Flashback

The flatscreen went black and hummed itself back down into the bureau.

“We know that you met with Advisor Omura in that gentleman’s aerie above Los Angeles yesterday, Mr. Bottom,” said Hiroshi Nakamura. “We have no recording of that conversation, but we can imagine how it went.”

“Let my people go, Nakamura.”

The billionaire ignored him. “Since everything that Omura told you is almost certainly either distorted or totally untrue, I will explain the real stakes of the struggle you have become involved in.”

“I don’t give a shit what the stakes are for…,” began Nick.

“SILENCE!!!” roared Sato.

Everyone in the room except for Nakamura and Leonard seemed to jump at the explosion of sound. Nick would not have thought that the human voice, without electronic amplification, could produce so many raw decibels. He imagined the black-garbed ninjas up and down Wazee Street and on the rooftops jumping in their tracks.

“Very correct,” said Nakamura. “If you interrupt me again, you and the other two will be gagged. And, given your father-in-law’s unfortunate condition, that might not be the best for him.”

Nick stood there. Swaying with anger.

“More than twenty years ago,” said Nakamura, “a group of my fellow Nipponese businessmen and myself watched as your new young president gave a speech from Cairo that flattered the Islamic world—a bloc of Islamic nations that had not yet coalesced into today’s Global Caliphate—and praised them with obvious historical distortions of their own imagined grandeur. This president began the process of totally rewriting both history and contemporary reality with an eye toward praising radical Islam into loving him and your country.

“The name for this form of foreign policy, whenever it is used with forces of fascism, Mr. Bottom, is appeasement.”

Nick said nothing.

“This president and your country soon followed this self-mockery of a foreign policy with ever more blatant and useless appeasement, attempts at becoming a social democracy when European social democracies were beginning to collapse from debt and the burden of their entitlement programs, unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the world stage, a betrayal of old allies, a rapid and deliberate surrendering of America’s position as a superpower, and a total retreat from international responsibilities that the United States of America had long taken seriously.”

Nick looked over his shoulder at Val. The boy’s mouth was opened slightly and his face was parchment white. He looked physically ill and Nick knew that Val didn’t want to throw up on the obscenely expensive Persian carpet in front of all these men.

“Mr. Bottom?” Nakamura said sharply. “You are listening?”

Nick looked back at the megalomaniac billionaire, who leaned forward, folded his hands on the gleaming desktop, and continued with his speech.

“The economic crises which resulted in the death of the European Union and the collapse of China—as well as the violent and unnecessary deaths of more than six million Jews in Israel, and another million non-Jewish Israeli citizens, all abandoned by your country, Mr. Bottom—were merely further steps in this decline—at first deliberate and then merely inevitable—of the United States of America.”

There was a long pause and Nick spoke into it, risking the gags. “What’s this history lecture got to do with anything, Mr. Nakamura? Especially with the reason you hired me to solve your son’s murder?”

Nakamura closed his eyes as if seeking patience. Then he smiled thinly.

“As I said, Mr. Bottom, these are the stakes of the game you have entered. We industrialists in Japan almost a quarter of a century ago knew that our nation would someday have to step in to fill the void left by America’s self-willed decline. It was not a duty we welcomed… the memories of what we called Daitoa Senso, the Greater East Asian War, and which your historians called World War Two… were still too painful.

“We were reluctant, Mr. Bottom, once again to acknowledge ourselves, the citizens of Nippon, as shido minzoku—‘the world’s foremost people’—even though we understood that we would have to fill that role.

“That first war, started in China almost a century ago, was a function of our hubris—militarism combined with hopes of an empire combined with self-inflicted distortions of our religion and the samurai code of bushido. But this coming war, Mr. Bottom, a war much wider and more terrible for the enemy than Daitoa Senso, will not be the kurai tanima ‘dark valley’ of that last war. It will be a global war of liberation.”

“War with whom?” said Nick. He had to hear it all said out loud before he could say what they would demand that he say.