“Yeah.” Suddenly Nick was impossibly weary. He just wanted to crawl back into the lice-and bedbug-infested flophouse/flashcave and go to sleep on the filthy floor.
“Call me sometime next week, Nick. Maybe we could figure something else out and…”
“I need the car tomorrow, K.T. By noon, if possible. After tomorrow is too late. Tomorrow night will be too late.”
Detective Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln said nothing.
After a minute, Nick said, “Good night, K.T. Sorry for waking you,” and broke the connection.
NICK OPENED HIS EYES. Twenty minutes until they were scheduled to land. Sato still sat with his eyes closed and arms crossed, but was no longer snoring. Nick had no idea whether he was awake or not.
He studied Sato’s face as the sound of the Airbus 310/360’s twin engines dropped in pitch and the plane began jolting in its rough descent into the never-forgiving thermals and downdrafts of Colorado’s Front Range.
NICK HAD BEEN MOST worried about getting to see Advisor Daichi Omura before he had to leave, but in the end, Omura set up the interview and demanded to see him.
This time, after Nick had surrendered his Glock and suffered the various indignities of high-tech and no-tech searches, he realized that there was no special reason that Omura should let him go if he didn’t want to. This might be the permanent last stop on his five-day Los Angeles tour.
Except for the fact that both this former Getty Center and Nakamura’s beautiful Japanese home were on mountaintops, the setting with Omura couldn’t have been more different than it was with Nakamura.
A smiling young man, no bodyguard, politely led Nick to a vast but strangely cozy room—the sense of coziness probably created by the intimate lighting and clusters of modern furniture set tastefully around the large space. Exquisite paintings decorated the walls (it had been the Getty Art Museum, after all), and the amazing Richard Meier modernist buildings situated on the double ridgetop, the 24 acres of campus, and the more than 600 acres of carefully planted trees and shrubs surrounding the campus were all promised to be returned to the people of Los Angeles once the current national emergency was over.
There was no sign of that emergency ending soon, and in the meantime, Advisor Omura and his delegation determined the future of not only California but of Oregon and Washington from these rooms.
While he waited for Omura to arrive, Nick allowed himself to be stunned by the view through the 30-foot-wide south window. This main building was 900 feet above the I-405 that cut past its feet and dropped down into Los Angeles to the south and to the San Fernando Valley to the north, but it seemed to be perched miles above Los Angeles. Toward the eastern horizon, Nick could see smoke rising from the looted wasteland that had been East Los Angeles. He could only imagine this view at night with the solid carpet of city lights close in and the complex constellations farther out.
Daichi Omura entered alone and Nick got to his feet, forcing himself not to wince from either his damaged ribs or the surprisingly painful gouge through the back of his left calf. A CHP medic at Dale Ambrose’s Glendale barracks had put an elastic corset-plus-tape thing on Nick for the cracked ribs, told him that the corset really wouldn’t help all that much, congratulated him on just cracking and not fully breaking the ribs, and then dressed the leg wound. Now Nick hurt more than before the medical treatment.
Omura was wearing a black gym suit and running shoes. Where Hiroshi Nakamura had been tall for a Japanese man, Daichi Omura couldn’t have been an inch over five feet. Where Advisor Nakamura had been vital in his mid or late sixties, Omura seemed far more lively and animated in his early eighties. Omura had no hair; his head was not only as bald as an egg, but gave the sense of ovoid perfection that only an egg and a very, very few human beings’ skulls could project. That perfect, tanned egg had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes.
Where Nick had once noted to himself, in his cop’s way, that Hiroshi Nakamura smiled the way a politician smiled—profoundly, whitely, perfectly, and totally superficially—a few minutes with Daichi Omura gave Nick the sense that this man could swap stories after a few drinks and laugh sincerely at his own jokes as well as at others’.
Advisor Nakamura had struck Nick as someone who had studied the subtleties of how to project wealth, power and destiny; Advisor Omura impressed Nick the way he’d always imagined Franklin Delano Roosevelt affecting people around him—as someone born to wealth and power, who wore them as comfortably as he wore patched old tweed jackets and dirty running shoes, as a man who laughed at the very idea of destiny even as he accepted his own as he would any other duty. But—Nick suspected—he accepted all of that duty and destiny joyously, even the tragic parts.
Nick knew this was a hell of a lot of impressions to file away in thirty seconds of looking at a short old man; maybe a function of fatigue and flashback withdrawal. He was trying to replace addiction with half-assed profundity, but he didn’t think it was going to work.
“Would you like a drink, Mr. Bottom?” asked Omura. “I would. I drank some water after my pathetic little two-mile run, but I could use a real drink now. It’s only four p.m., but we could pretend we’re in New York.”
“Whatever you’re having, sir.”
“You don’t have to say ‘sir’ to me, Mr. Bottom. May I call you Nick?”
“Yes, Omura-sama.”
The old man had walked over to a small assortment of liquor bottles on a marble counter near the north wall of books, but now he paused. “You’ve learned the honorific we Japanese use toward people we respect. Especially our elders. I appreciate that, Nick.” He began pouring Scotch in two glasses, not asking Nick if he wanted ice and not providing any from the small ice bucket. “Did you refer to your employer as Nakamura-sama?”
“No, I never have,” Nick said truthfully.
“Good,” said Omura and handed Nick his glass and took his seat on a sofa opposite. He waved Nick to his seat on the facing sofa.
“We have several important things we need to discuss, Nick,” said Omura. “Where do you think we should start?”
“I presume you’ll want to discuss the charges of my son’s involvement in the attack on you at the Disney Center on seventeen September, Omura-sama.”
The old man shook his head. “It’s not one of the truly important things we need to discuss today, Nick, but I certainly understand why you’d want to get it out of the way. Do you think your son, Val, was involved in that attempt to murder me a week ago today?”
Nick had sipped the single-malt Scotch. He noticed only distantly that it was strong and infinitely subtle, obviously twenty-five years old or older and of a quality he’d never encountered before. None of that mattered as he used the few seconds of subterfuge in tasting the Scotch to mask his wild mental scrambling to find the best response to Omura’s question. Something told Nick—based on no empirical evidence yet whatsoever—that this old man probably possessed the most earthquake-proof bullshit detector of any man or woman Nick had ever met.
“I’ve become convinced that my son ran with that particular flashgang that attacked you, Omura-sama,” Nick said slowly, carefully. “But from things said by people—and from everything I know about my son’s character—I don’t believe Val was involved in the actual firing at you that night. My best guess is that he ran from it… that he never had any intention of harming you.”
“My forensics people are all but certain that a bullet from your son’s weapon killed the Coyne boy, in the tunnels but some distance from their ambush site. No… what’s the English words… no slugs from that weapon were found among all the other bullets and flechettes recovered at the site of the ambush itself. You’re a detective. What is your opinion of that, Nick?”
“I have no… no solid evidence, Omura-sama, but that looks to be the case—that my son didn’t shoot during the ambush, but did shoot William Coyne some distance away down the tunnel. Val had been given a nine-millimeter Beretta semiautomatic pistol and my best guess is that he shot the Co
yne boy three times with it.”
“So your son, Val, is a killer,” Omura said quietly, his voice as flat and featureless as a leveled blade.
Nick couldn’t respond to that other than to nod. He gulped more Scotch and didn’t taste it at all.
“Nick, do you think he was attempting to protect me by shooting the Coyne boy?”
Nick looked at the old man’s tanned, smooth, hairless face. Other than a slight residual impression of pleasantness, there was no expression there at all. None. Yet somehow Nick knew that everything teetered in the balance depending upon how he answered this question.
“No, sir,” Nick said firmly. “There’s no sign that Val shot the other boy to protect you or anyone else. Coyne was shot too far from the drain opening, for one thing.”
“Why, then?” asked Omura.
Nick shrugged. “Something between the two of them is my hunch. What I want to believe is that Billy Coyne, who had quite a history of violence—including the rape of children—came after Val for some reason, perhaps because Val had run from the ambush scene, and my son had to shoot to protect himself. But that’s only a father’s wish, sir.”
Omura nodded. “Then the issue is closed. I’ve already directed my security people and the Los Angeles Police Department to cease their search for your son. And right now there are much more important things for you and me to discuss.”
Nick could only blink. More important things? He blurted out, “Do you have any idea where my son is, Omura-sama?”
The Advisor set down his glass and opened his palms as if to show he had nothing to hide. “I do not know his whereabouts, nor do I have any clue, Nick. If I did, I would tell you. If my security people had tracked your son down and… executed him… I would tell you the truth even about that.”
And you’d die here and now, by my bare hands, thought Nick. And as he looked at Daichi Omura, he knew that the old man was aware of that fact. No security guard could break into the room and kill Nick before Nick had snapped Omura’s neck.
“Shall we speak of the more important matters?” said Omura. He picked up his glass of Scotch again.
“Sure,” said Nick, his throat still tight. “What are they?”
“First, your involvement in this struggle between me and Hiroshi Nakamura and Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev and many others. Are you beginning to feel like a pawn on a chess board, Nick?”
Nick laughed. It was probably the easiest, most relaxed laugh that had escaped him in weeks. “I feel more like a piece of lint that’s blown onto a chess board, Omura-sama.”
“So you feel powerless,” said the old man, studying him. “And as if you have no moves left.”
“A few moves, maybe,” admitted Nick. “But they don’t get me anywhere. It’s like when the king’s under check and can only shuffle back and forth in the same squares.”
“That results in a stalemate,” said Omura.
“Well, I don’t see how to force anything as grand and bold as a stalemate,” said Nick.
Omura smiled. “A minute ago you were a piece of lint blown onto the chess board by mistake. Now you are a king under check. Which metaphor is it, Nick?”
“I was always piss-poor at metaphors, Omura-sama. And, as must be obvious, I know dick-all about chess.”
It was Omura’s turn to laugh.
“One thing,” said Nick. “In Santa Fe, Don Noukhaev was blathering something about me—for a short time before I died, at least—being in the position to affect the lives of millions of people. I assumed it was just more Noukhaev bullshit. But is there any sense or truth to what he was saying?”
“Yes, Nick, there is,” Omura said softly. He did not explain further. After a minute he said, “By tomorrow evening, my spies tell me, Hiroshi Nakamura will have returned to his aerie above Denver and will demand that you tell him exactly who murdered his son. Are you able to do that, Nick?”
Nick paused again, this time not to consider dissembling but just to sort out the truth of what he thought. “Not yet, Omura-sama,” said Nick. “But perhaps by this time tomorrow night.”
The elderly Advisor smiled again. “And perhaps the horse will learn to talk, eh, Nick?”
Nick, who’d heard the folktale from Dara, also had to smile. “Yeah, something like that.”
This is where Omura said, “If you go back to Denver, Bottom-san, you will die,” and had warned Nick that “Colonel” Sato would be waiting that night at the John Wayne Airport. It made Nick physically shiver.
“If I admit that I haven’t really figured out who Keigo Nakamura’s killer was, Advisor Nakamura will have me killed,” said Nick.
“Yes.” The syllable ended in a sort of hiss from Omura.
“If I do find the final evidence I need to finger the killer by tomorrow night, Nakamura will still order me killed,” said Nick.
“Yes.”
“Why?” said Nick. “Why kill me if I’ve done what he hired me to do? Why not just pay me—or don’t pay me? I guess I screwed the pay-me option when I took a tiny advance against that payment to get my ass out here to L.A., but why not just let me go back to my little flashback-riddled life?”
Omura looked at him in silence for a long moment. “I believe you know the answer to that already, Nick.”
Nick did, and knowing it brought him nothing but nausea. “I know too much,” he said at last. “I’ll be a danger to Nakamura and his plans to become Shogun.”
“Hai,” agreed the old man.
“What can I do?” asked Nick and immediately despised the desperate whiny undertone in his own voice. He’d always hated perps, witnesses, or even victims who whined like that. The pathetic squeak of a rat in a trap.
“You can stay in Los Angeles,” said Omura, still watching him carefully. “Under my protection.”
“Nakamura would send assassins—like Sato—until I was finally killed.”
“Yes,” said Omura. “You could flee—New or Old Mexico. South America. Canada.”
“Someone like Sato would find me within months. Weeks.”
“Yes.”
“And I can’t leave Val and his grandfather behind… to the mercy of… whomever.”
“But you have no assurance your son and father-in-law are even alive, Nick.”
“No, but… still…,” said Nick. Everything he said sounded pathetic to him.
Both men had finished their Scotch. Advisor Omura did not offer to refill the glasses. Outside the amazing window wall, the sun moved lower toward the Pacific Ocean and a late-September sunset.
Nick felt no rush to leave since Dale Ambrose had promised to get him to the John Wayne Airport in time. Nick had already dumped the Nissan Menlo Park, leaving it at the curb in South Central L.A. with the keys in the ignition. It had been a racist move and the best one. The interview with the California–Oregon–Washington Advisor must be over, Nick knew, but between the Scotch and his exhaustion—and the comfortable room with its beautiful view—Nick decided he’d get up only when Omura reminded him that the interview was over.
“Did you know, Nick,” said Omura at last, “that Hideki Sato had, for years, an American-born mistress… no, mistress is not the right word. Consort or concubine is closer to the meaning of our word sobame.”
“Oh?” said Nick. Why is the old man telling me this?
“By all accounts he loved her very much. His own wife of many years, Sato sees only twice a year upon formal family occasions.”
“Yes?”
Omura said nothing else. Nick felt the way he had in junior high school when he’d attempted a conversation with a pretty girl and simply ran out of things to say.
“You said Sato had a concubine… a relationship with her… for many years, Omura-sama. Had, past tense. It’s over?” Nick tried to imagine Sato feeling and showing love for anyone or anything. He failed.
“Hai,” Omura said with Japanese harshness on the syllable, slashing it like a blade. “She died some years ago.”
“Died… violently?
” asked Nick, trying to find a handle on this line of discussion.
“Oh, no. Of leukemia. It was said that Sato-san was devastated. His own two sons, by his wife, both died in battle in the last decade, died as military advisors early in the Chinese civil war. It is said that Sato mourned his boys, but that his mourning for his… concubine… was deeper, darker, and continues to this day.”
“What was her name, Omura-sama?”
The Advisor looked at him. “I forget her name, Nick.” The old man seemed to be saying I’m lying with his gaze and tone… but why?
“They had a child together,” continued Omura. “A daughter. She was, by all reports, quite beautiful. And almost completely Western-looking, with only the slightest hint of the Japanese race in her appearance.”
Nick was totally lost. He found it hard to believe that Sato could love anyone, but especially not a child that didn’t look Japanese. Was this some sort of riddle he was supposed to solve?
“You used the past tense again, Omura-sama,” Nick said softly. “Is the daughter born to Sato’s late concubine also dead?”
“Hai.”
“Also from natural causes?” Nick heard his old detective voice working: stomp all around the missing piece with a thousand stupid questions until all the vegetation is flattened and what you’re looking for stands out.
Or doesn’t.
Omura leaned forward. He didn’t answer the question, at least not directly. “Hideki Sato, as you know, Nick, is a daimyo in his own right, with vassals and soldiers and keiretsu interests of his own. But Hiroshi Nakamura is his liege lord. Sato is Nakamura’s vassal.”
“Yes?”
“So when daimyo Hideki Sato’s own powers and influence became too great for Nakamura’s comfort, he demanded—in the best feudal Nipponese tradition from our own Middle Ages, you understand—that Colonel Sato hand over his beloved daughter to be held as a sort of captive, a hostage to Sato’s continued loyalty and service, as it were.”