The September night air was chilly and there was a light drizzle. Nick realized that it was dark outside as Sato carried him down the alley, out of the alley to a side street with cars parked along the rain-filled gutter. Was it the same night? How long had he been under?
Sato beeped open the front passenger-side door of an old Honda electric, dumped Nick into the front seat, and then quickly handcuffed Nick’s right hand, running the short cuff chain through a naked steel bolt in the overhead door frame before he clicked the left cuff tight.
The pain scouring through his awakening arms and hands made Nick feel like he was being crucified. He screamed again just as Sato slammed the door shut and walked around to the driver’s side.
Nick shouted and Sato ignored him as he drove the Honda up Speer Boulevard in a cold rain that was coming down more heavily by the minute. The streets were almost empty. Even the thousands of homeless along the sunken Cherry Creek riverside walking paths and bikepaths were huddled in their shanties and boxes under the street-level overpasses. A dull lightening of the sky in the east told Nick that it was almost dawn. How long had he been under? Just the flash of that Friday afternoon with Dara back in the Year of Clear Vision and into that evening and night. No more than eight hours. Damn.
Nick shut up when Sato turned west on Colfax.
The Jap couldn’t… he can’t be… he wouldn’t…
The Jap was. Crossing over I-25, Sato turned south on Federal Boulevard and then east onto West 23rd Street, then south onto Bryant—a narrow, barricaded street running along the bluff’s edge above I-25 with ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE signs to either side and above.
“No!” cried Nick but Sato ignored him, stopping just long enough to show his ID to the automatic station and then to drive through the CMRI-torus tunnel. Nick felt his atoms being shifted into a different spin dimension—twice now in twenty-four hours—and wondered if this amount of exposure was unhealthy.
Far below and to their left, I-25 disappeared. To prevent conventional explosives damage, regular traffic was routed off I-25 two miles in either direction and had to bounce through what Californians called surface streets through the railyard district. VIP cars had single north-and southbound lanes in blastproof tubes two hundred feet under the surface.
He almost laughed then at his own concern, given the black-dipped edifice that was filling the windshield. The next checkpoint had the slanted one-way spikes rising from the empty access street’s pavement, so once beyond that point there was literally no turning back.
“No,” Nick said again, dully.
“Yes,” said Sato. But he stopped the car.
The huge structure blotting out the cloudy sunrise in front of them had once been called Invesco Field at Mile High.
This “new” football stadium, opened in 2001, had replaced the old Mile High Stadium that had hosted football, soccer, and baseball games since 1948. The wavy top edge of the stadium had caused execs in Invesco, some long-defunct company that had seized naming rights for the new stadium in 2001, to sneeringly call the new home to the now equally defunct Denver Broncos “the Diaphragm.” The place was built to hold more than 76,000 football fans and around 50,000 doped-out screamers for the rock concerts that used to be staged there. On August 28, 2008, Invesco Field at Mile High—a clumsy name that no one except announcers under strict orders had used even then—had reached an apotheosis of sorts when more than 84,000 people had crowded in (and a billion or so more had been present via early high-def TV) to listen to candidate Barack Obama give his nomination acceptance speech as the last act to the spectacle that had been the 2008 Democratic Convention held nearby at the so-called Pepsi Center here in Denver.
Now Invesco, Pepsi, the Broncos, the NFL, public sporting events, and that iteration of the Democratic Party were all defunct, and so, of course, was the man nominated to the chant of Hope and Change that night more than twenty-eight years earlier.
No one who’d gone to those football games or attended the nominee’s media bacchanalia of an acceptance speech in those naïve days would recognize Mile High Stadium today. The stadium, now the Department of Homeland Security Detention Center, looked as if it had been dipped in a hundred thousand gallons of 10W40-weight oil. This black foil-fabric, Nick knew, stretched across the top of the formerly roofless stadium, turning the 1.7 million square feet of space—rooms, corridors, ramps, steps, room for more than 76,000 seats, and hundreds of boxes and skyboxes—into a dimly lighted pit on even the brightest of days. The north entrance to the detention center was a concrete-lipped and steel-doored black cloaca large enough for two trucks to pass in opposite directions.
There was no light coming from the 150-foot-tall structure this dark morning.
No, that wasn’t quite true; over the black oval entrance to the DHSDC was a giant blue demon-horse, red veins standing out on its belly, its hooves of razor-sharp steel, its demonic eyes firing two laser beams from its distorted horse-demon face. The beams cut through the moving fog—or perhaps low wisps of clouds—and whipped back and forth until they converged on the Honda, then on Nick Bottom, and stopped.
“Tell me everything you know about the horse, Bottom-san,” Sato commanded softly.
The horse!? thought Nick, his thoughts scampering back and forth like rats trapped in a box. Who cares about the fucking horse? He rattled the short chain of his handcuffs against the doorframe D-bolt.
But then Nick heard his own voice answering in dulled, stupid tones.
“Originally the stadium horse was Bucky the Bronco. Bucky was twenty-seven feet tall and was cast and enlarged from an original mold of Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, when Trigger was rearing up on his hind legs. Roy Rogers was a TV and movie cowboy around the middle of the last century. Roy allowed them to make the cast from his mold of Trigger before this version of the stadium was built only if the city and stadium owners promised that they wouldn’t name the new horse ‘Trigger.’ The people voted, I think it was in the nineteen-seventies, and named this bigger Trigger ‘Bucky the Bronco.’ ”
Why the goddamned hell am I telling Sato all this crap? wondered Nick. I didn’t even know I knew all this garbage… He tried to clamp his jaws shut to stop the flow of stupid trivia but found that he literally couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“But that’s not Bucky the Bronco,” Nick droned on, straining to use his handcuffed left hand to point to the blue demon-stallion above the entrance to the detention center. “That insane blue horse was a sculpture that a New Mexico artist named Luis Jiménez—he wasn’t much of an artist, mostly a guy who did fiberglass shells for spanic low-riders—made under commission to the Denver International Airport about forty years ago. The only reason this Jiménez won the bid was that the tens of millions of dollars set aside to buy art for the new airport had been turned into one big grab bag for minorities—spanics, blacks, Indians, you name it. Everybody but the Asians in Colorado. I guess they didn’t qualify as minorities. Too smart. Anyway, the mayor at the time was black and his wife headed the committee that handed out all the art projects and all that counted was that the winners were minorities, not real artists, certainly not good artists.”
Nick turned his face away from Sato and banged his forehead against the passenger-side window. The red laser spots moved with him—now on his forearms, now on his chest.
“Please continue, Bottom-san,” said Sato. “Tell me everything you know about this horse.”
Nick tried to drown out the sound of his own voice by squeezing his forearms against his ears, but he could hear himself through bone conduction.
“This blue stallion is thirty-two feet tall, bigger than the original Bucky the Bronco. The people who live in the dead artist’s little town in Nuevo Mexico think the horse is accursed. It fell on the sculptor in his studio and killed him before he’d finished it. It was installed at DIA in 2008 and the contract stipulated that it had to be kept there for ten years, but as soon as that contract was up, the airport and city got rid
of it. It shook up people arriving in Denver for the first time and all of us locals hated it. Homeland Security replaced Bucky the Bronco with this mad, haunted stallion and moved him to this entrance when they moved into Mile High about twelve years ago. The lasers serve a security function. But they’re going to blind me if one of these fucking beams gets me in the retina.”
“Is that all you know about the blue horse?” asked Sato.
“Yes!” screamed Nick. He shook his head wildly and strained more against the cuffs. Broad blood spatters joined the laser spots across the chest of his sweatshirt. “You fuck, you fuck! That second needle in my thigh was Pfizer TruTel, wasn’t it?”
“Of course,” said Sato. “If I gave you another chance at the investigation, Bottom-san, would you betray us again and abandon the investigation to go back under flashback at your earliest opportunity?”
“Yeah, of course I would,” said Nick. “You betcha, Mr. Moto.”
“Would you kill me if you got the chance, Bottom-san?”
“Yes, yes, absolutely,” screamed Nick. “Oh, you fuck.”
“Do you honestly believe there is a chance that you can solve the mystery of Keigo Nakamura’s murder, Bottom-san?”
“Not a chance in hell,” Nick heard himself answer.
The security chief’s black gaze looked appraisingly at Nick, and Nick stared back. Finally he managed, “Why are you taking me to the DHSDC?”
Everyone in Colorado knew that a lot of people went into the black-oil cake of Mile High detention center, but almost no one came out.
Sato’s voice was as flat as ever. “Bottom-san, you betrayed one of the nine Federal Advisors to the United States of America. You violated your word and your contract. Perhaps you planned to assassinate Hiroshi Nakamura.”
“What?!?” screamed Nick, jerking at his restraints again until blood from his wrists spattered the windshield and dashboard.
Sato shrugged. “They will find the truth after sufficient interrogation.”
Nick could feel his eyes straining in their sockets, like the mad, blue stallion’s. Two wide red dots continued to move across his spattered chest like the bloody fingers of a blind lover. “You’re as crazy as that fucking horse, Sato. You want to disappear me into Homeland Security hell here so you can declare the reopened investigation a failure. Then your boss will give you permission to commit seppuku.”
Sato said nothing.
You can’t get away with this, Nick started to shout like some minor character in a cheap TV series but with the help of Pfizer TruTel it came out, “And you will get away with it. Nakamura’ll believe you and you’ll get to kill yourself to atone for your failure and I’ll rot here in the dark for fucking ever.”
Sato looked at him another long minute, then nodded to himself and held up his NICC. Both lasers from the blue stallion’s eyes flicked to the card, then one went back to Nick while the other continued to read the card.
Sato turned the Honda around on the wet street and drove back through the CMRI tunnel and down the lanes through the empty, littered gravel and wet stone wasteland where the parking lot and old neighborhood used to be around Mile High Stadium.
“I think, Bottom-san,” said Hideki Sato, “that we should visit the scene of the crime.”
2.01
The 10 and La Cienega, Los Angeles—Saturday, Sept. 11
BILLY COYNE AND Val were leading the other boys up the lashed-bamboo scaffolding to the Saturday Open Air Market on the collapsed section of the 10 when suddenly from the slab above and from the city below there came the unmistakable sound of hundreds of AK-47s firing into the air, amplified cries from muezzin calling out to the faithful from scores of L.A.’s minarets, church bells in the city ringing, and shouts from the Open Air Market they were heading for, as well as from the shaded surface streets below, of “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
All of the boys froze in their climbing, thinking that it was a hajji attack or suicide bomber.
Then Val realized that this was Los Angeles celebrating the events of that old holiday called 9-11, September 11, 2001, the date—as Val had been taught in school—of the beginning of successful resistance to the old imperialist American hegemony and a turning point in the creation of the New Caliphate and other hopeful signs of the New World Order. He knew that the Christian churches were ringing their bells in their annual attempt to join in the celebrations of hajjis at scores of Los Angeles’s mosques and to show their solidarity, understanding, and forgiveness.
Behind the climbing boys, in the direction of L.A.’s downtown, someone was sending red and orange rockets to crash and explode against the glass sides of the old city towers in an effort to enhance the citywide celebration. All eight boys climbed off the scaffolding onto the I-10 slab and watched the downtown show for a moment. Toohey, Cruncher, and Dinjin were cheering until they noticed that the older guys in the group weren’t. Then they shut up, but still pumped their fists whenever a new rocket exploded against the side of a stumpy skyscraper.
As they turned back toward the market stalls, Val was reminded why there’d been so much shooting from the slab; a majority of the so-called gypsy vendors here were hajji—or at least of Mideastern descent—and most of the high-end stuff they were selling came into the country with the hajjis during their flights back from their homes in Pakistan or Indonesia or the Euro-Caliphates or that mother of all Caliphate nations, the Greater Islamic Republic, which curved across the former countries of the Mideast—Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Sudan—like a scimitar’s blade. Unlike all the other kids he knew, Val had enjoyed geography in school and sometimes brought up maps on his phone’s virtual screen so he could study them. They changed so quickly.
He also liked learning about history, but he blamed that on his grandfather. Leonard just gabbled on about it so much that some of it had to rub off on Val when he was younger.
Val did wonder how—at a time when even domestic flights within what was left of the U.S.A. cost millions of new bucks—these towelheads could afford to fly across the oceans so frequently. Probably ’cause of the profit on the chillshit crap they’re selling right here in front of you, stupid, thought Val.
He had to admit that most of it was good chillshit crap.
The double line of market stalls ran about a hundred yards and the long space between the brightly canopied tables was already filled with early shoppers. Coyne nudged Val and nodded in each direction and Val understood that the older boy was pointing out the two pairs of LAPD cops in full black body armor at each end of the market and the mini-drones buzzing and hovering overhead. The cops’ blunt, black automatic weapons reminded Val of why they were there.
But first they followed Toohey and Monk and the other younger boys to some of the fun stalls.
A few of the tables had women behind them and most of them wore just hijabs, although others, sitting behind the bearded men at the tables, were in full burkas. Val noticed the bright blue eyes of one young woman in a burka and could swear that she was Cindy from his Wednesday Social Responsibility class. He’d watched her eyes in class often enough.
“Chillshit stuff!” cried Sully. “Double chillshit stuff!”
The boys were clustered around the interactive-T-shirt tables. This was serious clothing, most of it costing $500,000 new bucks and up, but Coyne always seemed to have money on his card, so everyone in the gang looked.
An old, black-bearded hajji was holding up one of the longer and more expensive black T-shirts. The 3D image of Jeffrey Dahmer (an old serial killer who’d been having quite a resurgence of public and scholarly interest since the HBO series starring Gillie Gibson had started streaming) ran full length down the back of the black T-shirt. The cannibal (the real Dahmer, not the actor) was in the act of fucking one of the empty eye sockets in the skull of one of his victims. As Gene D. approached the offered shirt, Dahmer stopped his frenzied motion and, still holding the skull against his crotch, looked back over his shoulder at Gene D., Dah
mer’s head seeming to emerge from the black cloth like a face rising out of a lake of oil, while the AI in the fabric said in a voice from hell, “You… yeah, you, the kid with the pimples in the red shirt… I got an eyehole free here. You want to join me?”
Gene D. jumped backward and the seven other boys and twenty or thirty nearby shoppers roared with laughter. The old women in burkas chuckled and turned away modestly while lifting their veils higher. The hajji holding the shirt showed missing teeth through the black barbed wire of his beard.
“This is the one I’m interested in,” said Coyne and pointed to a T-shirt in the back. One of the hajji’s teenaged assistants, a kid no older than Val with wispy attempts at a beard and wearing a coolshit hajji hat and bandolier over his vest and khaki shirt, held up the shirt Coyne wanted to see.
There was just a speck in the center of this T-shirt. But the speck grew larger—became a shirtless man walking toward the viewer—and pretty soon you could see the rapidly approaching man’s face. Vladimir Putin.
“Oh, chillshit sweet,” hummed Sully.
“Shut up, Sully,” said Coyne.
Putin continued walking toward Coyne until just Czar Vladimir’s powerful bare upper body and muscled arms and head filled the back of the shirt. Then just Putin’s face. Then just Putin’s narrowed eyes.
“God, he must be about a hundred and fifty years old,” said Monk, his voice hushed in the presence of the world’s longest-reigning strongman. And “strongman,” with Putin, could be interpreted literally as well.
“Just eighty,” said Val without thinking about it. “He was born in nineteen fifty-two… six years before my grandfather.”
“Shut up,” said Coyne. “Listen.”
Turning its head to squint more directly at Coyne, the Putin image said, “Moio sudno na vozdušnoy poduške polno ugrey.” Each syllable cracked like a bullet.