Doitnow doitnow doitnow don’twait doitnow…
Nick Bottom didn’t seem to be surprised. He said softly, “I’m wearing Kevlar-three under my shirt, Val. You’ll have to aim for my head… the face.”
Val blinked. The Old Man was trying to mess with his head.
Squeeze the trigger!! Doitnow… doitnow… don’twait… doitnow…
Val’s finger was off the trigger guard and on the trigger, exerting pressure.
“The safety’s still on, kid,” said the Old Man in the same tone he’d used to help Val learn how to balance his bicycle.
Val didn’t believe his father but looked anyway. It was true. The safety lever was down, the red dot covered. Fuck!! Fumbling with both hands, he got the safety lever up until the red dot was visible.
The Old Man could have floored the gelding and gotten away in those seconds, but he hadn’t done a thing. His left arm over the steering wheel, his right hand empty and visible on the beat-up old console between the seats, the Old Man just looked at Val.
He knows he deserves to die for killing Mom, thought Val. He came here knowing what I had to do. He’s guilty as hell.
Val’s finger was on the trigger again when he saw movement in the backseat. His arms still extended stiffly, the pistol aimed at the middle of the Old Man’s forehead, Val flicked a glance left.
Leonard was lying across the backseat nestled in a clumsy nest of pillows. The old man’s mouth was open and his eyes were closed. A bottle with some sort of clear liquid in it had been wired to the hook above the left-side car door where dry cleaning was usually hung and an IV line ran to Leonard’s bare and bruised left arm.
“What the fuck?” said Val.
The Old Man turned his head to look back at Leonard. “He’s all right. Or rather, he’s a mess from that attack I told you about. It’s called aortic stenosis and means that one of the valves of his heart is pretty messed up. Unless he gets a surgical valve replacement, your grandfather’s future looks pretty dim. But he’s okay right now. Dr. Tak gave him a sedative so he’d sleep awhile.”
Val didn’t ask who Dr. Tak was. He shook his head, although he wasn’t sure what he was denying. The Old Man’s attempt to distract him, maybe. Val peered down the iron sights at his father’s face.
Now!
Val knew he could do it. He remembered the muffled blast and kick of the Beretta as he’d fired it through the ski mask in his hand. He remembered Coyne saying “Ugh!” and dropping the flashlight. He remembered the round hole in the T-shirt just above Vladimir Putin’s pale face blobbing out into a red butterfly and continuing to grow and Coyne smirking at Val and saying “You shot me.”
Val remembered shooting the other boy in the throat and remembered the sound of Billy’s teeth snapping off as Coyne’s open mouth hit the cement floor of the tunnel. He remembered killing the animated T-shirt Putin AI by putting a third bullet between the Russian’s two beady little eyes.
That’s what he had to do now.
Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull!
Val realized that he was panting and weeping at the same time. His arms were shaking.
The Old Man leaned forward, but not to grab the gun. He opened the passenger-side door.
Val pulled the pistol back from the window as the door opened. The muzzle was aimed up under his own chin now and his finger was still on the trigger with the safety off.
“Get in,” said Nick. “Be careful with that thing.” He did reach for the pistol now, but only to push the safety lever back down. He didn’t take the gun away from Val as the boy collapsed into the passenger seat.
NICK PULLED OUT OF the park onto South Downing Street and drove north.
“I know what you read in my cubie,” he said, “but I didn’t kill your mother, Val. I could never have hurt your mother. I think that down deep, you know that.”
Val was shaking and concentrating on not throwing up in the car. The air from the open window helped a little bit.
“You’re the one I hurt,” continued Nick. “I’ve spent the last five and a half years with Dara under flashback and I completely fucked up every responsibility I had toward you. Sorry doesn’t come close to covering it, but I am sorry, Val.”
Val felt the hatred surge up into his chest again. He could have shot his father in the head at that moment—the rage would have allowed it—but his arms were totally without strength. He couldn’t lift the heavy Beretta if his life depended on it.
Approaching Speer Boulevard, there was a tremendous roar and both Val and the Old Man looked up as a massive Osprey III VTOL roared overhead, its wings and turboprops shifting into level flight. Canvas covering the high Denver Country Club fence that ran hundreds of meters along the street there vibrated and tried to tear free of the wire.
“What the fuck?” said Nick.
“Japs,” muttered Val. “Dottie and Harold Davison said that there are thousands of Jap soldiers in the old country club here.”
Nick didn’t ask who Dottie and Harold Davison were. Watching the Osprey fly off to the west, he said softly, “It’s illegal for the Japanese to bring troops into this country.”
Val shrugged. “Can we go to the old neighborhood?” he asked. Maybe, he thought, if he could just see the old house, the memory of his mother standing on the porch waiting for him the way she did every day he walked home from school would help him lift this pistol, aim it, and squeeze the trigger.
“We don’t have enough charge,” said Nick, turning west onto Speer Boulevard. “I have about nine miles left on this piece of crap and it’s four miles to Six Flags Over the Jews.”
“Six Flags…,” repeated Val, looking at the Old Man. Had his father gone completely nuts?
“K.T.’s left us a car there… a real car,” said Nick. “At least I hope to God she has. You remember K. T. Lincoln? My old partner?”
Val remembered her… a dangerous lady, from a young kid’s perspective. But his mother had liked K.T. for reasons young Val hadn’t understood.
“Anyway,” said Nick, “the same people who worked so hard to create that grand jury frame-up you read about are out to get me right now. They might hurt you and Leonard if you don’t get out of town. This gelding’ll be lucky to get up the street to Six Flags where the car’s waiting, but once we get there, you take the car K.T.’s parked there and get Leonard the hell out of town.”
“I don’t know how to drive,” said Val.
Nick barked a bitter laugh. “Leonard told me before he got his sedative that you wanted to get an NIC Teamsters Card so you could drive big rigs.”
“It was all bullshit,” muttered Val. “Everything is bullshit.”
“I won’t argue there,” said Nick. “Leonard said you had some NICC counterfeiter guy’s name and address. Show it to me.”
Feeling as drugged as his grandfather, Val poked through his jacket pockets—filled with extra magazines and loose rounds for the useless Beretta—and found the card. He handed it to Nick.
“Yeah, I know this guy,” said Nick. “K.T. and I sent him up for five years when you were a baby. He lives deep in reconquista turf now. You’d have a hard time getting there today.”
“I don’t have the money anyway,” said Val. They were passing the Hungarian Freedom Park with its Bonus Army of single homeless guys. There were police cars and vans parked along the curb and a lot of uniformed cops in riot gear. It all seemed a million miles away to Val. “I’d need two hundred bucks for the new card… old bucks.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have it to give to you,” said Nick. “A few days ago I did. But I blew it on bribes and on paying a pilot to fly me from Las Vegas to L.A.”
Val stared. “L.A.? Why did you go there?”
“To find you.”
“Bullshit,” barked Val.
“All right, it’s bullshit,” said Nick. “I blew it all on gambling in Las Vegas. I don’t care what you think. But I couldn’t give you the two hundred now even if I had it.”
“Why no
t?”
“I’d use it as a down payment in getting Leonard this valve replacement surgery. He needs it to live and Medicare won’t get around to paying for it until he’s been dead for a decade or two.”
As if hearing his name, Leonard stirred and groaned in the backseat.
Val looked at his grandfather and his own chest hurt.
“In a dream I had last night,” said Nick, “the three of us were hightailing it to Texhoma, Oklahoma, in an old Chevy Camaro SS with a supercharged V-8.”
“What the fuck is in Texhoma, Oklahoma?”
“A border-station crossing into the Republic of Texas.”
“They’d pay for Leonard’s surgery in Texas?”
Nick shot a glance at the boy. “No, but they’d have it available if we could pay for it. And I’d find a way to.”
“I hear that Texas doesn’t let in useless people,” said Val. “Especially useless people who are flashback addicts.”
Nick didn’t respond to that.
After a moment, Val said, “So the car that your friend… K.T… is leaving for us at Six Flags is an old gas-burning V-8 Camaro?”
“Probably not,” said Nick. “I just wanted the fastest car in the DPD impound lot. Remember Mad Max’s Last of the V-8 Interceptors?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” lied Val.
Nick shrugged. They were approaching the overpass crossing I-25 and he turned left toward the abandoned towers and roller-coaster steel of the old Elitch Gardens. The gelding told him that it had 3½ miles of charge left in it.
There was one vehicle parked away from the others, facing the wrong way, in the parking lot. Nick stopped near it and whispered, “Ah, Jesus Christ, no.”
He checked on Leonard and got out of the gelding. A moment later, Val did the same, still carrying his pistol.
Nick pulled a little box from the left rear wheel well. Folded around the ignition key fob was a note in K.T.’s handwriting—The impound lot’s almost empty and I could never get anything out of it today. This is my personal vehicle. Good luck.”
Nick and Val stood looking at the blue Menlo Park all-battery mini-van. On a good day, these things had a range of around 100 miles.
“At least it’s a lighter blue,” muttered Nick. Val had no idea what the Old Man was talking about.
Nick had just offered the keys to Val and was about to say something when four desert-camouflage tan M-ATVs roared across the parking lot and screeched to a stop around them. A dozen Japanese men in black ballistic cloth SWAT armor, all carrying automatic weapons, boiled out of the big vehicles and aimed their weapons at Val and Nick.
Val started to bring his Beretta up and the Old Man grabbed his wrist, squeezing hard until he dropped the gun. Nick himself made no motion toward a weapon.
A bulky Jap also in ballistic black came down the rear ramp of the closest Oshkosh M-ATV and looked silently as one of the younger men frisked Nick and took a 9mm Glock from his belt and a .32-caliber pistol from an ankle holster. Another ninja, who’d picked up the Beretta, now frisked Val and relieved him of all the pistol magazines and loose rounds. Two other men in black were easily lifting Leonard—still sleeping—out of the back of the gelding. A third man held the IV bottle.
The two ninjas who’d frisked Val and Nick nodded to the big man as other men with automatic weapons began herding the father and son into the back of the big M-ATV.
“Bottom-san,” said the man in black, “it is time.”
1.18
Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25
NICK HAD DONE everything possible to avoid this final meeting with Hiroshi Nakamura, but he’d always known it would have to happen.
In his mental rehearsals of this final encounter, the meeting was always set in Mr. Nakamura’s office in his mountaintop compound up in Evergreen where Nick had first met the billionaire. However, when Nick and Val were led out of the back of the Oshkosh M-ATV—both blinking in the low but bright early-evening light—Nick saw that they were in LoDo, on Wazee Street, in front of Keigo Nakamura’s bachelor-pad building. The murder scene.
Now this street in Lower Downtown reminded Nick of scenes from the countless urban-war videos on the TV each night showing American troops in some city in Pakistan or in Brazil or in China, with several big M-ATVs parked front to rear across the street at both ends of the city block being used as roadblocks, two helicopters landed in the middle of the street, and soldiers on the street and rooftops of evacuated buildings.
But this was an American city and these soldiers weren’t tired American troops in their bulky body armor and scuffed kneepads, but scores of Nakamura’s—or perhaps Sato’s (did it make any difference? wondered Nick)—ninjas in jump boots and ballistic black and carrying automatic weapons, all wearing identical tactical sunglasses and tiny bead earphones and microphones beneath their black ball caps.
Nick and Val had both been flex-cuffed, but with their wrists tied in front of their bodies. This gave Nick the slightest flicker of hope. Every cop and prisoner-taking grunt in the world knew you flex-cuffed dangerous prisoners—and anyone worthy of being taken prisoner should be considered dangerous—behind their backs. Arms, wrists, and fists tied in front could be, far too easily, used as weapons.
Either they weren’t in serious captivity (which Nick didn’t believe for an instant) or Sato’s men did not consider Nick and his son to be serious threats. Or, more likely, Sato’s people considered Nick and the boy dangerous but were certain that their numbers and firepower eliminated any real threat in the few minutes their prisoners would be allowed to live.
Given the number of ninjas illegally deployed along Wazee Street here in Lower Downtown Denver and the number that came with them as they entered Keigo’s building, Nick tended to agree with this last assessment.
“Careful there!” shouted Nick as three ninjas carried the still-unconscious Dr. George Leonard Fox down the ramp of the M-ATV, two using their arms as a sort of upright litter, the third man carrying the attached IV bottle.
The ninjas ignored him as the stream of men entered the building and made straight for the stairway. Nick remembered that Keigo’s old converted warehouse had no elevator. More work for the two men carrying Leonard, although Nick’s father-in-law looked as disturbingly thin and light as a professorially dressed scarecrow.
Sato led the way up to the third floor and, once there, did not turn right into the private quarters and bedroom where the murder took place, but left from the foyer to the fancy library where Nick had first seen the video recording of Dara standing down the darkened street. Today, for the first time in the two weeks since he’d stood shocked into silence by that image, Nick Bottom knew exactly why she’d been out there that night of Keigo’s party and Keigo’s murder.
He’d suspected ever since that night that Sato had known that Nick would see Dara on that video recording, had brought him down here to the murder scene precisely so that Nick would see Dara outside the building that night. But Nick hadn’t been able to figure out why his wife would have been there or why Sato would want him to know.
And now he had figured it out. And the solution to both those mysteries made Nick want to weep.
Hiroshi Nakamura had stood throughout their previous meeting, but now the billionaire was seated behind the big mahogany desk in front of the north-facing windows. There were four black-garbed ninjas with guns already standing on either side of that desk. The men carrying Leonard set him carefully on the leather couch by the bookshelves on the wall behind Nick, and Val was pushed down to sit next to his grandfather.
Sato stepped to one side of the room and nodded. One of his men closed the twin library doors. Counting the four who had already been there with Nakamura, there were now ten armed ninjas—not counting Sato—in the room, but the library was so large that the space didn’t seem crowded. No one had offered Nick a chair so he stood there on the Persian carpet in front of the desk, squinting slightly so he could make out Nakamura’s features
against the evening light coming in through the wooden blinds behind him.
Nakamura looked as perfectly calm as he had at their first meeting.
“Mr. Bottom,” said Nakamura, “I had hoped that we would meet under more fortuitous circumstances. But that was not to be.”
“Let my son and father-in-law go, Nakamura,” said Nick. His words struck him as bad dialogue from a thousand TV dramas. It didn’t matter. He had to go on. “They’re civilians. They’re not part of this. Let them go and you and I will talk.”
“You and I will talk at any rate,” said Nakamura. “Your son should see what kind of man you are.”
The few electric lights in the room dimmed and a flatscreen rose from an elaborately carved bureau on the south side of the room. As soon as the screen was fully visible, the video began playing. There was no sound to accompany the images.
Nick saw himself from a viewpoint about twenty-five feet above the ground, looking almost straight down. The color tones seemed very strange until one realized that the lens on the miniature unmanned aerial vehicle was compensating for very low light.
Nick watched himself pawing through the pockets of three men on the ground, two obviously dead, the third and youngest man pleading for his life.
Suddenly there was sound and everyone in the library could hear the young man’s moans and words—Please… mister… you promised… you promised… it hurts so much… you promised.”
Nick watched along with his son and the other men in the room—only Leonard had his eyes closed—as his image on the screen set the pistol to within inches of the young man’s shocked, pleading face and blew his brains out.
The flatscreen went black and hummed itself back down into the bureau.
“We know that you met with Advisor Omura in that gentleman’s aerie above Los Angeles yesterday, Mr. Bottom,” said Hiroshi Nakamura. “We have no recording of that conversation, but we can imagine how it went.”