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 ColoradŌOklahoma 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 with the mullahs in Tehran and Mecca. The new Shogun.”
Noukhaev was no longer smiling, merely staring. The gaze burned into Nick. He could feel it like a finger of fire against his face.
“A sort of second Louisiana Purchase,” murmured Nick. “But millions of Islamic colonists in former U.S. states? America would… never stand for it.”
Nick’s voice had been dropping from lack of conviction even before he finished the sentence. America had stood for a lot in recent decades. More to the point—what could it do to stop an organized and Caliphate-backed colonization of these desert states? America hadn’t been able to keep the territory out of the hands of the Mexican cartels in the first place.
Will they bring their own camels? wondered Nick. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He suddenly had one hell of a headache.
“I have been a poor host,” said Noukhaev. “Are you thirsty, Nick Bottom? Shall I call for some wine?”
“Not wine,” said Nick. “Just some water.”
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev seemed to be talking to the desktop when he spoke in low, conversational tones. “Please bring some water for my guest and myself.”
A minute later, the side door opened and a guayabera-wearing man came in carrying a silver tray upon which were a crystal carafe of water, so filled with ice that it fogged the crystal with its cold, and two crystal glasses.
Noukhaev poured for both of them.
“Please,” said the don, gesturing. Nick waited, holding the cold glass. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been this thirsty or when his head had hurt quite this much. Both, he imagined, were byproducts of the tasering.
But he didn’t drink.
Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev laughed easily and drained his entire glass of ice water. He poured more for himself.
Nick sipped. No taste, chemical or otherwise. It was water.
“Can I ask some questions now?” asked Nick. “That was supposed to be the purpose of this meeting.”
“By all means, Nick Bottom. You, after all, are the investigator. This is what Mr. Hiroshi Nakamura has said, and Mr. Hiroshi Nakamura is seldom wrong. Please, please, ask your questions.”
Noukhaev extracted a second cigar, prepared it, lit it, and sat back in his chair smoking it.