Flashback

stood shocked into silence by that image, Nick Bottom knew exactly why she’d been out there that night of Keigo’s party and Keigo’s murder.

He’d suspected ever since that night that Sato had known that Nick would see Dara on that video recording, had brought him down here to the murder scene precisely so that Nick would see Dara outside the building that night. But Nick hadn’t been able to figure out why his wife would have been there or why Sato would want him to know.

And now he had figured it out. And the solution to both those mysteries made Nick want to weep.

Hiroshi Nakamura had stood throughout their previous meeting, but now the billionaire was seated behind the big mahogany desk in front of the north-facing windows. There were four black-garbed ninjas with guns already standing on either side of that desk. The men carrying Leonard set him carefully on the leather couch by the bookshelves on the wall behind Nick, and Val was pushed down to sit next to his grandfather.

Sato stepped to one side of the room and nodded. One of his men closed the twin library doors. Counting the four who had already been there with Nakamura, there were now ten armed ninjas—not counting Sato—in the room, but the library was so large that the space didn’t seem crowded. No one had offered Nick a chair so he stood there on the Persian carpet in front of the desk, squinting slightly so he could make out Nakamura’s features against the evening light coming in through the wooden blinds behind him.

Nakamura looked as perfectly calm as he had at their first meeting.

“Mr. Bottom,” said Nakamura, “I had hoped that we would meet under more fortuitous circumstances. But that was not to be.”

“Let my son and father-in-law go, Nakamura,” said Nick. His words struck him as bad dialogue from a thousand TV dramas. It didn’t matter. He had to go on. “They’re civilians. They’re not part of this. Let them go and you and I will talk.”

“You and I will talk at any rate,” said Nakamura. “Your son should see what kind of man you are.”

The few electric lights in the room dimmed and a flatscreen rose from an elaborately carved bureau on the south side of the room. As soon as the screen was fully visible, the video began playing. There was no sound to accompany the images.

Nick saw himself from a viewpoint about twenty-five feet above the ground, looking almost straight down. The color tones seemed very strange until one realized that the lens on the miniature unmanned aerial vehicle was compensating for very low light.

Nick watched himself pawing through the pockets of three men on the ground, two obviously dead, the third and youngest man pleading for his life.

Suddenly there was sound and everyone in the library could hear the young man’s moans and words—Please… mister… you promised… you promised… it hurts so much… you promised.”

Nick watched along with his son and the other men in the room—only Leonard had his eyes closed—as his image on the screen set the pistol to within inches of the young man’s shocked, pleading face and blew his brains out.

The flatscreen went black and hummed itself back down into the bureau.

“We know that you met with Advisor Omura in that gentleman’s aerie above Los Angeles yesterday, Mr. Bottom,” said Hiroshi Nakamura. “We have no recording of that conversation, but we can imagine how it went.”

“Let my people go, Nakamura.”

The billionaire ignored him. “Since everything that Omura told you is almost certainly either distorted or totally untrue, I will explain the real stakes of the struggle you have become involved in.”

“I don’t give a shit what the stakes are for…,” began Nick.

“SILENCE!!!” roared Sato.

Everyone in the room except for Nakamura and Leonard seemed to jump at the explosion of sound. Nick would not have thought that the human voice, without electronic amplification, could produce so many raw decibels. He imagined the black-garbed ninjas up and down Wazee Street and on the rooftops jumping in their tracks.

“Very correct,” said Nakamura. “If you interrupt me again, you and the other two will be gagged. And, given your father-in-law’s unfortunate condition, that might not be the best for him.”

Nick stood there. Swaying with anger.

“More than twenty years ago,” said Nakamura, “a group of my fellow Nipponese businessmen and myself watched as your new young president gave a speech from Cairo that flattered the Islamic world—a bloc of Islamic nations that had not yet coalesced into today’s Global Caliphate—and praised them with obvious historical distortions of their own imagined grandeur. This president began the process of totally rewriting both history and contemporary reality with an eye toward praising radical Islam into loving him and your country.

“The name for this form of foreign policy, whenever it is used with forces of fascism, Mr. Bottom, is appeasement.”

Nick said nothing.

“This president and your country soon followed this self-mockery of a foreign policy with ever more blatant and useless appeasement, attempts at becoming a social democracy when European social democracies were beginning to collapse from debt and the burden of their entitlement programs, unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the world stage, a betrayal of old allies, a rapid and deliberate surrendering of America’s position as a superpower, and a total retreat from international responsibilities that the United States of America had long taken seriously.”

Nick looked over his shoulder at Val. The boy’s mouth was opened slightly and his face was parchment white. He looked physically ill and Nick knew that Val didn’t want to throw up on the obscenely expensive Persian carpet in front of all these men.

“Mr. Bottom?” Nakamura said sharply. “You are listening?”

Nick looked back at the megalomaniac billionaire, who leaned forward, folded his hands on the gleaming desktop, and continued with his speech.

“The economic crises which resulted in the death of the European Union and the collapse of China—as well as the violent and unnecessary deaths of more than six million Jews in Israel, and another million non-Jewish Israeli citizens, all abandoned by your country, Mr. Bottom—were merely further steps in this decline—at first deliberate and then merely inevitable—of the United States of America.”

There was a long pause and Nick spoke into it, risking the gags. “What’s this history lecture got to do with anything, Mr. Nakamura? Especially with the reason you hired me to solve your son’s murder?”

Nakamura closed his eyes as if seeking patience. Then he smiled thinly.

“As I said, Mr. Bottom, these are the stakes of the game you have entered. We industrialists in Japan almost a quarter of a century ago knew that our nation would someday have to step in to fill the void left by America’s self-willed decline. It was not a duty we welcomed… the memories of what we called Daitoa Senso, the Greater East Asian War, and which your historians called World War Two… were still too painful.

“We were reluctant, Mr. Bottom, once again to acknowledge ourselves, the citizens of Nippon, as shido minzoku—‘the world’s foremost people’—even though we understood that we would have to fill that role.

“That first war, started in China almost a century ago, was a function of our hubris—militarism combined with hopes of an empire combined with self-inflicted distortions of our religion and the samurai code of bushido. But this coming war, Mr. Bottom, a war much wider and more terrible for the enemy than Daitoa Senso, will not be the kurai tanima ‘dark valley’ of that last war. It will be a global war of liberation.”

“War with whom?” said Nick. He had to hear it all said out loud before he could say what they would demand that he say.

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