Flashback

The room was spinning now. The water, thought Nick. No, not the water. Noukhaev had drunk the water. Something in the glass that interacted with the water. Something slower-acting than the fucking taser, but just as sure.

“The man she came to Santa Fe with and stayed with at the Inn of the Anasazi while they were here,” Noukhaev was saying from a thousand miles away, his voice rattling and echoing down the quickly closing tunnel. “That assistant district attorney Harvey Cohen. He was a man of little or no imagination. But your lovely wife, Nick Bottom… your lovely wife, Dara, she was…”

Whatever his lovely wife Dara was, had been, Nick never heard it from Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev.

Nick had already begun the long slide down the dark tunnel into blackness.

1.14 Denver and Las Vegas, Nevada: Friday, Sept. 17—Sunday, Sept. 19

Denver was still standing when Nick got back on Friday evening. Most of Denver, at least. Some group had blown up the Denver branch of the U.S. Mint on West Colfax, near Civic Center Park.

Why the U.S. still had a mint, Nick had no idea. No one used coins any longer. So the destruction of that particular ancient landmark had been of interest only to the terrorists who built the bombs and to the five bored guards who’d been blown apart in the middle-of-the-night blasts. It was the sort of information that Nick and a million other Denverites had learned to file under Ignore and Forget.

What did get Nick’s attention immediately upon stepping naked out of the shower was a ten-minute-old text message from Detective First Grade, Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln: “Nick—Everything checked out okay. No worries. No need to see each other. Mami.”

The “Mami” was their old cop-partner code for “Must Arrange Meeting Immediately!” and also signified that all preceding sentences in the message meant the opposite of what they said. It was an I’m-under-some-duress code.

Something was very wrong.

Nick phoned her cell and got her message voice telling callers that she was on duty, so leave a message and she’d get back to them.

“Just back in town and checking in,” Nick said, working on the closest he could get to a bored tone of voice. “Glad everything’s okay. Call me when you get a chance. Oh, I broke my old phone and have a new number.” He gave her the number of the onetime phone he’d dug out of a duffel hidden behind the wallboards. After her return call, he’d pitch the thing.

Fifteen minutes later, K.T. phoned. “I’m supervising a stakeout and ESU thing over here on East Colfax. But it’s gotta be over before eleven-thirty because the ESU guys have to get their van back. I’ll meet you at midnight at that place where that guy did that thing that time.” She broke the connection. Nick was sure that she’d used a onetime as well.

Getting dressed, Nick checked the clock on his cubie’s TV. Just after 9 p.m. He had almost three hours to kill. He’d use some of that time speculating about just what the hell K.T. could have turned up that would call for such an urgent get-together.

Nick had been conscious by the time Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev’s people had dropped him off in front of the cathedral. Legs shaky, his insides quaking with anger, Nick had walked the short block to the Japanese consulate.

He’d assumed that Sato and the other Japs at the consulate would be so eager to hear what the don had said to him that the interrogation would go on all that afternoon and night, moving to sodium pentothal and other so-called truth drugs if Nick didn’t give them everything they wanted. But there was no interrogation.

Sato, his right arm looking slick-wet in the active sling, had come to Nick’s room, knocked, walked in, and said, “Did you learn anything important from Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev? Anything that could help our investigation?”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Nick had looked up at Sato and said, “I don’t think so.” That was a lie, but how much of a lie wasn’t quite clear yet.

Sato had just nodded and said, “It was worth a try.”

A few hours later, when Nick awoke from his nap but was still feeling drained and stupid, Sato invited him to dinner at Geronimo, a famous upscale restaurant that he and Dara had loved (and saved up to enjoy during their annual visits to Santa Fe). Without pondering why Hideki Sato would take him out to dinner at such an expensive spot, Nick accepted. He was hungry.