Flashback

perforated white shirts a Cuban might wear to a funeral—as they drove north out of the city on Bishops Lodge Road.

Nick knew this bumpy old backroad ran for about six miles to the little crossroads village of Tesuque, once the address of more than a few aging movie stars and starlets. This was a good place to hide large homes in the hills above the narrow, heavily forested valley, and Nick assumed that Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s hacienda would be one of those compounds between Santa Fe and the Tesuque crossroads.

It was.

About four miles out, the Mercedes turned to the right, followed a narrow gravel road up a runoff gully, and came out onto a wider, asphalt-paved driveway that switchbacked up to the top of the hill, moving from a cottonwood forest to brown-grass meadow and then back into pine forest again. Nick noticed camouflaged bunkers set back along the switchbacks; assuming that this driveway was the main way in, this would be an eminently defensible position against vehicles or ground forces.

It turned out that the don’s hacienda had more security levels than Mr. Nakamura’s mountaintop mansion. There were three walls with gates—the half-mile spaces between the walls and fences true killing zones, covered by visible towers and inevitable hidden gun positions—and two CMRIs for the car and three for Nick and his minders on foot.

Once they reached what he presumed was the main building, Nick was sent on into a blastproofed windowless room where more men in guayaberas fluoroscoped him, frisked him, and cavity-searched him. He was in a truly foul mood by the time the last guayabera’d guard silently led him into a huge room with tall windows and told him to take a seat. Because of the bookcases and gigantic leather-topped desk, Nick assumed that this was Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s study.

The first thing I have to do when he comes in, thought Nick, is ask him what I can call him. That Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev business gets old fast.

Nick had taken a seat but rose when the door opened and someone entered, but it wasn’t the don. Four more guards came in, the tallest, oldest man coming straight at Nick and signifying silently that Nick should raise his arms again.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Nick. “The other guys have already…”

He didn’t see the guard behind him or the knockout taser. But he felt it.

His last thought, falling, before his neurons became as totally and painfully scrambled as his nerve endings, was… Fuc…

Then he was gone.

Nick came to in slow stages, as one always does after being tasered. The first stage was confusion followed by a slow and muddled focus on trying not to urinate down your own pant leg. The second stage was pain and twitching and a little less confusion. The third stage for Nick now was trying to breathe.

He was trussed up, ankles and wrists—hands in front of him, which had allowed for some circulation—and blindfolded and gagged and there was some sort of cloth over the top half of his body. It took him a minute or two to realize that he hadn’t gone deaf; there were sound-deadening earphones over his ears.

But he could still tell that he was in a moving vehicle. Vibration and the body’s sense of balance as the vehicle took turns and jounced over rough parts told him that. So he was either in the trunk or backseat of a truck or car, being driven… somewhere.

More security or am I a hostage? wondered Nick when he could put together a full thought. Neither made much sense—why invite him to the hacienda and then shanghai him to another meeting place? Hell of a way to treat a guest. But what value did he have as a hostage? Did Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev possibly think that Nakamura would pay to get him back?

Or did the Chechen don believe that Nick might know something important? If that was the answer, Nick knew that there was probably a short future ahead of him and one that might include torture as well as execution.

Do I know anything that could be important to this Russian gunrunner, drug dealer, and would- be empire maker? If he did, Nick sure couldn’t think of what it might be.

As a former cop, Nick knew that the knockout tasers usually kept their targets unconscious for about fifteen minutes (if, as was more common than civilians knew, they didn’t cause a heart attack or stroke or leave you a drooling vegetable or just kill you outright). If he could time his heartbeats, he might be able to figure out how long the drive would be from the hacienda to wherever he was going to end up.

As if knowing that’s going to help you, dipshit, Nick told himself. Sato and his boys won’t be coming in like the cavalry with guns blazing. The don’s men made damn sure there were no tracking beepers on or in me and even if Sato was watching the hacienda by satellite or drone, they almost surely drove a dozen trucks out at the same time, all going different directions. Sato’d have no way of knowing which vehicle I was in.

It didn’t matter anyway, Nick realized. His heart was pounding so hard and fast that it was useless as a timekeeper. A lot of hostages, he knew, died when gagged and restrained—again through heart attacks or suffocation brought on by asthma or even a head cold, often through gagging on their own vomit. He tried not to think about any of those things and to slow his heart rate. He might need the adrenaline later; he didn’t need it now.

They’re taking me to a landfill.

That was probable, he realized, but why? Then Nick wondered how many millions or billions of men throughout history had died with that one syllable as their last living thought—Why?

Don’t get philosophical on me now, shithead. Plan your next move.

The vibration stopped. A moment later, strong hands grabbed him, pulled him up and out of something, and set him on his feet. He felt someone cut or release the binders around his ankles.

Nick saw no reason to pretend that he was still unconscious. He stood there blind and deaf and swaying. With hands around both his arms, gripping hard through the heavy bag fabric, he was half lifted, and propelled across what felt like gravel, then perhaps inside a structure and onto a hard surface—Nick’s lower body was outside the bag and he could feel a difference in the quality of air around him, more still, interior— and then down a corridor with a tiled floor, then down steps, then down another corridor.

They stopped and pressed him to sit.

The bag was removed, the earphones, the gag and blindfold, and finally the wrist binders.

Nick did the usual blinking against the light and yawning to get more air. He did resist rubbing his chafed wrists.

The men who released him—wearing guayaberas like all of Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s other chattel—left by one of the two doors.

It was a small room, windowless, bare walls, with an old metal desk in front of Nick and a few battered metal filing cabinets against one of the walls. Nick was sitting on a light metal-frame chair and there was a second one behind the desk. Both were too flimsy to be of much use to him. He thought that the place might be the basement office of a high school gym coach, save for the absence of trophies.

I’m the trophy, thought Nick.

There was nothing on the desk or atop the filing cabinets that he could use as a weapon. Nick had just struggled to his feet—still swaying—in preparation for going through the desk drawers and cabinets to find something, anything, that he could use when the second door opened and Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev came through, striding quickly to his place behind the desk.

“Sit down, my friend. Sit down,” said the don, waving Nick back into his seat.

Nick stayed standing and continued swaying. “I’m not your friend, asshole. And after that ride you can put me down as one of your enemies.”

Noukhaev laughed, showing strong, nicotine-stained teeth. “I would apologize, Nick Bottom, but you are man enough and smart enough not to accept my apologies for such indignities. You are right. It was barbarous of me and unfair to you. But warranted. Sit, sit, please.”

The older man sat but Nick remained standing. “Why was it warranted?”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev was quite a bit older than the photos which Sato had shown him would have