Nick could only stare at the big man. What the hell was this about?
“Texas doesn’t accept flashback addicts,” he said softly. The tables were very close together and Geronimo’s was a very quiet restaurant.
“Nor do they execute them as do my country, the Caliphate, and some others,” Sato said. “They only deport them if they refuse or are unable to drop their addiction. And the Republic of Texas does accept rehabilitated drug and flashback addicts.”
Nick set down his wineglass. “They say that getting into Texas is harder than getting into Harvard.”
Sato grunted that male grunt of his. What it signified still escaped Nick. “True, but Harvard University has little use for important life skills. The Republic of Texas does. You were an able law-enforcement officer, Bottom-san.”
It was Nick’s turn to grunt. “Was is the proper tense of that verb.” He squinted at the big security man—or Colonel Death assassin and daimyo, if he were to believe Noukhaev. “Why the hell do you care, Sato-san? Why would you—or Mr. Nakamura—want me in Texas?”
Sato sipped his wine and said nothing. Gesturing toward the emptied plates, he said, “I will be wanting dessert. You also, Bottom-san?”
“Me also,” said Nick. “I’m going to try some of that white chocolate mascarpone cheesecake.”
Sato grunted again, but the grunt sounded like approval to Nick’s wine-sotted ears.
THE RETURN TRIP TO Denver had been totally uneventful, thanks mostly—Nick felt sure—to the two black Mercedeses that Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev had sent along as “escort.” Why Sato would trust them to serve that function, Nick had no idea, but with one black limousine eighty meters in front of them and the other eighty meters behind on the Interstate, no one bothered them, even though they’d seen dust clouds suggesting tracked vehicles both to the east and west of their highway.
Sato had ridden in the front passenger seat while “Willy” Mutsumi ta drove, “Bill” Daigorou Okada handled the topside gun, and “Toby” Shinta Ishii sat in the back in a fold-down chair opposite Nick. For the first hundred miles or so, Nick could not put the image of the back of the first M-ATV Oshkosh—all flames, the metal and plastic interior walls melting, with “Joe” Genshirou It’s headless body turning to ash and burned bone in seconds—out of his mind. But when they passed the ambush site north of Las Vegas, NM, he relaxed. Soon he’d taken off his helmet and set his sweaty head back against the webbing and closed his eyes.
What had Noukhaev been trying to tell him?
The last night at the Japanese consulate, Nick had spent six of the eight hours of his sleep period using the last of his flashback. Most of the time he’d spent with the now-familiar hours with Dara—the dialogues just after Keigo was murdered where she seemed to be trying to tell Nick something (and where Nick, absorbed in his own job and the murder case, and in himself, had paid no attention to her attempts).
But to tell him what?
That she’d been having an affair with Harvey Cohen? That seemed the most likely. But what could have brought Harvey and her to Santa Fe four days before Keigo’s murder? Obviously it had something to do with Keigo Nakamura and his little movie, but what? And what interest could District Attorney Mannie Ortega have had in Keigo? What could be so important that they’d send an ADA and his research assistant all the way to Santa Fe?
Nick would just have to ask Ortega—now Mayor Ortega—when he got back.
As for all that crap about selling New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California to the Global Caliphate…
Nick opened his eyes and, using the Oshkosh’s comm uplink, used his phone to log on to the Internet. Shinta Ishii was paying no attention to him. Nick slipped his earbuds in place, shifted the screen to display inside his sunglasses, and surfed.
He had argued to Don Noukhaev that the Islamists wouldn’t come to North America because these desert states overrun by the reconquistas lacked infrastructure.
But looking at the data, Nick realized that if the Islamic Global Caliphate had shown anything in its last quarter century of expansion, it was that it had no respect or use for local languages, cultures, laws, or—other than milking the European or Canadian welfare states dry—infrastructure. They brought language, culture, laws, and their religious infrastructure with them. And much of that infrastructure was from the Middle Ages: tribes, clans, honor killings, and a murderous religious literalism and intolerance that neither Christianity nor Judaism had practiced for six hundred years or more.
And the core of the expanding Islamic infrastructure, Nick was reminded as he flicked from page to page, was sharia for those people who lived within its confines, for both Muslim human beings and the only partially human (under sharia law) infidel Dhimmis alike, and outside of that, the House of War stood aimed like a poised and poisoned spear at all those unbelieving nations and cultures around it.
Nick went to the proper archives page and saw that the Caliphate now boasted more than 10,000 nuclear weapons, easily surpassing Japan’s 5,500.
It took him thirty seconds of searching to see that the United States, after its proud unilateral disarmament (in START agreements with Russia, but in competition only with itself) in the second decade of this century, now was reported to have 26 nuclear warheads on aircraft or missiles and another 124 in storage—none of them less than fifty years old, all unreliable and untested and largely undeliverable.
Nick surfed and saw the image so often shown on TV of the sickle—crescent moon” was the way proud Global Caliphate leaders always described it—of Muslim cultural and overt political dominance that spread from the Mideast through Eurasia and Eastern and Western Europe to the north, down and east through Africa in the south. The other crescents swept from Indonesia through much of the Pacific regions—coexisting with great tension alongside Nippon’s New Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The larger European crescent swept through what had been the United Kingdom and across the polar regions, the tip of the scythe now deeply embedded in Canada. The Canadians had been willing—almost eager—to “share the wealth” of their northern part of the continent. Their religious creed of state-enforced multiculturalism and diversity—long having replaced Christianity in Canada—had, in less than two generations, produced a single minority-driven theocratic culture which eliminated all diversity in its realms.
From what Nick was reading, the remnants of the white Canadian culture up there, despite still being numerically in the majority, more or less got by in isolated cantons—almost reservations. Even though Muslims constituted slightly less than 40 percent of the total population, sharia was now the primary law of Canada, and most of the whites there—both English-and French-speaking—had meekly accepted their roles as Dhimmis. They’d built the 3,800-mile border fence between Canada and the U.S.—erected to keep fleeing Americans out—in less than eighteen months.
Wherever the Caliphate rule had come in contact with the formerly pampered “First Nations”—the Indians and Eskimos treated with such extravagant political correctness in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries by the English-and French-speaking white Canadian majorities—those native peoples who wouldn’t convert had been eradicated by their new Muslim rulers, mostly through starvation via the simple act by their new provincial masters of shutting off food supplies.
The so-called First Nations had lost their skill of feeding themselves through hunting and fishing.
After die-ought-if, after the Day It All Hit The Fan, when the U.S. ceased to be a serious trading partner and world power, and especially after the surprise attack that Tehran had called Al-Qiyamah (the Resurrection, Day of Judgment, and Final Reckoning, three days that removed Israel from all maps) and then by the global Islamic triumphalism that swept across all of Western Europe in less than a decade, Canada had turned to the Caliphate for trade and military protection. It had no other choice. Just as it had no choice now about the heavy Islamic immigration that had already changed Canadian laws and culture forever.
And
now Nuevo Mexico would have no choice but to sell its reconquista lands back to… to whom?
Nick slaved his phone to the outside monitor views.
North-central New Mexico was sliding by on either side of the M-ATV—overgrazed fields with no cattle left, empty ranches, abandoned small towns, abandoned rail lines, empty highways. Except for the damage done to the high-prairie environment by more than a hundred years of cattle overgrazing and the minor tread-tracks vandalism of modern mechanized armies on the move, this area was almost as pristine as it had been to the first white explorers more than two centuries earlier.
Why shouldn’t the Global Caliphate want this southern part of North America, even if they had to pay for it in a priced-to-sell second Louisiana Purchase? wondered Nick. It was the perfect place for a former desert people to colonize. And with the upper tip of the Islamic scimitar-crescent pressing down against the Canada–U.S. border to the north and now the lower tip thrusting up from Mexico against and into the cash-strapped and militarily impotent western states like Colorado, how long would it be until the two horns of the sharia crescent came together?
Nick had to ask himself the central questions—Do I care? Do I give the slightest shit if this part of the country goes to the jihadis? It isn’t even part of America any longer. Is there any reason in the world that I should give a damn if the Caliphate towelheads replace the Nuevo Mexico beaners as America’s nasty new neighbors to the south? Or even as our new masters in Colorado, for that matter, replacing the fucking Japanese looking down on us from their fucking mountaintops? The Mexicans are all about drugs and corruption, the Japanese all about… well, all about Japan. Why should I care if it’s a hajji bureaucrat rather than a Jap bureaucrat running things? They’d be more efficient than the Mexicans and more honest than the Japanese. Word on EuroTel, Sky Vision, Al Jazeera, and the CBC is that the life of Dhimmis in old Europe and Canada is pretty damned easy.
As long as the hajjis leave me alone to spend my days and nights with Dara, thought Nick, is there any reason I should care if their stupid crescent-moon-and-scimitar flag flies over Denver’s rotting gold-domed capitol?
Nick had taken off his sunglasses, removed his earbuds, shut down his phone, and set his head back in the webbing so that he could sleep the rest of the way home.
THE PLACE WHERE THAT guy did that thing that time was all that was left of the old Tattered Cover bookstore out in the 2500 block of East Colfax Avenue. Colfax, which ran from the prairie to the east of Denver all the way through the rottenest parts of the city to the foothills of the Rockies in the west, was once called by Playboy—one of the early stroke magazines, now out of print for decades—as “the longest, wickedest street in America.” It was true that it was one of the longest main streets in the country, but cops knew that it was mostly East Colfax that was the wickedest, if one judged liquor stores, run-down taverns, prostitutes, pimps, and really bad poets as proof of wickedness.
The Tattered Cover had been a huge independent bookstore in its day, before print-and-paper books just got too expensive to publish and the general population just too illiterate to read books. The old store had been across the street from Nick’s Cherry Creek Mall Condominiums, but sometime in the first decade of this century, the bookstore had moved to this East Colfax location, where it quoted Longfellow in offering “sequestered nooks, and all the serenity of books.”
The sequestered nooks were still there, but the serenity of books had been missing for decades now. The newer TC, across Colfax Avenue from the huge flophouse for the homeless that had been the once-proud East High School, was now a combination of flashcave and all-night beer joint. Oddly enough, many of the flashback addicts who inhabited the sequestered nooks of the lower levels of the cluttered old bookstore had come there to read: after they’d lost or sold their old books, they used flashback to relive the experience of reading Moby-Dick or Lolita or Robin Hood or whatever the hell it was for the first time again, somewhere on a cot here in the rotting confines of the once-great independent bookstore. “It’s like that old zombie movie where the walking dead go back to the shopping malls,” Dara had once said. “Their rotting brains associate the malls with a sense of well-being… like these flashers gravitating back to a bookstore.”
“They’re paying a fortune to flash on reading entire books” had been Nick’s surly response. “How much of that expensive time do you think is spent reliving sitting on the can? For that amount of money, they could download quite a library.”
“They don’t want to download books and suck on yet another glass teat, as you would say, Nick, to read them,” Dara had said. That was about as vulgar as she ever got, but she was emotional about books. “They want to hold them and read them. And nobody publishes the holding-and-touching kind of books anymore.”
At any rate, TC was the place. Nick and K. T. Lincoln had been patrol officers when they’d responded to a call of a man with a gun. The Tattered Cover was still trying to keep itself going then by selling and trading moldy old used books, but some crazy-ass heroin addict had shown up waving a semiautomatic pistol and demanding that the store sell him a new book by some writer named Westlake who’d died more than a dozen years earlier. It seemed like a joke until the addict shot and killed the manager of the coffee shop and threatened to kill a hostage every half hour until the new and original and never-before-read Westlake novel was delivered to him.
It had been K.T. who’d gone in dressed as a FedEx delivery person carrying the new book in its parcel. In the end, she’d had to shoot and kill the addict, who’d been trying to unwrap the parcel with one hand while holding his pistol in the other.
Nick parked his gelding in the old parking structure next to the store, taking great care not to run over the scores of bundled, sleeping men and women on the slanted floors of the big garage—Kipling’s “sheeted dead.” Nick had put fifteen slugs into the hood, windshield, and tires of the old Government Motors wreck, but while he was traveling, Nakamura’s people had replaced the tires, windshield, and central drive battery and the thing was running as well as it ever had. The gasoline engine had been shot to shit, but it had been mostly dismantled for parts many years ago. Nick sort of liked it that Nakamura’s mechanics hadn’t patched the many bullet holes. Usually when parking in an inhabited parking garage, Nick set the blue bubble on the roof to warn looters that there’d be a problem if they tried to strip this particular car, but now he just let the bullet holes in the hood send that message.
The TC was its usual badly lit, smelly labyrinth. Nick bought a beer in what had been the old bookstore’s coffee shop and carried the bottle down a long twisting ramp to the lowest level, where there were tables and lights. Below that area were the flashcave cots and sleepers.
K.T. was waiting for him at their usual table. There was no one else—or at least no one conscious—in this part of the maze of old shelves, rotted carpets, and twenty-watt bulbs. Lieutenant Lincoln had set her battered briefcase on the chair next to her and there was a stack of folders in front of her.
When Nick sat down with a tired sigh, she said, “Are you packing, Nick?”
He almost laughed but then saw her eyes. “Of course I’m packing,” he said.
“Put it here on the table,” said K.T. “Just use the thumb and little finger of your left hand. Now.” She raised her right hand from beneath the table and let Nick see the 9mm Glock. It was aimed at his midsection.
Nick didn’t protest or ask questions. He wore his holster on his left side under his leather jacket, butt of the Glock forward for a cross-body draw, and K.T. knew that. He lifted the pistol out gingerly, just as she’d directed, and put it on the table in front of her. She whisked it out of sight, setting it on the chair next to her big briefcase, and hissed, “Scoot back.”
Nick scooted back.
“Get up real slow. Lift your jacket and do a full turn. Then show me your ankles.”
He did what she’d said, pulling each trouser leg up to show her that he’
d brought no ankle gun.
“Sit down,” said K.T. “Stay scooted back there. Keep your hands spread open on your thighs where I can see them.”
He sat and spread his fingers as she’d directed. Somewhere in the dark flashcave down the ramp behind him, a man screamed in flashback terror or ecstasy.
“All right,” said K.T. “I’m going to be giving you three pieces of news. You may know all of it already. You may not. But you’re not going to do a damn thing when you hear each piece but sit there with your hands still on your thighs like that. Understand?”
“I understand,” said Nick. The Westlake-lover years ago had his pistol more or less aimed at K.T. when she’d pulled her piece from under her short FedEx delivery jacket and shot him five times before he could react. She might be a little slower now what with age and a desk job, but Nick wasn’t going to bet his life on it.
Still holding her Glock low with her right hand, K.T. extended her phone with her left hand. “Least bad piece of news first,” she said.
The faces of seven boys—each obviously dead, each obviously shot to death—flicked across the screen. The eighth boy’s face was Val’s.
Nick grunted and was halfway up out of his chair but the rising muzzle of K.T.’s Glock froze him in place. She silently gestured him back in his seat. Nick complied because of the gun, but more because of the photo of Val. It wasn’t a crime-scene shot of a dead boy like the others, but clearly something scanned from a high school virtual yearbook. Val wasn’t smiling in the photo, hadn’t dressed well for it, and his hair needed cutting, but the picture, unlike the others, wasn’t of a shooting victim. It kept Nick in his seat.
“What?” he managed after half a minute. “Tell me.”
“Word came in about two hours ago,” whispered K.T. “A flashgang of young punks tried to assassinate Daichi Omura in Los Angeles earlier this evening…”
“Omura the California Advisor?” Nick said stupidly. He felt as if his jaw and lips had been injected with Novocain.