“Let my people go, Nakamura.”
The billionaire ignored him. “Since everything that Omura told you is almost certainly either distorted or totally untrue, I will explain the real stakes of the struggle you have become involved in.”
“I don’t give a shit what the stakes are for…,” began Nick.
“SILENCE!!!” roared Sato.
Everyone in the room except for Nakamura and Leonard seemed to jump at the explosion of sound. Nick would not have thought that the human voice, without electronic amplification, could produce so many raw decibels. He imagined the black-garbed ninjas up and down Wazee Street and on the rooftops jumping in their tracks.
“Very correct,” said Nakamura. “If you interrupt me again, you and the other two will be gagged. And, given your father-in-law’s unfortunate condition, that might not be the best for him.”
Nick stood there. Swaying with anger.
“More than twenty years ago,” said Nakamura, “a group of my fellow Nipponese businessmen and myself watched as your new young president gave a speech from Cairo that flattered the Islamic world—a bloc of Islamic nations that had not yet coalesced into today’s Global Caliphate—and praised them with obvious historical distortions of their own imagined grandeur. This president began the process of totally rewriting both history and contemporary reality with an eye toward praising radical Islam into loving him and your country.
“The name for this form of foreign policy, whenever it is used with forces of fascism, Mr. Bottom, is appeasement.”
Nick said nothing.
“This president and your country soon followed this self-mockery of a foreign policy with ever more blatant and useless appeasement, attempts at becoming a social democracy when European social democracies were beginning to collapse from debt and the burden of their entitlement programs, unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the world stage, a betrayal of old allies, a rapid and deliberate surrendering of America’s position as a superpower, and a total retreat from international responsibilities that the United States of America had long taken seriously.”
Nick looked over his shoulder at Val. The boy’s mouth was opened slightly and his face was parchment white. He looked physically ill and Nick knew that Val didn’t want to throw up on the obscenely expensive Persian carpet in front of all these men.
“Mr. Bottom?” Nakamura said sharply. “You are listening?”
Nick looked back at the megalomaniac billionaire, who leaned forward, folded his hands on the gleaming desktop, and continued with his speech.
“The economic crises which resulted in the death of the European Union and the collapse of China—as well as the violent and unnecessary deaths of more than six million Jews in Israel, and another million non-Jewish Israeli citizens, all abandoned by your country, Mr. Bottom—were merely further steps in this decline—at first deliberate and then merely inevitable—of the United States of America.”
There was a long pause and Nick spoke into it, risking the gags. “What’s this history lecture got to do with anything, Mr. Nakamura? Especially with the reason you hired me to solve your son’s murder?”
Nakamura closed his eyes as if seeking patience. Then he smiled thinly.
“As I said, Mr. Bottom, these are the stakes of the game you have entered. We industrialists in Japan almost a quarter of a century ago knew that our nation would someday have to step in to fill the void left by America’s self-willed decline. It was not a duty we welcomed… the memories of what we called Daitoa Senso, the Greater East Asian War, and which your historians called World War Two… were still too painful.
“We were reluctant, Mr. Bottom, once again to acknowledge ourselves, the citizens of Nippon, as shido minzoku—‘the world’s foremost people’—even though we understood that we would have to fill that role.
“That first war, started in China almost a century ago, was a function of our hubris—militarism combined with hopes of an empire combined with self-inflicted distortions of our religion and the samurai code of bushido. But this coming war, Mr. Bottom, a war much wider and more terrible for the enemy than Daitoa Senso, will not be the kurai tanima ‘dark valley’ of that last war. It will be a global war of liberation.”
“War with whom?” said Nick. He had to hear it all said out loud before he could say what they would demand that he say.
Nakamura shook his head sadly. “With militant Islam, Mr. Bottom,” said the billionaire, his voice soft. “With the hydra called the Global Caliphate. Islam was always, despite America’s absolute resistance in acknowledging it, a violent and barbarous religion, Mr. Bottom, its prophet a military man no less cruel than our field marshal Hajime Sugiyama or your Army Air Force general Curtis Le May. The twentieth-and twenty-first-century fundamentalist terrorist-driven forms of expansionist Islam are vile obscenities. The citizens serving the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon, descended from the Sun Goddess herself in the Land of the Rising Sun, where all eight corners of the universe have been brought together under one divine roof, will not be pulled back to the seventh century by a barbarous desert religion intent on ruling the earth and treating its conquered people as less-than-human slaves!
“But it will not happen! We shall not let it happen!!”
Now it was Hiroshi Nakamura who was shouting, and while his voice had none of the rock-concert amplification of Sato’s blast, it was loud enough and sincere enough and fanatical enough to cause Nick to take half a step back.
When the billionaire continued and concluded, his voice was much softer.
“Thus we Nipponese business leaders turned our keiretsu back into wartime zaibatsu, our family-run business interests no longer merely serving Japan’s leadership, but deciding it. Thus we returned to the honor of the samurai and the true code of bushido. Thus we will soon need a single, all-powerful Shogun to advise the emperor in this time of total war.”
Nick cleared his throat. “Of total nuclear war,” he said thickly.
“Of course,” Nakamura said dismissively, almost contemptuously. “All daimyos, even your weak friend Omura, agree that this final struggle for the future of our world will be nuclear—and thermonuclear. The enemy has shown its ruthless resolve in the murder of Israel. We shall show no less in the eradication of an infectious mental disease that is two billion persons strong across the planet.”
“Omura-sama believes that Texas will be an ally,” said Nick.
Nakamura shook his head. “Advisor Omura is weak and sentimental when it comes to the last vestige of your once-strong nation, Mr. Bottom. He will not be considered when it comes time for us daimyos to select our first Shogun in a hundred and sixty years. The weak remnants of America are currently serving their role in preparation for the coming struggle.”
Nick nodded. “With two hundred thousand of our drafted kids fighting the war for you in China,” he said.
Nakamura said nothing for a long moment.
Nick could hear a regular helicopter, not one of the whisper-dragonflies, flying low over the building. Somewhere nearby a police or ambulance siren sounded in the unoccupied part of Denver. Nick thought he could hear distant gunshots.
Had the city come apart at the seams today as K.T. and the DPD had feared? Did Nick give the slightest shit if it had?
Nakamura said, “So now you understand what is at stake, Nick Bottom. It is time for you to deliver your report on the investigation you were hired to carry out.”
Nick held his flex-cuffed wrists out. “Untie me.”
Nakamura and Sato ignored the demand.
Nick knew that he could leap at Nakamura, try to get his cuffed wrists around the billionaire’s slender neck, but he also knew that Sato or the four guards on that side would kill him the second he tried.
Nick sighed, looked back over his shoulder at Val and the apparently unconscious Leonard, and began to speak.
“I FINALLY KNOW WHY you hired me. It all came together just today, and mostly by accident. You hired me to do this inve
stigation because you weren’t certain of what I knew. You didn’t know what my wife, Dara, had told me or what notes she might have left behind for me to find. You’d searched and never found her phone, so you just weren’t sure.
“In the end, you needed someone to make something public…”
Nick paused and looked up into the high corners of the library until he spotted the red lights on the video cameras.
“You needed someone other than yourselves to make something public—as this video recording will do after my son, father-in-law, and I are dead—so you hired me.
“I was your perfect fool. So eager to get some money to buy flashback that I’d go anywhere, do anything, betray anyone to get the information you needed to be let out into the world.
“And so I have.”
Nick paced a few steps. Sato and the other guards tensed, but there was no need. Nick was organizing his thoughts, not preparing a futile leap at Nakamura.
“Flashback was a drug developed in Japan,” he said at last. “There never was any biowar lab at Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm in the Israeli desert. It was just another blood libel the Jews had to suffer after they were murdered en masse—again. You Japs designed and developed flashback—at a lab in Nara, if my sources are correct—and it’s you who transported it to the United States and elsewhere, sold it way below its production price, and have continued to have your dealers, from the heights of Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev to the street depths of poor Delroy Nigger Brown and Derek Dean, deliver it to the growing number of addicts in the States.”
“Why would Japan do that?” interrupted Nakamura. His voice was soft to the point of exuding oil.
Nick laughed.
“You got what you wanted from what was left of us after the Day It All Hit The Fan,” said Nick. “After we screwed our country into near-oblivion through debt and cowardice. You wanted our soldiers and you have them. You wanted the rest of us tranquilized, and we paid one new-buck dollar a flashback minute to accommodate you. Our leaders turned away from the future decades ago—abandoning faith in the free market system, abandoning our worldwide responsibilities, hell, even abandoning our manned spaceflight program—and the rest of us turned the rest of the way from the future when we decided to go back to the past by using flashback. Three hundred and forty million American addicts, including me until this past week, all living—re living—our little masturbatory fantasies because we couldn’t face the real world.”
Sato spoke.
“Bottom-san, how did you discover that it was Nippon who developed and delivered flashback to America?”
Nick laughed again, with even more bitterness than before.
“I didn’t. My wife did. And she was murdered for it.”
He looked from Sato to Nakamura and then around at the other men with weapons in the room. Finally he looked at his unconscious father-in-law—had Leonard once told him that he spoke some Japanese?—and then at his son. He knew that he would not get the chance to say again to Val how sorry he was.
“The woman murdered in the bedroom not thirty steps from here was known to us Denver cops as a sex-pleasure woman from Japan named Keli Bracque. She was represented to us as Keigo Nakamura’s favorite sex toy, nothing more. We knew her as Keli Bracque because that was her name in the totally fabricated dossier that the various Japanese police services sent to us. Advisor Nakamura’s offices confirmed that fact.”
Nick paused. He was getting so angry that his arms were shaking, his hands were balled into fists, and his legs felt weak.
Sato snapped something in Japanese and one of the ninjas carried over a chair for Nick. He didn’t sit in it, but he grabbed the back to help hold himself up.
“Keli Bracque was supposed to be the daughter of American missionaries in Japan,” continued Nick, his voice thick with phlegm and fury. “That was a lie. It was all a lie. Keli Bracque’s real name was Kumiko Catherine Catton and she was the daughter of Sakura Catton, an American-born woman who’d spent her entire adult life in Japan. A woman who was a courtesan of a famous Japanese daimyo. What’s the Japanese word for ‘girlfriend’ or ‘mistress’ or ‘courtesan’ or ‘second wife,’ as you used to say? Keisi or gosai or aijin or sembo… you Jap guys have a lot of words for your out-of-marriage lady friends. The American Mafia bosses just called them goomahs.”
The very air in the library seemed to have stopped stirring. Nick glanced out of the corners of his eyes and saw that no one was looking at anyone, even the ever-vigilant ninjas staring only at their own feet. Nakamura had assumed the kind of inward-looking thousand-yard stare that Tokyo residents had perfected for traveling in their overcrowded subways.
“Here’s the complicated part of this whole scenario,” Nick said into the thickened silence. He pointed at Hiroshi Nakamura. “It wasn’t enough for your family and the families of Munetaka, Morikune, Omura, Toyoda, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, and Yoshiake just to take all of modern Japan back to feudal days to prepare yourselves for this holy war with Islam. You couldn’t just draw the line at rebuilding the old feudal system from Japan’s own Middle Ages—turning keiretsu into clan-run, government-ruling zaibatsu and industrialists into daimyo s—it wasn’t enough just to bring back the feudal realities of Shogun and samurai and ronin and a resurgence of the code of bushido—no, you superdaimyo heads of the überzaibatsu, you had to bring back feudal ways of assuring the allegiance of your vassals, including your vassal- daimyos.”
Nick paused and looked up at the still-glowing red eye of the video camera, then back at Nakamura.
“Hiroshi Nakamura had a problem with one of his vassal-daimyos becoming too popular with the people and with Nakamura’s own soldiers as a warrior-prince in China. Your daimyo’s loyalty was never in question, Mr. Nakamura—you knew he’d die for you or commit seppuku if you demanded it—but such popularity in an underling is a dangerous thing all by itself. So you—and Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, Yoshiake, Morikune, Omura, Munetaka, and Toyoda—began doing the same thing Japanese liege lords and their liege-lord counterparts in Europe’s Middle Ages did as insurance for such loyalty…
“You took the popular warrior-daimyo’s child as a sort of hostage. Not the two grown sons of this popular daimyo by his real wife—one of those sons had already died in battle in China and another soon would—but, rather, this daimyo’s beloved daughter by his American-born courtesan.
“Thus Kumiko Catherine Catton—who we were told was a sex worker named Keli Bracque—entered your household. She was not treated as a prisoner, Mr. Nakamura. Just as in feudal Europe during the Middle Ages, you raised Kumiko as if she were an honored member of your own family.
“But the unthinkable happened. Kumiko Catherine Catton fell in love with your only son. When Keigo came to the United States to shoot his documentary, fourteen months before you were appointed Advisor by your emperor—before you arranged to be appointed as a Federal Advisor in Colorado—Kumiko, aka Keli Bracque, came with him. She wasn’t Keigo’s sex toy. They were passionately in love.”
Nick paused.
Nakamura cleared his throat and said softly, “May I ask how you came by this information, Mr. Bottom?”
“You hired me to find it,” said Nick. “But I didn’t. I never would have followed up on Ms. Keli Bracque’s background. I was too stupid.
“But Keli—Kumiko—became alarmed for her beloved Keigo Nakamura’s safety. Your wastrel son was pretty bright after all, wasn’t he, Mr. Nakamura? Thrown out of Tokyo University, but not because he was stupid… because he was a born rebel. In the States, we have the expression The squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, you say The nail that stands up gets hammered down.
“Well, Mr. Nakamura, I don’t have to tell you that Keigo was the nail that stood up. He was a rebel in a society devoted as never before to blind obedience. The video documentary he was shooting wasn’t about how pathetic Americans were for getting hooked on the drug flashback… it was about where flashback had come from, Japan. And it was about the dam
age that the deliberate and premeditated introduction of this addictive drug had done to human beings here who used it—from pathetic Israeli survivors of the Second Holocaust to hopeless inner-city blacks to suburban housewives.”
“Prove it, Mr. Bottom,” said Nakamura.
Nick did not smile. “I don’t have to. I’ve seen several hours of his footage, Mr. Nakamura. And pretty soon, so will millions of other Americans. Keigo Nakamura will show the damage you and the other Japanese warlords have done to this nation.”
Nakamura said nothing.
“Kumiko Catherine Catton didn’t give a damn about any of the politics of the issue,” said Nick. “She just was afraid that someone would whack her beloved Keigo. Like her mother, Kumiko had grown up in Japan—had seen the changes there in the past twenty years. She knew that the daimyos weren’t going to allow Keigo to show and distribute his quixotic documentary. She knew that someone would stop Keigo… and stop him hard.
“So in Kumiko’s naïveté—she was still more used to the way things worked in Japan than in her mother’s birthplace of the United States—she went to local officials for help. Her thinking was that if the shocking information behind Keigo’s little movie went public first, there’d be no reason for the daimyos to harm the boy.
“Kumiko went to Denver’s district attorney—an ambitious but moronic political appointee named Mannie Ortega. Not even understanding what the girl was offering to give him, Ortega handed it off to a mere assistant district attorney—a poor, hardworking but unlucky sonofabitch named Harvey Cohen—who, with his assistant, my wife, Dara, began interviewing Keli Bracque, aka Kumiko Catherine Catton, and just what they learned about the origins of flashback was astounding.
“Ortega was an idiot, but Harvey and Dara knew what they were dealing with. They insisted, over Mannie Ortega’s insistence that it was no big deal, that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security be brought in.
“Both the FBI and DHS were brought in. They carried out their own ‘complete investigations.’ Then they assured District Attorney Ortega, Assistant District Attorney Cohen, and Cohen’s research assistant, Dara Fox Bottom, that Keli Bracque was a stone liar, that the girl was indeed an ambitious sex worker and a drug addict—heroin—and that there was no such person as Kumiko Catherine Catton.