Flashback

1.16 Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25

K.T. has outdone herself.

Nick, with Val riding shotgun beside him and Leonard in the backseat, is barreling due south on Highway 287 - 385 through the empty Comanche Grasslands at 130 miles per hour in the 2015 Chevy Camaro supercharged SS that K. T. Lincoln provided from the impound lot.

Endless grasslands unspool on either side of the white automobile roaring down the empty two-lane highway. They’ve long since outrun the puny Denver PD and Colorado Highway Patrol interceptors, and Nakamura’s hydrogen-powered skateboards never had a chance to catch up once they turned south from I-70. Val has been cheering and pumping his fist for forty miles now.

The almost-twenty-year-old Camaro is pouring out its Vortech-supercharged 603 horsepower and 518 pound-feet of torque. No plug-in electric motors here, just the raging 6.2-liter L99 V-8 engine gulping down gallons of rare high-octane gasoline.

The windshield and windows on the Camaro Vortech SS are just glassed-over gunslits and Val has already had the opportunity to use his as such. The hood of the highway patrol cruiser in pursuit had exploded upward from the shotgun blast and the car had spun into its own dust cloud. That had been the last of the pursuit before they passed through Springfield, Colorado, just north of the grasslands. Leonard is busy in the backseat double-checking unfolded paper maps, even though both Betty and the Camaro’s nav system are providing minute-by-minute information.

“When we get to the town of Campo ten miles ahead,” calls Leonard over the engine howl and roar of the Nitto Extreme Drag NT55R rear tires, “it’ll be about ninety-eight miles to the border station at Texhoma.”

“How many people in Campo?” shouts Nick. He finds it hard to believe that there’s a town out here in the endlessly undulating grasslands.

“A hundred and fifty,” shouts Leonard.

“One hundred thirty-eight,” answers Betty.

“One… hundred… forty… one,” says the Camaro’s mildly retarded nav system.

“Dad!” cries Val. “There’s some sort of helicopter coming in behind us. But I don’t hear it, just see it.”

“That’s a Sasayaki-tonbo,” says Nick, proud to share his knowledge of such things. He has had to concentrate hard on the driving the past hour and more. At more than 130 m.p.h., a chuckhole or jackrabbit could mean disaster. “It means ‘dragonfly’ in Japanese.”

“What do you want me to do?” shouts Val as he opens the sunroof, shucks off his shoulder harness, and stands, holding the RPG that Nick’s brought in his duffel of weapons.

“Just a warning shot across the bow,” shouts Nick over the roar of air that’s joined the engine and tire noise. “Sato might be in it. I don’t want to kill him.”

“Roger that,” shouts Val and takes aim and launches a rocket. The dark back-exhaust of the rocket scorches the white hood of the Camaro.

The rocket misses the nose of the dragonfly ’copter as planned, but it does catch the tip of one of the huge, intricately warped rotors. The big but elegant machine corkscrews to the right, out of sight over a grassy hill.

“Did you see it hit?” calls Nick as Val sets the spent RPG in back, closes the sunroof, and straps himself back in. They’re approaching Campo at 140 miles per hour.

“It’s all right,” says Leonard from the back. “It autorotated down and just landed hard in a big cloud of dust. No one hurt.”

Val high-fives his father, who quickly returns his hand to the steering wheel.

“Turn right onto Main Street and the highway marked four-twelve, two-eighty-seven, sixty-four, three, fifty-six in front of the town hall in Boise City,” says Leonard, leaning forward between the father and son.

“Why does one highway have so many numbers in Oklahoma?” laughs Val.

“What they lack in actual number of roads, they make up for in numbers for them,” says Nick and is surprised when both his son and father-in-law laugh.

Then they are in Texhoma, Oklahoma, population 909 according to Leonard, 896 according to Betty, not-enough-data according to the Camaro’s nav, 364 miles and less than three and a half hours’ Camaro SS driving time from Denver.

And then they are approaching the Republic of Texas border station.

“Jeez,” says Val, “they’re on horses.”

Nick turns right at the flagpole with the flag showing a single white star on the triangular field of blue. The red and white stripes look familiar. The Texas cavalry is escorting them through the opened gates that cut through the two high fences and intervening minefields.

Nick’s amazed to see a familiar building just beyond the open border gates. “I thought the Alamo was much farther south,” he says softly. The Camaro’s big V-8 is just rumbling softly now.

“A lot of people make that mistake,” says Leonard, who is leaning forward to shake Nick’s hand. When Nick offers his hand to Val, the boy hugs him instead.

Nick came awake gasping and with tears running down his cheeks.

Flashback addicts rarely dreamed at all. Now that real dreams, as opposed to flashback trips, were coming back to him, he was astonished at how powerful they were. Why would anyone trade such things for chemically induced reruns of fragments of a life? Why had he?

He was up and showered and shaved and planned to be dressed, armed, and out of the condo complex by 6:30 a.m. His ribs hurt worse today under the tape-corset, but he didn’t care. Looking in the mirror after he’d shaved, Nick saw that something was different.

He’d managed to lose quite a bit of weight for two weeks on a case, and his cheekbones were sharper, his features more gaunt, but that wasn’t the primary change. His eyes. His eyes were different. More clear. For almost six years now, he’d stared at himself and at everything else out of the cave-stare of either wanting and needing flashback more than anything else in the world or staring at the world through the glaze of a heavy flashback hangover. His eyes were different now.

Can they stay that way? Nick shivered and finished getting dressed.

At weapons-check, he signed out his 9mm Glock for the clip-on crossdraw holster at his belt and a tiny .32-caliber pocket gun for his rarely worn ankle holster. The .32 had been his throw-down for all the years he’d been a patrolman and homicide detective—numbers filed off, grip taped, no traceable history on it—but he’d never fired his service weapon in anger, much less come close to having to use a throw-down for himself or his partner. He trusted the short-barreled .32 to be accurate at distances of five feet or less.

Before leaving for the day, Nick took security chief Gunny G. aside, showed him the photos of Val and Leonard, and paid the ex-marine $50 in old bucks—more than a third of what Nick had left after paying the pilot to get him to Los Angeles and a fortune by anyone’s standards—with more promised if Gunny were to take care of the two until Nick got back. Or if he didn’t get back.

“The FBI and Homeland Security were here last week asking about the boy, Mr. B.,” said Gunny G.

“I know,” said Nick, handing the fortune in hard cash to the white-scarred ex-marine. “But I swear to you that it’s only because they wanted to question my son as a material witness to something he wasn’t involved in. And even that’s been dropped. You won’t get in trouble helping them, I promise you that, Gunny. And there’s another twenty-five in it for you after you do help them get settled ’til I get back—and keep anyone from bothering them.”

“I’d do that for you no matter what, Mr. B.,” said the security man as he pocketed the cash.

Nick scribbled a hasty note—he had little hope that Val and his grandfather would show up today, but the remnants of the dream he’d had made him a little more optimistic than usual—and then he was out the parking garage door and into his vibrating, wheezing gelding. It was hard to drive that volt-bucket after the dream-memory of real V-8 power and freedom. The charge indicator’s happy face showed that he had a range of thirty-one miles today, if a major part of it was downhill.

“K.T.! ”

The police lieutenant spun, crouched, and had almost cleared the Glock from its holster before she froze.

“Nick Bottom. What the fuck do you want?”

“And a good morning to you, too, Lieutenant Lincoln.”

K.T. lived on Capitol Hill in one of the big old nineteenth-century homes in that once-prestigious neighborhood that had been converted to a dozen or more cubie rentals late in the last century or early in this one. It had been a high-crime neighborhood for more than six decades now, but this only gave the cops who wanted to live there a better deal. The residents of K.T.’s building who could afford cars kept them in an oversized detached garage down this long driveway and that’s where he’d planned to intercept his old partner.

“What are you doing in your uniform, Detective?” asked Nick. Seeing K.T. in her patrol blacks, gunbelt, visible shield, baton and all, reminded him of their early years together.

“There’s been a little unpleasantness in Los Angeles this past week,” said K.T., straightening. “Or perhaps you’ve been too busy playing Philip Marlowe to notice.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” said Nick. “So?”

“So the reconquista armies and militias out there got their collective asses kicked, there are more than a million and a half spanic residents of East L.A. running south for their lives, and word is that the Nuevo Mexican forces haven’t been able to draw the line at San Diego but are falling back to the old border.”

“So?” repeated Nick.

“So there are about half a million yahoos in Denver who are getting big ideas of kicking spanic ass here in our own backyard,” said K.T. “The whole force is on duty today—full riot gear—and drawing a protective line in Five Points, north Denver, West Colfax area, the old Manual High School feeder neighborhoods, and all of southwest Denver beyond Santa Fe Drive.”

“You don’t have enough people, K.T.”

“Fucking tell me about it,” said the lieutenant. “What the hell do you want, Nick? I gotta get to work.”

“Any progress on getting me that impound V-eight I asked for?”

K.T. squinted at him. “You were serious?”

“As a heart attack, partner.”

“Don’t call me ‘partner,’ you flashcave dweller. Why on earth would I risk my entire career and pension by stealing you a car from impound, Nick Bottom?”

“Because they’ll kill me if I don’t have real wheels to get out of here.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” demanded K.T. “The black helicopters coming for you?”

Nick smiled at that. She was closer to the truth than she could know.

“You read the grand jury notes,” said Nick.

“Another reason not even to talk to you, mister. Much less commit a felony for you.”

Nick nodded. “Assuming they were a frame-up—assume that for just a minute—ask yourself who’d have the juice to change phone records, suborn testimony, do all the things that grand jury near-indictment required to be done. The late mayor and former DA Mannie Ortega?”

K.T. snorted a laugh.

“Who, then?” pressed Nick. “The governor? Who?”

“It’d have to be someone on the level of Advisor Nakamura’s group,” said K.T., glancing at her watch and glowering. “But why would Nakamura spend all that time almost six years ago framing you—at great effort and expense—and then hire you now to find the killer of his sweet widdle boy?”

“I’m working on that,” said Nick.

“But that’s assuming that all that grand jury work was a frame-up,” snapped K.T. “Which has to be bullshit.” She turned to walk away.

Knowing how much K. T. Lincoln hated to be touched—he’d watched her scowl a supervisor into retreat for doing so, not to mention baton the teeth out of a begging perp—he grabbed her by the upper arm and turned her around.

“That grand jury information meant that I killed my wife. You knew us for years, K.T. Can you imagine me hurting Dara?” He shook her with both hands. “God damn it, can you?”

She removed his hands and glared at him, but then looked down. “No, Nick. You couldn’t hurt Dara. Not ever.”

“So one way or the other—whether I find Keigo Nakamura’s killer or not, and I only have until this evening to report on that—Advisor Nakamura’s going to have me whacked. I’m certain of it. But with a fast car…”

“You’re nuts,” said K.T. But her voice was softer now. “Why did you say in your call yesterday morning—I never got back to sleep, by the way—that you were trying to save Val and you? Is Val back from L.A.?”

“I was out there looking for him from Monday until last night,” said Nick. “I think odds are decent that he and his grandfather got out of the city before the shit hit the fan.”

“And he’d come here… to you? Why, Nick?”

He may want to kill me, thought Nick. Instead of saying that, he shrugged. “All I know is that if he arrives today, I need a fast way out of town. A car with balls.”

“How far do you have to get to be… away… out of town?” asked K.T.

“Three hundred sixty-four miles would about do it,” said Nick.

“Three hundred sixty… Nick, no car goes that far these days without an overnight charge or a hydrogen top-off. What on earth is three hundred and sixty-one miles from here that you’d need to…” She paused and her eyes widened. “Texas? Are you shitting me?”

“I shit thee not, Lieutenant Lincoln.”

“The Republic of Texas doesn’t take felons on the run, Nick. Nor do they take flashback addicts. Nor do they…” She paused again.

Nick said nothing.

K.T. took a step closer. “You look… different. Your eyes… Are you off the flashback shit?”

“I think so,” Nick said softly. “The last nine days or so have been too busy for me to think about the drug.”

“Nine whole days,” said K.T. There was some sarcasm in her tone—there always was—but Nick could also hear the serious question beneath the derision.

“It’s a beginning, partner,” said Nick. He remembered when he’d helped her go off both painkillers and cigarettes in the months after a minor shooting—the nicotine being harder to kick than the narcotics. Dara had understood when he’d sat up nights with his partner, listening to her moan and bitch. He knew that K.T. also remembered it.

“Maybe,” she grunted. “But this car thing is a nonstarter, Nick. For one thing, the city just held their annual auction of impounded vehicles a few weeks ago. The lots are mostly empty.”

“You’ll find something for me, K.T.”

“God damn it,” she snarled, balling her hands into fists. “Quit doing that to me, you asshole. I don’t owe you anything.”

Nick nodded assent but K.T. looked down, almost panting in her anger, and said to the ground, “Except my life, Nick. Except my life.” She raised her head. “If I find a car—which I don’t think I can—where do you want me to deliver it? Your cubie mall?”

“No,” said Nick and thought fast. It had to be someplace public but also fairly safe from thieves. Someplace with security nearby but a non-noisy security. “The Six Flags Over the Jews parking lot,” he said. “As far on the south side as you can park it. They don’t check the vehicles until the end of the visiting hours about nine p.m., but the guards at the main gate sort of keep an eye out on the cars in the lot. Just park it as far south as you can but not so off by itself that it’ll be noticeable.”

“How will you know which car it is?” muttered K.T., checking her watch again.

“Text me. And park it, you know, the opposite direction of other cars in the row.”

“Where do I put the key fob for this car I won’t be able to get for you?” she asked. “Over the visor?”

Nick produced the small metal box he’d got from Gunny G. that morning. “This is magnetic. Set it inside the left rear wheel well… like in the Mad Max movies.”

“Right, like in the Mad Max movies.” She took the little box, clicked it open and shut, and rolled her eyes at the nonsense.

“Never mind,” said Nick. “Just don’t get the box anywhere near your phone or other computer stuff… that powerful magnet will wipe the memories clean.”

K.T. started to hand it back to him as if the box had the plague.

Nick held his palms out and shook his head. “I was joking. It’s barely strong enough to stick to the car. Left rear wheel well.”

“All right,” she said and turned again to leave. “But I’m not promising anything…”

Nick touched her shoulder again but gently this time. “K.T.?”

She glared back at him, but not with the real fury he’d seen before. “What?”

“Whether you find a car for us or not, if today doesn’t turn out well for me… and I have a hunch…” He shook his head and started over. “If something happens to me, and Val and his grandfather show up, can you look out for them for me? Find a safe place for them until…”

She stared at him and there was real pain in her dark eyes. She said nothing. Nor did she walk away.

“You’ve met Leonard,” Nick hurried on. “He’s a good man but he’s… you know… been an academic his whole life. If he got Val out of L.A. safely, he’s probably already exceeded his real-world survival capabilities and Leonard is already almost seventy-five years old…” He shut up. He couldn’t find the right words.

“You’re asking me to watch over Val if Nakamura or someone kills you today,” said K.T.

Nick nodded stupidly, his eyes full and his throat tight.

“Oh, Nick, Nick…,” K.T. said sadly and turned on her heel and walked away from him toward the distant wall of garage doors.

Nick knew that this was a yes. Or at least he took it as one.

He pulled the gelding into a thirty-minute parking area near the capitol at the top of the hill and looked down from south of the flaking gold capitol dome toward the valley where the Coors Field prison and Mile High DHS Detention Center straddled the junction of Cherry Creek and the Platte River. He lowered his driver’s-side window and shut the batteries off.

What next? For the first time in the two weeks since Nakamura hired him, he had a few hours to and for himself. In twelve hours or less—probably less, maybe a lot less—he’d be summoned to appear in front of that billionaire again to either announce he was sure who’d killed Keigo Nakamura or admit that he’d failed. Either way, he thought, Nakamura’s response wasn’t going to be gentle.

Nick Bottom hated puzzles. He’d hated them since he was a kid. But he had always been eerily good at figuring them out. It had been the ratiocination part of police work that had boosted him through the uniformed ranks to first grade so quickly and got him up into the rarefied air of Major Crimes detective work in his youthful midthirties.

But now…

Now what? He was sure that he had all the facts he needed to come up with a solution to this crime, but even the goddamn facts kept shifting and blurring. Nick felt like a blind artist trying to sculpt with a heap of marbles. For the most part he was where he and his investigative team had been six winters ago when they’d decided that while it could have been one of the witnesses who snuffed Keigo and, perhaps as an afterthought, Keigo’s girlfriend Keli Bracque—the poet Danny Oz, who had the logically weak but strong-enough-for-murder-in-the-real-world motive of his general smoldering anger and incipient insanity; the thief and drug dealer Delroy Nigger Brown, maybe because of something he said while he was high and being interviewed by Keigo which he didn’t want shown in the finished documentary; the addict and dealer Derek Dean, who was currently rotting in full-time flash immersion up at the People’s Republic of Boulder’s Naropa Institute, possibly killing Keigo just for the flashback fun of it; or Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev for a dozen reasons, half of which he’d teased Nick about when they’d met in Santa Fe—the best chance was that it had been a hit team from Japan, ninja assassins from one of the eight keiretsu or zaibatsu (actually seven kereitsu and zaibatsu not counting Nakamura’s) and seven daimyos who headed those clan-company confederations. Seven deadly daimyos, including kindly old bald-as-an-egg Daichi Omura, whom Nick, in his fatigue and posttraumatic stress after his fun five days in L.A., had honored every way short of kissing the Jap runt’s ass… seven deadly daimyos, each of whom was egomaniacally sure that his nation’s and the entire world’s survival depended upon him, that one man, becoming Shogun. Seven deadly daimyos each willing to kill a thousand Keigo Nakamuras and Keigo-ish sex-slave girlfriends to see that his Shogunate dreams of power came true.

This is where Nick and K. T. Lincoln had ended up in their investigation six winters ago, and this is where most tracks, new and old, seemed to lead again.

Almost, thought Nick. Not quite.

Denver from the capitol hill didn’t look like a city about to explode in racial and ethnic violence. Some of the leaves in the tree-filled park below the capitol were beginning to change color. The temperature was perfect—low seventies—and the sunlight had that clear, pure, crystalline, late-September quality that made residents of Colorado want to live there forever. (Or at least until the arrival of shitty springs with no spring weather, offering up winter until June’s heat.)

Nick tried to clear his mind of any thoughts about the case as he stared at the city buildings below. It used to help when he just let his subconscious weave threads together without any deliberate herding of facts.

Nestled in the little patches of park below was the city library, thrown up by some hotshot postmodern architect in the 1990s. The cuteness of the tower that looked sort of like a pencil—or maybe a crayon—had worn off before the last century was over. Beyond the library was the main part of the art museum, made to look “modern” but more than sixty years old now, Nick thought, which still looked like some tiled and parapeted castle huddling against its neighbors. Its windows were tiny, oddly shaped, and scattered almost at random around the building.

Nick remembered his mother, who’d loved art, taking him to the museum when he was a little kid and pointing to the windows and telling him, “The man who designed this building in the early nineteen-seventies, Nicky, made these windows in the shape they are—and put them where they are—to frame beautiful views of the mountains and foothills as if they were paintings on the walls, too. Clever, don’t you think? But what the architect didn’t take time to think out was that newer, taller buildings would pop up all around and hide those views… making these windows-as-frames silly.”

Leonard had once talked to Nick, after a few drinks, about some scholarly mentor of his who’d called such inevitabilities the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. As if a college professor had to explain to a cop and a son of a cop anything about the tyranny of unintended consequences.

Across the street from the old modernist art museum where his mother used to take him was the newer postmodernist annex to the art museum. Nick actually remembered the name of that architect—Daniel Libeskind. The titanium-and-glass structure was all shards and points and angles, looking like a smashed chandelier or shattered Christmas-tree star. That building had gone up in the first decade of this century and Nick remembered all the self-congratulatory whoop-de-do about the structure—how it put Denver back on America’s architectural map (as if that would matter at all in the dark decades after the Day It All Hit The Fan)—but the leaping up and down in joy had abated somewhat when the city had discovered that a) the inside of a broken Christmas decoration was a lousy place to try to show art and b) every angle and surface that could leak did leak and always would.

Wait, some of this bullshit I was remembering could help. What was it?

He ran his little Molly Bloom batch of free associations backwards like an old reel-to-reel tape, the way he’d taught himself to do, and found it.

The picture-frame windows on the old windows were useless because of the new buildings that had grown up to block the views.

He was still trying to solve this case using the old frames that were out of date. Something he’d stumbled over in the past week—some new thing that had grown up to block the old view—held the answer. It was there. He just couldn’t see it yet.

Nick turned on the fine four-wheeled G.M. appliance, checked the smiley-face and leaf-sprouting interfaces to make sure the gelding had actually started, noted that even though he’d hardly driven the thing it now had only nineteen miles left in its daily charge, and let the piece-a-shit glide down the hill toward the west.

There were only a dozen or so cars in the Six Flags Over the Jews parking lot. Nick knew that it was ridiculous to check for his Camaro SS escape vehicle—K.T. would have needed the Star Trek transporter teleportation doohickey to beam one here from the impound lot in this short of a time—but he looked anyway. No vehicles parked the wrong way or by themselves to the south.

He found Danny Oz smoking a cigarette—regular, not cannabis—and drinking coffee in a mostly empty mess tent under the rusting Tower of Doom. Oz didn’t seem surprised by the early-morning repeat visit.

“Coffee, Mr. Bottom?” asked Oz, gesturing toward the big urn on a counter. “It’s terrible but strong.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’ve thought of more questions.” Oz had been writing with a pencil in a small book of blank pages, but he set that aside.

“Not really,” said Nick. “At least not officially in terms of the investigation. That’s over.”

“Oh, did you find Keigo Nakamura’s killer?”

“I’m not sure,” said Nick, knowing how absurd that sounded. No matter. It was true. “I just had some free time and I wondered, Mr. Oz…”

“Danny.”

“I wondered, Danny, how you might describe Keigo’s demeanor and attitude when he interviewed you.”

Oz was silent for a minute and Nick was sure that he hadn’t understood the question—Nick wasn’t sure that he understood what he’d been asking. He was about to rephrase it when the Israeli poet spoke.

“That’s interesting, Mr. Bottom. I did notice something about Mr. Keigo’s demeanor and mood that day.”

“What?” said Nick. “Depressed? Worried? Apprehensive?”

“Triumphant,” said Oz.

Nick had been ready to write in his little notebook but now he lowered his pencil. “Triumphant?”

Danny Oz frowned and sipped his coffee. “That’s not quite the correct word, Mr. Bottom. I’m thinking of the Hebrew word menatzeiach, which probably most closely translates as ‘victorious.’ For no good reason other than my years of observing human beings as a poet, I had the distinct impression that Keigo Nakamura thought that he was on the brink of some triumph… some victory. A victory of epic… one might say ‘biblical’ proportions.”

“He was close to finishing his documentary on us Americans and flashback,” said Nick. “Is that the kind of triumph you might have detected?”

“Perhaps.” Oz was silent a long moment. “But I felt it was more a sense of having been victorious in some great struggle.”

“What kind of struggle? Personal? Bigger than personal? Something on his father’s scale of success or failure?”

“I have no idea,” said Oz and shrugged. “We’re in the area of totally subjective impressions here, Mr. Bottom. But I’d take a wild guess and say the young man felt victorious in some battle that had been both personal and larger than the mere personal to him. Corporate, perhaps, or political. But definitely something larger than himself.”

Nick sighed. “All right. Speaking of totally subjective impressions, I have two questions for you that don’t really relate to the investigation at all.”

“About your wife?” Oz asked softly. He rubbed his neck as if still feeling Nick’s forearm there. There was still a red spot on the poet’s left temple where the muzzle of Nick’s Glock had broken the skin.

“No, not about Dara,” managed Nick. He opened his mouth to apologize and then shut it without speaking. “Just a question. If you could have saved Israel from destruction by killing a single person—one human being—would you have done it?”

Danny Oz blinked several times. The pained expression on his face showed that the question was not only unfair but impossible to answer. Still, he answered.

“Mr. Bottom, the Talmud taught us—and I’m sure I’ve bollixed up this verse since I haven’t studied the Sanhedrin part of the Talmud since I was a boy, but I’ll try to quote—‘ For this reason was man created alone, to teach thee that whosoever destroys a single soul… scripture imputes… I think the word is ‘guilt’… to him as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whosoever preserves a single soul, scripture ascribes merit to him… or maybe the passage said ‘righteousness,’ I’m not sure… as though he had preserved a complete world.’ ”

“So you wouldn’t have killed someone to save Israel?” said Nick.

Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye and the former thousand-yard stare was completely absent from his gaze. And from Nick’s.

“I don’t know, Mr. Bottom. God forgive me, I simply don’t know.”

“One last question,” said Nick. “If you had the chance to return to Israel now, would you do it?”

Oz snorted derisively. He drank the last of his cold coffee and lit a new cigarette. “There is no Israel, Mr. Bottom. Only a radioactive wasteland inhabited by Arabs.”

“It’s not all radioactive,” said Nick. “And what if someone removed the new Arab settlers who came in after the bombings?”

Oz laughed again. It was a hollow, sad sound. “Remove them? Sure. Who would do that, Mr. Bottom? The United Nations?”

The UN, always a dependable ally of the Arab bloc and of Palestinians at the end of the twentieth century, was now—except for its Japanese-run “peacekeeper” operation in China—a full-fledged subsidiary of the Islamic Global Caliphate. The irony, as Nick saw it, was that even after six million Jews had been murdered and the state of Israel destroyed, the so-called Palestinians were denied their nation-in-radioactive-rubble by Shi’ite Iran and the competing and ever-wary and ever-jealous Sunni Arab states.

“No,” said Nick. “Cleared out by someone else. Would you go?”

“I have prostate cancer and other radiation-induced cancers,” said Oz. “I’m dying.”

“We’re all dying,” said Nick. “Would you go back to Israel if other Jews joined you there?”

Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye again and—once more—there was the new clarity to his gaze. “I’d go in a minute, Mr. Bottom. In a minute.”

Nick came out to the parking lot knowing that he’d learned almost nothing that could help him when he would have to stand before Mr. Nakamura in a few hours and be commanded to tell the billionaire who’d killed his son.

But I learned something important, thought Nick. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

The three Oshkosh M-ATVs roared in and blocked his vehicle before he got the doors to his car unlocked.

Mutsumi Ōta, Daigorou Okada, and Shinta Ishii—Nick’s fellow survivors from the Santa Fe trip—jumped out of the lead vehicle. Each was dressed for urban combat but not for war: SWAT Kevlar and black boots, even their black ball caps made of ballistic cloth. And each held an automatic weapon at port arms.

Nick didn’t move a muscle.

Sato moved his mass out the rear hatch of the M-ATV, nodded at his three ninjas, and said, “Bottom-san, will you come with us, please?”

Oh shit, thought Nick. Too soon. Too early. I’m not ready. He wondered once again how many billions of men and women had died with equally unworthy final thoughts.

He licked his lips. “Mr. Nakamura’s back?”

“Not yet,” rumbled Sato. “But Mr. Nakamura did direct us to show you some things before your meeting with him later today. Please come with us.”

“Do I have a choice?” said Nick.

“Please come with us, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “We shall return you to your vehicle here in an hour or less.”

Keeping his hands away from his Glock, making no sudden movements, Nick went up the rear ramp into the idling M-ATV.

The ride was short, less than two miles, and ended at a grassy sward of what had once been a long park on the east bank of the Platte River in front of a series of high-rise condos that had gone up around the turn of the century. Sato, Sato’s three ninjas, and Nick exited the lead M-ATV and moved to one of Nakamura’s dragonfly ’copters—the less luxurious one that Nick had flown in down to Raton Pass a week earlier. A dozen more of Sato’s people from the other M-ATVs, all in ballistic black and Kevlar, had set up a perimeter around the machine. Mutsumi ōta—whom Nick had once thought of as Willy—gestured and Nick clambered into the open door of the dragonfly. Sato put on a headset with microphone, waited until everyone else was belted or clipped in, spoke a few unheard Japanese syllables into the mike, and the Sasayaki-tonbo fluttered silently, hovered, pitched to one side, and flew east above Denver’s downtown.

They’d left the side doors open and Nick looked out at his own reflection in the gold-tinted glass of the fifty-one-story former Wells Fargo building, the modest skyscraper that Denver residents had called the cash register building for decades because of its distinctive shape at the top. Buildings continued to flash beneath them and then, suddenly, they were beyond Denver and flying southeast over farms and high prairie.

This had been the reality of Denver for many decades now, Nick knew. To the north and south and west, suburbs extended the city beyond the horizon. But to the east there had always been this startling line—city and then a few farms where irrigation worked and high prairie beyond that stretching toward Kansas. Nick didn’t ask where they were headed and his only guess was a very dark one.

He smelled their destination before he saw it and in smelling it, Nick knew his guess had been correct.

The dragonfly landed, everyone unbelted, and the ninja guards hopped down, gesturing politely for Nick to join them. Nick lifted his shirt front and put it over his mouth and nose. It was that or throw up.

“Do you know where you are, Bottom-san?” asked Sato, stepping close to Nick and close to the edge of a reeking chasm.

Nick nodded. He didn’t want to talk because he didn’t want the staggering stench to get into his mouth.

They were at Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.

“Have you been here before, Bottom-san?”

Nick shook his head. He didn’t know how Sato could stand speaking and breathing in more of this air. Nick had seen many forensic photos and videos taken from this spot, but he’d never had to come out here in person before.

Originally, the landfill had been a deep ravine that ran north to south for about a mile. Bulldozers had deepened parts, built low tabletop mesas and hills along its edge, and leveled some crude roads from the nearest county road to the fill. On the west side, the tons of garbage dumped there were of the usual twentieth-century urban sort—countless rotting garbage bags, ruined furniture, heaps of rotting cloth and organic materials. Here on the northwest side, there was plenty of that, but from the rim of the chasm to the bottom there were also rotting human corpses—many hundreds of them. Some were wrapped in cloth or plastic shrouds, but most lay open and exposed to the hot September sun. Clouds of seagulls and crows had risen from their feeding sites at the appearance of the dragonfly ’copter and now returned to their dining. One area was reserved for the turkey vultures that circled on thermals above, like aircraft in an approach pattern at DIA, awaiting their turn on the exposed corpses. Many of the corpses at the base of the ravine were mere skeletons, sexlessly clean, gleaming white, with only a few shreds and tatters of flesh left on the exposed ribs or pelvises or leg bones. But the majority of bodies were still flesh-filled, bloated beyond recognition as human, crawling with maggots, and with only obscene glimpses of white bone poking through their fermenting masses.

Nick noticed that many of the medium-old corpses seemed to be moving and twitching on the hillside: a trick of the light due to the movement of the millions of maggots on their surfaces and below. Even the gulls weren’t dining on those bodies.

Every American city had a landfill such as this near its borders now, a third of the way through this glorious twenty-first century. All those reconquista fighters, Cinco de Mayo militia, Aryan Brotherhood gangs, jihadists, neighborhood protection groups, motorcycle gangs, and sometimes the authorities themselves needed such a disposal place if proper urban hygiene was to be observed.

Sato touched Nick’s left arm and urged him closer to the edge.

They hadn’t disarmed him and Nick’s right hand was already raised. If Okada, Ishii, or ōta were to raise one of his weapons behind him, Nick was going to throw himself in front of Sato, grab the bigger man while emptying the full clip of his Glock into the security chief’s belly, chest, and face, then roll down into the heaps of corpses, using Sato’s body as a shield while he fired the Glock and then going for the useless little .32 pocket pistol at his ankle to take down the three body-armored ninjas carrying full-auto M4 carbines.

His body was ready to do that. But what Nick was thinking was—Val and Leonard and K.T. will never know what happened to me.

Well, K.T. might. The DPD checked Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine about once a month for corpses of interest. And she might tell his son and father-in-law, if those two didn’t soon join him here.

Which Nick didn’t think was very likely.

Sato put his hand on Nick’s left shoulder and Nick put his hand on the butt of the Glock under his light jacket. The three ninjas shifted close behind him.

“Mukatsuku yō na-sō desu ka?” said Sato.

Nick had no idea what the words meant. A good-bye, maybe. An ultimatum, maybe. He really didn’t care. His index finger slipped under the Glock’s trigger guard. Everything from this point on would happen in fractions of a second.

“Zehi, Bottom-san. Iko u.” Sato dropped the heavy hand from Nick’s shoulder, wheeled, and led the way back to the dragonfly. Before climbing in after the four Japanese, Nick noticed that the pilot and copilot had put on their oxygen masks to avoid the physically debilitating stench.

Wherever they were headed next, they weren’t taking him back to the Six Flags parking lot. Not yet.

Whatever it is, thought Nick, it can’t be as bad as Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.

As it would turn out, he was wrong.

The dragonfly hurtled west at somewhere above 150 m.p.h., never climbing higher than two or three thousand feet above the unscrolling terrain. They flew over the northern Denver suburbs and followed Highway 36, the Boulder Turnpike, toward the gleaming slabs of the Flatirons.

They were headed to the People’s Republic of Boulder.

Nick felt his phone vibrate. Moving slowly so as not to spook Sato or his ninjas, Nick withdrew the phone from his jacket pocket. It was a text message:—Mr. B—Your two visitors are here and I’ve shown them to your quarters and will watch over them. Chits for the food court and everything. Gunny G.

Nick tried not to show any emotion as he slipped the phone back in his pocket.

The dragonfly passed over Boulder, flying low over the buildings on the CU campus, and then climbed above the foothills and hovered. Nick leaned over and looked down. They were landing in what had been the parking lot at NCAR.

Nick remembered the Anthropogenic Global Warming furor. He was already in his twenties when that hysteria hit its apogee. Now it was just a cautionary tale from the early-century Dark Age of long-range computer modeling. Nick, for one, had looked forward to longer summers, easier winters, and palm trees in Colorado, but the weather the last few decades had been colder and snowier than average and the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming had joined that of Herr Becher’s phlogiston and Soviet Lamarckism evolutionary theory.

One of the first victims of the public’s disgust at the AGW false alarm, combined with disappearing federal budgets, was the group for which the beautiful building growing larger beneath them had been built: NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The architect I. M. Pei had designed this Mesa Lab NCAR center out of sandstone and glass and meant for its stone to age with and blend in with the giant sandstone Flatirons just above the building while the glass reflected the turbulent Colorado skies. It had done so beautifully for almost seventy-five years now, but the atmospheric research people had long since sold the structure—the only structure allowed to be built in the miles of greenbelt separating urban Boulder from the Flatirons and foothills—to some private company.

They landed gently. NCAR—NAKAMURA CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH said the small sign to the right of the entry walkway.

“Mr. Nakamura kept the old initials,” Sato said redundantly as he opened the door.

Damned white of him, thought Nick.

The outer sections of the old laboratory, in the towers and where the broad windows looked out on sky, stone, and brown grasslands, were still offices. But the basement and former courtyard core of the building had been converted into… something else.

They donned green cloth surgical booties and little cloth surgical shower caps in a sort of airlock outside the long, wide underground room. But Nick had already caught a glimpse of what was inside.

The three ninjas stayed in the airlock as Sato escorted Nick into the space. Two medicos or technicians, both wearing full surgical robes and masks as well as the caps and booties, hurried up to say something, but Sato waved a single finger that silenced them. One of them bowed low to Sato.

They walked past tall tanks of Plexiglas or some stronger, clear plastic-glass material. Each tank was filled with a greenish liquid. A score of pipes and tubes snaked into each tank, and half of the tubes connected to the human beings—mostly men, but a few women—who floated in each vat. They were naked except for a sort of diaper from which more tubes came and went. Tubes ran into the men’s and women’s nostrils, and broader tubes were forced down their throats. Other IV drips connected to wrists and arms. Sensors on the figures’ chests and bellies and shaven heads fed data to control boards on the exteriors of the tanks.

“The tubes are for nutrients and other functions, Bottom-san,” Sato said softly, almost whispering, as if they were in a church or shrine. “They receive no oxygen in gaseous form. You see, their lungs are actually filled with the liquid. The fluid is a highly oxygenated mixture. The initial immersion is difficult for the subject, if conscious, but the human body—once the lungs are completely filled—soon learns to use the oxygen in the fluid as easily as if he or she were breathing air.”

They moved from tank to tank, walking in single file between the tall containers. Each of the hundreds of tanks was illuminated from the inside and the overall effect in this subterranean chamber was that hushed, almost solemn sense of being in some fantastic aquarium. The only sound came from the quiet machines or the occasional rustle of soft-soled slippers on the tile floor. The laboratory space did have a churchlike hush and reverential feel to it.

“Except for a few cases, in which the subject is being punished,” whispered Sato, “we remove the eardrums, eyeballs, and optic nerves. There is no need for them, you see. They could only be a distraction.”

Nick thought, They’re being punished by not having their eardrums, eyeballs, and optic nerves removed? He feared that this would make sense in a moment.

“What is this?” demanded Nick. “Some sort of sci-fi experiment for long-distance space travel? Are these clones or something? Adapting the human body to live under the oceans? What the fuck is this nightmare?”

They stopped by a tank where a man who looked to be in his early sixties floated amid his Medusa-hair tangle of tubes and microtubes. His eyelids were sutured shut and sunken. He had no external ears and the ear openings had been covered over by grafts of flesh and skin.

“These are the first test subjects,” said Sato. “A few hundred here at NCAR from thousands finishing their testing nationwide. These are the final quality-control check before Flashback-two is distributed in America and elsewhere.”

“F-two?” Nick repeated stupidly.

“Precisely,” said Sato. He set his strong hand on the glass inches from the floating man’s face. Nick noticed that this man’s skin—the skin covering the faces and scalps and bodies of all the figures in all the tanks—was fishbelly-white and as wrinkled as an albino prune.

“They will spend the rest of their lives in flashback happiness,” continued Sato. “Less than two miles from here, people are spending millions of dollars to relive their entire lives under supervised flashback medication at the Naropa Institute. But regular flashback demands that the subject be awakened for several hours out of each twenty-four—to exercise, to eat, to avoid bedsores and other ailments of the permanently immobilized. Their relived lives are constantly being interrupted, the flashback illusion interrupted and violated. But here…”

Sato gestured around.

“Here Mr. Nakamura’s science department has provided full lifetimes’ worth of only the happiest moments, not merely relived as with flashback, but restructured as one’s imagination and fantasies would have them. People here are spending happy futures with loved ones they’ve lost to death. Cripples in real life walk and run here and will for the rest of their F-two lives. Failures in life find success in these tanks, with this drug, and no one is harmed. There is no failure or loss under this kind of flash, Bottom-san. There is no pain under Flashback-two. None at all.”

“It’s real,” mumbled Nick. He meant the drug. After all these years of rumor and myth about F-2, it was here. And real.

“Oh, yes. To these men and women, everything they are dreaming is totally real,” said Sato, misunderstanding Nick’s comment. “The only difference separating life under Flashback-two and what we call ‘real life’ is the wonderful absence of physical pain and painful experiences or memories or emotions for this privileged group.”

“How long do they… live?” asked Nick. His clothes still carried the stink of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine. He wished he were back there.

“Our best projections, based on a decade of research, suggest a normal span of seventy or eighty years,” said Sato. “Sometimes longer. A full, rich, happy life.”

Nick covered his mouth with his hand. After a moment he removed it and grated, “The penalty in Japan or anywhere else for Nipponese nationals using flashback is death.”

“As it shall remain, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “And that law will continue to be strictly enforced, just as it is in the Global Caliphate.”

Nick shook his head. “You’ll sell this stuff, this F-two…” He broke off when he realized he didn’t know how to end that sentence.

“At a lower price than the original flashback,” Sato said proudly. “F-two will be street priced at a new dollar for forty or fifty hours. Even the homeless will be able to afford it.”

“You can’t give three hundred and forty–some million people each a fish tank to float in,” snarled Nick. “And who’s going to feed the flashing millions? It’s hard enough to do that now.”

“Of course there will be no tanks, Bottom-san. The customer will have to find his or her own flashcave or comfortable, private place in which to go under Flash-two. The tank really is the best option. We imagine that providing such places—perhaps some not so different than NCAR—will be a growth industry in the next few years. We imagine that other nations, ones that do not allow either form of flashback within their own borders, might be helpful in manufacturing such total-immersion tanks for Americans.”

Nick counted cartridges. He had fifteen rounds in the magazine already in the Glock and one more magazine in his jacket pocket. Thirty rounds total. It might take several 9mm rounds to crack one of these tanks, if they were breakable by small-arms fire. The .32 didn’t count since it almost certainly couldn’t smash this type of super-Plexiglas. It might be transparent Kevlar-3, in which case even the Glock would be useless here. He later realized that this probability was the only thing that stopped him.

The two men stood in green-shadowed silence for a long moment: Hideki Sato contemplative, Nick Bottom seething in murderous frustration.

“Why are you showing me this?” asked Nick, staring Sato in the face.

The big security chief smiled slightly. “We have to leave now, Bottom-san, if I am to return you to your vehicle before the hour is up as I promised. Later today, when you speak to Mr. Nakamura, do not forget the possibility of NCAR.”

“I’ll never forget NCAR,” said Nick.