Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 53

The path down into Colca was a foot-pounded dusty white, in places barely an improvement over the loose scree and scrub it cut through. Initially, it straggled and twisted along the rim of the canyon like a recently unwound length of cable with the worst of the kinks still not out. It headed out of the village in a relatively straight line, followed the line of the canyon more or less, brushed up to the edge here and there, close enough to offer a dizzying view downward, then slid away again as if unnerved by the drop. A couple of kilometers out of town, the path skirted a desolate cleared space with a paint-peeled rusting goal iron at either end. It kinked a couple more times and then found and dropped into a wide basin-shaped bite in the canyon wall, riding the curve around and down like the track of a roulette ball made visible on its fall toward the luck of the numbers. Thereafter, it fell abruptly off the edge of the canyon, spilled down the flank of the valley in a concertina of hairpin turns that made grudging concession to the steep angle of descent, and arrived at last, in dust and sliding pebbles, at an ancient wooden suspension bridge across the pale greenish flow of the river.

The bridge was not much more user-friendly than the path that led to it. The materials employed in its construction didn’t look to have been renewed in decades, and where the planking had cracked and holed, the locals had placed rocks so there was no downward view into the water that might scare the mules—which were still the only viable means of heavy transport down from the towns on the canyon rim. Infrastructural neglect was a general feature of the region—significant distance from the nearest prep camps meant no possible return on corporate funds deployed here, tourism was the only staple, and the tourists liked their squalor picturesque—but here the process had been allowed to run a little farther than elsewhere. Here visitors other than known locals were not encouraged, and tour companies had been persuaded to route their itineraries away to other sections of the canyon. Here, comings and goings on the path were watched by men carrying weapons whose black and metal angles gleamed new and high-tech in the harsh, altiplano sun. Here, it was rumored, there lived a witch who, lacking the normal human capacity to survive the whole of the dry season awake, must fall into an enchanted sleep before the end of each year and could only be roused when the rains came, and only then by the call and ministrations of her pistaco lover.

“You cannot seriously be planning to go down there now.” Norton was shaking his head, but his tone carried less disbelief than weary resignation. He seemed to have lost all capacity for shock over the previous few days.

“Better now than later,” Carl told him soberly. “The more the dust settles, the more chance Bambarén and Onbekend have to take stock, and for them I’m a big black mark in the negative asset column. They don’t know about Sevgi, but they know the work I do for UNGLA, and they know I know about Onbekend. And they’re both cautious men. Leave it long enough, they’re going to start wondering where I am and what I’m doing. But right now, they figure I’m scrambling for cover just like everybody else.”

“Yeah, you should be.”

“Getting hard to hold the line, is it?”

“No, and that’s not what I meant. I’m just saying you need to think about what you’re going to do when this is over.”

Carl stared out at the slow nighttime crawl of the cross-border traffic in the checkpoint lanes. “I’ll worry about that when it is over. Meantime—you made me a promise.”

“And I came running, didn’t I?” Norton gestured around the stark, utilitarian space they had to themselves. “I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Not like I haven’t got other things to do, or more attractive places to be doing them.”

He had a point. RimSec’s Immigration Division was widely recognized as the shitty end of the organization’s sprawling jurisdiction, and the unlovely interior of the observation lodge offered mute testimony. Gray pressed-carbon lockers stood ranked along the back wall; a random scatter of cheap tables and chairs crowded one half of the limited floor space, and a pool table clothed in garish orange baize took up the rest. A plastic rack held the warped and battered cues pinned to the wall like suspects, alongside a couple of vending machines whose wanly glowing display windows were racked with items that looked more like hazardous material in an isolation chamber than food or drink. Bleak LCLS panels in the roof, the long window of the observation port commanding its three-meter elevated view of the traffic. An unobtrusive back door led out to the cells.

They’d been sitting there since before it got dark.

Carl got up and prowled the room for the fifteenth time. He was beginning to think he could feel the soul of the place breathing, and it didn’t improve his mood much. The yellow-painted walls were institutionally uncared for, scarred in a hundred places at the pool table end with the memory of overzealous windup for irritable, jaw-rattling shots. Elsewhere forlorn-looking posters attempted to break up the monotony, everything from RimSec information flyers and mission statements to soft-porn printouts and announcements of local gigs and fiesta nights at clubs up the road in Blythe. None of it looked very appealing, less so than ever fifteenth time around.

It wasn’t much of a place to say his farewells to Norton.

“NYPD still giving you a lot of grief?” he asked.

Norton gestured. “Sure, they’re pushing. They’d like to know where the hell you are, that’s for sure. Why you walked out like that. I’ve got you down as officially helping COLIN with its internal investigation, witness-protected as part of the deal. They don’t buy it, but hey, they’re just cops. They don’t get to argue with us about stuff like this.”

“They ask about anything else?”

The COLIN exec looked away. He’d never asked what Carl had found to do in Manhattan the rest of that day. “No, they haven’t. Why, is there something else I should know about?”

Carl gave the question a moment’s honest consideration. “That you should know about? No. Nothing else.”

The death of NYPD sergeant Amy Westhoff had made some headlines across the Union, he’d checked for it, but he doubted Norton had the spare time or energy to make any connection there still might be with Sevgi Ertekin. Four years was a long time, and he was pretty sure he’d covered his tracks when he called Westhoff. The woman’s guilt had done most of the heavy lifting for him.

“If I’m honest,” said Norton tiredly, “I’m more worried about the Weill Cornell people than the police. There’s some serious finance lying about in that place, some people with access to high-level ears, and some seriously dedicated medical staff who don’t like losing their patients under mysterious circumstances. Not to mention the fact that the Ortiz family’s personal physician has a consultant residency there.”

“Did you have to pay off the crash team?”

“No, they’re not the problem. They’re all juniors, looking to build careers, and they know what a malpractice suit can do to a résumé, even by association. I had them pronounce Ortiz dead at the scene and then chased them out, told them it wasn’t their responsibility any longer. You should have seen their faces—they were all very relieved to get out of that room.”

Carl paused by a gig listing. FAT MEN ARE HARDER TO KIDNAP—BLYTHE MARS MEMORIAL HALL, NOVEMBER 25. Nearly three weeks away. He wondered briefly where he’d be when the Fat Men took the stage. Put the thought away, barely looked at.

“Got an exit strategy for Ortiz yet?”

Norton peered into the dregs of coffee gone two hours cold. “Variations on a theme. Unsuspected late-stage viral contamination from the bioware slugs he was shot with. Or interface incompatibilities; his body rejected the nanorepair suite he was implanted with, and he was too weak to survive the shock. Either way, you can be damn sure there’ll be no postmortem worth worrying about. Alvaro Ortiz is going to get a statesman’s funeral, eulogies over a tragic untimely death, and his name on a big fucking plaque somewhere. None of this is ever going to come out. That’s how we buy the family’s silence.”

Carl gave him a curious look from across the room. Something had happened to Norton since he’d seen him last, something that went beyond the weary lack of capacity for surprise. It was hard to pin down, but the COLIN exec seemed to have taken to his new role as the Initiative’s fixer with a bitter, masochistic pleasure. In some obscure way, like a driven athlete with pain, he looked to be learning to enjoy the power he’d been handed. In the vacuum vortex created by the death of Ortiz and his brother, Tom Norton was the man of the hour, and he’d risen to it like a boxer to the bell, like the reluctant hero finally called to arms. As if, along with the young-patrician demeanor and the studied press-conference calm, this was just part and parcel of what he’d been made for after all.

“And the feeds?” Carl asked him. “The press?”

Norton snorted. “Oh, the press. Don’t make me fucking laugh.”

Carl came back to the table and stood staring out of the observation port. Up and down the lines of traffic, breath frosted from the mouths of uniformed immigration officers as they moved briskly about in the chilled desert night, bending and peering into vehicles at random with long tubular steel flashlights raised to the shoulder like some kind of mini bazooka. The queues stretched all the way back to the bridge, where Interstate 10 came across the Colorado River from Arizona under a frenzy of LCLS and wandering spotbeams. The prickly, piled-up fortifications around the bridge were blasted into black silhouette by the light.

“Come on, Suerte,” he muttered. “Where the fuck are you?”

There were two armed guards hanging about at the far side of the suspension bridge in the canyon, both of them bored to distraction, yawning and cold, weapons slung. One, the younger of the two, a lad barely out of his teens called Lucho Acosta, sat on a rock where the path began again, tossing pebbles idly out into the river. His somewhat older companion was still on his feet but propped casually back against the rope cabling on one side of the bridge, smoking a handmade cigarette and tipping his head back occasionally to look up out of the canyon at the sky. Miguel Cafferata was sick of this gig, sick of being buried down here a day’s hard drive from the lights of Arequipa and his family, sick of the chafing bulk of the weblar jacket, slimline though it was supposed to be, and sick of Lucho who didn’t seem to have a single interest in life outside soccer and porn. Miguel had the depressing sense when he spent time with the boy that he was looking at a premonition of his own son ten years hence, and the impression was making him irritable. When Lucho got to his feet and pointed upward to the path, he barely bothered following the gesture.

“Mules coming down.”

“Yeah, so I see.”

Conversation was exhausted between the two of them. They’d both been on the same duty every day for the last two or three weeks, the same dawn-to-midafternoon shift. The boss was twitchy; he wanted the place locked down tight, no unnecessary changing of the guard. The two of them watched in silence as the solitary figure and the two mules picked their way down the concertina turns of the path in the early-morning sun. It was a common enough sight, and anyway, you couldn’t be surprised down here in daylight, except maybe by snipers or a fucking airstrike.

Even when the mule driver and his animals made it onto the last few hairpin twists before the bridge, Miguel didn’t tense as such. But a flicker of interest woke on his weathered face. Behind him, he heard Lucho get to his feet off the rock.

“Isn’t that Sumariva’s mule, leading?”

Miguel shaded his eyes. “Looks like it. But that sure isn’t Sumariva. Way too big. And look at the way he’s walking.”

It was a fair comment. The tall figure clearly didn’t have the hang of coming down a mountain path. He jolted heavily, scudding up powdery white dust every couple of steps. Seemed to be walking with a limp, too, and he didn’t appear to have much idea of how to lead the mules. Big, modern boots and a long coat plastered with the dust of his ungainly descent, battered leather Stetson. Beneath the brim of the hat, a face flashed pale. Miguel grunted.

“It’s a fucking gringo,” he said curiously.

“You think…”

“Don’t know. Supposed to be looking out for some black guy, not a gringo and a couple of mules. Maybe this is someone from the university. A lot of those guys are from the north, doing survey experiments down here for Mars. Testing equipment.”

The mules did appear, now that he looked, to be loaded with small, shallow-draft crates that winked metallic in the high-angled slant of the sun.

“Well, he ain’t fucking testing it around here,” said Lucho, unshipping his shotgun with a youthful glower. He pumped a round into the chamber and stepped onto the bridge planking. Miguel winced wearily at the sound.

“Just let him come to us, all right? No sense rushing up to meet him, and there’s no space to do a search on that side anyway. Let him get across to this side, then we’ll see who he is, turn him around, and send him on his way.”

But when the gringo got to the bridge, he didn’t come out onto the planks immediately. Instead he stopped and sent one of the mules across ahead of him. The animal made the crossing with accustomed docility, while back on the other side the gringo in the hat seemed more concerned with searching his pockets and fiddling with the webbing straps across the other animal’s back.

“This is Sumariva’s mule,” Lucho said as the animal clopped solemnly up to them, then past and onto the solid ground of the riverbank, where it stood and waited for its owner to catch up. “You think he’d loan it out like that?”

“For enough cash, yeah. Wouldn’t you?” Miguel shifted to Spanish, raised his voice. “Hoy you, you can’t come down here. This is private property.”

The figure at the other end of the bridge waved an arm. The voice came back in Quechua. “Just give me a minute, will you.”

Then he started to lead the other mule out onto the bridge. Hat tilted down over his eyes.

“All right, you stay here,” Miguel told the boy. The language had floored him; he’d never met a gringo before who spoke it. “I’ll go see what this is about.”

“You want me to call it in?”

Miguel glanced at the mule standing there like the most ordinary thing in the world. It blinked back at him out of big liquid eyes. He grunted impatiently.

“Nah, don’t bother. Not like they won’t hear it if we have to shoot this guy.”

But he unslung his shotgun, and he went out to meet the new arrival with the vague crawl of unease in him. And he slowed as he closed the last few meters of the rapidly shrinking gap between himself and the advancing stranger. Came to a stop near the middle of the bridge, stood athwart, and pumped a round of his own into the shotgun in his hands.

The stranger stopped at the dry rack-clack of the action.

“That’ll do,” Miguel said, in Quechua. “Didn’t you hear me? This is private fucking property.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“So what the fuck are you doing down here, gringo?”

“I’m here to see the witch.”

That was when the stranger tipped up his head so Miguel could see his face properly. It was also when he realized he’d made a mistake. The white they’d seen flashing under the hat brim as he came down the path above was pasty and unreal, clotted and streaked on the face like a poorly applied clown’s mask or a half-melted Day of the Dead candy skull. The eyes were dark and impassive, and they stared out of the disintegrating white face with no more humanity than a pair of gun muzzles.

Pistaco.

Miguel had time for that single quailing thought, and then something erupted behind him in a string of firecracker fury. He locked up, tugged both ways at once, and the stranger’s long dusty coat split open and he had a flash glimpse of some stubby, ugly weapon cradled there in the pistaco’s arms.

Deep, throat-clearing cough, spiteful shredding whine.

Then there was only impact, a sense of being tugged violently backward, a split second of the sky and Colca’s steep-angled sides tilting and spinning, and then everything was gone.

Carl Marsalis sprinted past the ruins of the first familia gunman, closed the gap with the second while the other man raised his shotgun and snapped off a useless blast from the hip. This one was already panicked beyond any professional combat training he might have had, the remote-triggered firecrackers in the lead mule’s panniers, the sudden explosive death of his comrade. Carl ran in firing, too far out for the sharkpunch to have any serious impact yet, but the boy ahead of him flinched and staggered with the few shards that found their mark.

It wasn’t an ideal weapon for the circumstances, and out of the water it was too fucking heavy for comfort. He’d had to drape the long elastic sling it came with around his neck, and stick a cling patch on his right thigh to hold the damn thing still under his coat. His leg ached with the extra effort of walking with the weight. But the patented Cressi sharkpunch had the sterling advantage that it was classed as sub-aqua sports equipment, which meant he’d gotten it through security in his baggage without a second look, when second looks were the last thing he needed. And a gun that punched razor-sharp spinning slivers of alloy through water hard enough to eviscerate a great white shark did have some considerable reach in air, even if the spread made accuracy a joke. The young guard had blood running down his face as he fumbled at the slide on his shotgun, he was probably dazed from the sound of the explosions, and he was clearly terrified.

Carl closed the gap, pulled the trigger on the sharkpunch again. The boy slammed back against the side cables of the bridge. Large chunks of him slopped through and fell into the river; the rest collapsed skeletally onto the suddenly blood-drenched planking.

Over.

The mule carrying the firecrackers had, not unreasonably, panicked as much as anybody else. It was headed up the path along the riverside, bucking and snorting. No time to hang about. Carl loped after the animal, ears open for the sounds of other humans.

He met a third gunman a couple of hundred meters along the river, hurrying down the path toward the sounds of gunfire, a matte-gray Steyr assault rifle held unhandily across his body as he jogged. The man saw the mule, tried to get out of its way, and Carl darted around one side of the animal, threw out the sharkpunch, and fired more or less blind. The other man went down as if ripped apart by invisible hands. Carl scanned the path up ahead, saw and heard nothing, and stopped by the ruins of the man he’d just killed. He crouched and scooped up the Steyr left-handed out of the mess, dumped it immediately with a grunt of frustration. The guy had still been holding it across his body when Carl shot him, and the anti-shark load had smashed the breech beyond repair.

“Fuck!”

He picked and prodded his way around the shattered carcass, sharkpunch still leveled watchfully over his knee at the path ahead. Came up finally with a blood-soaked holster holding a shiny new semi-automatic. He tugged the gun loose and held it up to the light—Glock 100 series, not a bad gun. Pricey, shiny ordnance for backwoods muscle like this, but Carl supposed even here the power of branding must hold sway.

Tight, adrenaline-crazy grin. He put down the sharkpunch for a moment to work the action on the other weapon. It seemed to be undamaged, would be accurate to a point, but…

Still no decent longer-range weapon. The shotguns they’d been packing back at the river had no more reach than the sharkpunch, and he still had no clear idea how many more of Bambarén’s security there were between him and Greta Jurgens’s winter retreat. Outside of actual location, Suerte Ferrer had been hopelessly vague.

He shrugged and got back to his feet. Tucked the Glock into his waistband, hefted the sharkpunch again, and moved past the shattered man on the ground. Up ahead, the path seemed to rise slowly out of the rock-walled groove where it ran along the riverside. The mule had bolted on ahead, seemed to have finally found open ground off to the right.

Carl settled the leather hat a little more carefully on his head and followed. The combat high pounded through him. The mesh picked up the beat, fed it. The grin on his face felt like it would never come off.

“You need to get a sense of geography about this, Suerte.”

Suerte Ferrer glowered up from the holding cell chair as Carl walked around him. Immigration had cuffed him there. “Don’t need no fucking geography lessons from you, nigger.”

The insult twanged through him, freighted with memories from South Florida State. It was the first time he’d heard it since Dudeck.

Of course, he’d heard the word twist a few times in the interim.

“I see you’re acclimatizing to Jesusland culture pretty well.” Carl completed his circuit and leaned on the table at Ferrer’s level. Their captive was still grimy and tired looking from his border transit in a false-bottomed crate purporting to contain experimentally gene-modified rapeseed oil. He flinched back as Carl went face-to-face with him. “You want to go back there, maybe, Suerte? That what you want?”

“Quiros said—”

Carl slammed the table. “I don’t know this Quiros. And I don’t fucking want to know him. You think we pulled your autohauler out of the line for luck? You have been sold, to me, and by someone a lot farther up the food chain than your pal Quiros. So if you think you’re going get some slick down-the-wire Seattle lawyer come pull you out of here, you’re wrong.”

He went around the table and took a seat again, next to Norton, who’d done nothing but sit with his legs thrust out in front of him and stare somberly the whole time. Carl jerked a thumb toward the cell door, which they’d left promisingly ajar when they came in.

“Out there, Suerte, you’ve got a highway that goes in two directions. It goes west to the Freeport, or it goes east back into Jesusland and a bust for illegal crossover. Your choice which direction you get to take.”

“Who the fuck are you people?” Ferrer asked.

Norton exchanged a look with Carl. He leaned forward and cleared his throat. “We’re you’re fairy godmothers, Ferrer. Surprised you didn’t recognize us.”

“Yeah, we’re looking to grant all your wishes.”

“See, this identity is blown.” Norton gestured at the tabletop, where the documents Ferrer had been carrying were spread out. “Carlton Garcia. RimSec have a warrant out on you under that name from San Diego to Vancouver and back. Even if we hadn’t fished you out here, you’d get about three days into the Rim before you tripped something and ended up either busted or yoked to some gang-master who’d put you to work fifteen hours a day in a trench and expect you to suck his dick for the privilege.”

Carl grinned skullishly. “Was that the Rimside dream you had in mind, Suerte?”

“Go west, young man, go west,” Norton said piously. “But go with some cash and a decent fake ID.”

“Both of which we’ll give you,” Carl told him. “Together with a bus ticket right into the Freeport. And all you’ve got to do is answer a couple of questions we have about your cousin Manco Bambarén.”

“Hey!” Suerte Ferrer backed up in the chair. His hands chopped a flat cross out of the air in front of him. “I don’t know nothing about Manco’s operation, they didn’t tell me shit about any of that. I didn’t live down there more than a couple of years on and off anyway.”

Carl and Norton swapped another look. Carl sighed.

“That’s a shame,” he said.

“Yeah.” Norton started to get up. “We’ll tell the migra boys not to rough you up too bad before they dump you back over.”

“Hope you’ve enjoyed your brief stay in the Land of Opportunity.”

“Wait!”

Greta Jurgens’s hibernation retreat was an environment-blended two-story lodge built right into the side of a cliff face set back a couple of dozen meters from the riverbank. Fifteen meters or more of scrubby open ground from where the path from the bridge rose out of the groove it followed along the river, rounded a worn rock bluff, and petered out in the scrub a handful of paces from the front door. The upper-story windows were blanked with carbon-fiber security shutters, but downstairs there was activity. Motion visible through a wide picture window, and men darting in and out of the open door with weapons in their hands. Carl counted five before he slid back into cover, none of them yet fitted out in the weblar jackets the three down by the river had worn. One of them, older and apparently in charge, was already on the phone for further orders. Carl crouched where the rock wall on the right of the path still rose over a meter high and listened to the reports of his coming.

“…sounds like a whole fucking squad.” Voice panicky and small across the distance and the steady white-noise pour of the river in the background. “I can’t raise Lucho or Miguel down at the bridge. There’s a fucking mule here with panniers that look like they fucking blew up or something. I don’t know if—”

Pause.

“All right then, but you’d better make it quick.” A shouted aside. “You fucking idiots get your jackets on.”

Shit.

Well, not like you weren’t expecting this.

He went around the corner of the shallowing rock wall at a taut, bent-kneed run, sharkpunch slung and cling-padded to his thigh once more, Glock held out in both hands at head height before him like some kind of venerated icon.

It took them the first three meters to spot him, another two before they realized he wasn’t one of their own. He held fire until they realized, didn’t want to waste the shots. But as the yells erupted and weapons came up, he squeezed the trigger and the pistol yapped in his hands like a badly behaved little dog. He came on in, same rapid pace, straight line toward them, Make the shots count.

The older guy with the phone, jittering in front of his own men’s guns, tugging a pistol loose from somewhere. Carl’s third and fourth shots put him down, staggering back against the wall and doorjamb behind him, clawing for support, sinking fast. One down. More yelling, boiling confusion. Someone got off return fire—At fucking last, Jesus where’d you get these guys, Manco—but it crackled nowhere near, and the mesh made him ignore it. No time, no time, still firing, the steady, flat smack of the Glock rounds, the picture window starred and cratered, had to be security glass. Another guy with a Steyr, shooting wildly from the hip, correct right with the Glock and knock him off his feet like some tugging trick with a wire. Two down. The others were in the game now, cacophony of gunblasts, automatic stutter, and the dull boom of shotguns. Pale dry earth erupted from the ground to his right and in front, he darted left, lost some focus, thought he tagged a third target as the guy darted back inside the lodge, couldn’t be sure. The two remaining outside huddled back toward the door as well, weapons held higher; they’d be getting the range. Shotgun blast, he caught the outer edge of the spread, felt a couple of pellets sting through in his legs. He sprinted the rest of the way in, emptying the Glock as he came. A slug finally caught him somewhere low in the ribs, hammer-blow impact, and he staggered, jerked to a halt, nearly went over. His hat came off, bared his face to the light and his remaining opponents. He saw the shock in their eyes. He snarled and got the Glock back in line, kept pulling the trigger. One of the two men jolted, stumbled backward, firing wildly, one-handed, winged but not down. The Glock locked out on the last round, he threw it away. Less than half a dozen meters now, he ripped the sharkpunch clear and up, aimed vaguely for both men, pulled the trigger.

The picture window shattered in the center, became a sudden, jagged-toothed mouth. The two men were both hurled back off their feet and hard against it, the remaining glass suddenly awash with red and clots of gore; the bodies fell in shredded chunks. Carl got to within two meters of the door, put another shot through on general principles, and then stopped.

Listen.

Faint scrabbling sound from within, off to the right. He threw himself inside, falling and twisting in the air, saw vague movement above the rise of a breakfast bar, and fired at it. Another gun went off at the same time, and he felt a second impact in the ribs. But the edges of the bar ripped apart in flying splinters, and the darkened form in the kitchenette behind blew backward. Wet, uncooked meat noise and a shriek. He hit the ground, skidded painfully into the back of a wood-frame armchair.

And everything stopped again.

This time for real.

“It’s simple enough,” he told Norton, after the interrogation was done. They were playing an inept game of pool on the garish orange table. “I don’t have to find Onbekend now. He’ll come to me.”

“If he doesn’t just have you picked off at whatever airport you’re planning to use.”

“Yeah, well, like I said they’re kind of busy right now. And I’ll be going in under a fresh identity. No COLIN badge, no UNGLA accreditation, no weapons, nothing to ring any bells.”

Norton paused, chin hovering over the cue. “No weapons?”

“Not as such, no. I aim to look like a tourist.”

“And this fresh identity.” The COLIN exec rammed his shot home. “I assume you’re looking to me for that.”

“No, I’ve got a friend back in London can handle that for me, have the stuff couriered across inside a day. What I need from you is the cash. Free wafers, untraceable back to COLIN. My credit still good for that?”

“You know it is.”

“Good. And can you persuade RimSec to keep Ferrer locked up somewhere until end of next week? Make sure he doesn’t have a change of heart and go squawking down the wires to Bambarén?”

“I suppose so.” Norton looked vainly for position, tried a double, took it too fast and missed. “But look. You don’t know this Jurgens will be there. What if she’s not sleeping yet?”

“It’s November, Norton.” Carl chalked his cue. “Jurgens was almost flaking out when I talked to her three weeks ago. She’s got to be under by now.”

“I thought they had drugs that’ll unlock the hibernation.”

“Yeah.” Carl lined up his shot, eased back with due regard for the scarred yellow wall behind him. Sharp snap and the target ball disappeared into a corner pocket as if sucked there by vacuum. The cue ball stood solid in its place. “I knew this hibernoid back on Mars, we used to go the same tanindo classes. He was a private detective, occasional enforcer, too. Very tough guy, always getting into scrapes. I don’t think I ever knew him when he wasn’t carrying some kind of injury. And he told me that no beating he ever took hurt as much as the time he dosed himself with that wake-up shit.”

“Yeah, but if they’re worried about—”

“Norton, they don’t know any reason why I’d be coming after them like this. They don’t know Ertekin was anything to me. And if there’s going to be any COLIN fallout in the air, the very best thing Onbekend can do with his girlfriend right now is put her away somewhere safe and cozy for the next several months. Believe me, she’s there. Just a question of getting to her, digging in, and waiting for Onbekend to come running. And then killing the motherfucker.”

He slammed the next shot, rattled it in the jaws. It didn’t go down.

He peeled off his coat, unslung the sharkpunch, and dumped it on the kitchenette bar. He checked himself for damage. The Marstech impact jacket, disguised through airport security as part of his scuba gear, had soaked up the slugs he’d collected and left him with no worse than bruising, maybe a couple of cracked ribs. He pressed on the tender areas, grimaced, shrugged. He’d gotten off lightly.

So far.

He stripped the dead men of their weapons, piling them up on the shot-splintered breakfast bar. He dragged the worst of the wreckage from the man he’d killed in the kitchenette out the door and left him with his companions. He’d get the rest with a mop and bucket if there was time.

In the upstairs gallery of the lodge, he found a room that extended back into the cliff the house was built against. There was a heavy-duty lock on the door but he shot it out with one of his several newly acquired handguns. The door swung weightily inward on a curved womb-like space lit by subdued orange LCLS paneling at knee height along the walls. He found a panel of switches next to the door and flipped them until a harsher white light sprang up. Assumption confirmed—he’d found Greta Jurgens.

She lay like some dead Viking noblewoman on a broad, carved wood platform with lines that vaguely suggested a boat. Thick tangles of gray-green insulene foam netting supported her and wrapped her over. Carl could smell the stuff as he stepped toward her, the signature nanotech reek of tightly engineered carbon plastics. He’d used the netting on Mars a lot, camping out on expeditions in the Wells uplands.

—Flash recall of sitting out in the warm glow of a heating element while the Martian night came on in all its thin-air glory, thick shingles of stars everywhere and the tiny, on-and-off tracery of burn-up from the leftover seed particles as they kept coming down, decades overdue for their date with atmospheric modification. Sutherland, staring up there at it all, pleased smile on the scarred ebony features, as if all of it, the sky and everything in it, had been put there just for him. Musing, nodding along with whatever it was the young Carl Marsalis had been bitching about. Soaking it up, then turning it around so Carl’d have to look at it from an angle that hadn’t occurred to him before. You ever wondered, soak, if that doesn’t just mean…

Jurgens stirred just barely as the lights came up, but the down end of her cycle had her buried too deep for any substantial reaction. She was naked in the foam, skin taut and shiny with the adipose buildup, lidded eyes bruised and gummed shut with the secretions of the hibernoid sleep. Carl stood looking down at her for a long while, handgun at the end of his arm like a hammer. Images of the last month flickered behind his eyes like flames, like something burning down.

South Florida State. The Perez nanorack. Sevgi Ertekin beside him on the beach. New York, and the futon she made up for him. Gunfire in the street outside, the first warm crushing pressure as he flattened her under him.

Istanbul, the walk to Moda. The gleaming, glittering grins-in-darkness escaping feel to everything they did.

His mouth twitched upward in echo.

The wind across the stones at Sacsayhuamán. Sevgi leaned against the jeep at his back, the tight feeling of cover, of safety.

The road to Arequipa, her face in the soft dashboard glow.

San Francisco and Bulgakov’s Cat, the predawn view out of starboard loading. Don’t gloat, Marsalis. It’s not attractive.

Sevgi dead.

The smile fell off his face. He stared down at the sleeping woman.

Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?

So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.

The mesh surged a little in the pit of his stomach, maybe aftermath of the firefight, maybe something else. He thought of Sevgi’s eyes closing in the hospital. He stared at Jurgens like she was a problem he had to solve.

Only live with what you’ve done, and try in the future to do only what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.

He reached out left-handed. Spread the foam netting a little thicker over the hibernoid’s body, pulled it up where one pale shoulder was exposed.

Then he went rapidly back to the door and killed the bright white LCLS, because something was happening to his vision that felt like blindness. He stood a moment in the warm orange gloom, looked twitchily around as if someone were there next to him, then slipped quietly out and closed the door behind him.

He moved along the gallery, checked doors until he found a darkened, windowless chamber with the fragrant hygiene reek of a woman’s bathroom. He stepped inside, touched the switch panel; more bright white light exploded across the pastel-tiled space. His own face mugged him from a big circular mirror in one wall—sweat-streaked whitener melting and smudging, the black coming up underneath, eyes ringed with the stuff like dark water at the bottom of a pair of pale psychedelic wells. Fuck, no wonder the guys at the bridge freaked. He supposed he owed Carmen Ren for the inspiration.

Wherever she was right now.

He wondered briefly if Ren would make it, if she’d stay ahead of the cudlips and the Agency the way she had before. He wondered if the child growing inside her would make it out into the world safely, and what would happen then. What Ren would have to do to protect it after that.

He remembered the level gaze, the way she’d backed him off with nothing more than a look and the way she stood, the reek of survivability that came off her as she faced him by the tower. Not a bad set of cards to play with. He thought she might be in with a better chance than most of her male counterparts.

Mostly, he was just glad he wouldn’t be the one sent to bring her down.

In a drawer beside the basin, he found capsules he recognized—codeine married to a tweaked caffeine delivery kick. They’d do for his ribs. He ran water from infrared taps into the broad, shallow scoop of marble in front of the mirror, soaped up, and started washing the white shit off his face. It took awhile. When he’d gotten the worst off, he stuck his head under the tap and ran the water on his scalp and the back of his neck. He took one of Greta Jurgens’s pastel towels off the rail beside the basin and scrubbed himself dry with it, stared into the mirror again and didn’t scare himself so much this time.

Now let’s see if you can scare Onbekend.

He crunched up the codeine in his mouth, dry-swallowed a couple of times, tongued the clogged residue off his teeth, and rinsed it down with a swallow of water from the tap. He looked at himself once more in the mirror, as if his reflection might have some useful advice for him, then shrugged and extinguished the light.

He went downstairs to wait.

“You don’t have to do this,” Norton told him.

Carl walked past him around the table, eyeing up the angles. “Yeah, I do.”

“It isn’t going to bring her back.”

He settled to a long, narrow shot down the side cushion. “I think we’ve already had this argument.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m not arguing with you, Marsalis. I’m trying to make you see sense, maybe stop you throwing your life away down there. Look, Saturday is Sevgi’s funeral. I can get you cleared through Union immigration, and keep the police off your back for the time it’d take. Why don’t you come?”

“Because, as far as I can see, that won’t bring her back, either.”

Norton sighed. “This isn’t what she would have wanted, Marsalis.”

“Norton, you don’t have the faintest fucking idea what Sevgi would have wanted.” He rolled the shot, shaved the angle too fine, and watched it knock the object ball into the cushion and away from the pocket. “And neither do I.”

“Then why are you going down there?”

“Because someone once told me the key to living with what you’ve done is to only do those things you’re happy to live with. And I can’t live with Sevgi dead and Onbekend still walking around.”

Carl braced his arms wide on the edge of the table and nodded at the messed-up tangle of balls on the table.

“Your shot,” he said. “See what you can make of that.”

CHAPTER 54

The painkillers came on fast, left him with slight nausea and then a vague sense of well-being he could probably have done without. He prowled the lodge’s downstairs space, measuring angles of fire and thinking halfheartedly about defensibility. He toyed with the piled-up weaponry on the breakfast bar, couldn’t work up much interest there, either. Something was in the way.

He found a place where he could sit and look along the canyon to the jumbled rise of mountains it lay among. Sunlight knifed down over the ridges, turned the air luminous and slightly unreal. As if it was what she’d been waiting for all along, Sevgi Ertekin stepped into his thoughts.

It was the same feeling, the way he’d felt her as he watched the light die away over the hills of Marin County, and again as he left the canyons of Manhattan by way of the Queensboro Bridge. He sat and let the sensation rinse through him, and with it he felt a creeping sense of comprehension, conscious thought catching up with the undefined the way he’d caught up with Gray. Maybe it was the codeine, tripping a synaptic switch somewhere, letting the understanding through. Sevgi was gone, his brain was wired to process that much successfully. But not that she was dead. For the ancient Central African ancestor genes, that one just wouldn’t compute. People don’t just cease to exist, they don’t just vanish into thin fucking air. When people are gone, some deeply programmed part of his consciousness was insisting, it’s because they’re somewhere else, right? So Sevgi’s gone. Fine. So where’s she gone, let’s find that out, because then we can fucking go there and find her, be with her, and finally get rid of this fucking ache.

So.

Those hills dying into darkness on the other side of the bay—think she might be over there? Or in among all that glass and steel over there on the other side of the bridge, maybe? Or, okay, up this fucking canyon maybe, and over the other side of those mountains there. Maybe she’s there. Up past the luminous unreal light, up in the thin air, waiting there for you.

For the first time in his life, he saw why the cudlips might find it hard not to believe in an afterlife, in some other place you go when you’re gone from here.

And then, as he beat his own wiring, as the comprehension settled in, the feeling it had come to explain melted away, and left him nothing in its place but the raw pain in his chest and the stinging salve of the hate.

And out of thin air, as if in answer, the helicopters came.

There were two of them, nondescript commercial machines, bumping down through the brilliant canyon air with the ungainly caution of crane flies. They quartered noisily back and forth, dipped about for a while, angled rotor blur shimmering in the sun, and then they held position over the river opposite the lodge. Carl watched bleakly from the shattered picture window. Enough carrying capacity in the two aircraft for a dozen men at least. He stayed back out of view, let the scattered corpses on the ground around the lodge door paint the picture he wanted. The helicopters dithered and dipped. Finally, he picked up one of the Steyr assault rifles and loosed a quick burst out the window in their general direction. The response was immediate—both machines reared up and fled downriver, presumably in search of a safe place to land.

The path ran on that way, he knew, grooving back down toward the water, building another rock wall on its landward side. They’d be able to come back that way, upriver, and stay hidden right to the edge of the cleared ground outside the lodge, mirror-imaging the approach he’d made a couple of hours ago from the other side. He frowned a little, cuddled the folding frame stock of the Steyr into his shoulder, squinted along the sight, and panned experimentally across the cleared ground. He was pretty sure he could knock down anyone coming for the house before they’d made a couple of meters in the open. They might try a rush assault but it wasn’t likely—they didn’t know how many were in the house, or what they might have done with Greta Jurgens, whether she was alive or dead, safe in her womb or dragged downstairs ready to be held up ragdoll-limp as a shield.

And the lodge was a tough nut to crack. Ferrer had been clear about that much. Bitch got a fucking fortress there, man. Right into the fucking rock, no way you can come down from above, smooth sides so you can’t sneak up. I mean. He sat back, hands in the pockets of his clean new chinos, smirking and confident now he’d done his deal. Who the fuck she expecting, man, the fucking army? And all so she can fucking sleep? Man, I don’t know what hold that bitch got on Manco’s balls, but it’s gotta be something pretty fucking major, get him doing all this. Gotta give the mother of all blow jobs or something.

Like Stefan Nevant before him, Suerte saw the results and jumped to the obvious wrong conclusion. Onbekend stayed in the shadows. If you didn’t know he was there already, you looked for other, more visible explanations.

Like unhuman monsters, home from Mars.

It was the dynamic Ortiz had built his whole cover-up effort around. A monster stalks us! All hands to the palisades and the torches! Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen.

A head poked up from down near the river. Carl let him have a good look around, then fired off another burst. Stone chips and dust leapt in the air; the head jerked back down.

Just so they’re clear on the situation.

“Marsalis?”

Manco Bambarén’s voice. Carl got his back to the side of the window space, stayed in the shadows, and edged an eye around. Steep early-afternoon sunlight flooded down into the canyon. If you crouched and peered upward, you could just see the rich angled fall of it past the rim, and a restful blue gloom beneath where the higher parts of the valley wall were cast in shadow. It was very quiet now that the helicopters were gone—the whirring scrape of crickets, and the buzzing of flies on the bodies outside.

“Black man, is that you?”

“Good guess,” he shouted back, dumping Bambarén’s Spanish for Quechua. “What do you want?”

Brief hesitation. Carl wondered if Onbekend maybe couldn’t follow a conversation in Quechua—there was no guarantee he’d have learned it in his time living hidden up on the altiplano. He’d get by easily enough with Spanish and English. And as Bambarén’s pet pistaco, he’d have no need to integrate with the locals. Standard thirteen isolation would work like a dream.

Sure enough, Bambarén stayed in Spanish. “It’s really about what you want, Marsalis. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

“You guarantee not to shoot me before you’ve heard what I have to say?”

Carl grinned. “I don’t know, you going to take the word of a twist on that?”

“Yes. I will.”

“Then come on across. No weapons, no body armor, hands where I can see them.” Carl paused. “Oh yeah, and bring your brother with you.”

Long, long silence. The crickets scraped in the heated air outside.

“What’s the matter, Manco? You not been watching the feeds? It’s all burned down now, didn’t you know? Ortiz is gone, COLIN are cleaning house. We know all about Onbekend. So let’s see both of you.”

It took a couple of minutes, but then the two figures emerged from the cover down by the path and walked steadily up toward the lodge, hands clasped over their heads. Carl watched them over the Steyr’s sight. Onbekend was holding one arm lopsided, as if it hurt to lift. Carl remembered Sevgi in the Bayview bar—Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.

Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers.

He lined up on Onbekend’s face, flexed his trigger finger a couple of times, took up the tension. Then let it go, put the gun aside impatiently. He picked up a handgun, another Glock, from the pile on the floor, checked the load, and snapped the slide. As Bambarén and Onbekend reached the doorway, he stepped back, mindful of sniping angles through the picture window, and wagged the pistol at them.

“Come on in.”

Onbekend stared at him, spat out English. “Where is she, Marsalis?”

“Not so hasty. Back there to the table in the alcove, both of you. Hands on your head at all times. I’m not going to mess about patting you down, so if either of you do move a hand anywhere near your body without my permission, I’ll just make the assumption and kill you. Got that?”

Bambarén pivoted back and forth slightly, eyes sweeping the open-plan space inside the lodge. Understanding widened his eyes.

“You came here alone?”

“Go to the table. Sit down in the two chairs I’ve pulled out. Keep your hands on your heads until you’re seated, and then put them on the table in front of you. No sudden moves. Sudden movement will get you dead.”

He tugged the door closed, pulled it until the latch whined over into lock.

“Marsalis, I have fifteen men out there.” Bambarén’s voice was low and conversational as he walked to the table. He’d shifted into English as well. “You’re sealed in. Let’s talk about this.”

“We’re going to talk about it. But you’re going to be sitting down when we do. Hands where I can see them, and then flat on the table in front of you.”

They seated themselves, awkward with the need to keep their hands lifted. Bambarén took the head of the table, Onbekend the seat adjacent. This far back in the open-plan space, the lodge made inroads into the cliff face and it was cool and dim, so the two men looked like part of some arcane spiritualist gathering, stiff-backed in the chairs, palms down on the wood, expressions taut. Carl pulled out a chair opposite Onbekend and sat in it, well back from the edge of the table. He floated the Glock on his knee.

“And now what?” the other thirteen asked evenly.

“Now we talk about why I shouldn’t kill you both. Any ideas?”

“Are you so anxious to die, black man?” Bambarén asked.

Carl gave him a faint smile. “Well, fifteen-to-one is long odds, it’s true. But then again, eight-to-one didn’t look good, either, and there they all are, out there for the flies.”

“Have you learned nothing?” Onbekend was looking at him with the same contempt he’d given off in the Bayview bar. “Are you still nothing better than a soldier for the cudlips?”

Bambarén stiffened. Carl put a small smile together.

“Want to be careful who you use that word around, brother. It’s not Manco here’s fault he didn’t get an upgraded limbic system and a beefed-up area thirteen out of Isabela’s raw materials.”

Onbekend barely flickered a glance at Bambarén. “I’m not talking about Manco, and he knows it. I’m talking about the men at the UN you sold your soul to.”

“I’m not here for them.”

Onbekend’s eyes narrowed. “Then why did you come?”

“Because you killed a friend of mine.”

“If you have friends, hired man, then I don’t know them. Who have I killed?”

“You shot a woman called Sevgi Ertekin, a police officer, when she chased you out into the street in Bayview. You shot her with a Haag pistol, and she died.”

“Were you fucking her?”

“Yeah, we were fucking each other. Rather like you and Jurgens.”

Onbekend’s face whitened as he saw the corollary. He cleared his throat.

“It was a firefight,” he said quietly. “Not personal. You would have done the same in my place.”

Carl thought of Garrod Horkan camp and Gaby. The Haag shells knocking her down.

“That’s not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

Carl stared at the other thirteen. “Payment.”

“Listen to me, Marsalis.” Manco Bambarén, misunderstanding what he’d heard. “Whatever you think you’re owed, we can come to an agreement.”

“Manco, shut up.” The tayta looked at Onbekend as if the thirteen had slapped him. Onbekend ignored him, maybe didn’t even notice. His eyes had never left Carl’s face. “You want me to buy Greta’s life with my own?”

“Why not? It’s the same deal you offered Toni Montes in the Freeport, isn’t it? Her life for her children.”

Onbekend looked down at his hands. “If you knew what Toni Montes had done with her life before she acquired that name, had done with other children before she acquired her own, you would perhaps not judge me so harshly.”

“I don’t judge you at all. I just want you dead.”

“If you kill him, black man, you’ll have to kill me as well.” There was a quiet determination in Bambarén’s voice. “And then my men will cut you down like a rabid dog.”

Carl threw him a glance. He smiled, shook his head a little.

“You’re really enjoying having a younger brother all over again, aren’t you, Manco. Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. But do you want to know something about this brother of yours?” He nodded at Onbekend. “This brother of yours is a twin. You’ve actually got two younger brothers by way of your mother’s rather desperate attempts to stay afloat in Peru’s new corporate dream. The other one’s called Allen Merrin. Unfortunately, he’s dead. Do you want to know why?”

Bambarén looked back and forth between the two thirteens.

“He’s dead because you killed him, Marsalis,” Onbekend said casually. “That’s what I heard.”

“He’s dead because his twin brother, Onbekend here, had him brought back from Mars as a sacrificial gene set. Sold him to the people he’s been working for. Would have used him to explain away—”

“But you did kill him, didn’t you?”

The tayta stared at Onbekend. “What is this? What’s he talking about?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Don’t tell me it’s nothing, Onbee.” There was a gathering tightness in Bambarén’s voice now. The same thing Carl had seen on his face when Onbekend used the word cudlip. “What is he talking about?”

“I’m talking about Isabela’s other modified son.” Carl kept the pistol raised in Onbekend’s direction. “The egg your mother sold to the gringos sub-divided a few days in, Manco, and Project Lawman ended up with two identical thirteens for the price of one. That’s very handy when it comes to crime scene genetic trace. While your brother here went about slaughtering inconvenient colleagues from his past, he also arranged for his twin to take the fall for it.”

“Don’t listen to him, Manco. This is—”

“Is he lying?” The look on the tayta’s face marked it as rhetorical. His voice sank almost to a whisper. “You did this? You used your own blood to cover yourself?”

“Manco, there really wasn’t much option. I told you the situation Ortiz put me in, I told you the danger it—”

“You did not tell me this!”

And now Bambarén was trembling, still staring at the thirteen whose genes he shared. His face twitched with suppressed rage.

“A brother?” he asked hoarsely. “A twin? You sold your twin brother? After you came to me and I gave you—”

“It’s not important, Manco. I never knew him, we never even met—”

“He was your blood!” Bambarén started to get up. Carl wagged the Glock at him and he sank back, sat like something coiled. “He was your mother’s blood! I told you when you came to me, blood is everything. The corporations have stolen our souls, they shatter the bonds that make us strong, turn us into uniform strangers living out our lives alone in polymered boxes. Family is all we have.”

“Not if you’re a thirteen,” Carl told him somberly.

There was a long pause.

“Manco, listen to me,” Onbekend said. “I did this to protect—”

“Did you ever even tell our mother?” Bambarén’s face had gone cold and hard as the stones out at Sacsayhuamán, and his voice had grown quiet as the wind. “Did you ever tell Isabela that she had another son somewhere?”

Onbekend’s temper snapped across. “For fuck’s sake, Manco, there would have been no point!”

“No?”

“No. He was on Mars!”

The quiet swept in after the words like a tide, like a breath snuffing candle flames out. They sat in silence in the dim light.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to know how your other brother was persuaded to come home from Mars, would you, Manco?”

Onbekend tensed. His voice grated. “Marsalis, I’m warning you.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Carl told him. “I’ll put you down before your arse comes off the chair.”

He shifted slightly toward Bambarén. Kept the Glock leveled on the thirteen. The tayta stared back at him.

“See, Manco, your unexpected brother here did a deal with Mars. I’m guessing you didn’t know about that?”

“It was not a deal,” Onbekend growled. “It was a strategy, a deception.”

“Okay, he organized a deception, in your name. Your other brother was supposed to be coming back as an assassin for the Martian chapters. Some story about clearing out the Lima familias by way of reparation, laying the whole afrenta Marciana to rest so you could all do business with Mars again. That about right, Onbekend?”

“You did this?” Manco Bambarén whispered. “Even this?”

“Come on, Manco, we’ve talked about it often enough.” Onbekend gestured impatiently. “It wasn’t for real anyway, but—”

“You used my name?”

“By association, yeah. Marsalis, you fuck, listen to me—”

Bambarén lunged across the table at Onbekend. The thirteen jumped, blindsided, fended him off. Carl raised the Glock.

“Gentlemen,” he said warningly.

Bambarén appeared not to hear. He braced his arms on the table, still staring down into the face of the man he’d made into his brother. Rage brought up his accent, bruised the English he used.

“You used my fucking name?”

“Sit down, Manco,” Carl told him. “I won’t tell you again.”

But the familia chief did not sit. Instead he turned himself deliberately to face Carl and the Glock. He drew a deep breath.

“I wish to leave now,” he said stiffly. “I have no further interest in this matter. I withdraw my protection from Greta Jurgens.”

“Oh, Manco, you can’t fucking—”

“Don’t tell me what I can do, twist.” Manco pushed himself off the table with his hands. He looked at Carl. “Well? Is our business concluded, black man?”

“Sure.” Carl hadn’t expected it to work nearly this well, but he wasn’t about to miss the sudden bonus. “Walk to the door, hands on your head. Let yourself out and shut it behind you. And I’d better hear those helicopters leaving inside ten minutes.”

Bambarén stood up and laced his hands together over his head. He and Onbekend looked at each other for a long moment.

“Don’t do this,” Onbekend said tightly. “I’m your brother, Manco. Fourteen years, I’m your fucking brother.”

“No.” Bambarén’s voice was as cold now as the chill coming off the alcove rock. “You are not my brother, you are a mistake. My mistake, my mother’s mistake, and the mistake of gringos without souls. You are a twisted fucking thing, a thing that crept into my family and used me, a thing that cut the living fat from my bones to feed itself. I should have listened to the others when you came.”

“You used me, too, you fuck!”

“Yes. I used you for what you are.” Bambarén spat on the table in front of the thirteen. “Twist! Pistaco! You are nothing to me.”

Onbekend stared down at the spittle. Then, abruptly, he swayed to his feet.

“That’s it, Onbekend.” Carl rapped on the tabletop, gestured with the Glock. “Sit the fuck down.”

There was a grim smile stamped onto Onbekend’s mouth. “I don’t think so.”

Carl came to his feet like whiplash. The chair went over behind him, the Glock leveled on Onbekend’s face.

“I said—”

And then Bambarén was on him like an opsdog.

Later, he never knew why the tayta jumped. Maybe the rage, rage at Onbekend but sloshing generally to include all thirteens, maybe all variants, maybe just anybody within reach. Maybe rage at the unaccustomed powerlessness of sitting at the table under another man’s gun. Or maybe—he hated the thought—not rage at all, maybe the two of them, Bambarén and Onbekend, the two unlikely brothers, maybe in the end they just played Carl, improvised, used the angle, and it worked.

Bambarén slapped a hand into the Glock, swept it wide, and came around the edge of the table yelling. The gun went off, once, nowhere useful. Carl twisted, took the other man’s momentum, and dumped it over his hip. Most of him was still trying to work out where Onbekend had gone. Bambarén clung on with street-fighter savagery, fingers digging for eyes, knee to groin. Carl dropped the gun. They both went down, thrashing to get the upper position.

Tanindo and the mesh won out. Bambarén had an antique street-honed savagery to call on, but it was blurred with age and years of rank. Carl broke his holds, took the punches through the padding of the weblar jacket, teeth gritted tight as pain flared across his cracked ribs and through the codeine veil. He vented a snarl, smothered a knee jab to his groin, and then smashed an elbow into the tayta’s face. The other man reeled off him. Carl stabbed stiffened fingers in under the chin. Bambarén gagged and—

Behind him, the recently familiar chatter of a Steyr assault rifle erupted across the living room space. Short, controlled burst.

He flailed loose of Bambarén, rolled for the cover of the table and the chairs around it. The tayta yelled something, and then another brief storm of automatic fire swept over them both and the shout choked off. The tabletop was ripped into splinters, the assault rifle slugs punching through as if it were cardboard. He heard impacts off the rock behind him. Something slammed into his back, ricochet he knew fleetingly. The Glock, the fucking Glock—

—was gone. From his position on the floor, he saw Onbekend’s legs moving forward, cautious, bent-kneed stance, edging around for a clear shot. He did the only thing left, stormed to his feet, mesh-fed speed and raging strength, hurled the chewed-up table off two legs and forward like a shield. Onbekend snapped off more fire, the table toppled like a tossed playing card, impossibly slow, he dodged sideways. The Steyr chattered, impacts caught him, the impact jacket squeezed and warmed as it worked, the shots twisted and slammed him backward into the alcove wall…

And the firing stopped.

It was almost comical. Onbekend stood with the suddenly silent weapon in his hands. Faint ping of the load alert, into the quiet like a dripping tap. His gaze dropped from Carl’s face to the Steyr, saw the blinking red light. He’d had no time to check the magazine, must have grabbed the first decent weapon he saw off the pile on the breakfast bar, and he’d come away with one almost fully discharged.

Carl came off the wall with a yell.

Onbekend threw the emptied Steyr at him. He batted it aside. The other thirteen tried to grapple, he punched and stamped the attempt apart, drove Onbekend back across the space in a flurry of tanindo technique. The thirteen blocked and covered, launched jabbing counters, but all the time Carl read out the damage Sevgi’s slugs had done in the way the other man moved. He felt a snarl peel his lips, savage satisfaction, the heart-deep anticipation of damage. He closed, broke up a defense, lanced a high blow through, and caught Onbekend across the jaw. The other thirteen staggered, his back almost to the shattered picture window now. Blood and translucent light behind—Carl caught it out of the corner of his eye, dull red smears on the jagged lower line of the remaining glass, glint of the sun’s rays on the sawtoothed edges. He closed with Onbekend again—

And there was a crouched figure beyond the glass.

Carl had time to register the shocked, frightened face, the raised shotgun. His attack momentum was already committed, all he could do was let it carry him stumbling across the living room, trying to get out of the way. The shotgun went off, fresh glass smashed off the ruined window, and Onbekend bellowed. Carl fetched up against the breakfast bar, clawed down a clatter of weapons, and hit the floor. He grabbed at random, found himself with another of the assault rifles, dragged it around—safety off—and triggered it just as the door blew inward.

There were a pair of Bambarén’s men gathered there. They’d shot out the lock and burst in, one high, one low. Carl was sitting on the floor, back to the breakfast bar, nowhere near where they’d expected. He held down the trigger on the Steyr and sprayed. The hammering fire kicked both men backward, limbs waving as if they were trying to fend the bullets off. One of them flew back through the entryway and landed in a puffed cloud of dust outside; the other caught an ankle on the doorjamb and went down tangled where he was. Carl skidded back upright, got cover at the edge of the picture window, and then hooked around and hosed the shotgunner off his feet.

Sporadic fire from farther off. No more bodies. In the sudden quiet, the Steyr pinged insistently for more ammunition. The weapon’s previous owner had doubled magazines, taped two back-to-back and inverted. Carl unlocked the gun, swapped the ends, and snicked the fresh magazine into place.

Somewhere on the floor, Onbekend groaned.

Carl peered out and saw crouched figures backing hastily off, slithering back to their cover by the path. He chased them with a quick burst from the Steyr, drew a deep breath, went back to the doorway, shoved the body on the threshold out of the way with his boot so he could get the door closed. Halfway through, he realized the man was still alive, breathing shallowly and rapidly, eyes closed. Carl shot him in the head with the Steyr, kicked him the rest of the way out, and shut the door. Then he dragged an armchair across the floor and pushed it hard up against the handle. Vague realization of pain as he worked—he stopped and looked down at the impact jacket, saw the shiny bulges where the gene-tweaked weblar had stopped the slugs and melted closed around them. But blood trickled down past the lower hem of the garment. He pulled it up and saw an ugly gouge in the flesh above his hip. Angled fire from someone as he jumped or twisted or fell sometime in the last minute and a half. Could have been Onbekend or the guys in the door, maybe even a stray long shot from outside.

With the sight, the pain rolled in. He sagged onto the arm of the wedging chair.

“That’s fucking ironic,” Onbekend coughed wetly from the floor. “I come that close to taking you down and one of Manco’s fucking goons takes me out instead.”

Carl shot him a tired look. “You were nowhere near.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck you.” Onbekend propped himself up. “Manco?”

No reply.

“Manco?”

Carl watched the other thirteen’s face curiously from across the room. Onbekend’s features contorted with effort as he tried to get himself into a sitting position. His chest was drenched with blood from the shotgun blast. He growled through gritted teeth, pushed with both hands, couldn’t do it. He fell back.

“I’ll go look,” Carl told him.

Manco Bambarén was flat on his back in a pool of his own blood, gazing blankly up at the ceiling. It looked to have been instant—Onbekend’s shots must have nailed him across the chest as he was trying to get up. Carl looked down at the familia chief for a moment, then headed back.

“He’s dead,” Onbekend said. Blood in his throat turned his voice deep and muddy. “Right?”

“Yeah, he’s dead. Nice shooting.”

A bubbling laugh. “I was trying for you.”

“Yeah? Try harder next time.” Carl felt spreading wet warmth, glanced down at his leg, saw blood soaking through the material of his trousers at the belt and thigh. Even through the painkillers, his chest ached as if he’d been crushed in a vise. He wondered if the weblar had failed, let something through somewhere else as well—it could happen with multiple impacts in the same region of the jacket, he’d seen it before. Or maybe someone out there, some fucking gun fetishist, had an armor-piercing load he liked to show off. Power enough to bring down a coked-up black man, just like in Rovayo’s history books; power enough to bring down the thirteen. Power to stop the beast in its tracks.

“Ah. Not a complete waste, then.”

Onbekend had seen the blood as well.

Carl sank onto the floor, put his back against the armchair he had blocking the door, and pulled his feet in so his knees went up. He propped the Steyr on his legs and checked the load. Filtering sunlight slanted in past him, missed his shoulder by half a meter, made him shiver unreasonably in the contrasting shade.

“How many are there out there really?” he asked Onbekend.

The other thirteen turned his head and grinned across the short expanse of stone-tiled floor that separated them. His teeth were bloody.

“More than you’re in any state to deal with, I’d say.” He swallowed liquidly. “Tell me something, Marsalis. Tell me the truth. You didn’t hurt Greta, did you?”

Carl looked at him for a while. “No,” he said finally. “She’s fine, she’s sleeping. I didn’t come here for her.”

“That’s good.” A spasm of pain passed across Onbekend’s face. “Just came for me, huh? Sorry you got beaten to the draw, brother.”

“I’m not your fucking brother.”

Quiet, apart from the sound of Onbekend’s wet rasping breath. Something had happened to the angle of the light outside. Carl and Onbekend were both in pools of shadow, but between them bright sunlight fell in on the dark tiles, seemed to burn back up off them in a blurry dust-moted haze. Carl reached over with a little jagged effort and dipped his hand in the glow, brushed the tips of his fingers over the warmth in the tiles.

Definitely blood trickling somewhere inside the strictures of the weblar jacket. He tipped back his head and sighed.

So.

He wondered, suddenly, what Fat Men Are Harder to Kidnap would sound like when they took the Mars Memorial Hall stage in Blythe next week. If they’d be any good.

“Fifteen.”

He looked across at Onbekend. “What?”

“Fifteen men. Manco was telling you the truth. Plus two pilots, but they don’t count as guns.”

“Fifteen, huh?”

“Yeah. But you downed a couple just now in the doorway, right?”

“Three.” Carl raised his eyebrows at the gallery rail. He thought for just a moment he saw Elena Aguirre leaning there, watching. “Including the guy that got you. Leaves an even dozen. How’d you rate them?”

Onbekend coughed up more laughter, and some blood with it. “Pretty fucking poor. I mean, they’re good by gangster standards. But up against Osprey training? Against a thirteen? A dozen shit-scared cudlips? No contest.”

Carl grimaced. “Just want me to get out there and leave you alone with Greta, right?”

“Nah, stay awhile. Gives us time to talk.”

Carl shot the other thirteen a strange look. “We’ve got something to talk about?”

“Sure we do.” Onbekend held his eye for a moment, then his head rolled back to face the ceiling. He sighed, blood burbling through it. “You still don’t get it, do you. Even now, the two of us in here, all of them out there. You still don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“What we are.” The other thirteen swallowed hard, and his voice lost some of its pipey hydraulic sound. “Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power-grubbing men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.”

The words wiped out in throaty panting. Carl nodded and stared at the gray matte surface of the weapon in his hands.

“But not us, right?”

“Fucking right, not us.” Onbekend spasmed with coughing. Carl saw flecks of blood in the slanting flood of sunlight just past where the other thirteen lay. He waited while the spasm passed and Onbekend got his breath back. “Fucking right, not us. You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did with wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the 1900s. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how you get that?”

Carl said nothing. He’d read about this stuff, a long time ago. Back when there’d been that long gulf of time in the early nineties, while Osprey was mothballed and they all sat around waiting to see what Jacobsen would mean to them. He’d read but he’d let it wash over him at the time, didn’t recall much now. But he remembered talking to Sutherland about the origin mythology, remembered the big man dismissing it with a grunt. Got to live here and now, soak, he rumbled. You’re on Mars now.

But let Onbekend talk his way out.

“Tell you how you get that,” the dying thirteen rasped. “How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out twenty thousand years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis—we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists.” More coughing, and now the voice was turning hollow and bubbling again. “Modern humans are fucking infantilized adolescent cutoffs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?”

“Yeah, so did we,” Carl said somberly. “Remember.”

“They tried to contain us.” Onbekend shifted over onto his side, looked desperately across at Carl. He spat out more blood in the gloom, cleared his throat for what seemed like forever. “But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to rescue them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.”

“If you say so.” Carl watched the creep of the sun across the tiles. It seemed to be moving toward Onbekend, like the walking edge of fire on a piece of paper burning up.

“Yeah, I do fucking say so.” The other thirteen grinned weakly at him across the light, head drooping. He moved a hand, pressed it flat on the sun-touched tiles and tried to push down. The hand slid instead; the arm was limp behind it. “We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means.”

“You aren’t,” Carl pointed out.

Twist of lips, bloodied teeth. “No, but you can.”

“I’m injured, Onbekend. There are twelve of them out there.”

“Hey, you’re the lottery guy.” Onbekend was gasping now. “Telling me you don’t feel lucky?”

“I cheated the lottery. I fixed it.”

Laughter, like tiny hands beating a slow rhythm on a thin tin oil drum a long, long way off. “There you go. That’s pure thirteen, brother. Don’t play their fucking games, find a way to fuck them all instead. Marsalis, you’re it. You’ll do fine out there.”

He rolled over onto his back again. Stared up at the ceiling. The creeping edge of sunlight came and licked at his hand.

“You’ll show them,” he bubbled.

The sun crept on. It began to cover his body in the same burnishing, dusty glow. He didn’t speak again.

Outside, Carl could hear Bambarén’s men talking. Nerving each other up.

I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.

It was almost as if she were there, speaking in his ear. Or maybe that was Elena Aguirre again. He remembered squeezing her hand in the hospital, the dry weightlessness of it. Telling her all that sunlight through the trees.

He pulled the full magazine from the Steyr and looked at the soft gleam of the top shell. Snicked it back into the gun.

I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up.

We all will.

Onbekend’s breathing had stopped. The sunlight covered him. Carl shivered in the gloom on his side of the window. He thought he could hear stealthy movement somewhere outside.

He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he’d expected. He edged across to the weapons that had fallen from the bar, took a Glock, and tucked it into his belt for later. Lifted another Steyr, checked the magazines, and then slung it around his neck, adjusting the strap carefully. He’d grab it when he threw away the one in his hands, when that was emptied. It was extra weight, but it couldn’t be any worse than lugging the sharkpunch all the way down here had been.

A dozen shit-scared cudlips. Good odds for the lottery guy.

You’ll show them.

“Yeah, right,” he muttered.

Drag the armchair aside, crack the door, and peer out. He couldn’t see anybody, hadn’t expected to really. But they’d come in sooner or later, to check on the man who gave them their orders, told them what to do, kept them fed.

I’ll see you in the garden.

The whisper ghosted past his ear again, behind him in the gloom. This time he heard it for sure. It lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Carl nodded and reached back with his left hand, cupped the place on his neck where the voice had touched. He looked one more time at Onbekend’s incandescent corpse, checked his weapons one more time, nodded to himself again.

Deep breath.

Then he went out into the sun.