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Summer’s scream of warning was swallowed up in the noise of the battle, and Taka was too focused on trying to restrain the Shirosama to realize death was coming up behind him.
She screamed again as Heinrich raised the katana, and then he froze. The sword dropped uselessly from his hand while he sank to his knees, then pitched over onto the ground, onto the outstretched kimono, the blood from the hole between his eyes spilling out onto the ancient silk.
The mousy British woman was heading toward her, and Summer tried to scramble farther out of the way until she realized it was her husband, Brother Neville, who’d shot Heinrich. The tall man was now leaning over Reno’s fallen body, and he no longer looked like a gray ghost at all.
“Stop squirming, Summer,” the woman said in a clipped British accent. “I can’t untie you when you fight me.”
Summer stopped moving, her gaze focused on Taka, his hands around the Shirosama’s neck, squeezing, as the man’s pale eyes began to bug out of his bleached face. “He’s going to kill him,” she said in a hoarse voice.
The woman glanced toward them. “No, he won’t. There’s nothing Hayashi would like more than to be a martyr. Taka knows what he’s doing.”
Summer’s hands were free, and even as her shoulders screamed in pain she started for the bonds around her ankles herself. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
The battle was already over. She could no longer see Taka and the Shirosama—the silent, defeated brethren were blocking her view. Brother Neville seemed to be directing things, and Summer had the sudden fear that this was simply a religious coup, one crazed guru overthrowing another. Until he headed toward them and she looked up into icy blue eyes and he held out a hand for her.
“Are you all right, Dr. Hawthorne?”
She let him pull her to her feet. “Who the hell are you?” she said again. She still couldn’t see Taka past the crowd of silent brethren, and she couldn’t fight the clawing panic in her stomach.
“Takashi works for us,” he said simply. “That’s all you really need to know. We have to get you and Taka’s cousin off the mountain. Now. The plane is waiting.”
“The plane with the poisons?”
“They’ve been neutralized,” the woman said, rising, suddenly looking a great deal more authoritative. “This young man must get to a hospital, and I think you need to get out of this country and back to your sister.”
For a moment Taka was forgotten. “You have Jilly?”
“I’m the one who brought her out of L.A.,” the woman said. “She’s staying with Peter’s wife right now, and they’re waiting for you to join them.” She nodded toward the tall man. “That’s Peter, by the way. Peter Madsen. And I’m Madame Lambert.”
“The head of the Committee,” Summer said.
The woman did not look pleased. “Takashi has been much too talkative. He’s usually more discreet. Just exactly what went on between you two?”
“None of your business, Isobel,” Peter Madsen said easily. “Besides, Takashi never gets involved during his missions. He knows how to separate the job from life.”
And Summer was the job.
The stunned, defeated brethren had moved enough so that she could see where Taka and the Shirosama had been battling. They were both gone, and only the body of Heinrich, his blood soaking into the kimono, remained.
“Where are they?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Madame Lambert said in her cool, controlled voice. “It’s over, and the sooner you forget about the last few days the better. In the meantime we need to get the boy airlifted to a hospital and take you out of Japan before there are any kind of political repercussions. I’m sure you can’t wait to leave here.”
Summer glanced around her, at the frozen hillside. One of the ceremonial torii gates had been smashed, and the prized Hayashi Urn lay on its side in the dirt, forgotten. She’d lost track of time long ago, but it seemed as if she’d only just arrived in Japan. And leaving the country would mean leaving Taka forever.
“I can’t wait,” she echoed in an expressionless voice. Reno was being loaded onto a stretcher by a couple of the white-robed brethren, though they were clearly working with the Committee, not the cult and she felt as if her head was exploding. “Can you tell me just one thing?”
“I doubt it,” Isobel Lambert said, taking Summer’s arm and leading her up the hillside, skirting the fallen bodies.
“Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?”
The woman stopped to look back at the fallen bodies, then at Summer. “Shades of gray, Dr. Hawthorne. It’s all shades of gray.”
26
Post-traumatic stress syndrome, wasn’t that what they called it? It didn’t matter that she was sitting in the window seat of a beautiful old country house an hour outside of London, and that even in winter the garden outside was calming and beautiful. It didn’t matter that her almost-six-foot-tall baby sister seemed completely unscathed by her adventures, and spent her time either in the kitchen with their hostess or foraging through the impenetrable textbooks Peter Madsen had managed to procure for her. Jilly was safe and happy, adjusting. Genevieve was the perfect hostess, warm but not intrusive, and Peter turned out to be absolutely charming. Nothing the slightest bit scary about him, despite Summer’s initial doubts.
Madame Lambert had kept away, which suited Summer just fine. Isobel was cold, controlled and completely unemotional, which was what Summer had needed for the numb, endless plane ride to England. But right now her main goal was to keep calm, and Madame Lambert simply reminded her of the horror on the hillside.
