Flashback

are you taking me to the DHSDC?”

Everyone in Colorado knew that a lot of people went into the black-oil cake of Mile High detention center, but almost no one came out.

Sato’s voice was as flat as ever. “Bottom-san, you betrayed one of the nine Federal Advisors to the United States of America. You violated your word and your contract. Perhaps you planned to assassinate Hiroshi Nakamura.”

“What?!?” screamed Nick, jerking at his restraints again until blood from his wrists spattered the windshield and dashboard.

Sato shrugged. “They will find the truth after sufficient interrogation.”

Nick could feel his eyes straining in their sockets, like the mad, blue stallion’s. Two wide red dots continued to move across his spattered chest like the bloody fingers of a blind lover. “You’re as crazy as that fucking horse, Sato. You want to disappear me into Homeland Security hell here so you can declare the reopened investigation a failure. Then your boss will give you permission to commit seppuku.”

Sato said nothing.

You can’t get away with this, Nick started to shout like some minor character in a cheap TV series but with the help of Pfizer TruTel it came out, “And you will get away with it. Nakamura’ll believe you and you’ll get to kill yourself to atone for your failure and I’ll rot here in the dark for fucking ever.”

Sato looked at him another long minute, then nodded to himself and held up his NICC. Both lasers from the blue stallion’s eyes flicked to the card, then one went back to Nick while the other continued to read the card.

Sato turned the Honda around on the wet street and drove back through the CMRI tunnel and down the lanes through the empty, littered gravel and wet stone wasteland where the parking lot and old neighborhood used to be around Mile High Stadium.

“I think, Bottom-san,” said Hideki Sato, “that we should visit the scene of the crime.”

2.01 The 10 and La Cienega, Los Angeles—Saturday, Sept. 11

Billy Coyne and Val were leading the other boys up the lashed-bamboo scaffolding to the Saturday Open Air Market on the collapsed section of the 10 when suddenly from the slab above and from the city below there came the unmistakable sound of hundreds of AK-47s firing into the air, amplified cries from muezzin calling out to the faithful from scores of L.A.’s minarets, church bells in the city ringing, and shouts from the Open Air Market they were heading for, as well as from the shaded surface streets below, of “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

All of the boys froze in their climbing, thinking that it was a hajji attack or suicide bomber.

Then Val realized that this was Los Angeles celebrating the events of that old holiday called 9-11, September 11, 2001, the date—as Val had been taught in school—of the beginning of successful resistance to the old imperialist American hegemony and a turning point in the creation of the New Caliphate and other hopeful signs of the New World Order. He knew that the Christian churches were ringing their bells in their annual attempt to join in the celebrations of hajjis at scores of Los Angeles’s mosques and to show their solidarity, understanding, and forgiveness.

Behind the climbing boys, in the direction of L.A.’s downtown, someone was sending red and orange rockets to crash and explode against the glass sides of the old city towers in an effort to enhance the citywide celebration. All eight boys climbed off the scaffolding onto the I-10 slab and watched the downtown show for a moment. Toohey, Cruncher, and Dinjin were cheering until they noticed that the older guys in the group weren’t. Then they shut up, but still pumped their fists whenever a new rocket exploded against the side of a stumpy skyscraper.

As they turned back toward the market stalls, Val was reminded why there’d been so much shooting from the slab; a majority of the so-called gypsy vendors here were hajji—or at least of Mideastern descent—and most of the high-end stuff they were selling came into the country with the hajjis during their flights back from their homes in Pakistan or Indonesia or the Euro- Caliphates or that mother of all Caliphate nations, the Greater Islamic Republic, which curved across the former countries of the Mideast—Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Sudan—like a scimitar’s blade. Unlike all the other kids he knew, Val had enjoyed geography in school and sometimes brought up maps on his phone’s virtual screen so he could study them. They changed so quickly.

He also liked learning about history, but he blamed that on his grandfather. Leonard just gabbled on about it so much that some of it had to rub off on Val when he was younger.

Val did wonder how—at a time when even domestic flights within what was left of the U.S.A. cost millions of new bucks—these towelheads could afford to fly across the oceans so frequently. Probably ’cause of the profit on the chillshit crap they’re selling right here in front of you, stupid, thought Val.

He had to admit that most of it was good chillshit crap.

The double line of market stalls ran about a hundred yards and the long space between the brightly canopied tables was already filled with early shoppers. Coyne nudged Val and nodded in each direction and Val understood that the older boy was pointing out the two pairs of LAPD cops in full black body armor at each end of the market and the mini-drones buzzing and hovering overhead. The cops’ blunt, black automatic weapons reminded Val of why they were there.

But first they followed Toohey and Monk and the other younger boys to some of the fun stalls.

A few of the tables had women behind them and most of them wore just hijabs, although others, sitting behind the bearded men at the tables, were in full burkas. Val noticed the bright blue eyes of one young woman in a burka and could swear that she was Cindy from his Wednesday Social Responsibility class. He’d watched her eyes in class often enough.

“Chillshit stuff!” cried Sully. “Double chillshit stuff!”

The boys were clustered around the interactive-T-shirt tables. This was serious clothing, most of it costing $500,000 new bucks and up, but Coyne always seemed to have money on his card, so everyone in the gang looked.

An old, black-bearded hajji was holding up one of the longer and more expensive black T-shirts. The 3D image of Jeffrey Dahmer (an old serial killer who’d been having quite a resurgence of public and scholarly interest since the HBO series starring Gillie Gibson had started streaming) ran full length down the back of the black T-shirt. The cannibal (the real Dahmer, not the actor) was in the act of fucking one of the empty eye sockets in the skull of one of his victims. As Gene D. approached the offered shirt, Dahmer stopped his frenzied motion and, still holding the skull against his crotch, looked back over his shoulder at Gene D., Dahmer’s head seeming to emerge from the black cloth like a face rising out of a lake of oil, while the AI in the fabric said in a voice from hell, “You… yeah, you, the kid with the pimples in the red shirt… I got an eyehole free here. You want to join me?”

Gene D. jumped backward and the seven other boys and twenty or thirty nearby shoppers roared with laughter. The old women in burkas chuckled and turned away modestly while lifting their veils higher. The hajji holding the shirt showed missing teeth through the black barbed wire of his beard.

“This is the one I’m interested in,” said Coyne and pointed to a T-shirt in the back. One of the hajji’s teenaged assistants, a kid no older than Val with wispy attempts at a beard and wearing a coolshit hajji hat and bandolier over his vest and khaki shirt, held up the shirt Coyne wanted to see.

There was just a speck in the center of this T-shirt. But the speck grew larger—became a shirtless man walking toward the viewer—and pretty soon you could see the rapidly approaching man’s face. Vladimir Putin.

“Oh, chillshit sweet,” hummed Sully.