“What is that, Nick Bottom?”
“It was you who called Nakamura’s people and suggested this meeting,” said Nick. “At least that’s what Hideki Sato told me. So Nakamura couldn’t have known when he hired me that you’d be inviting me down here.”
Noukhaev nodded and exhaled more smoke. “Very true. But, Nick Bottom… ‘Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.’ Do you know who said that?”
“It would have to be Sun Tzu, Don Noukhaev.”
“Ahh, you know Sun Tzu, Nick Bottom?”
“Not in the least,” said Nick. “But I’ve met a hundred arrogant, condescending bastards playing the big, tough, intellectual generals who go around quoting him as if it meant something important.”
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev froze, cigar halfway to his mouth, and Nick thought—Shit, I went too far.
He didn’t care.
Noukhaev threw his head back and laughed again. It sounded sincere.
“You are right, Nick Bottom,” growled the don after finishing his laugh and inhaling his smoke. “I was patronizing you. You were right to call me on it. But Sun Tzu did say that, and it does apply to our… ah… situation here. Hiroshi Nakamura is a general and he does know his Sun Tzu. He might well have hired you simply because he knows that I would be tempted to talk to such an underling… no offense intended, Nick Bottom.”
“None taken,” said Nick. “So is that why Nakamura hired me? If so, I guess my job’s at an end. And I failed, since if Sato and his boss watched the various trucks or Mercedeses or whatever leaving the hacienda at the same time, they’d probably know you were taking me somewhere else and call off the gee-bear strike.”
“There were eleven vans that left the hacienda at the same moment thirty-nine minutes ago, Nick Bottom,” said the don. “Hiroshi Nakamura has the resources to hit a hundred targets with his kinetic missiles. Allowing time for you to be brought into the place and for me to enter, the orbital weapons should be arriving about… now.”
Nick glanced at the ceiling. He couldn’t resist the impulse. Nor could he stop his testicles from trying to climb back up into his body. He’d seen what six gee-bears could do.
“Do you play chess, Nick Bottom?” The don’s eyes looked serious.
“Sort of. I guess I could be called a chess-duffer.”
Noukhaev nodded, although whether that was a confirmation that there was such a stupid term, Nick had no idea. The don said softly, “As a chess player, Nick Bottom, even a beginner, how would you improve the odds that Nakamura not use his weapons on the eleven possible targets?”
“I’d have each of them go to some important, public, crowded, and—if possible—historic spot,” Nick said at once. “And unload the trucks out of sight. At the St. Francis Cathedral, say, or the Loretto Chapel or the Inn of the Governors… places like that. Nakamura might still do it—what do American historical sites and American casualties mean to him or Sato?—but it might give him pause.”
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev smiled slowly and it was a different sort of smile than any he’d shown Nick before. “You are not as stupid as you look, Nick Bottom,” said the don.
“Neither are you, Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.”
There was no hesitation this time before Noukhaev’s laugh, but Nick decided to quit pressing his luck.
“No, I do not believe that Hiroshi Nakamura hired you just so that he could locate and kill me, as much as he wishes and thinks he needs to do that. No, Nakamura hired you, Nick Bottom, because he knows that you may be the only man alive who can actually solve the crime of the murder of his son, Keigo.”
What’s this? thought Nick. Heavy-handed flattery? Nick didn’t think so. Noukhaev was too smart for that and—more important—he already knew that Nick was as well. What, then?
“You need to tell me why I’m the only man who can solve Keigo’s murder,” said Nick. “Because I don’t have a fucking clue—either to who did it or to why I’d be the one to know.”
“ ‘The one who figures on victory at headquarters before even doing battle is the one who has the most strategic factors on his side,’ ” said the don and this time there was no game-playing about the provenance of the quotation.
Nick shook his head. He wanted to tell Noukhaev just how much he’d always hated people who spoke in riddles—it was one reason he wasn’t a Christian—but he resisted that impulse. He was tired and he hurt.
“Hiroshi Nakamura knew when he hired you that you probably could solve the crime that none of the American or Japanese agencies—nor his own top people—could solve,” said the old don. “How could that be, Nick Bottom?”
Nick hesitated only a second. “It has to be something about me,” he said at last. “About my past, I mean. Something I know. Something I encountered when I was a cop… something.”
“Yes. Something about you. But not necessarily something you learned when you were a detective, Nick Bottom.” The don had pulled what looked to be a mayonnaise lid from the desk drawer and continued to flick his cigar ashes into it. It was almost full.
I could have used a real ashtray as a weapon, Nick thought stupidly.
“Something in my past, then,” said Nick. He shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Because of whom you do suspect as being behind the murder,” said Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.
“Yeah.”
“And who is that?”
“Killers from one of the Japanese… whatyacallthem? Daimyos. The other corporate lords in Japan who want to be Shogun.”
“Do you know the leading keiretsu warlord clans?” asked Noukhaev.
“Yeah,” Nick said again. “I know their names.” He’d known them before Sato had recited them to him during the drive down. Why had Sato recited them to him? What was that bastard up to?
Nick said, “The seven daimyo families and keiretsu clans running modern Japan are the Munetaka, Morikune, Omura, Toyoda, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, and Yoshiake keiretsu.”
“No,” Noukhaev said flatly, no joking or feigned friendship in his voice.
“No?” said Nick. This stuff was common knowledge. It had been true even back when he was a working homicide detective with his whole department looking into the Keigo Nakamura murder. Sato may have lied to him, but…
“The keiretsu have become zaibatsu,” said the don. “Not just interrelated, clan-owned industrial conglomerates, as in the late-twentieth-century keiretsu, but zaibatsu again—clan-owned corporate conglomerates that help win the war and guide the government, just as in the first empire of Japan a hundred years ago. And there are eight leading zaibatsu-clan daimyos running Japan. Not seven, Nick Bottom, but eight. Eight powerful men who want to be Shogun in their lifetimes.”
“Nakamura,” said Nick, naming the eighth superdaimyo. Was the don just being a wise-ass, or did this correction mean something?
“Both the Denver PD and the FBI thought that the key to Keigo Nakamura’s murder had nothing to do with local suspects—the mooks I’ve been reinterviewing—but with internal Japanese politics and rivalries,” said Nick. “We just didn’t know enough about those politics or deadly rivalries to make any sort of educated guess, and interviews with Mr. Nakamura and others didn’t help. Those keiretsu… or what you’re now calling zaibatsu again… are essentially above the law in modern-day Japan, or maybe I should say modern-day feudal Japan, so the Japanese police authorities weren’t of any help either.”
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev gave that toothy, not-really-amused smile again and flicked cigar ashes into the mayonnaise lid. “You don’t even really know who Hideki Sato is, do you, Nick Bottom?”
“He’s Mr. Nakamura’s chief security guy,” said Nick, willing to play the stooge to get more information from this egoist.
Noukhaev laughed softly. “He’s a professional assassin and the head of his own daimyo family—one of the top forty daimyos in Nippon today and not necessarily out of the line of becoming Shogun on his own. Have you heard of
Taisha No Shi?”
“No,” said Nick.
“It means ‘Colonel Death,’ ” Noukhaev said. “Do you remember Soong Jin?”
“Not really. Wait… that Chinese actress-turned-warlord about eight years ago?”
“Yes,” said Noukhaev, drawing deeply on his shortening cigar. “Soong—that’s her family name—was China’s last, best hope for reuniting. After she left the movies, she had an army of more than six million fanatics, plus the support of four or five hundred million more Chinese. She also had about six hundred bodyguards, including sixty or so of the best security people in China.”
“And she died in… I can’t remember. Some sort of boating accident,” said Nick.
Noukhaev’s smile looked sincere for a change. “She died when Taisha No Shi—the man you know as Sato—went to China and killed her,” said the don. “Whether on Nakamura’s orders, we do not know.”
“Colonel Death,” repeated Nick, drawing out the syllables. “Sounds cheesy to me. But if you’re suggesting that Sato works without Nakamura’s permission and direction, I find that hard to believe.”
Noukhaev nodded slowly. “Still, Nick Bottom, you need to appreciate that one of the foremost assassins in the world has been assigned to stay with you during your… ah… investigation. Were I in your position, I would treat that fact with sobriety and ponder its implications.”
“Whatever you say,” said Nick. He was tiring of this asshole’s sense of self-importance. “Do you want to tell me something I can use about Keigo Nakamura’s murder?”
Noukhaev smiled thinly. “I just did, Nick Bottom. ‘If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.’ ”
More fucking Sun Tzu, thought Nick. He was beginning to realize that it was Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev who was acting like a second-rate Bond villain. They always tried talking the hero to death rather than just pulling the trigger when they had a chance.
“Can you tell me any questions that Keigo asked that seemed unusual?” asked Nick to change the subject. “Odd? Out of the ordinary?”
Don Noukhaev smiled. “He did ask me if I would distribute F-two the way I’ve distributed flashback. His tone suggested that the fantasy drug was a reality… or would soon be one.”
F-two again, thought Nick and something in him leaped with the hope that Keigo Nakamura had known something no one else did about the fantasy-directed superdrug. With F-two, Nick’s imagination could structure a whole new life with Dara and even with Val, not the surly sixteen-year-old Val but a cute little five-year-old. As Nick understood the promise of the drug, with Flashback-two, there would be no bad memories, only happy fantasies that felt as real as real life. On all levels. And the F-two believers always insisted that unlike being under the flash—where you were always a little separate from the experience, floating above your original self even as you reexperienced things—F-two would be totally immersive.
“What did you tell him?” asked Nick.
Noukhaev laughed. “I told him that I’d sell and distribute any drug that people wanted, if it were real… which F-two isn’t. We’ve all heard the rumors of it forever. It’s an impossible drug. Take heroin or cocaine if you want fantasies, I told him.”
“And what did Keigo Nakamura say to that?” asked Nick. Part of him was crestfallen that the rumors of F-two were still just fantasy rumors. But Keigo asked the poet Danny Oz if he would use F-two. What the hell was Keigo Nakamura up to?
“Keigo changed the subject,” said Noukhaev. “Which I am going to do as well. Are you aware, Nick Bottom, of who wants all this land that used to be New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California?”
“I would take a wild guess and say Mexico… or Nuevo Mexico or whatever the hell the reconquistas call themselves hereabouts,” said Nick. “Given that it’s their goddamned troops, tanks, and millions of colonists squatting on most of it and fighting for the rest.”
Noukhaev blew blue smoke and shook his head. The lined, rugged face looked mildly disappointed—an aging tutor discouraged by his pupil’s thickheadedness. “You’ve truly been away, haven’t you, Nick Bottom? Lost in your flashback dreams and your incessant self-pity? The first man ever to lose a wife.”
Nick felt his face flush and his anger grow, but he held it down, attempting to ignore the adrenaline surge that made him want to smash in Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s head with…
With what? The chair he was sitting on was the only loose thing in the room that he could use as a weapon, and it was just too damned light to be of any real use. And Nick had no doubt whatsoever that Noukhaev had a pistol in his belt under that loose white shirt he wore outside his trousers.
But Nick didn’t have to answer the rhetorical insult and decided to change the subject.
“All right,” said Nick. “If not Mexico, who? Japan?”
“What would Japan do with all this space—mostly desert—with their declining birthrate?” asked Noukhaev, obviously enjoying his little performance as schoolteacher. “I know that foreign events isn’t your forte, Detective First Grade Nick Bottom, but put your addled shoulder to the wheel… think! What aggressive and thriving political entity needs Lebensraum and more Lebensraum? And is used to deserts?”
“The Caliphate?” said Nick at last. It was not a statement, just some dumbfounded syllables. He heard himself repeat the idea. “The Global Caliphate? Here in the Southwest? That’s… absurd. Absolutely ridiculous.”
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev clasped both hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, the cigar firmly clamped between his strong teeth. He said nothing.
“Worse than absurd,” said Nick, waving his hand as if batting away a fly. “Impossible.”
But… was it?
The world’s Muslim population, according to CNN or Al Jazeera–USA or wherever the hell Nick had heard it, had just reached 2.2 billion people. Of those, according to polls the network had quoted, more than 90 percent claimed membership in the Islamic Global Caliphate, even if they were in nations that weren’t yet technically part of the expansive regime with its tripartite capitals in Tehran, Damascus, and Mecca.
That meant, especially after almost a decade of the full civil war in China and India’s aggressive moves toward achieving a huge middle-class population (largely through restricting population much as the Chinese had three generations earlier), that the Islamic Global Caliphate was the most populous political entity on earth. And the birthrate of Muslims, someone had once told Nick—perhaps it had been his pedantic father-in-law—could now be charted in terms of what he’d called an asymptotic curve. The most common birth name in Europe had been Mohammed for more than twenty-five years now, which meant that it had been so even before the Caliphate was officially established there.
Hell, thought Nick, feeling his brain cells still reeling from the tasering, the most common baby name in fucking Canada is Mohammed.
That didn’t mean anything. Did it?
“The Caliphate moving into southern California and Arizona and New Mexico? Sending… what?… colonists here? Immigrants?” Nick said dumbly, his tongue thick. “The United States would never stand for it.”
“Oh?” said Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. “And what could the United States do about it?”
Nick opened his mouth angrily… thought a moment… and then shut his mouth. America had a standing army of draftees of a little more than six hundred thousand kids like his son, but poorly armed, poorly trained, and poorly led, mercenaries all as they fought for Japan or India in China, Indonesia, parts of Southeast Asia, and South America. The dregs of the regular Army and the National Guard were overextended just guarding the southern border with Nuevo Mexico from the ColoradOklahoma state line to the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles.
Could a U.S. president break the all-important mercenary contracts with Japan and the other hiring nations and bring that leased-out army home to fight a million or so immigrant jihadists? Would she?
Nick felt very dizzy. “Mexico wouldn’
t stand for it,” he said flatly. “The reconquistas fought too hard to retake these states, to undo the eighteen forty-eight American land grabs.”
Noukhaev laughed and stubbed out what was left of his cigar. “Trust me, my friend Nick Bottom, this Nuevo Mexico you speak of does not exist. You are talking to someone who has traded with it, worked with it, and moved within its confused borders for more than twenty years. Nuevo Mexico is a marriage of convenience—a fictional marriage of convenience—between leaders of murderous drug cartels, fleeing land barons from Old Mexico, younger speculators, and spanic warlords as loyal only to themselves as are the Chinese warlords. There is no Nuevo Mexico.”
“It has a flag,” Nick heard himself say. Even the tone of his voice sounded pathetic.
Noukhaev grinned. “Yes, Nick Bottom, and a national anthem. But the fiction that is Nuevo Mexico is as corrupt and rotten from the inside as Old Mexico was before its fall. The ‘colonists’ here cannot feed themselves, much less replace the large American ranches, farms, high-tech corporations, science centers, and civilian populations that they have occupied and overrun. They would starve in a month without food supplies from the cartels. They survive by sucking at the tit of cartel money—cocaine money, heroin money, flashback money. If that tit is denied them, eighteen million former Mexican ‘immigrants’ will be on the move again.”
“But… the Caliphate,” said Nick. “They don’t have the… the… language, the culture, the infrastructure…” He heard what he was saying and shut up again. He shook his head. “Who would sell the Southwest to the Caliphate?”
Noukhaev lowered his chin to his white-shirted chest and smiled in a way that could only be called diabolical.
“Me,” he said. “Among others.”
Nick blinked and really looked at the man across the desk from him. Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev wasn’t joking. Was he insane? A megalomaniac, yes… Nick had known that from the earliest parts of this crazy conversation… but fully insane?
Maybe not, thought Nick.