Flashback

1.15 Santa Ana and Airborne—Fri., Sept. 24

John Wayne airport was outside the area of the battle that had raged around Los Angeles for six or seven days, but the heavy amount of National Guard and other military traffic rumbling by on the 405 San Diego Freeway crossing the airport grounds just beyond the northeast end of Runway 1L/19R had been constant for days. No military air traffic was using John Wayne, only the usual commercial freight and occasional passenger traffic that regularly used the small field in unincorporated Orange County. Noise-abatement restrictions that had once made large aircraft takeoff from Runway 19R somewhat problematic for passengers with the required steep climbs and hard banks over Newport Beach had been eliminated in recent years.

Even though no Nakamura-owned commercial or private aircraft were allowed to land in Los Angeles–area airports, John Wayne Airport had for years been a negotiated exception. This Friday evening a modified FedEx A310/360 Nakamura courier-freight flight from Tokyo, with a stopover in Hawaii, had landed, refueled, and was awaiting a scheduled 7 p.m. takeoff, bound for Denver.

At five minutes before seven, the captain of the Nakamura aircraft requested a change in their flight plan to accommodate an 8 p.m. takeoff time. Tower personnel at John Wayne Airport forwarded the request to both the civilian Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale and the temporary Los Angeles Military Region Air Traffic Control located at the former Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, which was currently being operated as regional control center by the California Air National Guard for the duration of the military emergency. Both centers agreed to the one-hour delay. Along with that permission came the notice that military air traffic over the combat area currently centered on Lake Elsinore some fifty miles east of John Wayne Airport was so intense—and the evening military traffic out of LAX so busy—that all westbound commercial traffic from John Wayne was required to fly west out over the Pacific, northwest along the coast to a designated turning point near Morro Bay, and only then turn east by northeast, resuming their usual flight lanes to Denver at a point north and east of Las Vegas. All pilots were notified to refigure their fuel requirements accordingly.

The crew of the Nakamura aircraft was also notified that there would be no further delays granted this Friday night since, under local wartime regulations, John Wayne Airport would be shutting down for the night at 8:15 p.m. PDST.

At three minutes before 8 p.m., the Nakamura A310/360 started its engines and began taxiing to its takeoff position on Runway 19R. It had tested both engines and had requested final permission for takeoff when suddenly a California Highway Patrol cruiser pulled out onto the runway ahead of it, all of the police cruiser’s bubble lights flashing.

The A310/360 received permission to taxi onto the apron, although it was informed that it would have to be airborne in less than fifteen minutes or spend the night at John Wayne. It did not shut down its engines. Ground crews arrived in an old Ford electric pickup with Wollard Truck Model TLPH252 passenger stairs mounted on it and the aircraft opened its left front door. The CHP cruiser approached and stopped, its lights quit flashing, and Nick Bottom got out and came around to the driver’s side to talk to the newly appointed chief Ambrose at the wheel.

“Thanks, Chief,” said Nick, shaking the heavyset trooper’s hand.

“I’ll always be Dale to you, Nick,” said Ambrose. “I hope you find your boy.” The CHP vehicle drove off the tarmac as Nick climbed the steps to the aircraft. He favored his right side because of the injured ribs there.

Three hours earlier, advisor Daichi Omura had said to him, “If you go back to Denver, Bottom-san, you will die.”

“I have to go back, Omura-sama.”

“Hideki Sato will be waiting for you on the aircraft at John Wayne Airport, Bottom-san. You will never be out of his custody again for the short remnant of your life… if you try to go back.”

Nick had shaken his head and sipped the very fine single-malt Scotch Omura had provided. “I don’t think so, Omura-sama. Sato’s in Washington with Mr. Nakamura. They weren’t scheduled to get back to Denver until Saturday… tomorrow sometime. Plus, this flight’s coming from Tokyo via Hawaii. Mr. Nakamura himself told me that they didn’t have any flights going west from Denver to Los Angeles–area airports.”

“Sato will have to be there,” grunted the old man.

“Why is that, Omura-sama?”

“Because if you do not show up at John Wayne Airport tonight, Security Chief Sato’s job—Colonel Sato’s job—will be to enter the firestorm that is Los Angeles—my domain, Bottom-san—and find you, dead or alive. I understand Hiroshi Nakamura well enough to know this for a certainty. He will not let you escape if he can help it. Not now.”

Nick had shaken his head at that, but the words chilled him.

A crew member buttoned up the hatch behind him as Nick stepped into a luxuriously appointed cabin just aft of the flight deck. The swiveling leather seats at the windows, deep-cushioned couches, and 3DHD flatscreens on the bulkheads would have been at home in a billionaire’s executive jet, but this space was larger.

Sato was seated and buckled in at one of the starboard leather seats that had a low table in front of it. He did not rise as Nick entered but gestured to the chair opposite him.

Nick settled gingerly into the full-grain leather seat and buckled his seat belt. Cabin lights dimmed as the A310/360 returned to the head of the runway and tested its engines again at full throttle. The pilot said something over the intercom in Japanese and the big aircraft hurtled down the runway, lifted off into the night, and banked steeply to the left, coming around to a west-by-northwest course out over the ocean.

Nick looked at his watch. It was 8:14 p.m. PDST.

The first twenty-four hours—just getting into the city from the untowered landing field out east of the I-15—had been the most dangerous. But after surviving the slums and exodus of half a million panicked spanics and the gangs behind them, Nick was finally shot on a quiet side street in San Marino near Pasadena, in one of the most upper-class suburbs L.A. could offer.

It was more than fifty miles by car from this hillbilly Flabob Airport to his father-in-law’s neighborhood near Echo Park just northwest of the huge Homeland Security holding pen at Dodger Stadium. Using surface streets and alleys to keep out of the way of the fighting and massive evacuation, it was—Nick saw on the GPS mapping function of his phone—more than sixty miles with most of the route winding up through Ontario, Claremont, or Pomona, and down through south Pasadena. If he had to do it on foot, Nick thought, he might as well have started walking from Las Vegas. So the first thing he did was to steal an electric moped from a spanic kid who was just trying to flee the chaos behind his family, packed into an overloaded gelding SUV. Nick would have stolen the SUV, but the father—seeing the man with a gun emerge from the darkness—floored the rattling wreck of a vehicle, getting every dying amp he could from it while leaving his teenage son on the moped to a gunman’s mercy.

Nick used the Glock to wave the weeping kid off the moped, untied and tossed the bundled luggage to the now-howling teenager, and drove away without feeling the slightest hint of guilt. The father and family would return for the kid, even if they had to lash him to the roof rack with the rest of their belongings.

Probably.

The primitive display showed that the moped had been recently charged and had a range of two hundred miles. Nick told his phone to plot a bicycle-friendly trip to Echo Park and was informed that it would take him five and a half hours, but Nick knew that if he had to dodge fighters and fleeing civilians all the way, the trip would take at least twice as long.

Nick didn’t have the time for this shit. He knew now that he should have pulled his Glock on the pilot as they approached L.A. and demanded that the coward land them at some civilaviation field much closer to his destination—or even someplace like the Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena.

Cursing his own stupidity, Nick squatted on the undersized moped and goosed the little machine to its full speed of thirty miles per hour. Somehow the fact that the moped gave forth only a low electrical hum made it seem to go even slower.

To the west, northwest, and southwest, as Nick left the empty, dark airport grounds, all of Los Angeles looked as if it were on fire. Scores of helicopter gunships and TV news choppers flitted in front of the orange glow like bats fleeing a burning belfry. Ancient California Air National Guard A10 jet ground-support bombers were making runs on targets somewhere in Chino. The sound of the distant explosions arrived long after the tiny flashes.

For the first three hours of his circuitous route west toward the city, no one shot at him. He’d brought a ball cap that he tugged low so his ethnicity wasn’t obvious in the dark, and there was something about a grown man on a kid’s battery-powered moped—perhaps it was the knees higher than the handlebars—that made him a nonthreatening figure.

Even though it was after midnight, the freeways and surface streets were filled with fleeing civilians. Nick realized that he was seeing the tail end of several days of evacuation from L.A.—mostly from East L.A.—of hundreds of thousands of spanics, both residents who’d been there for many decades and hordes of the new immigrants who’d come north on the wave of reconquista victories. Nick caught only a few glimpses of the remnants of that Nuevo Mexican military force—clusters of battered Hummers forcing their way through the mobs of civilians in the night and the occasional N.M. helicopter roaring low above the freeways in an attempt to escape that was every bit as panicked and purposeless as the east and southeast surge of civilians.

Nick kept his phone GPS—he’d long ago named her Betty—constantly updating his route to keep him out of the path of these refugees, and Betty’s sexy voice whispered through his earbud to lead him down alleys across Claremont and Glendora, along empty bikepaths through Monrovia and Arcadia—most of the explosions and fighting seemed to be going on south of his route—and across the empty campus and soccer fields of Citrus College. The moped was happier on sidewalks than it was on streets.

Except for the military aircraft, there was no sign yet of the anglo military as the stars began to disappear behind him to the brightening east and the birds began to make their usual pre-sunrise clatter. Back in Glen Aven and southern Ontario, Nick had caught just enough glimpses of the shooting going on in the valley to the south to be sure that it was Aryan Brotherhood paramilitary, motorcycle gangs, Vietnamese and Chinese gangs from farther west and north, Mulholland mercenaries in armored Jeeps, and thousands of rioters from South Central L.A. whose parents and grandparents might have taken part in the Florence and Normandie fun forty years earlier. Leonard had described the ancient history of those riots to his daughter, and Dara, once calling the outbursts “the beginning of the modern era,” had passed on his account to Nick.

The gangs were looting and terrorizing the last of the refugees, but Nick saw enough to know that their primary goal was to burn down everything south of the Ventura Freeway and north of the Santa Ana Freeway. They appeared to be succeeding.

Nick had brought two water bottles and as many food bars as he’d been able to stuff in his jacket pockets and he sipped and munched as he drove west. The mobs of refugees were gone by the time he approached San Marino, the occasional police or anglo military presence visible only on primary roads and the entrance to freeways. As Nick headed west paralleling California Boulevard just north of the Huntington Botanical Gardens—the upscale neighborhoods were absolutely dark, their power obviously cut, as he wound along Betty’s chosen bikepaths and side streets—he congratulated himself on getting past the worst of it and essentially being home free.

Several shots hammered the predawn grayness. Nick felt a bullet bite the back of his left calf muscle even as a second slug killed the moped’s battery-driven motor.

Nick dumped the little bike on its side and rolled toward the gutter and a line of Dumpsters there as half a dozen more shots rang out. He scrabbled on all fours into a darker alley, ran half a block knowing that he was leaving a blood trail, and then crouched behind another Dumpster to check the damage.

The bullet had taken a lot of skin and some solid flesh but no real muscle. But it hurt like hell. Nick hiked up his pant leg and tied the wound off with a clean white handkerchief. He waited in the dark, Glock in hand, hoping that it was a random shot—or that, if they wanted the moped for some reason, his assailants would call it a morning when they saw they’d destroyed the little machine.

No such luck. They stalked him for the next half hour.

There were three of them—the big, stupid-sounding guy whom Nick thought of as the Linebacker, an older, skinny guy with the rifle whom he thought of as the Quarterback since he seemed to be literally calling the shots, and a greasy-haired teenager whom he thought of as Billy because he reminded Nick of the character Billy Clanton played by the young Dennis Hopper in the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Nick hobbled south through front yards, dodging from tree to tree and wall to wall, with his three shooters following on foot. All three of them fired at him as he dodged and weaved across Orlando Road, hurtling a low fence and crashing his way into the 120 or so acres of the botanical gardens. The hunters each carried a backpack full of ammunition and seemed intent on firing it all off.

Nick had no idea what these idiots wanted of him… other than to make him dead. His best guess was that they had been playing cowboy for the duration of the Los Angeles fighting, raiding East L.A. neighborhoods at night just for the fun of killing someone. And they’d obviously gotten addicted to the killing. He had no other explanation for why they’d fired at him in quiet San Marino.

Nick had Betty bring up a map of the botanical gardens, but he’d been here about five years ago with his father-in-law, who’d had some academic business at the research library here. It was the week that Nick had brought Val out to live with Leonard. He could find his way to the library, but the historic structure was near the center of this large urban mix of forests, flower gardens, formal Japanese gardens, and meadows, and although there might be security guards at the library, Nick didn’t want to get them involved.

The shooting trio had RadioShack walkie-talkies but kept shouting back and forth to one another. This was great sport to them and they’d obviously been drinking or using drugs. It became clear that they weren’t comfortable stalking someone in these manicured woods and meadows—they’d probably spent a good part of the last week shooting people in urban settings—but then, Nick wasn’t comfortable being stalked in the woods either. He would have preferred an alley.

He soon realized that they were making noise and firing at random in order to herd him to their left, toward Oxford Road bordering the gardens to the east. Nick didn’t want to go back east. He had business to the west and south.

It was starting to get light in earnest now. He had to get this over with.

He’d come into an area where a Doric-columned circular mausoleum stood in the middle of a clearing. Nick hobbled as quickly as he could across the clearing but his trackers still had time to get off two shots. One tugged at his jacket and then he was in the trees and panting to catch his breath. He’d seen the muzzle flashes and knew that the hunters were directly across the clearing from him. He shouted, “What do you want from me?”

“Everything you got, pal,” shouted one of the men. The other two giggled.

“Let’s meet in the middle and settle this,” shouted Nick. He ducked low and began running as quickly as he could through the thick undergrowth, no longer heading away from the shooters, circling the clearing back to the west, in their direction. There was a park road only a few meters to the north and he knew they’d also want to use the maximum amount of cover as they attempted to flank him.

Nearing the west end of the circular clearing, Nick stopped, knelt, and slipped in a fresh magazine of ammo. He crouched low and chambered the first round as silently as he could.

All three men came out into the clearing, crouching and silent. They were moving too quickly for Nick to get a clean shot at all of them at once. Counting on the fact that they were amateurs—no matter how many men and women they’d killed in recent days—Nick shouted, “Hey!”

Soldiers, mercenaries, or professional killers would have kept moving, throwing themselves in different directions. These three amateurs froze, turned, and opened fire. Even the Quarterback had a pistol in his right hand—while he carried the rifle in his left—and was joining in the shooting.

Two slugs caught Nick in his lower right side, not penetrating the Kevlar-3 he wore under his shirt, but cracking some ribs, knocking the wind out of him, and spinning him around. He knelt in a combat firing crouch, ignored the fusillade of bullets ripping branches just over his head, and fired eight times.

All three men went down hard. After a minute, seeing everyone’s hands empty in the increasing light of dawn, Nick crabwalked toward them, gun raised and steady in both hands.

He’d somehow managed to miss the great bulk of the Linebacker except for one high center-mass shot, but that had pulped the big man’s heart. Blood had exploded from the man’s mouth, ears, and eyes. He’d been dead before he hit the ground.

The Quarterback had taken two of Nick’s slugs center mass but it had been the third shot—a round, bloodless hole in the precise center of the ferret-faced man’s upper lip—that had done the job.

Billy Clanton had also absorbed three slugs but was still alive, writhing and curling in pain.

Nick kicked all the visible weapons into the bushes and crouched over the teenager.

“Help me, mister, please, help me, I hurt… oh, Jesus God, Jesus, it hurts… help me, please, for the love of Christ, mister, please…”

Nick studied the wounds. None was fatal in and of itself, but the boy would bleed out soon enough if he didn’t get medical attention. Nick was sure there’d be a medical station at the California Institute of Technology just a few blocks to the northwest.

“Where’s your car?” asked Nick, bending low so that he was hissing almost into the boy’s ear. “Where are the keys to your car?”

The mantra of pain and entreaty paused long enough for the boy to squint up at him. Like most young Americans, this one had never felt real pain for more than a few minutes at a time. He wanted a pill or shot or IV for this pain… and right now.

“You’ll… help me? I didn’t wanna come along, you know. It was all Dean’s idea. I didn’t wanna…”

“Where’s the car?” whispered Nick. “Where are the keys? Medical help’s only a few minutes away by car. I can’t carry you.”

The boy nodded and then belched blood. This terrified him and he started babbling through his groans and weeping.

Dean’s blue Nissan Menlo Park was parked on Landor Lane, just half a block from where they’d shot at Nick. They all lived up in Altadena and were just regular guys, you know, and were coming home from having some night fun down in East L.A.—everybody was doing it this week—when they’d seen the moped and Dean’d said, one more for a nightcap, but…

“Keys?” hissed Nick.

“Dean… Dean’s pocket… Dean… front pocket, I think… help, for the love of Christ, mister, it hurts so much.”

Nick guessed that Dean was the Quarterback and found the keys in the dead man’s front pocket. The key ring was labeled NISSAN. Nick also checked both the dead Linebacker’s pockets and the moaning, writhing boy’s, as well as all three backpacks, but found only some extra ammunition, billfolds, cards, and some cash. He kept the cash and Dean’s NICC.

Nick opened his shirt and checked the Kevlar-3 undershirt on the right side. It had stopped both pistol slugs but there was definitely some damage to his ribs on that side. Trying to take deep, slow breaths, he buttoned his shirt back up. The bullet crease on his left calf had finally stopped bleeding, but not before soaking through the handkerchief and his pant leg. It would be a bitch to pull the solidly caked material free later.

“Please… mister… you promised… you promised… it hurts so much… you promised.”

Nick knelt over the wounded boy and decided that he really didn’t look much like the young Dennis Hopper. He didn’t look anything like Val.

“You promised…”

He could get Dean’s van, drive back here, load the kid in, and try to find some medical help before the boy bled out. Or he could point his would-be killer in the direction of the Huntington Library and tell him to crawl, although odds were low that he’d get there before he bled to death.

Either way, he’d be leaving someone behind who could describe him and the Nissan to the cops—if the cops were still a factor in this L.A. suburb—and raise Nick’s chances of being detained somewhere, thus lowering his chances of finding Val.

You try to kill a stranger for fun, thought Nick, you need to be ready to face the consequences. He wasn’t absolutely sure at that second whether he was thinking of the young man moaning beneath him or of Val’s alleged involvement in the attack on Advisor Omura. The difference was that Val, whether he ran from his father’s last name or not, carried Nick’s own blood and DNA.

Nick used his left hand to shield his face and eyes from backspatter as he set the muzzle of the Glock within three inches of the boy’s pale forehead and white, widening eyes and squeezed the trigger.

The Menlo was parked right where the kid had said it would be. Betty whispered to him that there were less than twelve miles to go even if he avoided the Pasadena Freeway by taking Monterey Road to North Figueroa Street and the Nissan’s own nav system confirmed it. There might be roadblocks ahead, Nick knew, but one way or the other, he’d be at Leonard’s address in half an hour or so.

As the plane finally banked back toward the east an attractive female flight attendant wearing a kimono entered the cabin from aft and Sato said, “Are you hungry or thirsty, Bottom-san?”

Nick shook his head. The flight attendant took Sato’s order of tako su, pepper tuna, and sunomono—the big man specified that he wanted it sauced with ponzu and wasabi mayonnaise—and barbecued squid in soy ginger sauce. He also ordered a bowl of nabeyaki udon without the poached egg. And sake.

When the flight attendant turned to Nick and bowed, obviously inquiring as to whether he’d changed his mind and would like something after all, Nick said, “Yes, I’d also like some sake.”

When the woman was gone, Sato asked, “Do you need medical attention, Bottom-san? One of the crew has military medical training and the proper equipment and drugs.”

Nick shook his head again. “Just some scratches and dinged-in ribs. I had them taped.”

They flew in silence for a few minutes. The A310/360’s two engines were so quiet that almost no sound from them entered the cabin; Nick knew they were on only because of the faint vibration underfoot and in the arms of his leather chair. He was close to dozing off when Sato spoke.

“You did not find your son, then, Bottom-san?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Nor any clue as to his current whereabouts?”

Nick shrugged. “What are you doing here, Sato? You were supposed to be with Mr. Nakamura in Washington until tomorrow.”

The security chief—or was it assassin?—grunted. “Nakamura-sama is returning to Denver tomorrow, but a company flight to John Wayne Airport opened up today and he suggested I come out to make sure you made this flight.”

“If I hadn’t?” said Nick. He was very aware that no one had frisked him and that he still had the fully loaded Glock 9 on his left hip.

Sato made his clumsy version of a shrug. “I would have contacted authorities to inquire as to your fate, Bottom-san. Beginning with your assistant chief Ambrose, whom you mentioned in Denver. Or is it, as you said on the tarmac, ‘Chief’ Ambrose?”

“Promotion,” said Nick. Even talking sent pain through his tightly taped but still-aching ribs. “The regular CHP chief had a fatal heart attack on the third day of the rioting and fighting in L.A. and Dale received a temporary field promotion.”

“But your friend in the California Highway Patrol was not able to help you find your son?”

Nick shook his head again. The food came in, carried by three beautiful female attendants, and looked delicious. Nick wasn’t sure why he hadn’t ordered something: he hadn’t eaten in more than ten hours and it would be after midnight, Denver time, when they landed at DIA. Even his mall condos’ late-night cafeteria would be shut down by the time he got there.

Nick found himself salivating from just looking at Sato’s dinner laid out on the table, but it was the smell of the nabeyaki udon broth that really made his stomach rumble.

He gulped some sake, rose painfully, and said, “Where’s the lavatory?”

There were two doors on the aft bulkhead. The flight attendants had come in through the one on the right. Sato pointed to the door on the left.

A few minutes later, Nick stood in front of the wide mirror. This aircraft lavatory was three times the size of the bathroom in his cubie and had an actual bath as well as shower. The face and figure staring back at him looked out of place in the lemon-soap luxury of the executive-jet lavatory: Nick’s shirt was torn and bloodied, his tan jacket and chinos filthy—the left pant leg ripped and blood-soaked with white bandages showing through—and Nick had scrapes and new scars on his cheekbone and right temple. He’d received nine stitches along that cheekbone at the CHP barracks and the effect was moderately Frankenstein-like. They’d scrubbed off the worst of the grime there, but Nick still washed his hands and face vigorously in the plane lav, handling the thick hand towel gingerly, as if he didn’t want his dirt and blood to contaminate it.

Nick removed the Glock from the crossdraw holster, made sure the safety was off and that there was a round in the chamber, and set the heavy pistol back in place. If Omura-sama was correct—and Nick had believed him—then Sato was escorting him home to a death sentence. And one that would be carried out soon, probably tomorrow afternoon or evening when Nakamura arrived home to his mountaintop above Denver.

But Nick had his pistol now. An oversight? A test?

Either way, the 9mm Glock was real and his to use. But use how? Come out shooting, kill Sato first, then move from one hanging oxygen mask to the next until he could get onto the flight deck and demand that the pilot fly him…

Where? There was no nation in this hemisphere now that did not have extradition treaties with the New Nippon.

And what if Val had made it to Denver and was waiting for him?

But all this was academic, since Nick knew the door to access the flight deck could probably take repeated RPG rounds without opening or giving way. And that the crew was almost certainly armed, but wouldn’t even need that. All they’d have to do was keep the plane at altitude—assuming that some of his rounds either made it all the way through Sato or missed and depressurized the aircraft—and shut off the oxygen to his compartment. They could do that, of course, even if a stray round hadn’t depressurized the compartment. Nick shook his head and stared at the much thinner, almost gaunt by his standards of the last five years or so, and visibly beaten-up figure in the mirror. He was too tired. Too many nights with too little sleep. It was hard to think.

When he came out, there was a cluster of little plates and a bowl and a replenished glass of sake on his side of the small table as well.

“This meal was so good that I took the liberty, Bottom-san,” grunted Sato. “I personally do not enjoy the poached egg with the noodles in nabeyaki udon, but most people do. I had them serve it to you on the side. The slices of cooked octopus in the tako su are garnished with sticks of pale green cucumber, bathed in ponzu sauce and topped with sesame seeds, sliced scallion, and a drizzle of wasabi mayonnaise. I believe you will find that the sauce has an engagingly smoky, citrus taste that complements the octopus. Why are you smiling, Bottom-san?”

“No reason,” said Nick, although he’d come close to laughing at Sato’s impersonation of an eager maître d’. “I guess I’m more hungry than I knew, Sato-san. Thank you.”

Sato nodded abruptly. “The pepper tuna and sunomono are similarly sauced with ponzu and wasabi mayonnaise,” he said. “The black pepper–crusted tuna, seared on the outside but still raw, then sliced thin, is a favorite of mine. I hope you enjoy it, Bottom-san.”

“I am certain I will, Sato-san,” said Nick. He was still standing and he realized that he was bowing his thanks, and bowing low.

Sato grunted and Nick settled into his chair, giving out his own involuntary grunt from the pain in his ribs. The smell from the bowl of broth and other food brought tears to his eyes.

Galina Kschessinska, aka Galina Sue Coyne, was of a kind that Nick had interviewed many times, sometimes as eager witness, although more often as perp or accomplice. In any of the roles, the clinical description of the Galina Kschessinska type remained the same: malignant narcissist.

“I haven’t had anyone come to talk to me for several days,” said the middle-aged woman. Her eyes looked like small, pale oysters that had been swallowed by successive layers of makeup. Nick thought that her plastic surgeon should be arrested and tortured for crimes against humanity. “I was beginning to think,” she continued, inhaling smoke from her No-C stick at the end of a pearl cigarette holder, “that the police had lost interest in the case.”

Why would that be, just because the world is burning down here? thought Nick. He shook his head. Vigorously. “Oh, no, Ms. Kschessinska, the case is still very much open and we’re very interested in finding the culprit or culprits who shot your son… and for his death, let me say again, I’m very, very sorry.”

The woman lowered her eyes and gave herself a half-moment of dramatic silence. “Yesss,” she said finally, sending the pitiful purr-hiss out through projected pain. “Poor William.” Whatever her relationship with her son Billy had been, thought Nick, her mourning period for the kid hadn’t quite lasted the past week. And she’d obviously enjoyed the attention she’d received from the media and cops and wanted more of it. Today she seemed either drugged or drunk or a bit of both. Between her mild accent and the more-than-mild slurring, Nick had to concentrate to understand what she was saying.

Nick had flashed his Rent-a-Detective badge with his name on it, so if she’d known Val’s real last name, Nick’s cover—such as it was—was blown. But Ms. Kschessinska hadn’t paid close attention. Nick had the feeling that she hadn’t paid very close attention to many things—including her recently deceased son—for some years now.

“You mentioned that your son William gave this missing boy, Val Fox—the one we’re looking for—a gun shortly before the… ah… incident at the Disney Center?” said Nick. He had a small notebook out and pen poised, but so far all he’d scribbled in it in his tiny cop script was She smells bad.

“Oh, yes, Detective… uh… Botham, William did tell me that not long ago. Yes.”

And you didn’t call the cops to tell them that your kid was dealing guns? thought Nick. He didn’t correct her on his name and was phrasing his follow-up question carefully when Ms. Kschessinska forged ahead.

“You understand, Detective, my William was always concerned about my safety, about his little friends’ safety, about everyone’s… why, this is a very dangerous city in which to live, Detective! Just look out the windows!”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Nick. “Do you remember what kind of gun it was that your son gave to the Fox boy?”

“Oh, the other policemen mentioned it. Just talk to them. It started with a ‘B,’ I seem to remember.”

“Browning?” said Nick. “Bauer, Bren, Beretta…”

“That’s it,” said Ms. Kschessinska, “that last one. Beretta. Pretty name. Would you like a little drinkie, Detective? I always allow myself a little one in the afternoon, especially in these terrible days since William was… was…” She threatened to dissolve into tears.

“No, thank you,” Nick said hurriedly. “But you have one, please. I know this is hard for you.” He didn’t point out that it was not quite ten o’clock in the morning.

She mixed and poured and stirred with a serious drinker’s full attention. “You sure you won’t join me, Detective? There’s plenty to…”

“Did you happen to see the Beretta, Ms. Kschessinska?”

“What? Oh, no! Of course not.” She returned to her favorite chair with a tall glass. “But William told me about it. He used to share everything with me. He told me that this friend of his, Hal…”

“Val,” said Nick.

“Whatever. He told me that this friend of his was part of their little club, their little boys’ club, but that this Hal, Val, whatever it was, wasn’t really a team player.”

“How’s that?” Nick asked quietly.

“Oh, just little things… like the fact that this other boy wouldn’t take part when the boys were doing their little experiments.”

“Experiments?”

“Oh, their little experiments into sex and such. All boys do it, you know.”

“You’re talking about experiments with sex with girls, Ms. Kschessinska?”

“Of course I mean with girls!” shouted the heavy woman with the painted face of melting clay. She was truly angry. “William would never… could never…”

“So you’re saying that this Val Fox boy didn’t take part when the ga… when William’s boys’ club had sex with one or more girls?”

“Yes, exactly,” Ms. Kschessinska said primly, still not mollified.

Nick wrote Gang rape on his notebook page. Even six years ago when he’d still been with the Denver force, male flashgangs almost always began with gang rape. They’d relive the violation of some girl, frequently a minor, over and over under the flash. Then the gangs usually moved up to physical violence: tormenting and brutalizing younger kids or winos or other flashback addicts found helpless under the flash. Then—most frequently—murder. Or murder after a brutal rape. The ultimate event to flash on. Two for the price of one.

“Did this Val boy not participate in their flashback use of these… experiments?” asked Nick.

“That is precisely correct,” said Ms. Kschessinska, taking great care not to slur. “William told me that this person wasn’t enough of a man to join in the experiment and wasn’t enough of a friend to join the others when they relived the event as part of their… rite of passage, as it were.”

“What did William say this boy did when they were experimenting?”

“Oh, various excuses,” she slurred, waving her hands as she tried to light a real cigarette, plucking the No-C stick out and flinging it away angrily. “Standing guard. William said the boy always lost his nerve and stood apart, saying he was going to stand guard for the others. That sort of nonsense. The boy was not a true friend of William’s, no matter everything my dear boy tried to do for him. No matter what wonderful gifts William gave him.”

She looked up and Nick thought of shell-less oysters again as the mottled, mucusy gray eyes within their pools of makeup tried to focus on him. “But if he did indeed murder my son, I guess it ghosts… goes, that is… goes without saying that he was no real friend. This Hal Fox was probably always planning to betray and murder William.” She inhaled deeply, held it, and then exhaled smoke through her nose.

“No idea, then, where this boy might be?” asked Nick.

“Nothing more than what I’ve already told your colleagues, Detective… was it Detective Betham? Nick Betham?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Nick. He’d already checked out the various overpasses and other flashgang hangouts that Ms. Kschessinska had told the LAPD and CHP about. It hadn’t been easy going to those places either, since Leonard’s apartment and the entire neighborhood near Echo Park had been first reduced to rubble and then burned down in the fighting. Aryan B gangs numbering in the hundreds had blown the walls at the Dodger Stadium Homeland Security Detention Center, flooding that entire neighborhood with more terrorists, killers, and self-proclaimed jihadists. The area around Chávez Ravine was not a safe place to spend time this week.

Checking out the storm sewer system, including the area still a crime scene under the Disney Center, had also had its nasty surprises. But none that had given Nick a clue about Val’s current whereabouts.

He’d left Galina Kschessinska Coyne smoking, drinking, sobbing, and hiccupping. With the investigation into the attack on Advisor Omura being called off—due not only to the press of current events but to Omura’s own request that it be discontinued—it was doubtful that any authorities would come to visit Ms. Kschessinska again. Or at least, Nick thought as he let himself out, until some patrol officers, responding to complaints of a terrible smell, someday entered the apartment to find her corpse.

Do you wish any more pepper tuna or sunomono or nabeyaki udon or tako su, Bottom-san?” asked Sato. “Or sake?”

“No, no, no thank you,” said Nick. “Especially no thank you on the sake. I’ve had too much already.”

He was a little drunk. That would be fine if he were just going straight home to his cubie and bed after they landed in Denver in the next hour or so, but Nick wasn’t sure what Sato might have in mind.

“Sato-san,” he said, “tell me again when I’m going to see Mr. Nakamura?”

“You remember me saying, Bottom-san, that Nakamura-sama is scheduled to return to Denver tomorrow night. You are invited to come speak to Nakamura-sama as soon as he arrives home in the evening. He is most eager to hear what you have to say.”

To name Keigo Nakamura’s murderer, thought Nick. If I don’t know by then, I’m expendable. If I do have the murder figured out, I’ll be even more expendable.

“I brought these,” said Sato and set a nylon bag on the side of Nick’s table where it had just been cleared by the kimonoed flight attendants.

Suspicious, Nick unzipped the top. Ten vials of flashback cradled in foam, four of the vials obviously multihour flashes.

“Thanks,” said Nick, closing the bag and dropping it on the carpet next to his feet. It had been seven long days and nights since he’d last gone under the flash, but he found that the sight of the vials hadn’t excited him the way they had for the last half-dozen years. In fact, the thought of inhaling the stuff and going under its influence made him feel slightly nauseated.

“Sato,” he said softly, “I keep hearing from people who Keigo interviewed that the boy kept asking them about F-two… Flashback-two, that old legend. Is there something going on there?”

“Going on there, Bottom-san?”

“Is there something happening with F-two that I don’t know about?”

The big man shook his head in that Sato-way that involved his shoulders and entire upper body more than his massive neck. “There are rumors, Bottom-san, that this F-two has been sold on the streets of New York City and Atlanta, Georgia, in the last months, but as far as I can tell, they are only rumors. There are always rumors of the fantasy drug being available somewhere.”

“Yeah.” If any of the rumors had turned out to be real, Nick knew for a certainty, F-two would have been available everywhere in what was left of the country within a week. A nation addicted to its own past via flashback was ripe for the fantasy version of the drug. Since it hadn’t popped up everywhere, Flashback-two was still a myth. Part of Nick was sorry. Part of Nick was just… confused.

And very weary. He shouldn’t have drunk the sake.

Nick looked out the aircraft window. They’d passed beyond a region of clouds and the starlight and moonlight illuminated a convoluted western topography five miles below. When Nick had traveled by air as a young man, there had been more constellations of lights from small towns dotting even these barren stretches of the country at night, but those constellations had all but disappeared as the small towns in the west and elsewhere in what remained of the United States had fallen victim to the economy and other new realities. One’s instinct was to think of small towns as a better survival-center come catastrophe, but it had turned out that they were more brittle and less resilient than the big cities. Staring now at the solid darkness below, Nick imagined the millions who’d fled those now dark and silent towns over the past decade and a half—millions of the newly homeless who’d embraced at least a chance of survival in the battered big cities.

He dozed off while watching the tousled-gray bedspread of the western canyons, mountains, and deserts roll on darkly beneath them.

Why do you have him in custody?” Nick had asked Chief Ambrose as his father’s old friend and former student led Nick back through overcrowded holding cells to an isolated cell now holding only one man.

“His father and grandfather were both assassinated shortly after the fighting began,” said Ambrose, unlocking a door that led to the isolated cell. He paused to finish saying what he had to say before opening the door to the room. “Evidently they weren’t killed in the general fighting, but were assassinated… or so Roberto believes. His own reconquista unit had been cut off in the Culver City fighting and Roberto was sure that if he surrendered to the National Guard or state authorities or to any of the mercenary armies down from Mulholland, Beverly Hills, and the rest, they’d execute him as well. So he and the few surviving members of his unit found some CHP patrolmen to surrender to and we brought him to the Southern Division barracks’ lockup here in Glendale.”

Nick’s stolen Menlo was parked in the walled and razor-wire-protected visitors’ parking lot outside this North Central Avenue CHP headquarters. He just hoped that no trooper decided to run the plate numbers.

“Do you think he’ll talk to me?” asked Nick.

“Let’s find out,” said Dale Ambrose and swung open the door. The metal cell in the center of the larger room looked strange to Nick. Ambrose nodded and left.

Nick and the young man—in his late twenties, Nick thought—were alone in the room, except for the very obvious video camera near the ceiling in the far corner, and sat opposite each other on bunk beds in the oversized cell.

“I am Roberto Emilio Fernández y Figueroa,” said the young man in a strong voice. “Someone assassinated my grandfather Don Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa and my father, Eduardo Dante Fernández y Figueroa, last week, and those assassins will reach me soon, Mr. Bottom. Ask me what you wish to know and if I am able to help you without dishonoring my name or informing upon my family or comrades, I will do so.”

“I’m only hunting for my son,” said Nick. “But are you sure your grandfather and father were assassinated? It’s been a pretty crazy week.”

Roberto smiled ever so slightly. He was a handsome man and had been even more handsome before someone had broken his nose and beaten the right side of his face into a swollen red mass. “I am certain, Mr. Bottom. My grandfather knew of one assassination attempt scheduled for the very morning the fighting began—a Great White predator drone missile attack on one of our family compounds—and avoided that. But in the end, he and my father were killed by two separate assassins, people from within our own organization, who had obviously been suborned by the state of California or by Advisor Omura’s people. It was the loss of my father’s and his father’s leadership that turned the tide against us so soon in the fighting.”

Nick had nothing to say to that. He showed Roberto photos of Val and then of Leonard. “My father-in-law reportedly knew your grandfather,” he said softly.

“Yes. I have heard of their Saturday chess games in Echo Park,” said Roberto. The thin smile returned despite the massive bruising around his mouth.

“I’m trying to find out if my boy’s alive, Señor Fernández y Figueroa,” said Nick. “I was thinking that their only chance—my son’s and his grandfather’s—might have been if Leonard had come to see your grandfather to ask for help. It would have been immediately before the fighting. I’m hoping you might know whether my son and father-in-law left on one of your Friday convoys.”

Roberto nodded slowly. “I have met neither your son nor his grandfather, Mr. Bottom. But my father did mention that Grandfather Emilio’s ‘old chess partner’ had visited not long before the fighting began. It would make sense that your son and his grandfather might have been seeking escape on one of the truck convoys or railway services to which my family extended its protection and patronage.”

“Do you know if that’s what happened on Friday, September seventeenth?” asked Nick. “Do you know if my boy and his grandfather actually got on to some train or truck convoy?”

“I do not,” said Roberto, shaking his head sadly. Even that amount of movement must have pained the man, thought Nick. “I fear that events were too violent and too confused that Friday… my father never got around to telling me what the nature of Grandfather Emilio’s visit from your father-in-law was about. Lo siento mucho, Señor Bottom.”

They both stood painfully, two men moving slowly with bruises and aching ribs as well as two men with death sentences hanging over them. They shook hands.

“I wish you luck, Señor Roberto Emilio Fernández y Figueroa. And I sincerely hope that things turn out better for you than you fear.”

Roberto shook his head wryly but said, “And I wish you luck, Señor Bottom. And I will say a prayer asking that, if it is possible, your son and father-in-law are well and that you will all soon be reunited. At the very least, we must believe that we will be reunited with our family members in the next life.”

Nick had felt some strange emotions as he finished talking to Chief Dale Ambrose, left the South Division CHP lockup, and got that Nissan Menlo Park the hell out of there.

He twitched awake. Sato was snoring loudly, sitting in the chair across the table from him and sleeping with his massive arms crossed over his chest, the polymorphic smart-cast barely visible under his right shirtsleeve. Nick knew that if he made any noise at all, the security chief would be fully awake in a microsecond.

Nick checked his watch without moving his arm or body. If they were still on the schedule Sato had interpreted from the pilot’s earlier announcement, they should be landing in Denver in about thirty minutes. Nick leaned toward the window just enough to look down into the darkness. Starlight gleamed on high snowfields while a few headlights moved along dark canyon roads. I-Seventy? It didn’t matter. But the mere presence of vehicles on the highways meant that they were approaching the Front Range of Colorado.

Nick silently folded his own arms and closed his eyes.

He’d phoned K.T. Lincoln a little after 2 a.m. Los Angeles time, after 3 a.m. in Denver. He’d bought the use-once disposable phone that afternoon at a street market on an elevated and abandoned slab of the I-5. There were a lot of guns for sale there. And a lot of Arabs selling them.

“Lincoln,” came the sleepy voice. And then, more angrily as she saw it wasn’t the department calling and that the caller was shielding his name, “Who the hell is this?”

“It’s me, K.T., Nick. Don’t hang up!”

Nick knew that if they… always the invisible, hovering, omnipotent and terrifying they… had tapped K.T.’s cell phone, he was really and irrevocably fucked. But, as he already knew but would confirm beyond any doubt a few hours later in his interview with Advisor Omura, the addicted entity known as Nick Bottom was already really and irrevocably fucked.

“What do you want, Nick?” The tone of anger was far worse now, cold and deadly.

“I want to stay alive and to have any chance at all of that, I need your help, K.T.”

“Feeling a little melodramatic tonight, are we, Nicholas?” She’d always known that her using “Nicholas” had amused him when they were partners. But could mere teasing be a good sign?

“I’m feeling surrounded and closed in on tonight, K.T., but that isn’t the point. I need your help if Val and I are going to get out of this alive.”

“Have you found Val?” At least her tone sounded interested. But how much of that, Nick wondered, was a cop’s interest in capturing a material witness and probable felon with an APB out on him?

“Not yet, but I think I will.” Nick took a deep breath. He was on a fire escape outside a flophouse-cum-flashback-cave in downtown L.A. He’d spent $10,000 new bucks on a cot and blanket that were crawling with lice and bedbugs. Nick had dozed some on the floor, his jacket balled up under his head for a pillow and the Glock in his hand, until it was time to make this call. It helped a little to think of all the winos, flash addicts, and street people snoring around him as the geese a Roman legion would spread around their bivouac area; at least they might make some noise if the stocky guys in black Kevlar and laser rangefinders came crashing in on rappel ropes after Nick.

“I need you to do things for me if Val and I are going to have any chance at all,” said Nick.

“Now it’s two things,” K.T. said sarcastically. But she’s still on the line. Given the grand jury dossiers she’d seen and photocopied, just the act of her continuing to listen was a miracle.

“First,” hurried Nick, “I need you to get a meeting set with me and Mayor Ortega for as early Saturday morning as you can make it. He’s supposed to be back from the junket tomorrow. I don’t know what strings you can pull to get a Saturday meeting set but…”

“Nick…”

“… but it’s essential that I get in to see him early Saturday,” Nick galloped on. “Or to make it safer for him, we can arrange to meet somewhere other than his office. In City Park, maybe, near the…”

“Nick!”

“What?”

“I don’t know where you are or why you’ve been out of the news loop, but Mannie Ortega’s dead.”

“Dead,” Nick repeated stupidly. He was glad he was already sitting down. Digging his heels in between the grating bars, Nick shoved backwards hard against the ancient steel of the fire escape, feeling each rusty bar of the balusters pressing deep into his back. “How?”

“Today… yesterday, I mean,” said K.T. “Thursday. In Washington. A suicide bomber in a Georgetown restaurant. One of the waiters with a vest. Some other mayors bought it, too—mayor of Minneapolis, mayor of Birmingham, mayor of…”

“All right,” interrupted Nick. “I should have known that they’d have to silence Ortega before I got back. Stupid of me to think they wouldn’t.”

There was a sort of snorting noise from K. T. Lincoln’s end of the connection. “They blew up Ortega and six other mayors because of you, Nick? That’s more than mere melodrama. Feeling a little paranoid tonight, are we?”

“Yeah, but am I paranoid enough,” said Nick, finishing their tired old joke. “They made a mistake in preparing that grand jury frame-up, K.T. You saw how elaborate the frame-up was… phone records altered, hotel credit-card invoices faked. Mannie Ortega couldn’t have done that on the city level even if he’d wanted to. Hell, the governor couldn’t have faked all that ‘evidence’ that they set up for the grand jury. It takes a lot more juice than that… juice on the Jap Advisor level. So they made a mistake in preparing that frame-up, a second mistake in keeping it in the records and not using it, and a third mistake in keeping it where you could… K.T., are you there?”

Silence.

Nick feared that he might have gone too far, sounding too much like the paranoid wife-killer that K.T. probably thought he might be, and that she might have hung up during his rant.

“K.T.?”

More silence. His last chance and he’d blown it due to his goddamned inability to keep his mouth shut when…

“I’m here, Nick.” The voice was flat, cold, giving him nothing but its existence.

“Thank Christ,” breathed Nick. “OK, forget the first favor. That just leaves one, K.T., but it’s a huge one.”

“What?”

Nick paused and looked out at the empty but not quite silent downtown Los Angeles streets. Flashes and tiny explosion sounds still came from far to the east. Small-arms fire sounded much closer.

“I need you to find something close to Max’s Pursuit Special out of impound…,” began Nick.

“Max’s… what the fuck are you talking about, Bottom?”

Nick gave her a minute to let the allusion sink in.

“Pursuit Special,” she said at last. “Are you drunk, Nick?”

“I wish I were, but I’m not. Remember how we used to check out the impound lot, trying to find the closest match to Max’s Pursuit Special?”

Silence on the other end again.

K.T. had come to the house to watch a double feature of the two Australian Mad Max movies starring a very young Mel Gibson, but really starring the black-on-black supercharger-modified GT351 version of the Australian 1973 Ford XB Falcon hardtop that Mad Max drove past, through, and around bad guys. Dara had absented herself from those movies—which they’d watched more than once when K.T. came over—but Officer Lincoln and Val and Nick had loved them. Occasionally Nick or K.T. would see some drug dealer’s car that vaguely resembled the erroneously labeled Last of the V-8 Interceptors from the ancient movies and drag the other over to the impound lot to admire it.

“You want the nitrous oxide tank, too?” asked K.T.

“I think that was Humungus’s vehicle,” said Nick. “But if you find one, I’ll take it.”

“You are nuts,” said K.T., and there followed a more ominous silence than the earlier ones.

“K.T.?”

“You realize what you’re asking me to do, Nick? Steal a car from impound for you? Have you been an ex-cop so long that you’ve forgotten that we tend to keep track of little things like that? Impounded cars and such?”

“All the heroin from the real French Connection was sto…,” began Nick.

“Oh, fuck the heroin from the French Connection case!” shouted K.T. “You’re talking about me getting thrown off the force here, Bottom. About me going to jail.”

“You’re too smart to…”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” said K.T. “If you… you and Val… were running away from these Vast Invisible Powers that you say framed you, where would you go that they couldn’t reach you?”

It was Nick’s turn to be silent.

“Oh, shit,” said K.T. after a moment. “The good ol’ Republic of Texas doesn’t take in addicts and felons, Nick. It’s almost impossible to get into that crazy country. You have to be a combination of James Bond and Albert Schweitzer just to get considered. You know that! How many perps have we chased who headed for Texas only to be turned back at the Texhoma border portal and nabbed by the Oklahoma cops?”

“Yeah.” Suddenly Nick was impossibly weary. He just wanted to crawl back into the lice-and bedbug-infested flophouse/flashcave and go to sleep on the filthy floor.

“Call me sometime next week, Nick. Maybe we could figure something else out and…”

“I need the car tomorrow, K.T. By noon, if possible. After tomorrow is too late. Tomorrow night will be too late.”

Detective Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln said nothing.

After a minute, Nick said, “Good night, K.T. Sorry for waking you,” and broke the connection.

Nick opened his eyes. Twenty minutes until they were scheduled to land. Sato still sat with his eyes closed and arms crossed, but was no longer snoring. Nick had no idea whether he was awake or not.

He studied Sato’s face as the sound of the Airbus 310/360’s twin engines dropped in pitch and the plane began jolting in its rough descent into the never-forgiving thermals and downdrafts of Colorado’s Front Range.

Nick had been most worried about getting to see Advisor Daichi Omura before he had to leave, but in the end, Omura set up the interview and demanded to see him.

This time, after Nick had surrendered his Glock and suffered the various indignities of high-tech and no-tech searches, he realized that there was no special reason that Omura should let him go if he didn’t want to. This might be the permanent last stop on his five-day Los Angeles tour.

Except for the fact that both this former Getty Center and Nakamura’s beautiful Japanese home were on mountaintops, the setting with Omura couldn’t have been more different than it was with Nakamura.

A smiling young man, no bodyguard, politely led Nick to a vast but strangely cozy room—the sense of coziness probably created by the intimate lighting and clusters of modern furniture set tastefully around the large space. Exquisite paintings decorated the walls (it had been the Getty Art Museum, after all), and the amazing Richard Meier modernist buildings situated on the double ridgetop, the 24 acres of campus, and the more than 600 acres of carefully planted trees and shrubs surrounding the campus were all promised to be returned to the people of Los Angeles once the current national emergency was over.

There was no sign of that emergency ending soon, and in the meantime, Advisor Omura and his delegation determined the future of not only California but of Oregon and Washington from these rooms.

While he waited for Omura to arrive, Nick allowed himself to be stunned by the view through the 30-foot-wide south window. This main building was 900 feet above the I-405 that cut past its feet and dropped down into Los Angeles to the south and to the San Fernando Valley to the north, but it seemed to be perched miles above Los Angeles. Toward the eastern horizon, Nick could see smoke rising from the looted wasteland that had been East Los Angeles. He could only imagine this view at night with the solid carpet of city lights close in and the complex constellations farther out.

Daichi Omura entered alone and Nick got to his feet, forcing himself not to wince from either his damaged ribs or the surprisingly painful gouge through the back of his left calf. A CHP medic at Dale Ambrose’s Glendale barracks had put an elastic corset-plus-tape thing on Nick for the cracked ribs, told him that the corset really wouldn’t help all that much, congratulated him on just cracking and not fully breaking the ribs, and then dressed the leg wound. Now Nick hurt more than before the medical treatment.

Omura was wearing a black gym suit and running shoes. Where Hiroshi Nakamura had been tall for a Japanese man, Daichi Omura couldn’t have been an inch over five feet. Where Advisor Nakamura had been vital in his mid or late sixties, Omura seemed far more lively and animated in his early eighties. Omura had no hair; his head was not only as bald as an egg, but gave the sense of ovoid perfection that only an egg and a very, very few human beings’ skulls could project. That perfect, tanned egg had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes.

Where Nick had once noted to himself, in his cop’s way, that Hiroshi Nakamura smiled the way a politician smiled—profoundly, whitely, perfectly, and totally superficially—a few minutes with Daichi Omura gave Nick the sense that this man could swap stories after a few drinks and laugh sincerely at his own jokes as well as at others’.

Advisor Nakamura had struck Nick as someone who had studied the subtleties of how to project wealth, power and destiny; Advisor Omura impressed Nick the way he’d always imagined Franklin Delano Roosevelt affecting people around him—as someone born to wealth and power, who wore them as comfortably as he wore patched old tweed jackets and dirty running shoes, as a man who laughed at the very idea of destiny even as he accepted his own as he would any other duty. But—Nick suspected—he accepted all of that duty and destiny joyously, even the tragic parts.

Nick knew this was a hell of a lot of impressions to file away in thirty seconds of looking at a short old man; maybe a function of fatigue and flashback withdrawal. He was trying to replace addiction with half-assed profundity, but he didn’t think it was going to work.

“Would you like a drink, Mr. Bottom?” asked Omura. “I would. I drank some water after my pathetic little two-mile run, but I could use a real drink now. It’s only four p.m., but we could pretend we’re in New York.”

“Whatever you’re having, sir.”

“You don’t have to say ‘sir’ to me, Mr. Bottom. May I call you Nick?”

“Yes, Omura-sama.”

The old man had walked over to a small assortment of liquor bottles on a marble counter near the north wall of books, but now he paused. “You’ve learned the honorific we Japanese use toward people we respect. Especially our elders. I appreciate that, Nick.” He began pouring Scotch in two glasses, not asking Nick if he wanted ice and not providing any from the small ice bucket. “Did you refer to your employer as Nakamura-sama?”

“No, I never have,” Nick said truthfully.

“Good,” said Omura and handed Nick his glass and took his seat on a sofa opposite. He waved Nick to his seat on the facing sofa.

“We have several important things we need to discuss, Nick,” said Omura. “Where do you think we should start?”

“I presume you’ll want to discuss the charges of my son’s involvement in the attack on you at the Disney Center on seventeen September, Omura-sama.”

The old man shook his head. “It’s not one of the truly important things we need to discuss today, Nick, but I certainly understand why you’d want to get it out of the way. Do you think your son, Val, was involved in that attempt to murder me a week ago today?”

Nick had sipped the single-malt Scotch. He noticed only distantly that it was strong and infinitely subtle, obviously twenty-five years old or older and of a quality he’d never encountered before. None of that mattered as he used the few seconds of subterfuge in tasting the Scotch to mask his wild mental scrambling to find the best response to Omura’s question. Something told Nick—based on no empirical evidence yet whatsoever—that this old man probably possessed the most earthquake-proof bullshit detector of any man or woman Nick had ever met.

“I’ve become convinced that my son ran with that particular flashgang that attacked you, Omura-sama,” Nick said slowly, carefully. “But from things said by people—and from everything I know about my son’s character—I don’t believe Val was involved in the actual firing at you that night. My best guess is that he ran from it… that he never had any intention of harming you.”

“My forensics people are all but certain that a bullet from your son’s weapon killed the Coyne boy, in the tunnels but some distance from their ambush site. No… what’s the English words… no slugs from that weapon were found among all the other bullets and flechettes recovered at the site of the ambush itself. You’re a detective. What is your opinion of that, Nick?”

“I have no… no solid evidence, Omura-sama, but that looks to be the case—that my son didn’t shoot during the ambush, but did shoot William Coyne some distance away down the tunnel. Val had been given a nine-millimeter Beretta semiautomatic pistol and my best guess is that he shot the Coyne boy three times with it.”

“So your son, Val, is a killer,” Omura said quietly, his voice as flat and featureless as a leveled blade.

Nick couldn’t respond to that other than to nod. He gulped more Scotch and didn’t taste it at all.

“Nick, do you think he was attempting to protect me by shooting the Coyne boy?”

Nick looked at the old man’s tanned, smooth, hairless face. Other than a slight residual impression of pleasantness, there was no expression there at all. None. Yet somehow Nick knew that everything teetered in the balance depending upon how he answered this question.

“No, sir,” Nick said firmly. “There’s no sign that Val shot the other boy to protect you or anyone else. Coyne was shot too far from the drain opening, for one thing.”

“Why, then?” asked Omura.

Nick shrugged. “Something between the two of them is my hunch. What I want to believe is that Billy Coyne, who had quite a history of violence—including the rape of children—came after Val for some reason, perhaps because Val had run from the ambush scene, and my son had to shoot to protect himself. But that’s only a father’s wish, sir.”

Omura nodded. “Then the issue is closed. I’ve already directed my security people and the Los Angeles Police Department to cease their search for your son. And right now there are much more important things for you and me to discuss.”

Nick could only blink. More important things? He blurted out, “Do you have any idea where my son is, Omura-sama?”

The Advisor set down his glass and opened his palms as if to show he had nothing to hide. “I do not know his whereabouts, nor do I have any clue, Nick. If I did, I would tell you. If my security people had tracked your son down and… executed him… I would tell you the truth even about that.”

And you’d die here and now, by my bare hands, thought Nick. And as he looked at Daichi Omura, he knew that the old man was aware of that fact. No security guard could break into the room and kill Nick before Nick had snapped Omura’s neck.

“Shall we speak of the more important matters?” said Omura. He picked up his glass of Scotch again.

“Sure,” said Nick, his throat still tight. “What are they?”

“First, your involvement in this struggle between me and Hiroshi Nakamura and Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev and many others. Are you beginning to feel like a pawn on a chess board, Nick?”

Nick laughed. It was probably the easiest, most relaxed laugh that had escaped him in weeks. “I feel more like a piece of lint that’s blown onto a chess board, Omura-sama.”

“So you feel powerless,” said the old man, studying him. “And as if you have no moves left.”

“A few moves, maybe,” admitted Nick. “But they don’t get me anywhere. It’s like when the king’s under check and can only shuffle back and forth in the same squares.”

“That results in a stalemate,” said Omura.

“Well, I don’t see how to force anything as grand and bold as a stalemate,” said Nick.

Omura smiled. “A minute ago you were a piece of lint blown onto the chess board by mistake. Now you are a king under check. Which metaphor is it, Nick?”

“I was always piss-poor at metaphors, Omura-sama. And, as must be obvious, I know dick-all about chess.”

It was Omura’s turn to laugh.

“One thing,” said Nick. “In Santa Fe, Don Noukhaev was blathering something about me—for a short time before I died, at least—being in the position to affect the lives of millions of people. I assumed it was just more Noukhaev bullshit. But is there any sense or truth to what he was saying?”

“Yes, Nick, there is,” Omura said softly. He did not explain further. After a minute he said, “By tomorrow evening, my spies tell me, Hiroshi Nakamura will have returned to his aerie above Denver and will demand that you tell him exactly who murdered his son. Are you able to do that, Nick?”

Nick paused again, this time not to consider dissembling but just to sort out the truth of what he thought. “Not yet, Omura-sama,” said Nick. “But perhaps by this time tomorrow night.”

The elderly Advisor smiled again. “And perhaps the horse will learn to talk, eh, Nick?”

Nick, who’d heard the folktale from Dara, also had to smile. “Yeah, something like that.”

This is where Omura said, “If you go back to Denver, Bottom-san, you will die,” and had warned Nick that “Colonel” Sato would be waiting that night at the John Wayne Airport. It made Nick physically shiver.

“If I admit that I haven’t really figured out who Keigo Nakamura’s killer was, Advisor Nakamura will have me killed,” said Nick.

“Yes.” The syllable ended in a sort of hiss from Omura.

“If I do find the final evidence I need to finger the killer by tomorrow night, Nakamura will still order me killed,” said Nick.

“Yes.”

“Why?” said Nick. “Why kill me if I’ve done what he hired me to do? Why not just pay me—or don’t pay me? I guess I screwed the pay-me option when I took a tiny advance against that payment to get my ass out here to L.A., but why not just let me go back to my little flashback-riddled life?”

Omura looked at him in silence for a long moment. “I believe you know the answer to that already, Nick.”

Nick did, and knowing it brought him nothing but nausea. “I know too much,” he said at last. “I’ll be a danger to Nakamura and his plans to become Shogun.”

“Hai,” agreed the old man.

“What can I do?” asked Nick and immediately despised the desperate whiny undertone in his own voice. He’d always hated perps, witnesses, or even victims who whined like that. The pathetic squeak of a rat in a trap.

“You can stay in Los Angeles,” said Omura, still watching him carefully. “Under my protection.”

“Nakamura would send assassins—like Sato—until I was finally killed.”

“Yes,” said Omura. “You could flee—New or Old Mexico. South America. Canada.”

“Someone like Sato would find me within months. Weeks.”

“Yes.”

“And I can’t leave Val and his grandfather behind… to the mercy of… whomever.”

“But you have no assurance your son and father-in-law are even alive, Nick.”

“No, but… still…,” said Nick. Everything he said sounded pathetic to him.

Both men had finished their Scotch. Advisor Omura did not offer to refill the glasses. Outside the amazing window wall, the sun moved lower toward the Pacific Ocean and a late-September sunset.

Nick felt no rush to leave since Dale Ambrose had promised to get him to the John Wayne Airport in time. Nick had already dumped the Nissan Menlo Park, leaving it at the curb in South Central L.A. with the keys in the ignition. It had been a racist move and the best one. The interview with the California–Oregon–Washington Advisor must be over, Nick knew, but between the Scotch and his exhaustion—and the comfortable room with its beautiful view—Nick decided he’d get up only when Omura reminded him that the interview was over.

“Did you know, Nick,” said Omura at last, “that Hideki Sato had, for years, an American-born mistress… no, mistress is not the right word. Consort or concubine is closer to the meaning of our word sobame.”

“Oh?” said Nick. Why is the old man telling me this?

“By all accounts he loved her very much. His own wife of many years, Sato sees only twice a year upon formal family occasions.”

“Yes?”

Omura said nothing else. Nick felt the way he had in junior high school when he’d attempted a conversation with a pretty girl and simply ran out of things to say.

“You said Sato had a concubine… a relationship with her… for many years, Omura-sama. Had, past tense. It’s over?” Nick tried to imagine Sato feeling and showing love for anyone or anything. He failed.

“Hai,” Omura said with Japanese harshness on the syllable, slashing it like a blade. “She died some years ago.”

“Died… violently?” asked Nick, trying to find a handle on this line of discussion.

“Oh, no. Of leukemia. It was said that Sato-san was devastated. His own two sons, by his wife, both died in battle in the last decade, died as military advisors early in the Chinese civil war. It is said that Sato mourned his boys, but that his mourning for his… concubine… was deeper, darker, and continues to this day.”

“What was her name, Omura-sama?”

The Advisor looked at him. “I forget her name, Nick.” The old man seemed to be saying I’m lying with his gaze and tone… but why?

“They had a child together,” continued Omura. “A daughter. She was, by all reports, quite beautiful. And almost completely Western-looking, with only the slightest hint of the Japanese race in her appearance.”

Nick was totally lost. He found it hard to believe that Sato could love anyone, but especially not a child that didn’t look Japanese. Was this some sort of riddle he was supposed to solve?

“You used the past tense again, Omura-sama,” Nick said softly. “Is the daughter born to Sato’s late concubine also dead?”

“Hai.”

“Also from natural causes?” Nick heard his old detective voice working: stomp all around the missing piece with a thousand stupid questions until all the vegetation is flattened and what you’re looking for stands out.

Or doesn’t.

Omura leaned forward. He didn’t answer the question, at least not directly. “Hideki Sato, as you know, Nick, is a daimyo in his own right, with vassals and soldiers and keiretsu interests of his own. But Hiroshi Nakamura is his liege lord. Sato is Nakamura’s vassal.”

“Yes?”

“So when daimyo Hideki Sato’s own powers and influence became too great for Nakamura’s comfort, he demanded—in the best feudal Nipponese tradition from our own Middle Ages, you understand—that Colonel Sato hand over his beloved daughter to be held as a sort of captive, a hostage to Sato’s continued loyalty and service, as it were.”

“Jesus,” whispered Nick.

Omura nodded. “I believe this sort of taking your vassals’ or enemies’ most beloved children was a common thing in Western feudal times as well.”

“But this is the twenty-first century…,” began Nick in self-righteous tones but quickly shut up. Most of the thirty-plus years of this century had been one giant leap backward toward barbarism and clans and czars and theocracies and warlords and a more violent but also more stable feudal system everywhere in the world, the United States not excluded.

“She died in Nakamura’s captivity?” said Nick. There was something important here, if he could only find it and dig it out.

“Let us say that she arranged to take her own life,” said Omura. Even his eyes looked sad. “Out of shame.”

“Shame for being a hostage?” asked Nick. “For being… what? Sato’s child? For doing something wrong? I don’t get it.”

Omura said nothing.

“I would think that the Sato I know would’ve gone nuts,” said Nick at last. “Gone nuts and tried to kill Nakamura and everyone else even remotely involved in his daughter’s death.”

Omura shook his head. “You do not understand us, Nick. In twenty years, we have largely returned to bushido and our earlier form of feudal life and thinking. It will be what helps us survive as a culture… as a people. If a man is ready to give or even take his own life for his liege lord, he must also be willing to sacrifice his entire family if that is his lord and master’s will.”

“Jesus,” Nick said again. “So Sato did nothing about his daughter’s death?”

“I did not say that,” murmured Omura. “I merely said that he sought no revenge. There is one other thing we must discuss before you leave, Nick.”

Nick glanced at his watch. It was getting late. Ambrose would have to push it to get him to the John Wayne Airport in time. “Yes, sir?”

“Do you understand why Nippon is engaged in the war in China, Nick?”

“I think I do, Omura-sama. Japan had all but underbred itself out of existence by the beginning of this century… at least it was on the path toward doing so. By pretending to be UN peacekeepers when China tore itself apart in this civil war and general collapse—and by hiring American troops to play that role—Japan’s sort of reinvigorating itself with almost a billion young Chinese to do their work. New ports. New products. New workforce. But in a two-tier sort of Greater Japan, with you Japanese nationals always in the upper tier.”

“But not in thinking of the Chinese and others as slaves as before,” Omura said quickly. “Not this time. This Daitoa Senso—this Greater East Asia War—will not include a Rape of Nanking. Nor will it end with a second attempt by the Japanese to become shido minzoku—‘the world’s foremost people.’ ”

Nick shrugged. He didn’t really care that much what or how the Japanese people thought of themselves.

“But all that is mere preparation,” said Omura.

“Preparation for what?”

“For the real war, Nick.”

“The real war with… China? India? What’s left of Russia? Nuevo Mexico? Not America, certainly.” Nick was confused.

Omura shook his head and got easily to his feet. The little man seemed to balance on the balls of his sneakered feet like a boxer or athlete. Nick stood up, but in stages, and painfully.

“The coming war—and it will come in the next five years, Nick—will be a total war, an existential war, a nuclear war,” Daichi Omura said as he took Nick by the elbow and began leading him toward the door. “That culture or ours will inherit the earth. Only one culture will survive this war and determine humanity’s future, Nick. And it cannot be theirs. It is why we need to settle the issue of who will be Shogun soon.”

“Holy shit,” said Nick and stopped in his tracks. Omura gently moved him along. Outside, the sun was setting and the L.A. basin and its surviving tall buildings glowed gold. Sunlight glinted back from windshields on the remaining freeways. “Nuclear war, Omura-sama? With who? And why? For God’s sake, why? And what does this have to do with…”

Omura silenced him with a gentle hand on Nick’s back. “Bottom-san, if you do see Colonel Sato, would you please give my greetings to him in the following way? Say to him, as one old chess opponent to another, In this world there is a tree without any roots; / Its yellow leaves send back the wind. Can you remember that, Bottom-san?”

Nick said, “In this world there is a tree without any roots; / Its yellow leaves send back the wind.”

Omura opened the door and saw his guest through it. “You are a smart man, Nick Bottom. This is one reason—although not the important reason—that Hiroshi Nakamura hired you to solve the murder of his son. Certainly you are up to the challenge of solving the larger mysteries as well, especially since they are all one. Good luck, Nick.”

Nick shook the old man’s hand—a firm, dry, affectionate handshake—and then the door was closed in his face.

“We are landing, gentlemen,” said the child-faced flight attendant. Her kimono made small rustling sounds as she cleared the last of their glasses and glided into the aft cabin.

Sato was awake and had been looking at Nick as he’d slept. Nick rubbed his eyes and face, feeling the stubble on his cheeks and chin.

The A310/360 landed gently at Denver International Airport and taxied to the Nakamura private hangar.

Nick grabbed what few things he’d brought aboard. He left the nylon bag of flashback vials on the floor.

Sato raised one eyebrow as he waved Nick to go down the stairway first. “I have a vehicle waiting. Can I drop you at your condominium, Bottom-san?”

“I’ll phone a cab.”

“Very good. I shall notify the hangar manager that you can wait inside until your cab arrives,” said Sato. A long, black, hydrogen-powered Lexus hummed to a stop on the tarmac and two of Sato’s men stepped out. One held the rear door for Sato while the other watched the perimeter with a professional bodyguard’s quick flicks of glances. Another samurai, whom Nick also recognized from the trip to Santa Fe, was at the wheel of the Lexus.

“Oh,” said Nick, “Omura-sama sends you his greetings, Sato-san. He told me to say to you, as one old chess opponent says to the other, In this world there is a tree without any roots; / Its yellow leaves send back the wind. I think that’s the phrase.”

Nick had expected something from Sato—surprise, irritation—at hearing that he’d met with the California Advisor, but the big man showed no reaction whatsoever. “Good night, Bottom-san,” said the security chief. “We shall see you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow,” said Nick.