Flashback

busy with something else.

Nick couldn’t shift in his concave cradle of a seat to look back at Joe as the third man got busy behind him, but the dash monitor showed an interior view so Nick could watch the mercenary tuck himself into his own seat.

The rest of the Land Cruiser wasn’t exactly showroom stock. The rear seat and cargo areas were empty except for lockers everywhere on the bulkheads and Joe’s elaborate chair. To Nick’s surprise, that chair now rose through the roof of the truck with Joe clutching what looked to be an M260 7.62mm machine gun.

Nick looked at an exterior view and saw the black bubble up there enlarge and the barrel of the machine gun extend through the glass or plastic and lock in place. The vertical pillar of the seat assembly hummed behind Nick and he could see the barrel turning slowly as Joe and the gun barrel pivoted in a full circle. It reminded Nick of the top-gunner in the B-17 movies—Twelve O’Clock High, The Memphis Belle—that he and Val had loved to watch.

Then it struck him: the barrel had gone through the black glass or plastic or Plexiglas.

“Osmotic glass?” asked Nick. When Sato didn’t answer, Nick clicked the intercom floor button once and repeated the question.

“Hai,” grunted Sato. He seemed to be going through a checklist on his phone screen. “Semipermeable bulletproof plastic. A ten-centimeter patch on the top weapons dome. It molds in around the weapon.”

Nick laughed out loud. “That plastic alone is more expensive than any air tickets from Denver to L.A. and then on to Santa Fe would be. These damned vehicles… they must cost Nakamura thousands of times what he’s paying me for this investigation.”

“Of course,” came Sato’s flat voice on Nick’s earphones.

“Then why even bring me along?” demanded Nick. “ ‘Touch nothing, Bottom-san.’ I’m just a fucking passenger.”

“Not at all, Bottom-san. It is you who will be interrogating Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev when we get to his compound in Santa Fe.”

“Why me?” Nick’s voice was bitter and he was glad he was on the private comm circuit with Sato. “I’m just being hauled along on this trip like so much dirty laundry.”

“Did you interview Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev six years ago?” asked Sato.

“No, you know I didn’t. He was out of the country.”

“And the same was true for three of the four other attempts to interview him. There was a brief FBI interview with the Don—via satellite hookup—two years ago, but the special agents asked poor questions. Yours will be the first true interview with the man… the man who was one of the last to be interviewed on camera by Keigo Nakamura and who might have had serious motives for not wanting that interview seen by anyone else.”

“So you think that Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev is the prime suspect?” asked Nick, trying and failing to turn his head far enough to look directly at Sato.

“He is the most important person in the investigation yet to be interviewed by a competent investigator, Bottom-san.”

Nick almost laughed again. He felt like anything and everything but a “competent investigator” at that moment.

Sato touched buttons and a high whine seemed to be buzzing in Nick’s skull.

“What’s that? The turbines?”

“No, the large gyroscopes,” said Sato. “Coming up to speed.”

“What the hell do we need gyroscopes for?”

“They help right the vehicle, along with hydraulic jacks, should the Land Cruiser be knocked off its wheels.”

This time, Nick did laugh.

“There is something funny, Bottom-san?”

“Yeah, there’s something funny. A minute ago, when Joe went up through the roof, I thought I was in a World War Two B-seventeen movie—you know, Twelve O’Clock High or something. Now I realize I’m caught in the middle of Mad Max or Road Warrior.”

“These are also American movies about World War Two?” asked Sato as he pushed more buttons. The huge turbos fired up and added to the din in Nick’s aching skull. Joe’s turret-gun contraption whirred behind him.

“No,” said Nick, reminding himself not to shout into the microphone. “They were twentieth-century movies— Australian, I think—about a shitty future where everything had gone to hell and men killed men in their weird cars on the lawless highway.”

“Ahhh,” grunted Sato. “Skiffy.”

“What?”

“American skiffy.”

“What’s that?” asked Nick as Sato checked on comm with the Land Cruiser carrying Willy, Toby, and Bill. “Skiffy? What is that?”

“You know,” said Sato, shifting the heavy vehicle into gear. Nick could hear the Oshkosh M-ATV’s heavy transmission grinding beneath him. “Skiffy.”

“Spell it,” said Nick.

“S-c-i-hyphen-f-i,” said Sato, taking the lead in front of the second Land Cruiser and guiding them past a tank and toward the gap a military crane had opened for them in the wall of concrete barriers across the highway. “Skiffy.”

Nick laughed harder than before.

“You’re absolutely right, Hideki-san,” he said at last, wondering how he was going to wipe away the snot under his oxygen mask. “This whole thing is skiffy and getting skiffier by the moment.”

They rolled out of Colorado and the United States and downhill into New Mexico. 

3.02 Las Vegas, Nevada, and Beyond—Wednesday, Sept. 22

FROM PROFESSOR EMERITUS GEORGE LEONARD FOX’S PRIVATE JOURNAL

Five days of travel. Five days. These last five days seem more eventful to me, more lived, than my last five years. And when I say “lived,” I mean more filled with life defined in the rich, overflowing-with-consciously-realized-experience mode exemplified by only a few of my favorite literary characters such as, say, Alys, the Wife of Bath. So perhaps I’ve lived more in the last five days than I have in my last fifteen years. Or in my last fifty years.

Or perhaps I’ve never lived this fully before.

One reason I can write this with such cautious joy is that so far no one in our party has been harmed. By “party” I’m not sure if I’m talking about just Val and me, or Val and me and our drivers Julio and Perdita Romano, or Val, me, Julio, Perdita, and the hundreds of others in this truck convoy. In my joy and terror at being alive this week, I have become large. I contain multitudes.

It’s hard to believe that only two nights ago I was witnessing with my own aged eyes the spectacle that is Las Vegas—Las Vegas and all the joyfully riotous caravan encampments circled and sprawled across the torchlit desert beyond the wall that protects Las Vegas, Nevada, from the violent twenty-first-century cemetery that surrounds this last holdout of a twentieth-century city (but which so far does not intrude upon and which so far has not prevailed over Las Vegas’s own bright, improbable, tenuous, and surreal reality).