The Traveler fr-1 Page 13

  Lawrence was trying to appear diligent and respectful, but he was glad that no one else was in the room. He was frightened and his usual mask wasn’t concealing his emotions. A week earlier, Linden had mailed him a tiny battery-operated video camera called a spider. Concealed in Lawrence’s pocket, the spider felt like a time bomb that could explode at any moment.

  He double-checked the water glasses, making sure they were clean, and then headed for the door. Can’t do it, he thought. Too dangerous. But his body refused to leave the room. Lawrence began praying silently. Help me, Father. I’m not as brave as you.

  The anger he felt at his own cowardice suddenly overpowered his survival instinct. First he switched off the closed-circuit camera that would be used during the discussion, then he bent down and pulled off his shoes. Moving quickly, he stepped onto one of the chairs and stood in the middle of the table. Lawrence inserted the spider into a ceiling air-conditioning vent, made sure that the holding magnets were in contact with the metal, and jumped back onto the floor. Five seconds had gone by. Eight seconds. Ten seconds. Lawrence turned on the closed-circuit camera and began to adjust the chairs.

  * * *

  WHEN HE WAS growing up, Lawrence never suspected that his father was Sparrow, the Japanese Harlequin. His mother told him that she had gotten pregnant when she was a student at Tokyo University. Her wealthy lover refused to marry her and she didn’t want to have an abortion. Instead of bringing up an illegitimate child in Japanese society, she immigrated to America and raised her son in Cincinnati, Ohio. Lawrence accepted this story completely. Although his mother taught him to read and speak Japanese, he never felt the desire to fly to Tokyo and track down some selfish businessman who had abandoned a pregnant college girl.

  Lawrence’s mother died of cancer during his third year of college. In an old pillowcase hidden in the closet, he found letters from her relatives in Japan. The friendly, affectionate letters surprised him. His mother had told him that her family had thrown her out of the house when she became pregnant. Lawrence wrote to the family members and his aunt Mayumi flew to America for the funeral.

  After the ceremony, Mayumi stayed to help her nephew pack up everything in the house and transfer it to a storage warehouse. It was during this time that they found the belongings that Lawrence’s mother had brought from Japan: an antique kimono, some old college textbooks, and a photo album.

  “That’s your grandmother,” Mayumi said, pointing to an old woman smiling at the camera. Lawrence turned the page. “And that’s your mother’s cousin. And her school friends. They were such pretty girls.”

  Lawrence turned the page again and two photographs fell out. One showed his young mother sitting next to Sparrow. The other photograph showed Sparrow alone with the two swords.

  “And who’s this?” Lawrence asked. The man in the photograph looked calm and very serious.

  “Who is this person? Please tell me.” He stared at his aunt and she began to cry.

  “It’s your father. I met him only once, with your mother, at a restaurant in Tokyo. He was a very strong man.”

  Aunt Mayumi knew only a few things about the man in the photographs. He called himself Sparrow, but occasionally used the name Furukawa. Lawrence’s father was involved in something dangerous. Perhaps he was a spy. Many years ago, he was killed with a group of Yakuza gangsters during a gunfight at the Osaka Hotel.

  After his aunt flew back to Japan, Lawrence spent all his free time on the Internet looking for information about his father. It was easy to find out about the Osaka Hotel incident. Articles about the massacre appeared in all the Japanese newspapers as well as the international press. Eighteen Yakuza had died. A gangster named Hiroshi Furukawa was listed as one of the dead, and a Japanese magazine printed a morgue photograph of his father. It seemed strange to Lawrence that none of the articles gave a definitive reason for the incident. Usually the reporter called it a “gangland dispute” or a “clash over illegal profits.” Two wounded Yakuza had survived, but they refused to answer questions.

  At Duke University, Lawrence had learned how to write computer programs that could handle a large amount of statistical data. After graduation, he worked for a game Web site run by the U.S. Army that analyzed the responses of the teenagers who formed online teams and fought each other in a bombed-out city. Lawrence helped create a program that generated a psychological profile of each player. The computer-created profiles had a high correlation with the face-to-face evaluations performed by the army’s recruiters. The program determined who was a future master sergeant, who should operate the radio, and who would volunteer for high-risk missions.

  The army job led to a job in the White House and Kennard Nash. The general felt that Lawrence was a good administrator and that he shouldn’t waste his talents writing computer programs. Nash had a relationship with the CIA and the National Security Agency. Lawrence realized that working for Nash would help him obtain a high-level security rating that would give him access to secret data about his father. He had studied the photograph of his father with the two swords. Sparrow didn’t have the elaborate tattoos of a typical Yakuza.

  Eventually General Nash called Lawrence into his office and gave him what the Brethren called “the Knowledge.” He was told the most basic version: that there was a terrorist group called the Harlequins who protected heretics called Travelers. For the health of society, it was important to destroy the Harlequins and control the visionaries. Lawrence went back to his workstation with his first Brethren access codes, typed his father’s name into the information database, and received his revelation. NAME: Sparrow. AKA: Hiroshi Furukawa. SUMMARY: Known Japanese Harlequin. RESOURCES: Level 2. EFFECTIVENESS: Level 1. CURRENT STATUS: Terminated-Osaka Hotel-1975.

  As Lawrence was given more of the Knowledge and a larger range of access codes, he discovered that most of the Harlequins had been destroyed by Brethren mercenaries. Now he was working for the forces that had murdered his father. The evil surrounded him, but like a Noh actor he kept his mask on at all times.

  When Kennard Nash left the White House, Lawrence followed him to a new job at the Evergreen Foundation. He was allowed to read the Green, Red, and Blue books that described the Travelers and Harlequins and that gave a short history of the Brethren. In this new age, the Brethren rejected the brutal totalitarian control of Stalin and Hitler for the more sophisticated Panopticon system developed by the eighteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

  “You don’t need to watch everyone if everyone believes they’re being watched,” Nash explained. “Punishment isn’t necessary, but the inevitability of punishment has to be programmed into the brain.”

  Bentham had believed that the soul didn’t exist and there was no reality other than the physical world. Upon his death, he promised to leave his fortune to the University of London if his body was preserved, dressed in his favorite clothes, and placed in a glass case. The philosopher’s body was a private shrine for the Brethren, and they all made a point to see it whenever they were visiting London.

  A year ago, Lawrence had flown to Amsterdam for a meeting with one of the Brethren’s Internet monitoring teams. He had a one-day layover in London and took a taxi to the University College London. Entering from Gower Street, he walked across the main quadrangle. It was late in the summer and quite warm. Students wearing shorts and T-shirts were sitting on the white marble steps of the Wilkins Building and Lawrence felt jealous of their casual freedom.

  Bentham sat on a chair inside a glass-and-wood display case at the entrance to the south cloister. His skeleton had been stripped of flesh, padded with straw and cotton wool, and then dressed in the philosopher’s clothes. The philosopher’s head had been kept in a container placed at his feet, but students had stolen it for football games on the quadrangle. Now the head was gone, stored in the university’s vault. A wax face had been substituted, and it had a pale, ghostly appearance.

  Normally a college security guard sat in an identical wood-and-g
lass case about twenty feet away from the philosopher. Brethren paying homage to the inventor of the Panopticon used to joke that it was impossible to know who was more dead-Jeremy Bentham or the obedient drone who watched his body. But that particular afternoon, the guard had vanished and Lawrence was alone in the hall. Slowly he approached the display case and stared at the wax face. The French sculptor who had created the face had done a particularly good job, and the slight upward curve of Bentham’s lip suggested that he was quite satisfied with the progress of the new millennium.

  After staring at the preserved body for a few seconds, Lawrence stepped to the left to study a small exhibit about Bentham’s life. He glanced down and saw graffiti scrawled with a red grease pencil on the tarnished brass molding at the bottom edge of the case. It was an oval shape and three straight lines; Lawrence knew from his research that it was a Harlequin’s lute.

  Was it a gesture of contempt? A defiant statement from the opposition? Crouching down, he studied the mark closer and saw that one of the lines was an arrow pointing toward Bentham’s padded skeleton. A sign. A message. He looked down the cloister hallway at a distant tapestry. A door slammed somewhere in the building, but no one appeared.

  Do something, he thought. This is your only chance. The door of the display case was fastened with a small brass padlock, but he pulled it hard and ripped off the latch. When the door squeaked open, he reached inside and searched the outer pockets of Bentham’s black coat. Nothing. Lawrence opened the coat, touched cotton padding, then found an inside pocket. Something was there. A card. Yes, a postcard. He concealed the prize within his briefcase, shut the glass door, and walked quickly away.

  An hour later he sat in a pub near the British Museum, examining a postcard of La Palette, a café on the rue de Seine in Paris. A green awning. Sidewalk tables and chairs. An X had been drawn on one of the tables in the photograph, but Lawrence didn’t understand what that meant. On the other side of the postcard, someone had written in French: When the temple fell.

  Lawrence studied the postcard when he returned to America and spent hours doing research on the Internet. Had a Harlequin left the card as a clue, a ticket to a certain destination? What temple had collapsed? He could think of only the original Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Ark of the Covenant. Holy of Holies.

  One evening at his town house, Lawrence drank an entire bottle of wine and realized that the ancient order of the Templars was connected to the Harlequins. The Templars’ leaders had been arrested by the King of France and eventually burned at the stake. When did that happen? Using his laptop computer, he went on the Internet and found out immediately. October 1307. Friday the thirteenth.

  There were two Friday the thirteenths this year and one of them was a few weeks away. Lawrence changed his vacation schedule and flew to Paris. On the morning of the thirteenth, he went to La Palette wearing a sweater with a Harlequin diamond pattern. The café was situated on a side street of small art galleries that was near Pont Neuf. Lawrence sat outside at one of the little tables and ordered a café crème from the waiter. He was tense and excited, ready for an adventure, but an hour went by and nothing happened.

  Studying the postcard one more time, he saw that the X mark was on a particular table at the extreme left edge of the restaurant’s sidewalk area. When a young French couple finished reading the newspaper and left for work, he moved to the chosen table and ordered a baguette with ham. He waited until noon, when an elderly waiter wearing a white shirt and black vest walked over to his table.

  The man spoke French. Lawrence shook his head. The waiter tried English. “You are looking for someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who is that?”

  “I can’t say. But I’ll know this person when they arrive.”

  The old waiter reached beneath his waistcoat, took out a cell phone, and handed it to Lawrence. Almost immediately the phone rang, and Lawrence answered it. A deep voice spoke in French, German, and then English.

  “How did you find this place?” asked the voice.

  “A postcard in a dead man’s pocket.”

  “You have encountered an access point. We have seven of these points around the world to gain allies and contact mercenaries. This is only an access point. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be allowed to enter.”

  “I understand.”

  “So tell me-what happened today?”

  “The Templar order was rounded up and destroyed. But some survived.”

  “Who survived?”

  “The Harlequins. One of them was my father, Sparrow.”

  Silence. And then the man on the phone laughed softly. “Your father would have enjoyed this moment. He savored the unexpected. And who are you?”

  “Lawrence Takawa. I work for the Evergreen Foundation.”

  Again, silence. “Ahhh yes,” the voice whispered. “The public façade of the group that calls themselves the Brethren.”

  “I want to find out about my father.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “That’s your choice,” Lawrence said. “I’ll sit at this table for ten more minutes, then I’m leaving.”

  He clicked off the cell phone and waited for it to explode, but nothing happened. Five minutes later, a large man with a shaved head marched down the sidewalk, stopped in front of the table. The man had a black metal tube slung over his shoulder and Lawrence realized that he was looking at a Harlequin carrying a hidden sword. “Apportez-moi une eau-de-vie, s’il vous plaît,” the man said to the waiter and sat down in a wicker chair. The Harlequin thrust his right hand in the pocket of his trench coat as if he was grabbing a handgun. Lawrence wondered if the Harlequin was going to execute him immediately or if he would wait for his drink to arrive.

  “Switching off the phone was a decisive action, Mr. Takawa. I like that. Maybe you really are the son of Sparrow.”

  “I’ve got a photograph of my parents sitting together. You can see it if you want.”

  “Or I could kill you first.”

  “That’s another choice.”

  The Frenchman smiled for the first time. “So why are you risking your life to meet me?”

  “I want to know why my father died.”

  “Sparrow was the last Harlequin left in Japan. When the Tabula hired Yakuza gangsters to kill three known Travelers, he defended these people and kept them alive for almost eight years. One of the Travelers was a Buddhist monk living in a Kyoto temple. The Yakuza sent several teams of men to assassinate this monk, but the killers kept disappearing. Sparrow caught them, of course, and cut them down like tall weeds in a garden. Unlike many modern Harlequins, he actually preferred using a sword.”

  “What happened? How did they catch him?”

  “He met your mother at a bus stop near Tokyo University. They started to see each other and fell in love. When your mother became pregnant, the Yakuza found out about it. They kidnapped your mother and took her to a banquet room at the Osaka Hotel. She was tied up, hanging from a rope. The Yakuza planned to get drunk and rape her. They couldn’t kill Sparrow, so they were going to defile the only important person in his life.”

  A waiter served a glass of brandy and the big man removed his hand from his coat pocket. The traffic noise, the sound of conversations around them faded away. All that Lawrence could hear was the man’s voice.

  “Your father walked into the banquet room disguised as a waiter. He reached under a serving cart and pulled out a sword and a twelve-round rotary-drum shotgun. Sparrow attacked the Yakuza, killed some and wounded the rest. Then he freed your mother and told her to run away.”

  “Did she obey him?”

  “Yes. Sparrow should have fled with your mother, but his honor had been violated. He walked around the banquet room with his sword, executing the Yakuza. While he was doing this, one of the wounded men pulled out a handgun and shot him in the back. The local police were bribed to obscure the facts, and the newspapers said it was a gang war.”

  “What about the
Travelers?”

  “With no one to protect them, they were destroyed in a few weeks. A German Harlequin named Thorn flew to Japan, but it was already too late.”

  Lawrence stared down at his coffee cup. “And that’s what happened…”

  “Like it or not, you’re the son of a Harlequin and you work for the Tabula. The only question is: What are you going to do about that?”

  ***

  AN INTENSE FEAR returned to Lawrence as the meeting time got closer. He locked his office door, but anyone with a higher security rating-like Kennard Nash-would be allowed to enter. At 3:55 PM, he took out the receiver device that Linden mailed with the spider and plugged it into the cable port of his laptop computer. Hazy red lines appeared on the monitor, and then suddenly he saw the conference room and heard voices on his headset.

  Kennard Nash was standing by the long table and greeting the Brethren as they arrived for the meeting. A few of the men were wearing golf clothes and had spent the afternoon at a local Westchester country club. The Brethren shook hands firmly with one another, made jokes, and gossiped about the current political situation. An uninformed observer might have decided that this group of well-dressed older men ran a charitable foundation with a yearly banquet and honorary awards.

  “All right, gentlemen,” Nash said. “Take your seats. It’s time for our conversation.”

  Typing instructions into his computer, Lawrence focused the spider’s lens. He watched as Nathan Boone appeared on the conference-room video screen. The small squares at the bottom of the screen showed head shots of the Brethren in other countries.

  “Hello, everyone.” Boone spoke calmly, like a financial officer discussing current revenue. “I wanted to give you a summary of the current situation regarding Michael and Gabriel Corrigan.