Flashback

“Flashback was a drug developed in Japan,” he said at last. “There never was any biowar lab at Havat MaShash Experimental Agricultural Farm in the Israeli desert. It was just another blood libel the Jews had to suffer after they were murdered en masse—again. You Japs designed and developed flashback—at a lab in Nara, if my sources are correct—and it’s you who transported it to the United States and elsewhere, sold it way below its production price, and have continued to have your dealers, from the heights of Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev to the street depths of poor Delroy Nigger Brown and Derek Dean, deliver it to the growing number of addicts in the States.”

“Why would Japan do that?” interrupted Nakamura. His voice was soft to the point of exuding oil.

Nick laughed.

“You got what you wanted from what was left of us after the Day It All Hit The Fan,” said Nick. “After we screwed our country into near-oblivion through debt and cowardice. You wanted our soldiers and you have them. You wanted the rest of us tranquilized, and we paid one new-buck dollar a flashback minute to accommodate you. Our leaders turned away from the future decades ago—abandoning faith in the free market system, abandoning our worldwide responsibilities, hell, even abandoning our manned spaceflight program—and the rest of us turned the rest of the way from the future when we decided to go back to the past by using flashback. Three hundred and forty million American addicts, including me until this past week, all living—re living—our little masturbatory fantasies because we couldn’t face the real world.”

Sato spoke.

“Bottom-san, how did you discover that it was Nippon who developed and delivered flashback to America?”

Nick laughed again, with even more bitterness than before.

“I didn’t. My wife did. And she was murdered for it.”

He looked from Sato to Nakamura and then around at the other men with weapons in the room. Finally he looked at his unconscious father-in-law—had Leonard once told him that he spoke some Japanese?—and then at his son. He knew that he would not get the chance to say again to Val how sorry he was.

“The woman murdered in the bedroom not thirty steps from here was known to us Denver cops as a sex-pleasure woman from Japan named Keli Bracque. She was represented to us as Keigo Nakamura’s favorite sex toy, nothing more. We knew her as Keli Bracque because that was her name in the totally fabricated dossier that the various Japanese police services sent to us. Advisor Nakamura’s offices confirmed that fact.”

Nick paused. He was getting so angry that his arms were shaking, his hands were balled into fists, and his legs felt weak.

Sato snapped something in Japanese and one of the ninjas carried over a chair for Nick. He didn’t sit in it, but he grabbed the back to help hold himself up.

“Keli Bracque was supposed to be the daughter of American missionaries in Japan,” continued Nick, his voice thick with phlegm and fury. “That was a lie. It was all a lie. Keli Bracque’s real name was Kumiko Catherine Catton and she was the daughter of Sakura Catton, an American-born woman who’d spent her entire adult life in Japan. A woman who was a courtesan of a famous Japanese daimyo. What’s the Japanese word for ‘girlfriend’ or ‘mistress’ or ‘courtesan’ or ‘second wife,’ as you used to say? Keisi or gosai or aijin or sembo… you Jap guys have a lot of words for your out-of-marriage lady friends. The American Mafia bosses just called them goomahs.”

The very air in the library seemed to have stopped stirring. Nick glanced out of the corners of his eyes and saw that no one was looking at anyone, even the ever-vigilant ninjas staring only at their own feet. Nakamura had assumed the kind of inward-looking thousand-yard stare that Tokyo residents had perfected for traveling in their overcrowded subways.

“Here’s the complicated part of this whole scenario,” Nick said into the thickened silence. He pointed at Hiroshi Nakamura. “It wasn’t enough for your family and the families of Munetaka, Morikune, Omura, Toyoda, Yoritsugo, Yamahsita, and Yoshiake just to take all of modern Japan back to feudal days to prepare yourselves for this holy war with Islam. You couldn’t just draw the line at rebuilding the old feudal system from Japan’s own Middle Ages—turning keiretsu into clan-run, government-ruling zaibatsu and industrialists into daimyo s—it wasn’t enough just to bring back the feudal realities of Shogun and samurai and ronin and a resurgence of the code of bushido—no, you superdaimyo heads of the überzaibatsu, you had to bring back feudal ways of assuring the allegiance of your vassals, including your vassal- daimyos.”

Nick paused and looked up at the still-glowing red eye of the video camera, then back at Nakamura.