“Not at a goddamned target or rabbit or some such, I mean,” said Begay, taking his full attention off the road ahead and laying it on Val. “I mean at a living person. A man.”
“Yeah,” breathed Val.
“Hit him?”
“Yeah.”
“Kill him?” Begay’s eyes were flinty lie detectors.
Val tried to swallow. Couldn’t.
“Yeah.”
They were approaching the interchange with I-25, but the old one had been blown up. There was a temporary gravel ramp. The convoy was shifting down, bouncing down the grade in unison.
“Did he deserve it?” asked Henry Big Horse Begay.
Val started to answer with the same syllable he’d been using and then stopped. This question had been most of what had kept him awake at night the last week. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t know,” said Val. “Probably not. But I think it was either him or me. I chose me.”
Begay drove south on I-25 in silence for several minutes.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’m gonna be coming back through here—Ăttsé Hashké permitting—around October twenty-seven. Supposed to be at the big loading docks at the South Broadway GOVCO Center all that afternoon. I’ll look for you. Schedule now says the convoy leaves at eight p.m. You ain’t there, I won’t ever look for you again.”
“I’ll be there,” said Val.
1.13
Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico—Thursday, Sept. 16
THE REST OF THE VOYAGE to Santa Fe had gone without incident with paramilitary “technicals”—pickups with large-caliber machine guns mounted in the back—escorting them the last seventy miles or so from Las Vegas, NM, to Santa Fe.
The three mercenaries, Sato, and Nick stayed at the Japanese consulate in Santa Fe, formerly the old La Fonda Hotel right on the plaza. Joe’s remains were taken into the basement of the complex for cremation.
Upon arrival, Sato had led Nick and the others to the consul’s medical clinic—better equipped and more modern and clean than any medical facility left in Denver, Nick was sure; while Nick and the others had a quick checkup, Sato had his burns and cuts treated and his serious fracture was set into one of those expensive new polymorphic sports casts—a smart-cast, they called it, too expensive for any Americans other than the top athletes, or rather, those athlete templates for their digital avatars—that allowed full use of the arm even as the bones healed.
Nick’s interview with Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev at his hacienda compound outside of town was scheduled for 10 a.m. The invitation had gone to Mr. Nakamura and the specifics were clear—neither the Oshkosh vehicle nor Hideki Sato was to come within ten miles of the don’s home. Nick had been told to be at the St. Francis Cathedral—formally, he knew, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi (and, Dara had told him when they’d come to Santa Fe on vacation early in their marriage, the cathedral which the archbishop spent his life seeing constructed in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop)—at 9:30 a.m. Alone.
The half-block walk from the consulate to the cathedral took Nick about one minute. And that only because he dawdled to study the 145-year-old church from a distance before crossing the street to stand on its stairs. Nick remembered Dara telling him that the French Romanesque cathedral with its twin towers was begun by French-born archbishop John Baptiste Lamy around 1869 and discontinued and dedicated in 1887 without the spires because they’d run out of funds.
It had always looked odd—doubly truncated—to Nick Bottom.
It was a warm, sunny day and Santa Fe smelled as it always had to Nick in the autumn: a mixture of the sweet aroma of burning piñon pine logs, dried leaves from the tall, ancient cottonwoods that lined many of the streets in the old section, and sage. Dara had once said that there wasn’t a better-smelling city in all of the United States.
Back when Santa Fe was in the United States.
Now, Nick knew, the wealthy city wasn’t part of any nation. Nuevo Mexico claimed titular control of the town, but Santa Fe had enough money to hire its own small army to maintain its independence. Besides still being a second-home capital for movie stars, famous writers, and Wall Street types, Santa Fe had received heavy Japanese investment in recent years and the Japanese didn’t choose to live in a Mexican village.
So Santa Fe had become a modern small-town version of World War II’s Lisbon, with spies, double agents, retired soldiers of fortune, and international ne’er-do-wells like Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev making the lovely little adobe-cottage mountain town, nestled in its fragrant valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos, one of their homes and their center of operations.
The black Mercedes S 550—all-electric or super-expensive hydrogen drive—whispered to a stop at the curb. There were three men in the car, all dressed identically in white Havana shirts; their race might be hard to pin down, Nick thought, but their profession was easy to see. They were hard men. Hard beyond the everyday hardness of mere mercenaries. These were fifth-generation killers from another continent.
The man in the backseat opened the curb-side door and beckoned Nick inside.
Nick didn’t speak and neither did any of the three men in guayabera Cuban shirts—the kind of formal, perforated white shirts a Cuban might wear to a funeral—as they drove north out of the city on Bishops Lodge Road.
Nick knew this bumpy old backroad ran for about six miles to the little crossroads village of Tesuque, once the address of more than a few aging movie stars and starlets. This was a good place to hide large homes in the hills above the narrow, heavily forested valley, and Nick assumed that Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s hacienda would be one of those compounds between Santa Fe and the Tesuque crossroads.
It was.
About four miles out, the Mercedes turned to the right, followed a narrow gravel road up a runoff gully, and came out onto a wider, asphalt-paved driveway that switchbacked up to the top of the hill, moving from a cottonwood forest to brown-grass meadow and then back into pine forest again. Nick noticed camouflaged bunkers set back along the switchbacks; assuming that this driveway was the main way in, this would be an eminently defensible position against vehicles or ground forces.
It turned out that the don’s hacienda had more security levels than Mr. Nakamura’s mountaintop mansion. There were three walls with gates—the half-mile spaces between the walls and fences true killing zones, covered by visible towers and inevitable hidden gun positions—and two CMRIs for the car and three for Nick and his minders on foot.
Once they reached what he presumed was the main building, Nick was sent on into a blastproofed windowless room where more men in guayaberas fluoroscoped him, frisked him, and cavity-searched him. He was in a truly foul mood by the time the last guayabera’d guard silently led him into a huge room with tall windows and told him to take a seat. Because of the bookcases and gigantic leather-topped desk, Nick assumed that this was Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s study.
The first thing I have to do when he comes in, thought Nick, is ask him what I can call him. That Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev business gets old fast.
Nick had taken a seat but rose when the door opened and someone entered, but it wasn’t the don. Four more guards came in, the tallest, oldest man coming straight at Nick and signifying silently that Nick should raise his arms again.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Nick. “The other guys have already…”
He didn’t see the guard behind him or the knockout taser. But he felt it.
His last thought, falling, before his neurons became as totally and painfully scrambled as his nerve endings, was… Fuc…
Then he was gone.
NICK CAME TO IN slow stages, as one always does after being tasered. The first stage was confusion followed by a slow and muddled focus on trying not to urinate down your own pant leg. The second stage was pain and twitching and a little less confusion. The third stage for Nick now was trying to breathe.
He was trussed up, ankles and wrists—hands in front of him, which
had allowed for some circulation—and blindfolded and gagged and there was some sort of cloth over the top half of his body. It took him a minute or two to realize that he hadn’t gone deaf; there were sound-deadening earphones over his ears.
But he could still tell that he was in a moving vehicle. Vibration and the body’s sense of balance as the vehicle took turns and jounced over rough parts told him that. So he was either in the trunk or backseat of a truck or car, being driven… somewhere.
More security or am I a hostage? wondered Nick when he could put together a full thought. Neither made much sense—why invite him to the hacienda and then shanghai him to another meeting place? Hell of a way to treat a guest. But what value did he have as a hostage? Did Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev possibly think that Nakamura would pay to get him back?
Or did the Chechen don believe that Nick might know something important? If that was the answer, Nick knew that there was probably a short future ahead of him and one that might include torture as well as execution.
Do I know anything that could be important to this Russian gunrunner, drug dealer, and would-be empire maker? If he did, Nick sure couldn’t think of what it might be.
As a former cop, Nick knew that the knockout tasers usually kept their targets unconscious for about fifteen minutes (if, as was more common than civilians knew, they didn’t cause a heart attack or stroke or leave you a drooling vegetable or just kill you outright). If he could time his heartbeats, he might be able to figure out how long the drive would be from the hacienda to wherever he was going to end up.
As if knowing that’s going to help you, dipshit, Nick told himself. Sato and his boys won’t be coming in like the cavalry with guns blazing. The don’s men made damn sure there were no tracking beepers on or in me and even if Sato was watching the hacienda by satellite or drone, they almost surely drove a dozen trucks out at the same time, all going different directions. Sato’d have no way of knowing which vehicle I was in.
It didn’t matter anyway, Nick realized. His heart was pounding so hard and fast that it was useless as a timekeeper. A lot of hostages, he knew, died when gagged and restrained—again through heart attacks or suffocation brought on by asthma or even a head cold, often through gagging on their own vomit. He tried not to think about any of those things and to slow his heart rate. He might need the adrenaline later; he didn’t need it now.
They’re taking me to a landfill.
That was probable, he realized, but why? Then Nick wondered how many millions or billions of men throughout history had died with that one syllable as their last living thought—Why?
Don’t get philosophical on me now, shithead. Plan your next move.
The vibration stopped. A moment later, strong hands grabbed him, pulled him up and out of something, and set him on his feet. He felt someone cut or release the binders around his ankles.
Nick saw no reason to pretend that he was still unconscious. He stood there blind and deaf and swaying. With hands around both his arms, gripping hard through the heavy bag fabric, he was half lifted, and propelled across what felt like gravel, then perhaps inside a structure and onto a hard surface—Nick’s lower body was outside the bag and he could feel a difference in the quality of air around him, more still, interior—and then down a corridor with a tiled floor, then down steps, then down another corridor.
They stopped and pressed him to sit.
The bag was removed, the earphones, the gag and blindfold, and finally the wrist binders.
Nick did the usual blinking against the light and yawning to get more air. He did resist rubbing his chafed wrists.
The men who released him—wearing guayaberas like all of Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s other chattel—left by one of the two doors.
It was a small room, windowless, bare walls, with an old metal desk in front of Nick and a few battered metal filing cabinets against one of the walls. Nick was sitting on a light metal-frame chair and there was a second one behind the desk. Both were too flimsy to be of much use to him. He thought that the place might be the basement office of a high school gym coach, save for the absence of trophies.
I’m the trophy, thought Nick.
There was nothing on the desk or atop the filing cabinets that he could use as a weapon. Nick had just struggled to his feet—still swaying—in preparation for going through the desk drawers and cabinets to find something, anything, that he could use when the second door opened and Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev came through, striding quickly to his place behind the desk.
“Sit down, my friend. Sit down,” said the don, waving Nick back into his seat.
Nick stayed standing and continued swaying. “I’m not your friend, asshole. And after that ride you can put me down as one of your enemies.”
Noukhaev laughed, showing strong, nicotine-stained teeth. “I would apologize, Nick Bottom, but you are man enough and smart enough not to accept my apologies for such indignities. You are right. It was barbarous of me and unfair to you. But warranted. Sit, sit, please.”
The older man sat but Nick remained standing. “Why was it warranted?”
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev was quite a bit older than the photos which Sato had shown him would have indicated. Nick wondered how many years it had been since Nakamura’s people or any law-enforcement or intelligence agency had managed to get a photo of this man.
“A good question,” said the deeply suntanned and wrinkled don, folding his hands on the metal desktop. “I would answer sincerely that nothing could warrant such treatment of a guest, Nick Bottom, but you are, of course, something more than a mere guest. Your employer, Mr. Hiroshi Nakamura, has reasons—good reasons, both political and strategic—for wishing that I no longer existed. He also has, under his control, certain orbital hyperkinetic weapons that the Japanese whimsically refer to, I believe, as gee-bears. Have you heard this term?”
“Yes,” said Nick, suspecting that Noukhaev knew all about Sato’s use of the things against the tanks the day before.
“So you see,” said the don, “it was tempting fate to give Mr. Nakamura absolute knowledge of my presence at the hacienda at any specific moment on any specific day.” He grinned. “Yes, you are thinking, Nick Bottom—This man is paranoid—and I would agree with you. I ask myself only, Am I paranoid enough? Please sit down before you fall.”
Nick sat before he fell.
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev was reminding him of someone. He got it almost at once—Anthony Quinn, that twentieth-century movie actor that he and Val had liked—not so much because Noukhaev looked like Quinn, but because the voice and slight accent were similar, the quirk of the mouth into an arrogantly amused smile was similar, and because Noukhaev was hard to place ethnically, the same way that Anthony Quinn had played Mexicans, Indians, Arabs, and Greeks. The don also had a powerful body resembling the late actor’s—compact but broad-chested, massive forearms, a man’s strong hands.
Nick said, “So where are we now?”
Noukhaev laughed as if Nick had made a joke. “Somewhere safe. Somewhere that I believe even your omnipotent Mr. Nakamura does not know of.”
“He’s not my omnipotent Mr. Nakamura,” Nick said sourly. “And if he were omnipotent, he sure as hell wouldn’t have had to hire me to help find out who killed his kid.”
“Exactly!” cried Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev, holding up one brown finger. “Why did he hire you, Nick Bottom?”
“I have a hunch you want to enlighten me on why Nakamura hired me,” said Nick.
“You must know, Nick Bottom,” said the don. “And if you do not know, you must suspect.”
“I suspect everyone and no one,” said Nick. He’d wanted to say that line since he was nine years old. Nick guessed that it was probably the oxygen deprivation while he was gagged and bound that prompted him to say it now.
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev squinted at him for a silent moment. Then the older man threw his head back and laughed uproariously.
Shit, he is nuts, thought Nick.
Noukhaev opened a lower desk drawer, removed a box, offered the box to Nick. Cigars. Nick shook his head and the don chose one for himself, went through the usual stupid ritual of biting, spitting (Nick had learned through movies that more sophisticated types cut the ends of the cigar off, or had their butlers do it), and lighting the expensive stogie with a lighter he produced from his khakis’ pockets.
Nick still thought the room was in a basement or deep underground, but the ventilation was very good. He got only a slight whiff of the cigar smoke.
“Why would one of the most powerful men on the planet hire you, Nick Bottom?” Noukhaev said rhetorically. Nick hated it when speakers got rhetorical. It insulted your intelligence.
“Nakamura has already carried out multiple investigations of his son’s murder,” continued the don, sitting back in his chair and exhaling blue-white smoke. “The Denver police—both before and after you—the CBI, the FBI, Homeland Security, his own security people, the Keisatsu-ch…”
If the Japanese National Police Agency had investigated Keigo Nakamura’s murder, it was news to Nick. For most of its history the Keisatsu-ch had just overseen and regulated local Japanese police departments—mostly setting standards, a bureaucracy with none of the powers of the FBI, not even agents or officers of its own—but in the last few decades since It All Hit The Fan and Japan had ended up on top (or at least near the top), the National Police Agency had grown real teeth, both with its new secret-police security agency, the Keibi-kyoku, and its overseas intelligence agency, the Gaiji Jh-bu. Beyond knowing their names and hearing and reading that the agency’s subdepartments were lethal, Nick knew nothing about them.
“… and then Mr. Nakamura hires you, Nick Bottom,” Noukhaev was concluding. He seemed to be enjoying the cigar. “Why do you think he did that?”
Full circle, thought Nick. He said, “Obviously not to solve his son’s murder, Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. That leaves… what? To set you up as a target in this meeting at your hacienda so Mr. Nakamura could gee-bear you to dust and ashes? But there’s a problem with that, isn’t there?”