Flashback

pitched to one side, and flew east above Denver’s downtown.

They’d left the side doors open and Nick looked out at his own reflection in the gold-tinted glass of the fifty- one-story former Wells Fargo building, the modest skyscraper that Denver residents had called the cash register building for decades because of its distinctive shape at the top. Buildings continued to flash beneath them and then, suddenly, they were beyond Denver and flying southeast over farms and high prairie.

This had been the reality of Denver for many decades now, Nick knew. To the north and south and west, suburbs extended the city beyond the horizon. But to the east there had always been this startling line—city and then a few farms where irrigation worked and high prairie beyond that stretching toward Kansas. Nick didn’t ask where they were headed and his only guess was a very dark one.

He smelled their destination before he saw it and in smelling it, Nick knew his guess had been correct.

The dragonfly landed, everyone unbelted, and the ninja guards hopped down, gesturing politely for Nick to join them. Nick lifted his shirt front and put it over his mouth and nose. It was that or throw up.

“Do you know where you are, Bottom-san?” asked Sato, stepping close to Nick and close to the edge of a reeking chasm.

Nick nodded. He didn’t want to talk because he didn’t want the staggering stench to get into his mouth.

They were at Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.

“Have you been here before, Bottom-san?”

Nick shook his head. He didn’t know how Sato could stand speaking and breathing in more of this air. Nick had seen many forensic photos and videos taken from this spot, but he’d never had to come out here in person before.

Originally, the landfill had been a deep ravine that ran north to south for about a mile. Bulldozers had deepened parts, built low tabletop mesas and hills along its edge, and leveled some crude roads from the nearest county road to the fill. On the west side, the tons of garbage dumped there were of the usual twentieth-century urban sort—countless rotting garbage bags, ruined furniture, heaps of rotting cloth and organic materials. Here on the northwest side, there was plenty of that, but from the rim of the chasm to the bottom there were also rotting human corpses—many hundreds of them. Some were wrapped in cloth or plastic shrouds, but most lay open and exposed to the hot September sun. Clouds of seagulls and crows had risen from their feeding sites at the appearance of the dragonfly ’copter and now returned to their dining. One area was reserved for the turkey vultures that circled on thermals above, like aircraft in an approach pattern at DIA, awaiting their turn on the exposed corpses. Many of the corpses at the base of the ravine were mere skeletons, sexlessly clean, gleaming white, with only a few shreds and tatters of flesh left on the exposed ribs or pelvises or leg bones. But the majority of bodies were still flesh-filled, bloated beyond recognition as human, crawling with maggots, and with only obscene glimpses of white bone poking through their fermenting masses.

Nick noticed that many of the medium-old corpses seemed to be moving and twitching on the hillside: a trick of the light due to the movement of the millions of maggots on their surfaces and below. Even the gulls weren’t dining on those bodies.

Every American city had a landfill such as this near its borders now, a third of the way through this glorious twenty-first century. All those reconquista fighters, Cinco de Mayo militia, Aryan Brotherhood gangs, jihadists, neighborhood protection groups, motorcycle gangs, and sometimes the authorities themselves needed such a disposal place if proper urban hygiene was to be observed.

Sato touched Nick’s left arm and urged him closer to the edge.

They hadn’t disarmed him and Nick’s right hand was already raised. If Okada, Ishii, or ota were to raise one of his weapons behind him, Nick was going to throw himself in front of Sato, grab the bigger man while emptying the full clip of his Glock into the security chief’s belly, chest, and face, then roll down into the heaps of corpses, using Sato’s body as a shield while he fired the Glock and then going for the useless little .32 pocket pistol at his ankle to take down the three body-armored ninjas carrying full-auto M4 carbines.

His body was ready to do that. But what Nick was thinking was—Val and Leonard and K.T. will never know what happened to me.

Well, K.T. might. The DPD checked Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine about once a month for corpses of interest. And she might tell his son and father-in-law, if those two didn’t soon join him here.

Which Nick didn’t think was very likely.

Sato put his hand on Nick’s left shoulder and Nick put his hand on the butt of the Glock under his light jacket. The three ninjas shifted close behind him.

“Mukatsuku yo na-so desu ka?” said Sato.

Nick had no idea what the words meant. A good-bye, maybe. An ultimatum, maybe. He really didn’t care. His index finger slipped under the Glock’s trigger guard. Everything from this point on would happen in fractions of a second.

“Zehi, Bottom-san. Iko u.” Sato dropped the heavy hand from Nick’s shoulder, wheeled, and led the way back to the dragonfly. Before climbing in after the four Japanese, Nick noticed that the pilot and copilot had put on their oxygen masks to avoid the physically debilitating stench.

Wherever they were headed next, they weren’t taking him back to the Six Flags parking lot. Not yet.

Whatever it is, thought Nick, it can’t be as bad as Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine.

As it would turn out, he was wrong.

The dragonfly hurtled west at somewhere above 150 m.p.h., never climbing higher than two or three thousand feet above the unscrolling terrain. They flew over the northern Denver suburbs and followed Highway 36, the Boulder Turnpike, toward the gleaming slabs of the Flatirons.

They were headed to the People’s Republic of Boulder.

Nick felt his phone vibrate. Moving slowly so as not to spook Sato or his ninjas, Nick withdrew the phone from his jacket pocket. It was a text message:—Mr. B—Your two visitors are here and I’ve shown them to your quarters and will watch over them. Chits for the food court and everything. Gunny G.

Nick tried not to show any emotion as he slipped the phone back in his pocket.

The dragonfly passed over Boulder, flying low over the buildings on the CU campus, and then climbed above the foothills and hovered. Nick leaned over and looked down. They were landing in what had been the parking lot at NCAR.

Nick remembered the Anthropogenic Global Warming furor. He was already in his twenties when that hysteria hit its apogee. Now it was just a cautionary tale from the early-century Dark Age of long-range computer modeling. Nick, for one, had looked forward to longer summers, easier winters, and palm trees in Colorado, but the weather the last few decades had been colder and snowier than average and the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming had joined that of Herr Becher’s phlogiston and Soviet Lamarckism evolutionary theory.

One of the first victims of the public’s disgust at the AGW false alarm, combined with disappearing federal budgets, was the group for which the beautiful building growing larger beneath them had been built: NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The architect I. M. Pei had designed this Mesa Lab NCAR center out of sandstone and glass and meant for its stone to age with and blend in with the giant sandstone Flatirons just above the building while the glass reflected the turbulent Colorado skies. It had done so beautifully for almost seventy-five years now, but the atmospheric research people had long since sold the structure—the only structure allowed to be built in the miles of greenbelt separating urban Boulder from the Flatirons and foothills—to some private company.

They landed gently. NCAR—NAKAMURA CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH said the small sign to the right of the entry walkway.

“Mr. Nakamura kept the old initials,” Sato said redundantly as he opened the door.

Damned white of him, thought Nick.

The outer sections of the old laboratory, in the towers and where the broad windows looked out on sky, stone, and brown grasslands, were still offices. But the basement and former courtyard core of the building had been converted into… something else.

They donned green cloth surgical booties and little cloth surgical shower caps in a sort of airlock outside the