Flashback

set that aside.

“Not really,” said Nick. “At least not officially in terms of the investigation. That’s over.”

“Oh, did you find Keigo Nakamura’s killer?”

“I’m not sure,” said Nick, knowing how absurd that sounded. No matter. It was true. “I just had some free time and I wondered, Mr. Oz…”

“Danny.”

“I wondered, Danny, how you might describe Keigo’s demeanor and attitude when he interviewed you.”

Oz was silent for a minute and Nick was sure that he hadn’t understood the question—Nick wasn’t sure that he understood what he’d been asking. He was about to rephrase it when the Israeli poet spoke.

“That’s interesting, Mr. Bottom. I did notice something about Mr. Keigo’s demeanor and mood that day.”

“What?” said Nick. “Depressed? Worried? Apprehensive?”

“Triumphant,” said Oz.

Nick had been ready to write in his little notebook but now he lowered his pencil. “Triumphant?”

Danny Oz frowned and sipped his coffee. “That’s not quite the correct word, Mr. Bottom. I’m thinking of the Hebrew word menatzeiach, which probably most closely translates as ‘victorious.’ For no good reason other than my years of observing human beings as a poet, I had the distinct impression that Keigo Nakamura thought that he was on the brink of some triumph… some victory. A victory of epic… one might say ‘biblical’ proportions.”

“He was close to finishing his documentary on us Americans and flashback,” said Nick. “Is that the kind of triumph you might have detected?”

“Perhaps.” Oz was silent a long moment. “But I felt it was more a sense of having been victorious in some great struggle.”

“What kind of struggle? Personal? Bigger than personal? Something on his father’s scale of success or failure?”

“I have no idea,” said Oz and shrugged. “We’re in the area of totally subjective impressions here, Mr. Bottom. But I’d take a wild guess and say the young man felt victorious in some battle that had been both personal and larger than the mere personal to him. Corporate, perhaps, or political. But definitely something larger than himself.”

Nick sighed. “All right. Speaking of totally subjective impressions, I have two questions for you that don’t really relate to the investigation at all.”

“About your wife?” Oz asked softly. He rubbed his neck as if still feeling Nick’s forearm there. There was still a red spot on the poet’s left temple where the muzzle of Nick’s Glock had broken the skin.

“No, not about Dara,” managed Nick. He opened his mouth to apologize and then shut it without speaking. “Just a question. If you could have saved Israel from destruction by killing a single person—one human being— would you have done it?”

Danny Oz blinked several times. The pained expression on his face showed that the question was not only unfair but impossible to answer. Still, he answered.

“Mr. Bottom, the Talmud taught us—and I’m sure I’ve bollixed up this verse since I haven’t studied the Sanhedrin part of the Talmud since I was a boy, but I’ll try to quote—‘ For this reason was man created alone, to teach thee that whosoever destroys a single soul… scripture imputes… I think the word is ‘guilt’… to him as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whosoever preserves a single soul, scripture ascribes merit to him… or maybe the passage said ‘righteousness,’ I’m not sure… as though he had preserved a complete world.’ ”

“So you wouldn’t have killed someone to save Israel?” said Nick.

Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye and the former thousand-yard stare was completely absent from his gaze. And from Nick’s.

“I don’t know, Mr. Bottom. God forgive me, I simply don’t know.”

“One last question,” said Nick. “If you had the chance to return to Israel now, would you do it?”

Oz snorted derisively. He drank the last of his cold coffee and lit a new cigarette. “There is no Israel, Mr. Bottom. Only a radioactive wasteland inhabited by Arabs.”

“It’s not all radioactive,” said Nick. “And what if someone removed the new Arab settlers who came in after the bombings?”

Oz laughed again. It was a hollow, sad sound. “Remove them? Sure. Who would do that, Mr. Bottom? The United Nations?”

The UN, always a dependable ally of the Arab bloc and of Palestinians at the end of the twentieth century, was now—except for its Japanese-run “peacekeeper” operation in China—a full-fledged subsidiary of the Islamic Global Caliphate. The irony, as Nick saw it, was that even after six million Jews had been murdered and the state of Israel destroyed, the so-called Palestinians were denied their nation-in-radioactive-rubble by Shi’ite Iran and the competing and ever-wary and ever-jealous Sunni Arab states.

“No,” said Nick. “Cleared out by someone else. Would you go?”

“I have prostate cancer and other radiation-induced cancers,” said Oz. “I’m dying.”

“We’re all dying,” said Nick. “Would you go back to Israel if other Jews joined you there?”

Danny Oz looked Nick in the eye again and—once more—there was the new clarity to his gaze. “I’d go in a minute, Mr. Bottom. In a minute.”

Nick came out to the parking lot knowing that he’d learned almost nothing that could help him when he would have to stand before Mr. Nakamura in a few hours and be commanded to tell the billionaire who’d killed his son.

But I learned something important, thought Nick. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

The three Oshkosh M-ATVs roared in and blocked his vehicle before he got the doors to his car unlocked.

Mutsumi Ota, Daigorou Okada, and Shinta Ishii—Nick’s fellow survivors from the Santa Fe trip—jumped out of the lead vehicle. Each was dressed for urban combat but not for war: SWAT Kevlar and black boots, even their black ball caps made of ballistic cloth. And each held an automatic weapon at port arms.

Nick didn’t move a muscle.

Sato moved his mass out the rear hatch of the M-ATV, nodded at his three ninjas, and said, “Bottom-san, will you come with us, please?”

Oh shit, thought Nick. Too soon. Too early. I’m not ready. He wondered once again how many billions of men and women had died with equally unworthy final thoughts.

He licked his lips. “Mr. Nakamura’s back?”

“Not yet,” rumbled Sato. “But Mr. Nakamura did direct us to show you some things before your meeting with him later today. Please come with us.”

“Do I have a choice?” said Nick.

“Please come with us, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “We shall return you to your vehicle here in an hour or less.”

Keeping his hands away from his Glock, making no sudden movements, Nick went up the rear ramp into the idling M-ATV.

The ride was short, less than two miles, and ended at a grassy sward of what had once been a long park on the east bank of the Platte River in front of a series of high-rise condos that had gone up around the turn of the century. Sato, Sato’s three ninjas, and Nick exited the lead M-ATV and moved to one of Nakamura’s dragonfly ’copters—the less luxurious one that Nick had flown in down to Raton Pass a week earlier. A dozen more of Sato’s people from the other M-ATVs, all in ballistic black and Kevlar, had set up a perimeter around the machine. Mutsumi ota—whom Nick had once thought of as Willy—gestured and Nick clambered into the open door of the dragonfly. Sato put on a headset with microphone, waited until everyone else was belted or clipped in, spoke a few unheard Japanese syllables into the mike, and the Sasayaki-tonbo fluttered silently, hovered,