shot him a dirty look, and continued. “Baker loved all that crap. After I mustered out, I lost touch. But you hear things . . . he’s been involved in all kinds of stuff.”
Micky looked at me. “Like the martial arts.”
“Aha,” I said, ever alert to a clue.
“Aha,” Art echoed.
“They did some sort of basic hand-to-hand training when I was in the Marines,” Micky said.
I nodded. “Basically judo and jujutsu, from what I’ve read.”
“Yeah,” Art added. “That and the more subtle techniques like jump on the enemy’s head once you knock him down.” He reminisced for a minute. “Simple, yet effective.”
“So what’s Baker want?” I asked, trying to get them back on track.
Art fished a note out of his pocket. “He’s involved with some new unarmed system fighting they’re teaching.” He looked at the small piece of scrap paper. “It’s based at Fort Bragg at something called CERG.”
“Let me guess, “I said, “the Center for Effective . . . ” I trailed off, at a loss for inspiration, but sure that I was on the right track. The military loves acronyms.
“Close, but no cigar. It’s the Combat Effectiveness Research Group.”
“Seems important, yet extremely vague,” Micky said. “Now I’m sure this is something related to our government.”
Art gave his partner a look, then faced me. “Anyway, Baker’s always on the prowl for new ideas and techniques . . . ”
“New blood,” I suggested.
“Fresh meat,” Micky corrected.
“ . . . and he had read a bit about you. He made the connection between you and Micky, then between Micky and me, and was making some inquiries about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
Art held up a finger, “Well, we both spoke with him. I said you were an academic, a writer of fine, yet obscure tomes . . . ”
“I said you had a knack for pissing people off and getting into trouble,” my brother continued.
Art nodded thoughtfully at the comment. “It’s true, you know, Connor.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “And I say that as a friend.”
I shrugged his hand off and smiled. “Will you cut that out?” I looked at Micky. “What else did you say?”
For once, my brother’s face lost its usual sarcastic look. We both had light blue eyes and the same smirky facial expressions that had outraged countless nuns in our bumpy progress through parochial school. But it was gone now and he was very quiet and very serious.
“I told him,” Micky said in a careful voice, “that I had seen you do some remarkable things in some tough situations.”
Art added, “I told Baker I thought that you were the real deal.”
“Hmm,” I said, momentarily surprised at them both.
Then Micky reverted to type. “We also told him you needed a job.”
“He said he’d contact you,” Art supplied. “He may have a proposition.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Art, however, did. He sat back and took a long sip of his beer. “Baker’s a wild man, Connor. Keep your eyes open. But look on the bright side.”
Micky and I looked at Art skeptically.
“Your mother will be so pleased,” he told the two of us, beaming.
The video footage was flat, and it obscured the subtlety of angle and timing. The old teacher regretted that. But the audience wasn’t trained to appreciate subtlety and the outcome was clear enough. That was all that mattered.
They watched it without comment, which was unusual. They were garrulous as a rule, excitable, and given to flowery discussion. The small old Japanese man in the corner was just the opposite. Words leaked from him in a cadence that was shaped by patience, the slow drip of insight squeezed out drop by drop only by the force of necessity. He felt no need for speech, certainly not here. The image on the television screen spoke for him.
The group’s mission had not moved him, but their timing had suited his purpose. They believed that they had sought him out. In reality, it had not been difficult for him to attract them. He would have preferred to remain in the mountains of his home islands, desiring familiar territory in which to execute his attack. But it was not to be—that meddler from Tokyo had seen to that.
They had asked for his knowledge and he had come, knowing that what they sought was a thing that was easy to bestow. It merely needed devotion, and they had that quality in abundance. He had left one island chain for another, abandoning the peaks and rice fields of his ancestors, spurning the cities that had grown up in sterile imitation of the West. His new pupils understood the decay that the West created. They, too, resented what had been done: legacies spurned and lives rendered pointless. The old teacher spoke to them through translators, but when his eyes looked into theirs, he saw a familiar glint. The anger and resentment needed no translation.
It was not a difficult task to teach them the techniques of his art. To create the warrior’s spirit was a deeper challenge. They were willing to fight, but had spent so long hiding that their impulse was always for ambush—a vicious blow to the back of the head, or the strike from a distance—a peaceful morning rent by the blast of a car bomb. It was sometimes effective, the old man knew, but it was a tactic ultimately shaped by fear. It was ironic in some ways. They hated the nations that had made them weak, and yet their very weakness drove them to rely on the technology of the people they hated.
The rushing bloom and fire of explosions entranced them. The old man watched them swell with pride and power as they spoke of it. They ignored the imprecision and gloried only in the fear that it created. The old man thought them foolish. He valued few things in this world, but precision was one of them.
Yet, he persisted in instructing them. They knew of guns and bombs, the things that brought death from afar. He had different, more feral skills to impart.
Deep down, he felt contempt for their tactics. They had chortled in glee at the video footage from New York, seeing in the storm of concrete dust and black smoke a great battle won. The old man did not care one way or the other about the lives snuffed out as the buildings pancaked down into the ground, but he knew that the true warrior faces his enemy. What their brothers had done was not the act of warriors, whatever they called themselves; it was homicidal demolition.
He did not speak to them about the warrior’s code. Instead, he made them into weapons themselves. This, at least, was a thing they understood, these young men from the hot, dry places of the world. It was their strength. They knew that the West searched for weapons in the hands, not in the eyes. It was a weakness in their enemy that they appreciated. And the old man helped them cultivate fragments of an ancient wisdom that would give
