“The FBI and Homeland Security told Mannie, Harvey, and Dara that this kind of hysteria could hurt American-Japanese relations at a time when we depended on Japan and would personally insult the soon-to-be Federal Advisor to Colorado and the southwestern states, Hiroshi Nakamura. These federal agencies recommended—strongly recommended—that the investigation into this crazy woman’s allegations be shut down immediately and that all interviews and records be destroyed.
“So Ortega immediately terminated the investigation, burned and wiped all the files he had, and ordered Harvey and Dara to do the same.
“But my wife and her hapless boss were stubborn. They continued meeting secretly with Kumiko Catherine Catton—and began discussions with Keigo Nakamura himself, foolishly promising him safety in the Witness Protection Program—right up to the time of Keigo’s and Kumiko’s murder in October six years ago.
“Even after those murders, Harvey and Dara kept hardcopy and computer files in a room they rented, using Harvey’s own personal credit card—and he couldn’t afford it—at a motel here in Denver. Their plan was to turn the information over to the Attorney General of the United States, with duplicate copies to all the AGs in forty-four states.
“Right up to the day of their deaths—their murders—more than three months after the execution of Keigo and Kumiko, Harvey and Dara didn’t understand what they had. Dara tried to tell me—tried to lead me toward the real killers in my own investigation—but she knew that if she revealed the secrets she and Harvey had been sitting on, I’d lose my job. A job I loved. And the truth is—she never really did figure out who’d killed her friend Kumiko and the billionaire’s son, Keigo.”
Nick paused. He hadn’t spoken this much for this long in more than six years. His throat was sore.
“She and her boss Harvey never understood how big the whole thing was,” he rasped at last. “They thought it was just a revelation about who invented and distributed flashback. They didn’t see that it was really about the future of who controlled this country. That it was really about power.”
He stopped.
Hiroshi Nakamura sat far back in the plush leather chair behind the big desk. He steepled his fingers, looked at Hideki Sato, looked back at Nick, and smiled. His voice was purr-soft.
“You still haven’t told us who the murder or murderers were, Detective Bottom.”
Exhausted, Nick leaned on the back of the chair they’d given him. He looked Nakamura in the eye.
“The fuck I haven’t,” he said flatly, coldly. “You haven’t been listening. You ordered your son and his girlfriend to be killed, Hiroshi Nakamura.”
He would have pointed at the billionaire, but it seemed melodramatic to do so and he was too tired to lift his arm.
“You did it to show the other daimyo s—not just the top boys, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, Yoshiake, Morikune, Omura, Munetaka, and Toyoda, but the scores of other important daimyos back in old Nippon—that you could be ruthless when it came to protecting the Motherland’s secrets. Or is it the Fatherland’s?
“At any rate, you called back your top assassin and most loyal daimyo, Hideki Sato—Colonel Death himself—from China to do the job. A bullet in the brain was enough for the girl, you told him, but Keigo had to be… massacred. To show what happens to those who reveal a future Shogun’s secrets.”
Nick turned wearily toward Sato.
“And you were never Keigo’s bodyguard here. It was always that other guy, Satoh. But you’d known Keigo Nakamura all his short life. He trusted you. When he went up to the roof to meet you—when you stepped out of that whisper-dragonfly ’copter or rappelled down a rope from it or whatever the hell you did—he never would have believed that you were the assassin his father would send.
“Especially, Sato-san, since you were Kumiko Catherine Catton’s father.”
There was no buzz in the room. No one made a sound. But Nick could feel a buzz as all eyes, even the ninja guards’, shifted in the direction of Sato.
The huge security chief stared at Nick with no expression whatsoever.
“You did your job,” Nick said, his voice rough and devoid of energy. “Three months later, when it was decided that poor Harvey and my Dara were still a threat, you arranged for their ‘accidental deaths’ on I-Twenty-five here in town. Two days ago I’m sure you either personally whacked that stupid mutt Mannie Ortega in Washington or had your boys do it.”
Nick looked away from Nakamura and up at the red-glowing video camera.
“Is that enough? You can edit this down later to the good stuff. But this should show you other daimyos that Hiroshi Nakamura will be a Shogun who means business and that Colonel Hideki Sato will do whatever he has to do to serve his liege lord and boss. Is this enough? Because all I have left to say is that perhaps—just perhaps—you daimyos won’t be the only ones to be seeing examples of Nakamura’s and Sato’s cruelty.”
Nick walked around the chair and sat down. It was either sit or fall.
And he needed to conserve his energy. Whether they offered him a chance now or not—and he was sure they would not—he was determined to take one. Just saying Dara’s name aloud several times had made that a certainty.
Nick hadn’t expected a round of applause for his Inspector Clouseau performance and he didn’t receive one. The silence was absolute. But what he heard next was something he really hadn’t expected.
Nakamura stood and looked around the room. He was smiling. “Our guest’s last comment—the last vague threat—was due to the fact that earlier today, Mr. Bottom e-mailed copies of his wife’s diary and my son’s video to eight people. Unfortunately for our detective friend, Colonel Sato’s people have been monitoring all Internet access from that sad condominium and intercepted all eight e-mails sent from a certain Gunny G.’s computer.”
Nick felt as if he’d been hit in the solar plexus. Spots danced in his vision. The end of even the most cynical twentieth-century movies he loved had the hero turning over the evidence of government or CIA conspiracies to the New York Times or Washington Post or some other crusading newspaper. Now those newspapers were gone forever and so was any hope of Nick’s getting Dara’s notes and Keigo’s videos out to the world.
“Which leaves,” continued Nakamura, “the detail of Ms. Dara Fox Bottom’s actual telephone with its… ah… compromising files. Colonel Sato?”
Sato walked close to the desk and produced the old phone that they’d confiscated from Nick. The security man held the phone over Nakamura’s wastebasket and squeezed until plastic ruptured and microchips crumbled. When he opened his hand, the shards and shattered filaments fell in a silvery waterfall into the wastebasket.
Nick was too defeated to look over his shoulder at Val.
Still standing, Nakamura fired a rapid-fire salvo of Japanese at Sato.
Sato barked back, “Hai, Nakamura-sama,” and gestured for the guards in the room to take Nick, Val, and the still-unconscious Leonard out.
Nick was concentrating on the few seconds when they were in the open air before they’d be loaded on the sealed M-ATVs again, but Sato led the way upstairs rather than down.
They all came out onto the roof—a small army of blackclad guards, the boy, the exhausted ex-cop, and the sleeping old man being carried again—and the Sasayaki-tonbo whisper-dragonfly ’copter was hovering there, three feet above the building’s roof, just as it must have been the night it had brought Sato there to murder his young friend Keigo and his daughter, Kumiko.
The ninja were very, very good. They never crossed into each other’s field of fire. They never got close enough for Nick to grab and grapple. At least three of them always kept their automatic weapons aimed at Nick’s, Val’s, and even Leonard’s heads while the others did what they had to do.
Nick’s old friends from the Santa Fe trip—ninjas Shinta Ishii, Mutsumi ta, and Daigorou Okada—jumped into the hovering dragonfly along with two men he didn’t know, and all five turned to cover Nick, Val, and the sleeping Leonard as they fi
rst loaded Leonard aboard, then pulled Val up, then beckoned Nick forward. The three prisoners were made to sit against the forward bulkhead—Leonard still out and his IV bottle suspended on a bracket above him—while Sato jumped aboard.
Their ’copter moved away and hovered a hundred feet above Wazee Street while a second dragonfly loaded a dozen of Sato’s men, then a third.
Even in the closer confines of the helicopter, Ishii, ta, and Okada kept the muzzles of their low-velocity automatic weapons aimed steadily at all three of the Americans’ heads, but there was a second or two—just a second or two—where Sato’s attention was distracted as he was putting on and plugging in his dragonfly-intercom earphones and microphone.
The few seconds were not enough for Nick to act, but he leaned against Leonard as if checking on his unconscious father-in-law and had time to whisper—Did you understand what Nakamura said in Japanese?”
The seemingly unconscious old man nodded.
“What did he say?” whispered Nick.
“Something about taking us all to Landfill Number Nine,” whispered Leonard without moving his lips.
ta shouted something in Japanese and Shinta Ishii repeated the shout in English, “No talking! No talking!”
“Sit back against the bulkhead, Bottom-san,” said Hideki Sato. He had his pistol out and it was aimed at Nick’s head. He gestured gently with it.
Nick sat back, setting his cuffed wrists on his knee, and glanced once toward Val. His son’s eyes were bright, but he did not seem to be afraid. This astonished Nick. Val nodded once as if Nick had sent him a telepathic message.
The line of three whisper-dragonflies banked hard to the right and flew fast and silently east over Denver as the last of the evening light bled out of the Colorado sky.
1.19
Airborne—Saturday, Sept. 25
THE ONLY SOUND was the air rushing over the dragonfly’s airframe and into the open doors. Nick was not seated close enough to the open door to see when they’d flown over the eastern edge of Denver, but his view of the horizon suggested that they were out over open country.
The flight to Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine would take only a few minutes. Ninjas Ishii, ta, and Okada as well as one other blackclad guard, whom Nick didn’t know, all kept their low-velocity automatic weapons aimed. All of them had tasers hooked on their belts or combat utility vests. The fifth guard, who might have been a medic, had gone over to check on Leonard’s IV after the apparently unconscious man had lolled to his left and pulled out the IV needle.
Nick only wished that he could go back to those few seconds in the parking lot at Six Flags where both he and Val could have reached for their weapons and gone down fighting. It had all happened so quickly, but that was no excuse. Cops were trained to react quickly. And cops were also trained never to surrender their weapons. Not ever. In the movies and TV there were a thousand scenes where the bad guy has some hostage—sometimes the hapless cop’s even more hapless partner—and the hero or heroine cop puts down the gun—Look, I’m putting it down!” Nick remembered when he was a little kid sprawled on the couch watching such a cop melodrama on pre- 3D TV and the Old Man, passing through the room, said, “Never gonna happen.”
Had it been the presence of Val and Leonard this afternoon that had kept Nick from fighting—that had made him grab his son’s wrist to force the Beretta out of his hand? Probably. Nick had more or less come to terms with dying over the past couple of weeks, but he hadn’t been prepared to watch his son die.
Still—you surrender your weapon, you surrender all hopes of ever regaining control of a situation. Cops knew that and at one time Nick’s country had understood that. And then they’d shown the way to peace through one-sided nuclear disarmament, annual budget cuts to the military in order to feed the exponentially growing entitlements…
The most sickening thing about Hiroshi Nakamura’s little history speech was that Nick had agreed with much of it.
Now Nick shoved all such thoughts out of his mind, concentrating on being aware. If the ninjas and Sato gave him a single instant of inattention, Nick was going to take the chance.
And if they didn’t give him a chance, he knew he was going to take it anyway. Sato was standing by the open door, one arm casually hooked through a strap from the aft bulkhead. Nick knew exactly what he was going to try.
FOR SOME REASON, ONE of the ninjas was still attending to his captives’ wounds and injuries. Why? It was crazy to fuss over medical stuff with your prisoners when you were going to execute them in a few minutes anyway. Nick assumed that it had something to do with the Japs’ medieval samurai code of bushido. Maybe it wasn’t honorable—that all-purpose Nipponese concept that seemed to cover all sorts of self-imposed insanity—to allow your doomed prisoners to die from their wounds on the way to their executions.
But it didn’t matter why the ninja playing medic was doing so; the only thing that mattered was that it gave Nick an opening.
The fifth ninja had removed the tape from Leonard’s wrist and was preparing to reinsert the IV needle—the bottle hanging from a bulkhead bracket was almost empty—when Leonard kicked the man between the legs, under the armor there, and when the guard doubled over, Leonard was shouting to Val and Nick and on his feet, physically lifting the shorter Jap off his feet and thrusting the ninja and himself forward, blocking all lines of fire.
Another guard jumped at Leonard, clubbing at him and reaching for his taser. Val leaped past his grandfather and began wrestling with a ninja for his submachine gun. Nick propelled himself straight at Sato.
There was confusion and shouting. The weapon Val was struggling for discharged and insulation flew from the forward bulkhead where Nick’s head had been an instant earlier. Perhaps it penetrated the forward compartment and hit one of the pilots, for the dragonfly suddenly listed to the left.
Nick had leaped onto Hideki Sato and was head-butting the big man and pummeling his face with both flex-cuffed fists. Sato lurched backward, shielded his face with his injured right forearm that still had the polymorphic smart-cast on it, and caught a swing-arm girder that was used for hydraulic cable lifts of people and things from below. Sato had his pistol in his left hand and was clubbing at the back of Nick’s head, but Nick was hunched over and the heavy blows fell on his back and shoulders.
A ninja had gone down and Val was straddling him, still trying to wrest a long gun from a second guard. Leonard’s medic was down, writhing, but the larger man he was wrestling with zapped Leonard with a taser. Nick saw his father-in-law drop like a bag of bricks and just had time to wonder if the taser had killed him.
Sato shoved him back, trying to clear a space between them, and for a few perfect seconds, Nick’s back was against his son’s back as he and Val swung and clubbed and butted away opponents and for those few seconds he was so close to his boy that their combined fury and determination to survive became a single force, almost a form of love.
Then there were numerous taser zaps behind him and Val fell away.
Sato squared himself off to finish with Nick but Nick leaped in the air, landing on the broad man’s upper body, head-butting him fiercely again, and shoving both of them out the open door of the wildly banking helicopter.
Sato had grabbed the winch-frame girder again but it had swung out on its heavy hinges over nothing, Sato’s huge weight dangling from it by one hand and Nick clinging and grabbing and hanging on to Sato. He was screaming and clawing, determined to pull the Jap from his perch and make him fall with him.
The dragonfly banked steeply back to its right and Sato’s and Nick’s legs flew high, almost touching the whirling rotors. Sato did a complete three-hundred-sixty-degree swing over the horizontal winch bar—like an Olympic athlete doing his routine on the high bar—and the metal frame was bending and tearing out of its hinge sockets from their combined weight. Nick had no idea how Sato still had so much strength in an arm that had been broken so recently. Maybe the polymorphic smart-cast added strength.
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Ninjas crouched in the madly tipping open doorway, aiming their weapons at Nick and screaming in Japanese.
Nick realized that he was snarling, clawing at Sato’s eyes with his nails, and biting at the big man’s huge neck like a wild animal. The two men spun back and forth under the groaning and swinging winch bar, connected to the dragonfly ’copter only by Sato’s right hand.
Nick began chewing Sato’s right upper arm above the cast, biting for muscle, willing to chew to the bone to get the sonofabitch to release his grip. It was more than a thousand feet to the tilting ground below. Nick thought he could already smell the stench of Landfill Number Nine.
All right, I’ll go there, but we’ll go together, you motherfucker, thought Nick through his snarls and chewing and clawing. Terminal velocity, two hundred miles an hour, the both of us.
Sato threw away the pistol he still held in his free hand and clubbed Nick on the side of the head with a giant fist. Nick saw flashing lights and he lost his cuffed grip on Sato’s bleeding neck and head.
He was loose and falling. By himself. Sato still hung on.
Nick screamed his defiance even as he fell away. But the dragonfly banked hard left, the tilted rotors slashing air inches above Nick’s tumbling head, and then he felt Sato’s lunging left hand—impossibly strong—close around his cuffed wrists.
Then, even more impossibly, Sato hung on to the screeching and bending winch girder with his right hand while he swung Nick up and around and threw him—contemptuously, it seemed—back into the open door of the helicopter.
Val and Leonard were sprawled out, either dead or unconscious. Nick smashed against a bulkhead and felt something tear in his leg but leaped up against the dark shapes coming toward him. He could see Sato swinging back into the chopper behind the ninjas. Nick’s teeth were bloody with Sato’s blood and he had flesh in his mouth and he wanted more…