“No,” said Nick. “You weren’t.”
He got up to go.
“I’ll see you to the gate,” said Danny Oz as he lit a new cigarette.
They walked out of the tent to find that storm clouds had come in from over the mountains. The rusted steel skeleton of the two-hundred-foot-tall Tower of Doom loomed over them. A rafting ride called Disaster Canyon had been all but dismantled for building materials behind them. From some tent or hovel or abandoned ride came that Jewish-sounding chanting or cry of grief again.
Nearing the gate, Danny Oz said, “Please give my best to your wife, Dara, Mr. Bottom.”
Nick whirled. “What?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention it? I met her six years ago. A delightful woman. Please give her my warmest regards.”
The 9mm Glock was in Nick’s hand in an instant, the muzzle pressed against Danny Oz’s temple as Nick slammed into the frail poet, shoving him up against a metal stanchion, Nick’s forearm tight and heavy across Oz’s throat. “What the fuck are you talking about? Where did you meet her? How?”
The pistol had gotten the old poet’s attention, but Nick could see something like eagerness in the man’s eyes. He wanted Nick to pull the trigger. That was fine with Nick.
“I… met her… I… can’t talk… with your… forearm…”
Nick let up the pressure on his forearm slightly and increased the pressure on the muzzle of the Glock. The circle of steel had broken the parchment-brittle skin on the dying man’s forehead.
“Talk,” said Nick.
“I met Mrs. Bottom on the day that Keigo Nakamura interviewed me,” said Oz. “She was here about an hour and I introduced myself and…”
“My wife was here with Keigo Nakamura?” Nick thumbed the hammer back.
“No, no… at least I don’t believe so. She and a man were standing back with the crowd but apart from it slightly, watching the interview—which was done quite publicly, you understand, so the old merry-go-round would be in the background of the shot.”
“Who was the man with her?”
“I have no idea.”
“What did he look like?”
“Short, heavy, early middle age, almost bald. He carried a beat-up old briefcase and had a mustache and wore old-fashioned glasses. The kind without the rims.”
Nick knew who that was—Harvey Cohen, the assistant district attorney for whom Dara had worked as executive assistant. But why the hell were those two here at Six Flags Over the Jews on the day that Keigo Nakamura interviewed Oz?
“Did you see the woman you thought was my wife talking to Keigo or his people?”
“No,” said Oz.
“What did she say to you when you introduced yourself?”
“Just how interesting the interview had been, how nice the day was for October… small talk. But when she said that her name was Dara Fox-Bottom, we discussed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She said that her husband was a detective for the Denver Police Department.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you mention meeting her when I interviewed you six years ago?” demanded Nick, pressing the muzzle of the Glock even deeper into Oz’s bleeding forehead.
“It didn’t seem appropriate then,” gasped Oz, still having trouble breathing even though Nick had let up most of the pressure from his forearm. “There was that woman detective with you when you interviewed me… I mean, I didn’t think there was anything wrong about your wife being here during a workday with that short, balding gentleman, but since I was a suspect in Keigo Nakamura’s murder, I thought it best then not to mention it.”
“Why mention her now, then?” demanded Nick. His finger was on the trigger, not the trigger guard.
“Because of our conversation today… about Bottom’s dream,” said Oz. “Shoot me if you’re going to shoot me, Mr. Bottom. But otherwise let me go.”
A minute later, Nick did. There was nothing else to find out. It was starting to rain when Nick turned his back on the dying Jew and on all the other dying Jews and left the camp.
Out in the parking lot next to Nick’s gelding, Hideki Sato was waiting. Nick ignored the security man and got in his car, slammed the door shut, and thumbed the ignition.
Nothing. The gauges showed a flat charge. The car was totally dead, even though the batteries should have given him another dozen miles or so today.
“Fuck,” screamed Nick Bottom. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
He was out of the car and clicking off the safety of the Glock. Sato stepped back behind his own vehicle.
Nick put five shots through the hood into the batteries and long-emasculated engine, six shots through the windshield, and four more shots into the front tires and hood again. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
He kept squeezing the trigger but the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
Four guards came running from the entrance gate, their visors down and automatic weapons raised. Sato held up his badge and waved them away. Nick turned the Glock toward Sato but the slide was back, magazine empty.
Sato was looking at Nick’s gelding. The car was emitting some sort of murdered-battery ticking from under the hood and there came a dying hiss from the deflating tires.
“I have always wanted to do that to a car,” said Sato. He turned to Nick. “Having a bad day, are we?”
1.08
The People’s Republic of Boulder—Monday, Sept. 13
THE MOTIONLESS LINE of giant wind turbines ran along the entire visible span of the Continental Divide, from Wyoming in the north to beyond Pikes Peak a hundred and sixty miles south. The abandoned turbine-towers looked to Nick Bottom like nothing so much as a dilapidated, unpainted picket fence with each rusted picket post rising almost four hundred feet into the Colorado sky. A picket fence or—perhaps—a cage.
Growing up, Nick had loved looking at the high peaks and the snowcapped skyline of these peaks but in the past decades he’d learned to avoid looking west. Some scientist had estimated that the “greening” of the nation’s power system with wind turbines killed more than four billion migrating and night-flying birds a year. Nick always imagined huge heaps of bird carcasses at the base of these flaked and rusting turbines… back when they still worked.
The turbines had never generated enough power to earn their maintenance and upkeep, and the visible network of power cables laid across the snowfields and hard-rock face of the high peaks reminded Nick of the varicose veins on the mottled legs of a dying old man. The former EU had abandoned most of its uneconomical wind turbines just as the U.S., under its visionary new administrations, was pouring the last of its fortune into “green” technologies. The People’s Republic of Boulder now bought its actual power from one of the standardized-for-manufacture HTGC (high-temperature gas-cooled) reactors on the plains west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the city-republic’s official stance was that it still relied only on “green” power.
Nick wouldn’t have gone to the People’s Republic this afternoon to keep his appointment with Keigo interview subject Derek Dean if he’d had a choice. Given that choice, Nick would have gone back to his Cherry Creek cubie and spent hours flashing on conversations with Dara around the time of the first Oz interview six years ago. Perhaps he’d missed something she’d said at the time that would explain…
He didn’t have a choice.
Sato was driving and insisting on keeping the appointment. More than that, Sato had Nick’s next stash of flash in the backseat of the car and wasn’t going to release it to Nick until after the goddamned useless interview.
So Nick sat dumbly, not conversing with Sato, numbed by what Danny Oz had said about Dara being there during the Keigo interview, and stared at the approaching white metal cage bars of the once-proud Continental Divide.
The line of cars at the customs entrance for those heading northwest along Highway 36 to the People’s Republic was at least forty-five minutes long.
“You have your physical passport, Bottom-san?” asked Sato.
Nick nodded.
Sa
to swung the armored Honda into the empty far-left diplomatic lane, produced two black NIC Cards and their old hardcopy passports that the PRoB still demanded, and they were waved through the rest of the inspection gates in half a minute.
EVERYONE IN COLORADO ENJOYED a love-hate, love-love, or pure hate-hate relationship with what was now the People’s Republic of Boulder. Nick’s father had held strong opinions on the place.
According to the grumblings of Nick’s state patrolman dad, in the 1960s the town of Boulder and its university had been one of the national loci for drugs, sex, outdoor sports, and total rejection of authority (assuming one’s parents kept paying one’s tuition and bills). Nick’s father liked to tell his son that these midcontinent refugees from the Summer of Love grew up, grew old—still with their graying ponytails, which Nick’s dad had called dork knobs—and passed laws.
Two decades before Nick was born, the salt-and-pepper-dork-knobbed Boulder city council passed draconian laws on the city’s growth, thus almost immediately doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling housing prices and driving any true middle class out of the city. Within fifteen years, according to State Trooper Bottom, Boulder was a comfortable and self-satisfied mixture of dork-knobbed trust-fund babies and louse-infected street people.
During the 1980s the city again deliberated deeply and—with the support of the anti-Reagan, anti-defense populace—passed resolutions declaring Boulder a “nuclear-free zone.” The upshot of that effort, Nick’s father had explained, was that in all the decades since then, not a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or submarine had tied up in Boulder.
In the 1990s, the same city council—the men’s long dork knobs and the women’s short, severe Phys Ed–instructor haircuts grew grayer but the faces remained largely the same according to Nick’s father—labored for months before deciding that there would and could be no more “pets” in Boulder, Colorado. Dogs and cats were to be entrusted to human “guardians.” The changes in licensing paperwork alone cost a fortune. In old dollars.
Also in the 1990s, about the time that Nick Bottom was in third grade, the investigation of the murder of a six-year-old child named JonBenét Ramsey in her home on Christmas Day was so botched by the police, district attorney, and other authorities that almost every city official who came in contact with the case lost his or her job. Nick’s father had been fascinated with the almost total ineptitude of the JonBenét Ramsey investigation. It showed, he’d later told his teenage son, that this Boulder metro area of almost two hundred thousand people definitely had not been ready for prime time. When the case was accidentally solved by an independent investigator more than twenty-five years later—after almost all the principals, family members, and suspects were dead—the answer to the mystery was as clear and obvious as it had been on the day the body was found.
Nick was sorry that his father hadn’t lived long enough to hear the solution. He thought that his old man would have appreciated the irony.
Into the twenty-first century, the Boulder city council could never restrain itself from taking sides on issues that had nothing to do with a medium-sized city: coming out in support of Nicaraguan Marxist rebels, officially opposing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, refusing to support state laws restricting marijuana and other drug use, harboring illegal Mexican immigrants as political refugees (although there was no place in the city for low-paid immigrants to live, so after the very public “harboring” they were always quietly ejected from the city limits), and finally going on record to say that the city of Boulder would not “collaborate” with any Republican president of the United States.
Of course, Nick knew that his father’s view of Boulder—even before it had declared itself an independent republic shortly after Texas did—wasn’t fair. Despite the graying dork knobs (who were mostly dead now anyway), Boulder had once been a thriving science center. The University of Colorado at Boulder, CU, had boasted an excellent science department and was one of the few universities in the world where students actually controlled orbital satellites. (That disappeared when America’s predominance in spaceflight and satellite technology was surpassed by the Japanese, Russians, Chinese, Indians, Saudis, the New Caliphate, and Brazilians.) A beautiful 1960 modernist glass-and-sandstone structure designed by I. M. Pei up near the Flatirons—the only building allowed in the greenbelt—had been built to house NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, pronounced “En-car.”
The revelations of hoaxes and totally false data sets in Anthropogenic Global Warming studies, confessed to by scores of scientists only after hundreds of billions of dollars and euros had gone down that rat hole, followed by more scandals that led to the collapse of the Global Carbon Trading Networks and that collapse’s contribution to the Day It All Hit The Fan, had finally resulted in NCAR’s budget being reduced by 85 percent. Their new headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, were much more modest.
And there had been the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, which for decades had brought scientists with international reputations to the city. Both the NCAR building high in the greenbelt and the Bureau of Standards complex of buildings were now leased by the Naropa Institute and its Rinpoche School of Disembodied Transpersonal Wisdom.
The Old Man missed the best of it, thought Nick as they approached the city near the foothills. For it had been since die-ought-if, the Day It All Hit The Fan, that the People’s Republic of Boulder had truly come into its own.
THE FENCES AND MINEFIELDS and armed patrols and custom gates ran along the highest ridge three miles to the southeast of Boulder. As one descended into the valley beyond that last high ridge, the beauty of the city and its surroundings became more obvious. The hardwoods in the city were beginning to change color and the foothills along the giant sandstone slabs called the Flatirons were thick with green pines. The high peaks and damned wind turbines disappeared as one dropped lower toward the town. The air was cleaner and more clear than it had been in a hundred and fifty years.
No automobiles or powered vehicles of any sort were allowed in Boulder. Even the police cars and fire engines depended on bicycle power. Sato was directed to one of the underground parking garages that ran for two miles along the east-west line of Table Mesa Road. Parking was expensive since each slot was in its own bombproof cradle (and this after having to pass through two CMRI portals on the way in). From the garage, one could proceed into Boulder on foot, but since the metro area of about two hundred thousand people was almost twenty-eight square miles in size, most visitors opted for renting a city-owned Segway or—much cheaper—a bicycle, human-pulled rickshaw, pedal-yourself pedicab, or bicycle-pulled rickshaw. (Every time Nick visited the People’s Republic, he thought of how his old man would have enjoyed the irony of the city that couldn’t stand the thought of dogs and cats being degraded as “pets” having a transportation system based on human beings, mostly immigrants housed in city barracks, pulling rickshaws.)
Sato and Nick opted for a double-wide rickshaw pulled by two Malaysian men on bikes.
The ride was about three miles and Nick tried to relax as the rickshaw jolted up Table Mesa to Broadway, Broadway to Baseline, and Baseline west a half mile or so toward Chautauqua Park.
The Boulder Chautauqua had been there since 1898. Based on the idea of the original Chautauqua, in western New York, and part of the burgeoning Chautauqua Movement in the 1890s, it had been founded in Boulder by Texans who wanted a place with cottages, a dining hall, and a barn for lectures and musical events where they could escape the Texas summer heat. When Mark Twain lost his fortune through bad investments in a typesetting machine and took to the lecture circuit again just before he turned sixty, the circuit was mostly through Chautauquas around the nation. Many summer Chautauquas were mere tent cities, but a few such as the one in Boulder boasted permanent residences and large buildings for the educational, religious, and cultural lectures and courses.
This Chautauqua was perched on a grassy shelf above Boulder that backed against th
e greenbelt and a web of hiking trails. Nick had come up to Boulder with his parents when he was a little kid to hike those trails. It was still a popular hiking area for Boulderites, although occasional sniper attacks and a resurgence in the mountain lion population had somewhat reduced the number of hikers.
Much farther to their right, beyond Canyon Road at the edge of this residential district, rose the high minaret of Masjid Ahl al-Hadeeth Mosque. Boulder’s prohibition on any structure taller than five stories was more than sixty years old, but the city council had waived that restriction for the Masjid Ahl al-Hadeeth and its minaret was three times the old legal building height. Local Muslims and the New Caliphate had shown their appreciation with major financial contributions to the city and by demanding that Boulder evict any and all Jews currently living within the city limits. The city council was taking the request under advisement (and Nick had seen the online Boulder Daily Camera blog editorials arguing that there were very few Jews in Boulder anyway, so little would be lost in honoring the Muslim request). Boulder had already allowed an exemption for all Boulder Muslims—their population was now up to around 15 percent of the total with more immigration welcomed by the city—not to be tried under Colorado laws but only under sharia should they be accused of a crime.
Sato interrupted Nick’s broodings by saying, “It’s a good thing that our Advisor diplomatic status allows us to keep our weapons.”
Nick grunted.
“You did not bring an extra magazine, did you, Bottom-san,” Sato said softly.
“My daddy taught me that if fifteen isn’t enough, another fifteen or thirty won’t help,” Nick said tersely.
Sato nodded. “Indeed. But those Government Motors geldings are hard to kill. Well, you should not need your weapon here in Boulder. It is the most peaceful city in Colorado, is it not?”