Flashback

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.”

“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.