Flashback

Nick looked at an exterior view and saw the black bubble up there enlarge and the barrel of the machine gun extend through the glass or plastic and lock in place. The vertical pillar of the seat assembly hummed behind Nick and he could see the barrel turning slowly as Joe and the gun barrel pivoted in a full circle. It reminded Nick of the top-gunner in the B-17 movies—Twelve O’Clock High, The Memphis Belle—that he and Val had loved to watch.

Then it struck him: the barrel had gone through the black glass or plastic or Plexiglas.

“Osmotic glass?” asked Nick. When Sato didn’t answer, Nick clicked the intercom floor button once and repeated the question.

“Hai,” grunted Sato. He seemed to be going through a checklist on his phone screen. “Semipermeable bulletproof plastic. A ten-centimeter patch on the top weapons dome. It molds in around the weapon.”

Nick laughed out loud. “That plastic alone is more expensive than any air tickets from Denver to L.A. and then on to Santa Fe would be. These damned vehicles… they must cost Nakamura thousands of times what he’s paying me for this investigation.”

“Of course,” came Sato’s flat voice on Nick’s earphones.

“Then why even bring me along?” demanded Nick. “ ‘Touch nothing, Bottom-san.’ I’m just a fucking passenger.”

“Not at all, Bottom-san. It is you who will be interrogating Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev when we get to his compound in Santa Fe.”

“Why me?” Nick’s voice was bitter and he was glad he was on the private comm circuit with Sato. “I’m just being hauled along on this trip like so much dirty laundry.”

“Did you interview Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev six years ago?” asked Sato.

“No, you know I didn’t. He was out of the country.”

“And the same was true for three of the four other attempts to interview him. There was a brief FBI interview with the Don—via satellite hookup—two years ago, but the special agents asked poor questions. Yours will be the first true interview with the man… the man who was one of the last to be interviewed on camera by Keigo Nakamura and who might have had serious motives for not wanting that interview seen by anyone else.”

“So you think that Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev is the prime suspect?” asked Nick, trying and failing to turn his head far enough to look directly at Sato.

“He is the most important person in the investigation yet to be interviewed by a competent investigator, Bottom-san.”

Nick almost laughed again. He felt like anything and everything but a “competent investigator” at that moment.

Sato touched buttons and a high whine seemed to be buzzing in Nick’s skull.

“What’s that? The turbines?”

“No, the large gyroscopes,” said Sato. “Coming up to speed.”

“What the hell do we need gyroscopes for?”

“They help right the vehicle, along with hydraulic jacks, should the Land Cruiser be knocked off its wheels.”

This time, Nick did laugh.

“There is something funny, Bottom-san?”

“Yeah, there’s something funny. A minute ago, when Joe went up through the roof, I thought I was in a World War Two B-seventeen movie—you know, Twelve O’Clock High or something. Now I realize I’m caught in the middle of Mad Max or Road Warrior.”

“These are also American movies about World War Two?” asked Sato as he pushed more buttons. The huge turbos fired up and added to the din in Nick’s aching skull. Joe’s turret-gun contraption whirred behind him.

“No,” said Nick, reminding himself not to shout into the microphone. “They were twentieth-century movies—Australian, I think—about a shitty future where everything had gone to hell and men killed men in their weird cars on the lawless highway.”

“Ahhh,” grunted Sato. “Skiffy.”

“What?”

“American skiffy.”

“What’s that?” asked Nick as Sato checked on comm with the Land Cruiser carrying Willy, Toby, and Bill. “Skiffy? What is that?”

“You know,” said Sato, shifting the heavy vehicle into gear. Nick could hear the Oshkosh M-ATV’s heavy transmission grinding beneath him. “Skiffy.”

“Spell it,” said Nick.

“S-c-i-hyphen-f-i,” said Sato, taking the lead in front of the second Land Cruiser and guiding them past a tank and toward the gap a military crane had opened for them in the wall of concrete barriers across the highway. “Skiffy.”

Nick laughed harder than before.

“You’re absolutely right, Hideki-san,” he said at last, wondering how he was going to wipe away the snot under his oxygen mask. “This whole thing is skiffy and getting skiffier by the moment.”

They rolled out of Colorado and the United States and downhill into New Mexico. 

3.02 Las Vegas, Nevada, and Beyond—Wednesday, Sept. 22

FROM PROFESSOR EMERITUS GEORGE LEONARD FOX’S PRIVATE JOURNAL