Flashback

1.20 Texline, Republic of Texas—Saturday, Sept. 25

It was the pain that finally made Nick open his eyes.

He was astounded that he could open his eyes. Had Sato waited until he regained consciousness to carry out the executions? Had that been part of Nakamura’s orders? Was Nick supposed to watch his son and father-in-law be shot before he received the merciful bullet to the brain?

His head hurt so much when he opened his eyes that he felt as if he’d already been shot in the head. He tried squinting through the headache and through a strange pain from his left leg.

The first thing he noticed was that he wasn’t lying among the rotting corpses at the edge of Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine. It was dark outside and he was in a lighted, open-sided tent. Lying on a cot with clean sheets under him. There was something on his face… a clear oxygen mask. Nick clawed it off with his free hand.

His free hand. He wasn’t flex-cuffed anymore. His left leg was in a cast and he wasn’t wearing his chinos.

Nick tried turning his head to the side to see what was around him, but the motion made lights flash behind his eyes again and made him too dizzy. He closed his eyes.

“You’re awake,” said a woman’s voice.

Nick managed to squint again without inducing the vertigo. He tried to sit up. A woman wearing some sort of gray-shirted uniform with a round shoulder badge and a red-cross armband pushed him back into the pillows. “Try not to move too much, Mr. Bottom. You have a concussion as well as a broken leg and a lot of bruises and contusions. Captain McReady will be right in to talk to you.”

Nick could turn his head to his left as long as he kept his eyes shut while he moved it. There were some empty cots to his left and outside the first-aid tent he could see it was full-dark night. Overhead electric lights illuminated some old Humvees parked along a wire fence, some new armored personnel carriers with the single white star and thirteen red-and-white stripes of the Republic of Texas flag on them, and beyond the vehicles—in an open area lit with searchlights and within a circle of green and red landing lights that pulsed in syncopation with the pounding of his headache—sat Nakamura’s three whisper-dragonfly ’copters, rotors still. Men in various uniforms stood around talking. Nick didn’t see any of the black-garbed ninjas.

He closed his eyes and turned his head all the way to the right.

Next to him was an empty cot and beyond that a cot with Leonard lying unconscious under a blanket. There were two IVs going into the old man now, but Nick could see that he was breathing. Snoring softly, actually.

He looked for Val, but the other cots in the first-aid tent were empty. Where’s my son?

“Mr. Bottom?”

Nick found that if he opened his left eye wider than his right, he could focus on things without total vertigo. The man standing over him looked to be in his sixties, had a rich white mustache, wore the same gray uniform as the female nurse or medic with the same shoulder badge with a white star in a blue-and-white circle, carried a long-barreled sidearm in an old-fashioned holster, and was wearing a big Stetson.

“I’m Captain McReady, Mr. Bottom,” said the man, removing the big hat. There was a line in his gray hair, the kind of line that Nick imagined only a Stetson could carve over decades of wear. “Greg B. McReady, the ‘B’ standing for nothing at all, captain in Company C of the Texas Ranger Division, Department of Public Safety. This here is the Texas Army border station at Texline, along the New Mexico border just southwest of the Oklahoma Panhandle. We’re glad you made it here, Mr. Bottom.”

“My son…,” croaked Nick. He tried to push himself up on one elbow.

“Val’s okay,” said Captain McReady. “A bunch of bruises, but he was the first to get over the taser shock. He was waiting here, watching over you and his grandpa for quite a while, but we convinced him to go get some chow. He’s in the mess tent next door but should be back soon.”

“My father-in-law,” managed Nick. He raised his right hand and gestured. “Going… to live?”

“Oh, yes,” said the white-mustached Ranger. “Professor Fox is just sleeping. He was awake for a while. We know of his medical condition—the aortic stenosis—from Colonel Sato, and we’ll be discussing surgical options with the good professor over the next day or two.”

“Sato,” hissed Nick. He still had the taste of the assassin’s flesh in his mouth and he wanted more. He wanted his heart.

McReady set a wrinkled, liver-spotted, but very strong hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Easy, son. We know what happened. It should have been handled better, but there wasn’t enough time for finesse. Colonel Sato wanted to be here to talk to you when you woke, but we were afraid that you’d kill him before he could explain.”

“Kill him,” repeated Nick. It wasn’t a question. He remembered the killer crushing Dara’s phone and thought of how he must have planned Dara’s and Harvey’s deaths.

Yes, he would kill Sato if he could. In fact, nothing on earth could stop him.

“What’s wrong with my leg?” he said stupidly.

“You broke one of the lower bones there in the scuffle on the dragonfly,” said Captain McReady. “Clean break. We set it while you were out. It should heal quickly enough.”

“When… is it?” asked Nick.

“Same night, son,” said the Ranger. “A little before midnight on the twenty-fifth of September. A Saturday. A busy one for you, from the looks of it.”

Sato and Val walked into the tent together. Sato had a bandage on his neck and stitches on his cheek and forehead. Nick risked the vertigo to look around to see if there was anything sharp—a scalpel, a dinner knife, a bottle he could break, anything. There wasn’t. His eyes went to the big pistol in Captain McReady’s holster.

“Take it easy, friend,” said the old Ranger. He pushed Nick back into his pillow, stood, and stepped back.

“Bottom-san,” said Sato. He sat on the empty cot to Nick’s right and the cot frame groaned under his weight.

“Whoa, Dad, did you see Grandpa knee that ninja’s cojones up into his mouth?” cried Val. The boy was still chewing on the remains of a sandwich. “I mean, who knew old Leonard had it in him?”

Dad? thought Nick. That was a word he was sure he’d never hear again, even if—somehow, impossibly—both he and his son survived. Off to Nick’s right, Leonard continued to snore softly, either oblivious to the praise or faking unconsciousness again so he could listen without commenting.

“We need to talk, Bottom-san.” Sato’s voice was very soft.

Nick noticed more stitches and bandages on Sato. Two of the fingers on his left hand were in a splint. The big man’s black shirt was partially open and it looked as if his ribs had been taped as well.

“Fuck you,” breathed Nick. He was only sorry that he’d been so groggy that he’d stupidly looked at Ranger Captain McReady’s horse pistol before grabbing it.

“No, Dad, it’s okay. Colonel Sato…,” began Val.

“Killed your mother,” said Nick, his tone low and lethal. “Stay out of this, Val.”

The boy blinked in surprise and took two steps back.

“No, Bottom-san,” said Sato. The big man shook his head back and forth in that weird way he had that involved his whole upper body. “I did not kill or arrange to kill your wife and Assistant District Attorney Cohen. This I swear to you on my honor.”

“Your honor!” laughed Nick. The laugh hurt his head so much that he almost blacked out. “Your honor,” he repeated. “The honor of a man who killed his own daughter in cold blood. Shot her between the eyes with a twenty-two-caliber slug so the bullet would bounce around in her skull and do the most damage.”

“Hai,” grunted Sato. “I admitted that I killed my beloved Kumiko. She—as her mother before her—was the light of my life. And I extinguished that light by my own hand. You see, it was a form of jigai—a woman samurai’s form of ritual seppuku that does not involve disembowelment—and my darling Kumiko was indeed a samurai.”

“Your daughter didn’t commit suicide, Sato,” snapped Nick. “You killed her. You shot and murdered her, along with Keigo, a boy who trusted you completely.”

“Hai,” Sato said again, bowing his head slightly. “This would have happened at Nakamura-sama’s order at any rate. There was no escape for either my darling or her lover. Kumiko knew this would be the fate of both of them when she decided to go to your local Denver authorities—your beloved wife’s boss’s boss—to reveal the true origins of flashback. It was her jigai and I gave them both a quick and painless death.”

“You tore the boy apart,” said Nick.

Sato’s bowed head moved slowly from side to side. “Only the body. He died instantaneously.”

Nick had been holding himself up on one elbow but now collapsed on his side, still staring at Sato. Captain McReady, Val, and other people who’d come into the tent were just distant silhouettes to him. For Nick, it was just Hideki Sato and himself there in the night.

“I don’t understand,” said Nick.

“I needed Hiroshi Nakamura’s total trust if I were to do what I had to do,” said Sato. “Both my darling Kumiko and young Keigo had chosen their fates… Keigo’s attempt to tell the world about Nippon’s use of flashback to complete the collapse of America was daring and bold, as the young man himself was. As you said, Bottom-san, a true rebel in a culture with very few rebels in its history. By carrying out the executions myself, I passed Nakamura’s test for me.”

“To what end?” asked Nick.

“Your message to me from Omura-sama… In this world there is a tree without any roots; / Its yellow leaves send back the wind… a poem composed by Omura-sama’s and my own beloved teacher Sozan in the moments before he died… was the last coded message I needed to receive to know that tonight was the night to proceed.”

“Proceed with what?” asked Nick, his words dripping with audible suspicion. There was no need to believe a single word this man said… this man who had shot his own daughter in the face.

Sato was looking at him as if reading his thoughts. He nodded and looked at his wristwatch. “It is midnight here and four p.m. Sunday in Tokyo. Currently, hostile takeover offers are being made against eight of Hiroshi Nakamura’s eleven major companies which constitute the heart of his zaibatsu. Tomorrow, when the markets open in Japan, at least five of these eight takeover attempts, perhaps more, will succeed. The Nakamura dynasty will crumble.”

“He’s still a Federal Advisor here,” said Nick. “He controls the Colorado National Guard and a dozen other armed groups.”

“Nakamura and his people are being arrested as we speak, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “It is his punishment for never coming down off his Colorado mountain… and for believing too much in the reports of his spies, my people. For seven weeks now I have brought several thousand Japanese commandos—my own Taigāsu Tiger Troops—from China.”

“We saw them at the old Denver Country Club this afternoon, Dad,” said Val, stepping forward and sitting on the far end of the cot that Sato was on. “The Ospreys were just deploying.”

Nick forgot everything else for a moment as he extended his right hand and grasped Val’s hand in a grip that was more than a handshake.

Captain McReady and the other men had also moved closer. “It’s true, Mr. Bottom. Colonel Sato, Advisor Omura, and others have been in touch with us for weeks now. Colonel Sato informed us of your record with the Denver PD. We need good investigative people in the Texas Rangers. Our role is going to be greatly expanded in the coming months and years.”

“Expanded?” repeated Nick, looking from Sato to the broad-mustached old Ranger. “Texas is Omura’s ally? Japan’s ally? In this big fight with the Caliphate that’s coming up?”

“Damned right we are,” said Captain McReady. “First we take back our own country, then we begin settling some old scores with others. We hope you’ll join us, Detective Bottom.”

“You don’t even allow flashback addicts to live in Texas,” said Nick. “You drive them to the nearest border and boot them out.”

“Are you a flashback addict, son?” asked the old Ranger.

“No,” said Nick after only the slightest hesitation. “No, sir.”

Sato stood and it pleased Nick to see that the standing hurt him somewhere.

“I must get back to Denver. There will be much to organize in the next few days. Many things to coordinate with Omura-sama and with certain daimyos back home who have long awaited Hiroshi Nakamura’s downfall. Sometimes, Bottom-san, even under the code of bushido, the best Shogun will not be the harshest or cruelest or most ruthless one of the candidates. Nakamura forgot that in his hunger for power.”

Nick said, “But you showed how ruthless you could be, Sato-san. Just in case anyone in Nippon had any doubts.”

“Yes,” said Sato. “I will not offer to shake your hand this day, Bottom-san, for I respect your anger.” He touched the thick bandages on his neck and smiled the broadest that Nick had ever seen him smile. “I thought, for a moment on the dragonfly, that you were going to eat me.”

Nick returned the smile and made sure he showed his canines.

“But perhaps we will shake hands and be allies again at some future date,” said Sato. “After your nine-eleven, many people—however briefly—spoke of the Long War that was coming. They were right about the Long War. They were just wrong about the two world-historical opponents who would be fighting to the death.”

Sato started to leave and then turned back.

“I thought you might want these, Bottom-san,” he said and handed across Nick’s phone and a stamp-sized flashdrive. The phone display showed Dara’s text files and Keigo Nakamura’s documentary video files.

“The drive has the video recording of your recent inquisition by Nakamura in the library,” said Sato. “Use all of these as you see fit.”

The big man clasped Val on the shoulder and walked out.

The nurse came back to check Nick’s blood pressure and to urge him to use the oxygen mask.

He shook his head. “Help prop me up, would you?”

In the end, Val and the young woman both worked to help him sit almost upright.

The pain in his head was less and the ground had quit tilting every time he turned his head. Captain McReady and three other Texas Rangers were still standing there. The old captain’s Stetson was back on his head.

“What do you say to joining the Rangers, son?” asked McReady.

“Let me get a night’s sleep and I’ll give you my answer,” said Nick. He nodded toward the sleeping Leonard. “You people do surgeries like valve replacements for money without a long wait, right?”

“Yeah,” said the younger Ranger to the right of McReady. “We’re old-fashioned that way. Down here we let you keep most of what you earn and let you pay for what you need.”

McReady turned to Val.

“How ’bout you, son? You going to talk to me tomorrow about joining the Texas Rangers?”

Val smiled and the sight of that smile made Nick’s heart lurch.

“No, thank you, sir,” said his son. “I want to see a man in Austin about something and then I may have some plans of my own.”

McReady nodded, touched his hat, and led the men out of the tent. Outside, the three dragonflies were lifting off silently in a rush of hot night wind.

Val sprawled on the empty cot next to Nick’s, bunching the pillow under his head. “The top doctor said we should spend the night here—sleep in these cots—and I think I’ll take them up on it. Talk to Leonard in the morning.”

“Good,” said Nick. In a few minutes, he was going to ask the way to the closest latrine and make his way to it. No bedpan for him. Not in this open-sided tent. Not for any reason.

“Wow, Dad, Grandpa really kneed that ninja’s gonads right out through the top of his head, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did,” said Nick, getting ready to swing his cast over the edge of the cot to the floor. He could use some help hobbling and he wasn’t going to wait for the Texas Ranger nurse. Might as well put Val to some use while he was still close by. “He really did.”