When Val spoke, he was amazed how normal—even solid—his voice sounded, given that he’d almost pissed himself a minute or so earlier when Coyne had pointed the Beretta at him.
“What Gene D.’s saying,” said Val, “is that we couldn’t get close, and even if we did get close, we couldn’t kill Omura without getting gunned down by his security, and even if we did somehow get close and kill the Advisor and not get killed ourselves, we’d never get away. The whole city would go apeshit. They’d have our faces on every sat channel before we got half a block away… which we wouldn’t get anyway.”
Val heard how lame that finish had been, but he left it that way and crossed his arms.
Coyne smiled. “You’re absolutely right, my man. Except for one thing. Sewers. I know the sewers and how to get there and where to wait and which one to shoot from and which ones to get away in.”
Toohey made a scrunchy face. “Forget it, man. I ain’t crawling through shit to kill no one.”
Coyne rolled his eyes. “Not shit-sewers, stupid. Storm sewers. Rain runoff sewers. The city’s riddled with them.”
Val again remembered the 1954 movie Them about the giant ants and the finale where FBI guy James Arness and his sidekick, whatshisname, chased down the ants in the storm sewers that ran into the usually dry Los Angeles River with army Jeeps and big trucks roaring down the echoing underground corridors. Val’s old man had loved that movie for some stupid reason—probably because Val’s mother also loved it—and when Val was little, he’d loved watching the idiot black-and-white flatfilm with both his parents, the little room in the little house smelling of popcorn and the sprung old couch crowded…
He came up out of it—the memory had been almost as compelling as a flash, but only because he had flashed on those experiences so many times with the drug—and said, “No, Coyne. No. It’s not like the city and Jap security people don’t also know about those sewers. When someone like the Advisor goes somewhere public, I’ve read where they weld the sewer openings closed for a mile or so around…” Val could see Coyne grinning but he went ahead anyway. “Not just the round manhole-type sewer-sewers that Toohey was talking about, but storm sewer openings, too. Weld them shut or seal them up somehow.”
The grin stayed on Coyne’s smug face so Val shut up. He realized that his arms were still crossed. He wasn’t buying any of Coyne’s bullshit. And he hadn’t liked having the muzzle of a loaded gun aimed at him. He wasn’t going to forget that.
As if sensing Val’s hostility, the flashgang’s leader set his hand on Val’s shoulder. His voice was soft, reasonable. “You’re absolutely right, Valerino. City security and State Department Security and DHS security and Omura’s own ninja guys will all make sure that all windows in nearby buildings will be sealed against snipers, all rooftops checked, all unauthorized vehicles hauled away, and all sewers—those carrying Toohey’s shit and those for storms—will be sealed up…”
Coyne waited several beats like the son of a movie actor he was, his gaze moving from face to face—even to Cruncher’s ruined face—and then he said, “But this storm sewer opening outside the Disney Pavilion is already sealed up. Has been for years and years. All the computer files say it’s a permanent weld-job, but it ain’t. It’s an old rusty iron door made out of panels with a steel grate inside. We can cut through the grate ahead of time. And…”
Coyne looked around the faces again, drawing it out.
“… and I’ve got the fucking key for the iron panels.”
Six of the seven other boys started babbling and jostling one another.
“They’ll never see us,” said Coyne. “We’ll shoot the Jap VIP from the sewer opening, just cut him down like a weed, and be gone before his security can turn around. We lock the iron panels behind us. By the time they get down into the sewers, we’re a mile away through the whatchamacallit—labyrinth—of those old storm sewers, already out on the streets and blending with the crowds. I even know where to dump the guns on the way so they’ll never be found.”
The babbling and jostling stopped and all eight boys just looked at one another. Even Cruncher quit mopping his bleeding mouth.
“Holy shit,” Val whispered at last. “It might work. Holy shit.”
“We’ll flash on this for years,” said Coyne.
“Holy shit,” repeated Val.
“Holy shit and amen,” Coyne said, blessing everyone with his fingers like he was the new pope who’d taken over for the dead one.
“Yurodivy!” said the thinly smiling, smirking, full-face T-shirt image of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. “You are all… holy fools.”
1.05
LoDo, Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11
SATO DIDN’T TAKE the handcuffs off as he drove north to 20th Street and then east above I-25 again and down into the part of Denver called LoDo. Nick’s wrists were already torn and bloody; the jouncing of the heavy—obviously armored—turd-brown Honda electric tore more flesh off his wrists and made Nick grind his molars rather than cry out again.
He’d wanted to kill Sato before this. Now he vowed to torture the Jap before he killed him.
LoDo was the cute name developers back in the 1980s—or maybe the ’70s—gave to the old Lower Downtown warehouse district of Denver that squatted between the real downtown and the South Platte River. In the 1800s the area had been the site for whorehouses, saloons, saddleries, warehouses, and more saloons. By the middle of the 1900s even the saloons and whorehouses had gone out of business, leaving one saddle-seller, a few working warehouses, a lot of empty warehouses, and hundreds upon hundreds of winos, drug addicts, and street people. In the last decades of the twentieth century, urban renewal—and the city revitalizing itself toward the river—had chased the winos and addicts out to be replaced by upscale eateries and even more upscale condos with brick walls and exposed rafters. By the time the classic-looking Coors Field ballpark opened in 1995, LoDo was in full resurgence. It didn’t begin its decline until after It All Hit The Fan, but by the Year of Clear Vision, LoDo was well on its way to its current state of boasting mostly whorehouses, a few saloons, abandoned condos haunted by flashback and other addicts, whorehouses, and more whorehouses.
Keigo Nakamura had died in a room on the third floor of a three-story building on Wazee Street, a long dark street with two-story whorehouses, saloons, and warehouses on one side and three-story warehouses, saloons, and whorehouses on the other side.
It was full light—or at least as light as it was going to get on this chilly, rainy September morning—when Sato parked the Honda at the curb outside the three-story building that looked exactly like all the other three-story buildings on the south side of Wazee Street. As the security chief came around to unlock the cuffs, Nick considered jumping Sato… then rejected the idea. He was too worn out by the night of flashing, the injections of T4B2T and TruTel, and from the sheer adrenaline of terror.
It would have to be another time.
Sato unlocked the cuffs and, seizing both of Nick’s bleeding wrists in one gigantic hand, pulled an aerosol can from his suit pocket.
Mace! thought Nick and squeezed his eyes shut.
Sato sprayed something cold onto Nick’s lacerated wrists. For a few seconds the pain was so terrible that Nick gasped loudly despite himself. Then… nothing. No pain at all. When Sato released his grip, Nick flexed his fingers. Everything worked fine and despite all the blood on his sweatshirt and the dash and windshield, the lacerations were superficial.
Sato grabbed Nick under the arm, lifted him out of the car, and plopped him down on the curb, steering him toward the old building. Shapes—sleeping flash addicts or winos, Nick assumed—stirred and stood in the dark entrance under the overhang.
Two men stepped out of the shadows but they weren’t winos or addicts. They were well-dressed young Japanese men. Sato nodded to them and one of the athletic-looking young men unlocked the double lock on the door.
“Coming to the crime scene six years after the crime,” said Nick, his
voice shaking slightly from the cold and from the roil of fury inside him. “You think seeing this empty building after all this time is going to tell me anything?”
Sato’s only reply was to switch on the lights.
Nick had been to this crime-scene building numerous times five years and eleven months ago, even though he hadn’t been the responding homicide detective first on the scene, and he remembered the totally trashed mess of a site it was: three large rooms filled with couches and chairs and screens and a small kitchen on the first floor, furniture turned over everywhere, flashback vials crushed underfoot, lamps broken in the stampede of the witnesses to get out before the cops arrived that night, even wads of dirty clothing and the occasional used condom in corners.
No longer.
The furniture had been repaired and returned, the lamps were back in place and working, and although every surface was cluttered with dishes and glasses—a huge buffet had been set out down here on the first floor that night as a movie wrap party for Keigo’s Japanese assistants, the interview subjects, and others involved in his documentary film—all three rooms and the kitchen were now clean and in a fairly orderly early-party-stage clutter again.
“I don’t get it,” said Nick.
Sato handed him a pair of stylish wrap-around tactical glasses.
Even before activating them, Nick noticed how tremendously light they were. The DPD tactical glasses had always seemed to weigh a pound or more and gave their users headaches after ten minutes. Not these glasses. They were as light as regular sunglasses and, being wrap-around, filled his entire field of vision. The DPD glasses had always been an island of virtual sight with a vertigo-inducing reality seeping in all around.
Nick touched the icon on the glasses’ stem and just barely caught himself from exclaiming aloud. He took a few steps to confirm what he now saw.
All three party rooms and the kitchen were suddenly filled with people frozen in mid-stride, mid-conversation, mid-munch, mid-laugh, mid-flirt, and mid-flashback-inhalation. Real faces, real bodies. Real people.
He’d expected the figures to be there—it was what tac-glasses did—but he hadn’t expected this level of reality. The DPD and American military tactical glasses he’d used generated little more than wire-frame stick people with cartoonish and barely recognizable faces floating above the armature bodies like Halloween masks on a stick.
These were real people. The quality of 3D digital rendering was on the level of virtual movies or TV series being streamed these days, including the popular Casablanca series starring Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Ingrid Bergman, and such constant new guest stars as nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall. And after a while on that series, Nick knew from his late-night viewings, it didn’t seem at all strange to have other guest stars from different eras such as Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kathleen Turner, Galen Watts, Byron Bezukhov, Sheba Tits, or even all-virt stars such as Natasha Lyubof or Tadanobu Takeshi on the show. They were all equally real.
As real as the people suddenly filling this space and the adjoining rooms.
He took the tac-glasses off and paced through the rooms that circled the central open staircase. Sato followed. The rooms were now empty of anyone but Sato and him. He put the glasses back on and felt the inevitable jolt of vertigo as more than two hundred people reappeared.
Walking closer and inspecting the face of the first witness and interview subject he’d recognized, the former Israeli poet Danny Oz—pores were visible on the haggard man’s face and Nick could see the burst capillaries in Oz’s eyes and nose—he said, “This must have cost Mr. Nakamura a fucking fortune.”
Sato didn’t find that comment worth responding to.
“All three floors virtualized like this?” asked Nick, moving around the room looking closely at the unblinking men and women. He paused to stare down the low bodice of a young blond woman he didn’t recognize, perhaps one of the hookers hired for the party.
“Of course,” said Sato.
Nick looked up at the security chief. Sato didn’t appear any more or less three-dimensional, solid, or real than the other men and women and transvestites and gender-benders in the crowded room. Just broader and thicker than anyone else. Also, Sato was no longer the only Jap in the room. Besides two very young men and a young woman whom Nick recognized as being part of Keigo Nakamura’s video and sound crew, there were three well-dressed bodyguards, also wearing tactical glasses.
Why would they be wearing tac-glasses? wondered Nick but set the question aside for now. His head hurt.
At first, out of practice with tactical and having never practiced with this quality of tactical, Nick made the rookie’s mistake of stepping around and squeezing between the human forms in the crowded room. Then he shook his head ruefully and began walking through them to get where he was headed. The solid-looking three-dimensional digital maquettes didn’t object.
In one corner, a stocky, handsome, sandy-haired former Google exec wearing saffron robes was explaining the karmic glories of Total Immersion to five or six rapt young people. Nick remembered the guy—Derek Somebody. He’d been on Sato’s Top 18 list of witness-suspects yesterday morning… but Nick hadn’t been paying much attention then. He remembered now that he’d had to drive up to Boulder to interview the Buddhist-robed jerkwad at the Naropa Institute there six years ago. Derek Somebody was a total flash addict whose goal was to relive every second of his forty-six years of life in a total-immersion flashback tank. The goal was satori via flashback.
“The murder floor is like this, too?” Nick asked while trying to remember the name of one of the more spaced-out men here standing in the small kitchen area and holding a glass filled with amber liquid that obviously had just come from a solid, real-world bottle of expensive-looking Scotch.
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” said Nick, remembering the crime-scene and autopsy photos. “Wait, has Mr. Nakamura seen all this?”
“Of course,” Sato said in tones that couldn’t get any flatter. “Many times.”
“You did this for your private investigation,” said Nick. He realized how dull-witted he sounded… no, was… but didn’t feel apologetic about that. He had damned good reason to feel a little slow this morning.
Sato nodded ever so slightly. The big security chief was following Nick around the large living area and smaller kitchen space. He showed no hesitation at walking through people.
“In that suit,” said Nick, talking just to shake the cobwebs out of his head, “you remind me of Goldfinger’s guy… Oddjob.”
Sato showed no sign of recognition and Nick mentally kicked himself for trying to make conversation. The rule of cop life—hell, of life—was that you don’t try to converse with your own armpit or asshole, so don’t try with ambulatory surrogates of same.
Nick sighed and said mostly to himself—Still, if Mr. Nakamura keeps seeing all this and visiting his son’s freshly murdered corpse upstairs, it must be…”
Nick froze. He turned slowly to stare at Sato and said, “Why, you miserable motherfucker.”
One of Sato’s dark eyebrows rose a few millimeters in query. Otherwise, the big man showed no expression.
“You sure in hell didn’t get all this detail from witness statements or memory,” said Nick.
“Perhaps some witnesses volunteered to submit to flashback before describing details?” suggested Sato. Detairs.
“My ass,” said Nick.
Sato folded his hands over his crotch in the ancient posture of funeral directors, military men at ease during a dressing-down, and security men trying to disappear into the wallpaper or drapes behind them.
“My ass,” repeated Nick for no other reason than he liked the sound of it. “You were here. You were on all three floors that night. You know how to observe better than any so-called witness there that night. You went under flashback—probably for weeks of sessions—to see and record all this incredible detail so you could give it to the VR programmers. You did.”
Sato
said nothing.
“It is illegal for all Japanese nationals to own, sell, possess, or use flashback, either in Japan or when traveling abroad,” said Nick. “And, if convicted of the offense, the only punishment a judge may impose under Japanese law is death by lethal injection.”
Sato stood there calmly.
“You motherfucker,” repeated Nick, also just because he liked the sound of it. And because it was overdue. But he also hesitated in his newfound advantage. Why on earth would Sato give Nick such life-and-death leverage over him?
The answer was—he wouldn’t.
Nick walked quickly from room to room, passing through frozen forms without hesitating. This is simultaneous. In all three rooms and the kitchen, what one could see of the other rooms was occurring at the same instant. Even if Sato had gone under the flash, he couldn’t have recalled what was occurring simultaneously in different rooms here on the first floor, much less what might have been happening on the second and third floors.
Not for the first time this miserable morning, Nick Bottom felt like throwing up.
Sato nodded as if reading Nick’s thoughts (again) and handed Nick two blue-glowing earbuds.
Nick set them in place with a sick dread at what would come next. And it did.
Sato pressed an icon on his phone’s diskey and all the digitally re-created three-dimensional people around him and in the adjoining room came to life. Just the ambient roar of party noise made Nick reflexively throw his hands over his ears. With the tiny earbuds set deep, that obviously didn’t help much.
Nick stood there motionless for a moment and watched the totally natural movement of people and endured the roar. Then he crossed quickly to the couch and leaned down between a far-too-handsome-to-be-natural young blond man who was, in turn, leaning forward to talk intimately with a far-too-beautiful-to-be-real young blond woman.
“I find the cocaine-three, brandy, flash, and fucking go really, really well together when you’re, like, there doing it all,” the male was whispering, “but you don’t, like, get the buzz when you go back to it under the flash again.”