Deliverance (Book 1)

Epilogue

Neil and Suzu got back to Tsukuba in the early hours, in the back of a taxi. The quattro had been re-crated and shipped out much the same way it got in, and was on its way to a storage unit in Singapore; it would be staying there for a while, until things quietened down a bit and they could organise a legal import. They were both dog tired, not unexpectedly, and had to be shaken awake by the taxi driver, who was clearly less than amazed by this turn of events.

Suzu decided the Sera was the best choice, and ran Neil home groggily, then set off for her place, where she spent an inordinate amount of time asleep on the cruddy cheap mattress she'd found at the local hardware shop, and woke at about lunchtime. She saw the picture and read Yamashita's caption as she was waking, puzzling it over until she realised whose glasses they must be.

She returned to the garage to find Neil already there, trying to straighten out the Cedric a little. He had also got the message, and had diagnosed it as Yamashita's declaration of victory, and explained about the heirloom gun. It was good that she'd won out, and their work had been useful, but the feeling was nevertheless anticlimactic. Whatever Yamashita had done, it was probably way more important in the grand scheme of things than their trans-Kanto run; but they had already won, in their own eyes. News was already calling it the longest and most astounding chase in Japanese history.

Suzu helped Neil with the Cedric, and once they reached the limit for what they could do with that, he helped her strip down the Delta some more, and then parts for the Odyssey came in by courier, so they fitted those, and before they knew it, the stars were out again, and Maon was nagging Neil to come home for dinner.

So Neil decided to call it a night. Suzu went back to dismantling the Delta, but he climbed onto his bicycle and headed off into the evening.

It was a cool evening, cloudless, the stars bright and almost within reach. He rode relatively fast, and faster on nights like this, generating heat. Ever since they'd acquired this garage, he'd made it a habit to vary the route he took every day, morning and evening, to expose any tail he might pick up and try to insulate Maon from his work. It seemed ridiculous now, in the face of what he'd learned about how much people knew about him and about Deliverance in the last few days, but it was a habit he enjoyed for aesthetic reasons as much as practical ones.

Today, his route was similar to the route for cars, at least to start with. He pedalled out onto the long straight that headed down towards the expressway. The riding position on his bicycle, which was a very ordinary sort of road bicycle, was almost as high as walking, a lot higher than any car they operated, so the experience was different again from the feeling of turning onto this street in a car. It was exciting in entirely its own way, thanks to the fact that for once he was controlling the vehicle himself, and also the inherent exposure to the world that came with cycling. The openness and rush of air on the whole body combined with the silence of a well-maintained bicycle was sometimes like floating along the street, more intimately a part of the world around than anything with an engine.

He didn't stay on the road that long, only a few hundred metres, and took a right that sliced across the fields. It was an elegiac time of year. In summer the road was deafening with the calls of frogs, trying to find mates, their chirrups and croaks and squeaks and even cow-like lowing at times, an orchestra that pervaded the area, but now with the cold coming, and coming fast, the fields were silent. The frogs and toads and newts were deep in the mud, hearts slow and minds numb. Soon the spiders would all die in their webs, leaving their eggs to hatch and devour them, and all the green vanish from the world around until spring.

The road was slightly downhill, so Neil pedalled slowly, to avoid the tick of the gear cassette ratchet, the only sound the slight rumble of Bridgestones on old asphalt. Sometimes he did this with music in his headphones, but tonight the purity of flowing night air and palpable calm of the dark was what he needed. A car passed, a little Suzuki Alto Lapin, and something in the way the lights swept across him as it rounded the curve made him think of their drive from Nagoya with 'Calloway', or whatever he was really called. He thought of his idea about the dead spectating the living, and wondered if Masa was watching him slide silently through the evening like a knife through the water, or whether he was off watching something more exciting; his Porsche-driving woman, or some other delivery driver somewhere, pushing their limits, courting disaster with their engine complaining and their time ticking low. Either way, he hoped he was getting a good show.