He and an agent named Pelner had doubled back and moved through a plus-size clothing store a few doors down. Initially, they'd planned to see if they could go through a back corridor and enter the Internet cafe that way, but instead they had come into direct contact with three of the fleeing targets.
Pelner had tasered two of the girls before they could react; orders had been very specific that guns were not to be used. Trank darts, gas, tasers, or other immobilization techniques were the only acceptable options. The teens in question were reportedly armed and dangerous.
As Pelner had advanced on the third girl, Kaneko knelt to check the status of the two unconscious girls. For a] moment, he was concerned that the girls might have been innocent bystanders… employees scared by the conflict in the mall… but then he'd recognized them from the pictures the office had gotten along with the alert.
The third girl finally got down onto the floor as ordered, and while Pelner kept the trank gun trained on her, Kaneko had cuffed her. As far as he could see, none of the girls were armed, nor did they seem very dangerous. But he knew that looks could be deceiving, and it was anyone's guess what horrors lay in the minds of these three.
Kaneko had planned to cuff the other two unconscious girls and call in with his cell phone, but a noise down the hall drew his attention. That was when three young males rounded a corner, coming toward them.
The next minute was a blur, and even now, Kaneko didn't know whether to believe his eyes… and his body… or not. At one point during the stand-off he had heard a shout in his head; someone calling for an Isabel to wake up. Moments later, one of the unconscious girls had awakened, and somehow slammed Pelner into a wall.
And then, the cuffed girl had kicked him in the leg, making him feel as though he'd just been struck by lightning.
Ten minutes later, when he had finally regained consciousness, he saw many of the other agents picking themselves out of a maze of concrete and steel rubble a floor beneath them. A local deputy named Duane Elkins had been hurt the most, when a metal support bar had punctured his leg in the fall; most of the rest of them had just been scraped or bruised when the floor had collapsed underneath them.
No one knew how or why the floor had given way, nor how the cafe's windows had changed from transparent to black, nor how the clothing store's windows had blown out. Compared to those questions, the mystery of how the unarmed, cuffed girl had electro-shocked him into unconsciousness was small potatoes.
After much tossing and turning, he had taken a trip to the kitchen for a nip or two of Maker's Mark. The bourbon helped him sleep on particularly stressful days. Now he finally drifted into slumber.
His dreams were… as always… a barely lucid hodgepodge of scenes from recent events and conversations, snippets of television shows, and random elements swirling up from his subconscious. Kaneko was rarely able to make sense of his dreams, even when he awoke and wrote them in his dream diaries. A few times, some nugget of dream-delivered information had spurred him to recall a forgotten detail, enabling him to use it to help resolve a case. But those times were few and far between.
Now events from the day at the mall began to replay in his dreaming mind, though they were disarrayed, like an incident report whose pages had been shuffled into random order. But this time, as he knelt to check the status of the taller girl who had been tasered, Kaneko found that their positions were reversed. He was the one lying on the cold concrete, and she was kneeling over him instead.
"Frank Kaneko, do you know who I am?" the girl asked. She seemed to glow with a silver aura. She was beautiful, but he could tell she was fierce as well.
"You're the fugitive from the report." As he answered her, the scenery shifted, and he was in an all-white room, strapped to a table in the center. A bright light shone on him from above.
She was now in different clothing, and the leather pants and dark red top showed off her figure. "But you don't know my name? “
"No," he replied. "The report just told us to apprehend you and five others. It didn't specify who you were or what you had done. “
"Who issued the report? “
Frank struggled against his bonds, and saw that they weren't like any binding material he had ever seen before. Instead of rope or steel or canvas, these seemed to be composed of energy. "Why am I being held? Why are you interrogating me? How are you interrogating me? "This is a dream," the girl said. "Don't you know that? I'm not really here, and you aren't really tied up. I'm a figment of your subconscious mind, a part of your guilty conscience." She leaned over toward him. He felt her soft breath on his face, and looked into her beautiful brown eyes. "You do feel guilty about today, don't you? “
"Yes," he agreed, then recalled his duty. "No. Why should I? “
"You don't know what we did, or who we were, or why we were wanted. Doesn't that bother you? “
He nodded. "A bit. But I had my orders. “
She suddenly snapped a riding crop against her leg. It cracked loudly on her leather pants. "I was just following orders. Where has that phrase been heard before? “
Frank looked around at his environment, watching it change. He recognized the fences and the wood and tar-paper barracks and shacks that housed them all, saw hundreds of the Japanese men, women, and children who lived there. His grandparents had lived there, had met there. The internment camps. His grandmother was a Nisei, second-generation Japanese-American. His grandfather was classified as Kibei, a member of the American-born second generation who was schooled in Japan, and thus was more suspect.
After the war, when they had been released back into society, his grandparents had gotten married. They had passed down to all their children and grandchildren the stories and photos of the camps, sharing with them the feeling of helplessness as the government to which they had been loyal branded them as dangerous, confiscated their possessions, and forced them into confinement.
" Colorado River Relocation Center. This is where they met," he told the girl, who was now in a military uniform. "Why are we here? “
"You know the answer to that better than I do," she said. "Something about today reminded you of this place. “
Seeing that he was no longer bound to the table, he rose and approached the girl. "What did you do? Why are they hunting you? “
"I tried to live my life," she said. "Certain people felt I shouldn't be allowed to live my life in freedom, so they began hunting me and my friends. “
"But you had to have done something" he said, though he wasn't at all sure that she had.
"We didn't do anything until they attacked us. And then, we only defended ourselves from harm." Her eyes narrowed. "You tried to harm us today. We defended ourselves. Wouldn't you have done the same for your family? Or would you have let them take you here… or someplace worse?" The walls of the camp barracks all turned white, and the sun grew brighter in the sky.
Something about the girl's statements made sense, and yet, it all seemed vague. "The report we got about you came in from a special branch of intelligence," Kaneko said. "I don't know what section it came from, just that they had high-level clearance. It wasn't very specific about who you were or why you were wanted, but it did tell us not to shoot you. “
She laughed. "Well, I guess there's something positive. So what happened afterward? “