the wind and the dry clacking of tree branches. He turned around quickly, sure that someone was on the path behind him. But he saw no one. He focused his attention back down the slope. Hidden by the curve of the land, karate students were exercising in the distant courtyard. He could hear the bark of their cadences bouncing along the hills. And when he looked down the curving path as it dipped into a hollow, the trees seemed to close ranks, crowding in on the trail and blurring its boundaries in the waning light.
He stuck his cold hands in his coat pockets, hurrying back the way he had come, his report forgotten. The brilliance of his investigative triumph seemed suddenly unreal and unimportant. He was now just a man, alone on a winter hillside, cold, and suddenly jumpy. He walked quickly toward the temple, activity masking a growing unease. A more experienced man would have heeded the visceral message his body was sending. A field agent would have known that fear, like cunning, springs from a primitive reflex for self-preservation. Higashi the analyst knew little of cunning. He was learning more about fear.
Lost in his reverie, he had gone far up the slopes. The hills were networked with paths that meandered by scenic overlooks and small clearings. In these spaces, tiny, ancient dolmens listed sadly off their uprights, like forgotten, exhausted travelers. Higashi, lost, walked faster, his head swiveling, eyes hungry for a familiar landmark. He was convinced that he heard footsteps in the woods behind him. But when he looked, there was nothing, just the looming trunks of trees, the wind, and the distant chorus of kiai from the karate students in the valley. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise and he fled down the hill.
His face was slick with sweat. The path dipped down into a dark place. A small rocky streambed glinted with ice. He hurried across a small stone bridge, looking down to keep his footing. He slipped and fell anyway, righted himself and then hurried across the icy place, casting another terrified look behind him.
He ran headlong into the trap.
The old man emerged from the trees along the path, his robes one of many archaic shades living in the hollow of the hills. He stared at Higashi with a fire that halted the younger man in his tracks.
“Who are you?” the old voice hissed.
“Sumimasen,” Higashi apologized, ducking his head and spinning around to flee.
“Yame!” the old voice ordered. Higashi felt powerless to withstand the command. Like a man caught in a nightmare, Higashi turned to face the old master. He trembled in fear and cold.
“I must know,” the old one croaked, and removed a weapon from under his robes. It was a suruchin, a fine chain with a small weight at either end. He held the loops of the chain in his left hand and spun a short length in a tight circle with his right. The chain made a deep whirring sound in the cold air. Higashi was shocked into movement by the sound of the chain. He jerked forward in despair, hands held out like claws.
The chain whipped out, and the weight smashed into the ridge of bone where the nose met the brow. Higashi grunted and sunk to his knees, stunned and bleeding. The old man rewound the chain and watched Higashi impassively. Then the chain snicked out again, smashing into the younger man’s cheek. Higashi could taste the blood in his mouth. He spit out a fragment of tooth. In shock, all he could think was how cold and hard was the ground on which he knelt, as cold as the old eyes that bore into him.
He cried out involuntarily as the old man swarmed toward him, but his cry was mixed in with the echo of the kiai, the shouts of the karate trainees in the courtyard. Higashi held up his hands defensively. They were beaten away. He tried to rise, but was slammed into the ground and had the wind knocked out of him. He lay stunned and disbelieving, his eyes wide, retreating into innocence. He regretted coming. He yearned for the safety of his cubicle, the ordered ranks of files under his control. He closed his eyes in the hope that, when he opened them, the old man would be gone. Like a bad dream.
When the fine chain looped around Higashi’s neck, his eyes jerked open. He was dragged into the woods. He kicked feebly and tried to choke out a protest against the relentless and irresistible force. But no one heard.
Higashi recognized this man in an elemental way. He had the same hard eyes as those judoka from so long ago, the sheer physical presence of his father. It sparked a brief flare of resentment and resistance. Higashi knew what the old one was up to: his contacts abroad and the skills he was selling.
By the time he was finished with the interrogation, the old one knew what he wanted. He worked the nerve points with a casual brutality, his short, hard fingers jabbing, grinding, bringing fire to the last moments of Higashi’s life. The analyst gasped and burned, largely powerless to resist the heat of questioning. But even then, Higashi’s mind whirred with a fading spurt of dispassionate analysis. His last coherent thought was that he was glad he had made a complete copy of the file and mailed it to his father. As if to say, here, this is what I’ve done, finally.
It was the one secret he was able to keep from his murderer. One final triumph on the rocky slope that Higashi’s failing senses confused with a judo mat.
In the end, the old one simply snapped Higashi’s neck, backing away with an odd fastidiousness as Higashi’s muscles spasmed and then relaxed, a stain of urine spreading under the corpse.
The old man melted into the trees, his compact form moving silently through the gloom. In the distance, the karateka called together. Their voices echoed in the twilight, bouncing in cadence around the hills, strong, united, and purposeful. Alone in the forest, Higashi’s body steamed slightly in the cold air, his eyes open to the sky. The trees creaked in the wind, branches rubbing together and making small noises like hurt animals. Far away, a crow called in distant protest of the coming dark.
Rain whipped against the high windows of the training hall—hard pellets cast by an angry hand. Inside, students knelt along the hardwood floor of the dojo. The room was silent except for the distant noise of wind and weather and the dry rasp of Yamashita’s feet as he moved to the place of honor at the head of the room.
He moved with a fluid certainty, settling down into the formal sitting posture known as seiza with the soft inevitability of snowfall. Yamashita Rinsuke had been my sensei, my teacher, for twelve years, and I had seen him do remarkable things, but the simple spectacle of everyday actions was enough to show me that I was in the presence of a master.
In the martial arts, the really good teachers cultivate in their students an acute sensitivity to various stimuli. Your nerve endings are teased and jolted, your reflex actions made more subtle, and, for some of us, the result is a change in the ways we see the world and exist within it. The true masters are both brutal and refined, compassionate torturers, and guides who lead you to places where you will stand alone, confronting age-old fears that snarl in the abyss.
Once you’ve gone into that void and come through to the other side, it changes you. You glimpse it sometimes in people who’ve had a similar experience. I see it in my teacher’s face in his rare unguarded moments. And I see it in the mirror. It doesn’t make us better than other people, just different.
This day for a fleeting second, as he knelt, I saw something else in Yamashita’s expression. It puzzled me. I knew he was displeased with the progress of the afternoon’s class, but I didn’t think that was what I had detected. My teacher wore a mask during class time—his shaved head swiveled on a thick neck and his eyes were dark holes in a face that regarded his students with silent comment. I’ve come to be the same way. This afternoon I thought I saw something unusual behind his eyes. It lasted a micro-second, almost like a gap in concentration—what they call tsuki
