Chapter 20
Like something out of a war correspondent's film footage, the inside of Agete headquarters, laid visible through the shattered lower windows that had been their escape way mere days earlier, was bloodstained, gouged by blades and bullets, and littered with glass, broken furniture, and debris. Off to the side of the yellow police tape that cordoned off the perimeter of the building, a couple of uniformed NYPD officers stood speaking together next to their squad cars.
"You figure Doshida ought'a have a hell of an insurance policy," Raphael said, perched on the edge of the rooftop. "Every place he touches ends up trashed."
Leonardo pointed out the structure half a block behind the main one. "The Foot didn't know about the underground corridor to the other building. It looks intact."
"And empty. Whoever made it out of that fight ain't here now."
"It's early yet." Leonardo scanned the rooftops, considering. "You stay on this side. I'll take that upper vantage point on the south end."
When he was in place, Leo had an unobstructed view of Agete's grounds and the road leading up to it. He glanced back to the far end of the rooftop where Raphael crouched one level down, still as a gargoyle. He turned his attention back to the building. As much as they needed to find out what their enemies were up to, the greater part of him hoped that they found nothing; that the night would pass uneventfully. They could use the reprieve.
An hour and a half later, just as he was beginning to think he would get his wish, a black SUV drove up, slowing as it passed the police cars and continuing on, turning in behind the second building where Doshida had his office and training facility. The driver pulled up right to the back doors and kept the vehicle running. Four men climbed out; two stood guard with guns drawn, the other two darted inside.
Leo flicked his gaze across the roof. Raphael was gone from his perch. He was running along the edge of the roof, a rappelling line held loosely in his hand.
"Shit," Leo cursed under his breath. From a distance, he didn't think Doshida was one of the four men he'd spotted, but Raphael had gotten a closer look. Was he running to better see what was going on, to follow, or to attack? Leo leapt to his feet and sprinted across the rooftop, trying to keep both his brother and the SUV in sight.
Raphael reached the corner of the roof and flung his line around the fire escape railing. It snagged and held a split second before his feet left the ledge and he disappeared down the side of the building.
Damn, he was fast, even when injured and in no state to be taking on a carload of armed men alone. Leo drew his own line as he ran, but before he reached the edge, the two men emerged from the building, one of them carrying a computer hard drive, the other a large cardboard filing box. They hurried back into the vehicle, followed by their two armed companions. The SUV backed up, turned, and sped away.
Leonardo changed direction in mid-stride and ran parallel to the vehicle as it drove down the street below him. It continued straight; he fixed his sight past the edge of the roof, appraising the distance to the next building. His stride lengthened, he put a burst of power into the final three paces and leapt into space.
He knew better than to look down; the balls of his feet hit concrete and he let himself roll, absorbing the impact. He was back on his feet and running, but now there were filaments of pain radiating from the point in his left thigh where he'd been injured only a few nights ago. He ignored them, keeping his focus on the vehicle. It turned left at an intersection. He leapt again, trying to shift more of the landing to his right leg. Cutting diagonally across the rooftop, he caught sight of the car, stopped at a red light. The next building over was too tall; he dug his hands into climbing spikes and jumped to a window ledge. He hugged the brick wall as he stepped quickly but carefully from ledge to ledge, making his way around the side of the high-rise. To reach the next rooftop, he had to spring almost straight up, hauling himself up by the armpits and swinging his legs over.
The SUV's taillights were turning right. Despite the growing spike of pain in his leg, he raced across the roof, only to discover that the next building over was missing. It had been demolished; a construction crane stood over the naked support pillars of what would be the new structure. The black SUV drove under an overpass and out of sight.
Leonardo lowered himself to one knee, taking the weight off his throbbing leg and letting his breathing and heart rate come down. He examined the street below, making a careful mental note of where he was. The SUV had headed west, towards Hell's Kitchen and the Hudson River. It wasn't much- less than he'd hoped for- but it was something.
Rather than retrace all his climbing and leaping, he decided it would be more prudent to give his leg a rest and find his way back at street level. He rappelled down into an alley and took to the shadows, moving at a steady but unhurried pace, scanning the rooftops for Raphael. He hoped, if they didn't find each other, that Raph would have the good sense to go back to their agreed-upon checkpoint and not take off on his own.
He wondered how Mike and Don were doing; he hadn't seen them since yesterday, and then only for a few minutes when they'd come back to the lair for some stuff and Don had given him a brief and promising update. What a puzzle they were uncovering. If anyone could figure it out, though, Don would...
Even if he hadn't let his guard come down a hair too low, the attack was perfectly silent. He reacted on instinct, throwing himself to the ground the instant he sensed it. The chain whistled right over him, the blade at the end of it lodged in the mortar where his head had been a moment earlier.
Leonardo was on his feet in a second. Counter-surprise was his only advantage against an ambush; he grabbed the chain and pulled his attacker towards him before the man could think to let go. His hands closed over an arm, he rooted his weight and hurled the man head-first into the wall behind him. He saw two things: the symbol on the man's headband as it flitted past his field of vision on its way towards brick, and the motion of at least two other attackers coming in from either side.
Foot soldiers.
He couldn't let himself be trapped in the middle, against the wall. His katana flew into his hands as he sprang at the nearest opponent, intending to force an opening and pivot behind him. But the man saw immediately what he was trying to do and shifted adeptly to block and counterattack with his own blade. The others closed in quickly.
The shriek of metal on metal reverberated up Leonardo's arms. Propelled into that state of altered consciousness were his body seemed to think for itself, his twin katana took on lives of their own, clashing, parrying, striking. An enemy weapon went spinning through the air past him, the severed hand still attached to the hilt.
His left leg was a fraction too slow; a blade sliced open the calf. He didn't feel pain, not at first. Only mild surprise when the swordsman pitched forward, the tip of a sai protruding from his throat. Like a small nuclear bomb, Raphael's presence cleared a circle of destruction upon impact. Leo recovered his footing, felt his battle senses reach and join his brother's, so it seemed as though their breathing, their heartbeats, fell into sync and they became two limbs of the same creature of war. The Foot pressed back in, recklessly malevolent, sensing, rightly, that only by attacking all at once did they stand a chance, not just of winning, but of surviving.
"Teishi!" The sharp call cut through the fight. The Foot soldiers fell back reluctantly.
Raphael's burning gaze swept across the circle of black-clad fighters. "What are you waiting for?" he growled.
One of the Foot soldiers stepped through the circle, a big man with a scarred face. His authority and the stripes on his headband denoted his senior rank. His hard, assessing gaze took in the two turtles, weakened but fearsome, his eight remaining soldiers, and the handful already lying moaning or silent on the ground. He said, "You will come with us to Kan-Jonin. He will speak with you."
"Oh he will, will he?" Raph shifted his stance, coiled to attack. "Seems his message is pretty damn clear."
Leonardo made the same rapid calculation that the Foot captain had. He straightened up and met the man's eyes. "We'll come," he said.
Raphael's face spoke plainer than words. What the fuck, Leo?
"You will not fight," the Foot captain declared.
"We won't fight. If we aren't attacked."
The captain grunted in acknowledgement and made a signal to his soldiers. They stowed their weapons, though not their hateful and suspicious glares. Leonardo returned his swords to their scabbards and turned a look on his brother. Raphael's knuckles whitened around the hilts of his sais. He slid them into his belt, his jaw clenched.
The Foot captain spoke rapid words in Japanese to his men, instructing two of them to handle the dead and wounded. Leonardo knelt and pulled off his mask to tie his calf wound. He was lucky the blade had sliced along the muscle rather than across it; he could have been hamstrung. It was deep and bleeding copiously though. He yanked the fabric tight. Raphael stood over him, scowling. "You know what the hell you're doing?" he said, his voice fast and low. "Letting them walk us over to meet Kan and a few dozen more Foot? On their turf, their terms? We can win if we fight here."
"Maybe. But not without taking a lot more hits. Then where'd we be? Too injured to fight, to find Doshida, to help Don and Mike. It's what the Rising Hand would want, isn't it? The Foot are in the same boat. Maybe Kan will listen to reason."
"Reason," Raphael echoed with a contemptuous snort. "Reason's got nothing to do with how the Foot feel about us."
The Foot captain stepped up with his remaining six soldiers. Three of them led the way forward; the captain and the other three spaced out and escorted them from behind. Leonardo put his leg down and felt it burn but walked forward without favoring it, determined not to betray the extent of his injury. Wordlessly, knowingly, Raphael fell into stride on his left side. His eyes kept twitching, expecting, daring the men to change their minds and give him a reason to finish what he'd started.
They cut through alleys and side streets, the Foot always close enough to strike, and positioned so that they could not escape. By the time they reached the Foot compound, Leonardo could no longer conceal his limp. He could tell that Raphael was hurting as well, though he hid it beneath a fierce glower. They'd been weakened by the journey and would soon be surrounded by fresh warriors. Raph was right; what had he done?
It was too late. The sentries pulled open the gate and they were swept in by their posse of guards.
Last summer, the Foot compound had resembled a construction zone; now it was a battlefield camp. On a row of cots, lined up against the wall of the now-completed west wing of the main building, lay the bodies of several men wrapped in funeral shrouds, casualties from the past week. A couple dozen soldiers were arrayed in the compound, being drilled in sword work. A pile of weapons was being repaired. Kan Masataro was in the center of it all, in conversation with a lieutenant.
At their entry, the entire courtyard fell silent. The captain with the scarred face approached Kan with a low bow, speaking quickly as the Foot leader walked towards them. The ninjas that had accompanied them stepped back, as others stopped what they'd been doing and drew forward in curiosity. Leonardo and Raphael became the center of a ring, alone with Kan.
No one spoke. Raphael emanated tension like light from a bulb. It crashed against the hostile stares pressing in from all sides. Kan regarded them, not in the respectful manner he had last fall, but like a general considering what to do with dangerous prisoners of war.
"So you have declared yourselves enemies of the Foot Clan after all." He spoke slowly, in English. Perhaps now they were beneath being addressed in Japanese.
Leonardo met the man's gaze calmly. "It is the Foot that have attacked us. Twice."
"You have allied yourselves with the traitor, Saito Doshida. So you must be willing to share his fate."
"You're mistaken," Leo said. "And acting against your own interests. The night we met with Doshida, we were opposing his plans to carry out assassinations. Your soldiers thought we were collaborating and attacked us just for being there. We haven't allied with the Rising Hand or acted against the Foot."
"Have you not?" Kan motioned to one of his lieutenants, who approached with a laptop computer. Leonardo blinked at the jarringly incongruous sight. Kan opened the computer, hit a couple keys, and turned it around so that the turtles could see the screen.
For several seconds, Leonardo couldn't tell what he was looking at. It appeared to be a video, shot from slightly above, of a group of people making their way down a deserted street. Not a real street though, a fake one, like a movie set. Then he recognized Tami's blue hair, and the kid that had been named Ren. And then, clearly, damningly, Michelangelo's unmistakable figure entered the frame. "That's better." Mike's voice, sounding distant and tinny on the laptop speaker, was audible to the utterly silent crowd in the courtyard. "Let's try it again, work on what I've been teaching you about choosing your cover..."
Kan shut the laptop with a snap. A whisper of outrage rippled outward through the circle of assembled Foot. Leonardo imagined he heard Raphael's thoughts projected at him telepathically: Now do you agree we're fucked?
Though his mind spun furiously, Leo kept his gaze forward and level as the leader of the Foot Clan came up next to him. "You are responsible?"
What other answer could there be? "Yes."
With a startlingly loud crack, Kan's staff came down hard across the back of his calves. Pain engulfed his left leg as he went down to his knees.
Raphael's reaching, murderous hands closed on air. Kan stepped aside deftly as the turtle, snarling vociferous curses, was slammed to the ground by half a dozen Foot soldiers moving in unison.
"Your lives are forfeit," Kan stated loudly, and there was a murmur of assent. "You have given up your chance to preserve peace with the Foot."
"Peace?" Raphael spat the word as if it were poison. He'd been dragged to his knees and his arms pinned. "Peace with the Foot is a joke. The Foot are a bunch of crooks! You act like you're noble, carrying on a tradition from the sixteenth century, when you're just another horde of gangsters preying on the city. There could never be peace- it doesn't matter if it's the Shredder, Karai, you, who gives a shit-"
Someone silenced Raphael by striking him across the barely-healed right side of his face, splitting open the thin new skin. For a second he was stunned, blinking the blood from his eye, then Leonardo could see it, the swell of violent abandon glazing over Raph's vision, suffusing his limbs. He would throw off the hands that held him and fight like a thing possessed. And Leo would fight with him, and they would die.
He thought: this is where Karai knelt, when she bore the weight of her clan's defeat.
"Kan!" Leonardo swung all attention to himself with the sharp challenge in his voice. Firmly, deliberately, he rose to his feet and faced the Clan leader. "That video was delivered to you, anonymously, sometime yesterday or today, wasn't it? You know it was sent by Saito Doshida. I'll swear again- we've no allegiance to him; what you saw on the screen was an act of desperation. Surely you see that this-" he swung his arm out to encompass their situation, "only plays to his advantage."
Kan was stone-faced. "Perhaps. But insult and treachery must be answered."
"We will not die without fighting." Leonardo glanced meaningfully to either side, letting the jonin follow his thoughts as he judged how many men he and Raphael could kill before they went down. "And we have brothers who will avenge us." He lowered his voice and spoke only to Kan now. "Consider your position. Think of your clan."
Kan stared long and hard at Leo. The gathered ninjas, and even Raphael, seemed to be holding their breath. Finally Kan said, "Shrewd, kappa creature that you are, nevertheless you speak sense. So as not to further weaken our clans- we settle this on their behalf." He stepped back, motioning aside his Foot soldiers, and drew his katana slowly, sliding out the gleaming and finely hammered blade, inch by gleaming inch, until he held it poised, somberly and ceremoniously.
"My brother leaves here alive," Leo said.
"What are you doing?" Raphael blurted.
Leo ignored him, acknowledging only Kan's curt nod. Win or lose, a decent save, he thought, from certain death for both of them and ultimate victory for the Rising Hand. He drew his own katana and took a long, steady breath, tapping into his deepest reserves of strength, setting aside the knowledge that he would be fighting lame and wounded against a master swordsman, trying to make himself, as Splinter described it, a creature purely of the moment, unattached and indifferent to victory or defeat.
"Wait!" Raphael's eyes were wild.
Kan began to move, the edge of his blade sweeping silently through air.
"I can give you Doshida!"
Kan paused. He turned slightly to regard Raphael with disdainfully narrowed eyes.
"What's that worth to you? More than this farce?" Raphael held onto the man's gaze with frightening, reckless intensity.
"How can you offer such a thing?" Kan kept his sword raised, daring the turtle to admit his desperate and ridiculous lie.
"You think that video was something? Well, get this - I saved Doshida from being executed when he first turned traitor to the Foot. I hid him, I helped him, I told him to build the Rising Hand. All 'cause I wanted to see the Foot bite the dust."
Leonardo stared. Dear God, what does he think he's doing?
There was complete silence. Kan focused on Raphael as if seeing him clearly for the first time. A slow flush of rage began creeping up his neck into his stern and weathered face.
Raphael smiled. "So, here's the deal, see? You can take that sword you got out, and kill me. Try to, at least. Or, I find Doshida, I bring him to you, and we call it good. What'dya say?"
Kan's mouth twisted in a kind of bitter amusement. "We will find that traitor without your... assistance."
"Like you did last year at the boathouse? Or just a few days ago in his own building, when he mowed your men down with darts and bullets? And lemme guess- his two bodyguards- kinda unusually strong and fast, weren't they? Seems to me, if I were placing bets, I'd put my money on him."
Why, WHY is he so good at making people want to kill him? Leonardo kept his katana ready and shifted to move with Kan as the man took a step forward, his face reddening. Without flinching, Raphael plowed on, "Don't get me wrong, you've done a bang-up job training the sorry lot that you inherited from Karai. But if anyone can get to Doshida, I will. What've you got to lose? Only the satisfaction of killing us right now."
"Which would be significant."
"No doubt."
Kan squinted at the turtle, trying to determine if his goading was a sincere death wish. "You expect that I will let you walk out, trusting that you will do as you say?"
Raphael shrugged. "I'm good for my word, but I'll tell you something else. I'd go after Doshida anyways. He's fucked with me and my family one too many times. We were out looking for him tonight, before your crew jumped us. If you don't believe me, ask him." He jerked his head towards Leo. "I would've beaten you to him too. So now, instead of killing him, I'll bring him to you. Same outcome, ain't it? But you get the credit with those bigwigs in Japan - worth something, am I right?"
Leonardo was not sure whether to be mortified or impressed. He'd rarely heard Raphael speak at such length - with a style that could only be described as borderline suicidal yet perversely persuasive. Raphael had a small, daring smirk on his face. The trickle of blood from his open cheek had run down his neck and pooled in the shallow crevice between his collarbone and plastron. His eyes looked more than a little mad; Leo was certain only he could detect the hint of apprehension. At that moment, Leonardo could see Kan's thoughts written on his face. What demon creature IS this? And is it better to use it, or kill it?
Kan lowered his sword and sheathed it. "I agree to your proposal." He motioned to his Foot soldiers, who unhanded Raphael a little roughly, but who stepped back from him as quickly as possible, as if letting go of a grenade. "However, I require more assurance that you will give me what you promise." He pointed to Leonardo. "He will stay, until you return."
Raphael's smirk vanished. "No fucking w-"
"I accept," Leo cut in.
Raphael's expression went from merely frightening to downright terrifying. Leonardo had one thought: get him out of here before he ruins his own success. Quickly, he sheathed his katana and said to Kan, with a slight bow, "You are a man of honor. I trust your hospitality."
"Hospitality?" Raphael hissed, starting to quiver like a taut wire.
"If I might speak with my brother for a moment?"
Kan inclined his head.
Leonardo stepped up to Raph and turned them away from the watching Foot. "You've gotten us this far, don't wreck it," he whispered.
"You're offering yourself as a hostage? To the Foot? You think I'm gonna-"
"I'm not offering. You heard Kan- we don't have a choice. It's not much, but that car tonight - it turned west into Hell's Kitchen. Go to Don and Mike - they're on to something. Raph, listen to me." He grabbed his brother by the arm and looked into his face. "Don't go after Doshida at the expense of protecting Chambers. If you can't come back, don't."
Raphael's face seemed to drain of feeling, going limp, agony left in his eyes.
"Have you decided?" Kan asked.
"Yes." Leonardo gripped his brother's arm tightly for one more second, then let go and stepped back.
"Your katana," Kan said.
Wordlessly, Leonardo unstrapped his scabbards and handed them over.
"I will give you ten days," Kan said to Raphael. "After which, I will assume you have failed or betrayed our agreement." To Leonardo, "Then you will answer for your clan, with your life, as you were prepared to do."
Leo replied expressionlessly, "If it comes to that."
"Gēto o hiraku," Kan called out sharply, and the sentries at the gate pulled it open. A line of ninja stepped forward from either side to escort Raphael out, cutting him off from where Kan and Leonardo stood. Raphael's entire body tensed, as though, like a frayed cable, he would snap after all. Leonardo held his breath. He found himself remembering his brother leaping forward and hurling shuriken to clear them an escape path out of battle. Go, dammit. Go.
Raphael turned and went. The gate shut behind him.