Begay turned the radio up.
Val dozed off.
They came out of the mountains above Denver at about ten o’clock in the morning. The roar of gears and engine had wakened Val during the climb over Loveland Pass and it would always remain one of the most terrifying things he’d ever experienced.
The long 6 percent and steeper grade of the last dozen miles or so out of the mountains toward Denver, the high-rises gleaming in the midmorning light ahead, was all lower-gear, high-revving engines braking by compression, and the stink of overheated brakes. Two of the trucks in the convoy had to use runaway truck ramps.
And then they were down. Val could see other cars on I-70 and the adjoining roads and highways. It was the first real traffic they’d seen for hours. It made him dizzy.
“One thing I gotta ask you before we seal this maybe deal,” said Henry Big Horse Begay, switching off the radio. This close to a major city, it was NPR and the other official stations.
“What’s that?” asked Val. He was terrified that the Indian was going to renege on his offer. With a month to get the $200 old bucks—maybe steal it from the Old Man before shooting the bastard, although Val doubted that the old flashback addict would have that much anywhere—and then to get the NICC, he might just be ready for Begay.
“That piece you had in your belt in the back and been shiftin’ around, furtive-like, all night so it wouldn’t dig into your back or side or gut. You ever shoot it?”
Val hesitated. Finally, not knowing what the right answer was, he said, “Yeah.”
“Not at a goddamned target or rabbit or some such, I mean,” said Begay, taking his full attention off the road ahead and laying it on Val. “I mean at a living person. A man.”
“Yeah,” breathed Val.
“Hit him?”
“Yeah.”
“Kill him?” Begay’s eyes were flinty lie detectors.
Val tried to swallow. Couldn’t.
“Yeah.”
They were approaching the interchange with I-25, but the old one had been blown up. There was a temporary gravel ramp. The convoy was shifting down, bouncing down the grade in unison.
“Did he deserve it?” asked Henry Big Horse Begay.
Val started to answer with the same syllable he’d been using and then stopped. This question had been most of what had kept him awake at night the last week. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t know,” said Val. “Probably not. But I think it was either him or me. I chose me.”
Begay drove south on I-25 in silence for several minutes.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’m gonna be coming back through here—Attse Hashke permitting—around October twenty-seven. Supposed to be at the big loading docks at the South Broadway GOVCO Center all that afternoon. I’ll look for you. Schedule now says the convoy leaves at eight p.m. You ain’t there, I won’t ever look for you again.”
“I’ll be there,” said Val.
1.13
Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico—Thursday, Sept. 16
The rest of the voyage to Santa Fe had gone without incident with paramilitary “technicals”—pickups with large-caliber machine guns mounted in the back—escorting them the last seventy miles or so from Las Vegas, NM, to Santa Fe.
The three mercenaries, Sato, and Nick stayed at the Japanese consulate in Santa Fe, formerly the old La Fonda Hotel right on the plaza. Joe’s remains were taken into the basement of the complex for cremation.
Upon arrival, Sato had led Nick and the others to the consul’s medical clinic—better equipped and more modern and clean than any medical facility left in Denver, Nick was sure; while Nick and the others had a quick checkup, Sato had his burns and cuts treated and his serious fracture was set into one of those expensive new polymorphic sports casts—a smart-cast, they called it, too expensive for any Americans other than the top athletes, or rather, those athlete templates for their digital avatars—that allowed full use of the arm even as the bones healed.
Nick’s interview with Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev at his hacienda compound outside of town was scheduled for 10 a.m. The invitation had gone to Mr. Nakamura and the specifics were clear—neither the Oshkosh vehicle nor Hideki Sato was to come within ten miles of the don’s home. Nick had been told to be at the St. Francis Cathedral— formally, he knew, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi (and, Dara had told him when they’d come to Santa Fe on vacation early in their marriage, the cathedral which the archbishop spent his life seeing constructed in Willa Cather’s
The half-block walk from the consulate to the cathedral took Nick about one minute. And that only because he dawdled to study the 145-year-old church from a distance before crossing the street to stand on its stairs. Nick remembered Dara telling him that the French Romanesque cathedral with its twin towers was begun by French- born archbishop John Baptiste Lamy around 1869 and discontinued and dedicated in 1887 without the spires because they’d run out of funds.
It had always looked odd—doubly truncated—to Nick Bottom.
It was a warm, sunny day and Santa Fe smelled as it always had to Nick in the autumn: a mixture of the sweet aroma of burning pinon pine logs, dried leaves from the tall, ancient cottonwoods that lined many of the streets in the old section, and sage. Dara had once said that there wasn’t a better-smelling city in all of the United States.
Back when Santa Fe was
Now, Nick knew, the wealthy city wasn’t part of any nation. Nuevo Mexico claimed titular control of the town, but Santa Fe had enough money to hire its own small army to maintain its independence. Besides still being a second-home capital for movie stars, famous writers, and Wall Street types, Santa Fe had received heavy Japanese investment in recent years and the Japanese didn’t choose to live in a Mexican village.
So Santa Fe had become a modern small-town version of World War II’s Lisbon, with spies, double agents, retired soldiers of fortune, and international ne’er-do-wells like Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev making the lovely little adobe-cottage mountain town, nestled in its fragrant valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos, one of their homes and their center of operations.
The black Mercedes S 550—all-electric or super-expensive hydrogen drive—whispered to a stop at the curb. There were three men in the car, all dressed identically in white Havana shirts; their race might be hard to pin down, Nick thought, but their profession was easy to see. They were hard men. Hard beyond the everyday hardness of mere mercenaries. These were fifth-generation killers from another continent.
The man in the backseat opened the curb-side door and beckoned Nick inside.
Nick didn’t speak and neither did any of the three men in guayabera Cuban shirts—the kind of formal,
