Flashback

Nick walked around the chair and sat down. It was either sit or fall.

And he needed to conserve his energy. Whether they offered him a chance now or not—and he was sure they would not—he was determined to take one. Just saying Dara’s name aloud several times had made that a certainty.

Nick hadn’t expected a round of applause for his Inspector Clouseau performance and he didn’t receive one. The silence was absolute. But what he heard next was something he really hadn’t expected.

Nakamura stood and looked around the room. He was smiling. “Our guest’s last comment—the last vague threat—was due to the fact that earlier today, Mr. Bottom e-mailed copies of his wife’s diary and my son’s video to eight people. Unfortunately for our detective friend, Colonel Sato’s people have been monitoring all Internet access from that sad condominium and intercepted all eight e-mails sent from a certain Gunny G.’s computer.”

Nick felt as if he’d been hit in the solar plexus. Spots danced in his vision. The end of even the most cynical twentieth-century movies he loved had the hero turning over the evidence of government or CIA conspiracies to the New York Times or Washington Post or some other crusading newspaper. Now those newspapers were gone forever and so was any hope of Nick’s getting Dara’s notes and Keigo’s videos out to the world.

“Which leaves,” continued Nakamura, “the detail of Ms. Dara Fox Bottom’s actual telephone with its… ah… compromising files. Colonel Sato?”

Sato walked close to the desk and produced the old phone that they’d confiscated from Nick. The security man held the phone over Nakamura’s wastebasket and squeezed until plastic ruptured and microchips crumbled. When he opened his hand, the shards and shattered filaments fell in a silvery waterfall into the wastebasket.

Nick was too defeated to look over his shoulder at Val.

Still standing, Nakamura fired a rapid-fire salvo of Japanese at Sato.

Sato barked back, “Hai, Nakamura-sama,” and gestured for the guards in the room to take Nick, Val, and the still-unconscious Leonard out.

Nick was concentrating on the few seconds when they were in the open air before they’d be loaded on the sealed M-ATVs again, but Sato led the way upstairs rather than down.

They all came out onto the roof—a small army of blackclad guards, the boy, the exhausted ex-cop, and the sleeping old man being carried again—and the Sasayaki-tonbo whisper-dragonfly ’copter was hovering there, three feet above the building’s roof, just as it must have been the night it had brought Sato there to murder his young friend Keigo and his daughter, Kumiko.

The ninja were very, very good. They never crossed into each other’s field of fire. They never got close enough for Nick to grab and grapple. At least three of them always kept their automatic weapons aimed at Nick’s, Val’s, and even Leonard’s heads while the others did what they had to do.

Nick’s old friends from the Santa Fe trip—ninjas Shinta Ishii, Mutsumi ta, and Daigorou Okada—jumped into the hovering dragonfly along with two men he didn’t know, and all five turned to cover Nick, Val, and the sleeping Leonard as they first loaded Leonard aboard, then pulled Val up, then beckoned Nick forward. The three prisoners were made to sit against the forward bulkhead—Leonard still out and his IV bottle suspended on a bracket above him—while Sato jumped aboard.

Their ’copter moved away and hovered a hundred feet above Wazee Street while a second dragonfly loaded a dozen of Sato’s men, then a third.

Even in the closer confines of the helicopter, Ishii, ta, and Okada kept the muzzles of their low-velocity automatic weapons aimed steadily at all three of the Americans’ heads, but there was a second or two—just a second or two—where Sato’s attention was distracted as he was putting on and plugging in his dragonfly-intercom earphones and microphone.

The few seconds were not enough for Nick to act, but he leaned against Leonard as if checking on his unconscious father-in-law and had time to whisper—Did you understand what Nakamura said in Japanese?”

The seemingly unconscious old man nodded.

“What did he say?” whispered Nick.

“Something about taking us all to Landfill Number Nine,” whispered Leonard without moving his lips.

ta shouted something in Japanese and Shinta Ishii repeated the shout in English, “No talking! No talking!”

“Sit back against the bulkhead, Bottom-san,” said Hideki Sato. He had his pistol out and it was aimed at Nick’s head. He gestured gently with it.

Nick sat back, setting his cuffed wrists on his knee, and glanced once toward Val. His son’s eyes were bright, but he did not seem to be afraid. This astonished Nick. Val nodded once as if Nick had sent him a telepathic message.

The line of three whisper-dragonflies banked hard to the right and flew fast and silently east over Denver as the last of the evening light bled out of the Colorado sky.

1.19 Airborne—Saturday, Sept. 25