Curtailment of freedom is a powerful social tool and must be deployed as such, with wisdom and restraint. It is therefore vital to distinguish between the genuine and quite complex parameters of what is socially necessary, and the simplistic and emotive demands of a growing popular hysteria. Failure to make this distinction is likely to have unattractive consequences.
In the end, it went down in the chapel, pretty much as he’d expected it would. Prisons like this didn’t offer many places free of surveillance, but Florida’s faith-based approach to rehabilitation meant that a man had a Charter-enshrined right to privacy in prayer at any hour outside of the night lockdown. No securi-cams, no invasive scrutiny. The theory was, presumably, that in the House of the Lord the corrections officers didn’t need to be watching you, because God already was. No one seemed to have noticed that the Lord was falling down on the job. In the three months since Carl transferred in from Miami, there’d been at least half a dozen bloody showdowns in the low-light arena of the chapel. Two ended in fatal injury.
Carl wasn’t sure if at some level, prison staff were giving sanction to the fights, or if quiet and massive pressure from above kept the matter clean of investigation or review. In the end, it came to the same thing. No one wanted to buck the system, no one wanted to hear about it. Sigma Corporation, by invoking religious status for its operation, effectively sidestepped the bulk of what weak administrative oversight the Confederated Republic was prepared to endorse, and glowing testimonials at the congressional level pissed all over the rest. The bodies were taken away, shrink-wrapped in black.
See, niggah, you gotta put your trust in the Lord, grinned the Guatemalan when he sold him the shank. He nodded at the little oil lamp altar he had on a corner shelf, though it was the black-skinnned Virgen de Guadalupe behind the flickering flame. Like the governor always sayin’ at the assemblies, the Lord got your back. But it don’ never hurt to equalize, right.
The shank itself was a splinter of homegrown practicality that echoed the pragmatism in the Guatemalan’s words. Someone had taken the monofil blade off a workshop fretsaw and piece-melted an array of colored plastic beads around the lower half to form a garish, pebbly-surfaced grip. The whole thing was less than twenty centimeters long, and the beads had been carefully selected for a surface that resisted fingerprinting. That left genetic trace, of course, but the Guatemalan was thorough and he’d carefully anointed his customer’s hands from a tiny bottle he kept on the same shelf as the Virgen. Brief high-tech reek of engineered molecules cutting through the fart-and-patchouli warmth in the cell as Carl rubbed the fluid in; then the volatile bulk evaporated and left a fading chill on his palms. For a good three or four hours now, any skin cells he shed from either hand would be useless to a gene sniffer. The high-and low-tech mix sent a faint shudder of recollection through him. Going equipped among the nighttime shanties of Caracas. The city center spread out below him like a bowl of stars, the close warmth of barely lit streets up where he prowled. The confidence of well-chosen weaponry and what it would do.
Eventually, of course, the monofil would cut into the plastic enough to loosen the mounting, and with time the blade would drop out. But by then the whole weapon would have been dropped through the grate on some basement ventilation duct. Like a lot of what went on inside the South Florida State Partnership (Sigma Holdings) Correctional Facility, it was strictly a short-term option.
It was also expensive.
Seventeen, the Guatemalan wanted. He liked Carl enough to add explanations. My boy Danny gotta run big risks down in the shop, puttin’ something like this together. Then I gotta hold it for you. Do your hands for you. Find the downtime for handover. Full service like that don’t come cheap. Carl looked back into the man’s polished coal features, shrugged, nodded. There was a degree of race solidarity operating in South Florida State, but it didn’t do to push it too far. And he had the seventeen. Had, in fact, nearly two dozen of the twenty-mil endorphin capsules that served the prison as a high-denomination contraband currency. Never mind that he’d need them in a couple of weeks to trade against whatever debased form of griego Louie the Chem could swing for him this time around. Never mind that he might need endorphins for his own wounds a few hours hence. Short-term focus. Now he needed the shank. Worry about the rest later, if and when he had the leisure.
Short-term focus.
It was a profoundly depressing feature of life in the prison that increasingly he caught himself thinking like his fellow inmates. Adaptive behavior, Sutherland would have tagged it. Like finding himself masturbating to cheap porn, something he’d also done his share of since Florida’s penal system had swept him up into its clammy embrace. Best, he’d found, to simply not think about it at all.
So he stepped out of the Guatemalan’s cell and went casually back down the B wing thoroughfare, right arm held slightly bent. Under his sleeve, the chill of the monofil strip warmed slowly against his skin. Gray nanocarb scaffolding rose on either side of him, holding up three levels of galleries and the tracks for the big surveillance cams. The wing was roofed in arched transparency, and late-afternoon light sifted down into the quiet of the hall. Most of general population were out on Partnership work projects, paying their debt to society into Sigma’s corporate coffers. The few who remained in B wing leaned off the galleries in ones or twos, or stood in small knots across the hall floor. Conversation evaporated as he passed, eyes swiveling to watch him. On the lower right-hand gallery, a grizzled longtimer called Andrews stared down at him and nodded in fractional acknowledgment. Suddenly, despite the sunlight, Carl felt cold.
It wasn’t the coming fight. Equipped as he now was, Carl was reasonably sure he could take Dudeck without too much trouble. The Aryans either weren’t hooked up outside the prison or just hadn’t done their research; all they knew about Carl Marsalis was that he talked funny for a nigger, was up from Miami on some foreign-national retention loophole, and, at forty-one, was old. Possibly they thought he was some kind of terrorist, therefore foreign and a coward who had everything coming to him. Certainly they believed that lean-muscled tat-covered twenty-something Jack Dudeck was going to rip his shit apart, whoever he fucking was. That nigger had to learn some respect.
It wasn’t the fight. It was the creeping sense of the trap that came with it.
Three months in this corporate newbuilt shithole, before that five weeks in the Miami High Risk unit. No trial, no bail. Release assessment dates set back time and again, access to lawyers refused. Appeals and diplomatic pressure from UNGLA summarily thrown out, no end in sight. He could feel the time getting away from him like blood loss. There was an ongoing investigation that no one was prepared to talk about but Carl knew it had to do with Caracas and the death of Richard Willbrink. It had to be. Relations between the UN and the Republic had never been great, but there was no way the Florida state legislature would have held out against major diplomacy for the sake of a single low-grade vice bust that already screamed entrapment. No, somewhere in the processing when the fetal murder team took him downtown, his documentation had tripped a high-level wire. Connections had been made, whether in Langley or Washington or some covert operations base farther south, and the national security beast was awake. Ghost agencies were looking for payback, cold covert vengeance for one of their own; they were going to make an example of Carl Marsalis, and while they tried to assemble the necessary legal toys to do it, he was going to stay safely locked down in a Republic prison. And if he shanked Jack Dudeck today as he fully intended to, they might not be able to pin it on him, but it was still going to put him back into Close Management and provide the perfect pretext for another lengthy extension of holding time, maybe even a subsidiary sentence. More than a few times in the last month he’d awoken with a panicky shortness of breath and a dream-like certainty that he would never get out of this place. It was starting to look like premonition.
He locked down the fear, siphoned it carefully into anger and stoked it up. He stopped at the B wing gate and raised his face for the laser. The blue light licked over his features, the machine consulted its real-time records, and the gate cracked open. He paced through. The chapel was left and halfway down a fifty-meter corridor that led to kitchen storage. Surveillance would have him for twenty-five meters along the passage, would see him turn in through the impressively sculpted genoteak double doors, and that was all they would know. Carl felt the mesh shudder online, jerky and grating with Louie’s substandard griego chlorides.
All right, Jacky boy. Let’s fucking do this.
The chapel doors gave smoothly as he pushed them, oozed backward on hydraulic hinges and showed him twin rows of pews, also in genoteak. The furniture sat like islands on the shine of the fused-glass floor. The interior architecture soared modestly in echo of a modern church. Angled spots made the altar rail and lectern gleam. In the space between the rail and the first row of pews, Jack Dudeck stood with another, bulkier Aryan at his side. Both wore their corporate prison blue coveralls peeled neatly to the waist and tied off. Sleeveless generic gray T-shirts showed beneath. A third shaven-headed weight-bench type, similarly dressed, hauled himself up from his slumped position between two pews halfway down on the right. He was chewing gum.
“Hello nigger,” said Dudeck loudly.
Marsalis nodded. “Needed help, did you?”
“Don’t need me no fucking help to carve a slice off your ass, boy. Marty and Roy here just wanted to make sure we ain’t disturbed.”
“That’s right, nigger.” The gum chewer squeezed out between the pew ends, eyes screwed up in a grin, voice leaning hard on the insult. Carl tamped down a flaring rage and thought about hooking out those eyes with his thumbnails.
Lock it down, soak.
It was depressing—the same timeslip sense of loss at his reactions. Over the last four months, he could track his own change in attitude toward the antique racial epithets still in wide use across the Republic. Nigger. The first couple of times, it was disconcerting and almost quaint, like having your face slapped with a dueling glove. With time, it came to feel more and more like the verbal spittle it was intended to be. That his fellow blacks in general population used it of themselves did nothing to stem the slowly awakening anger. It was a locally evolved defense, and he was not from there. Fuck these Republicans and their chimpanzee-level society.
Lock it down.
The gum chewer came ponderously up the aisle toward him. Carl moved to the right-hand bank of pews and waited, nailed the approaching Aryan’s gaze as he came level, watched the man’s eyes for the move if it was coming. He figured boot to shin and elbow uppercut to chin if he had to, left-side strikes. He didn’t want to show Dudeck the shank ahead of time.
But the other man was as good as Dudeck’s word. He brushed past with a snort of contempt and stationed himself at the door. Carl moved down the aisle, feeling the mesh now like arousal, like the juddering of bad brakes. It wasn’t ideal, but the tidal power of it would do. He stepped out from between the two last pews and faced Dudeck across five meters of fused glass. He lifted his left hand in a casual gesture designed to lead the Aryan’s attention away from his right, rejoiced silently as Dudeck’s eyes flickered to follow the move.
“So, birdshit. You want to run me your rap now?” Carl burlesqued a Jesusland comedy drawl. “The South will rise again.”
“South already risen, nigger,” blurted the big Aryan next to Dudeck. “Confederated Republic is the white man’s America.”
Carl let his gaze shift briefly to the speaker. “Yeah, that seems to have worked out well for you.”
The big Aryan bristled, surged forward. Dudeck lifted a hand and pressed him back without looking away from Carl.
“No call to get all riled up, Lee,” he said softly. “This here—”
“Jack!” It was a hissed prison whisper from the door. The lookout, gesturing furiously. “Jack! COs coming.”
The change was unreal, almost comical. In seconds flat, the two Aryans in front of Carl hit the front pew side by side, shaven heads bent in an attitude of prayer. Back by the door, the lookout moved two rows down and did the same. Carl stifled a snort and found a front seat of his own on the far side of the aisle from Dudeck and Roy. The mesh surged and pounded for release. He kept peripheral awareness of the two men and waited, head down, controlling his breathing. If the correctional officers passed by without stopping, the fight was going to kick off again right where it got paused, only by then Roy would have calmed down and the chances of goading him back up to interference levels would be lost. Carl had planned to fuck with the big Aryan’s head just enough to get him in Dudeck’s way, and then use the confusion to shank them both. Now—
Footfalls at the back of the chapel.
“Marsalis.”
Fuck.
He looked around. Three COs, two from the B wing day crew, Foltz and Garcia, both hefting stunwrap carbines and scanning the pews with seasoned calm. The other guy was a stranger, unarmed, and the phone clip he wore at ear and jaw looked shiny new with lack of use. White male, forties or older. Carl made him for admin-side, and probably senior. There was gray in his hair and the face was lined with middle-aged working weariness, but his eyes lacked the laconic watchfulness of the men who walked the galleries. The fact that Carl didn’t know him wasn’t in itself of note—South Florida State was a big prison—but the appeal-and-counter game had taken him across to admin close to a dozen times now and he was good with faces. Wherever this guy worked, wasn’t somewhere Carl had been or seen.
“Chew doin’ here, Marsalis?” Foltz’s jaws worked a steady, tight-jaw rhythm on the gum in his mouth. “You ain’t no believer.”
It didn’t require an answer. Garcia and Foltz were old hands; they knew what went down in the chapel. Foltz’s eyes tracked across to Dudeck and Lee. He nodded to himself.
“Findin’ racial harmony in the Lord, are we, boys?”
Neither of the front-pew Aryans said anything. And back at the door, the third supremacist had the butt of Garcia’s carbine almost at his ear.
“That’s enough,” snapped the new face. “Marsalis, you’re required in admin.”
A tiny surge of hope. Meetings with Andritzky, the UNGLA rep, were alternate Tuesdays, late morning. For someone to turn up this late in the week unannounced, it had to be progress. Had to be. Someone somewhere had found the key log in the Republican logjam of xenophobia and moral illusion. Pressure applied, it would break up the jam and set the whole legal and diplomatic process flowing downstream once more. The trigger line of code that would crack Carl Marsalis out of this fucking prison glitch and send him home.
Yeah, you’d better hope, soak. He let the shank slide out of his sleeve and land gently on the pew beside him. He tucked it back against the upright with his fingers and got up, leaving it there, invisible to anyone, including the Aryans, who didn’t have a clear angle of vision on where he’d been sitting. Seventeen, he remembered, and felt a faint chill at the thought. He didn’t have the finances or the juice to buy again if this didn’t work out and they sent him back to B wing to face Dudeck and the supremacist grudge. And mesh or no mesh, without an edged weapon he was probably going to get hurt.
Suddenly the hope in his belly collapsed into sick despair and a pointless, billowing anger.
Reggie Barnes, I hope you fucking die on that respirator.
He walked up the aisle toward the COs. Dudeck turned to watch him go. Carl caught it in peripheral vision, swung his head to meet the Aryan’s gaze. He saw the hunger there, the deferred bloodlust, and summoned a stone-faced detachment to meet it. But beneath the mask, he found he was suddenly falling-down weary of the youth and fury in the other man. Of the hatred that seemed to seep not just out of Dudeck and his kind, but right out of the prison walls around him, as if institutions like South Florida State were just glands in the Republican body politic, oozing the hate like some kind of natural secretion, stockpiling it and then pumping it back out into the circulatory system of the nation, corrosive and ripe for any focus it could find.
“Eyes front, Dudeck.” Foltz had spotted the sparks. His voice came out rich with irony. “That ain’t how you pray, son.”
Carl didn’t look back to watch Dudeck comply. He didn’t need to. Whichever way Dudeck was now looking, it didn’t matter. Carl could feel the Aryan’s hatred at his back, pushing outward behind him like a vast, soft balloon swelling to fill the space in the house of worship. Faith-based prison charter. Each man to his own personal god, and Dudeck’s was white as polypuff packing chips.
Sutherland’s voice, deep and amused, like honey ladling down in the back of his head.
Nothing new in the hate, soak. They need it like they need to breathe. Without it, they fall apart. Thirteen’s just the latest hook to hang it off.
That supposed to make me feel better?
And Sutherland had shrugged. Supposed to prepare you, is all. What else were you looking for?
The hope and despair played seesaw in his guts all the way out of B wing and across the exercise yard to the administration building. Florida heat clutched at him like warm, damp towels. The glare off the nailed-down cloud cover hurt his eyes. He squinted and craned his neck in search of omens. There was no helicopter on the roof of the building, which meant no high-ranking visitors in from Tallahassee or Washington today. Nothing in the gray-roofed sky either, and no sound or sense of anything going on in the parking lot on the other side of the heavy-duty double fence. No journalistic flurry of activity, no uplink vans. A couple of months back, not long after he was transferred up to Florida State, Andritzky had leaked details to the press in an attempt to generate enough public embarrassment for a quick release. The tactic had backfired, with the Republic’s media picking up almost exclusively on Carl’s UNGLA covert ops status and the death of Gabriella at the Garrod Horkan camp. UN connections, fruitful leverage in any other corner of the globe, here only played directly into a longstanding paranoia that Washington had carefully nurtured since Secession and before. And it didn’t help that Carl was the color of the Republic’s deepest atavistic fears. Served up through the id-feeding Technicolor TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already 150 years screen-ingrained.
Black male, detained, dangerous.
For now, that seemed to be more than enough for Republican purposes. Neither Sigma nor the Florida state legislature had seen fit to leak details of Carl’s genetic status so far—for which he was duly grateful: in prison population here it would have been tantamount to a death sentence. There’d be a line out the fucking cell block for him, young men like Dudeck but of every race and creed, all filled with generalized hate and queuing up to test themselves against the monster. He wasn’t sure why they were holding back; they must have the data by now. It was no secret what he was, a little digging at Garrod Horkan camp, or into UNGLA general record, or even a trawl back eight years to the Felipe Souza coverage would have turned it up. He assumed the Jesusland media had backed off and muzzled themselves in time-honored compliance with governmental authority, but he still couldn’t work out why. Possibly they were holding back the knowledge as a weapon of last resort against the UN, or were afraid of the widespread panic it might trigger if it hit the public domain. Or maybe some worm-slow process of interagency protocol was still working itself out, and as soon as it cleared they’d have their vengeance for Willbrink via that long line of shank-equipped angry young men.
If he was still here by then.
Hope. Despair. The wrecking-ball pendulum swing in his belly. They went in through the steel-barred complications of admin block security, where Carl was prodded about, machine-swiped, and patted down by hand. Harsh, directing voices; rough, efficient hands. Foltz bowed out, leaving Garcia and the stranger to lead their charge up two flights of clanging steel stairs, through a heavy door, and into the abrupt thickly carpeted quiet of the prison’s offices. Sudden cool, sweat drying on his skin. Textured walls, discreet corporate logos, SIGMA and SFSP in muted tones, the deep blue and bright orange that characterized the inmate uniform bleached out here to pastel shades. The soft, occasional chime from a desk as data interfaces signaled a task complete. Carl felt his senses prickle with the change. A woman moved past him in a skirt, an actual woman, not a holoporn confection, early fifties maybe, but fleshily handsome and moving for real under the clothing. He could smell her as she passed, scent of woman and some heavy musk fragrance he knew vaguely. Life outside prison came suddenly and touched him at the base of his spine.
“This way.” The CO he didn’t know gestured. “Conference Four.”
His heart dropped sickeningly into his guts. It was Andritzky. Conference Four was a tiny, one-window chamber, no room for more than two or three people around the small oblong table, certainly no room for the assembled worthies of a state legislature or UN delegation. Nothing of consequence was going to go down in Conference Four. He’d have an hour with Andritzky, maybe some updates on the appeal, and then he was going back into general population and watching his back for Dudeck. He was fucked.
Lock. It. Down.
He breathed, drew in the new knowledge, and started to map it. Sutherland’s situational Zen. Don’t bitch, don’t moan, only see what is and then ready yourself. Here came the door, here came Andritzky and his attempts at camaraderie and comfort, none of it ever quite masking the obvious personal relief at not being where Carl was. Here came an hour of useless bureaucratic narrative, punctuated with awkward silences and bitten-back rage at UNGLA’s total fucking impotence in this Jesusland shithole. Here came—
It wasn’t Andritzky.
Carl stopped dead in the open doorway. Sutherland’s situational Zen spiraled away from him, like a sheaf of papers spilled down a well, like gulls riding the wind. The anger went with it, bleeding out.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Marsalis.” The speaker was a white male, tall and smoothly elegant in a gray-blue micropore suit that hung like Shanghai custom as he got up and came around the table, hand extended. “I’m Tom Norton. Thank you, gentlemen, that’ll be all for now. I’ll buzz you when we’re ready to leave.”
There was an electric silence. Carl could feel the exchange of glances going on behind his back. Garcia cleared his throat.
“This is a violent-crime inmate, sir. It’s not acceptable procedure to leave you alone with him.”
“Well, that’s curious.” Norton’s tone was urbane, but abruptly there was an edge in it. “From my records, it seems Mr. Marsalis is being held on a putative Dade County vice charge. And hasn’t even been formally arraigned yet.”
“It’s against procedure,” insisted Garcia.
“Sit down please, Mr. Marsalis.” Norton was looking past him at Garcia and the other CO. His expression had turned cold. He took a phone from his jacket pocket, thumbed it, put it to his ear. “Hello. Yes, this is Tom Norton, could you put me through to the warden. Thank you.”
Brief pause. Carl took the seat. The table held a slim black dataslate, cracked open at a discreet angle. No logo, an ultimate in brand statements. Marstech. Hardcopy lay around, unfamiliar forms. Carl scanned upside-down text—the word release leapt out and kicked him in the heart. Norton offered him a small, distracted smile.
“Hello, Warden Parris. Yes, I need your help here. No, nothing serious. I’m just having a little difficulty with one of your men over procedure. Could you. Ah, thank you, that would be ideal.” He held out the phone to Garcia. “The warden would like to talk to you.”
Garcia took the phone as if it might bite him, held it gingerly to his ear. You couldn’t hear what Parris said to him—it was a good phone, and the projection cone was tight. But his face flushed as he listened. His eyes switched from Carl to Norton and back like they were two parts of a puzzle that didn’t fit. He tried to say Yes, but a couple of times, jarred to a halt on each attempt. Parris, it was clear, wasn’t in the mood for debate. When Garcia finally got to speak, it was a clenched Yes, sir, and he lowered the phone immediately after. Norton held out a hand for it and Garcia, still flushing, slung it under the other man’s reach onto the surface of the table. It made almost no sound on impact, slid a bare five centimeters from where it landed. A very good phone, then. Garcia glared at it, perplexed maybe by his failure to skid the thing off the edge of the table onto the floor. Norton picked the little sliver of hardware up and stowed it.
“Thank you.”
Garcia stood there for a moment, wordless, staring at Norton. The other CO murmured something to him, put a hand on his arm, was propelling him out when Garcia shook off the grip and stabbed a finger at Carl.
“This man is dangerous,” he said tightly. “If you can’t see that, then you deserve everything you get.”
The other CO ushered him out and closed the door.
Norton gave it a moment, then seated himself adjacent to Carl. Pale blue eyes leveled across the space. The smile was gone.
“So,” Norton said. “Are you dangerous, Mr. Marsalis?”
“Who wants to know?”
A shrug. “In point of fact, no one. It was rhetorical. We’ve accessed your records. You are, let’s say, quite sufficiently dangerous for our purposes. But I’m interested to know what your perceptions are on the subject.”
Carl stared at him. “Have you ever done time?”
“Happily, no. But even if I had, I doubt it would approximate your experiences here. I’m not a citizen of the Confederated Republic.”
Light trace of contempt in the last two words. Carl hazarded a guess.
“You’re Canadian?”
The corner of Norton’s mouth quirked. “North Atlantic Union. I’m here, Mr. Marsalis, at the behest of the Western Nations Colony Initiative. We would like to offer you a job.”
As soon as he walked through the door, Sevgi knew she was in trouble.
It was there in the looseness as he moved, in the balance of stance as he paused behind the chair, in the way he hooked it out and sat down. It smoked off the body beneath the shapeless blue prison coveralls like music cutting through radio interference. It looked back at her through his eyes as he settled into the chair, and it soaked out through the powerful quiet he’d carried into the room with him. It wasn’t Ethan—Marsalis had skin far darker than Ethan’s, and there was no real similarity in the features. Ethan had been stockier, too, heavier-muscled.
Ethan had died younger.
It didn’t matter. It was there just the same.
Thirteen.
“Mr. Marsalis?”
He nodded. Waited.
“I’m Sevgi Ertekin, COLIN Security. You’ve already met my partner, Tom Norton. There are a number of things we need to clarify before—”
“I’ll do it.” His voice was deep and modulated. The English accent tripped her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Whatever it is you need me to do. I’ll do it. At cost. I already told your partner. I’ll take the job in return for unconditional immunity to all charges pending against me, immediate release from Republican custody, and any expenses I’m likely to incur while I’m doing your dirty work.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s quite an assumption you’re making there, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Is it?” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not known for my flower arranging. But let’s see if I’m assuming wrong, shall we? At a guess you want someone tracked down. Someone like me. That’s fine, that’s what I do. The only part I’m unclear on is if you want me to bring him in alive or not.”
“We are not assassins, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Speak for yourself.”
She felt the old anger flare. “You’re proud of that, are you?”
“You’re upset by it?”
She looked down at the unfolded dataslate and the text printed there. “In Peru, you shot an unarmed and injured woman in the back of the head. You executed her. Are you proud of that, too?”
Long pause. She picked up his stare and held it. For a moment, she thought he would get up and walk out. Half of her, she realized, hoped he would.
Instead, he switched his gaze abruptly to one of the high-placed windows in the waiting room. A small smile touched his lips. Went away. He cleared his throat.
“Ms. Ertekin, do you know what a Haag gun is?”
“I’ve read about them.” In NYPD communiqués, urging City Hall to issue tighter gun control guidelines before the new threat hit the streets. Scary enough that the initiatives passed almost without dispute. “It’s a bioload weapon.”
“It’s a little more than that, actually.” He opened his right hand loosely, tipped his head to look at it as if he could see the gun weighed there in the cup of his palm. “It’s a delivery system for an engineered immune deficiency viral complex called Falwell Seven. There are other loads, but they don’t get a lot of use. Falwell is virulent, and very unpleasant. There is no cure. Have you ever watched someone die from a collapsed immune system, Ms. Ertekin?”
In fact, she had. Nalan, a cousin from Hakkari, a onetime party girl in the frontier bases where Turkey did its proud European duty and buffered the mess farther east. Something she caught from a UN soldier. Nalan’s family, who prided themselves on their righteousness, threw her out. Sevgi’s father spat and found a way to bring her to New York, where he had clout in one of the new Midtown research clinics. Relations with family in Turkey, already strained, snapped for good. He never spoke to his brother again. Sevgi, only fourteen at the time, went with him to meet a sallow, big-eyed girl at the airport, older than her by what seemed like a gulf of years but reassuringly unversed in urban teen sophistication. She still remembered the look on Nalan’s face when they all went into the Skill-man Avenue mosque through the same door.
Murat Ertekin did everything he could. He enrolled Nalan in experimental treatment lists at the hospital, fed her vitamin supplements and tracker anti-virals at home. He painted the spare room for her, sun-bright and green like the park. He prayed, five times a day for the first time in years. Finally, he wept.
Nalan died anyway.
Sevgi blinked away the memory; fever-stained sheets and pleading, hollow eyes.
“You’re saying you did this woman a favor?”
“I’m saying I got her quickly and painlessly where she was going anyway.”
“Don’t you think that should have been her choice?”
He shrugged. “She made her choice when she tried to jump me.”
If she’d doubted what he was at all, she no longer did. It was the same unshakable calm she’d seen in Ethan, and the same psychic bulk. He sat in the chair like something carved out of black stone, watching her. She felt something tiny shift in her chest.
She tapped a key on the dataslate. A new page slid up on the display.
“You were recently involved in prison violence. A fight in the F wing shower block. Four men hospitalized. Three of them by you.”
Pause. Silence.
“You want to tell me your side of that?”
He stirred. “I would think the details speak for themselves. Three white men, one black man. It was an Aryan Command punishment beating.”
“Which prison staff did nothing to prevent?”
“Surveillance in the showers can be compromised by steamy conditions. Quote unquote.” His lip curled fractionally. “Or soap jammed over lenses. Response time can be delayed. By extraneous factors, quote unquote.”
“So you felt moved to intervene.” She groped around for motivations that would have fit Ethan. “This Reginald Barnes, he was a friend of yours?”
“No. He was a piece-of-shit wirehead snitch. He had it coming. But I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Was he genetically modified?”
Marsalis smirked. “Not unless there’s some project somewhere I haven’t heard of for turning out brainless addictive-personality fuckups.”
“You felt solidarity because of his color, then?”
The smirk wiped away, became a frown. “I felt I didn’t want to see him arse-fucked with a power drill. I think that’s probably a color-neutral preference, don’t you?”
Sevgi held on to her temper. This wasn’t going well. She was gritty with the syn comedown—no synaptic modifiers permitted in Jesusland, they’d taken them off her at the airport—and still fuming from the argument she’d lost with Norton in New York.
I’m serious, Sev. The policy board’s all over this thing now. We’ve got Ortiz and Roth coming down to section two, three times a week—
In the flesh? What an honor.
They’re looking for progress reports, Sev. Which means reports of progress, and right now we don’t have any. If we don’t do something that looks like fresh action, Nicholson is going to land on us with both feet. Now, I’ll survive that. Will you?
She knew she wouldn’t.
October. Back in New York, the trees in Central Park were starting to rust and stain yellow. Under her window as she got ready for work each day, the market traders went wrapped against the early-morning chill. The summer had turned, tilted about like a jetliner in the clear blue sky above the city, sunlight sliding cold and glinting off its wings. The warmth wasn’t gone yet, but it was fading fast. South Florida felt like clinging.
“How much has Norton told you?”
“Not much. That you have a problem UNGLA won’t help you with. He didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s Munich-related.” A sudden, unexpected grin that dropped about a decade off his seamed features. “You guys really should have signed up to the Accords like everybody else.”
“COLIN approved the draft in principle,” said Sevgi, feeling unreasonably defensive.
“Yeah. All about that principle, wasn’t it. Principally: you don’t tell us what to do, you globalist bureaucrat scum.”
Since he wasn’t far wrong, she didn’t argue the point. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No. I’m freelance. My loyalties are strictly for sale. Like I already said, just tell me what you want me to do.”
She hesitated a moment. The dataslate had an integral resonance scrambler built to COLIN specs, which made it tighter than anything any lawyer had ever carried into an interview room at South Florida State. And Marsalis was pretty clearly desperate for an out. Still, the habit of the past four months was ingrained.
“We have,” she said finally, “a renegade thirteen on our hands. He’s been loose since June. Killing.”
He grunted. No visible surprise. “Where’d he get out of? Cimarron? Tanana?”
“No. He got out of Mars.”
This time she had him. He sat up.
“This is a completely confidential matter, Mr. Marsalis. You need to understand that before we start. The murders are widely distributed, and varied in technique. No official connection has been made among them, and we want it to stay that way.”
“Yeah, I bet you do. How’d he get past the nanorack security?”
“He didn’t. He shorted out the docking run and crashed the vessel into the Pacific. By the time we got there, he was gone.”
Marsalis pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “Now, there’s an idea.”
She let the rest out. Anything to take the smug, competent control off his face. “Before that, he had systematically mutilated the other eleven cryocapped crewmembers in order to feed himself. He amputated their limbs and kept them alive in suspension, then, finally, began to kill them and strip the rest of their bodies for meat.”
A nod. “How long was transit?”
“Thirty-three weeks. You don’t seem surprised by any of this.”
“That’s because I’m not. You’re stuck out there, you’ve got to eat something.”
“Did you ever think that?”
Something like a shadow passed across his eyes. His voice came out just short of even. “Is that how you found me? Cross-reference?”
“Something like that.” She chose not to mention Norton’s sudden enthusiasm for the new tactic. “Our profiling n-djinn cited you as the only other thirteen known to have experienced similar circumstances.”
Marsalis offered her a thin smile. “I never ate anybody.”
“No. But did you think about it?”
He was silent for a while. She was on the point of asking her question again when he got up from the seat and went to stand by the high window. He stared out at the sky.
“It crossed my mind a few times,” he said quietly. “I knew the recovery ship was coming, but I had the best part of two months to worry about it. You can’t help running the scenarios in your mind. What if they don’t make it, what if something crazy happens? What if—”
He stopped. His gaze unhooked from the cloud cover and came back to the room, back to her face.
“Was he out there the whole thirty-three weeks?”
“Most of it. From what we can tell, his cryocap spat him out about two weeks into the trajectory.”
“And Mars Control didn’t fetch him back?”
“Mars Control didn’t know about it.” Sevgi gestured. “The n-djinn went down, looks like it was tricked out. The ship fell back on automated systems. Silent running. He woke up right after.”
“That’s a nice little cluster of coincidence.”
“Isn’t it.”
“But not very convenient from a culinary point of view.”
“No. We’re assuming the cryocap timing was an error. Whoever spiked the n-djinn probably planned to have the system bring him up a couple of weeks out from Earth. Something in the intrusion program flipped when it should have flopped, and you wake up two weeks out from Mars instead. Our friend arrives starved and pissed off and probably not very sane.”
“Do you know who he is?”
Sevgi nodded. She hit the keypad again and pushed the dataslate around so they could both see the screen and the face it held. Marsalis left the window and propped himself in casual angles on the edge of the table. Light gleamed off the side of his skull.
“Allen Merrin. We recovered trace genetic material from Horkan’s Pride, the vessel he crashed, and ran it through COLIN’s thirteen database. This is what they came up with.”
It was almost imperceptible, the way he grew focused, the way the casual poise tautened into something else. She watched his eyes sweep the text alongside the pale head-and-shoulders photo. She could have recited it to him from memory.
Merrin, Allen (sin 48523dx3814)
Delivered (c/s) April 26, 2064, Taos, New Mexico (Project Lawman). Uteral host, Bilikisu Sankare, source genetic material, Isaac Hubscher, Isabela Gayoso (sins appended). All genetic code variants property of Elleniss Hall, Inc., patents asserted (Elleniss Hall & US Army Partnership 2029).
Initial conditioning & training Taos, New Mexico, specialist skills development Fort Benning, Georgia (covert ops, counterinsurgency). Deployed: Indonesia 2083, Arabian peninsula 2084—5, Tajikistan 2085—7 & 2089, Argentina, Bolivia 2088, Rim Authority (urban pacification program) 2090—1.
Retired 2092 (under 2nd UNGLA Convention Accords, Jacobsen Protocol). Accepted Mars resettlement 2094 (COLIN citizenship record appended).
“Very Christ-like.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The face.” He tapped the screen with a fingernail. The LCLS glow rippled around the touch. Merrin stared up under the tiny distortions. “Very Faith Satellite Channel. Looks like that Man Taking Names anime they did for the Cash memorial.”
The smile slipped out before she could stop it. His mouth quirked response. He moved the chair a little, sat down again.
“Saw that, did you? We get the reruns in here all the time. Faith-based rehab, you know.”
Quit grinning at him like a fucking news ’face, Sev. Get a grip.
“You don’t recognize him, then?”
A curious, tilted look. “Why would I?”
“You were in Iran.”
“Wasn’t everybody.” When she just waited, he sighed. “Yeah, we heard about the Lawmen. Saw them at a distance a few times in Iran, down around Ahvaz. But from what you’ve got there, it doesn’t look like this Merrin ever got up that far north.”
“He could have.” Sevgi nodded toward the screen. “I’ll be honest with you, this is a pretty loose summary. Once you get into the mission records, it’s a whole lot less defined. Covert deployments, so-called lost documentation, rumor and hearsay, subject is understood to have, that sort of shit. Executive denial and cover-ups around practically every corner. Plus, you’ve got a whole fucking hero mythology going on around this guy. I’ve seen data that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometers apart on the same day, eyewitness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories are true. Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo-deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City.” Her disgust bubbled over. “I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking ghost.”
He smiled, a little sadly she thought.
“We all were, back then,” he said. “Ghosts, I mean. We had our own British version of Project Lawman, minus the delusional name, of course. We called it Osprey. The French preferred Department Eight. But none of us ever officially existed. What you’ve got to remember, Ms. Ertekin, is that back in the eighties the whole thirteen thing was fresh out of the can. Everyone knew the technology was out there, and everybody was busy denying they’d ever have anything to do with it. UNGLA didn’t even exist back then, not as an agency in its own right. It was still part of the Human Rights Commission. And no one was very keen on letting anybody else get a close look at their new genetic warriors. The whole Middle East was a testing ground for all sorts of cutting-edge nastiness, and all of it was operating on full deniability. You know how that shit works, right?”
She blinked. “What shit?”
“Deniability. You work for COLIN, right?”
“I’ve been with COLIN two and a half years,” she said stiffly. “Before that I was a New York police detective.”
He grinned again, a little more genuine humor in it this time. “Getting the hang of it, though, aren’t you. This is a completely confidential matter, we want it to stay that way. That’s very COLIN.”
“It’s not a question of that.” She tried without much success to get the stiffness out of her voice. “We don’t want a panic on our hands.”
“How many has he killed so far? Here on the ground, I mean.”
“We think it’s in the region of twenty. Some of those are unconfirmed, but the circumstantial evidence points to a connection. In seventeen cases, we’ve recovered genetic trace material that clinches it.”
Marsalis grimaced. “Busy little fucker. Is this all in the Rim States?”
“No. The initial deaths were in the San Francisco Bay Area, but later they spread over the whole of continental North America.”
“So he’s mobile.”
“Yes. Mobile and apparently a very competent systems intrusion specialist. He murdered two men at the same location in the Bay Area on the night of June 13th and a man in southeastern Texas less than a week later. There’s no trace anywhere in the flight records for that period, and nothing from Rim Border Control, either. We had an n-djinn run face recognition checks on every cross-border flight and surface exit into the Republic for that week and got nothing.”
“He could have had his face changed.”
“In less than a week? With matching documentation? Rim States fenceline is the toughest frontier anywhere in the world. Anyway the same n-djinn we used for the face recog had instructions to flag anyone with bandaging or other traces of recent surgical procedure to the face. All we got was a bunch of rich brats coming home from West Coast cosmetic therapy, and a couple of over-the-hill erotica stars.”
She saw him hold back all but the corner of a grin. It was irritatingly infectious. She concentrated on the dataslate.
“The only options we are seriously entertaining are that either he was able to contact professional frontier busters within days of coming ashore, or he left the Rim for some other, intermediate destination before flying back into the Republic. It would be a tight time frame that way, but still doable. Of course once it goes global like that, there’s no way to run a comprehensive face recog. Too many places that refuse to let the n-djinns into their datasystems.”
“I take it these are both confirmed kills, Bay Area and then Texas?”
“Yes. Genetic trace material recovered at both locations.”
His gaze went back to the dataslate display. “What do Fort Benning have to say about it?”
“That Merrin was never provided with substantial datasystems training. He could run a battlefield deck—anybody in covert ops could. But that’s it. We’re assuming he upskilled on Mars.”
“Yeah. Or someone’s doing it for him.”
“There is that.”
He looked at her. “If he had systems help getting aboard Horkan’s Pride, and he’s still getting it now, then this is bigger than just some thirteen bailing out of Mars because he doesn’t like all the red rocks.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re out of leads.”
It wasn’t a question.
She sat back and spread her hands. “Without access to the UNGLA databases, we’re in a hole. We’ve done everything we know how to do, and it isn’t enough. The deaths keep coming, they’re steady but unpredictable. There’s no crescendo effect—”
“No, there wouldn’t be.”
“—but he’s not stopping. He’s not making any mistakes big enough to nail him or give us a working angle. Our inquiries on Mars have hit a wall—he obviously covered his tracks there, or, as you say, someone did it for him.”
“And down here?”
She nodded. “Down here, as you’ve also so eloquently pointed out, we are not on hugely cooperative terms with UNGLA, or the UN in general.”
“Well, I guess you can hardly blame them for that.” He widened his eyes at her, grinned. It’s not like you’ve been overly cooperative yourselves for the last decade.”
“Look, Munich was not—”
The grin faded to a grimace. “I wasn’t really talking about the Accords. I was thinking more of the reception we get in the prep camps every time we have to operate in them. You know we’re about as welcome down there as evolutionary science in Texas.”
She felt herself flush a little. “Individual corporate partners in the Colony effort do not necessarily—”
“Yeah, skip it.” A frown. “Still, UNGLA have a mandate requirement in circumstances like this. You report a loose thirteen, they pretty much have to show up.”
“We don’t really want them to show up, Mr. Marsalis.”
“Ah.”
“We need access to their datastacks, or failing that someone like you to talk to our profiling n-djinns. But that’s all. In the end, this is a COLIN matter, and we’ll clean our own house.”
Listen to you, Sevgi. Cop to corporate mouthpiece in one easy, well-paid move.
Marsalis watched her for a couple of moments. He shifted slightly in the chair, seemed to be considering something.
“Are you running this gig out of New York?”
“Yes. We’ve got borrowed space at RimSec’s Alcatraz complex, liaison with their detectives. But since this thing went continental, we’re back in the New York offices. Why?”
A shrug. “No reason. When I get on the suborb, I like to know where I’m going to be when I get off again.”
“Right.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, if we’re going to make that suborb, we should probably get moving. I imagine my colleague will have finished with the warden by now. There’ll be some paperwork.”
“Yes.” He hesitated a moment. “Listen. There are a couple of people in here I’d like to say good-bye to before we go. People I owe. Can we do that?”
“Sure.” Sevgi shrugged carelessly. She was already folding up the dataslate. “No problem. It’s a COLIN perk. We can do pretty much anything we want.”
The Guatemalan was still in his cell, flat on his back in his bunk and blissed out by the look of him on some of his newly acquired endorphin. A half-smoked New Cuban smoldered between the knuckles of his left hand, and his eyes were lidded almost shut. He looked up, dreamily surprised, when Carl strummed the bars of the half-open door.
“Hey, Eurotrash. Chew doin’ here?”
“Leaving,” said Carl crisply. “But I need a favor.”
The Guatemalan struggled upright on the bunk. He glanced up to the cell’s monitor lens, and the cheap interference slinger taped on the wall next to it. No attempt had been made to hide the scrambler, and it had hung there every time Carl had been inside the cell. He didn’t like to think what it cost the Guatemalan to have it overlooked on a permanent basis.
“Leavin’?” A stoned smirk. “Don’ see no fuckin trowel in your hand.”
Carl moved an African-carved wooden stool over to the bunk and seated himself. “Not like that. This is official. Out the front gate. Listen, I need to make a phone call.”
“Phone call?” Even through the endorphins, the Guatemalan was blearily shocked. “You know what tha’s gonna cost you?”
“I can guess. And I don’t have it. Look, there are seven more twenty-mil caps taped in plastic up in the U-bend of my cell’s shitter. All yours. Think of—”
“That ain’t gonna cut it, niggah.”
“I know. Think of it as a down payment.”
“Yeah?” The stoned look was sliding away from the other man. He put the New Cuban in the corner of his mouth and grinned around it. “How’s that shit work? You walkin’ outta here, how you gonna settle your account? Down payment on what? Come to that”—brow creasing—“you walkin’ outta here, why you need my little phone service?”
Carl gestured impatiently. “Because I don’t trust the people who are walking me out. Listen, once I’m outside, I’m going to have juice—”
“Yeah, sounds like it. Juice with folks that you don’t trust.”
“I can help you on the outside.” Carl leaned in. “This is COLIN business. That mean anything to you?”
The Guatemalan regarded him owlishly for a moment. Then he shook his head and got off the bunk. Carl shifted aside to let him past.
“Sound to me, niggah, like you ridin’. You sure those seven caps still in that shitter bend, not inside you? COLIN getting you out? What the fuck for?”
“They want me to kill someone for them,” Carl said evenly.
A snort from behind him. Liquid coursing as the Guatemalan poured himself a glass of juice from the chiller flask he kept on a shelf. “Sure. In the whole Confederated Republic, they can’t find one black man do their killin’ for them, they got to come flush some high-tone Eurotrash outta South Florida State. You ridin’, niggah.”
“Will you stop fucking calling me that.”
“Oh yeah.” The Guatemalan drank deep. He put the glass down and made a gusty, satisfied sound. “I’s forgettin’. You the only black man in here don’ seem to noticed what color skin he got.”
Carl stared straight ahead at the cell wall. “You know, where I come from, there are a lot of different ways of being black.”
“Well, then you one lucky fucking black man.” The Guatemalan moved around to face him. His face was almost kindly, softened with the endorphins and maybe something else. “But see, blood, ’bout now, where you come from ain’t where you at. ’Bout now, you in South Florida State. You in the Confederated Republic, niggah. Roun’ here, they only got the one way of being black, and sooner or later that’s the black you gonna be. Ain’t no diversity of product in the Republic, they just got this one box for us, and sooner or later they gonna squeeze you in that box right along with the rest of us.”
Carl looked at the wall some more. He took the decision.
“Now, see, that’s where you’re wrong.”
“I’m wrong?” The other man chuckled. “Look around you, blood. How the fuck am I wrong?”
“You’re wrong,” Carl told him, “because they already got me in a whole other box. It’s a box you won’t ever see the inside of, and that’s why I’m getting out, that’s why they need me. They can’t get anyone else like me.”
The Guatemalan propped himself against the cell wall and gave Carl a quizzical look.
“Yeah? You got moves, trash, I give you that. And what I hear from Louie, you got some fucked-up wirin’ inside you. But that don’ make you no stone killer. Two hours ago you walk out of here with my boy’s best shiv-work up your sleeve, but what I hear is Dudeck still walking around.”
“We were interrupted.”
“Yeah. By the nice people from COLIN.” But there wasn’t much mockery in the other man’s voice now. He sucked thoughtfully on the cigar. “Shame about Dudeck, that birdshit coulda used some time in the infirmary. You want to tell me what that means, they can’t get anyone else like me?”
Carl met his eyes. “I’m a thirteen.”
It was like peeling a scab. For the last four months, he’d kept it hedged behind his teeth, the secret that would kill him. Now he watched the Guatemalan’s face and saw the final confirmation for his paranoia, saw the flicker of fear, faint but there, covered for quickly with a nod.
“O-kay.”
“Yeah.” He felt an obscure disappointment; somehow he’d hoped this man might be proof against the standard prejudice. Something about the Guatemalan’s patient con math realism. But now abruptly he could feel himself through the other man’s gaze, sliding into caricature. Could even feel himself go with it, let go, take on the old skin of impassive power and threat. “So. About this phone call. What’s it going to take?”
He found Dudeck in the F wing rec hall, playing speed chess against the machine. Three or four others inmates were gathered around: one tat-stamped and certified AC brother, a couple of late-teen wannabe sycophants, and an older white guy who seemed to be there just for the chess. No one from the chapel confrontation—Dudeck would have shrugged loose of them in the wake of the failed gig. Too many undischarged fight chemicals sloshing around, too much blustering talk while they leached back out of the system. Not what you needed at all after a walk-away.
No one paid any attention to the black man as he came up the hall. Dudeck was too deep in the game, and with full audiovid monitoring systems webbed up in the nanocarb vault of the hall, the others were loose and unvigilant. Carl got to within ten paces of the gathering before anybody turned around. Then one of the wannabes must have caught black in motion out of the corner of an eye. He pivoted about. Stepped forward, secure in the knowledge of how the monitoring system worked, puffed up with association and proximity to Dudeck.
“Fuck you want, nigger?”
Carl stepped in and hit him, full force, with one trailing arm and the back of his hand. The impact smashed the boy’s mouth and knocked him to the floor. He stayed there, bleeding and staring up at Carl in disbelief.
Carl was still moving.
He closed with the tat-marked spectator, broke down a fumbled defense, and tipped the man into Dudeck, who was still trying to get up from the console. The two men tangled and went down sprawling. The second sycophant hovered, gaped. He wasn’t going to do anything. The older guy was already backing off, hands spread low in front of him to denote his detachment.
Dudeck rolled to his feet with practiced speed. A siren cut loose somewhere.
“Got some unfinished business,” Carl told him.
“You’re fucking cracked, nigger. That’s monitored, unprovoked aggre—”
He let the mesh drive him. Dudeck saw him coming, threw together a Thai boxing guard, and kicked out. Carl stamped the kick away, feinted the guard, rode the jab punch response, and then broke Dudeck’s nose with a close-in palm heel. The Aryan went over again, explosively, backward. The second serious AC member was staggering upright. Carl punched him in the throat to keep him out of the fight. He went down, choking. Dudeck had bounced up, hadn’t even wiped the blood from his nose. Old hand. His eyes were blank with fury. He came in like a truck, a flurry of blows, all simple linear shit. Carl beat most of it, winced on a stray punch that scraped his cheekbone, then snagged the other man’s right arm at the wrist. He locked up the arm, twisted it, and slammed down with his own forearm. Dudeck’s elbow broke with a crunch, audible even over the sirens. The Aryan shrieked and went down for the last time. Carl kicked him as hard as he could in the ribs. He felt something give. He kicked again, twice, into the stomach. Dudeck threw up on the second impact, softly, like something rupturing. Carl stepped over the Aryan’s twitching body to avoid the pool of vomit, stamped in the man’s already bloodied face, and then bent over him. He grabbed Dudeck’s head up by one ear.
“New rules, birdshit,” he hissed. “I’m working for the man now. I can do what the fuck I want with you. I could kill you, and it wouldn’t make any fucking difference now.”
Dudeck foamed blood and spit. Fragments of a tooth on his smashed lower lip. He was making a low grinding noise somewhere deep in his throat.
Carl let go and stood up. For a moment, he thought he’d stamp on the crumpled form at his feet again, hard into the base of the spine to do some damage the infirmary wouldn’t easily put right, into the face again to destroy it utterly. Maybe go back for the ribs until they snapped inward and punctured something. At least, he thought, he might spit on the Aryan. But the rage had drained abruptly away. He couldn’t be bothered. The Guatemalan had what he’d asked for. Dudeck was out, infirmary-bound. Let the remainder of the Aryan’s shitty Jesusland life take him the rest of the way down. Marsalis didn’t need to see or inflict any more damage. He already knew, within parameters, how it would play out. They stacked men like Dudeck in cheap coffins five-deep outside the poor fund crematoria across the Republic every Sunday. Most of them never made it out of their twenties.
At the far end of F wing, the gate clanged back and the intervention squad piled through. Body armor, stunwrap carbines, and yells. Carl sighed, raised his hands to his head, and walked down the siren-screaming nanocarb hall to meet them.
“Cordwood Systems.”
“Marsalis. Print me.”
“Voiceprint confirmed. You are speaking to the duty controller. Please state your preferences.”
“Jade, lattice, mangosteen, oak.”
“Opening. What are your requirements?”
“I’ve just been hired out of custody by the Western Nations Colony Initiative. They want me to run a variant thirteen retrieval outside UNGLA jurisdiction.”
“That is contrary to—”
“I know. I’ll be in New York in a couple of days. Tell the perimeter crews to expect me. I’ll be dumping my newfound friends as soon as practically possible.”
“Did you have to fucking hospitalize him?”
He shrugged. He’d dumped his prison jacket earlier—stripped off shoes and socks, too—and the beach sand under his feet was cool and firm. The night air brushed his neck and his bared arms like loose-drape silk.
“Couldn’t see a good reason not to.”
“No?” Ertekin had not taken off her shoes. “Well, it would have meant we got home tonight, instead of staying in this dump. Ever think of that?”
Her gesture took in the floodlit clutch of low-rise behind them, the coms tower, and behind it like some Godzilla parent the endless upward loom of the Perez nanorack. The rack’s structure stood mostly in darkness, but red navigation lights blinked in dizzying stacked synchrony, dragging vision upward until the lights disappeared into the cloud cover.
“It’s your dump,” he said.
“It’s leased.”
“That must be heartbreaking for you. COLIN dependent on local state power. I’m surprised you don’t just topple the government. You know, like you did in Bolivia back in the nineties.”
She shot him a look he was beginning to recognize. Halfway to anger, locked down by something else. In another thirteen, he’d have read it as social aptitude training. Here, he wasn’t sure what it might mean. Only one thing was clear. Something was scratching at the edges of Sevgi Ertekin, and had been since he met her.
“Marsalis, it’s late,” she told him. “I’m not going to get in a fight with you about something COLIN may or may not have done ten years before I joined them. The reason we’re in this dump is because you let your much-vaunted thirteen tendencies get out of hand, and it cost us another six fucking hours of phone calls and negotiation. So don’t push your luck. I’m close enough to sending you back as it is.”
He grinned. “Now you’re lying.”
“Think so? The warden wanted to refer it all the way back up to Tallahassee and a convened Violent Crimes Committee assessment. He’d just love to have you locked down while that grinds through the legislature.”
“I’d have thought he’d be glad to see the back of me.”
“Well, you’d be wrong. Warden Parris is an ex-marine.” Sevgi shot him another glance. “Just like Willbrink.”
“Will who?”
“Yeah, right. Forget it.”
He didn’t know how much truth she was telling. Certainly, things had been fraught once they saw what he’d done to Dudeck. The intervention squad didn’t quite stunwrap him on the spot, but it was a close thing. He spent three hours in the faintly ammoniac-perfumed gloom of the riot holding cells, was hauled out, marched summarily across to admin, and then marched just as rapidly back as, he supposed, competing authorizations whiplashed back and forth. It took another two hours to get him out of the hole permanently, by which time it was dark and the admin block was down to a skeleton crew of caretakers and security.
Norton and Ertekin came and went, in and out of doors to offices he never got to see inside. They barely glanced his way. Shift change came and went. At one point, a CO came and took his picture, took it away without comment. Carl let it all wash over him. When they were all done, he signed the documents they gave him, changed back into his own clothes, and, guessing it would be cold in New York, blagged an inmate jacket from the yawning night clerk. It was a use-faded gray-black, not a bad color in itself, but one sleeve was flashed with a line of orange chevrons and across the back was the customary sigma logo and name in the same glaring color. As with a lot of old stock, some tagging freak wit had taken a dye squirt to the lettering, dumping in a long jagged lowercase t after the S. He shrugged and took it anyway. Miami PD had impounded his gear from the hotel when they busted him, and he didn’t suppose he’d ever see it again. UNGLA were apparently still negotiating for the return of the Haag gun and its load. Point of principle, point of pride. No one really believed they’d win. He shouldered his way into the jacket, rolled up the short personal effects strip that went with the clothes he’d been arrested in, and walked out.
Fuck the accessories, Carl. You’re halfway home.
A grim-faced Norton stayed at his side all the way to the innocuous hired teardrop in the parking lot, opened the backseat for him, and closed it again as soon as he was in. Ertekin came out of the admin building a couple of minutes later, muttered something to her partner, and then got in behind the wheel. When Norton was in beside her, she fired up the engine and steered the car out of the prison gates on manual. Neither of the COLIN officers spoke to Carl at all.
Warden Parris, if he was still on site, never showed.
A couple of hundred meters down the exit highway, Norton was already on the phone, checking the Miami suborb terminal for departures north. Not surprisingly, there was nothing flying this late.
“Hotel?” he’d asked Ertekin.
She shook her head “Parris is way too pissed. I don’t want to wake up to a VCC warrant tomorrow morning because he called some friend in Tallahassee during the night. We need to get back on our own turf.”
Norton went back to the phone. A couple of hours later, they were rolling through a security gate and into the nanorack facility environs. Powered fences glinted off across the Florida flatland, watchful men and women in coveralls prowling back and forth in the gloom. The low-light headgear they wore made them look like insect aliens from a low-budget stage show. Carl spotted the colin insignia on an upper arm, on the badge of a beret. Safe haven. He could see the tension drain almost visibly out of his two rescuers.
Now, out on the beach with sand between his toes and his own clothes on his back for the first time in four months, he could feel a similar easing in himself. A sudden self-knowledge slopped in him, the awareness of how clenched he’d become, and the faintly scary slide as he let it go increments at a time. He’d been here before a few times: the bridge of the Felipe Souza, crackling suddenly with transmission from the incoming rescue boat; stepping off the elevator platform at the bottom of the Hawking nanorack and onto ground that sucked at him with a full g; getting out of the teardrop taxi in Hampstead and looking up at Zooly’s new pad, checking the street corner sign, wondering if this could really be it, if maybe he’d gotten her instructions wrong—and then seeing her come to the huge picture window and grin down at him, dimly seen through the tree-shadowed glass. The slip in your guts that tells you it’s okay, you can let go now.
“Tell me something, Ertekin.” The words came out of his mouth like exhaled smoke, pure unguarded conversation. He didn’t much care what she thought or said in reply—just talking and knowing it wasn’t going to get him shanked was the point. “You’ve worked for COLIN a couple of years, right?”
“Two and a half.”
“So who’s senior? You or Norton?”
He got the look again, but muted. Maybe she could hear the lack of cabling in his voice. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“No? So how does it work?” He gestured. “Come on, Ertekin. We’re just talking here. It’s a beach, for fuck’s sake.”
The twitched corner of a smile, but he got the feeling it wasn’t for him. He gestured again.
“Come on.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you.” She shook her head. “One in the morning, the man wants to talk office politics. Works like this. Norton’s an accredited COLIN investigator, a troubleshooter. Got a dozen years in, he went straight to them after law enforcement training in some upstate college. It’s a good career move: COLIN pay way over average and most of the work isn’t what you’d call hazardous. You’re looking at anticorruption task forcing, chasing down local government scams on COLIN property, Marstech licensing breaches, that sort of thing.”
“Not much serial homicide then.”
“No. When things get heavy, they mostly hire muscle from private military contractors like ExOp or Lamberts. Where it’s legally messy, they pull local PD liaison. That was me. I came in on a couple of Marstech hijacks where COLIN staff got killed, seconded from NYPD Homicide. They liked the work I did for them, Norton was moving up to a senior post, he needed a permanent partner with bloodwork experience, so.” She shrugged. “Like that. They offered me the job. The money was a lot. I took it.”
“But Norton still ranks you?”
Ertekin sighed. Looked out to sea.
“What?”
“Thirteens. You’re all so fucking wired for hierarchy. Who’s in charge? Who’s at the top? Who do I have to dominate? Every detective I ever shared an office with, it—”
She stopped.
For a moment, he thought Norton was there, coming down the beach toward them from the bunkhouse. The mesh cranked, rustily. He flicker-checked the beach, saw nothing. Went back to her face and found her still staring out at the ocean.
“It what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said evenly. “Yeah, Norton ranks me. Norton knows COLIN inside and out. But he’s not a cop and I am.”
“So he defers to you?”
“We cooperate.” She left the sea and met his eyes. “Strange concept for someone like you, I know. But Norton’s got nothing to prove.”
“And a thick head of hair, right?”
The lyric left her looking blank. He guessed she was too young to really remember Angry Young and the Men. Carl owned their last album because, hey, who over the age of forty didn’t, the download went triple platinum as soon as it hit the open stacks. But Ertekin would have been barely out of diapers at the time. He’d only just been old enough himself to take it on board when Angry Young blew his brains out all over the fittings of a Kilburn recording studio. Making a Mess. Right. Black-comic sly and London-gutter cool to the last. He sometimes wondered if Angry Young had known what would happen to sales of Making a Mess when he put the barrel of the frag carbine in his mouth that afternoon, grinned—apparently—at the sound man, and flipped the trigger. Whether he had in fact begun to guess when he’d scrawled out the title track and lyrics a year earlier.
“What’s his hair got to do with it?”
“Well, it’s hardly male-pattern baldness, is it?”
“Hardly….” She got it. “Oh you’re fucking kidding me. You cannot be serious. Marsalis, you don’t have male-pattern baldness.”
“No. But I’m not human.”
It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.
“You quoting somebody there?”
“Well, yeah.” He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. “Your guys, for a start.”
She raised an eyebrow. “My guys?”
“Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?”
“For your information,” she said thinly, “the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.”
Carl shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland Baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh excuse fucking me.” He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place. You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it. He pushed out a laugh. “I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ‘93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disemboweled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the shahuda hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.”
“The shahuda are not—”
“Yeah, yeah. The shahuda are not representative. Heard it. Just like the gladius dei don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity, either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.”
“You’re talking about fanatical mino—”
“Look, Ertekin.” He found this time the laugh was genuine. “I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group-solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?”
“I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.”
“Good. Let’s not, then.”
They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white-noise hiss as they sucked back.
“How come you knew I was Turkish?” she asked him finally.
He shrugged. “Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.”
“What were you doing in Turkey?”
“What do you think.”
“The tracts?”
He nodded somberly. “Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorized. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?”
“No, I’m from New York.”
“Right.” He nodded. “Sorry. I meant—”
He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand toward them, and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.
“Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.” The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, henna-red hair cut short and stylish. flip. Body a graceless tangle in disarrayed skirt and blouse, limned in crime scene white on a polished wood floor. “Shot to death in her home in the Angeline Freeport this evening.” flip. Close-up morgue shot. Face bruised at the mouth, makeup smeared, eyes blown black by the pressure of the head shot that had killed her. The entry wound sat in her forehead like a crater. flip. “Children were out at a swimming class with the father. The house is smart, wired into a securisoft neighborhood net and upgrade-paid for the next three years. Either Merrin broke in with some very sophisticated intrusion gear, or Toni let him in.” flip. Body detail, one mottled flank and the sexless sag of a breast. “There was a fight, he knocked her around, put her on the floor more than once. A couple of her ribs were broken, there’s substantial bruising pretty much everywhere. You saw the face. Blood traces everywhere, too; CSI got it off the couch in the other room, the walls, too, in a couple of places.” flip. Red smears on stucco cream. “Most of it’s hers. Seems like he really went to town.”
“Did he rape her?” Carl asked.
flip.
“No. No detectable sexual assault.”
“Same as the others,” said Sevgi quietly. “Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.”
flip.
“Siloam Springs,” Norton supplied. “Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?”
“No, I don’t remember.” Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. “We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.”
Norton shrugged. “Time enough to decide it was a shithole, though, right?”
“Oh shut up. It’s all Jesusland, isn’t it?” Ertekin rubbed at an eye and nodded at the projection wall. “Why’d they flag this one up?”
The sequence of images had frozen on another section of pale cream wall, Rorschach-blotched with blood and tissue. A tiny red triangle pulsed on and off in the corner of the screen.
“Yeah, Angeline PD couldn’t work this one out.” Norton prodded the dataslate on the table. On the screen, a block of forensic data floated down onto the picture. “When Merrin finally killed this woman, he shot her standing upright in the next room. High-velocity electromag round; it went right through her head and into the wall behind. The angle suggests he was standing right in front of her. That’s what doesn’t fit. Dying on her knees when she’s finally got no more fight in her, yeah, that I can see. But standing up and just taking it, after the struggle she put up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Yeah, it does.” Carl paused for a moment, testing the intuition, the lines of force it flowed along. He knew the shape of it the way his hand knew the butt of the Haag gun. “She gave up before she was done, because he threatened her with something worse.”
“Worse than beating her to death?” There was an icy anger in the rims of Norton’s eyes as he spoke. Carl couldn’t tell if it extended to him as well as Merrin. “You want to tell me what that would be, exactly?”
“The children,” said Ertekin quietly.
He nodded. “Yeah. Probably the husband as well, but it’s the children that would have clinched it. Playing to her genetic wiring. He told her he’d wait until the children came home.”
“You can’t know that,” said Norton, still angry.
“No, of course not. But it’s the obvious explanation. He got in through the house defenses. Either Montes knew him and let him in, or he gutted the software, in which case he’d been scoping the house well enough to know the systems, so he certainly would have known that there were children, that they’d be back soon. That was his leverage, that was what he used.”
He saw the way a look went between them.
“It works, up to a point,” Ertekin said, more to herself than anyone else. “But all it does is turn the question around. If he was prepared to use a threat like that, why not use it from scratch? Why bother dancing around the furniture in the first place?”
Carl shook his head. “I don’t know. But to me, the shot looks like an execution. The fight must have been something else.”
“Interrogation? You think this was about extracting a confession?”
Carl thought about it for a moment, staring into the border of glare and gloom where the side of the screen edged out on the wall. Recollection coiled loose like snakes—this woman seemed to dislodge memory in him practically every time she opened her fucking mouth. Back in the jail—did you ever think that?—it was the passageways of the Felipe Souza and the cold inevitability of his thoughts as he waited out the rescue. Now she had him again. The hot, tiny room in a nameless Tehran backstreet. Blocks of sunlight etched into the floor, the shadow of a single barred window. Stale sweat and the faint aroma of scorched flesh. Discordant screaming from down the hall. Blood on his fist.
“I don’t think so. There are smarter ways of getting information.”
“Then what?” pushed Norton. “Just straight sadism? Or is this some kind of übermensch thing? Brutalism by genetic right.”
Carl met the other man’s eyes for a moment, just to let him know. Norton held his gaze.
Carl shrugged. “Maybe it was rage,” he said. “For whatever reasons, maybe this Merrin just lost control.”
Ertekin frowned. “All right. But then he just, what? Just calmed down and executed her?”
“Maybe.”
“That still doesn’t make much sense to me,” said Norton.
Carl shrugged again, this time dismissive. “Why should it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Norton, that at a basic biochemical level, you’re not like Merrin. None of you are. Down in the limbic system where it counts, across the amygdalae and up into the orbitofrontal cortex, Merrin has about a thousand biochemical processes going on that you don’t have.” Carl had meant to come across calm and detached—social aptitude routines had his body language and speech locked away from confrontational. But outside it all, the weariness in his own voice astounded him. He finished abruptly. “Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t have a map for where this guy is right now.”
Quiet in the softly lit conference room. He could feel Ertekin’s gaze on him like a touch. He looked at his hands.
“You said he’s killed twenty others apart from this one.”
Norton fielded it. “Seventeen confirmed, genetic trace material recovered at the scene. There are another four we’re not so sure about. That’s not including the people he murdered and ate aboard Horkan’s Pride.”
“Yeah. You got this stuff mapped out? Where he’s been?”
He didn’t look up, but he felt the glance run between them again.
“Sure,” said Norton.
He worked the dataslate deck and the image of Toni Montes’s blood went away. In its place, continental North America glowed to life, stitched with highways and slashed red along the excision lines of the Rim States and the Union. The map was punched through with seventeen black squares and four gray, each checked against a thumbnail victim photo. Carl got up and went to the wall for a closer look. The Angeline Freeport marker showed a laughing Toni Montes, hair styled up for some party and an off-the-shoulder gown. He touched it gently, and detailed data scrolled down beneath. Mother, wife, real estate feed host. Corpse.
He looked at the other images pockmarking the map. They were mostly similar, careless snapshots, lives caught in the living. In a couple of cases, the image was an ID holoprint, but mostly it was smiles and squints for the camera, close-cropped to cut family members or friends from the frame. The faces looking down were a mix of races and a range of ages, midthirties all the way up to one old man in his late sixties. Married, single, with children, without. Work ranging from datasystems specialties to manual labor.
They had nothing in common but the continent they lived on and the fact they were dead.
He moved back to the West Coast. Norton did something to the dataslate, and a Bay Area blowup slid out on top of the main map. The Horkan’s Pride splashdown was marked in a not-to-scale box just off the coast, eleven faces and names stacked on top of one another beside it. Then three more red squares, all clustered around San Francisco and Oakland. Carl stared at the grouping for a moment, aware, at some level, that something didn’t gel. He frowned, touched and read the scroll-down data.
Saw the dates.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Ertekin moved up behind him. Abruptly, he could smell her. “He came back. Two kills, same day Horkan’s Pride hits the water. Then he’s gone, across the frontier into the Republic. Next stop Van Horn, Texas, June 19. Eddie Tanaka, shot to death outside a cathouse on Interstate 10. And then he’s back in the Bay Area again, nearly four months later, October 2, killing this Jasper Whitlock. What does that suggest to you?”
“He forgot his wallet?”
“There you go. I knew there was some reason we hired you.”
Carl twisted and gave her a reproachful look. Something happened in the line of her mouth. He breathed in lightly, trying for her scent again. “He’s working off partial data. However he came up with this hit list, he didn’t have all the names at the start. Why cross into Jesusland in June when he’s got to come all the way back and do this guy, uh, Whitlock, later. And now we’ve got Montes, she’s down in the Angeline Freeport. That’s a short run down from the bay, and no frontier checks. He’s making this up as he goes along.”
“Right. What we figured, too.” Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. “If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All aboveboard, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.”
“Question is where from?” Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. “He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?”
“No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled-organ deal.”
Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. “In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.”
“Well…”
Ertekin scowled. “We already chased that connection,” she told Carl. “Tanaka’s got no official medical standing, in the Republic or anywhere else. He was a biohazard engineer by trade—”
“Rat catcher,” supplied Norton.
“Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than—”
“Catching rats.” Carl nodded slowly. “Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeastern Texas, northern Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia, and northern Florida. Have you got any ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?”
The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map, too, and the scattered faces of the dead.
“He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,” said Norton soberly.
The sounds of shouting dragged her awake.
For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl-gray light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.
On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.
“Yeah?”
Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. “Hear the fans?”
“I’m awake, aren’t I?”
“Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.”
“So.” She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. “Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.”
“Better than that.” There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. “He went to the media feeds. We’re all over Good Morning South.”
“Ah, fuck.” Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. “You think we can still get out of here okay?”
“Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.”
“Got to be Parris.”
“Yeah, well, in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty-deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Diefor-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.” She could hear him grinning again. “We’re not just trying to evade Republican justice anymore, Sev. We’re harboring an abomination before the Lord.”
“Great. So what do we do?” Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirtsleeve. “Fly home the old-fashioned way? COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.”
“I would think so, yes.”
“And they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky when we hit Republic airspace, are they?”
Norton said nothing. Sevgi remembered her profiler cups halfway through seaming her shirt shut. She split the seam back open, peered around on the floor.
“Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously think—”
“Okay, no, they probably won’t shoot us down. But they might force the pilot back to a landing at Miami International and take us off the plane there. We’re not popular in these parts, Sev.”
“Not fucking popular anywhere,” she muttered. She caught the translucent gleam of a p-cup at the foot of the bed. She fished it up between two fingers and pressed it up under the weight of her right breast. “All right, Tom. What do you want to do?”
“Let me talk to Nicholson.” He rode out her snort. “Sev, he may be an asshole, but he’s still responsible for operations. It doesn’t look any better for him than for us if we end up slammed in some Miami jail.”
Sevgi prowled the darkened room looking for the other p-cup. “Nicholson won’t get in a fight at state legislature level, Tom, and you know it. He’s too much of a political animal to upset people with that much clout. If Tallahassee gets in line behind this thing, we’re going to be left twisting in the wind down here.”
Another hesitation. Outside, the sounds of the crowd surged like distant surf. Sevgi found the cup under the bed, dug it out, and fitted it awkwardly, left-handed, under her left breast. She sat on the edge of the bed and started seaming her shirt shut again.
“Tell me I’m wrong, Tom.”
“I think you are wrong, Sev. Nicholson is going to see this as interference with his COLIN Security authority, and at a minimum it’s going to make him look bad. Even if he doesn’t take on Tallahassee directly himself, he’ll kick it upstairs with an urgent-action label attached.”
“And meanwhile, what? We sit tight here?”
“There are more unpleasant places to be stranded, Sev.” He sighed. “Look. Worst-case scenario, you get to spend the day on the beach with your new pal.”
Sevgi took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. The little screen was an innocent matte gray. Norton hadn’t enabled the v-feed. “Fuck you, Tom.”
“It was a joke, Sev.”
“Yeah? Well, next time you’re down on Fifth Avenue, get yourself a new fucking sense of humor.”
She killed the call.
From the landward observation tower, it didn’t look like much. Several hundred variously dressed men and women milling about in front of the facility gate while off to the left a suited, white-haired figure declaimed from behind a portable plastic ampbox podium. A couple of amateurish, hastily scrawled holo-placards tilted about in the air above the crowd. Teardrops and a few old-style IC vehicles were parked back along the access road, and people leaned against their flanks in ones and twos. Early-morning sunlight winked and glinted off glass and alloy surfaces. A couple of helicopters danced in the sky overhead, media platforms by the look of their livery.
It didn’t look like much, but they were a good two hundred meters back from the gate here; the noise was faint, and detail hard to see. Sevgi had worked crowd control a few time as a patrol officer, and she’d learned not to make snap judgments about situations involving massed humanity. She knew how quickly it could turn.
“…may have the form of a man, but do not be deceived by his form.” The words rinsed up from the podium sound system, still relatively unhysterical. Whoever the preacher was, he was building up slowly. “Man is made in the image and love of God. This. Creature. Was made by arrogant sinners, by shattering the seed God gave us in His wisdom. The Bible tells us…”
She tuned it out. Squinted up at one of the helicopters as it banked.
“No sign of the state police?” she asked the tower guard.
He shook his head. “They’ll show up if those clowns start charging the gate, not before. And only then because they know we’re authorized to use lethal force if there’s a line breach.”
His face was impassive, but the sour edge in his voice was unmistakable. The name on his chest tag read kim, but Sevgi guessed Korean American was close enough to Chinese for a common bitterness to find roots. Back before Secession, the Zhang fever mobs hadn’t been all that selective in their lynchings.
“I doubt it’ll come to that.” She faked a breezy confidence. “We’ll be out of your hair before lunchtime. They’ll all go home after that.”
“Good to know.”
She left him staring out across the COLIN defenses at the crowd and made her way back down the caged staircase to the ground. There was an ominous quiet around the facility, in contrast with the noise outside. They’d suspended nanorack operations while the crisis lasted, and the storage hangars were all closed up. Tracked freight loaders ten meters broad squatted immobile on the evercrete aprons and access paths, like massive, scalped tanks, abandoned at the end of some colossal urban conflict. Their mortarboard lifting platforms were all empty.
At the other end of the complex, the ’rack thrust up into the cloud cover like a god-size fire escape. It made everything on the ground feel like toys. They’d built Perez early on, back when Mars was still a barely scratched desert and Bradbury a collection of pressurized ’fabs. Now it looked used and grim, all mottled grays and blacks and overstated support structure. Compared with the cheery, brightly colored minimalism at Sagan or Kaku, Perez was a relic. Even for Sevgi, who didn’t like the ’racks whatever fucking color they came in, it was a melancholy sight.
“Ever been up?”
She looked around and saw that Marsalis had gotten within two meters of her back without giving himself away. Now he stood watching her with a blank speculation that reminded her of Ethan so much, it sent shivers up from the base of her spine.
“Not this one, no.” She nodded vaguely northward. “They trained me in New York. Kaku ’rack, mostly. I’ve been up Sagan and Hawking as well, and what they’ve built of Levin.”
“You don’t sound overenthusiastic.”
“No.”
It made him smile. “But the money’s good. Right?”
“The money’s good,” she agreed.
He looked away, toward the gate. The smile faded out.
“Is all that noise out there for me?”
“Yes, it is.” She felt oddly embarrassed, as if the Republicans on the other side of the wire were acquaintances whose bad behavior she had to cover for. “Blame your old friend Parris. Apparently he took exception to your departure after all. He’s fed the whole thing to the local media.”
“Smart of you to bring us here last night, then.”
She shrugged. “I worked witness protection for a while. You learn never to take anything for granted.”
“I see.” He seemed to consider for a moment. “Are you people going to give me a gun?”
“That’s not part of the deal. Didn’t you read the fine print?”
“No.”
It brought her up short. “You didn’t?”
“Ever spent time in a Jesusland justice facility?” He put on a gentle smile, but his eyes were hard with memory. “It’s not the sort of place you quibble over detail if they come to let you out.”
“Right.” She cleared her throat. “Well, the fine print says that you’re retained by COLIN in an advisory capacity, not for actual enforcement. So, ah, you don’t need a gun.”
“I will if our Jesusland friends decide to storm the fences.”
“That’s not going to happen here.”
“Your confidence is inspiring. Can we fly out of here?”
“It doesn’t look like it. Tom’s working the diplomatic angle, but it’ll be awhile before we know if we can take the risk. In this part of the world, the Air Nationals tend to shoot first and sift wreckage afterward.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that.” He turned away from the powered fences and the gate, looking out across the shimmering surface of the Atlantic. “Speaking of which, any idea why the skycops in the Rim didn’t shove a heatseeker up Horkan’s arse when it crossed the line? I hear those boys are pretty jumpy, too, and it must have profiled pretty much like a threat.”
“Local COLIN liaison talked them out of it, apparently.”
“Yeah?” Marsalis raised an eyebrow.
“Yes. Relations with the Rim are pretty good these days. It’s not like down here. We negotiated a direct AI interface last year, high-level trust protocols, minimal buffering. The Sagan n-djinn mapped the trajectory and shunted it straight to the Rim Air Authority. No blocks, no datachecks above basic. It cleared the buffers in a couple of nanoseconds.” Sevgi spread her hands. “Everyone’s happy.”
“Especially Merrin.”
She said nothing. The sporadic chanting at the gate reached them between gusts of wind coming off the ocean. After a couple of seconds, Marsalis started away from her in the direction of the water. He didn’t speak or look back. It took her his first three steps to understand he’d been waiting for her to continue the conversation, and now that she hadn’t he was leaving.
“Where are you going?” It came out a lot less casually than she would have liked.
He stopped and turned back to her. “Why?” he asked gravely. “Am I in some kind of protective custody?”
Fuck it. “No, it’s just.” She gestured awkwardly. “In case I need to find you later, in a hurry.”
He weighed it, the way he had the comment about her work for WP.
“I’m going for another walk on the beach,” he said. “Want to come?”
“Ah…no.” She hesitated. He was waiting. “I need to go over the Montes crime scene while we’ve got the time. See if there’s anything that jumps out.”
“Is that likely?”
“No, but you never know. I’ve been looking at Merrin’s handiwork for the last four months, Angeline PD haven’t. There might be something.”
“No direct data interface there, then?”
“No. Technically, they’re not part of RimSec. It’s the Freeport legislation, Angeline PD have autonomy, they work pretty much like any city police department over in the Republic.”
“And you’re not sharing what you’ve got on this with any of those guys?”
“No. I told you, we don’t want a panic on our hands.” She threw out a weary signpost arm toward the chanting. “Listen to that. How do you think people like that are going to react to the news that there’s a cannibal thirteen loose in North America, murdering selected citizens at his leisure. Remember Sundersen?”
“Eric Sundersen?” A shrug. “Sure. I spent a couple of months looking for him last year, just like everybody else.”
“Then you’ll remember what it was like. Seven weeks, and we nearly had martial law declared in five states of the Republic. Media screaming off the screen about clone monsters. Armed mobs trying to break into the tract at Cimarron and slaughter everyone there. Emergency measures all along the Rim frontier. If Sundersen hadn’t broken cover when he did, it would have been Zhang fever all over again. And all he did was escape. He hadn’t killed anybody. With this one, the mobs would go fucking crazy.”
“Yeah, mobs. You humans have that trick down, don’t you.”
Sevgi ignored the jibe.
“We just don’t want another bloodbath,” she said doggedly. “We make local police aware that we have an interest, and we give them what help we can. But we can’t afford anyone to know the whole picture.”
He nodded. His walk on the beach seemed forgotten. “So what picture are they getting?”
“The cover story in the Republic is Marstech. A heist gang and a distribution network, squabbling over product.” The words tasted stale on her tongue, as concocted and unconvincing as some corporate mission statement. She forced down a grimace and pressed on. “With scumbags like Eddie Tanaka that’s been easy to sell. Elsewhere, when the victim’s respectable, we’re playing the collateral damage angle. Innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, or cases of mistaken identity.”
“Sounds a little creaky. What are you doing about the genetic trace?”
“Taking it off their hands. The COLIN n-djinns have access to police datastacks right across North America; they fish out anything that fits the profile. That’s usually long before Forensics get around to running a gene scan on the crime scene traces, so in most cases we get there before anybody knows there’s been a thirteen at the scene.”
“Most cases?”
“Yeah, been a couple of medical examiners we’ve had to lean on, get them to shut up.” She looked away. “It isn’t hard to do that with COLIN authority.”
“No, I don’t imagine it is.”
She could feel herself flush a little. “Look, I have to get over to the upload building. You want to hit the beach, that’s fine.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll walk with you.”
She gave him a sharp look. He looked innocently back.
“May as well look at this Montes myself,” he said. “Start earning my keep.”
So they crossed the apron from the observation tower together, heading for the main complex. There was some heat in the day now, and Sevgi’s own slightly stale scent pricked in her nostrils. She began to wish she’d had a shower before she tumbled out of the hospitality suite and into action.
“So, you were saying,” Marsalis prompted. “The Republic don’t know this is linked to Horkan’s Pride.”
“No. The media coverage said there were no survivors. We let them have the cannibalism angle, and told them anybody still alive would have been killed on impact. We let them have pictures.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.” Sevgi curled her lip. “Cannibal Ghost Ship Horror—click for further images. Worked like a dream, they ran with it, splashed it across every site on the net. They completely forgot to do any investigative journalism.”
“Handy.”
She shrugged. “Standard. American media’s been taking sensation over fact for better than a hundred years now, and Secession just loaded the trend. Anyway, it is a miracle Merrin survived the crash. I mean, he had to find some way to trick the systems into accepting him back into his cryocap, which is glitched to fuck so the cryogen protocol doesn’t work anymore. So he’s got to beat that, he’s got to persuade the cryocap to fill with gel anyway, to drown a live, unsedated body—”
“Not like he didn’t have the spare time to work it all out.”
“I know. But that’s just the start. He’s then got to lie there and let the system drown him, unsedated. He’s got to breathe the gel, unsedated, awake, without his lungs revolting, for a good twenty minutes while Horkan’s Pride programs its final approach, hits reentry, course-corrects, and comes down in the ocean.”
A freight loader bulked dinosaur-like on their right, blocking out the angle of the early-morning sun. Sevgi shivered a little as they stepped into the long shadow it cast. She looked across at Marsalis, almost accusingly.
“You want to think what that must have been like—locked in an upright coffin with that shit filling your nose and your mouth and your throat, pouring in and filling up your lungs, pressing in on your eyeballs, and all around you the whole ship feels like it’s shaking itself apart, maybe is shaking itself apart for all you know. Can you imagine what that would have felt like?”
“I’m trying not to,” he said mildly. “Do we know how he got ashore?”
She nodded. “First victim in the Bay Area, Ulysses Ward. You saw him on the map last night. Tailored microfauna magnate, he had culture farms all over the Marin County shoreline and a bunch of those tethered plankton trays about a hundred klicks off the coast. We don’t have the satellite footage to be sure, but it looks like he was out there doing maintenance when Horkan’s Pride came down. Got curious, got too close, got himself killed.”
“Or he went out there specifically to pick Merrin up.”
“Yeah, we thought of that, too. RimSec did an n-djinn search, couldn’t find any links between Ward and Merrin. We went back forty years. Unless they knew each other in a previous life, this is exactly what it looks like—a bad-luck coincidence.”
“How’d he kill him?”
“Cressi sharkpunch. You ever see anyone killed with one of those things?” Sevgi gestured graphically. “Designed to stop a great white shark through ten meters of water, it’s practically a handheld disintegrator. Blew Ward’s belly out all over the surrounding furniture. Him plus another employee name of Emil Nocera, all in the same shot.”
“Thanks for the ride.”
“Right. CSI say there were another couple of employees around at the time, but they ran.”
“Hard to blame them.”
“Yeah, plus they were illegals. Apparently a lot of the casual labor up that way is. They see something, they’re not going to hang around and make witness statements. RimSec are looking, but they don’t hold out much hope.”
“Do they know what this is about?”
“RimSec do, but that’s as far as it’s gone. There’s no public knowledge, we can’t afford it, and neither can they. Things are bad enough between Jesusland and the Rim without word getting out that this guy’s treating their precious border security like a knee-high picket fence.”
“But the Rim cops know he’s killing in the Republic as well?”
“They’ve been apprised, yes.”
“Nice of them to keep quiet about it for you.”
“Well, like I said, there’s no love lost across the fencelines. And it looks bad if the high-powered high-tech Rim States couldn’t stop some psychotic killer crossing over and going on the rampage in the Republic. You can see how that’d play diplomatically.”
“What price technology without God on your side?”
“Right. Plus, if word got out that said psychotic killer is a, uh…”
“A genetic monster?” he asked gently. “A twist?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No. I guess you didn’t.”
“The Republic are already handing their people a line of shit about how the Rim is just a craven appeasement system for the Chinese. And with the stories coming out of China, the black lab escapees—” She shrugged again. “Well, you can see how that one’d play as well, right?”
“Pretty much. Nothing like a good monster scare.”
They cleared the shadow of the freight loader. Sevgi turned her head to beat the sudden glare of the sun and thought she caught a smile slipping across the black man’s lips. His gaze had rolled out to somewhere well beyond the gathering of buildings around the nanorack.
“Something funny?”
His attention reeled back in, but he didn’t look at her. “Not really.”
She stopped.
After a couple of paces, so did he, and turned to face her. “Something the matter?”
“If you’ve got something to contribute,” she said evenly, “then I would like to hear it. This isn’t going to work unless you talk to me.”
He looked at her for a long couple of moments. “It’s really not very important,” he said easily. “I guess you’d call it a resonance.”
She stood where she was. “Resonance with what.”
He sighed. “A resonance with monsters. Do you know what a pistaco is?”
She dredged memory, pulled up something from a long-ago briefing on altiplano training camp crimes. “Yeah, it’s some sort of demon, right? Something the Indians believe in. Some sort of vampire?”
“Close. Pistaco’s a white man with a long knife who comes at night and chops up Indians to get at their body fat. Most likely, it’s a cultural memory from the conquistadores and the Inquisition, because they certainly weren’t averse to a bit of dismemberment in the name of Gold and Jesus Christ. But these days, up on the altiplano they’ve got a new angle on the story.”
“Which is what?”
Marsalis grinned. She was appalled at how much it reminded her of Ethan, at how it reached inside and touched her in the place he used to.
“These days,” he said, “the Andeans don’t believe the pistaco is the white man as such anymore. That’s gone. Still the same monster, still looks the same, but now the story they tell is, the pistaco’s something evil that the white man’s brought back.”
He nodded toward the dark towering webbed architecture of the nanorack.
“Brought back from Mars.”
The sweep and swoop of the codes took hold.
Sevgi felt herself dislodged from current reality, turned away from it like a small child guided away from a TV screen by warm parental hands. The couches at COLIN Florida were clunky, thirty-year-old military surplus stock, fully enclosed and soundproofed, and now, in the deadened stillness they created, there was a low chiming that seemed to resonate deep in her guts. From long habit, she let herself home in on it. Gentle steerage to the new focus. Look at this, look at this. The colors above her seemed to mesh into significance just out of reach. The chiming was the beat of her heart, the shiver of blood along veins and arteries, a cellular awareness. The swirling ebbed and inked back, glaring out like antique celluloid film melting through. The standard desert format inked in.
She looked around. Marsalis was not with her.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.”
The Freeport PD ’face was a handsome black patrolman in his early twenties, insignia winking in the jarringly heatless Arizona sun. The fabric of his short-sleeved uniform had a perfect, factory-fresh texture to it, and so did his flawless, airbrushed skin. Muscle roped his forearms and bulked out his shoulders. He might have stepped, Sevgi thought sourly, out of the early stages of a porn experia, the storyline section before the clothes came off. She guessed the intention was to inspire confidence and respect for the symbols of Angeline law enforcement, but all it did was put her on the edge of a giggle and make her slightly warm.
Oh well, at least it isn’t another fucking body-perfect überbitch.
More than slightly warm, in fact.
“Uh, I’m waiting—”
“For a colleague.” The ’face nodded. “He’s incoming, but it’s taking some time. May I see your authorization?”
Sevgi lifted an open palm and watched as the skeins of bluish machine code fell out of it. They splashed on the ground with a faint crackling and disappeared into the dirt as if soaked up. Despite the color, it felt uncomfortably like watching herself bleed through a slashed wrist. At least, what she’d imagined it would when—
Stop that.
“Thank you, ma’am. You are cleared to proceed.” Ahead of her, the familiar adobe datahomes swam rapidly into existence. The ’face stepped aside to indicate Sevgi’s new status. “Your colleague also.”
She hadn’t noticed. Beside her, Marsalis was shading in. Looking at him as he solidified, she suddenly lost all interest in the patrolman. The attraction was in the flaws, the lines in the face, the faint and flattened scar across his left hand that looked like a burn, the barely perceptible tangles of gray in the hair. The way his mouth crimped slightly to the right when he looked at the patrolman. The way he took up space as if blocking a doorway to somewhere. The way—
She still wasn’t sure why he’d suddenly opted to join her in the virtuality.
“You took your time,” she said, a little more harshly than she’d intended.
He shrugged. “Blame the genes. Thirteens run high resistance to hypnotic technique. I knew some guys back in Osprey who had to be sedated before they could use a v-format at all. Shall we go have a look at Toni?”
The ’face led them across the sand to the closest of the datahomes. Primary crime scene hung in the air beside it in holographic blue. Unusually, the adobe structure had a door. The patrolman worked the black iron latch and pushed the raw wood surface inward. It opened incongruously onto a prissily decorated suburban front hall.
“My name is Cranston,” said the ’face as it stood back to let them pass. “If you need departmental assistance, please call me. The victim is in the dining room. Second door on the left. Feel free to touch or move anything, but if you wish the changes to be saved, you’ll need to advise me.”
They found Toni Montes sprawled on the dining room floor not far from the section of wall where her blood and brains were splashed. She’d rolled when she fell and landed on her side, head turned, displaying the soggy mess of the exit wound. Her limbs were a seemingly boneless tangle, her feet bare. The faintly shimmering white corpse outline seemed to isolate her from the surroundings of her home, as if preparatory to snipping her out of the picture. As they approached, supplementary data scrolled up over the body in neat holographic boxes. Tissue trauma, time of death. Probable causes of secondary injuries. Age, sex, race. Genetic salients.
“I hate that shit,” said Sevgi, for something to say. “Fucking convenience culture, it just gets in the way of what you’re trying to see.”
“You can probably disable it.”
“Yeah.” She made no move to summon Cranston. “Back when I started on the force, NYPD ran trials on this option where you could get the corpse to talk to you.”
“Jesus, whose fucked-up idea was that?” But it was said absently. Marsalis knelt by the body, brow creased.
“I don’t know. Some datageek with too much time on his hands, looking for a creative edge. Rationale was, it was to prevent desensitizing. Supposed to bring back to you the fact that this was once a living, breathing human being.”
“Right.” He took one of the dead woman’s hands, which had fallen cupped loosely upward, and lifted it gently. He seemed to be stroking her fingers.
Sevgi crouched beside him. “Well, they already had the models where you could get the victim to reverse from moment of death, back up, and then walk through the probable sequence of events. Guess it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”
He turned to look at her, face suddenly close. “Can we do that here?”
“You want to?”
Another shrug. “We’ve got time to kill, haven’t we?”
“All right. Cranston?”
The ’face shaded undramatically into being across the room from them, like a pre-millennial photo Sevgi had once seen developed chemically at a seminar.
“What can I do for you?”
Sevgi got up and gestured. “Can you run the crime event model for us? Last few minutes only.”
“No problem. You’ll need to come through to the front room; that’s where it seems to have started. I’ll engage the system now. Do you want sound?”
Sevgi, who’d watched a lot of this sort of thing, shook her head.
“No, just the motions.”
“Then if you’ll follow me.”
Unnervingly, the patrolman stepped directly through the wall. They left the body and took the more conventional route through the connecting door to the front room, where Cranston was waiting. As they came in, the sky outside the room’s window darkened abruptly to night and the drapes drew themselves partway closed like some cheap horror-flick effect. An unharmed edition of Toni Montes stood in for the ghost—she shaded back to life in the center of the room, feet still shod in mint-and-cream espadrilles that picked up the colors in her skirt and blouse. Her makeup was intact, and she looked impossibly composed.
A pace away from her, the system penciled in the perpetrator.
It was a black outline of a man, a figure with the smooth, characterless features and standardized body mass of an anatomical sketch, all done in shiny jet. But it breathed, and it swayed slightly, and it sprang at Toni Montes and hit her with a savage, looping backfist. The image of the woman flew silently backward, tripped, and fell on the couch. One espadrille came off, flipped ludicrously high, and landed on the other side of the room. The black figure went after Montes, seized her by the throat, and punched her in the face. She flopped and slumped. The other espadrille came off. She pushed herself away along the couch, stumbled toward upright while the black figure stood and watched with robot calm. When Montes got to her feet, it stepped in again and punched her high in the chest. She flew back into the drapes, rolled, staggered upright. She flailed with nails, got a backhand for her trouble that knocked her fully across the room. The edge of the opened door to the hall caught her in the back. This time she went down and stayed down.
The black figure stalked after her.
“At this point,” said the ’face, “the model estimates the killer force-marched Montes into the other room, threw her back against the wall, and shot her through the head. Reasons for the change of tactic are still under consideration. It may be that he was concerned the killing would be seen through the window to the street.”
The black figure bent over Montes and hauled her to her feet by the hair. It pinioned her arm into the small of her back and shoved her, struggling, toward the connecting door to the dining room. At the threshold, the two figures froze in tableau.
“Would you like to relocate to view the final sequence?”
Sevgi glanced at Marsalis. He shook his head. “No. Turn it off.”
Montes and her black cutout killer blurred and vanished. Marsalis walked through the space where they’d been, leaving Sevgi in the front room. When she followed, she found him knelt once more by the corpse, apparently reading the scroll-ups.
“See something you like?” It was an old homicide joke, crime scene black humor. It was out of her mouth before she realized she’d said it.
He looked up and seemed to be scanning the room. “I’m going to need to see prior record.”
She blinked at him. “Prior record of what?”
“Her prior record.” He indicated the sprawled corpse. “Montes.”
“Marsalis, she was a fucking housewife.” Angry, she realized, with herself and the ease with which she’d slid back into crime scene macabre. She brought her voice down. “This is a suburban mother of two who sold real estate part-time. What record are you talking about?”
He hesitated. Got up and stared around the room again, as if he couldn’t work out how Montes had come to be living with this décor.
“Marsalis?”
He faced her. “If this woman was a real estate saleswoman, I’m a fucking bonobo. You want to get some air?”
She cranked an eyebrow. “In a virtuality?”
“Figure of speech. There’s got to be a briefing level somewhere in this format. How about we go there?”
The briefing level was cut-rate, a mesa top that you got to from anywhere in the construct by reciting a key code Cranston provided them with. The system switched without any transition you could feel to a viewpoint high up over the desert and the spread of datahomes on the plain below. Over time, it appeared various AFPD detectives had imported their own custom touches, and now the mesa top was littered with favorite armchairs in clashing upholstery, a couple of tatami mats, a hammock strung on two thick steel hooks embedded, startlingly, in floating patches of brickwork, another slung more conventionally between two full-size palm trees, a pool table, and, for some inexplicable reason, a tipped-over antique motorcycle with an ax buried in its fuel tank.
It was very quiet up there, just the wind catching on edges of rock in the cliff face below. Quiet enough that you thought if you listened carefully, you might be able to hear the faint static hiss of the base datasystems turning over. Carl stared down at the adobe structures for a while, not listening for anything, thinking it over. The datahomes seemed very distant, and he supposed that was appropriate. There was nothing here he needed to interest himself in more than superficially. He wondered how much to bother telling Ertekin, how much cooperation he needed to fake to keep her cop instincts cooled.
“Look,” he said finally. “That fight they’ve modeled down there is bullshit. Montes wasn’t a victim, she fought this guy all the way. She knew how to fight. That’s why the slippers came off. She didn’t lose them in the battering, she kicked them off so she could fight better.”
“And you’re basing this on what?”
“Initially, instinct.” He held up a hand to forestall her protest. “Ertekin, this isn’t some fucked-in-the-head serial killer we’re talking about. Merrin came all the way to the Freeport just to kill this woman. That has to make her something special.”
“Maybe so. But it doesn’t make her a combat specialist.”
“No. But her hands do.” He raised both his own hands now, palms toward his face, fingers loosely curled, halfway to a double fist guard. “There’s bone alloy marbling across the knuckles, you can feel it under the skin. Probably calcicrete. That’s combat tech.”
“Or part of a menopausal support regime.”
“At forty-four?”
Ertekin shook her head stubbornly. “I looked through the file last night. There’s nothing about combat training there. And anyway, it doesn’t gel with the genetic trace material under her fingernails. You really think a combat pro would bother scratching her attacker?”
“No. I think she did that when she’d already given up. When she’d already made the decision to let him kill her.”
“Why would…”
He saw the way it dawned on her, the way her brow smoothed out and the heavy-lidded eyes widened slightly. In the Arizona construct sunlight, he realized suddenly that they were irised in flecked amber.
“She knew we’d find it,” she said.
“Yeah.” He looked somberly down at the datahomes again. “Toni here was gathering evidence for us. Just think about that for a moment. This is a woman who knows she’s about to die. A minute or less off her own death, she’s calculating how to take this guy down posthumously. Now, that is either psychotic force of will, or training. Or a bit of both.”
They both stood in silence for a while. He glanced at her again and saw how the wind twitched her hair around the lines of her jaw. Tiny motion, barely there at all, but something about it set off an itching in the pit of his stomach. She must have felt some of it, too, because she turned and caught him looking. He got the full sunlit force of the tiger eyes for a moment, then she looked hurriedly away.
“Gene analysis says no enhancement,” she said. “Standard chromosome set, twenty-three pairs, no anomalies.”
“I didn’t say there would be.” He sighed. “That’s the fucking problem these days. Anything extraordinary shows up in anyone, we all go running to the augment catalog looking for correlation. Got to be something crammed into an Xtrasome, something fucking engineered. No one ever wonders if it might just be good old-fashioned heredity and formative conditioning.”
“That’s because these days it mostly isn’t.”
“Yeah, don’t fucking remind me. Anyone wins anything these days, they’re up there plugging some gene frame consortium as soon as the cameras roll.” Carl lifted his arms in acceptance-speech burlesque. “I’d just like to say I couldn’t have done it without the good people at Amino Solutions. They truly made me what I am today. Yeah, fuck off.”
She was giving him an odd look, he knew.
“What?”
“Nothing. Seems like an odd stance for you to be taking, that’s all.”
“Oh, because I’m a thirteen I’ve got to like this pay-and-load excellence we’re all living with. Listen, Ertekin, they rolled the dice with me just like with you. No one dumped an artificial chromosome into me in vitro. I got twenty-three pairs, just like you, and what I am is written all over them. There’s no optional discard for shit like mine. No knockout sequencer in a hypo they can shoot me up with and make me safe to breed.”
“In which case,” she said quietly, “I’d have thought you’d see the Xtrasomes as a step forward. For the next generation at least.”
For a moment, he could feel the rolling weight of his own pointless anger, back and forth through his chest cavity like a punching bag left swinging. Images from the past four wasted months flickered jaggedly through his head.
He put a clamp on it.
“I’m a little short on that kind of outlook right now. But let’s stick with Montes, shall we? I’ll bet you this much: she’s got a combat history, at a minimum a combat training history. If it doesn’t show up in the prior record, then she hid it for some reason. She wouldn’t be the first person to wind up in the Angeline Freeport wearing a brand-new identity. Wouldn’t be the first person to marry someone who knows nothing about who she used to be, either, so you’re probably wasting your time talking to the husband.”
“Yeah. Usually the way.”
“How old were the kids?”
“Four and seven.”
“His?”
“I don’t know.” Ertekin reached up and made a gesture that split the virtuality open. She tugged down a data scroll, gently glowing text written on the air like some angelic missive. She paged down with delicate middle-and ring-finger motions while the index finger kept the scroll open. “Yeah. First birth’s Republic-registered, looks like they moved to the Freeport shortly after. Second child was born there.”
“So she’s from the Republic, too.”
“Looks like it, yeah. You think that’s relevant?”
“Might be.” Carl hesitated, trying to put the rest of it into words, the vague intimations he’d had while he watched the replay death of Toni Montes. “There’s something else. The children were the obvious leverage, the reason she let him kill her.”
Ertekin made a gesture of distaste. “Yeah, so you said.”
“Yeah, so the question has to be why did she believe him. He could have killed her and then still waited around and murdered the rest of her family. Why trust him to keep his word?”
“You think a mother put in that situation has a choice? You think—”
“Ertekin, she was making choices all the time. Remember the genetic trace under the nails? This isn’t a civilian we’re talking about, this is a competent woman making a series of very cold, very hard calculations. And one of those calculations was to trust the man who put a bullet through her head. Now, what does that say to you?”
She grimaced. The words came reluctantly.
“That she knew him.”
He nodded. “Yeah. She knew him well. Well enough to know she could trust his word. Now, where does your suburban housewife mother of two part-time real estate saleslady make friends like that?”
He went and sat in one of the hammocks while she thought about it.
Norton was waiting for them when they surfaced.
Sevgi blinked back to local awareness and saw him watching her through the glass panel on the couch cover. It felt a little like staring up at someone from underwater. She thumbed the release catch at her side, propped herself up on her elbows as the hood hinged up.
“Any progress?” Her voice sounded dull in her own ears—hearing thickened with the residual hum of the soundproofing.
Norton nodded. “Yes. Of the slow variety.”
“Do we get to go home?”
“Maybe tonight. Nicholson pulled in Roth and there’s a full-scale diplomatic war in the making.” He crimped a grin. “Roth is demanding a fully armed motorcade escort to Miami International, and fighter cover until we’re out of Republican airspace. Really wants to rub their faces in it.”
“That’s our Andrea.” Sevgi hauled herself off the couch and upright, groggy from the time in virtual and lack of k37. Despite herself, she felt a flicker of warmth for Andrea Walker Roth and the arrayed might of COLIN’s diplomatic muscle. She didn’t really like the woman, not any more than the rest of the policy board; she knew Roth was, like all of them, first and foremost a power broker. But—
But sometimes, Sev, it’s good to have the big battalions standing behind you.
“Yeah, well, my guess is the real pressure’s coming from Ortiz.” Norton gestured at the other couch, where Carl Marsalis was just sitting up. “Secretary general nomination in the wind and all. He’s going to be full of UN-friendly gestures for the next eight months. Luck and a following wind, he could be your boss next year, Marsalis.”
The black man grimaced. “Not my boss. I’m freelance, remember.”
“Fact remains, he’s our best hope of not having to spend another night down here. There’s a lot of COLIN subcontracting in this state. Lot of sensitive business-community leaders who won’t want waves made. That’s the angle Ortiz will play while Roth goes down the wires to Washington.” Norton spread his hands, turned back mostly to Sevgi. “My guess is we’ll wait till nightfall. Just a case of sitting tight.”
Marsalis got up off the couch and winced. He worked one shoulder around in circles.
“Something the matter?” Sevgi asked.
He looked at her for a moment as if gauging the level of genuine concern in her voice. “Yeah. Four months of substandard betamyeline chloride.”
“Ah,” said Norton.
Marsalis flexed his right arm experimentally, a climber’s stretch, palm to nape of neck, elbow up beside his head. He grimaced again. “Don’t suppose you’d have any around?”
Norton shook his head. “It’s unlikely. Human traffic through Perez is down to a minimum these days. Not much call for mesh-related product. Can you hold on until we get to New York?”
“I can hold on pretty much forever. I’d just rather not, if it’s all the same to you. It’s, uh, uncomfortable.”
“We’ll get you some painkillers,” Sevgi promised. “You should have said something last night.”
“It slipped my mind.”
“Look, I’ll check with supplies anyway,” said Norton. “You never know. There might be some mothballed stock.”
“Thank you.” Marsalis glanced between the two COLIN officers, then nodded toward the door of the v-chamber. “I’m going to go for a walk. Be on the beach if you need me.”
Norton waited until he was gone.
“Excuse me? If we need him? Is it just me or is he the one who needs something from us right now?”
Sevgi held down an unexpected smile. “He’s a thirteen, Tom. What are you going to do?”
“Well, not look very hard for his betamyeline is what comes immediately to mind.”
“He did say thank you.”
“Yeah.” Norton nodded reluctantly. “He did.”
He hesitated, and Sevgi could almost hear what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. She found herself, suddenly, inexplicably saying it for him. “Ethan, right?”
“Look, I know you don’t like to—”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter, Tom. I. You know, maybe I’m way too sensitive around certain topics. Maybe it’s time. Right? You were going to ask about Ethan? If he was like this?”
Small pause. “Was he?”
She sighed, testing the seals on her self-control. Breath a little shuddery, but otherwise fuck it, Sev, it’s four years gone, you need to…
To what? Need what?
You need…something, Sev. Some fucking thing, you need.
Sigh again. Gesture at the door Marsalis just walked out of.
“Ethan was a different man, Tom. Ethan wasn’t his gene code, he wasn’t just a jazzed-up area thirteen and a custom-wired limbic system. He—”
Another helpless gesture.
“Do I see similarities? Yeah. Did Ethan have the same hey-cut-my-fucking-throat-see-if-I-care attitude? Yeah. Did Ethan make any normal male in the room itch up the way Marsalis is making you itch up? Yeah. Does that—”
“Sev, I’m not—”
“You are, Tom.” She spread her hands, offered up the smile she’d repressed earlier. “You are. It’s how they built them, it’s what they’re for. And your reaction—that’s how they built you. It’s just that it took evolution a hundred thousand generations to put you together, and it took human science less than a century to build them. Faster systems management, that’s all.”
“What’s that, a quote from the Project Lawman brochure?”
Sevgi shook her head, kept the smile. “No. Just something Ethan used to say. Look, you asked me if Ethan and this guy are alike? How would I know? Ethan used to get up half an hour before me every morning and grind fresh coffee for us both. Would this guy do that? Who knows?”
“One way to find out,” said Norton, deadpan.
Sevgi lost her smile. Leveled a warning finger. “Don’t even go there.”
“Sorry.” There wasn’t much sincerity in the way he said it. A grin hovered in one corner of his mouth. “Got to get down to Fifth Avenue, sort out that sense of humor.”
“You got that right.”
He grew abruptly serious. “Look, I’m just curious, is all. Both these guys do share some pretty substantial engineered genetic traits.”
“Yeah, so what? Your parents engineered some similar genetic material into you and your brother way back at the start of Project Norton. Does that make the two of you similar?”
Norton grimaced. “Hardly.”
“So why assume that because Ethan and Marsalis have some basic genetic traits in common, there’d be any similarity in what kind of men they are? You can’t equate them just because they’re both variant thirteen, any more than you can equate them because, I don’t know, because they’re both black.”
“Oh come on, Sev. Be serious. We’re talking about substantial genetic tendency, not skin color.”
“I am serious.”
“No, you’re not. You’re flailing, and you know it. It’s not a good analogy.”
“Maybe not for you, Tom. But take a walk out that gate and see what kind of thinking you knock up against. It’s the same knee-jerk prejudice, just out of fucking date like everything else in Jesusland.”
Norton gave her a pained look. His tone tugged toward reproach. “Now you’re just letting your Union bigotry run away with you.”
“Think so?” She didn’t want to be this angry, but it was swelling and she couldn’t find a way to shut it down. Her voice was tight with the rising pulse of it. “You know, Ethan tracked down his sourcemat mother once. Turns out she’s this drop-dead-smart academic up in Seattle now, but she’s from here originally.”
“From Florida?”
“No, not from Florida.” Sevgi waved a hand irritably. “Louisiana, Mississippi, someplace like that. Jesusland, however you want to look at it. She grew up in the southern US, before Secession.”
Norton shrugged. “From what I hear, that’s pretty standard. They got most of the sourcemat mothers from the poverty belt back then. Cheap raw materials, fresh eggs for quick cash, right?”
“Yeah, well, she was luckier. She let some West Coast clinic harvest her in exchange for enough cash to set up and study in Seattle. Point is, I went across there with Ethan to see her.” Sevgi knew she was staring off into space, but she couldn’t make herself stop that, either. It was the last trip they’d made together. “You wouldn’t believe some of the shit she told us she went through, purely based on the color of her fucking skin. And that’s a single generation back.”
“You’re talking about Jesusland, Sev.”
“Oh, so who’s pulling Union rank now?”
“Fine.” For the first time, anger sharpened Norton’s voice. “Look, Sev, you don’t want to talk about this stuff, that’s fine with me. But make up your mind. I’m just trying to get a lock on our newfound friend.”
Sevgi held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. She sighed. “No, you’re not, Tom. That’s not it.”
“No? Now you’re a telepath?”
She smiled wearily. “I don’t need to be. I’m used to this. From before, from when I was with Ethan. This isn’t about Marsalis. It’s about me.”
“Hey, a telepath and modest, too.” But she saw how he faltered as he said it. She shrugged.
“Suit yourself, Tom. Maybe you haven’t spotted it yet, maybe you just don’t want to see it. But what you’re really trying to get a lock on is Marsalis and me. How I’m going to react to him, how I am reacting to him.”
Norton stared at her for a long moment. Long enough that she thought he would turn away. Then he gave her a shrug of his own.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “So how are you reacting to him, Sev?”
Norton was on the money about going home, if nothing else. It took the rest of the day to get clearance, and when it finally came, the crowds were still at the gate. Someone had set up big portable LCLS panels along the road, jacked into car batteries or run off their own integral power packs. From the tower, it looked like a bizarre outdoor art gallery, little knots of figures gathered in front of each panel, or walking between. The chanting had died down with the onset of night and the eventual arrival of three cherry-topped state police teardrops. They were parked now in among the other vehicles, but if the officers they’d brought were doing any crowd control, they were keeping a low profile while they did it. And the media had apparently all gone home.
“Seen it before,” said the tower guard, a slim Hispanic just on for the graveyard shift. “Staties usually chase them off, so there’s no adverse coverage if the shit hits the fan. Shit does hit the fan, everyone runs the same sanitized broadcast the next morning. Tallahassee got deals with most of the networks, privileged access to legislature and like that. No one breaks ranks.”
“Yeah,” rumbled Marsalis. “Responsible Reporting. I’m going to miss that.”
The night wind coming off the sea was cool and faintly sewn with salt. Sevgi felt it stir strands of hair on her cheek, felt cop instinct twitch awake inside her at the same moment. She kept herself from turning to look at him, kept her tone casual. “Going to miss it? Where you going then?”
He did turn. She offered him a sideways glance, clashed gazes.
“New York, right?” he said easily. “North Atlantic Union territory, proud home of the free American press?”
She looked again, locked stares this time. “Are you trying to piss me off, Marsalis?”
“Hey, I’m just quoting the tourist guide here. Union’s the only place they got Lindley versus NSA still in force, right? Still got their statue of Lindley up in Battery Park, defender of truth chiseled on the base? Most places I’ve been in the Republic, they’ve pulled those statues down.”
She let it go, let the cop twitch slide out of view for the time being, tagged for later attention. For the rest, she didn’t know if she’d misread the irony in his voice or not. She was irritable enough to have done so; maybe he was irritable enough to have meant it. She couldn’t be bothered to call it either way. After a full day of waiting, none of them was in the best of moods.
She shifted to the other side of the tower, swapped her view. Out at the far side of the complex, partially occluded by the towering bulk of the rack, the landing strip lights burned luminous green. They were far enough off for the distance to make them wink, as if they were embers the sea wind kept blowing on. COLIN were sending a dedicated transport, flatline flight so they’d be waiting awhile longer, but it was on its way and home was only a matter of hours away. She could almost feel the rough cotton sheets on her bed against her skin.
Marsalis, she’d worry about later.
After a couple of minutes, he left the tower top without comment and clattered back down the caged stairs to the ground. She watched him walk away in the flare of ground lighting, off toward the shore again. Casual lope, almost an amble but for the barely perceptible poise in the way he moved. He didn’t look back. The darkness down to the beach swallowed him up. She frowned.
Later. Worry about it later, Sev.
She let her mind coast in neutral, watched the lights.
And presently, the COLIN jet whispered down from the cloud base toward them, studded sparsely with landing lights of its own. It kissed the ground, silent with distance, and taxied in like a jeweled shadow.
She yawned and went to fetch her stuff.
In flight, she dozed off and dreamed about the Lindley statue. Murat stood with her in winter sunlight—as he had when she was about eleven, but in the dream she was an adult—and pointed at the chiseled legend in the base. From the discomfort of truth there is only one refuge and that is ignorance. I do not need to be comfortable, and I will not take refuge. I demand to know.
See, he was saying. It only takes one woman like this.
But when she looked up at the statue of Lindley, it had transformed into the black-sketched perpetrator from the Montes CSI construct, and it leapt off the base at her, fist raised.
She fell back and grappled, one from the manual, cross-block and grab. The figure’s arm was slick in her grasp and now ended, she saw, not in a fist but a Greek theater mask cut out of metal. As she wrestled with the sketch, she understood with the flash logic of dreams that her opponent intended to press the mask onto her face and that once it was done, there would be no way to get it off.
Across the park, a mother pushed a baby in a stroller. Two kids sat in the grass and dueled their glinting micro-fighter models high overhead, fingers frantic on the controls in their laps, heads tilting wildly beneath the blank-faced headsets. Her own fight went slower, sluggish, like drowning in mud. The construct murderer was stronger than she was, but seemed disinclined to tactics. Every move she made bought her time, but she could do no damage, could not break the clinch.
The mask began to block out the sun on her face.
I have done everything I can, said Murat wearily, and she wanted to cry but couldn’t. Her breath came hard now, hurting her throat. Her father was walking away from her, across the park toward the railings and the water. She had to twist her neck to keep him in sight. She would have called after him, but her throat hurt too much, and anyway she knew it wouldn’t do any good. The fight started to drain out of her, tiny increments heralding the eventual evaporation of her strength. Even the sun was turning cold. She struggled mechanically, bitterly, and overhead, the mask—
The plane banked and woke her.
Someone had lowered the cabin lights while she slept, and the plane’s interior was sunk in gloom. She leaned across the seat to the window and peered out. Towers of crystalline light slid beyond the glass, red-studded with navigation flash. Then the long dark absence of the East River, banded with bridges like jeweled rings on a slim and slightly crooked finger. She sighed and sank back in her seat.
Home. For what it was worth.
The plane straightened out. Marsalis came through from the forward section, presumably on his way to the toilet. He nodded down at her.
“Sleep well?”
She shrugged and lied.
By the time they disembarked and came through the deserted environs of the private-carrier terminal at JFK, it was nearly 3 am. Norton left them standing just inside the endless row of glass doors onto the pickup zone and went to get his car out of parking. The whole place was full of a glaring, white-lit quiet that seemed to whine just at the edge of audibility.
“So what’s the plan?” Marsalis asked her.
“The plan is get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll take you over to Jefferson Park and get you hooked up with our chain of command. Roth, Ortiz, and Nicholson are all going to want to meet you. Then we’ll look at Montes. If your theory checks out, there’ll be some trace of a previous identity somewhere in the data record.”
“You hope.”
“No, I know,” she said irritably. “No one disappears for real anymore, not even in the Angeline Freeport.”
“Merrin seems to be managing.”
“Merrin’s strictly a temporary phenomenon.”
They went back to staring averted angles around the terminal space until Norton rolled up in the snarl-grilled Cadillac. He’d held off putting the top up until a couple of weeks ago, but there was no way to avoid it now. The early-hours air beyond the terminal doors had a snap in it that promised the raw cold of the winter ahead.
“Nice ride,” said Marsalis as he got in.
He’d taken the front seat. Sevgi rolled her eyes and climbed in the back. Norton grinned at her in the mirror.
“Thanks,” he said, and gunned the magdrive as they pulled away. It didn’t quite have the throaty roar of the vehicles from the period road movies he occasionally dragged Sevgi to at art-house theaters in the Village, but the car thrummed pleasantly enough and they took the exit ramp at rising speed. Norton drifted them across into the curve of the citybound highway. The airport complex fell away behind them like a flung fairy crown. Norton raised his eyes to the mirror again. “What are we doing about accommodation, Sev?”
“You can put me in a hotel,” Marsalis said, yawning. “Wherever suits. I’m not fussy.”
Sevgi faked a yawn of her own and slumped back in the seat. “Let’s sort that out tomorrow. Too much hassle coordinating it all now. You can stay at my place tonight. Tom, I’ll bring him in and meet you at the office for lunch. Somewhere on the mezzanine. Say about twelve?”
Peripheral vision showed her Norton trying to make eye contact in the mirror. His face was the carefully immobile deadpan she associated with his witnessing of mistakes made. He used it a lot in briefings with Nicholson. She gazed steadfastly out of the side window.
“He could stay with me, Sev. I’ve got the space.”
“So do I.” She made it come out casual. Still watching the dull metal ribbon of the crash barrier as it whipped smoothly along beside the car in the gloom. A teardrop taxi blipped past on the opposing side of the highway. “Anyway, Tom, it’d take you the best part of an hour just to clear out all that junk you keep in the spare room. All I have to do is crank down the futon. Just drop us off, it’ll be fine.”
Now she turned and met his eyes in the mirror. Matched him deadpan for deadpan. He shrugged and punched up some music on the car’s sound system, ancient Secession-era punk no one played anymore. Detroitus or Error Code; Sevgi never could tell the two bands apart despite Norton’s best efforts to instruct her. She settled back to the outside view again and let the vitriol of it wash over her, lulled by the familiar high-stepping bass lines and the stuttering, hacking guitars. She found her mouth forming fragments of lyrics:
Got what you want at last, got your
Closed little world
Got your superhero right and wrong
And your fuckin’ flag unfurled
Marsalis stirred, leaned forward to read the player display, and sank back again without comment. Guitar fury skirled out of the speakers. The car slammed on through the night.
When they pulled up outside Sevgi’s building, Norton killed the engine and got out to see them to the door. It was a nice gesture, but it felt wrong—Harlem hadn’t seen serious crime in decades, and anyway, in among the carbon-fiber skeletons of the market stalls, figures were already moving around with crates, setting up. The place would be coming to noisy life in another couple of hours. Sevgi made a mental note to make sure the windows were all tight shut before she slept. She smiled wearily at Norton.
“Thanks, Tom. You’d better get moving.”
“Yeah.”
He hesitated.
“See you on the mez, then,” she said brightly.
“Uh, yeah. Twelve o’clock?”
“Yeah, twelve’s good.”
“Where’d you want to eat? Henty’s or—”
“Sure. Henty’s.” Backing away now. “Sounds good.”
He nodded slowly and went back to the car. She raised a hand in farewell. He pulled out, looking back. They watched him out of sight before Sevgi turned to the door of the building and showed the scanner her face. The door cracked open on a hydraulic sigh.
“Sixth floor,” she said, hefting her shoulder bag. “No elevator.”
“Yeah? Why’s that then?”
“Period charm. You coming?”
They took the stairs at a trudge. LCLS panels blinked awake on each floor as they climbed, then died to dimness in their wake. The bright white glow shone on pre-Secession grafitoform murals and embedded holoshots of the building in its various stages of growth. Sevgi found herself noticing them for the first time in months as consciousness of the man at her back lit everything for her the same way as the LCLS. She bit back the impulse to play tour guide.
In the apartment, she went from room to room, showing him where things were. He went to use the bathroom as soon as she was done. She checked the windows while he was in there, set the locks, organized herself. Fetched sheets and a quilt from the cupboard in the en suite. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she took the bed linen down, and didn’t recognize the look on her face. There was a warm, irritable confusion rising in her as to how she should do this. Back in the living room, she powered up the futon and remote-extended it. She was putting on the sheets when he came out and joined her.
“All yours,” she said, finishing and standing back up.
“Thank you.”
They stood looking at the crisp, clean sheets. He seemed to be waiting for something. Maybe in response, a circuit clicked shut somewhere inside her. She put her hands in her jacket pockets and hooked his gaze.
“The door’s double-locked,” she said. “It’s DNA-coded.”
His brow creased. Silent query.
Ah fuck it, here we go. “You may as well know this now, Marsalis. You’re going to find out sooner or later, so it may as well come from me. My last relationship was a thirteen. He’s dead now, but I know how that shit works.” She tapped fingertips to her temple. “I know how you work up here. Right now, you’re probably mapping the shortest possible route across town to East Forty-fifth and First.”
No visible reaction. She plunged on.
“And you’re right, it’s not far. Three, four klicks and cross the lines, you’re home free. UN territory, right here in the heart of New York. I’m not sure how they’d get you out after that, but my guess is the powers-that-be here in the Union wouldn’t kick much. They’ve got a better working relationship with the UN than with COLIN most of the time. Truth comes down, they don’t like us much better than they do the Republic.”
“That must be very upsetting for you.”
“You’re too kind. So, like I said, I know what’s in your mind. I don’t even blame you much. It’s not like you’re a free actor here—you’re locked into something you’d probably rather not be a part of. You’re under duress, and I know how badly that plays in the thirteen mind-set. You’re looking for a way to pick the locks or smash down the door.”
Ethan’s words. He used to grin as he said them, that something-burning grin.
She waited to see what he’d do. If he’d move.
He didn’t. He raised an eyebrow instead, looked down at the open blade of his right hand. She recognized the displacement training, and a faint shiver ran through her.
He cleared his throat.
“Well, it’s nice to know I’m so well understood. But you see, Ms. Ertekin, there seems to be a major flaw in your procedures here. If I’m the ravening, duress-shattering thirteen motherfucker you—”
“I didn’t say—”
“—have me down as, then what’s to stop me caving in your skull here and now, slashing you open to get some warm blood for your precious DNA locks, and then doing my predawn sprint across town after all?”
“The lock only works off saliva.”
He stared at her. “I could always scrape it out of your dead mouth.”
“Do you think you’re going to scare me, Marsalis?”
“I couldn’t care less if I scare you or not.” For the first time since she’d met him, his voice tightened toward anger. “You were fucking some burned-out genetic augment who said he was a thirteen, and you want to delude yourself I’m him, that’s your problem. I don’t know what I symbolize to you, Ertekin, what you want me to symbolize, but I’m not up for it. I’m not a fucking number, I’m not a fucking gene code. I’m Carl Marsalis, I think we met already.” He stuck out his hand bluntly, mock-offer of a clasp, then let it fall. “But in case it hasn’t sunk in, that’s all I am. Got a problem with that, then fuck off and deal with it somewhere I don’t have to listen to you.”
They faced each other either end of the stare, a couple of meters apart. To Sevgi, the room seemed to rock gently on the axis of their locked gazes.
“This is my house you’re in,” she reminded him.
“Then book me into a fucking hotel.” He held her eyes for a moment, then looked down at the extended futon. “One with room service that doesn’t lecture the guests.” Another pause. “And an elevator.”
Out of nowhere, the laugh broke in her. She coughed it up.
“Right,” she said.
He looked up again. Grimaced. “Right.”
She seated herself on one arm of the couch. Hands still tucked in her pockets, but she could feel the tension in her begin to ease. Marsalis raised an arm toward her and let it fall.
“I’m tired,” he said. It wasn’t clear if he meant it as an apology or information. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going to try and run out on you. I’m going to get some sleep and see if we can’t make a fresh start in the morning. Sound okay to you?”
Sevgi nodded. “Sounds good.”
“Yeah.” He looked around, fixed on the futon again. “Well. Thanks for making up the bed.”
She shrugged. “You’re a guest.”
“Could I get a glass of water?”
She stood up and nodded toward the kitchen. “Sure. Chiller on the counter. Glasses are in the cupboard above. Help yourself.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. G’night.”
She went to the bedroom and hooked the door closed behind her. Stood there for a while, listening to him move about in the kitchen.
Then she took her right hand out of her jacket pocket, opened her palm, and considered the Remington stunspike it held. It looked innocuous, a short thick tube in smooth matte gray. The charge light winked green at her from one end. Thrown hard or jabbed into the target by hand, it carried enough power to put anything human on the floor and leave it there for the best part of twenty minutes.
She hesitated for a moment, then slipped the spike under her pillow and began to get undressed.
He lay flat on his back on the futon, head pillowed on his crossed palms, and stared at the ceiling.
Still locked up, then.
Stupid fucking bitch.
Well, not really. She saw you coming a thousand meters out. That makes her pretty fucking smart.
He sighed and looked across at the window. Six floors up, probably jacked into the same security as the door anyway. Not a chance.
Could always—
Oh fuck off. Weren’t you listening to Sutherland? Only do what you are happy to live with. She made your bed, for fuck’s sake. You’re out of the Republic, you’re out of jail. How bad can it be? Sit it out, look at the case. Make some suggestions, let them get comfortable with you. If they want this to work, they can’t keep a leash on you twenty-four seven.
He reached over for the glass and propped himself up to drink.
So she’s an unluck-fucker. Doesn’t seem the sort.
The sort being? Zooly?
Come on, that was a one-off.
A twice-off. So far.
Zooly’s a friend.
Yeah, a friend who likes to fuck unlucks on an occasional basis.
Maybe it’s me Zooly likes to fuck on an occasional basis. Ever think of that? Maybe my genetic status has fuck-all to do with it.
Right. And maybe this Ertekin woman just liked to fuck her unluck boyfriend for who he was, too.
Ah, go to sleep.
He couldn’t. The mesh sent rusty twinges through him, out of time with his pulse.
Better deal with that tomorrow. Nearly four months of substandard chloride, you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t seize up on you soon.
Seemed to work on Dudeck and his pals.
Yeah, this isn’t some bunch of neo-Nazi fuckwits you’re dealing with now, this is another thirteen. An adapted thirteen, by the sound of it. You’ll need to be wired all the way right if you’re going to—
Hoy. Going to what? Couple of days and a dropped guard, we’re out of here, remember.
He went back to staring at the ceiling.
A bad chloride twinge kicked him awake, bone-deep aching along his left forearm and sudden sweat from the intensity of the pain. He’d curled up around it instinctively in his sleep, and there was a faint whimper trapped in his throat as he woke. Aunt Chitra’s pain-management training, the silent imperative. Take the pain, breathe, breathe it under control, and don’t make a fucking sound. He swallowed and rolled over, protecting the aching limb with his other arm.
Remembered he was in Sevgi Ertekin’s home, and relaxed. The whimper got free as a low groan.
The room was full of barely filtered light—there were varipolara drapes at the windows, and someone had forgotten to opaque them the all the way down the night before. His watch said it was a little after nine. He grunted and flexed the fingers of his left hand, chased the pain to fading. The mesh, for reasons the Marstech biolabs apparently still didn’t understand, “remembered” injury trauma and tended to overload the system in those parts of the body that had suffered it in the past. Fine so long as you fueled the system right; the worst you got was a faint warmth and itching at the site of previous wounds. But with the shit he’d been buying from Louie over the last few months, the neuromuscular interfacing would be ragged and inflamed. And Carl had once stopped a Saudi opsdog with that forearm. Some monstrous engineered hybrid, ghost-pale and snarling as it materialized out of the desert night and leapt at his throat. The impact put him on his back, the jaws sank into the bone, and even after he killed the fucking thing, it took them nearly five minutes to break the bite lock and get it off him.
He listened for sound through the apartment, heard nothing. Evidently Ertekin was still out cold. No chance of going back to sleep now, and the door was still locked. He thought about it for a moment then got up, pulled on his pants, and padded through to the kitchen. A brief search of the cupboards produced coffee for the espresso machine in the corner. OLYMPUS MONS ROBUSTA BLEND—FROM ACTUAL MARSTECH GENE LABS! Yeah, right. He allowed himself a sour grin and set up the machine to make two long cups, then went to the fridge for milk.
There were a couple of LongLife cartons open, one weighing in at about half full, the other a lot less. On impulse he sniffed at the torn cardboard openings on both. Pulled a face and upended each carton carefully one after the other over the sink. With the least full of the two, the contents came out slow and semi-solid, splattered across the metal in slimy white clots. He shook his head and rinsed the mess away.
“You and Zooly’d get on like a fucking house on fire,” he muttered and went back to the cupboards to find more milk.
“Who you talking to?”
He turned with the fresh carton in his hand. The kitchen had filled with the smell of coffee, and either that or the noise he was making rummaging in the cupboards had woken Ertekin. She stood in the kitchen doorway, eyes heavy-lidded, hair stuck up in clumps, wearing a faded NYPD T-shirt several sizes too big for her and, as far as he could tell, nothing much else. The look on her face wasn’t friendly.
“Singing,” he said. “To myself. I made coffee.”
“Yeah, so I fucking see.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re welcome.”
She looked back at him for a moment, impassively, then turned away. He caught the lines of her hips under the T-shirt, the length of her thighs as the about-turn brought her legs together.
“What time is it?”
“’Bout half past nine.”
“Fuck, Marsalis.” Her voice trailed away, back toward the bedroom. “What you got, insomnia or something?”
Sounds of water splashing, a door closing it off. A sudden, unlooked-for image opened in his head. Sevgi Ertekin strips off her T-shirt and steps into the shower, hands gathered under her chin beneath the stream of warm water, arms pressing breasts flat and—
He grinned wryly and derailed the internal experia script before it reached his groin. Finished making the coffee anyway. It came out rich and creamed with bubbles, steaming an aroma that kicked him straight back to the dusty bubblefabs of Huari camp. The ominous itch on his skin of sunlight through an atmosphere only recently made thick enough to breathe, the uneasy pull of Mars gravity, the loose grip of a planet that didn’t recognize him as its own and didn’t really see why it should hold on to him. Coffee in aluminium canisters, dust crunching underfoot, and Sutherland at his shoulder, rumbling speech like the reassuring turnover of heavy plant machinery. Nothing human-scale around here, soak. Just shade your eyes and take a look. And the staggering, neck-tilting view up Massif Verne, to drive the other man’s point home.
He poured the coffee into two mugs, took one for himself and left hers to get cold on the kitchen counter. Serve her fucking right. He sipped from his mug, pulled a surprised face. From actual Marstech gene labs was right. He hated it when reality bore out the clanging boasts of the hype. He went back to the living room and peered out at the market below. He didn’t know the city well, and this part less than most, but Ertekin’s building was a pretty standard nanotech walk-up and he guessed the open plaza below had been a part of the same redevelopment. It had the faintly organic lines of all early nanobuild. He knew parts of southeast London that looked much the same. Buildings in a bucket—just pour it out and watch them grow.
He heard her come out of the bedroom, heard her in the kitchen. Then he could feel her in the room with him, at his back, watching. She cleared her throat. He turned and saw her on the other side of the room, dressed and somewhat groomed, coffee mug held in both hands. She gestured with the drink.
“Thanks.” She looked away, then back. “I uh. I’m not great first thing in the morning.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Randomly, for something to fill the quiet between them: “Possible sign of greatness. Nor was Felipe Souza, by all accounts.”
Flicker of a smile. “No?”
“No. Did all his molecular dynamics work at night. I read this biography of him, once I got back to Earth. Seemed appropriate, you know. Anyway, book says, when they took him on at UNAM, he refused to lecture before midday. Great guy to have as a tutor, right?”
“Not for you.”
“Well, my head starts to spin once you get past basic buckyball structure, so—”
“No, I meant the morning thing.” She gestured with the cup again, one-handed this time, a little more open. “You wouldn’t be—”
“Oh, that.” He shrugged. “It’s the training. Never really goes away.”
Quiet opened up again in the wake of his words. The conversation, caught and scraping in the shallow waters of her continued embarrassment. He reached for something to pole them clear again. Something that had flared dimly in his mind the previous night as he finally arced downward toward sleep.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking. You guys debriefed the onboard djinn for Horkan’s Pride, right? Back in June, when this all started.”
“Yeah.” Her voice stretched a little on the word, quizzical. He liked the sound it made. He fumbled after follow-up.
“Yeah, so who’d you have do it? In-house team?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it. We got transcripts handed down, probably some geek hired out of MIT’s machine interface squad. They handle most of our n-djinn work. Why, you think there’s something they missed?”
“It’s always a possibility.”
A skeptical look. “Something you’d pick up?”
“Okay, maybe not something they missed, as such.” He sipped his coffee. Gestured. “Just something they weren’t looking for, because I wasn’t on the scene. A close link between Merrin and me. Something that’ll put me next to him.”
“A link? You said you didn’t know him.”
“I don’t, directly. Come on, Ertekin, you were a cop. You must know something about complexity theory. Social webbing.”
She shrugged. “Sure. We got the basics in our demodynamics classes. Yaroshanko intuition, Chen and Douglas, Rabbani. All the way back to Watts and Strogatz, all that small-world networks shit. So what? You know, once you get out on the streets for real, most of that demodynamics stuff’s about as useful as poetry in a whorehouse.”
He held back a grin. “Maybe so. But small-world networks work. And the variant thirteen club on Mars is a very small world. As is Mars itself. I may not know Merrin, but I’m willing to bet you can link me to him in a couple of degrees of separation or less. And if those links are there, then nothing’s going to spot them out better than an n-djinn.”
“Yeah. Any n-djinn. Why’s it got to be Horkan’s Pride?”
“Because Horkan’s Pride was the last djinn to see Merrin alive. It stands to reason that—”
Soft chime from the door.
Ertekin glanced at her watch, reflexively. Confusion creased in the corners of her eyes.
“Guess Tom just doesn’t trust the two of us together,” Carl said, deadpan.
The confusion faded out, traded for a disdain he made as manufactured. She crossed to the door and picked up the privacy receiver.
“Yes?”
He saw her eyes widen slightly. She nodded, said yes a couple more times, then hung up. When she looked at him again, there was a fully fledged frown on her face. He couldn’t decide if she was worried or annoyed, or both.
“It’s Ortiz,” she said. “He drove here.”
He covered his own surprise. “What an honor. Does he collect all his new hires by limousine?”
“Not since I’ve been working there.”
“So it must be me.”
He’d intended it to come out light and supple with irony. But somewhere, sometime in the last four months, he’d lost the knack. He heard the weight in his own words, and so did she.
“Yeah.” She looked at him over her coffee mug. “It must be you.”
He’d met Ortiz a couple of times before, but doubted the man would remember him. Both meetings were years in the past, both had been swathed in the glassy-smile insincerity of diplomatic visits, and Carl had been only one of several variant thirteen trackers in a queue of agency staff lined up to press the visiting flesh on arrival. Munich II was in process, there was talk of COLIN coming back to the table to approve the Accords, fully this time, and everyone was walking on eggs. Back then—Carl recalled vaguely, he hadn’t been that interested—Ortiz was a newly recruited policy adviser, fresh from a political career in the Rim States and not yet a major figure in the COLIN hierarchy. Detail had faded, but Carl remembered grizzled hair and a tan, a slim-hipped dancer’s frame that belied the other man’s fifty-something years. A slight lift to the serious brown eyes that might have been Filipino ancestry or just biosculp to suggest the same to voters. A good smile.
For his own part, Carl had been busy enjoying the comforts of his newly reacquired anonymity at the time. The media focus attendant on his rescue and return from Mars and the Felipe Souza had died down, to his relief, the previous year; the celebrity machine, in the absence of any attempt on his part to restoke the fires of its interest, had grown bored with him and moved on. Sure, he’d made it back alive and sane from a nightmarish systems breakdown in deep space, but what else had he done recently? UNGLA was sealed up tight, bureaucratically impassive, not the kind of brightly confected media play the networks liked at all. The high-profile cases were still to come. Meanwhile, some adolescent son of African royalty was up and about on the Euro scene, deploying his Xtrasome capacity at a Cambridge college and his polished-jet good looks in the dj-votional clubs of west London. The Bannister family were settling, amid some local acrimony, into their Union citizenship. A Thai experia star was getting married. And so on. The unblinking media eye rolled away, and Carl felt its absence like the sudden cool of shade from the Martian sun.
They went down to the street. Cold struck through the thin fabric of the S(t)igma jacket he’d blagged in Florida.
Ortiz was waiting for them on the other side of the thoroughfare, leaning against the flank of the COLIN limo in a plain black topcoat and sipping coffee from a stall up the street. Carl could see the yellow-and-black logo repeat, weak holoplay in the bright winter air of the market and again in stenciled micro on the Styrofoam in Ortiz’s hand. Steam coiled up out of the cup and met the frost of the man’s breath as he raised the coffee to his lips. An unobtrusive security exec stood nearby, hands lightly clasped, scanning the façade from behind lens-sheathed eyes.
Ortiz spotted them and stacked his coffee casually on the roof of the limo at his side. As Carl approached, he stepped forward to meet him and stuck out his hand. No wince, no sign of the internal steeling Carl was used to when he made the clasp with someone who knew what he was. Instead, there was a loose grin on Ortiz’s lean bronzed face that shaved years off his otherwise sober demeanor.
“Mr. Marsalis. Good to see you again. It’s been awhile, I don’t know if you’ll remember me from Brussels.”
“Spring ’03.” Carl masked his surprise. “Yeah, I remember.”
Ortiz made a wry face. “What a complete mess that was, eh? Two agendas, worlds apart and steaming steadily in opposite directions. Hard to believe we even bothered talking.”
Carl shrugged. “Talking’s always the easy part. Looks good, doesn’t cost anything.”
“Yes, very true.” Ortiz shifted focus with the polished smoothness of the career politician. “Ms. Ertekin. I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. Tom Norton told me you’d be coming in, but I felt in view of the. Unpleasantness, it might be as well to provide an escort. And since I was on my way across town anyway…”
You thought you’d swing the opportunity to curry some potential UN favor. Right. Or maybe just gawk at the thirteen.
But underneath the sneer, Carl found himself unable to summon much dislike for Ortiz. Maybe it was the relaxed handshake and the grin, maybe just the contrast with the past four months down in the Republic. He turned to catch Ertekin’s response, see what he could read in her face. The tiger eyes and—
—something invisible splits the air between them.
Carl was moving before he had time to consciously understand why.
—flicker of black motion in the corner of his eye—
He hit Ertekin with crossed arms, bore her to the pavement and crushed her there. One hand groping for a weapon he didn’t have. Over his head, the air in the street erupted in spit-hiss fury.
Magfire.
He heard the coachwork on the limo go first, riddled from end to end—it sounded like a spate of sudden, heavy rain. Someone yelled, grunted as they were hit. Bodies tumbled behind him, dimly sensed. Screams. He was smearing himself on top of Ertekin, casting about for the—
There.
Out of the market, the pitch and panic of the surrounding multitude, three crouched, black-clad forms, and the sashaying gait of skaters. They hugged the stubby electromag spray guns to their bellies, cradled low in both hands as they surfed the crowd. Shoulder work opened their path—Carl saw bystanders shunted aside and sprawling. The mesh made it seem like slow motion. Chloride clarity gave him the lead skater, stance shifting as he lifted the muzzle of the spray gun, eyes wide in the pale skin gap of the black ski mask. Half a dozen meters at most, he was going to make sure of his shot this time.
Carl locked gazes and came up off the floor snarling.
Later, he’d never know if it was the matched stare, the noise he made, or just the mesh-assisted speed that saved his life. Maybe there was the edge of a flinch in the man’s face as he hurtled forward; the ski mask made it hard to tell. By then Carl was already up and on him. Three—count them, one! two! three!—sprinted steps and a whirl of tanindo technique. The blade of his left hand slammed in under the lead skater’s chin; his right just added lift and vectored spin. The two of them went over together in a tangle of limbs. The spray gun dropped and skittered. Carl got on top of the skater and started hitting him in the face and throat.
The other two were sharp. The right wing leapt cleanly over the tumbled bodies in his path, came down tight with a solid plastic smack, and kept going. Carl got a confused glimpse of the landing, too busy killing the lead skater to pay real attention. But he felt the other wingman fuck up the same maneuver and catch one skate on Carl’s raised shoulder as he jumped. The black-clad form went headlong, almost graceful, hit and rolled on the pavement. Controlled impact, he’d be back up any second. The mesh strung moments apart like loops of cabling. Carl hacked down savagely with an elbow one more time and beneath him the lead skater went abruptly limp. As the tumbled wingman got almost back upright, Carl lunged, grabbed up the leader’s electromag, clumsily, left-handed, squirmed sideways, getting line of fire, and emptied the gun.
The magload sounded like seething water as it left the gun. No recoil—thank Christ—and pretty much point-blank. Carl lay, awkwardly braced, and watched the slugs rip into their target. The wing skater seemed to trip forward again, but jerkily this time, no grace in it. He collapsed facedown, twisted once, and didn’t move again.
The electromag’s feed mechanism coughed empty and stopped.
Sound filtered through: voices raised and hysterical weeping. Still frosted into the mesh, Carl heard it as if through a long pipe. He picked himself up warily, still not convinced at a cellular level that the third skater wasn’t coming back. He dropped the empty weapon, walked to the dead wingman. Crouched beside the body and tugged the man’s spray gun free. He checked the load, almost absently, on autopilot now, and surveyed the damage around him.
The limo was a write-off, coachwork pockmarked gray on black with the raking impact of the magfire. The windows were punched through in a couple of dozen places, powdered to white opaque in spiderweb lines around each hole. Incredibly, Ortiz’s coffee stood where he’d parked it, intact and steaming quietly on the roof of the limo. But Ortiz and his security were both down, tangled in each other’s arms and motionless—it looked as if the bodyguard had tried to get his boss to the ground and cover him there. Blood pooling on the molded pavement where they lay suggested he’d failed. Other bodies lay at a distance, shoppers and stall traders caught in the magfire. Ertekin was up on her knees, staring dazedly around at the mess. Her olive skin was smeared sallow with shock.
“Got two of them,” said Carl thickly as he helped her to her feet. “Third one was too fast leaving. Sorry.”
She just stared at him.
“Ertekin.” He flickered fingers in front of her face. “Are you injured? Are you hurt? Talk to me, Ertekin.”
She shook herself. Pushed his hand away.
“Fine.” It was a bare croak. She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. We’d better get. An ambulance. Get these people…”
She shook herself again.
“Who? Did you see…?”
“No.” Carl stared away in the direction the last skater had disappeared. He could feel a decision stealing over him like ice. “No, I didn’t. But right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work and find out.”
Sevgi was still shaking when the cops showed up. She felt an odd shame when the detective in charge, a lean dark man with hard bones in his face, finished talking with patrol and made his way across to her. He was bound to notice. Wrapped in an insulene recovery shawl, seated in the open rear door of the murdered limo and watching CSI go about their business, she felt drenched in her civilian status.
“Ms. Ertekin?”
She looked up bleakly. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Detective Williamson.” He flipped his left palm open. The NYPD holo twisted to blue-and-gold life, glistened at her like lost treasure. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if you’re feeling up to it.”
“I’m fine.” She’d taken the syn that morning, in the shower, but it wouldn’t have kicked in yet even on an empty stomach. She groped after conventional resources, pulled herself together with a shiver. “I used to be on the force, I’m fine.”
“That so?” Polite, speculative. Williamson didn’t want to be her buddy. She could guess why.
“Yeah, eleven years. Queens, then Midtown Homicide.” She managed a shaky smile. “You guys are from the Twenty-eighth, right? Larry Kasabian still attached there?”
“Yeah, Kasabian’s still around, I think.” No warmth in the words. He nodded at Marsalis, who sat starkly on the steps of the building in his South Florida State inmate jacket, watching the crime scene squad go about their business as if they were a stage play put on for his benefit. “Patrol says you told them this guy’s a thirteen.”
“Yes.” She was cursing herself for it now. “He is.”
“And.” Brief hesitation. “Is that filed with anyone here in the city?”
Sevgi sighed. “We got in late last night. He’s a technical consultant for COLIN Security, but we haven’t had time to notify anybody yet.”
“All right.” But it clearly wasn’t all right. Williamson’s expression stayed cool. “I’m not going to pursue that, but you need to get him registered. Today. Is he, uh, staying with you?”
The implication sneered beneath the words. It felt like a slap. It felt like her father’s tirade when he found out about Ethan. Sevgi felt her own expression tighten.
“No, he’s not uh, staying with me,” she parodied. “He’s uh, staying in COLIN-account accommodation, just as soon as we can find him some. So do you think we can maybe just shelve the fucking Jesusland paranoia. And maybe get on with the police work at hand? How’d that be?”
Williamson’s eyes flared.
“That’d be just fine, Ms. Ertekin,” he said evenly. “The police work at hand is that this twist just killed two armed men in broad daylight, empty-handed, and he doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him. Now, maybe this is just my paranoia running away with me, or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned cop instinct, but something about that doesn’t chime in time.”
“He’s carrying a Mars environment systemic biohoist. And he was combat-trained from age seven up.”
Williamson grunted. “Yeah, I heard that about them. Bad to the bone, right? And you don’t think the men he killed here were combat-proficient.”
“You do?” Sevgi rapped her knuckles on the slug-riddled coachwork at her side. “Come on, Williamson, look at this shit. Combat-proficient? No, they just had guns.”
“Any reason you can think of that someone would send a low-grade spray-for-pay crew after a COLIN executive?”
She shook her head wordlessly. They weren’t after Ortiz, she knew inside. Ortiz just got in the way. They were here to kill Marsalis. Kill him before he gets any kind of handle on Merrin.
No reason to share that with Detective Williamson right now.
“And you told patrol you didn’t see the actual fight at all?”
She shook her head again, more definitely this time, getting traction. “No, I said I didn’t see much of it. Much of anything, I was on the ground—”
“Where he threw you, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.” The weight of his body on hers. “He probably saved my life.”
“So he saw them coming?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
Williamson nodded. “I’ll get around to it. Right now, I’m asking you.”
“And I told you I don’t know.”
There was a compressed pause. Williamson started again. “In the statement, you say you think there were three attackers. Or is that just what your twist friend over there told you?”
“No. I saw one take off toward the boulevard.” She indicated the shrink-wrapped corpses of the men Marsalis had killed. The black skater rig was clearly visible through the plastic. “And I can count.”
“Description?”
She looked up at him for a long moment. “Black-clad. Wearing a ski mask.”
Williamson sighed. “Yeah. Okay. You want to tell me about this other guy?”
He gestured at the third bundle on the pavement. The pale, blood-speckled face of Ortiz’s bodyguard gaped up wide-eyed through the plastic. They’d had to roll him onto his back to get Ortiz out from under and onto the wagon, and that was how CSI had wrapped him.
Sevgi shrugged.
“Security.”
“Did you know him?”
“No. Not my section.” It dawned abruptly on Sevgi why Williamson was so edgy. In theory, NYPD held the ground here, but under the Colony Initiative Act, she could take it from them pretty much at will. The sudden sense of the power she had gusted through her like insects in her belly. It wasn’t a clean feeling.
Williamson moved a couple of paces to stand over the dead bodyguard. He stared down at the man’s face. “So this guy covers Ortiz, right?”
“Yes, apparently.”
“Yeah, that’s his job. And our twist friend over there—”
“Do you want to stop using that fucking word?”
It got her a speculative look. The detective came back toward the limo. “All right. Security covers Ortiz. Your genetically modified friend over there covers you. You got any idea at all why he might have done that?”
Sevgi shook her head wearily. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Yeah, I will. But thirteens aren’t known for their honesty.” Williamson paused deliberately. “Or their self-sacrifice. Had to be something in it for him.”
She glared back at the detective, and maybe it was the syn coming on now, but she thought she could have blown Williamson’s head off if she had a weapon at hand. Instead she levered herself to her feet and faced him. “I’m done talking to you, Detective.”
“I don’t think—”
“I said I’m done talking to you.” No maybe about it, it was the syn. The anger drove her forward, but it was the drug that gave her the poise. Williamson was a head taller than she was, but she stood in his personal space as if she wore body armor. As if the last forty minutes hadn’t happened to her. The insulene shawl was puddled around her feet. “Someone a little less fucking Neanderthal, I’d be happy to liaise with. You, I’m done wasting time on.”
“This is a murder investi—”
“Yeah, right now that’s what it is. You want to see how fast I can turn it into a COLIN Security operation?”
His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
“You back off, Detective, leave me the fuck alone, and you can keep your investigation. Otherwise I’m going to pull the COLIN act on you, and you can go back and tell them at the Twenty-eighth they’ll be losing their jurisdiction.”
Behind the syn, there was a tiny trickle of guilt as she watched Williamson crumble, an empathy from her own years on the other side of the fence.
She crushed it. Crossed the street to Marsalis.
COLIN arrived in modest force about ten minutes later. A secure transit Land Rover rolled quietly into the marketplace, parting the crowds with a low-intensity subsonic dispersal pulse that set Sevgi’s teeth on edge even at distance. She hadn’t called Norton, so someone must have authorized the roll-out when the news about Ortiz broke. The police had been holding back accredited film crews and solo shoulderscope artists in the crowd for a while, and it would be all over the feeds by now.
The Land Rover came to a halt at the edge of the crime scene, with scant regard for the incident barriers the NYPD had strung. One armor-swollen corner of its bodywork broke the bright yellow beams and set off the alarm. Police uniforms came running.
“Subtle,” said Marsalis.
The Land Rover’s forward passenger door cracked, swung open at a narrow angle. Tom Norton stood up on the running board behind it, scanning the crime scene. Even at a distance, Sevgi could see how ashen his face was.
“Sev?”
“Over here.” She waved from the steps of the building, and Norton spotted her. He swung his door wider, stepped down, and closed it again. Brief words with the uniforms in his way, a display of badges, and they opened a path for him. Someone went to shut off the barrier breach alarm, and quiet soaked back into the street. The Land Rover backed up a couple of meters and sat there rumbling like the elegant tank it essentially was. The driver did not emerge.
“Overreacting a bit, aren’t we?” Sevgi asked as Norton reached them.
He grimaced. “Tell that to Ortiz.”
“Is he okay?”
“Relative to what? He isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. They’ve got him hooked up to half the life-support machines available over at Weill Cornell. Major organ damage, but he’ll have ready stock cultured somewhere. Family’ve been notified.” Norton looked sick as he stared around at the shrink-wrapped corpses. “What the fuck was he doing over here anyway, Sev?”
She shook her head.
“I think he was here to see me,” said Marsalis, rising to his feet for the first time since the assault. He yawned cavernously.
Norton eyed him with dislike. “All about you, huh?”
“NYPD are all over him, Tom,” said Sevgi, defusing. “Detective in charge hardly gave a shit about Ortiz, all he wanted to talk about was how come we’d got an unlicensed thirteen on the streets.”
“Right.” Norton sharpened on the new task. “What’s this detective’s name?”
“Williamson. Out of the Twenty-eighth.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“He’s already been talked to. That’s not what I meant. I think it might play better if we let this look like an attempt on Ortiz.”
“You think it wasn’t?” Norton blinked. He gestured at one of the dead assassins. “Skater crew, Sev. Track the limo through traffic, that’s standard gang operating procedure. Ten, twelve city murders a year the exact same way. What else are you going to make of this?”
Sevgi nodded at Marsalis.
“Oh come on. Sev, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been in town less than a day. Who knew we were here?”
“Makes no sense the other way around, either, Tom. These guys were street. A real ground-level hit squad. What are they doing coming after someone fiftieth-floor like Ortiz? Man wouldn’t know street if it bit him in the ass.”
“It just did,” Marsalis said, deadpan.
Norton spared him a hard look. Sevgi stepped in.
“Look, whatever just went down here, we had more than enough publicity we didn’t need in Florida. Let’s not have a repeat performance. Ask the cops to kill the thirteen angle, make sure the media don’t run it. For public consumption purposes, Marsalis here can be just another heroic COLIN bodyguard, identity protected so that he can continue his good work.”
“Yes,” said Norton sourly. “As opposed to being a dangerous sociopath who hasn’t actually done any work for us at all yet.”
“Tom—”
Marsalis grinned. It was like a muscle flexing. “Well, I did save your partner’s life for you. Does that count?”
“As far as I can see you saved your own skin, with some collateral benefits. Sevgi, if this Williamson is going to raise a stink about our friend here, we need to get you both out of here.”
“Now, there’s an idea.”
Marsalis’s voice was amiable, but something at the bottom of it made Sevgi look at him. She recalled the way he’d stared after the escaped assassin, the flat sound his voice made then as he told her Right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work. There was a finality to the way he’d said it that was like the silence following a single gunshot. And now, suddenly, she was afraid for Tom Norton and his dismissive flippancy.
“Sounds good to me, too,” she said hurriedly. “Tom, can we wire up the n-djinn from Horkan’s Pride at COLIN? Run a direct interface?”
Norton looked at her curiously, let his gaze slip to the black man at her shoulder and then back again. He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose we could. But what the hell for? MIT already handed down the transcripts.” He addressed himself directly to Marsalis. “They’re on file at the office. You can go over them if you want.”
“But I don’t want.” Marsalis was smiling gently. A small chill blew down Sevgi’s spine at the sight. “What I want, Tom, is to talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn.”
Norton stiffened. “So now suddenly you’re an expert on the psychology of artificial intelligence?”
“No, I’m an expert on the hunting and killing of variant thirteens. Which is why you hired me. Remember?”
“Yeah, and don’t you think that precious expertise might be—”
“Tom!”
“—better deployed going over the scenes of the crimes we’re trying to bring an end to?”
Still the black man smiled. Still he stood relaxed, at a distance that Sevgi abruptly realized was just outside Norton’s easy reach.
“No, I don’t.”
“Tom, that’s enough. What the fuck is wrong with you this mor—”
“What’s wrong with me Sev, is that—”
Two-tone rasp—a throat being ostentatiously cleared. They both stopped, switched their gazes back to Marsalis.
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly.
They were silent. The call for attention hung off the end of his words like a spoken command.
“You don’t understand what you’re up against.” The smile came back, fleeting, as if driven by memory. “You think because Merrin’s killed a couple of dozen people, he’s some kind of serial killer writ large? That’s not what this is about. Serial killers are damaged humans. You know this, Sevgi, even if Tom here doesn’t. They leave a trail, they leave clues, they get caught. And that’s because in the end, consciously or subconsciously, they want to be caught. Calculated murder is an antisocial act, it’s hard for humans to do, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable the capacity. But that’s you people. It’s not me, and it’s not Merrin, and it’s not any variant thirteen. We’re not like you. We’re the witches. We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context. You have to understand this: there is nothing wrong with Merrin. He’s not damaged. He’s not killing these people as an expression of some childhood psychosis, he’s not doing it because he’s identified them as some dehumanized, segregated extratribal group. He’s just carrying out a plan of action, and he is comfortable with it. And he won’t get caught doing it—unless you can put me next to him.”
Norton shook his head. “You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.”
“I know he fed off the passengers.”
“No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.” Norton took a steadying breath. “You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.”
It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.
“Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,” he said finally. “But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.”
Norton grinned mirthlessly. “Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.”
“It’s not enough.”
“So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.”
That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. “Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?”
The night sky lay at his feet.
Not a night sky you could see from Earth or Mars, or anywhere else this far out on a galactic arm. Instead the black floor was densely splattered with incandescence. Stars crowded one another’s brilliance or studded the multicolored marble veins of nebulae. It might have been an accurately generated view from some hypothetical world at the core of the Milky Way; it might just have been a thousand different local night skies, overlaid one on top of the other and amped up to blazing. He took a couple of steps and stars crunched into white powder underfoot, smeared across the inky black. Over his head, the sky was a claustrophobic steel gray, daubed with ugly blob riveting in wide spiral runs.
Fucking ghosts in the machine.
No one knew why the shipboard djinns ran their virtual environments like this. Queries on the subject from human interface engineers met with vague responses that made no linguistic sense. Flown from it-will, cannot the heavy, there-at, through-at, slopeless and ripe was one of the famous ones. Carl had known an IF engineer on Mars who had it typed out and pasted above his bunk as a koan. The accompanying mathematics apparently made even less sense, though the guy insisted they had a certain insane elegance, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was planning a book, a collection of n-djinn haiku printed very small on expensive paper, with illustrations of the virtual formats on the facing pages.
It was Carl’s opinion, admittedly not founded on any actual evidence, that the n-djinns were making elaborate jokes at humanity’s dull-witted expense. He supposed that the book, if it ever saw print, could be seen as a punch line delivered.
In his darker moments, he wondered what might come after that. The joke over, the gloves off.
“Marsalis.”
The voice came first, then the ’face, almost as if the n-djinn had forgotten it should manifest a focus the human could address. Like someone asking for a contact number, and then groping about for a pen to write it down. The ’face shaded in. A blued, confetti-shredded androgynous body that stood as if being continually blown away in a wind tunnel. Long ragged hair, streaming back. Flesh like a million tiny fluttering wings, stirring on the bone. It was impossible to make out male or female features. Under the voice, there was a tiny rustling, crackling sound, like paper burning up.
It was a little like talking to an angel. Carl grimaced.
“That’s me. Been looking me up?”
“You feature in the flow.” The ’face lifted one arm, and a curtain of images cascaded from it to the star-strewn floor. He spotted induction photos from Osprey, media footage following the Felipe Souza rescue, other stuff that lit odd corners of memory in him and made them newly familiar. Somewhere in among it all he thought he saw Marisol’s face, but it was hard to tell. A defensive twinge went through him.
“Didn’t know they were letting you hook up so soon.”
It was a lie. Ertekin had shown him the release documentation from MIT—he knew to the hour when the n-djinn had been recalibrated and allowed back into the flow.
“It is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data,” the blue figure said gravely. “Re-enabling a nanolevel artificial consciousness engine necessitates reconnection to local dataflows.”
Unhumanly, the djinn had left the upheld arm where it was, and the downpour of images ran on.
Carl gestured toward the display. “Right. So what does the local dataflow have to say about me lately?”
“Many things. UNGLA currently defines you as a genetic licensing agent. The Miami Herald calls you a murderer. The Reverend Jessie Marshall of the Church of Human Purity calls you an abomination, but this is a generalized reference. News feeds abstracted from the Mars dataflow and currently held locally refer to you as this year’s luckiest man on Mars, though the year in question is of course 2099. The Frankfurter Allgemeine called y—”
“Yeah, fine. You can stop there.” Shipboard n-djinns were famously literal-minded. It was in the nature of the job they did. Minimal requirement for interface. Humans were deep-frozen freight. The djinns sat alone, sunk in black silence laced with star static, talking occasionally with other machines on Mars and Earth when docking or other logistics required it. “I came to ask you a couple of questions.”
The ’face waited.
“Do you recall Allen Merrin?”
“Yes.” Merrin’s gaunt, Christ-like features evolved in the air at the ’face’s shoulder. Standard ID likeness. “Occupant of crew section beta capsule, redesignated for human freight under COLIN interplanetary traffic directive c93-ep4652-21. Cryo-certified Bradbury November 5, 2106, protocol code 55528187.”
“Yeah, except he didn’t really occupy the beta capsule much, did he?”
“No. The system revived him at four hundred fourteen hours of trajectory time.”
“You’ve told the debriefing crew that you shut down voluntarily at three hundred seventy-eight hours, on suspicion of corruptive material in a navigational module.”
“Yes. I was concerned to prevent a possible viral agent from passing into the secondary navigational core. Quarantine measures were appropriate.”
“And Merrin wakes up thirty-six hours later. Is that a coincidence?”
The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.
It took about twenty seconds.
“There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.”
“Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?”
“To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way; an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.”
“So you dreamed Merrin.”
“That is one way of describing it, yes.”
“And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?”
The confetti-streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really gotten the hang of human features.
“Talk to whom?”
Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. “To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.”
“If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.”
“Often?”
“I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two percent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine percent of his speech was apparently directed—”
“All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?”
“Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.”
“Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.”
“What referents do you wish employed for the curve?”
“Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links, they’re not what I’m after.” Carl wished suddenly that Matthew were here to handle this for him, to reach quicksilver-swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here—Carl felt clumsy by contrast. The terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. “Cross-reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.”
The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.
“This will take time,” it said.
Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.
“Better get me a chair then.”
He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neo-Nordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something—his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism—or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.
Instead he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-djinn’s dreams.
The ’face had left him to his chair—a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him—and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place—at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three meters tall, two broad, and angled slightly backward at the base a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the djinn’s upheld arm. Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn’s unhuman associative processes.
He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognizable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan’s Pride, face unreadable.
Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.
Saw him request a lateral vision port unshuttered, the ships’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms on either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.
Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.
Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matte-textured metal of a bulkhead.
Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.
Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.
There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn’t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard Felipe Souza, the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he’d been assured—no really, it’s true, it’s in the programming—was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.
Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn’t aware of letting show, a need he didn’t know he had. Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.
Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.
The floating blue shredded figure returned.
“There is this,” it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her—just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in postrevival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.
“…not again,” she pleaded vaguely.
Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking—to yourself, for sanity’s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening—speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.
“Again, yes,” Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. “The cormorant’s legacy.”
The image froze.
“Cormorant,” said Carl, memory flexing awake.
“Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions,” said the djinn. “An association suggests itself. According to data from Wells region work camp rotations on Mars, both you and Merrin were acquainted with Robert P. Danvers, sin 84437hp3535. Yaroshanko-form extrapolation from this connects you both through Danvers to the Martian familias andinas, and, integrating with the term cormorant used here, with high probability to the sin-disputed identity Franklin Gutierrez.”
Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he’d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides.
“Well, well, well,” he said at last. “Gutierrez.”
“Never heard of him.”
Norton, preparing to be unimpressed. He was standing, close enough to Carl for it to be a challenge.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Carl agreed. He brushed past Norton, went to the office window, and stared out at the view. Smashed autumn sunlight lay across the East River in metallic patches, like some kind of chemical slick. “Franklin Gutierrez used to be a datahawk in Lima back in the mideighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In ’86, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution. It took them nearly a month to even realize he’d done it.”
Norton grunted. “Couldn’t have been that immaculate, if he ended up on Mars.”
Carl fought down a sudden urge to remove Norton’s vocal cords with his bare hands. He summoned patience from within, Sutherland style. Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. He focused on the details of the view below. COLIN New York, perhaps in conscious locational echo of the UN territory, stood a couple of long blocks south of Jefferson Park, vaulted and cantilevered over FDR Drive and looking out across the river. It was a fractal tumbling of structure that recalled nothing so much as a handful of abandoned segments from a huge peeled orange. Thin white nanocarb spidered over curves and angles of smoked amber glass, then swept down to brace elegantly amid the multi-level array of carefully tended walkways, paths, and gardens that linked each section into the whole site. You could stand here in the vaulted open-plan office suite Ertekin and Norton shared and look down across the whole thing, the gardens, the jutting edge of the mezzanine, and the river beyond. Carl’s gaze reeled back out to the water, and he suffered a sudden resurgence of a feeling from his first days back on Earth eight years ago, a time when the sight of any large body of water came as an abrupt, visceral shock.
Time with the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn had stirred him up, left him choppy and bleak with old memories.
So much for looking beyond.
“Yeah, they caught up with Gutierrez,” he said neutrally. “But they caught him spending the money, not stealing it. Keep that in mind. This guy had his weak points, but getting away with the game wasn’t one of them.”
“So they offered him resettlement?” Ertekin asked.
“Yeah, and he took it. You ever seen the inside of a Peruvian jail?” Carl left the broad roofward sweep of the window, turned back into the office and his new colleagues. “He ended up in Wells, running atmospheric balance systems for the Uplands Initiative. When he wasn’t doing that, he handled datacrime for the Martian familias andinas. I think it paid better than the day job.”
Norton shook his head. “If this Gutierrez has links with Mars organized crime, then we’ve already run him and his association with Merrin.”
“No, you haven’t.”
A swapped glance between Norton and Sevgi Ertekin. Norton sighed. “Look, Marsalis. One of the first things this investigation did was to—”
“Contact the Colony police, and ask them to run a list of associates for Merrin on Mars. Right.” Carl nodded. “Yeah. Makes sense, I’d have done the same. Just that it wouldn’t do any good. If Gutierrez had dealings with Merrin, they’re gone now, wiped off the flow like shit off a baby’s arse. All you’ll be left with is some minor association with a low-level middleman like Danvers. And men like Danvers rub shoulders with practically everyone who’s ever worked the Wells camps anyway. In other words, your business transaction is invisible. That’s how it works when Gutierrez does something for you.”
“And you know this how?”
He shrugged. “How do you think?”
“Gutierrez did something for you,” Ertekin said quietly. “What was it?”
“Something I’m not going to talk to you about. The point is, in dataflow terms, my connection with Gutierrez no longer exists, and neither does Merrin’s. Any associative search Colony ran on Merrin would have stopped at Danvers. The Horkan’s Pride n-djinn only went farther because it didn’t like the coincidence of two thirteens both making it back from Mars under uncommon circumstances and both having a separate, unrelated connection with a low-grade fence like Danvers. That’s Yaroshanko intuition for you. Very powerful when it works, but it needs something to triangulate off.”
“I still don’t see,” said Norton irritably, “how that gives you this Gutierrez.”
“On its own, it doesn’t. But the recollections the n-djinn has of Merrin include a couple of references to a cormorant.”
Norton nodded. “Yeah, we saw that first time around. The cormorant legacy, leavings of the cormorant, wring that fucking cormorant’s neck. We had our own reference n-djinns go over it. Checked out Martian slang, and got nothing—”
“No, it’s not a Martian term.”
“Might be now,” Ertekin pointed out. “You’ve been back awhile. Anyway, we backed up into Project Lawman usage and thirteen argot in general. We still got nothing.”
“It’s Limeño.”
Norton blinked. “Excuse me?”
“It’s a Lima underground term. Pretty obscure, and old. Your n-djinn probably would have discounted it as irrelevant. Goes back to the early seventies, which is when Gutierrez was a young gun on the Andes coast datahawk circuit. Have you heard of ukai?”
Blank looks.
“Okay, ukai is a form of fishing where you use trained cormorants to bring up your fish. It’s originally from Japan, but it got big in the Peruvian Japanese community about fifty years back when the whole designer-breeding thing really took off. Ukai is done at night, and the cormorants dive with a ring on their throat that stops them from swallowing the fish. They get fed when they bring the catch back to their handler. See the imagery?”
“Contracted datahawking.” Ertekin’s eyes lit up with the connection. “The familias andinas.”
“Yeah. In those days the familias here on Earth were still a force to be reckoned with. Anyone starting out as a hawk on the South Pacific coast worked for the familias, or they didn’t work at all. You might end up a big-name halcon de datos. But you started life as a cormoran.”
Ertekin was nodding now. “Including Gutierrez.”
“Including Gutierrez,” he agreed, and something sparked between them as he echoed her words. “Later he got his rep, got his own gigs. Got caught.”
“And when he got to Mars, he found the familias waiting for him all over again.”
“Right. It’s like stepping back in time half a century there. The familias have a hold they haven’t had on Earth for decades. Apparently Gutierrez had to go right back into ukai work. Back to being a cormorant.” Carl spread his hands, case-closed style. “He bitched to me about it all the time.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d do the same with Merrin,” Norton said.
“Yeah, it does. Gutierrez had a thing about thirteens. A lot of people do on Mars, there’s a whole fetish subculture dedicated to it. It’s like the bonobo fan clubs here. Gutierrez was a fully paid-up member, fascinated by the whole thing. He had this pet analogy he liked to draw, between the thirteens and the Lima datahawks. Both supermen in their own right, both feared and hated by the herd because of it.”
Norton snorted. “Supermen. Right.”
“Well, it was his theory,” Carl said evenly. “Not mine. Point is, he went on and on about being reduced back to ukai status, about how I could understand that shit because of who I was, because of what I was. And he would have laid exactly the same line off on Merrin.”
“So.” Norton broke it up, stepped into the flood of light. “We call Colony, tell them to bring Gutierrez in and lean on him.”
Carl snorted. “Yeah, lean on him from a couple of hundred million kilometers away. Ten-minute coms lag each way. That interrogation, I want to watch.”
“I didn’t say we’d lean on him, I said Colony would.”
“Colony couldn’t lean on a fucking wall. Forget it. What happens on Mars doesn’t play this end. It’s not a human distance.”
Ertekin sank deeper into her chair, bridged her hands, and stared across the office. Light from the tall window fell in on her like the luminous sifting sunset rains on Mars. Carl’s woken memories came and kicked him in the chest again.
“If the familias andinas helped get Merrin out of Mars,” she said slowly, and mostly to herself, “then they could be helping him at this end as well.”
“Not the South American chapters,” Carl observed. “They’ve had a war with the Martian familias for decades. Well, a state of war anyway. They wouldn’t be cooperating with anything at the Mars end.”
Ertekin shook her head. “They wouldn’t have to be. I’m thinking about the Jesusland familias, and what’s left of them in the Rim. They pay lip service to the altiplano heritage, but that’s about it. This far north, they run their own game, and a lot of it’s human-traffic-related. I mean, the Rim squashed them pretty fucking flat after Secession, ripped their markets with the drug law changes, the open biotech policies. Sex slaves and fence-hopping’s about all they had to fall back on. But they’re still out there, just like they’re still here. And in between, in the Republic, they still swing a hell of a lot of old-time weight.”
She brooded for a while.
“Yeah, okay. They’ve got the human-traffic software Merrin would have needed to get in and out of the Rim like that. Maybe they’ve got something going on with the Martian chapters, some kind of deal that gets them this Gutierrez’s services. The question is why? What’s their end of something like this? Where’s the benefit?”
“You think,” Norton ventured, “these are familia-sanctioned hits he’s carrying out?”
“They bring a thirteen all the way back from Mars to do their contract killing for them?” Ertekin scowled. “Doesn’t make much sense. Sicarios are a dollar a dozen in every major Republican city. Prisons are full of them.”
Norton flickered a glance at Carl. “Well, that’s true.”
“No, this has to be something else.” Ertekin looked up at Carl. “You said this Gutierrez did something for you on Mars. Can we assume you had a working relationship with the familias as well?”
“I dealt with them on and off, yeah.”
“Care to speculate on why they’d do this?” She was still looking. Tawny flakes in the iris of her eyes.
Carl shrugged. “Under any normal circumstances, I’d say they wouldn’t. The familias run an old-time macho, conservative setup, here and on Mars. They’ve got all the standard prejudices against people like me.”
“But?”
“But. Several years ago, I ran into a thirteen who tried to forge an alliance with what’s left of the altiplano chapters. Guy called Nevant, French, ex—Department Eight Special Insertion Unit. Very smart guy, he was an insurrection specialist in Central Asia. Warlord liaison, counterintelligence, all that shit. Given time, he might have gotten something working up there, too.”
“Might have,” drawled Norton. “So it’s safe to say he wasn’t given time.”
“No. He wasn’t.”
“What happened to him?”
Carl smiled bleakly. “I happened to him.”
“Did you kill him?” Ertekin asked sharply.
“No. I tracked him to some friends he had in Arequipa, pulled the Haag gun on him, and he put his hands in the air sooner than die.”
“Bit unusual for a thirteen, isn’t it?” Norton cranked an eyebrow. “Giving up like that?”
Carl matched the raised brow, deadpan. “Like I said, he’s a smart guy.”
“Okay, so you busted this Nevant, this smart guy, and you took him back.” Ertekin got to her feet and went to stare out the window. He guessed she could see where this was going. “So where is he now?”
“Back in the system. Eurozone Internment Tract, eastern Anatolia.”
“And you want to go and talk to him there.” It wasn’t a question.
“I think that’ll be more effective than a v-link or a phone call, yes.”
“Will he see you?” Still she didn’t turn around.
“Well, he doesn’t have to,” Carl admitted. “The Eurozone internment charter guarantees his right to refuse external interviews. If this were an official UNGLA investigation, we could maybe bring some pressure to bear, but on my own I don’t carry that kind of weight. But you know, I think he’ll see me anyway.”
“You basing that on anything at all?” asked Norton.
“Yeah, previous experience.” Carl hesitated. “We, uh, get on.”
“I see. A few years ago you bust the guy, send him back to a lifetime in the Turkish desert, and as a result you’re the best of friends?”
“Anatolia isn’t a desert,” said Ertekin absently, still at the window.
“I didn’t say we were the best of friends, I said we get on. After I busted him, we had to kill a few days in Lima, waiting for transfer clearances. Nevant likes to talk, and I’m a pretty good listener. We both—”
A phone chirruped from Norton’s desk on the other side of the office. He shot a last glance at Carl, then strode across to answer the call. Ertekin turned from the window and nailed Carl with a mistrustful look of her own.
“You think I should let you back across the Atlantic at this point?”
Carl shrugged. “Do what you like. You want to pursue another line of inquiry, be my guest and dig one up. But Nevant’s the obvious lead, and I don’t think he’ll talk to me in virtual, because a virtual identity can be faked. Tell the truth, I wouldn’t trust it in his place, either. Us genetic throwbacks don’t like advanced technology, you know.”
He caught the momentary twitch of her mouth before she locked the smile reflex down. Norton came back from the phone call, and the moment slid away. The COLIN exec’s face was grim.
“Want to guess?” he asked.
“Merrin’s holed up in the UN building with a nuclear device,” suggested Carl brightly. “And enough delegates held hostage to eat his way through to Christmas.”
Norton nodded. “I’m glad you’re having a good time. Wrong guess. You’re all over the feeds. Thirteen saves COLIN director, slaughters two.”
“Oh fuck.” Ertekin’s shoulders slumped. “All we needed. How the hell did that happen?”
“Apparently, some anal little geek at one of the city feeds had a fit of total recall. Got our friend here’s face off the crime scene footage, face reminded him of something, he matched it with the trouble down in Florida.” Norton pointed. “Or maybe it was that jacket. Hard to miss, and it’s not exactly high fashion. Anyway, the geek rings up the Twenty-eighth Precinct and asks some leading questions. Evidently he got lucky. He talked to either someone really cooperative or someone really dumb.”
“Fucking Williamson.”
Norton shrugged. “Yeah, or whoever. You’ve got to bet half an hour after Williamson got back to the Twenty-eighth, every cop in the precinct house knew they had a thirteen walking the streets. And probably saw no reason on Earth to shut up about it. In their eyes, it’s a basic public safety issue. They know they’ve got no leverage with us, they’d be more than happy to let the feeds do their demonizing for them.”
“Demonize?” Carl grinned. “I thought I was up there for saving Ortiz.”
“And slaughtering two,” said Ertekin wearily. “Don’t forget that part.”
“They’re asking for a statement, Sev. Nicholson says he figures you’re it. Former NYPD detective and all that, should make it easier to play down any anti-COLIN feeling the Twenty-eighth may have stirred up.”
“Oh thanks, Tom.” Ertekin threw herself back into her chair and glared up at Norton. “A fucking press conference? You think I haven’t got anything better to do than talk to the fucking media?”
Norton spread his hands. “It isn’t me, Sev. It’s Nicholson. And the way he sees it, no, you don’t have anything better to do right now. What do you want me to do, tell him you had to go out of town?”
Carl met her eyes across the room. He grinned.