Flashback

As if hearing his name, Leonard stirred and groaned in the backseat.

Val looked at his grandfather and his own chest hurt.

“In a dream I had last night,” said Nick, “the three of us were hightailing it to Texhoma, Oklahoma, in an old Chevy Camaro SS with a supercharged V-8.”

“What the fuck is in Texhoma, Oklahoma?”

“A border-station crossing into the Republic of Texas.”

“They’d pay for Leonard’s surgery in Texas?”

Nick shot a glance at the boy. “No, but they’d have it available if we could pay for it. And I’d find a way to.”

“I hear that Texas doesn’t let in useless people,” said Val. “Especially useless people who are flashback addicts.”

Nick didn’t respond to that.

After a moment, Val said, “So the car that your friend… K.T… is leaving for us at Six Flags is an old gas-burning V-8 Camaro?”

“Probably not,” said Nick. “I just wanted the fastest car in the DPD impound lot. Remember Mad Max’s Last of the V-8 Interceptors?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” lied Val.

Nick shrugged. They were approaching the overpass crossing I-25 and he turned left toward the abandoned towers and roller-coaster steel of the old Elitch Gardens. The gelding told him that it had 3½ miles of charge left in it.

There was one vehicle parked away from the others, facing the wrong way, in the parking lot. Nick stopped near it and whispered, “Ah, Jesus Christ, no.”

He checked on Leonard and got out of the gelding. A moment later, Val did the same, still carrying his pistol.

Nick pulled a little box from the left rear wheel well. Folded around the ignition key fob was a note in K.T.’s handwriting—The impound lot’s almost empty and I could never get anything out of it today. This is my personal vehicle. Good luck.”

Nick and Val stood looking at the blue Menlo Park all-battery mini-van. On a good day, these things had a range of around 100 miles.

“At least it’s a lighter blue,” muttered Nick. Val had no idea what the Old Man was talking about.

Nick had just offered the keys to Val and was about to say something when four desert-camouflage tan M-ATVs roared across the parking lot and screeched to a stop around them. A dozen Japanese men in black ballistic cloth SWAT armor, all carrying automatic weapons, boiled out of the big vehicles and aimed their weapons at Val and Nick.

Val started to bring his Beretta up and the Old Man grabbed his wrist, squeezing hard until he dropped the gun. Nick himself made no motion toward a weapon.

A bulky Jap also in ballistic black came down the rear ramp of the closest Oshkosh M-ATV and looked silently as one of the younger men frisked Nick and took a 9mm Glock from his belt and a .32-caliber pistol from an ankle holster. Another ninja, who’d picked up the Beretta, now frisked Val and relieved him of all the pistol magazines and loose rounds. Two other men in black were easily lifting Leonard—still sleeping—out of the back of the gelding. A third man held the IV bottle.

The two ninjas who’d frisked Val and Nick nodded to the big man as other men with automatic weapons began herding the father and son into the back of the big M-ATV.

“Bottom-san,” said the man in black, “it is time.”

1.18 Denver—Saturday, Sept. 25

Nick had done everything possible to avoid this final meeting with Hiroshi Nakamura, but he’d always known it would have to happen.

In his mental rehearsals of this final encounter, the meeting was always set in Mr. Nakamura’s office in his mountaintop compound up in Evergreen where Nick had first met the billionaire. However, when Nick and Val were led out of the back of the Oshkosh M-ATV—both blinking in the low but bright early-evening light—Nick saw that they were in LoDo, on Wazee Street, in front of Keigo Nakamura’s bachelor-pad building. The murder scene.

Now this street in Lower Downtown reminded Nick of scenes from the countless urban-war videos on the TV each night showing American troops in some city in Pakistan or in Brazil or in China, with several big M-ATVs parked front to rear across the street at both ends of the city block being used as roadblocks, two helicopters landed in the middle of the street, and soldiers on the street and rooftops of evacuated buildings.

But this was an American city and these soldiers weren’t tired American troops in their bulky body armor and scuffed kneepads, but scores of Nakamura’s—or perhaps Sato’s (did it make any difference? wondered Nick)—ninjas in jump boots and ballistic black and carrying automatic weapons, all wearing identical tactical sunglasses and tiny bead earphones and microphones beneath their black ball caps.