Flashback

1.18 Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25

Nick had done everything possible to avoid this final meeting with Hiroshi Nakamura, but he’d always known it would have to happen.

In his mental rehearsals of this final encounter, the meeting was always set in Mr. Nakamura’s office in his mountaintop compound up in Evergreen where Nick had first met the billionaire. However, when Nick and Val were led out of the back of the Oshkosh M-ATV—both blinking in the low but bright early-evening light—Nick saw that they were in LoDo, on Wazee Street, in front of Keigo Nakamura’s bachelor-pad building. The murder scene.

Now this street in Lower Downtown reminded Nick of scenes from the countless urban-war videos on the TV each night showing American troops in some city in Pakistan or in Brazil or in China, with several big M-ATVs parked front to rear across the street at both ends of the city block being used as roadblocks, two helicopters landed in the middle of the street, and soldiers on the street and rooftops of evacuated buildings.

But this was an American city and these soldiers weren’t tired American troops in their bulky body armor and scuffed kneepads, but scores of Nakamura’s—or perhaps Sato’s (did it make any difference? wondered Nick)—ninjas in jump boots and ballistic black and carrying automatic weapons, all wearing identical tactical sunglasses and tiny bead earphones and microphones beneath their black ball caps.

Nick and Val had both been flex-cuffed, but with their wrists tied in front of their bodies. This gave Nick the slightest flicker of hope. Every cop and prisoner-taking grunt in the world knew you flex-cuffed dangerous prisoners—and anyone worthy of being taken prisoner should be considered dangerous—behind their backs. Arms, wrists, and fists tied in front could be, far too easily, used as weapons.

Either they weren’t in serious captivity (which Nick didn’t believe for an instant) or Sato’s men did not consider Nick and his son to be serious threats. Or, more likely, Sato’s people considered Nick and the boy dangerous but were certain that their numbers and firepower eliminated any real threat in the few minutes their prisoners would be allowed to live.

Given the number of ninjas illegally deployed along Wazee Street here in Lower Downtown Denver and the number that came with them as they entered Keigo’s building, Nick tended to agree with this last assessment.

“Careful there!” shouted Nick as three ninjas carried the still-unconscious Dr. George Leonard Fox down the ramp of the M-ATV, two using their arms as a sort of upright litter, the third man carrying the attached IV bottle.

The ninjas ignored him as the stream of men entered the building and made straight for the stairway. Nick remembered that Keigo’s old converted warehouse had no elevator. More work for the two men carrying Leonard, although Nick’s father-in-law looked as disturbingly thin and light as a professorially dressed scarecrow.

Sato led the way up to the third floor and, once there, did not turn right into the private quarters and bedroom where the murder took place, but left from the foyer to the fancy library where Nick had first seen the video recording of Dara standing down the darkened street. Today, for the first time in the two weeks since he’d stood shocked into silence by that image, Nick Bottom knew exactly why she’d been out there that night of Keigo’s party and Keigo’s murder.

He’d suspected ever since that night that Sato had known that Nick would see Dara on that video recording, had brought him down here to the murder scene precisely so that Nick would see Dara outside the building that night. But Nick hadn’t been able to figure out why his wife would have been there or why Sato would want him to know.

And now he had figured it out. And the solution to both those mysteries made Nick want to weep.

Hiroshi Nakamura had stood throughout their previous meeting, but now the billionaire was seated behind the big mahogany desk in front of the north-facing windows. There were four black-garbed ninjas with guns already standing on either side of that desk. The men carrying Leonard set him carefully on the leather couch by the bookshelves on the wall behind Nick, and Val was pushed down to sit next to his grandfather.

Sato stepped to one side of the room and nodded. One of his men closed the twin library doors. Counting the four who had already been there with Nakamura, there were now ten armed ninjas—not counting Sato—in the room, but the library was so large that the space didn’t seem crowded. No one had offered Nick a chair so he stood there on the Persian carpet in front of the desk, squinting slightly so he could make out Nakamura’s features against the evening light coming in through the wooden blinds behind him.

Nakamura looked as perfectly calm as he had at their first meeting.

“Mr. Bottom,” said Nakamura, “I had hoped that we would meet under more fortuitous circumstances. But that was not to be.”

“Let my son and father-in-law go, Nakamura,” said Nick. His words struck him as bad dialogue from a thousand TV dramas. It didn’t matter. He had to go on. “They’re civilians. They’re not part of this. Let them go and you and I will talk.”

“You and I will talk at any rate,” said Nakamura. “Your son should see what kind of man you are.”

The few electric lights in the room dimmed and a flatscreen rose from an elaborately carved bureau on the south side of the room. As soon as the screen was fully visible, the video began playing. There was no sound to accompany the images.

Nick saw himself from a viewpoint about twenty-five feet above the ground, looking almost straight down. The color tones seemed very strange until one realized that the lens on the miniature unmanned aerial vehicle was compensating for very low light.

Nick watched himself pawing through the pockets of three men on the ground, two obviously dead, the third and youngest man pleading for his life.

Suddenly there was sound and everyone in the library could hear the young man’s moans and words—Please… mister… you promised… you promised… it hurts so much… you promised.”

Nick watched along with his son and the other men in the room—only Leonard had his eyes closed—as his image on the screen set the pistol to within inches of the young man’s shocked, pleading face and blew his brains out.

The flatscreen went black and hummed itself back down into the bureau.

“We know that you met with Advisor Omura in that gentleman’s aerie above Los Angeles yesterday, Mr. Bottom,” said Hiroshi Nakamura. “We have no recording of that conversation, but we can imagine how it went.”

“Let my people go, Nakamura.”

The billionaire ignored him. “Since everything that Omura told you is almost certainly either distorted or totally untrue, I will explain the real stakes of the struggle you have become involved in.”

“I don’t give a shit what the stakes are for…,” began Nick.

“SILENCE!!!” roared Sato.

Everyone in the room except for Nakamura and Leonard seemed to jump at the explosion of sound. Nick would not have thought that the human voice, without electronic amplification, could produce so many raw decibels. He imagined the black-garbed ninjas up and down Wazee Street and on the rooftops jumping in their tracks.

“Very correct,” said Nakamura. “If you interrupt me again, you and the other two will be gagged. And, given your father-in-law’s unfortunate condition, that might not be the best for him.”

Nick stood there. Swaying with anger.

“More than twenty years ago,” said Nakamura, “a group of my fellow Nipponese businessmen and myself watched as your new young president gave a speech from Cairo that flattered the Islamic world—a bloc of Islamic nations that had not yet coalesced into today’s Global Caliphate—and praised them with obvious historical distortions of their own imagined grandeur. This president began the process of totally rewriting both history and contemporary reality with an eye toward praising radical Islam into loving him and your country.

“The name for this form of foreign policy, whenever it is used with forces of fascism, Mr. Bottom, is appeasement.”

Nick said nothing.

“This president and your country soon followed this self-mockery of a foreign policy with ever more blatant and useless appeasement, attempts at becoming a social democracy when European social democracies were beginning to collapse from debt and the burden of their entitlement programs, unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the world stage, a betrayal of old allies, a rapid and deliberate surrendering of America’s position as a superpower, and a total retreat from international responsibilities that the United States of America had long taken seriously.”

Nick looked over his shoulder at Val. The boy’s mouth was opened slightly and his face was parchment white. He looked physically ill and Nick knew that Val didn’t want to throw up on the obscenely expensive Persian carpet in front of all these men.

“Mr. Bottom?” Nakamura said sharply. “You are listening?”

Nick looked back at the megalomaniac billionaire, who leaned forward, folded his hands on the gleaming desktop, and continued with his speech.

“The economic crises which resulted in the death of the European Union and the collapse of China—as well as the violent and unnecessary deaths of more than six million Jews in Israel, and another million non-Jewish Israeli citizens, all abandoned by your country, Mr. Bottom—were merely further steps in this decline—at first deliberate and then merely inevitable—of the United States of America.”

There was a long pause and Nick spoke into it, risking the gags. “What’s this history lecture got to do with anything, Mr. Nakamura? Especially with the reason you hired me to solve your son’s murder?”

Nakamura closed his eyes as if seeking patience. Then he smiled thinly.

“As I said, Mr. Bottom, these are the stakes of the game you have entered. We industrialists in Japan almost a quarter of a century ago knew that our nation would someday have to step in to fill the void left by America’s self-willed decline. It was not a duty we welcomed… the memories of what we called Daitoa Senso, the Greater East Asian War, and which your historians called World War Two… were still too painful.

“We were reluctant, Mr. Bottom, once again to acknowledge ourselves, the citizens of Nippon, as shido minzoku—‘the world’s foremost people’—even though we understood that we would have to fill that role.

“That first war, started in China almost a century ago, was a function of our hubris—militarism combined with hopes of an empire combined with self-inflicted distortions of our religion and the samurai code of bushido. But this coming war, Mr. Bottom, a war much wider and more terrible for the enemy than Daitoa Senso, will not be the kurai tanima ‘dark valley’ of that last war. It will be a global war of liberation.”

“War with whom?” said Nick. He had to hear it all said out loud before he could say what they would demand that he say.

Nakamura shook his head sadly. “With militant Islam, Mr. Bottom,” said the billionaire, his voice soft. “With the hydra called the Global Caliphate. Islam was always, despite America’s absolute resistance in acknowledging it, a violent and barbarous religion, Mr. Bottom, its prophet a military man no less cruel than our field marshal Hajime Sugiyama or your Army Air Force general Curtis Le May. The twentieth-and twenty-first-century fundamentalist terrorist-driven forms of expansionist Islam are vile obscenities. The citizens serving the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon, descended from the Sun Goddess herself in the Land of the Rising Sun, where all eight corners of the universe have been brought together under one divine roof, will not be pulled back to the seventh century by a barbarous desert religion intent on ruling the earth and treating its conquered people as less-than-human slaves!

“But it will not happen! We shall not let it happen!!”

Now it was Hiroshi Nakamura who was shouting, and while his voice had none of the rock-concert amplification of Sato’s blast, it was loud enough and sincere enough and fanatical enough to cause Nick to take half a step back.

When the billionaire continued and concluded, his voice was much softer.

“Thus we Nipponese business leaders turned our keiretsu back into wartime zaibatsu, our family-run business interests no longer merely serving Japan’s leadership, but deciding it. Thus we returned to the honor of the samurai and the true code of bushido. Thus we will soon need a single, all-powerful Shogun to advise the emperor in this time of total war.”

Nick cleared his throat. “Of total nuclear war,” he said thickly.

“Of course,” Nakamura said dismissively, almost contemptuously. “All daimyos, even your weak friend Omura, agree that this final struggle for the future of our world will be nuclear—and thermonuclear. The enemy has shown its ruthless resolve in the murder of Israel. We shall show no less in the eradication of an infectious mental disease that is two billion persons strong across the planet.”

“Omura-sama believes that Texas will be an ally,” said Nick.

Nakamura shook his head. “Advisor Omura is weak and sentimental when it comes to the last vestige of your once-strong nation, Mr. Bottom. He will not be considered when it comes time for us daimyos to select our first Shogun in a hundred and sixty years. The weak remnants of America are currently serving their role in preparation for the coming struggle.”

Nick nodded. “With two hundred thousand of our drafted kids fighting the war for you in China,” he said.

Nakamura said nothing for a long moment.

Nick could hear a regular helicopter, not one of the whisper-dragonflies, flying low over the building. Somewhere nearby a police or ambulance siren sounded in the unoccupied part of Denver. Nick thought he could hear distant gunshots.

Had the city come apart at the seams today as K.T. and the DPD had feared? Did Nick give the slightest shit if it had?

Nakamura said, “So now you understand what is at stake, Nick Bottom. It is time for you to deliver your report on the investigation you were hired to carry out.”

Nick held his flex-cuffed wrists out. “Untie me.”

Nakamura and Sato ignored the demand.

Nick knew that he could leap at Nakamura, try to get his cuffed wrists around the billionaire’s slender neck, but he also knew that Sato or the four guards on that side would kill him the second he tried.

Nick sighed, looked back over his shoulder at Val and the apparently unconscious Leonard, and began to speak.

“I finally know why you hired me. It all came together just today, and mostly by accident. You hired me to do this investigation because you weren’t certain of what I knew. You didn’t know what my wife, Dara, had told me or what notes she might have left behind for me to find. You’d searched and never found her phone, so you just weren’t sure.

“In the end, you needed someone to make something public…”

Nick paused and looked up into the high corners of the library until he spotted the red lights on the video cameras.

“You needed someone other than yourselves to make something public—as this video recording will do after my son, father-in-law, and I are dead—so you hired me.

“I was your perfect fool. So eager to get some money to buy flashback that I’d go anywhere, do anything, betray anyone to get the information you needed to be let out into the world.

“And so I have.”

Nick paced a few steps. Sato and the other guards tensed, but there was no need. Nick was organizing his thoughts, not preparing a futile leap at Nakamura.

“Flashback was a drug developed in Japan,” he said at last. “There never was any biowar lab at Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm in the Israeli desert. It was just another blood libel the Jews had to suffer after they were murdered en masse—again. You Japs designed and developed flashback—at a lab in Nara, if my sources are correct—and it’s you who transported it to the United States and elsewhere, sold it way below its production price, and have continued to have your dealers, from the heights of Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev to the street depths of poor Delroy Nigger Brown and Derek Dean, deliver it to the growing number of addicts in the States.”

“Why would Japan do that?” interrupted Nakamura. His voice was soft to the point of exuding oil.

Nick laughed.

“You got what you wanted from what was left of us after the Day It All Hit The Fan,” said Nick. “After we screwed our country into near-oblivion through debt and cowardice. You wanted our soldiers and you have them. You wanted the rest of us tranquilized, and we paid one new-buck dollar a flashback minute to accommodate you. Our leaders turned away from the future decades ago—abandoning faith in the free market system, abandoning our worldwide responsibilities, hell, even abandoning our manned spaceflight program—and the rest of us turned the rest of the way from the future when we decided to go back to the past by using flashback. Three hundred and forty million American addicts, including me until this past week, all living—re living—our little masturbatory fantasies because we couldn’t face the real world.”

Sato spoke.

“Bottom-san, how did you discover that it was Nippon who developed and delivered flashback to America?”

Nick laughed again, with even more bitterness than before.

“I didn’t. My wife did. And she was murdered for it.”

He looked from Sato to Nakamura and then around at the other men with weapons in the room. Finally he looked at his unconscious father-in-law—had Leonard once told him that he spoke some Japanese?—and then at his son. He knew that he would not get the chance to say again to Val how sorry he was.

“The woman murdered in the bedroom not thirty steps from here was known to us Denver cops as a sex-pleasure woman from Japan named Keli Bracque. She was represented to us as Keigo Nakamura’s favorite sex toy, nothing more. We knew her as Keli Bracque because that was her name in the totally fabricated dossier that the various Japanese police services sent to us. Advisor Nakamura’s offices confirmed that fact.”

Nick paused. He was getting so angry that his arms were shaking, his hands were balled into fists, and his legs felt weak.

Sato snapped something in Japanese and one of the ninjas carried over a chair for Nick. He didn’t sit in it, but he grabbed the back to help hold himself up.

“Keli Bracque was supposed to be the daughter of American missionaries in Japan,” continued Nick, his voice thick with phlegm and fury. “That was a lie. It was all a lie. Keli Bracque’s real name was Kumiko Catherine Catton and she was the daughter of Sakura Catton, an American-born woman who’d spent her entire adult life in Japan. A woman who was a courtesan of a famous Japanese daimyo. What’s the Japanese word for ‘girlfriend’ or ‘mistress’ or ‘courtesan’ or ‘second wife,’ as you used to say? Keisi or gosai or aijin or sembo… you Jap guys have a lot of words for your out-of-marriage lady friends. The American Mafia bosses just called them goomahs.”

The very air in the library seemed to have stopped stirring. Nick glanced out of the corners of his eyes and saw that no one was looking at anyone, even the ever-vigilant ninjas staring only at their own feet. Nakamura had assumed the kind of inward-looking thousand-yard stare that Tokyo residents had perfected for traveling in their overcrowded subways.

“Here’s the complicated part of this whole scenario,” Nick said into the thickened silence. He pointed at Hiroshi Nakamura. “It wasn’t enough for your family and the families of Munetaka, Morikune, Omura, Toyoda, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, and Yoshiake just to take all of modern Japan back to feudal days to prepare yourselves for this holy war with Islam. You couldn’t just draw the line at rebuilding the old feudal system from Japan’s own Middle Ages—turning keiretsu into clan-run, government-ruling zaibatsu and industrialists into daimyo s—it wasn’t enough just to bring back the feudal realities of Shogun and samurai and ronin and a resurgence of the code of bushido—no, you superdaimyo heads of the überzaibatsu, you had to bring back feudal ways of assuring the allegiance of your vassals, including your vassal- daimyos.”

Nick paused and looked up at the still-glowing red eye of the video camera, then back at Nakamura.

“Hiroshi Nakamura had a problem with one of his vassal-daimyos becoming too popular with the people and with Nakamura’s own soldiers as a warrior-prince in China. Your daimyo’s loyalty was never in question, Mr. Nakamura—you knew he’d die for you or commit seppuku if you demanded it—but such popularity in an underling is a dangerous thing all by itself. So you—and Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, Yoshiake, Morikune, Omura, Munetaka, and Toyoda—began doing the same thing Japanese liege lords and their liege-lord counterparts in Europe’s Middle Ages did as insurance for such loyalty…

“You took the popular warrior-daimyo’s child as a sort of hostage. Not the two grown sons of this popular daimyo by his real wife—one of those sons had already died in battle in China and another soon would—but, rather, this daimyo’s beloved daughter by his American-born courtesan.

“Thus Kumiko Catherine Catton—who we were told was a sex worker named Keli Bracque—entered your household. She was not treated as a prisoner, Mr. Nakamura. Just as in feudal Europe during the Middle Ages, you raised Kumiko as if she were an honored member of your own family.

“But the unthinkable happened. Kumiko Catherine Catton fell in love with your only son. When Keigo came to the United States to shoot his documentary, fourteen months before you were appointed Advisor by your emperor—before you arranged to be appointed as a Federal Advisor in Colorado—Kumiko, aka Keli Bracque, came with him. She wasn’t Keigo’s sex toy. They were passionately in love.”

Nick paused.

Nakamura cleared his throat and said softly, “May I ask how you came by this information, Mr. Bottom?”

“You hired me to find it,” said Nick. “But I didn’t. I never would have followed up on Ms. Keli Bracque’s background. I was too stupid.

“But Keli—Kumiko—became alarmed for her beloved Keigo Nakamura’s safety. Your wastrel son was pretty bright after all, wasn’t he, Mr. Nakamura? Thrown out of Tokyo University, but not because he was stupid… because he was a born rebel. In the States, we have the expression The squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, you say The nail that stands up gets hammered down.

“Well, Mr. Nakamura, I don’t have to tell you that Keigo was the nail that stood up. He was a rebel in a society devoted as never before to blind obedience. The video documentary he was shooting wasn’t about how pathetic Americans were for getting hooked on the drug flashback… it was about where flashback had come from, Japan. And it was about the damage that the deliberate and premeditated introduction of this addictive drug had done to human beings here who used it—from pathetic Israeli survivors of the Second Holocaust to hopeless inner-city blacks to suburban housewives.”

“Prove it, Mr. Bottom,” said Nakamura.

Nick did not smile. “I don’t have to. I’ve seen several hours of his footage, Mr. Nakamura. And pretty soon, so will millions of other Americans. Keigo Nakamura will show the damage you and the other Japanese warlords have done to this nation.”

Nakamura said nothing.

“Kumiko Catherine Catton didn’t give a damn about any of the politics of the issue,” said Nick. “She just was afraid that someone would whack her beloved Keigo. Like her mother, Kumiko had grown up in Japan—had seen the changes there in the past twenty years. She knew that the daimyos weren’t going to allow Keigo to show and distribute his quixotic documentary. She knew that someone would stop Keigo… and stop him hard.

“So in Kumiko’s naïveté—she was still more used to the way things worked in Japan than in her mother’s birthplace of the United States—she went to local officials for help. Her thinking was that if the shocking information behind Keigo’s little movie went public first, there’d be no reason for the daimyos to harm the boy.

“Kumiko went to Denver’s district attorney—an ambitious but moronic political appointee named Mannie Ortega. Not even understanding what the girl was offering to give him, Ortega handed it off to a mere assistant district attorney—a poor, hardworking but unlucky sonofabitch named Harvey Cohen—who, with his assistant, my wife, Dara, began interviewing Keli Bracque, aka Kumiko Catherine Catton, and just what they learned about the origins of flashback was astounding.

“Ortega was an idiot, but Harvey and Dara knew what they were dealing with. They insisted, over Mannie Ortega’s insistence that it was no big deal, that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security be brought in.

“Both the FBI and DHS were brought in. They carried out their own ‘complete investigations.’ Then they assured District Attorney Ortega, Assistant District Attorney Cohen, and Cohen’s research assistant, Dara Fox Bottom, that Keli Bracque was a stone liar, that the girl was indeed an ambitious sex worker and a drug addict—heroin—and that there was no such person as Kumiko Catherine Catton.

“The FBI and Homeland Security told Mannie, Harvey, and Dara that this kind of hysteria could hurt American-Japanese relations at a time when we depended on Japan and would personally insult the soon-to-be Federal Advisor to Colorado and the southwestern states, Hiroshi Nakamura. These federal agencies recommended—strongly recommended—that the investigation into this crazy woman’s allegations be shut down immediately and that all interviews and records be destroyed.

“So Ortega immediately terminated the investigation, burned and wiped all the files he had, and ordered Harvey and Dara to do the same.

“But my wife and her hapless boss were stubborn. They continued meeting secretly with Kumiko Catherine Catton—and began discussions with Keigo Nakamura himself, foolishly promising him safety in the Witness Protection Program—right up to the time of Keigo’s and Kumiko’s murder in October six years ago.

“Even after those murders, Harvey and Dara kept hardcopy and computer files in a room they rented, using Harvey’s own personal credit card—and he couldn’t afford it—at a motel here in Denver. Their plan was to turn the information over to the Attorney General of the United States, with duplicate copies to all the AGs in forty-four states.

“Right up to the day of their deaths—their murders—more than three months after the execution of Keigo and Kumiko, Harvey and Dara didn’t understand what they had. Dara tried to tell me—tried to lead me toward the real killers in my own investigation—but she knew that if she revealed the secrets she and Harvey had been sitting on, I’d lose my job. A job I loved. And the truth is—she never really did figure out who’d killed her friend Kumiko and the billionaire’s son, Keigo.”

Nick paused. He hadn’t spoken this much for this long in more than six years. His throat was sore.

“She and her boss Harvey never understood how big the whole thing was,” he rasped at last. “They thought it was just a revelation about who invented and distributed flashback. They didn’t see that it was really about the future of who controlled this country. That it was really about power.”

He stopped.

Hiroshi Nakamura sat far back in the plush leather chair behind the big desk. He steepled his fingers, looked at Hideki Sato, looked back at Nick, and smiled. His voice was purr-soft.

“You still haven’t told us who the murder or murderers were, Detective Bottom.”

Exhausted, Nick leaned on the back of the chair they’d given him. He looked Nakamura in the eye.

“The fuck I haven’t,” he said flatly, coldly. “You haven’t been listening. You ordered your son and his girlfriend to be killed, Hiroshi Nakamura.”

He would have pointed at the billionaire, but it seemed melodramatic to do so and he was too tired to lift his arm.

“You did it to show the other daimyo s—not just the top boys, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, Yoshiake, Morikune, Omura, Munetaka, and Toyoda, but the scores of other important daimyos back in old Nippon—that you could be ruthless when it came to protecting the Motherland’s secrets. Or is it the Fatherland’s?

“At any rate, you called back your top assassin and most loyal daimyo, Hideki Sato—Colonel Death himself—from China to do the job. A bullet in the brain was enough for the girl, you told him, but Keigo had to be… massacred. To show what happens to those who reveal a future Shogun’s secrets.”

Nick turned wearily toward Sato.

“And you were never Keigo’s bodyguard here. It was always that other guy, Satoh. But you’d known Keigo Nakamura all his short life. He trusted you. When he went up to the roof to meet you—when you stepped out of that whisper-dragonfly ’copter or rappelled down a rope from it or whatever the hell you did—he never would have believed that you were the assassin his father would send.

“Especially, Sato-san, since you were Kumiko Catherine Catton’s father.”

There was no buzz in the room. No one made a sound. But Nick could feel a buzz as all eyes, even the ninja guards’, shifted in the direction of Sato.

The huge security chief stared at Nick with no expression whatsoever.

“You did your job,” Nick said, his voice rough and devoid of energy. “Three months later, when it was decided that poor Harvey and my Dara were still a threat, you arranged for their ‘accidental deaths’ on I-Twenty-five here in town. Two days ago I’m sure you either personally whacked that stupid mutt Mannie Ortega in Washington or had your boys do it.”

Nick looked away from Nakamura and up at the red-glowing video camera.

“Is that enough? You can edit this down later to the good stuff. But this should show you other daimyos that Hiroshi Nakamura will be a Shogun who means business and that Colonel Hideki Sato will do whatever he has to do to serve his liege lord and boss. Is this enough? Because all I have left to say is that perhaps—just perhaps—you daimyos won’t be the only ones to be seeing examples of Nakamura’s and Sato’s cruelty.”

Nick walked around the chair and sat down. It was either sit or fall.

And he needed to conserve his energy. Whether they offered him a chance now or not—and he was sure they would not—he was determined to take one. Just saying Dara’s name aloud several times had made that a certainty.

Nick hadn’t expected a round of applause for his Inspector Clouseau performance and he didn’t receive one. The silence was absolute. But what he heard next was something he really hadn’t expected.

Nakamura stood and looked around the room. He was smiling. “Our guest’s last comment—the last vague threat—was due to the fact that earlier today, Mr. Bottom e-mailed copies of his wife’s diary and my son’s video to eight people. Unfortunately for our detective friend, Colonel Sato’s people have been monitoring all Internet access from that sad condominium and intercepted all eight e-mails sent from a certain Gunny G.’s computer.”

Nick felt as if he’d been hit in the solar plexus. Spots danced in his vision. The end of even the most cynical twentieth-century movies he loved had the hero turning over the evidence of government or CIA conspiracies to the New York Times or Washington Post or some other crusading newspaper. Now those newspapers were gone forever and so was any hope of Nick’s getting Dara’s notes and Keigo’s videos out to the world.

“Which leaves,” continued Nakamura, “the detail of Ms. Dara Fox Bottom’s actual telephone with its… ah… compromising files. Colonel Sato?”

Sato walked close to the desk and produced the old phone that they’d confiscated from Nick. The security man held the phone over Nakamura’s wastebasket and squeezed until plastic ruptured and microchips crumbled. When he opened his hand, the shards and shattered filaments fell in a silvery waterfall into the wastebasket.

Nick was too defeated to look over his shoulder at Val.

Still standing, Nakamura fired a rapid-fire salvo of Japanese at Sato.

Sato barked back, “Hai, Nakamura-sama,” and gestured for the guards in the room to take Nick, Val, and the still-unconscious Leonard out.

Nick was concentrating on the few seconds when they were in the open air before they’d be loaded on the sealed M-ATVs again, but Sato led the way upstairs rather than down.

They all came out onto the roof—a small army of blackclad guards, the boy, the exhausted ex-cop, and the sleeping old man being carried again—and the Sasayaki-tonbo whisper-dragonfly ’copter was hovering there, three feet above the building’s roof, just as it must have been the night it had brought Sato there to murder his young friend Keigo and his daughter, Kumiko.

The ninja were very, very good. They never crossed into each other’s field of fire. They never got close enough for Nick to grab and grapple. At least three of them always kept their automatic weapons aimed at Nick’s, Val’s, and even Leonard’s heads while the others did what they had to do.

Nick’s old friends from the Santa Fe trip—ninjas Shinta Ishii, Mutsumi ōta, and Daigorou Okada—jumped into the hovering dragonfly along with two men he didn’t know, and all five turned to cover Nick, Val, and the sleeping Leonard as they first loaded Leonard aboard, then pulled Val up, then beckoned Nick forward. The three prisoners were made to sit against the forward bulkhead—Leonard still out and his IV bottle suspended on a bracket above him—while Sato jumped aboard.

Their ’copter moved away and hovered a hundred feet above Wazee Street while a second dragonfly loaded a dozen of Sato’s men, then a third.

Even in the closer confines of the helicopter, Ishii, ōta, and Okada kept the muzzles of their low-velocity automatic weapons aimed steadily at all three of the Americans’ heads, but there was a second or two—just a second or two—where Sato’s attention was distracted as he was putting on and plugging in his dragonfly-intercom earphones and microphone.

The few seconds were not enough for Nick to act, but he leaned against Leonard as if checking on his unconscious father-in-law and had time to whisper—Did you understand what Nakamura said in Japanese?”

The seemingly unconscious old man nodded.

“What did he say?” whispered Nick.

“Something about taking us all to Landfill Number Nine,” whispered Leonard without moving his lips.

Ōta shouted something in Japanese and Shinta Ishii repeated the shout in English, “No talking! No talking!”

“Sit back against the bulkhead, Bottom-san,” said Hideki Sato. He had his pistol out and it was aimed at Nick’s head. He gestured gently with it.

Nick sat back, setting his cuffed wrists on his knee, and glanced once toward Val. His son’s eyes were bright, but he did not seem to be afraid. This astonished Nick. Val nodded once as if Nick had sent him a telepathic message.

The line of three whisper-dragonflies banked hard to the right and flew fast and silently east over Denver as the last of the evening light bled out of the Colorado sky.