Flashback

1.13 Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico—Thursday, Sept. 16

The rest of the voyage to Santa Fe had gone without incident with paramilitary “technicals”—pickups with large-caliber machine guns mounted in the back—escorting them the last seventy miles or so from Las Vegas, NM, to Santa Fe.

The three mercenaries, Sato, and Nick stayed at the Japanese consulate in Santa Fe, formerly the old La Fonda Hotel right on the plaza. Joe’s remains were taken into the basement of the complex for cremation.

Upon arrival, Sato had led Nick and the others to the consul’s medical clinic—better equipped and more modern and clean than any medical facility left in Denver, Nick was sure; while Nick and the others had a quick checkup, Sato had his burns and cuts treated and his serious fracture was set into one of those expensive new polymorphic sports casts—a smart-cast, they called it, too expensive for any Americans other than the top athletes, or rather, those athlete templates for their digital avatars—that allowed full use of the arm even as the bones healed.

Nick’s interview with Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev at his hacienda compound outside of town was scheduled for 10 a.m. The invitation had gone to Mr. Nakamura and the specifics were clear—neither the Oshkosh vehicle nor Hideki Sato was to come within ten miles of the don’s home. Nick had been told to be at the St. Francis Cathedral—formally, he knew, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi (and, Dara had told him when they’d come to Santa Fe on vacation early in their marriage, the cathedral which the archbishop spent his life seeing constructed in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop)—at 9:30 a.m. Alone.

The half-block walk from the consulate to the cathedral took Nick about one minute. And that only because he dawdled to study the 145-year-old church from a distance before crossing the street to stand on its stairs. Nick remembered Dara telling him that the French Romanesque cathedral with its twin towers was begun by French-born archbishop John Baptiste Lamy around 1869 and discontinued and dedicated in 1887 without the spires because they’d run out of funds.

It had always looked odd—doubly truncated—to Nick Bottom.

It was a warm, sunny day and Santa Fe smelled as it always had to Nick in the autumn: a mixture of the sweet aroma of burning piñon pine logs, dried leaves from the tall, ancient cottonwoods that lined many of the streets in the old section, and sage. Dara had once said that there wasn’t a better-smelling city in all of the United States.

Back when Santa Fe was in the United States.

Now, Nick knew, the wealthy city wasn’t part of any nation. Nuevo Mexico claimed titular control of the town, but Santa Fe had enough money to hire its own small army to maintain its independence. Besides still being a second-home capital for movie stars, famous writers, and Wall Street types, Santa Fe had received heavy Japanese investment in recent years and the Japanese didn’t choose to live in a Mexican village.

So Santa Fe had become a modern small-town version of World War II’s Lisbon, with spies, double agents, retired soldiers of fortune, and international ne’er-do-wells like Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev making the lovely little adobe-cottage mountain town, nestled in its fragrant valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos, one of their homes and their center of operations.

The black Mercedes S 550—all-electric or super-expensive hydrogen drive—whispered to a stop at the curb. There were three men in the car, all dressed identically in white Havana shirts; their race might be hard to pin down, Nick thought, but their profession was easy to see. They were hard men. Hard beyond the everyday hardness of mere mercenaries. These were fifth-generation killers from another continent.

The man in the backseat opened the curb-side door and beckoned Nick inside.

Nick didn’t speak and neither did any of the three men in guayabera Cuban shirts—the kind of formal, perforated white shirts a Cuban might wear to a funeral—as they drove north out of the city on Bishops Lodge Road.

Nick knew this bumpy old backroad ran for about six miles to the little crossroads village of Tesuque, once the address of more than a few aging movie stars and starlets. This was a good place to hide large homes in the hills above the narrow, heavily forested valley, and Nick assumed that Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s hacienda would be one of those compounds between Santa Fe and the Tesuque crossroads.

It was.

About four miles out, the Mercedes turned to the right, followed a narrow gravel road up a runoff gully, and came out onto a wider, asphalt-paved driveway that switchbacked up to the top of the hill, moving from a cottonwood forest to brown-grass meadow and then back into pine forest again. Nick noticed camouflaged bunkers set back along the switchbacks; assuming that this driveway was the main way in, this would be an eminently defensible position against vehicles or ground forces.

It turned out that the don’s hacienda had more security levels than Mr. Nakamura’s mountaintop mansion. There were three walls with gates—the half-mile spaces between the walls and fences true killing zones, covered by visible towers and inevitable hidden gun positions—and two CMRIs for the car and three for Nick and his minders on foot.

Once they reached what he presumed was the main building, Nick was sent on into a blastproofed windowless room where more men in guayaberas fluoroscoped him, frisked him, and cavity-searched him. He was in a truly foul mood by the time the last guayabera’d guard silently led him into a huge room with tall windows and told him to take a seat. Because of the bookcases and gigantic leather-topped desk, Nick assumed that this was Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s study.

The first thing I have to do when he comes in, thought Nick, is ask him what I can call him. That Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev business gets old fast.

Nick had taken a seat but rose when the door opened and someone entered, but it wasn’t the don. Four more guards came in, the tallest, oldest man coming straight at Nick and signifying silently that Nick should raise his arms again.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Nick. “The other guys have already…”

He didn’t see the guard behind him or the knockout taser. But he felt it.

His last thought, falling, before his neurons became as totally and painfully scrambled as his nerve endings, was… Fuc…

Then he was gone.

Nick came to in slow stages, as one always does after being tasered. The first stage was confusion followed by a slow and muddled focus on trying not to urinate down your own pant leg. The second stage was pain and twitching and a little less confusion. The third stage for Nick now was trying to breathe.

He was trussed up, ankles and wrists—hands in front of him, which had allowed for some circulation—and blindfolded and gagged and there was some sort of cloth over the top half of his body. It took him a minute or two to realize that he hadn’t gone deaf; there were sound-deadening earphones over his ears.

But he could still tell that he was in a moving vehicle. Vibration and the body’s sense of balance as the vehicle took turns and jounced over rough parts told him that. So he was either in the trunk or backseat of a truck or car, being driven… somewhere.

More security or am I a hostage? wondered Nick when he could put together a full thought. Neither made much sense—why invite him to the hacienda and then shanghai him to another meeting place? Hell of a way to treat a guest. But what value did he have as a hostage? Did Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev possibly think that Nakamura would pay to get him back?

Or did the Chechen don believe that Nick might know something important? If that was the answer, Nick knew that there was probably a short future ahead of him and one that might include torture as well as execution.

Do I know anything that could be important to this Russian gunrunner, drug dealer, and would-be empire maker? If he did, Nick sure couldn’t think of what it might be.

As a former cop, Nick knew that the knockout tasers usually kept their targets unconscious for about fifteen minutes (if, as was more common than civilians knew, they didn’t cause a heart attack or stroke or leave you a drooling vegetable or just kill you outright). If he could time his heartbeats, he might be able to figure out how long the drive would be from the hacienda to wherever he was going to end up.

As if knowing that’s going to help you, dipshit, Nick told himself. Sato and his boys won’t be coming in like the cavalry with guns blazing. The don’s men made damn sure there were no tracking beepers on or in me and even if Sato was watching the hacienda by satellite or drone, they almost surely drove a dozen trucks out at the same time, all going different directions. Sato’d have no way of knowing which vehicle I was in.

It didn’t matter anyway, Nick realized. His heart was pounding so hard and fast that it was useless as a timekeeper. A lot of hostages, he knew, died when gagged and restrained—again through heart attacks or suffocation brought on by asthma or even a head cold, often through gagging on their own vomit. He tried not to think about any of those things and to slow his heart rate. He might need the adrenaline later; he didn’t need it now.

They’re taking me to a landfill.

That was probable, he realized, but why? Then Nick wondered how many millions or billions of men throughout history had died with that one syllable as their last living thought—Why?

Don’t get philosophical on me now, shithead. Plan your next move.

The vibration stopped. A moment later, strong hands grabbed him, pulled him up and out of something, and set him on his feet. He felt someone cut or release the binders around his ankles.

Nick saw no reason to pretend that he was still unconscious. He stood there blind and deaf and swaying. With hands around both his arms, gripping hard through the heavy bag fabric, he was half lifted, and propelled across what felt like gravel, then perhaps inside a structure and onto a hard surface—Nick’s lower body was outside the bag and he could feel a difference in the quality of air around him, more still, interior—and then down a corridor with a tiled floor, then down steps, then down another corridor.

They stopped and pressed him to sit.

The bag was removed, the earphones, the gag and blindfold, and finally the wrist binders.

Nick did the usual blinking against the light and yawning to get more air. He did resist rubbing his chafed wrists.

The men who released him—wearing guayaberas like all of Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s other chattel—left by one of the two doors.

It was a small room, windowless, bare walls, with an old metal desk in front of Nick and a few battered metal filing cabinets against one of the walls. Nick was sitting on a light metal-frame chair and there was a second one behind the desk. Both were too flimsy to be of much use to him. He thought that the place might be the basement office of a high school gym coach, save for the absence of trophies.

I’m the trophy, thought Nick.

There was nothing on the desk or atop the filing cabinets that he could use as a weapon. Nick had just struggled to his feet—still swaying—in preparation for going through the desk drawers and cabinets to find something, anything, that he could use when the second door opened and Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev came through, striding quickly to his place behind the desk.

“Sit down, my friend. Sit down,” said the don, waving Nick back into his seat.

Nick stayed standing and continued swaying. “I’m not your friend, asshole. And after that ride you can put me down as one of your enemies.”

Noukhaev laughed, showing strong, nicotine-stained teeth. “I would apologize, Nick Bottom, but you are man enough and smart enough not to accept my apologies for such indignities. You are right. It was barbarous of me and unfair to you. But warranted. Sit, sit, please.”

The older man sat but Nick remained standing. “Why was it warranted?”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev was quite a bit older than the photos which Sato had shown him would have indicated. Nick wondered how many years it had been since Nakamura’s people or any law-enforcement or intelligence agency had managed to get a photo of this man.

“A good question,” said the deeply suntanned and wrinkled don, folding his hands on the metal desktop. “I would answer sincerely that nothing could warrant such treatment of a guest, Nick Bottom, but you are, of course, something more than a mere guest. Your employer, Mr. Hiroshi Nakamura, has reasons—good reasons, both political and strategic—for wishing that I no longer existed. He also has, under his control, certain orbital hyperkinetic weapons that the Japanese whimsically refer to, I believe, as gee-bears. Have you heard this term?”

“Yes,” said Nick, suspecting that Noukhaev knew all about Sato’s use of the things against the tanks the day before.

“So you see,” said the don, “it was tempting fate to give Mr. Nakamura absolute knowledge of my presence at the hacienda at any specific moment on any specific day.” He grinned. “Yes, you are thinking, Nick Bottom—This man is paranoid—and I would agree with you. I ask myself only, Am I paranoid enough? Please sit down before you fall.”

Nick sat before he fell.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev was reminding him of someone. He got it almost at once—Anthony Quinn, that twentieth-century movie actor that he and Val had liked—not so much because Noukhaev looked like Quinn, but because the voice and slight accent were similar, the quirk of the mouth into an arrogantly amused smile was similar, and because Noukhaev was hard to place ethnically, the same way that Anthony Quinn had played Mexicans, Indians, Arabs, and Greeks. The don also had a powerful body resembling the late actor’s—compact but broad-chested, massive forearms, a man’s strong hands.

Nick said, “So where are we now?”

Noukhaev laughed as if Nick had made a joke. “Somewhere safe. Somewhere that I believe even your omnipotent Mr. Nakamura does not know of.”

“He’s not my omnipotent Mr. Nakamura,” Nick said sourly. “And if he were omnipotent, he sure as hell wouldn’t have had to hire me to help find out who killed his kid.”

“Exactly!” cried Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev, holding up one brown finger. “Why did he hire you, Nick Bottom?”

“I have a hunch you want to enlighten me on why Nakamura hired me,” said Nick.

“You must know, Nick Bottom,” said the don. “And if you do not know, you must suspect.”

“I suspect everyone and no one,” said Nick. He’d wanted to say that line since he was nine years old. Nick guessed that it was probably the oxygen deprivation while he was gagged and bound that prompted him to say it now.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev squinted at him for a silent moment. Then the older man threw his head back and laughed uproariously.

Shit, he is nuts, thought Nick.

Noukhaev opened a lower desk drawer, removed a box, offered the box to Nick. Cigars. Nick shook his head and the don chose one for himself, went through the usual stupid ritual of biting, spitting (Nick had learned through movies that more sophisticated types cut the ends of the cigar off, or had their butlers do it), and lighting the expensive stogie with a lighter he produced from his khakis’ pockets.

Nick still thought the room was in a basement or deep underground, but the ventilation was very good. He got only a slight whiff of the cigar smoke.

“Why would one of the most powerful men on the planet hire you, Nick Bottom?” Noukhaev said rhetorically. Nick hated it when speakers got rhetorical. It insulted your intelligence.

“Nakamura has already carried out multiple investigations of his son’s murder,” continued the don, sitting back in his chair and exhaling blue-white smoke. “The Denver police—both before and after you—the CBI, the FBI, Homeland Security, his own security people, the Keisatsu-chō…”

If the Japanese National Police Agency had investigated Keigo Nakamura’s murder, it was news to Nick. For most of its history the Keisatsu-chō had just overseen and regulated local Japanese police departments—mostly setting standards, a bureaucracy with none of the powers of the FBI, not even agents or officers of its own—but in the last few decades since It All Hit The Fan and Japan had ended up on top (or at least near the top), the National Police Agency had grown real teeth, both with its new secret-police security agency, the Keibi-kyoku, and its overseas intelligence agency, the Gaiji Jōhō-bu. Beyond knowing their names and hearing and reading that the agency’s subdepartments were lethal, Nick knew nothing about them.

“… and then Mr. Nakamura hires you, Nick Bottom,” Noukhaev was concluding. He seemed to be enjoying the cigar. “Why do you think he did that?”

Full circle, thought Nick. He said, “Obviously not to solve his son’s murder, Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. That leaves… what? To set you up as a target in this meeting at your hacienda so Mr. Nakamura could gee-bear you to dust and ashes? But there’s a problem with that, isn’t there?”

“What is that, Nick Bottom?”

“It was you who called Nakamura’s people and suggested this meeting,” said Nick. “At least that’s what Hideki Sato told me. So Nakamura couldn’t have known when he hired me that you’d be inviting me down here.”

Noukhaev nodded and exhaled more smoke. “Very true. But, Nick Bottom… ‘Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.’ Do you know who said that?”

“It would have to be Sun Tzu, Don Noukhaev.”

“Ahh, you know Sun Tzu, Nick Bottom?”

“Not in the least,” said Nick. “But I’ve met a hundred arrogant, condescending bastards playing the big, tough, intellectual generals who go around quoting him as if it meant something important.”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev froze, cigar halfway to his mouth, and Nick thought—Shit, I went too far.

He didn’t care.

Noukhaev threw his head back and laughed again. It sounded sincere.

“You are right, Nick Bottom,” growled the don after finishing his laugh and inhaling his smoke. “I was patronizing you. You were right to call me on it. But Sun Tzu did say that, and it does apply to our… ah… situation here. Hiroshi Nakamura is a general and he does know his Sun Tzu. He might well have hired you simply because he knows that I would be tempted to talk to such an underling… no offense intended, Nick Bottom.”

“None taken,” said Nick. “So is that why Nakamura hired me? If so, I guess my job’s at an end. And I failed, since if Sato and his boss watched the various trucks or Mercedeses or whatever leaving the hacienda at the same time, they’d probably know you were taking me somewhere else and call off the gee-bear strike.”

“There were eleven vans that left the hacienda at the same moment thirty-nine minutes ago, Nick Bottom,” said the don. “Hiroshi Nakamura has the resources to hit a hundred targets with his kinetic missiles. Allowing time for you to be brought into the place and for me to enter, the orbital weapons should be arriving about… now.”

Nick glanced at the ceiling. He couldn’t resist the impulse. Nor could he stop his testicles from trying to climb back up into his body. He’d seen what six gee-bears could do.

“Do you play chess, Nick Bottom?” The don’s eyes looked serious.

“Sort of. I guess I could be called a chess-duffer.”

Noukhaev nodded, although whether that was a confirmation that there was such a stupid term, Nick had no idea. The don said softly, “As a chess player, Nick Bottom, even a beginner, how would you improve the odds that Nakamura not use his weapons on the eleven possible targets?”

“I’d have each of them go to some important, public, crowded, and—if possible—historic spot,” Nick said at once. “And unload the trucks out of sight. At the St. Francis Cathedral, say, or the Loretto Chapel or the Inn of the Governors… places like that. Nakamura might still do it—what do American historical sites and American casualties mean to him or Sato?—but it might give him pause.”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev smiled slowly and it was a different sort of smile than any he’d shown Nick before. “You are not as stupid as you look, Nick Bottom,” said the don.

“Neither are you, Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.”

There was no hesitation this time before Noukhaev’s laugh, but Nick decided to quit pressing his luck.

“No, I do not believe that Hiroshi Nakamura hired you just so that he could locate and kill me, as much as he wishes and thinks he needs to do that. No, Nakamura hired you, Nick Bottom, because he knows that you may be the only man alive who can actually solve the crime of the murder of his son, Keigo.”

What’s this? thought Nick. Heavy-handed flattery? Nick didn’t think so. Noukhaev was too smart for that and—more important—he already knew that Nick was as well. What, then?

“You need to tell me why I’m the only man who can solve Keigo’s murder,” said Nick. “Because I don’t have a fucking clue—either to who did it or to why I’d be the one to know.”

“ ‘The one who figures on victory at headquarters before even doing battle is the one who has the most strategic factors on his side,’ ” said the don and this time there was no game-playing about the provenance of the quotation.

Nick shook his head. He wanted to tell Noukhaev just how much he’d always hated people who spoke in riddles—it was one reason he wasn’t a Christian—but he resisted that impulse. He was tired and he hurt.

“Hiroshi Nakamura knew when he hired you that you probably could solve the crime that none of the American or Japanese agencies—nor his own top people—could solve,” said the old don. “How could that be, Nick Bottom?”

Nick hesitated only a second. “It has to be something about me,” he said at last. “About my past, I mean. Something I know. Something I encountered when I was a cop… something.”

“Yes. Something about you. But not necessarily something you learned when you were a detective, Nick Bottom.” The don had pulled what looked to be a mayonnaise lid from the desk drawer and continued to flick his cigar ashes into it. It was almost full.

I could have used a real ashtray as a weapon, Nick thought stupidly.

“Something in my past, then,” said Nick. He shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Because of whom you do suspect as being behind the murder,” said Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.

“Yeah.”

“And who is that?”

“Killers from one of the Japanese… whatyacallthem? Daimyos. The other corporate lords in Japan who want to be Shogun.”

“Do you know the leading keiretsu warlord clans?” asked Noukhaev.

“Yeah,” Nick said again. “I know their names.” He’d known them before Sato had recited them to him during the drive down. Why had Sato recited them to him? What was that bastard up to?

Nick said, “The seven daimyo families and keiretsu clans running modern Japan are the Munetaka, Morikune, Omura, Toyoda, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, and Yoshiake keiretsu.”

“No,” Noukhaev said flatly, no joking or feigned friendship in his voice.

“No?” said Nick. This stuff was common knowledge. It had been true even back when he was a working homicide detective with his whole department looking into the Keigo Nakamura murder. Sato may have lied to him, but…

“The keiretsu have become zaibatsu,” said the don. “Not just interrelated, clan-owned industrial conglomerates, as in the late-twentieth-century keiretsu, but zaibatsu again—clan-owned corporate conglomerates that help win the war and guide the government, just as in the first empire of Japan a hundred years ago. And there are eight leading zaibatsu-clan daimyos running Japan. Not seven, Nick Bottom, but eight. Eight powerful men who want to be Shogun in their lifetimes.”

“Nakamura,” said Nick, naming the eighth superdaimyo. Was the don just being a wise-ass, or did this correction mean something?

“Both the Denver PD and the FBI thought that the key to Keigo Nakamura’s murder had nothing to do with local suspects—the mooks I’ve been reinterviewing—but with internal Japanese politics and rivalries,” said Nick. “We just didn’t know enough about those politics or deadly rivalries to make any sort of educated guess, and interviews with Mr. Nakamura and others didn’t help. Those keiretsu… or what you’re now calling zaibatsu again… are essentially above the law in modern-day Japan, or maybe I should say modern-day feudal Japan, so the Japanese police authorities weren’t of any help either.”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev gave that toothy, not-really-amused smile again and flicked cigar ashes into the mayonnaise lid. “You don’t even really know who Hideki Sato is, do you, Nick Bottom?”

“He’s Mr. Nakamura’s chief security guy,” said Nick, willing to play the stooge to get more information from this egoist.

Noukhaev laughed softly. “He’s a professional assassin and the head of his own daimyo family—one of the top forty daimyos in Nippon today and not necessarily out of the line of becoming Shogun on his own. Have you heard of Taisha No Shi?”

“No,” said Nick.

“It means ‘Colonel Death,’ ” Noukhaev said. “Do you remember Soong Jin?”

“Not really. Wait… that Chinese actress-turned-warlord about eight years ago?”

“Yes,” said Noukhaev, drawing deeply on his shortening cigar. “Soong—that’s her family name—was China’s last, best hope for reuniting. After she left the movies, she had an army of more than six million fanatics, plus the support of four or five hundred million more Chinese. She also had about six hundred bodyguards, including sixty or so of the best security people in China.”

“And she died in… I can’t remember. Some sort of boating accident,” said Nick.

Noukhaev’s smile looked sincere for a change. “She died when Taisha No Shi—the man you know as Sato—went to China and killed her,” said the don. “Whether on Nakamura’s orders, we do not know.”

“Colonel Death,” repeated Nick, drawing out the syllables. “Sounds cheesy to me. But if you’re suggesting that Sato works without Nakamura’s permission and direction, I find that hard to believe.”

Noukhaev nodded slowly. “Still, Nick Bottom, you need to appreciate that one of the foremost assassins in the world has been assigned to stay with you during your… ah… investigation. Were I in your position, I would treat that fact with sobriety and ponder its implications.”

“Whatever you say,” said Nick. He was tiring of this asshole’s sense of self-importance. “Do you want to tell me something I can use about Keigo Nakamura’s murder?”

Noukhaev smiled thinly. “I just did, Nick Bottom. ‘If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.’ ”

More fucking Sun Tzu, thought Nick. He was beginning to realize that it was Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev who was acting like a second-rate Bond villain. They always tried talking the hero to death rather than just pulling the trigger when they had a chance.

“Can you tell me any questions that Keigo asked that seemed unusual?” asked Nick to change the subject. “Odd? Out of the ordinary?”

Don Noukhaev smiled. “He did ask me if I would distribute F-two the way I’ve distributed flashback. His tone suggested that the fantasy drug was a reality… or would soon be one.”

F-two again, thought Nick and something in him leaped with the hope that Keigo Nakamura had known something no one else did about the fantasy-directed superdrug. With F-two, Nick’s imagination could structure a whole new life with Dara and even with Val, not the surly sixteen-year-old Val but a cute little five-year-old. As Nick understood the promise of the drug, with Flashback-two, there would be no bad memories, only happy fantasies that felt as real as real life. On all levels. And the F-two believers always insisted that unlike being under the flash—where you were always a little separate from the experience, floating above your original self even as you reexperienced things—F-two would be totally immersive.

“What did you tell him?” asked Nick.

Noukhaev laughed. “I told him that I’d sell and distribute any drug that people wanted, if it were real… which F-two isn’t. We’ve all heard the rumors of it forever. It’s an impossible drug. Take heroin or cocaine if you want fantasies, I told him.”

“And what did Keigo Nakamura say to that?” asked Nick. Part of him was crestfallen that the rumors of F-two were still just fantasy rumors. But Keigo asked the poet Danny Oz if he would use F-two. What the hell was Keigo Nakamura up to?

“Keigo changed the subject,” said Noukhaev. “Which I am going to do as well. Are you aware, Nick Bottom, of who wants all this land that used to be New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California?”

“I would take a wild guess and say Mexico… or Nuevo Mexico or whatever the hell the reconquistas call themselves hereabouts,” said Nick. “Given that it’s their goddamned troops, tanks, and millions of colonists squatting on most of it and fighting for the rest.”

Noukhaev blew blue smoke and shook his head. The lined, rugged face looked mildly disappointed—an aging tutor discouraged by his pupil’s thickheadedness. “You’ve truly been away, haven’t you, Nick Bottom? Lost in your flashback dreams and your incessant self-pity? The first man ever to lose a wife.”

Nick felt his face flush and his anger grow, but he held it down, attempting to ignore the adrenaline surge that made him want to smash in Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s head with…

With what? The chair he was sitting on was the only loose thing in the room that he could use as a weapon, and it was just too damned light to be of any real use. And Nick had no doubt whatsoever that Noukhaev had a pistol in his belt under that loose white shirt he wore outside his trousers.

But Nick didn’t have to answer the rhetorical insult and decided to change the subject.

“All right,” said Nick. “If not Mexico, who? Japan?”

“What would Japan do with all this space—mostly desert—with their declining birthrate?” asked Noukhaev, obviously enjoying his little performance as schoolteacher. “I know that foreign events isn’t your forte, Detective First Grade Nick Bottom, but put your addled shoulder to the wheel… think! What aggressive and thriving political entity needs Lebensraum and more Lebensraum? And is used to deserts?”

“The Caliphate?” said Nick at last. It was not a statement, just some dumbfounded syllables. He heard himself repeat the idea. “The Global Caliphate? Here in the Southwest? That’s… absurd. Absolutely ridiculous.”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev clasped both hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, the cigar firmly clamped between his strong teeth. He said nothing.

“Worse than absurd,” said Nick, waving his hand as if batting away a fly. “Impossible.”

But… was it?

The world’s Muslim population, according to CNN or Al Jazeera–USA or wherever the hell Nick had heard it, had just reached 2.2 billion people. Of those, according to polls the network had quoted, more than 90 percent claimed membership in the Islamic Global Caliphate, even if they were in nations that weren’t yet technically part of the expansive regime with its tripartite capitals in Tehran, Damascus, and Mecca.

That meant, especially after almost a decade of the full civil war in China and India’s aggressive moves toward achieving a huge middle-class population (largely through restricting population much as the Chinese had three generations earlier), that the Islamic Global Caliphate was the most populous political entity on earth. And the birthrate of Muslims, someone had once told Nick—perhaps it had been his pedantic father-in-law—could now be charted in terms of what he’d called an asymptotic curve. The most common birth name in Europe had been Mohammed for more than twenty-five years now, which meant that it had been so even before the Caliphate was officially established there.

Hell, thought Nick, feeling his brain cells still reeling from the tasering, the most common baby name in fucking Canada is Mohammed.

That didn’t mean anything. Did it?

“The Caliphate moving into southern California and Arizona and New Mexico? Sending… what?… colonists here? Immigrants?” Nick said dumbly, his tongue thick. “The United States would never stand for it.”

“Oh?” said Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. “And what could the United States do about it?”

Nick opened his mouth angrily… thought a moment… and then shut his mouth. America had a standing army of draftees of a little more than six hundred thousand kids like his son, but poorly armed, poorly trained, and poorly led, mercenaries all as they fought for Japan or India in China, Indonesia, parts of Southeast Asia, and South America. The dregs of the regular Army and the National Guard were overextended just guarding the southern border with Nuevo Mexico from the ColoradŌOklahoma state line to the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles.

Could a U.S. president break the all-important mercenary contracts with Japan and the other hiring nations and bring that leased-out army home to fight a million or so immigrant jihadists? Would she?

Nick felt very dizzy. “Mexico wouldn’t stand for it,” he said flatly. “The reconquistas fought too hard to retake these states, to undo the eighteen forty-eight American land grabs.”

Noukhaev laughed and stubbed out what was left of his cigar. “Trust me, my friend Nick Bottom, this Nuevo Mexico you speak of does not exist. You are talking to someone who has traded with it, worked with it, and moved within its confused borders for more than twenty years. Nuevo Mexico is a marriage of convenience—a fictional marriage of convenience—between leaders of murderous drug cartels, fleeing land barons from Old Mexico, younger speculators, and spanic warlords as loyal only to themselves as are the Chinese warlords. There is no Nuevo Mexico.”

“It has a flag,” Nick heard himself say. Even the tone of his voice sounded pathetic.

Noukhaev grinned. “Yes, Nick Bottom, and a national anthem. But the fiction that is Nuevo Mexico is as corrupt and rotten from the inside as Old Mexico was before its fall. The ‘colonists’ here cannot feed themselves, much less replace the large American ranches, farms, high-tech corporations, science centers, and civilian populations that they have occupied and overrun. They would starve in a month without food supplies from the cartels. They survive by sucking at the tit of cartel money—cocaine money, heroin money, flashback money. If that tit is denied them, eighteen million former Mexican ‘immigrants’ will be on the move again.”

“But… the Caliphate,” said Nick. “They don’t have the… the… language, the culture, the infrastructure…” He heard what he was saying and shut up again. He shook his head. “Who would sell the Southwest to the Caliphate?”

Noukhaev lowered his chin to his white-shirted chest and smiled in a way that could only be called diabolical.

“Me,” he said. “Among others.”

Nick blinked and really looked at the man across the desk from him. Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev wasn’t joking. Was he insane? A megalomaniac, yes… Nick had known that from the earliest parts of this crazy conversation… but fully insane?

Maybe not, thought Nick.

“Who would do the selling?” repeated Nick, speaking more to himself now than to the don. “Not Nuevo Mexico, although their military forces and new colonists here will be in the way.”

“No, not really,” said Noukhaev. “No more in the way than, say, the native populations and so-called armies of Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and European Russia. The new Islamic owners of all those former nations have gained much experience in efficient expansion in the past three decades.”

“But still…,” muttered Nick, his nerve ends twitching and misfiring from the tasering. “Who would do the real selling? Who would get the billions of old dollars involved in such a…”

Nick looked up and met Noukhaev’s dark-eyed gaze. “Japan,” he said softly.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev opened his callused palms.

“Not the country of Japan,” Nick said. “But the keiretsu and the daimyo who has most control here in the States when the time comes to make the deal with the mullahs in Tehran and Mecca. The new Shogun.”

Noukhaev was no longer smiling, merely staring. The gaze burned into Nick. He could feel it like a finger of fire against his face.

“A sort of second Louisiana Purchase,” murmured Nick. “But millions of Islamic colonists in former U.S. states? America would… never stand for it.”

Nick’s voice had been dropping from lack of conviction even before he finished the sentence. America had stood for a lot in recent decades. More to the point—what could it do to stop an organized and Caliphate-backed colonization of these desert states? America hadn’t been able to keep the territory out of the hands of the Mexican cartels in the first place.

Will they bring their own camels? wondered Nick. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He suddenly had one hell of a headache.

“I have been a poor host,” said Noukhaev. “Are you thirsty, Nick Bottom? Shall I call for some wine?”

“Not wine,” said Nick. “Just some water.”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev seemed to be talking to the desktop when he spoke in low, conversational tones. “Please bring some water for my guest and myself.”

A minute later, the side door opened and a guayabera-wearing man came in carrying a silver tray upon which were a crystal carafe of water, so filled with ice that it fogged the crystal with its cold, and two crystal glasses.

Noukhaev poured for both of them.

“Please,” said the don, gesturing. Nick waited, holding the cold glass. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been this thirsty or when his head had hurt quite this much. Both, he imagined, were byproducts of the tasering.

But he didn’t drink.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev laughed easily and drained his entire glass of ice water. He poured more for himself.

Nick sipped. No taste, chemical or otherwise. It was water.

“Can I ask some questions now?” asked Nick. “That was supposed to be the purpose of this meeting.”

“By all means, Nick Bottom. You, after all, are the investigator. This is what Mr. Hiroshi Nakamura has said, and Mr. Hiroshi Nakamura is seldom wrong. Please, please, ask your questions.”

Noukhaev extracted a second cigar, prepared it, lit it, and sat back in his chair smoking it.

“Do you know who killed Keigo Nakamura?” asked Nick, his voice flat and hard. But the effort of speaking drove white-hot spikes of pain into his aching head.

“I believe I do,” said Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.

“Will you tell me?”

“I would prefer not to,” said Noukhaev with a small smile.

Bartleby, thought Nick. Dara had introduced him to the wicked and memorable Melville story with that sad and memorable repeated line. He thought that the full title had been Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. Either way, right now Nick envied the little scrivener who could just roll over on his cot and turn his face to the wall of his prison. And die, remembered Nick.

“Why not?” he asked, voice still hard. “Just tell me what you know or what you think you know. It’d make everyone’s life a hell of a lot easier. Especially mine.”

“Yes, but you are the investigator, Nick Bottom,” the don said again, this time through the haze of blue smoke. “In the first place, I might be wrong. In the second place, I would never deny you the triumph of identifying the murderer or murderers yourself.”

Nick shook his head to clear it. “We know that Keigo Nakamura came down with his little video documentary team five days before he was murdered. His assistants said Keigo interviewed you on camera. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

Why would you allow such a thing? Nick thought, squinting at the older man. Why would a gunrunner, drugrunner, information seller, and international expediter of all things illegal allow himself to be interviewed, on camera, by the son of one of his greatest enemies—perhaps a deadly enemy—for a stupid documentary on Americans and their flashback addiction?

Nick struggled to put the question into a few clear words and then gave it up. His head hurt too much for such efficiency. Instead, he said, “Did Keigo say something—or ask you something—while he was here that made you want to kill him? That required he die?”

“No to your first question, Nick Bottom. A sad but total yes to the second question.”

Nick rubbed his brow as he worked that out. “So Keigo said something here that caused someone to have to kill him. That’s what you’re saying?”

Noukhaev inhaled cigar smoke, enjoyed it, expelled it. He said nothing.

“That something was on the memory chip of his camera?” Nick asked.

“Oh, yes,” said the don. “But that is not why Keigo Nakamura had to die the way he did, when he did.”

“What is the reason, Don Noukhaev?”

The don smiled, shook his head sadly, and flicked ashes into the makeshift ashtray.

“Someday,” Noukhaev said at last, “you must look into the kind of documentary the young Nakamura was really making. Why would the scion of a modern zaibatsu clan almost sure to produce the next Shogun come to America to waste his time documenting useless flashback addicts… no insult intended, Nick Bottom.”

“None taken,” said Nick. “You tell me what Keigo was doing with his little documentary, if it wasn’t to document American flashback use. I’ve seen hours and hours of the unedited rough footage. It’s all about how people use flashback.”

“All about that?” said the don.

“That and how the dealers get it… how the drug itself is transported into the country and sold. That sort of stuff. But all related to flashback and Americans using it. Are you suggesting that there’s a hidden film in his footage… a movie within the movie or something? Something telling us to expect this F-two you mentioned? Are you suggesting something like that?”

“I suggest nothing,” said Noukhaev. “Except that, regrettably, our time together is growing short.”

Nick sighed.

“But you think the one who gave the order to kill Keigo is one of the seven family daimyos competing with Nakamura for the Shogunate?”

“I did not say that.” Noukhaev turned his cigar around and blew the ash into flame.

“If I guess and give my reasons, will you confirm or deny the names?”

Noukhaev laughed his broad, aggravating laugh. Nick had had just about enough of it.

“Investigators do not guess, Nick Bottom. They deduce. They eliminate the impossible and improbable until only the inevitable remains.”

“Bullshit,” said Nick.

“Yes,” grinned the large-knuckled don.

“But you invited me to this meeting,” said Nick, more thinking aloud than communicating now. “If you’re not going to help me with the investigation, then you must have brought me here—and put yourself in some danger from Nakamura’s gee-bears—because you want to send him, Nakamura, a message.”

Noukhaev smoked his cigar.

Nick sipped more water. “Or maybe a message to Sato,” he said at last. “Were you serious about Sato being his own important daimyo in Japan? Colonel Death and all that? Ten thousand ninjas or samurai or whatever at his command?”

Nick hadn’t expected an answer but the don said, “Yes.”

“So, you’re saying, Sato’s also a player in all this. That he might have his own motives and not just be a mindless Nakamura vassal… someone who will commit seppuku at Mr. Nakamura’s order.”

“Oh, Hideki Sato will commit seppuku at once upon his liege lord’s command,” said Noukhaev. No smile. “He has already done worse than that.”

Nick wondered what could possibly be worse than being ordered to disembowel oneself. Much later, he realized that if he’d asked that question of Noukhaev then, the entire mystery would have been solved. Instead, he said, “And Sato’s really an assassin?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Why would Nakamura assign one of the world’s top assassins to spend so much time with me? To risk such a valuable man’s life by sending him down here through enemy-held territory, with me, so that I could see you, Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev? Sato was almost killed when we were attacked, you know.”

Again, Nick was sure that there would be no answer to this ill-shaped, amorphous question, so he was deeply surprised when the don replied so earnestly.

“When you solve this murder, Nick Bottom—if you solve this murder—for the short period of time they will allow you to remain alive, perhaps just hours, more probably mere minutes, you will be the most dangerous man on earth.”

Nick set down his water glass. “Dangerous to whom, Don Noukhaev? To just the murderer and his keiretsu? Or zaibatsu or whatever the hell it’s called today?”

“Much more dangerous than that,” Noukhaev said softly. “And to many more people. To millions of people. Which is why they cannot allow you to live once you solve this crime.”

Me, dangerous to millions of people? That made no sense, no matter which way Nick turned it. He was totally at sea. Nothing explained anything to him and everything he heard made his head hurt more and his insides feel more queasy.

“Then I’d better not solve the fucking crime,” Nick said at last. His voice came out slightly slurred, as if he’d been drinking vodka rather than water.

“But you must solve this crime, Nick Bottom.” The don didn’t seem to be bantering or waxing sarcastic. His voice was as low and as serious as Nick had heard it.

“Why must I solve this crime?” Nick had gone for a sarcastic tone, but it had come out merely tired-slurred.

“Because she would have wanted you to,” said Noukhaev.

Nick sat up straight in his uncomfortable metal chair. She would have wanted him to?

“Who’s ‘she,’ Noukhaev?”

“Your wife, Nick Bottom,” said the don, flicking ashes with a relaxed move of his hairy wrist. “The lovely lady named Dara.”

Nick was on his feet, his hands balled into his fists. On his feet but swaying slightly. “How do you know my wife’s name?” Stupid thing to say, Nick realized at once. Noukhaev must have multiple dossiers on him, compiled as soon as Nakamura had hired him. He shook his head and tried again.

“What’s my wife got to do with anything? Why bring her into this?” Nick put a fist onto the desktop to help steady himself. The don had remained seated.

“Your wife, Dara Fox Bottom, was a beautiful woman,” Noukhaev said in low tones. “She sat right there… in the same chair that you just vacated…”

Nick swiveled awkwardly to look down at his empty chair. When he turned back to Noukhaev, he had to set both fists, knuckles first, onto the don’s desk to keep from falling.

“Dara here? Why? When?”

“The day after Keigo Nakamura interviewed me,” said Noukhaev. “Four days before the young Mr. Nakamura was murdered in Denver. He and his retinue had already flown home by the time your wife met with me.”

“Met with you… why?” managed Nick.

The room was spinning now. The water, thought Nick. No, not the water. Noukhaev had drunk the water. Something in the glass that interacted with the water. Something slower-acting than the fucking taser, but just as sure.

“The man she came to Santa Fe with and stayed with at the Inn of the Anasazi while they were here,” Noukhaev was saying from a thousand miles away, his voice rattling and echoing down the quickly closing tunnel. “That assistant district attorney Harvey Cohen. He was a man of little or no imagination. But your lovely wife, Nick Bottom… your lovely wife, Dara, she was…”

Whatever his lovely wife Dara was, had been, Nick never heard it from Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.

Nick had already begun the long slide down the dark tunnel into blackness.