Flashback

Nakamura shook his head sadly. “With militant Islam, Mr. Bottom,” said the billionaire, his voice soft. “With the hydra called the Global Caliphate. Islam was always, despite America’s absolute resistance in acknowledging it, a violent and barbarous religion, Mr. Bottom, its prophet a military man no less cruel than our field marshal Hajime Sugiyama or your Army Air Force general Curtis Le May. The twentieth-and twenty-first-century fundamentalist terrorist-driven forms of expansionist Islam are vile obscenities. The citizens serving the Imperial Son of Heaven of Dai Nippon, descended from the Sun Goddess herself in the Land of the Rising Sun, where all eight corners of the universe have been brought together under one divine roof, will not be pulled back to the seventh century by a barbarous desert religion intent on ruling the earth and treating its conquered people as less-than-human slaves!

“But it will not happen! We shall not let it happen!!”

Now it was Hiroshi Nakamura who was shouting, and while his voice had none of the rock-concert amplification of Sato’s blast, it was loud enough and sincere enough and fanatical enough to cause Nick to take half a step back.

When the billionaire continued and concluded, his voice was much softer.

“Thus we Nipponese business leaders turned our keiretsu back into wartime zaibatsu, our family-run business interests no longer merely serving Japan’s leadership, but deciding it. Thus we returned to the honor of the samurai and the true code of bushido. Thus we will soon need a single, all-powerful Shogun to advise the emperor in this time of total war.”

Nick cleared his throat. “Of total nuclear war,” he said thickly.

“Of course,” Nakamura said dismissively, almost contemptuously. “All daimyos, even your weak friend Omura, agree that this final struggle for the future of our world will be nuclear—and thermonuclear. The enemy has shown its ruthless resolve in the murder of Israel. We shall show no less in the eradication of an infectious mental disease that is two billion persons strong across the planet.”

“Omura-sama believes that Texas will be an ally,” said Nick.

Nakamura shook his head. “Advisor Omura is weak and sentimental when it comes to the last vestige of your once-strong nation, Mr. Bottom. He will not be considered when it comes time for us daimyos to select our first Shogun in a hundred and sixty years. The weak remnants of America are currently serving their role in preparation for the coming struggle.”

Nick nodded. “With two hundred thousand of our drafted kids fighting the war for you in China,” he said.

Nakamura said nothing for a long moment.

Nick could hear a regular helicopter, not one of the whisper-dragonflies, flying low over the building. Somewhere nearby a police or ambulance siren sounded in the unoccupied part of Denver. Nick thought he could hear distant gunshots.

Had the city come apart at the seams today as K.T. and the DPD had feared? Did Nick give the slightest shit if it had?

Nakamura said, “So now you understand what is at stake, Nick Bottom. It is time for you to deliver your report on the investigation you were hired to carry out.”

Nick held his flex-cuffed wrists out. “Untie me.”

Nakamura and Sato ignored the demand.

Nick knew that he could leap at Nakamura, try to get his cuffed wrists around the billionaire’s slender neck, but he also knew that Sato or the four guards on that side would kill him the second he tried.

Nick sighed, looked back over his shoulder at Val and the apparently unconscious Leonard, and began to speak.

“I finally know why you hired me. It all came together just today, and mostly by accident. You hired me to do this investigation because you weren’t certain of what I knew. You didn’t know what my wife, Dara, had told me or what notes she might have left behind for me to find. You’d searched and never found her phone, so you just weren’t sure.

“In the end, you needed someone to make something public…”

Nick paused and looked up into the high corners of the library until he spotted the red lights on the video cameras.

“You needed someone other than yourselves to make something public—as this video recording will do after my son, father-in-law, and I are dead—so you hired me.

“I was your perfect fool. So eager to get some money to buy flashback that I’d go anywhere, do anything, betray anyone to get the information you needed to be let out into the world.

“And so I have.”

Nick paced a few steps. Sato and the other guards tensed, but there was no need. Nick was organizing his thoughts, not preparing a futile leap at Nakamura.