Flashback

believers always insisted that unlike being under the flash—where you were always a little separate from the experience, floating above your original self even as you reexperienced things—F-two would be totally immersive.

“What did you tell him?” asked Nick.

Noukhaev laughed. “I told him that I’d sell and distribute any drug that people wanted, if it were real… which F-two isn’t. We’ve all heard the rumors of it forever. It’s an impossible drug. Take heroin or cocaine if you want fantasies, I told him.”

“And what did Keigo Nakamura say to that?” asked Nick. Part of him was crestfallen that the rumors of F-two were still just fantasy rumors. But Keigo asked the poet Danny Oz if he would use F-two. What the hell was Keigo Nakamura up to?

“Keigo changed the subject,” said Noukhaev. “Which I am going to do as well. Are you aware, Nick Bottom, of who wants all this land that used to be New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California?”

“I would take a wild guess and say Mexico… or Nuevo Mexico or whatever the hell the reconquistas call themselves hereabouts,” said Nick. “Given that it’s their goddamned troops, tanks, and millions of colonists squatting on most of it and fighting for the rest.”

Noukhaev blew blue smoke and shook his head. The lined, rugged face looked mildly disappointed—an aging tutor discouraged by his pupil’s thickheadedness. “You’ve truly been away, haven’t you, Nick Bottom? Lost in your flashback dreams and your incessant self-pity? The first man ever to lose a wife.”

Nick felt his face flush and his anger grow, but he held it down, attempting to ignore the adrenaline surge that made him want to smash in Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s head with…

With what? The chair he was sitting on was the only loose thing in the room that he could use as a weapon, and it was just too damned light to be of any real use. And Nick had no doubt whatsoever that Noukhaev had a pistol in his belt under that loose white shirt he wore outside his trousers.

But Nick didn’t have to answer the rhetorical insult and decided to change the subject.

“All right,” said Nick. “If not Mexico, who? Japan?”

“What would Japan do with all this space—mostly desert—with their declining birthrate?” asked Noukhaev, obviously enjoying his little performance as schoolteacher. “I know that foreign events isn’t your forte, Detective First Grade Nick Bottom, but put your addled shoulder to the wheel… think! What aggressive and thriving political entity needs Lebensraum and more Lebensraum? And is used to deserts?”

“The Caliphate?” said Nick at last. It was not a statement, just some dumbfounded syllables. He heard himself repeat the idea. “The Global Caliphate? Here in the Southwest? That’s… absurd. Absolutely ridiculous.”

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev clasped both hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, the cigar firmly clamped between his strong teeth. He said nothing.

“Worse than absurd,” said Nick, waving his hand as if batting away a fly. “Impossible.”

But… was it?

The world’s Muslim population, according to CNN or Al Jazeera–USA or wherever the hell Nick had heard it, had just reached 2.2 billion people. Of those, according to polls the network had quoted, more than 90 percent claimed membership in the Islamic Global Caliphate, even if they were in nations that weren’t yet technically part of the expansive regime with its tripartite capitals in Tehran, Damascus, and Mecca.

That meant, especially after almost a decade of the full civil war in China and India’s aggressive moves toward achieving a huge middle-class population (largely through restricting population much as the Chinese had three generations earlier), that the Islamic Global Caliphate was the most populous political entity on earth. And the birthrate of Muslims, someone had once told Nick—perhaps it had been his pedantic father-in-law—could now be charted in terms of what he’d called an asymptotic curve. The most common birth name in Europe had been Mohammed for more than twenty-five years now, which meant that it had been so even before the Caliphate was officially established there.

Hell, thought Nick, feeling his brain cells still reeling from the tasering, the most common baby name in fucking Canada is Mohammed.

That didn’t mean anything. Did it?

“The Caliphate moving into southern California and Arizona and New Mexico? Sending… what?… colonists here? Immigrants?” Nick said dumbly, his tongue thick. “The United States would never stand for it.”

“Oh?” said Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. “And what could the United States do about it?”

Nick opened his mouth angrily… thought a moment… and then shut his mouth. America had a standing army of draftees of a little more than six hundred thousand kids like his son, but poorly armed, poorly trained, and poorly led, mercenaries all as they fought for Japan or India in China, Indonesia, parts of Southeast Asia, and South America. The dregs of the regular Army and the National Guard were overextended just guarding the southern border with Nuevo Mexico from the ColoradOOklahoma state line to the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles.

Could a U.S. president break the all-important mercenary contracts with Japan and the other hiring nations and bring that leased-out army home to fight a million or so immigrant jihadists? Would she?

Nick felt very dizzy. “Mexico wouldn’t stand for it,” he said flatly. “The reconquistas fought too hard to retake these states, to undo the eighteen forty-eight American land grabs.”

Noukhaev laughed and stubbed out what was left of his cigar. “Trust me, my friend Nick Bottom, this Nuevo Mexico you speak of does not exist. You are talking to someone who has traded with it, worked with it, and moved within its confused borders for more than twenty years. Nuevo Mexico is a marriage of convenience—a fictional marriage of convenience—between leaders of murderous drug cartels, fleeing land barons from Old Mexico, younger speculators, and spanic warlords as loyal only to themselves as are the Chinese warlords. There is no Nuevo Mexico.”

“It has a flag,” Nick heard himself say. Even the tone of his voice sounded pathetic.

Noukhaev grinned. “Yes, Nick Bottom, and a national anthem. But the fiction that is Nuevo Mexico is as corrupt and rotten from the inside as Old Mexico was before its fall. The ‘colonists’ here cannot feed themselves, much less replace the large American ranches, farms, high-tech corporations, science centers, and civilian populations that they have occupied and overrun. They would starve in a month without food supplies from the cartels. They survive by sucking at the tit of cartel money—cocaine money, heroin money, flashback money. If that tit is denied them, eighteen million former Mexican ‘immigrants’ will be on the move again.”

“But… the Caliphate,” said Nick. “They don’t have the… the… language, the culture, the infrastructure…” He heard what he was saying and shut up again. He shook his head. “Who would sell the Southwest to the Caliphate?”

Noukhaev lowered his chin to his white-shirted chest and smiled in a way that could only be called diabolical.

“Me,” he said. “Among others.”

Nick blinked and really looked at the man across the desk from him. Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev wasn’t joking. Was he insane? A megalomaniac, yes… Nick had known that from the earliest parts of this crazy conversation… but fully insane?

Maybe not, thought Nick.

“Who would do the selling?” repeated Nick, speaking more to himself now than to the don. “Not Nuevo Mexico, although their military forces and new colonists here will be in the way.”

“No, not really,” said Noukhaev. “No more in the way than, say, the native populations and so-called armies of Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and European Russia. The new Islamic owners of all those former nations have gained much experience in efficient expansion in the past three decades.”

“But still…,” muttered Nick, his nerve ends twitching and misfiring from the tasering. “Who would do the real selling? Who would get the billions of old dollars involved in such a…”

Nick looked up and met Noukhaev’s dark-eyed gaze. “Japan,” he said softly.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev opened his callused palms.

“Not the country of Japan,” Nick said. “But the keiretsu and the daimyo who has most control here in the States when the time comes to make the deal