It was the middle of June. Ten days since he had floated down the bloodstained Rhine. On his return tc Washington he spent two days in an AXE hospital,' most of the time floating in a hot bath loaded with Epsom salts to reduce the swelling, but he was still fiendishly sore and moved with difficulty. During his time in the bath he had refused to eat, had gone into an intense yoga trance. It was the water pranayama, in which he hoped to achieve what his guru had called a "one pointed" mind. The AXE doctors were doubtful, and puzzled, and one suggested that Nick needed a psychiatrist more than the soothing bath. But Nick stuck by his guns, abetted by Hawk, and though the doctors grumbled they let him have his way. For two days he was deep in hatha yoga; he united the moon breath and the sun breath; when he came out of it and the hospital, he entered a long series of high-level conferences with a certainty that he was right. In the end he won his point, but only over furious objection from the CIA. AXE had goofed it, they said. Fumbled the ball. Now it was their turn. Hawk did not tell Nick about it, but it was his own call to the White House that finally turned the tide. Nick, and AXE, were to get one more chance to handle it alone. They had better be right!
The door opened and Tonaka came into the room. Her getas whispered on the straw matting as she crossed to where Nick stood at the single window, gazing into a silver curtain of rain. The monsoon had come to Korea. It rained for at least twelve hours out of every twenty-four, dispersing for the moment the stinks and aridity of this Land of the Morning Calm.
The woman was carrying a tray with tea things and a bowl of fish and rice. She put it down near a brazier in which a few coals glowed lividly, then came back to stand near Nick. He put an arm about her tiny waist. He had aot wanted a woman — he was in no shape, physically or mentally, for sexual sport — but here he had run into the house rules. Shanghai-Gai was adamant; you had a woman, you paid her, or you did not stay. Nick paid. The gesang house was safe and good cover. It kept him out of Pusan, where he was sure to be noticed, yet he could get into the docks and the railroad station in half an hour. Tonaka, instead of a sexual companion, had become comrade and nurse. She did not seem to mind. Until this moment, when she rather startled Nick by saying: "I have feeling you go soon, Nick-san. You think you can maybe love me before you go?"
It was an embarrassing question as well as an unexpected one. The AXEman had no desire to make love to Tonaka, even had he been able to do so without pain, yet he did not wish to wound her feelings. He sensed that she had become much attracted to him during his brief stay.
Gently he said, "I'm afraid I can't, Tonaka. I would like to — but there is still much pain."
Tonaka put her hand down and touched him lightly. Nick, faking a little, said "Ouch!"
"I hate them for doing bad things to you, Nick-san. For hurt you so we cannot make love. I am sad for us, Nick-san."
"I am sad also," said Nick. He had told her nothing, of course. She had invented her own fantasies.
He glanced at his wrist. Nearly two. The ferry from Shimonoseki, in Japan, got into Pusan Harbor at two. Jimmy Kim would be watching the ferry slip. It was only a short walk from the slip to the railroad station. The trait for Seoul left at four. It was a good train, the best the Koreans had — all that was left of the old Asia Express from Pusan to Mukden. Now it stopped at Seoul.
Nick patted Tonaka's arm and kissed her lightly on the forehead. She was wearing a heady Occidental perfume which somehow did not clash with her gesang clothes: tiny felt slippers and socks, a long red skirt with a little jacket of yellow brocade. She was tall for a Korean girl — actually she was in her early thirties, a woman — and she kept her breath clean and free of kimchi. She had a round, bland face the color of lemons, with a pronounced epicanthic fold and small dark eyes as alert as a raven's.
She clung to the big man for a moment, burying her face in his chest. Nick was wearing only a white silk kimono with a golden dragon emblazoned across the back. It is, at times, hard for an Occidental to tell when an Oriental woman is aroused. Nick Carter had been around and he sensed that Tonaka was in the tender travail. He felt an answering stir in himself and he walked her quickly toward the door. "Maybe later, Tonaka. I have some business now."
She nodded but did not comment. She knew he had a radio in his suitcase. She stood on tiptoe and pressed her moist rosebud mouth against his cheek. She shook her head. "I do not think it, Nick-san. I told you I have a feeling — you will leave this place soon." She patted his cheek and the dark eyes twinkled. "It is too bad. I like the way you big noses make love. You are better than Korean man."
Nick patted her behind. "Com-mo-semni da. Thank you. Now beat it."
Tonaka laughed at his atrocious Korean — they usually conversed in either Japanese or broken English — and left. Nick closed the door after her. As he did so he heard the buzzing in the suitcase, like a boxed rattler. He waited until he heard the clatter of the girl's getas on the tile passage, then he went to the suitcase, opened it and flicked a switch on the small receiving set. Jimmy Kim's voice came into the room. "Testing — il, ees sahm, sah, oh — Mansei?"
Nick spoke into the little hand mike. "Long live Korea! You doing any business?"
Jimmy Kim sounded excited. "Maybe. Just could be this is it. A couple of live ones — just got off the ferry. Better get in here fast."
"I'm on my way."
On the way into Pusan in his borrowed jeep, sweating under a heavy black poncho, he kept telling himself that this had better be it. Had to be! Washington was getting very nervous. Even Hawk was nervous, and that was most unusual. Killmaster knew his boss would string along with him as far as possible, but there was a limit to everything. Ten days now. Ten days with only one faint hint that Nick's thinking was right, that he was on the right track. Word had finally leaked out of Albania that the Yellow Widow had gone to ground there. She had a man with her. That had been an inspired guess on Nick's part — he winced even now as he remembered the circumstances — and he was careful not to tell the assembled brass that it had been only a guess. A frantic clutch at a straw to save himself more pain. What the brass didn't know wouldn't hurt them. And he had been right.
Immediately after getting the word from Albania Nick had made his first move, taken his first gamble. He'd had to move while his credit was still good with the Powers That Be, and he got a somewhat reluctant Hawk to state his case.
They would make no move while Bennett, and the Widow, were in Albania. The country was tiny, desolate, with rugged mountains, the population fierce and suspicious of strangers. Neither AXE nor the CIA had ever been able to maintain a respectable apparatus there. Even British Intelligence couldn't do it. All that was available were scraps, a few bits and pieces sent out now and then by native agents who would risk their lives for a few leks.
Leave them alone, Nick urged. Depend on Soviet pressure to winkle them out of their hiding place, set them on the run again. Colonel Kalinski, that horror of a woman, would be panting on their trail. The trail that Nick had so inadvertently revealed. He grimaced at the thought now. In a way the torture had worked — he had lied to her and the lie had turned true. So far it had worked to his advantage — at least Kalinski had flushed the birds again.