Flashback

universe have been brought together under one divine roof, will not be pulled back to the seventh century by a barbarous desert religion intent on ruling the earth and treating its conquered people as less-than-human slaves!

“But it will not happen! We shall not let it happen!!”

Now it was Hiroshi Nakamura who was shouting, and while his voice had none of the rock-concert amplification of Sato’s blast, it was loud enough and sincere enough and fanatical enough to cause Nick to take half a step back.

When the billionaire continued and concluded, his voice was much softer.

“Thus we Nipponese business leaders turned our keiretsu back into wartime zaibatsu, our family-run business interests no longer merely serving Japan’s leadership, but deciding it. Thus we returned to the honor of the samurai and the true code of bushido. Thus we will soon need a single, all-powerful Shogun to advise the emperor in this time of total war.”

Nick cleared his throat. “Of total nuclear war,” he said thickly.

“Of course,” Nakamura said dismissively, almost contemptuously. “All daimyos, even your weak friend Omura, agree that this final struggle for the future of our world will be nuclear—and thermonuclear. The enemy has shown its ruthless resolve in the murder of Israel. We shall show no less in the eradication of an infectious mental disease that is two billion persons strong across the planet.”

“Omura-sama believes that Texas will be an ally,” said Nick.

Nakamura shook his head. “Advisor Omura is weak and sentimental when it comes to the last vestige of your once-strong nation, Mr. Bottom. He will not be considered when it comes time for us daimyos to select our first Shogun in a hundred and sixty years. The weak remnants of America are currently serving their role in preparation for the coming struggle.”

Nick nodded. “With two hundred thousand of our drafted kids fighting the war for you in China,” he said.

Nakamura said nothing for a long moment.

Nick could hear a regular helicopter, not one of the whisper-dragonflies, flying low over the building. Somewhere nearby a police or ambulance siren sounded in the unoccupied part of Denver. Nick thought he could hear distant gunshots.

Had the city come apart at the seams today as K.T. and the DPD had feared? Did Nick give the slightest shit if it had?

Nakamura said, “So now you understand what is at stake, Nick Bottom. It is time for you to deliver your report on the investigation you were hired to carry out.”

Nick held his flex-cuffed wrists out. “Untie me.”

Nakamura and Sato ignored the demand.

Nick knew that he could leap at Nakamura, try to get his cuffed wrists around the billionaire’s slender neck, but he also knew that Sato or the four guards on that side would kill him the second he tried.

Nick sighed, looked back over his shoulder at Val and the apparently unconscious Leonard, and began to speak.

“I finally know why you hired me. It all came together just today, and mostly by accident. You hired me to do this investigation because you weren’t certain of what I knew. You didn’t know what my wife, Dara, had told me or what notes she might have left behind for me to find. You’d searched and never found her phone, so you just weren’t sure.

“In the end, you needed someone to make something public…”

Nick paused and looked up into the high corners of the library until he spotted the red lights on the video cameras.

“You needed someone other than yourselves to make something public—as this video recording will do after my son, father-in-law, and I are dead—so you hired me.

“I was your perfect fool. So eager to get some money to buy flashback that I’d go anywhere, do anything, betray anyone to get the information you needed to be let out into the world.

“And so I have.”

Nick paced a few steps. Sato and the other guards tensed, but there was no need. Nick was organizing his thoughts, not preparing a futile leap at Nakamura.

“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.