, ignoring her own pain, and put an ear against his chest. Something wasn’t right. She’d never heard of boils being catchy like this — but they both had them. It sounded like Rick was getting pneumonia. And now, her throat was killing her.
CHAPTER 13
Shimoyama Takako took great pleasure in the simple, Zen-like design of the things that surrounded her. She had few friends, but at least two of the girls she knew as a child had mothers who practiced ikebana, the art of flower arrangement. That was well and good, but Shimoyama had found such an art constraining. There was so much more to arrange in the world than flowers.
She knelt in front of the low table in her spacious room, palms flat against the cool lacquered top. Her notebook was open, the ivory pen forming a perfect diagonal across its pages. Her metallic cell phone case and dangling fuzzy charm lay at the tip of her fingers, faceup. The design of it all was a work of wabi sabi—art and beauty in the mundane — and set Shimoyama’s heart at ease.
Taking a quick breath, she pressed a number into the phone. Someone of less focus might be tempted to toy with the gun when they were forced to make such a nerve-racking call. Shimoyama took comfort in the simple focus of looking at the weapon.
“Ah, Auntie,” the man said on the other end of the line. Her superior was exceedingly polite, if not actually kind. He’d once called her his lover. Now, it was auntie, if only to prove she no longer held her previous position. “I hope you have good news.”
“If you have a moment,” Shimoyama said, willing her voice not to crack — from sorrow more than nerves.
“Of course, Auntie,” the man said. She imagined him as a huge spider, beckoning with one of eight whiskered legs while he grinned at her from a dark corner. “Please, go ahead.”
Shimoyama licked her lips.
“The business with our mutual friend in Las Vegas did not go as planned.”
Though the man said nothing for some time, she could feel his mood darken over the phone.
“Yes,” he said, “I have heard that very thing.”
“The Pakistani was late in his arrival,” Shimoyama said. She took some solace in the fact that the blame did not rest entirely with her people. Her employer would surely have required more than a finger if that had been the case. “I fear Quinn had a very short window of time to speak with the American.” Shimoyama crossed off another note in her book with a perfectly straight line of black ink.
“What do you intend to do about him?”
“The Pakistani?” Shimoyama nodded to herself.
“Not the Pakistani,” her employer snapped. “I am speaking of Quinn. It will please me greatly, Auntie, if he were dead before nightfall.”
“These matters are fluid,” Shimoyama said, sounding more sure of herself than she was. “But I have another contact working on that as we speak.”
“I hope so, Takako-chan,” he said. “For your sake.”
Shimoyama’s heart leaped in her breast. Not because of the threat, but because he had called her by her given name, something he had not done since he had loved her, so many years before.
CHAPTER 14
Quinn stood beside a squat Japanese lamp carved of gray stone, watching. The contest, or more correctly, the spanking that Emiko Miyagi was giving Jacques Thibodaux, did little to take his mind off Kim.
Palmer had summoned him back to D.C. after the incident in Las Vegas with the curt order to go to Miyagi’s and wait for his call. Quinn hated waiting more than he hated neckties. It made him feel like a racehorse trapped in the gates. But wait he did, at Palmer’s order, and while he waited, he trained.
They’d already run several miles as a warm-up that morning. Chasing the sun, Miyagi called it, trying to run a prescribed course through the Mount Vernon neighborhoods before the sun peaked over the tree line to the east. Quinn was in excellent shape but never turned down the opportunity to rest during one of Mrs. Miyagi’s killer workouts. Apart from being entertained by the big Cajun’s swordplay, it gave him time to breathe — and think.
Kim wouldn’t be able to travel for several more days, so she and Mattie had stayed behind in Colorado. Before he left, Jericho made certain a full complement of security from OSI and the El Paso County Sheriff ’s Department surrounded them in concentric circles of security, each layer going outward bristling with progressively heavy weapons.
Quinn’s parents had flown in and that was what really calmed him. His mother had raised two of the wildest sons in Alaska and knew how to handle herself. In truth, she’d never been a huge Kim fan, but Mattie had won her over from the first moment she saw her in the hospital. Quinn’s father, a commercial fisherman, was an aloof, quiet man. He felt the good Lord had given him a finite number of words, so he did his best not to waste any of them. He was also the toughest human being Quinn had ever met. Even tough men could be killed, but it did Quinn’s heart good to know that his father was there, watching over things.
A rattling clash of wood on wood drew Quinn’s attention back to the moment. He watched as Miyagi chased the big Marine in a tight circle over the frosted grass.
The fact that Jacques only had one good eye made no difference to Emiko or the Marine. In battle, weakness had to be overcome or it brought defeat — and both of them knew it.
It would have been a mistake to call what Miyagi taught defensive tactics. Tactics they were, but due to the nature of their jobs, much of what she taught was offensive in nature — and no one Quinn had ever met was better than taking the battle to the enemy than Emiko Miyagi.
She’d dispensed with the more traditional martial arts uniforms, reasoning that they needed to learn to fight in the same clothing they wore in everyday life. In this case, that meant khaki slacks and polo shirts. Miyagi wore a long-sleeve Under Armour shirt beneath her polo, black to match the hair she kept pulled back in a high ponytail like some sort of medieval Mongol warrior. Thibodaux’s khakis, like Quinn’s, were stained at the knees and butt from repeated contact with the ground over the last half hour. The birds were just waking up in the surrounding oaks and sycamore trees and there was enough sun to give them light, but not nearly enough to chase away the clammy cold of a Potomac morning.