Flashback

“About your wife?” Oz asked softly. He rubbed his neck as if still feeling Nick’s forearm there. There was still a red spot on the poet’s left temple where the muzzle of Nick’s Glock had broken the skin.

“No, not about Dara,” managed Nick. He opened his mouth to apologize and then shut it without speaking. “Just a question. If you could have saved Israel from destruction by killing a single person—one human being—would you have done it?”

Danny Oz blinked several times. The pained expression on his face showed that the question was not only unfair but impossible to answer. Still, he answered.

“Mr. Bottom, the Talmud taught us—and I’m sure I’ve bollixed up this verse since I haven’t studied the Sanhedrin part of the Talmud since I was a boy, but I’ll try to quote—‘ For this reason was man created alone, to teach thee that whosoever destroys a single soul… scripture imputes… I think the word is ‘guilt’… to him as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whosoever preserves a single soul, scripture ascribes merit to him… or maybe the passage said ‘righteousness,’ I’m not sure… as though he had preserved a complete world.’ ”

“So you wouldn’t have killed someone to save Israel?” said Nick.

Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye and the former thousand-yard stare was completely absent from his gaze. And from Nick’s.

“I don’t know, Mr. Bottom. God forgive me, I simply don’t know.”

“One last question,” said Nick. “If you had the chance to return to Israel now, would you do it?”

Oz snorted derisively. He drank the last of his cold coffee and lit a new cigarette. “There is no Israel, Mr. Bottom. Only a radioactive wasteland inhabited by Arabs.”

“It’s not all radioactive,” said Nick. “And what if someone removed the new Arab settlers who came in after the bombings?”

Oz laughed again. It was a hollow, sad sound. “Remove them? Sure. Who would do that, Mr. Bottom? The United Nations?”

The UN, always a dependable ally of the Arab bloc and of Palestinians at the end of the twentieth century, was now—except for its Japanese-run “peacekeeper” operation in China—a full-fledged subsidiary of the Islamic Global Caliphate. The irony, as Nick saw it, was that even after six million Jews had been murdered and the state of Israel destroyed, the so-called Palestinians were denied their nation-in-radioactive-rubble by Shi’ite Iran and the competing and ever-wary and ever-jealous Sunni Arab states.

“No,” said Nick. “Cleared out by someone else. Would you go?”

“I have prostate cancer and other radiation-induced cancers,” said Oz. “I’m dying.”

“We’re all dying,” said Nick. “Would you go back to Israel if other Jews joined you there?”

Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye again and—once more—there was the new clarity to his gaze. “I’d go in a minute, Mr. Bottom. In a minute.”

Nick came out to the parking lot knowing that he’d learned almost nothing that could help him when he would have to stand before Mr. Nakamura in a few hours and be commanded to tell the billionaire who’d killed his son.

But I learned something important, thought Nick. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

The three Oshkosh M-ATVs roared in and blocked his vehicle before he got the doors to his car unlocked.

Mutsumi ta, Daigorou Okada, and Shinta Ishii—Nick’s fellow survivors from the Santa Fe trip—jumped out of the lead vehicle. Each was dressed for urban combat but not for war: SWAT Kevlar and black boots, even their black ball caps made of ballistic cloth. And each held an automatic weapon at port arms.

Nick didn’t move a muscle.

Sato moved his mass out the rear hatch of the M-ATV, nodded at his three ninjas, and said, “Bottom-san, will you come with us, please?”

Oh shit, thought Nick. Too soon. Too early. I’m not ready. He wondered once again how many billions of men and women had died with equally unworthy final thoughts.

He licked his lips. “Mr. Nakamura’s back?”

“Not yet,” rumbled Sato. “But Mr. Nakamura did direct us to show you some things before your meeting with him later today. Please come with us.”

“Do I have a choice?” said Nick.

“Please come with us, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “We shall return you to your vehicle here in an hour or less.”

Keeping his hands away from his Glock, making no sudden movements, Nick went up the rear ramp into the idling M-ATV.