Flashback

“You have the first month’s expenses now,” said Sato. “Including money for flashback purchase, of course, but also for transportation—you will need a new car, as Mr. Nakamura pointed out—and other incidentals. Obviously all expenditures will be tracked in real time from our end.”

Nick only nodded. But as Sato moved toward the door, Nick said, “Three of those eighteen are dead, you know.”

“Yes.”

“But you still want me to review them under flash and keep them as a focus of the investigation?”

“Yes.”

Nick shrugged again. “I’ll walk you out.”

The phrase sounded archaic even to Nick’s middle-aged ears. And he didn’t give a damn whether the security chief had trouble finding his way out of the mall. He only wanted to make sure he was really gone.

Surprisingly, Sato didn’t walk to any of the airlock exits. He crossed to the north mezzanine and the administrative corridor near the old Ralph Lauren store. Gunny G. and the black-armored security sergeant named Marx were there to meet him. The four men went through a door and up a flight of steps—the elevators weren’t working in the brownout—and out onto the roof. Nick knew this roof access; he had its entry code memorized and a hundred feet of Perlon-3 climbing rope, carabiners, and a rappel-harness in his cubie closet in case he ever had to leave the building quickly via the roof.

Now he squinted in the hazy light. Smoke was still rising many miles to the northwest.

The helicopter that came in to fetch Sato was one of the new silent ones that looked more like a dragonfly than any of the Homeland Security, police, and other choppers that Nick had known. The only noise as it touched down—Nick couldn’t have told anyone that the old mall had an infrared-marked heliport space on its roof—was the scrabble of gravel blowing across the grimy skylights and decommissioned solar panels.

Sato clambered in without saying a word to anyone and the Nakamura aircraft lifted off and flew due west.

On the way down the steps, Gunny G. said, “Some company you’re keeping these days, Nick.”

Nick grunted.

Nick didn’t have to leave the mall to get to his flashback dealer. Gary met him in the part of the subbasement that used to be the mall’s boiler room.

“Holy shit,” said the maintenance man when he saw the balance on Nick’s NICC. “How much of this you want to spend on the flash?”

“All of it,” said Nick. He handed the card to Gary and watched as the other man swiped it in his illicit, illegal, but quite effective black-market diskey.

“It’s going to take me some time to get that many vials together.”

“Ten minutes,” said Nick, who knew where Gary kept his supplies. “One minute more and I’ll do this buy on the street.”

“Easy, easy,” said Gary, making patting motions with his gnarled hands. “I’ll get it all up to you at your cubie in ten minutes. But they gonna be a lotta unhappy flashers in the building tonight.”

“Fuck ’em,” said Nick. “But don’t deliver to my cubie. I’ll meet you here in ten minutes.”

“You the buyer.”

“You’re damned right,” said Nick.

Gary was back in the boiler room in eight minutes and so was Nick. He’d dumped his card and phone in his cubie and showered and changed clothes and passed his old police bug detector over himself—just in case Sato had put a tracker on him—and come down to the basement carrying only his old olive-canvas messenger bag slung over one shoulder.

Even with the high number of twenty-hour vials Nick had specified, there were a lot of flashback vials coming out of Gary’s duffel. Nick stuffed them into his messenger bag, wrapping them quickly in the towels he’d packed to keep them from rattling.

When Gary was gone, Nick went through the seldom-used door down into the pipe conduits and crawlspaces beneath the boiler room. There was a deeper crawlspace here going to the older pipes, most out of use now, that ran to and from the mall from the outside, and this access panel was locked with a number keypad for which no one working in the mall probably still had the code. Nick tapped in the seven-digit code. He knew this not from his time living at the mall but from a case ten years ago when he and other detectives had searched this whole maze of Cherry Creek underground heating and sewage pipes for a serial killer who’d specialized in children.

Clicking the access panel shut behind him, Nick pulled a tiny flashlight from his messenger bag and moved in a crouching run fifty yards or so, avoiding the rusty and corroded pipes that all but filled the space. Whatever was in there now—and dripping and oozing from those pipes—was bad enough to keep the street people out of this particular stretch of the underground maze. It was hard to breathe there.

Nick reached the first junction of tunnels and turned left. The tunnel here was just as small and just as foul-smelling. Nick counted twenty paces and stopped where several smaller pipes ran dripping into the concrete wall. An old inspection panel there looked corroded shut but it slid screechingly upward when Nick pulled.