Flashback

Nick forced himself to calm down. He’d have to borrow some of Dr. Tak’s tranquilizers from Leonard’s doggie bag if he kept flirting with hysteria this way.

Getting down on his hands and knees, Nick looked under the bed and under the desk, pawing through the mess. He found the old phone between the faux wood and the wall baseboard where someone had knocked it off the back of his desk.

Please God, tell me it’s not broken.

As usual, God did not deign to tell Nick Bottom anything.

The phone’s scratched screen lit up, but only to inform him that the long-term battery was too weak to run the old phone.

Nick again looked through all the junk removed from his room’s various drawers until he found the charger-adapter for his own phone. Nick and Dara had bought their phones at the same time; the charger fit both.

The files had closed and reencrypted at the power-down so Nick had to reenter the dream password.

Eight-to-five odds that the password won’t work for me.

But it did.

Nick went to the massive video files, hoping to see Dara. Even though he’d visited her for hours every night and day of his life for the past five and a half years—this past week excepted—his heart pounded wildly at the thought of seeing new video of her.

She wasn’t there.

But Danny Oz was. And Delroy Nigger Brown. And Derek Dean. And Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. And two dozen other talking heads, all familiar to Nick Bottom through the homicide investigation of Keigo Nakamura’s messy murder.

The missing last hours of Keigo’s documentary.

Nick didn’t even ask himself—yet—how Dara could have gotten a copy. Unless she was the murderer. He shut that problem out for now and flicked through the video-recorded interviews, too impatient to listen to them in their entirety, but jumping from interview subject to interview subject.

It was there. Something incredible was there.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev talking about the laboratories in Nara in Japan where flashback had really been invented and the larger, newer laboratories outside Wuhan and Shantou and Nanjing in China that would be producing the Flashback-two. Noukhaev smiling and talking about distribution networks flowing from Japan and reaching everywhere—just as they had for fifteen years now.

Nick jumped from person to person, hearing Keigo’s distant voice asking the questions—only the answers were to be in his documentary—and while most of the questions and answers were like the billionaire’s son’s earlier recorded footage, there were new parts—hints—clues—which began to come together for Nick, even hearing only fragments and unrelated snippets.

This footage alone might help him understand what Keigo Nakamura had been doing with his goddamned documentary—if not who murdered him for it—before Nick’s meeting with Nakamura later this afternoon or evening.

Of course, Nick realized, if he was still here when it came time for that meeting, he probably would have lost everything anyway. The trick was not to solve Keigo Nakamura’s murder after six years of both it and Nick being lost in the cold file, the idea was to get his son and father-in-law and to get away.

Even if, unlike in his dream that morning, there was no place to get away to. The Republic of Texas didn’t take in wanted felons—and he would be such by the time he got to any border—much less wanted felons and their sons and fathers-in-law.

Nick closed out the video and used the second password—Kildare—to open the text files.

The first ones, made about two months before Keigo’s murder, made Nick stop breathing.

It was not a long or thick text file, despite the fact that it covered the last seven months of his wife’s life. She’d made only a few notes for him (or for herself?) in the weeks before and after Keigo’s death, and then almost none through the winter months until just the days before her own death.

Nick didn’t skip through these files as he had through the videos. He read them straight through…

… participation of Homeland Security and the FBI, but Mannie Ortega is keeping it within his department…

… Harvey doesn’t want to lose the time with his family, but he sees it as a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity…

… if I could only tell Nick, but I’ve sworn to both my boss and my boss’s boss, in writing, that this will stay quiet until…