Flashback

1.01 Japanese Green Zone Above Denver—Friday, Sept. 10

NIck’s first response was professional, a product of his years on Vice and Major Crimes stakeouts—This took five cameras, at least two of them in stealth-daylight MUAVs. Two with very long, stabilized lenses. One handheld impossibly close.

It was him, on the screens, of course. Him in his clapped-out gelding, windows down because the day was already hot in the September morning sun, the vehicle parked under an overhanging tree in a cul-de-sac in an abandoned development of new multimillion-dollar homes less than four miles down the hill from the Japanese Green Zone and about a mile off the Evergreen–Genesis exit from I-70. Nick had taken triple precautions to be sure he hadn’t been followed—although why would his prospective employer follow him before the hiring interview? No matter. He liked being paranoid. It had served him well during his years on the force. He’d even gotten out of the gelding and scanned the sky and overgrown shrubs and weeds growing out of the abandoned structures with his old IR, motion-sensor, and stealth-seeking binoculars. Nothing.

Now Nick watched himself settle back in the driver’s seat and remove from his rumpled suit coat pocket the only vial of flashback he’d brought along that morning.

He and the two Japanese men continued watching as the Nick on the screens closed his eyes, squeezed the vial and inhaled deeply, tossed the vial out the driver’s-side window, and settled back farther into the headrest, his eyes rolling up within seconds as they always did with flashers, his mouth open a bit—just as it was open now.

Since he’d come up the hill from Denver early and still had almost thirty minutes to kill before reaching the Colorado State Police roadblocks around the Green Zone—the first of three concentric circles of security he knew he’d be going through—it had been only a ten-minute vial. Ten measly bucks to relive ten easy fucks the street sources liked to say.

Seeing himself from five angles, three of them close up, was no different from watching the thousands of flashers nodding on street corners: Nick’s eyelids were lowered but not completely closed with just the bottom third of the rolled-up irises visible as they flicked back and forth in tune with the active REM. Nick’s body and face twitched on the five displays as emotions and reactions almost, not quite, found their way to the right muscles. The closest camera picked up the silver trail of drool from the left corner of the twitching, spastic mouth, zoomed in on the jaw working numbly as the flasher tried to talk while deep in the throes of his relived memory-experience. No words emerged fully formed, just the usual flasher’s idiot gabble-mumble. There was good audio pickup and Nick could now hear the soft rustle of the morning’s breeze in the cottonwood branches above his car. He’d been oblivious to it fifty minutes earlier.

“You’ve made your point,” he said after a couple of minutes to the two Japanese men, who seemed rapt in their attention to the five displays. “Are you going to make us watch all ten minutes of this crap?”

They were. Or, rather, Mr. Nakamura was. So the three men stood watching for the full ten minutes as Nick Bottom on the screens, as rumpled and sweaty as he was here in real life, drooled and twitched while the black dilated iris-dots on the hard-boiled eggs of his not-quite-lidded eyes flitted back and forth like two buzzing flies. Nick forced himself not to look down or away.

Why this is Hell. Nor am I out of it. It was one of the few non-movie quotes that he’d picked up from his English-major wife. Nick couldn’t have cited the precise source of the quote if his life depended on it, but he guessed it had something to do with Faustus and the Devil. Like her father, Dara had spoken and read German and several other languages besides English. And both father and daughter had seemed to know all the plays and novels and good movies in all those languages as well. Nick had a master’s degree in legal forensics—mildly unusual for a cop, even a homicide detective—but he’d always felt like an education impostor around Dara and her father.

He’d been flashing in the car on his honeymoon with Dara at the Hana Maui Hotel those eighteen years ago, and he was glad now that he hadn’t included any of their actual lovemaking in the quick flash—choosing instead to relive just their swimming in the infinity pool looking out on the Pacific where the moon was rising, to relive their rush to shower and dress quickly in their hale because they were late for their dinner reservation, and finally to reexperience their walking up to the dining lanai between sputtering torches and their talking to each other as the stars came out in the dark skies above them. The air had been scented with tropical flowers and the clean salt-smell from the sea. Nick had avoided flashing on the sex because the last thing he needed in this interview was a moist semen stain on his trousers, but now he was simply glad that his video-recorded idiot’s face wouldn’t be showing the uncoordinated spastic echoes of his orgasms from eighteen years earlier.

The endless video finally closed with the Nick Bottom–on-screen coming up and out of his twitchy trance, shaking his head, running his hands through his hair, tugging his tie tighter, checking himself in the rearview mirror, starting the car with a scraping, dying-electric-motor hum, and driving off. The five cameras, even the aerial ones, did not follow. Four of the five displays in the room went back to being antique dark wood. The final display had zoomed to the time stamp and frozen.

Hiroshi Nakamura and Hideki Sato held their silence but shifted their gazes.

After an absurd minute of this, Nick said, “All right, so I’m still a flashback addict. I go under the flash all the time—at least six or eight hours a day, about the same amount of time Americans used to spend sucking on the glass tit of TV—so what? You’ll still hire me for this job, Mr. Nakamura. And you’ll pay for my flashback so that I can go back almost six years to reanimate your son’s murder investigation.”

Sato hadn’t removed his chip-phone from the top of the antique tansu, and now all five display surfaces lit up with different photographs of twenty-year-old Keigo Nakamura.

Nick hardly gave the images a glance. He’d seen plenty of pictures of Keigo both alive and dead during the investigation six years ago and hadn’t been impressed. The billionaire’s son had a weak chin, slanty brown eyes, stupid spiked hair, and that pouty, surly, sneaky look that Nick had seen on too many young Asians here in the States. Nick had learned to hate that expression on the faces of young rich-shit Japanese tourists on their slumming-in-America expeditions. The only photos of Keigo Nakamura that had interested him at all had been the crime-scene and autopsy photos showing a huge smile—but one created by the ragged knife slash across the boy’s neck that revealed the white glisten of cervical vertebrae. The unknown assailant had almost severed Keigo’s head from his body when he’d cut the young heir’s throat.

“If you’re going to hire me, it’s precisely because of flashback,” Nick said softly. “Why don’t we quit fucking around and either get to it or call it a day? I have things to do today, other people to see.”

That last sentence was the biggest lie Nick had told.

Nakamura’s and Sato’s faces remained totally impassive, seemingly uninterested, as if Nick Bottom had already left the room.

Nakamura shook his head. Nick saw the man’s age now in the subtle but growing pouches under the eyes, the lines of wrinkles flowing back from the corners of the eyes. “You are mistaken to think that you are indispensable, Mr. Bottom. We have hard copies of all the police reports both before and after the cyberattack, both before and after you were removed from my son’s case. Mr. Sato has a complete dossier of everything the Denver Police Department had.”

Nick laughed. For the first time he saw anger in the aging billionaire Advisor’s eyes. He was glad to see it.

“You know better than that, Mr. Nakamura,” he said. “That ‘everything’ the department shared with you, both before and after I was heading up the investigation, constituted less than ten percent of what we kept in digital form. Paper’s too fucking expensive to print out tons of redundant crap, even for pushy Japanese billionaires with pull from the White House. Sato never even saw the Murder Book… did you, Hideki-san?”

The security chief’s expression did not change at the taunt and familiarity, but his already cold eyes turned to black ice. There was no hint of amusement there now.

“So you need me if there’s going to be a new investigation,” said Nick. “For the last time, I suggest we cut the bullshit and get on with it. How much will you pay me for this job?”

Nakamura stared in silence for another moment and then said softly, “If you succeed in finding my son’s killers, Mr. Bottom, I am prepared to pay you fifteen thousand dollars. Plus expenses.”

“Fifteen thousand new bucks or old dollars?” asked Nick in only slightly choked tones.

“Old dollars,” said Nakamura. “And expenses.”

Nick folded his arms as if he were thinking, but the movement was actually an attempt to catch his balance. He suddenly felt faint.

Fifteen thousand old dollars was the equivalent of a little more than twenty-two million new bucks.

Nick had about $160,000 in new bucks in his NICC balance now and owed several million to his former friends and to bookies and flashback dealers and various loan sharks.

$60,000,000 bucks. Mother of Christ. Nick planted his feet wider so he wouldn’t sway.

Still playing out his noir tough-guy string, he managed to put some energy in his voice. “All right, I want the fifteen thousand old dollars transferred to my card at once. No strings attached… ‘no strings’ means no restrictions or tricks or evasions, Mr. Nakamura. Hire me and transfer the money. Now. Or call your golf cart guy to take me back to my car.”

This time it was the billionaire’s turn to laugh.

“Do you think us fools, Mr. Bottom? If we transferred the full payment to you now, you would flee at your first opportunity and spend it all on buying flashback for your own purposes.”

Of course I would, thought Nick. I’ll be alive again. And rich enough to spend the rest of Dara’s and my life together—several times over.

Still dizzy, Nick said, “What do you suggest, then? Half now? Half when I catch the guy?” Seventy-five hundred old dollars was enough to keep him under the flash for years.

Nakamura said, “I will transfer a suitable amount for expenses to your NIC Card and increase it as is needed. These are expenses, mind you. In new dollars. The fifteen thousand old dollars will be transferred to your private account only after my son’s killer is identified and the information has been verified by Mr. Sato.”

“After you’ve killed the guy I finger, you mean,” said Nick.

Mr. Nakamura ignored this. After a moment he said, “Our holistic contract has been transferred to your phone, Mr. Bottom. You can study it at your leisure. Your virtual signature will activate the contract and Mr. Sato will then transfer the money for initial expenses to your NICC. In the meantime, will you be so kind as to give Mr. Sato a ride back to Denver?”

“Why the hell should I do that?” said Nick.

“You will not see me again until this investigation is finished, Mr. Bottom, but you will be seeing much of Mr. Sato. He will be my full-time liaison with you for this investigation. Today I wish him to experience your vehicle and see your residence.”

“Experience my vehicle?” laughed Nick. “See my residence? What on earth for?”

“Mr. Sato has never seen a Baby Gap store,” said Hiroshi Nakamura. “It would amuse him to do so. This concludes our business, Mr. Bottom. Good day.”

The billionaire bowed almost infinitesimally, the bow all but invisible in its shallow curtness.

Nick Bottom did not bow. He turned on his heel and walked back toward the genkan entranceway and shoe-storage area, feeling the soft tatami under his exposed big toe every step of the way.

Hideki Sato followed close behind him without making any noise at all.