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.”
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“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 close
st 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?”