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 indicated. Nick wondered how many years it had been since Nakamura’s people or any law-enforcement or intelligence agency had managed to get a photo of this man.
“A good question,” said the deeply suntanned and wrinkled don, folding his hands on the metal desktop. “I would answer sincerely that nothing could warrant such treatment of a guest, Nick Bottom, but you are, of course, something more than a mere guest. Your employer, Mr. Hiroshi Nakamura, has reasons—good reasons, both political and strategic—for wishing that I no longer existed. He also has, under his control, certain orbital hyperkinetic weapons that the Japanese whimsically refer to, I believe, as gee-bears. Have you heard this term?”
“Yes,” said Nick, suspecting that Noukhaev knew all about Sato’s use of the things against the tanks the day before.
“So you see,” said the don, “it was tempting fate to give Mr. Nakamura absolute knowledge of my presence at the hacienda at any specific moment on any specific day.” He grinned. “Yes, you are thinking, Nick Bottom—This man is paranoid—and I would agree with you. I ask myself only, Am I paranoid enough? Please sit down before you fall.”
Nick sat before he fell.
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev was reminding him of someone. He got it almost at once—Anthony Quinn, that twentieth-century movie actor that he and Val had liked—not so much because Noukhaev looked like Quinn, but because the voice and slight accent were similar, the quirk of the mouth into an arrogantly amused smile was similar, and because Noukhaev was hard to place ethnically, the same way that Anthony Quinn had played Mexicans, Indians, Arabs, and Greeks. The don also had a powerful body resembling the late actor’s—compact but broad-chested, massive forearms, a man’s strong hands.
Nick said, “So where are we now?”
Noukhaev laughed as if Nick had made a joke. “Somewhere safe. Somewhere that I believe even your omnipotent Mr. Nakamura does not know of.”
“He’s not my omnipotent Mr. Nakamura,” Nick said sourly. “And if he were omnipotent, he sure as hell wouldn’t have had to hire me to help find out who killed his kid.”
“Exactly!” cried Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev, holding up one brown finger. “Why did he hire you, Nick Bottom?”
“I have a hunch you want to enlighten me on why Nakamura hired me,” said Nick.
“You must know, Nick Bottom,” said the don. “And if you do not know, you must suspect.”
“I suspect everyone and no one,” said Nick. He’d wanted to say that line since he was nine years old. Nick guessed that it was probably the oxygen deprivation while he was gagged and bound that prompted him to say it now.
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev squinted at him for a silent moment. Then the older man threw his head back and laughed uproariously.
Shit, he is nuts, thought Nick.
Noukhaev opened a lower desk drawer, removed a box, offered the box to Nick. Cigars. Nick shook his head and the don chose one for himself, went through the usual stupid ritual of biting, spitting (Nick had learned through movies that more sophisticated types cut the ends of the cigar off, or had their butlers do it), and lighting the expensive stogie with a lighter he produced from his khakis’ pockets.
Nick still thought the room was in a basement or deep underground, but the ventilation was very good. He got only a slight whiff of the cigar smoke.
“Why would one of the most powerful men on the planet hire you, Nick Bottom?” Noukhaev said rhetorically. Nick hated it when speakers got rhetorical. It insulted your intelligence.
“Nakamura has already carried out multiple investigations of his son’s murder,” continued the don, sitting back in his chair and exhaling blue-white smoke. “The Denver police—both before and after you—the CBI, the FBI, Homeland Security, his own security people, the Keisatsu-chō…”
If the Japanese National Police Agency had investigated Keigo Nakamura’s murder, it was news to Nick. For most of its history the Keisatsu-chō had just overseen and regulated local Japanese police departments—mostly setting standards, a bureaucracy with none of the powers of the FBI, not even agents or officers of its own—but in the last few decades since It All Hit The Fan and Japan had ended up on top (or at least near the top), the National Police Agency had grown real teeth, both with its new secret-police security agency, the Keibi-kyoku, and its overseas intelligence agency, the Gaiji Jōhō-bu. Beyond knowing their names and hearing and reading that the agency’s subdepartments were lethal, Nick knew nothing about them.