Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 43

Dawn crept up on the Stanford campus like a cautious painter, mixing color into the monochrome gloom overhead so it faded through shades of gray toward a clean morning blue, layering beige back onto the sandstone angles of the hospital buildings one pale coat at a time, working from the top down. In the gardens, the hedges and trees got back their green and people started to come through on the gravel paths in ones and twos. A few of them glanced at the black man seated alone on the bench, but none stopped. There was a curious immobility to him that drove off any impulse for human contact, and stilled conversational voices as they approached. Those whose work was in the acute wards at the medical center knew at a glance what it meant. This was a man undergoing surgery without anesthetic—the slow, sawtoothed severing of himself from another human being somewhere inside the hospital.

Out on Highway 101, the occasional brushing sound of nighttime traffic was building to a steady background murmur. Birdsong made self-important, twittering aural counterpoint, like handfuls of brightly colored pebbles tossed continually onto a broad gray conveyor belt. Human voices splashed between with increasing strength and frequency, feet crunched in gravel like a grave being dug. Day stormed the walls Carl had built around himself in the cold hours, smashed and battered down the simplicity of his vigil with human detail. He looked up out of the wreckage with a quiet and implacable hatred for everything he could see and hear.

“Happy now?”

Norton stood in front of him, not in reach. He’d slept in his clothes somewhere; even the Marstech jeans were creased.

He seemed to be genuinely waiting for an answer.

“No. You?”

There was a stone bench on the other side of the path, twin to the one Carl was using. Norton lowered himself onto it.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” he said woodenly. “I’m going to have you sent back to South Florida State. I’m going to have you sent to Cimarron or Tanana for the rest of your fucking life.”

By the look of him, he’d been crying. Carl felt a brief stab of envy.

“How is she?” he asked.

“You’re joking, of course. You fuck.”

The mesh pounded up out of his desolation. He lifted a shaky, loose-fingered hand, pointed it. “Don’t push me, Norton. I could do with killing something right now, and it might as well be you.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth.” Norton stared down at his own hands as if assessing their suitability for the task. “But that isn’t going to help Sevgi.”

“Nothing’s going to help Sevgi, you fucking prick!” There was a brutal pleasure somewhere in the snapped words, like biting down on a mouth ulcer until it split and bled. “Didn’t they tell you? It’s a Haag slug.”

“Yes, they told me. They also tell me Stanford has the best immune system repair clinic on the West Coast. Cutting-edge techniques.”

“It won’t matter. It’s Falwell. Nothing short of death stops that motherfucker.”

“That’s right, give up why don’t you? Very fucking British.”

Carl stared at him for a couple of seconds, made a disgusted spitting noise, and looked away. A young woman went by pushing a bike. The small black backpack she wore had a smiley face pinned to it, winking a merciless yellow in the fresh morning light. Whatever you are, a tinselly patch above the badge suggested brightly, be a good one.

“Norton,” he said quietly. “How is she?”

The COLIN executive shook his head. “They’ve stabilized her. That’s all I know. They’ve got an n-djinn mapping the viral shift.”

Carl nodded. Sat in silence.

Finally, Norton asked him. “How long has she got?”

“I don’t know.” Carl drew breath. Let it out by shuddering increments. “Not long.”

More quiet. More people went past, talking intimate irrelevancies. Living their lives.

“Marsalis, how the fuck did this guy get hold of a Haag gun in the first place?” There was a high, desperate note in Norton’s voice now, like a child protesting an unfair punishment. “They’re illegal everywhere I know, incredibly expensive to get hold of on the black market. Lethally dangerous in the wrong hands. There can’t be more than a couple of hundred people on the planet with a Haag carry permit.”

“Yeah. For anyone with major male tendency, you just described the perfect object of desire.” Carl drew on the collateral detail like dying embers in a fire, huddling to the warmth and distraction it offered. “Haag gun’s infinitely attractive to anyone even remotely enamored of weaponry. Guy I knew in Texas once offered me half a million dollars for mine. Cash in a suitcase.”

“Okay, look.” The COLIN exec rubbed hands over his face. Dragged his head up through his fingers. “Say this guy, this Onbekend, he somehow gets hold of a Haag gun because it makes his dick hard. He carries it into a situation where he runs the risk of arrest or a shoot-out with RimSec, and just before the action starts he leaves the damn thing in the car? There’s no sense in that.”

“Yes there is.” He’d had the whole night to think it through, sitting in a chair outside the intensive-care unit and fitting together the irreversible march of events that put Sevgi Ertekin in a support cocoon on the other side of the biosealed doors. He had his solution before dawn, and it stared him in the face like a skull, drove him out of the cleanly kept corridors and away, down into the gardens and their graying light. “Onbekend brought the Haag gun for me, because he thought he was going to have to walk me out of the hotel and get me somewhere they could fake my suicide. They couldn’t afford a murder, they’re trying to run silent right now. And Onbekend couldn’t afford to sedate me, because it might show up in an autopsy. He was looking to back me up and push me around fully conscious, and that’s a tricky thing to do with a thirteen. We don’t scare easily, and we’re generally not that afraid of dying. But there are ways and ways to die. I might have tried to jump almost any ordinary weapon, even against the odds. Not the Haag gun.”

“He told you that. That he was planning to fake your suicide?”

“Yeah, he told me.” Carl stared back into the memories. “Above and beyond anything he was hired to do, Onbekend hated me. I’m used to that from other thirteens, it’s standard. But this was a little more. He wanted me stripped down before I died. Wanted me to know how stupid I’d been, how far ahead and above me he was. How pitiful I was going to look with my brains blown out by my own hand somewhere.”

“But they shelved the suicide.”

“Yeah.” Carl drew another hard breath. Onbekend’s remembered scorn cut through him. “They didn’t need it. I went walkabout, and the plan changed. It was going to be enough to fake a street death instead. No need for the Haag as a threat, and it would have been entirely the wrong weapon to actually kill me with. Onbekend left it in the teardrop, only used it on Sevgi because he didn’t have anything else at hand.”

Norton stared at him. “I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to her.”

Carl looked tiredly back at him. “You want to blame me for this, Norton? Need a target for your impotent male rage? Go right ahead, hate me. I’m used to it, I’m not going to notice the extra weight. Just don’t push your luck, because I’m tired and I will break you in half if you cross the line.”

“If you hadn’t—”

“If I hadn’t gone out, it would have been different. I know. They would have taken me in the hotel, walked me out, and Sevgi Ertekin would still have been there when it happened because, Norton, she was coming to see me anyway. Maybe that’s what’s really eating you, huh?”

“Oh fuck you.” But it was said wearily, and he looked away.

“You want to know the truth, Norton? Why she was coming to see me?”

“No, I don’t.”

“She was coming to clear your name.”

The COLIN exec looked back at him as if Carl had just slapped him.

“What?”

“I didn’t trust you, Norton, any more than a Jesusland presidential address. Those skaters were outside Sevgi’s place that morning, and you were the only one who knew where I was. I figured you had some agenda that involved wiping me off the landscape.”

“What? I fucking got you out of jail in the first place, Marsalis. It was my call, my initiative. Why the hell would I—”

“Hey, call it thirteen paranoia.” Carl sighed. “Anyway, seems last night Sevgi got a call from NYPD: they’d picked up the third skater and he talked. I was never the target. Ortiz was. Sevgi was coming to tell me that, because she couldn’t bear the idea of your name being smeared.”

Norton said nothing.

“Feel any better now?”

“No.” It was a whisper.

“She never wore it as a theory anyway. Slapped me down when I tried to sell it to her. I don’t know if you guys were ever an item—”

“We weren’t.” Snapped out, brittle and harsh.

“No, well, whatever you had, it still went pretty deep, apparently.”

Long silence. Norton looked around the garden as if he might see some kind of explanation hanging up in a shrub, sparkling there in the fountain.

“She was a cop,” he muttered finally. “Two and a half years in COLIN, but I don’t think she ever really changed.”

“Yeah. She was a cop. That’s why she backed you, her partner, against anything I could sell her. And that’s why she went out into the street after Onbekend, and that’s why she got shot.”

More quiet. Direct sunlight reached the bottom of the buildings, gilded the gravel. There was some real warmth seeping into the day now. A group of students went past in a hurry, late for something. A woman in a blue doctor’s tunic came toward them from the acute unit building.

“Which of you is Marsalis?” she asked peremptorily. Under close-cropped black hair, her Chinese features were smudged with tiredness.

Carl raised his hand. The doctor nodded.

“You’d better come in. She’s asking for you.”

Norton looked away.

The v-format was state-of-the-art and took less time than he’d expected to cajole his thirteen nervous system into relaxing and accepting the illusion. He blinked in behind floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. On the other side there was a garden, less arid and stylized than the one he’d been sitting in back in the real world. Here, there was a border of lush growth around the well-kept lawn, nodding ferns and draped foliage, tall, straight trees beyond. A pair of wooden easy chairs were set out in the center.

Sevgi Ertekin sat in one of them, loosely robed in a slate-and-blue kimono with embroidered Arab characters, waiting. There was a book in her lap, but she held it closed, fingers loosely inserted between the pages; her head was lifted, as if listening. She was staring at something else, as if someone already stood there on the other side of the garden, waiting as well.

The glass slid back soundlessly, and he stepped through. The motion caught her eye, or the system was wired to chime the arrival of visitors. She saw him, lifted an arm in greeting.

“Nice, isn’t it,” she called out. “No expense spared for dying COLIN executives, you know.”

“So I see.” He walked to her, stood looking down into her face. The system had allowed no trace of her illness into its imaging.

She gestured. “Come on, then. Sit down, soak it up.”

He sat.

“I guess I’m looking a lot better in here than I do for real,” she said brightly, treading on the heels of his own thoughts with an accuracy that made him blink. “Right?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t let me in to see you yet.”

“Well, they haven’t shown me a mirror yet, either. Then again, I haven’t asked. I figure the idea is to make you feel as good about yourself as possible, hope that kicks your will to live into high gear, boosts your immune system, and gets you out of their expensive acute-care unit as soon as humanly possible.” She stopped abruptly, as if unplugged, and he saw for the first time how scared she really was. She licked her lips. “Of course, that’s not a dynamic that applies to me.”

He said nothing, could think of nothing to say. A brook chuckled to itself somewhere beyond the foliage. A couple of small birds hopped about on the grass, closer to the humans than would have been likely in the real world. Sunlight struck through the surrounding trees at a high angle.

“My father’s flying in from New York,” she said, and sighed. “I’m not looking forward to that.”

“I don’t suppose he is, either.”

She ghosted a chuckle, barely louder than the brook. “No, I guess not. We haven’t been getting along all that well the last few years. Don’t see each other much, don’t really talk. Not the way we used to, anyway.” Another faint laugh. “He’s probably going to think I did this just to get his attention. Deathbed reconciliation. What a fucking drama queen, huh?”

Carl felt his mouth tighten, back teeth locking down with involuntary force. It cost him more effort than he’d thought to keep looking at her.

“Norton here?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He tried to smile. It was as if he’d forgotten which muscles to use. “I think he’s kind of hurt you asked to see me first.”

Ertekin pulled a face. “Yeah, well. Be time for everybody, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of friends.”

He took an interest in one of the brightly colored birds around his feet.

“Marsalis?”

He looked up reluctantly. “Yeah?”

“How much time have I got?”

“I don’t know,” he said quickly.

“But you know how the Haag system works.” Urgency in her voice like pleading. “You’ve used the fucking thing often enough, you must have some idea.”

“Sevgi, it depends. They’re treating you with state-of-the-art anti-virals here—”

“Yeah, just like fucking Nalan.”

“Sorry?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Look, you’re not going to scare me any more than I already am. Tell me the truth. They can’t stop it, can they?”

He hesitated.

“Tell me the fucking truth, Carl.”

He met her eyes. “No. They can’t stop it.”

“Good. Now tell me how long I’ve got.”

“I don’t know, Sevgi. Honestly. They can probably back it up with what they have here, maybe model it enough to…”

He saw the look on her face and stopped.

“Weeks,” he said. “A couple of months at most.”

“Thank you.”

“Sevgi, I—”

She raised a hand, made a smile for him. She got out of the chair.

“Going to walk down to the river. Want to come? They told me I’m not supposed to exert myself, even in here. Stimulus feedback, apparently it affects the nervous system almost like the real thing. But I think I’d like to walk a little while I still can.” She held up the book. “And there’s only so much fifteenth-century poetry you can handle without a break, you know.”

He read the title off the antique russet-and-green binding. The Perfumed Garden by Ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi.

“Any good?”

“The aphrodisiac recipes are shaky, but the rest is pretty solid, yeah. Always promised myself I was going to get around to reading it one day.” Again the brief flicker of fear in her eyes, rapidly quashed. “Better late than never, right?”

Again, he had no answer, not for what she said or for what he’d seen in her eyes. He followed her across the lawn toward the sound of the water and helped her hold back the hanging branches that blocked passage. They eased through, bent-backed, and stood up in sun-dappled foliage on the bank of the shallow stream. Sevgi stared down at the flow for a while as it slipped past them.

“I need to ask you a couple of favors,” she said quietly.

“Sure.”

“I need you to stay on here. I know I said you were free to go, I know I more or less sent you away, but—”

“Don’t worry.” His voice thickened. He had to damp down the surge of fury. “I’m not going to just walk away from this. Onbekend is a dead man walking. And so is whoever sent him.”

“Good. But that’s not what I meant.”

“No?”

“No. With what’s happened now, there’s more than enough to keep the case wide open. It’d be good if you were there to help out after I’m…” She made a limp gesture at the flow of the stream. “But that’s not what I’m asking you for. This is, well, it’s more selfish.”

“I’m alive because of you, Sevgi,” he said tonelessly. “That buys you a lot of indulgence.”

She turned. She touched his hand.

There was a brief, visceral shock to it; tactile contact was one of the wrinkles the technology still hadn’t really ironed out, and format etiquette tended against it as a result. Outside of the crude and curiously unsatisfying porn virtuals he’d used on base in the military, he doubted he’d touched anyone in format more than half a dozen times in his life, and most of those would have been accidental collisions. Now he felt Sevgi Ertekin’s hand as if through gloves, and a twitching sense of frustration rose to fan the embers of his fading anger.

“I need you to stay with me,” she said. She looked down at where their hands met, as if trying to make out some detail she wasn’t sure was there. “It’s going to be hard. Murat—that’s my father—he’s going to be hurting too much. Norton’s too conflicted. Everyone else is too far off, I’ve pushed them all away anyway, since Ethan. I wouldn’t know what to say to them. That leaves you, Carl. You’re clean. I need you to help me do this.”

Clean?

“You said two favors,” he reminded her.

“Yeah.” She dropped his hand, went back to staring at the flow of the water. “I think you know what the other one’s going to be.”

He stood beside her and watched the stream flow.

“All right,” he said.

CHAPTER 44

He waited for Norton in the corridor outside the visiting station and the v-format cubicles. The COLIN exec came out puffy-eyed and blinking, as if the light in the corridor was too harsh to deal with.

“I need to talk to you,” Carl told him.

Norton’s face twitched. “And you think now’s the time?”

“She isn’t going to improve, Norton. You’d better get used to operating under these conditions.”

“What do you want?”

“Have you read the statement I gave to RimSec?”

“No, I.” Norton closed his eyes for a moment. “Yes. I skimmed it. So what?”

“Someone sent Onbekend to take me out. Probably the same someone who hired Carmen Ren to partner Merrin, the same someone who had Merrin brought back to Earth in the first place. We’re not done here, we’re not even half done.”

Norton sighed. “Yes, I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes with Sevgi telling me the same thing. I don’t need you to ram it home. COLIN will step up the inquiry, RimSec are already covering bases here. Right now, though—”

“I’m not going home until this is done.”

“Yes, Sevgi made that quite clear to me as well.” Norton tried to brush past him. Carl fought down a desire to snag his arm and snap him around. He backed up a couple of rapid paces instead and put his arm out across the corridor to the wall, so the COLIN exec had to stop. Norton’s teeth clenched, his fists balled at his sides.

“What, do you want, from me, Marsalis?”

“Two things. First, you need to get on to Ortiz and have him put a stopper on my release back to UNGLA jurisdiction. I had a call from the Brussels office last night and they’re very keen to have me back in the fold.”

“Ortiz is barely out of intensive care. He’s in no condition—”

“Then talk to whoever is. I don’t want to have fight UNGLA as well as whoever’s running Onbekend.”

Norton pulled in a compressed breath. “Very well. I’ll pass this on to Nicholson when I speak to him this afternoon. What else?”

“I want you to lean on Colony. I want to talk to Gutierrez.”

COLIN ran a small administrative unit out of two blocks in downtown Oakland, with facilities for a Mars coms link. Norton got a RimSec autocopter detailed to fly them back up and across the bay, and a COLIN limo to meet them at touchdown. He did it all with the remote command of a preoccupied man driving a familiar route home. In the limo, he called ahead to the coms link duty technician and set up the call.

Sevgi burned in his head like a brand, dry-eyed beside the small stream, all the things she didn’t say. All the things he didn’t, either.

The red tape from the Colony police administration at the Mars end was fierce and self-referential. Having Gutierrez arrested and interrogated had been easy by comparison—Colony knew, in their own cloddish way, how to do that. But authorized off-world communication, from custody, with non-COLIN personnel was apparently just too exotic to have precedent or established procedure. It took three levels of rank before he reached someone who’d do what he told them. And the distances didn’t help—Mars currently sat just less than 250 million kilometers away, and transmission time was around thirteen and a half minutes each way. Almost a full half hour between each act of communication. It seemed somehow emblematic.

Marsalis prowled outside the chamber, occasionally visible through the head-height windows on the door. There was a small, mean-spirited pleasure in excluding the thirteen from the early proceedings, an impulse that Norton knew only too drearily well was the human equivalent of a tomcat pissing to mark his territory.

He was too tired to combat the urge, too nonspecifically furious to feel embarrassed by his behavior. He battered down the red tape at Colony with a cold, controlled anger he hadn’t known he owned, appealed to reason where he could, bullied and threatened where he could not. He waited out the long delay silences that punctuated the whole process with the patience of an automaton. None of it seemed to matter, except as a way to stave off the knowledge that Sevgi would die, was dying right now by stages as her immune system staggered under the repeated blows from the Falwell viruses and their mutating swirl.

Finally, he let Marsalis in. Ceded the operational seat and folded himself into an off-scope chair at the side of the chamber. Stared emptily at the thirteen as he settled himself.

“You really think this is going to work?”

His voice was slack and careless in his own ears, run flat with emotional overload.

“That depends,” said Marsalis, studying the countdown clock above the lens-and-screen array in front of him.

“On what?”

“On whether Franklin Gutierrez wants to go on living or not.”

The last digits blinked through, the receiving announcer chimed, and the screen rezzed up to an image of a similar transmission chamber at the Mars end. Gutierrez sat there, cleaned up since Norton had last seen him dragged out of interrogation. There was a clean white plaster wrap on his damaged hand, and the bruising around his face and eye had been treated with inflammation suppressants. He frowned into the camera a little, glanced aside to someone off screen, then cleared his throat and leaned forward.

“Till I see who the fuck’s on the other end of this, I don’t say anything. Got that? You get these morons to pull their claws out of me, we can maybe do some kind of deal. But that’s when I see your face, not before.”

He sat back. The transmission-locked seal blipped across the screen in green machine code, and the image froze. The online light glowed orange. Marsalis sat looking at the screen, moved no more than a corpse.

“Hullo, Franklin,” he said flatly. “Remember me? I’m pretty sure you do. So now that you know who’s on the other end, listen carefully to me. You will give me everything you know about Allen Merrin and why you helped send him home. You get one chance to do this. Don’t disappoint me.”

He snapped the arm control and the transmission sealed, fired off. Above their heads, the counter started down again.

“You’ll forgive me if I’m not impressed yet,” Norton said.

Marsalis barely shifted in the seat, but his eyes tracked around and out of nowhere, through all the weariness and grief, Norton saw something there that sent a small chill chasing around the base of his skull like cold water rinsing around a basin.

They waited out the counter. It reached zero, started counting up again into time used before transmission at the other end.

“Hey, the lottery man!” Gutierrez came back sneering, but behind it Norton could see the chill, the same jolt he’d felt when Marsalis looked at him half an hour earlier. And the counter told its own tale in glowing frozen digits. They were up around two and a half minutes over base transmission-and-turnaround time—and unless the datahawk had made a speech to the camera, the time overspill was hesitation. Gutierrez had jammed up, had had to put a reply together on hold. The bravado rang false as a Tennessee Marstech label. “Yeah, how’s your luck holding back home, Marsalis? How you doing? Missing the girls from the Dozen Up club?”

After that, Gutierrez switched into Quechua. The screen fired up stilted subtitles to cover. You are three hundred million kilometers away from me. That is a long way off for making threats. What will you do, take the long sleep? Come all the way back here, just to kill me? You don’t scare me anymore, Marsalis. You make me laugh. It went on, derisory, building the bravado up. It boiled down to fuck off and die.

It still rang false.

Marsalis watched it all with a thin, cold smile.

When the transmission ended, he leaned forward and started speaking, also in Quechua. Norton had no knowledge of the altiplano tongue beyond counting one to twenty and a handful of food items, but even through the blanket incomprehension, he felt a dry-ice cold coming off the black man and what he was saying. The words husked out of him, rustling and intent, like something reptilian breaking out of an egg. In the fog of sleeplessness that was gradually shutting down his senses, Norton had one moment of clarity so supreme he knew it had to be a lie; but in that moment it was as if something else was speaking through Marsalis, something ancient and not really human using his mouth and face as a mask and a launch point to hurl itself across the gulf between worlds, to reach out and take Franklin Gutierrez by the throat and heart, as if he were sitting across a desk and not a quarter of a billion kilometers of empty space.

It took little more than a minute to say, whatever it was, but for Norton the whole thing seemed to happen outside real time. When Marsalis was finished speaking, the COLIN exec opened his mouth to say something—say anything, to break the creaking, something-has-left-the-building silence—and then stopped because he saw that Marsalis had not thumbed for transmission. The message was still open, still waiting to be sealed, and for what seemed like a very long time the black man just looked into the facing lens and said nothing at all, just looked.

Then he touched the button and, in some way Norton could not define, he seemed to slump.

It was a solid minute before the COLIN exec found words of his own.

“What did you say?” he asked, through dry lips.

Marsalis twitched like someone waking from a doze. Shot him a normal, human look. Shrugged.

“I told him I’d go back to Mars and find him if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. Told him COLIN would fund the ticket, there and back. Told him I’d kill him and everyone he cares about.”

“You think he’ll buy it?”

The black man’s attention drifted back to the screen. He must also, Norton suddenly realized, be very tired. “Yes. He’ll buy it.”

“And if he doesn’t? If he calls your bluff?”

Marsalis glanced at him again, and Norton knew what the answer was going to be before the quiet, matter-of-fact words fell into the quiet room.

“This isn’t a bluff.”

They waited, down to zero on the glowing counter and then minutes clocking up beyond. Neither of them said anything; Norton at least could think of nothing to say. But the lack was almost companionable. Marsalis met his eye once or twice, and once he nodded as if the COLIN exec had said something, so securely that Norton wondered if he hadn’t in the extremities of his grief and weariness vocalized some random internal thought.

If he had, he couldn’t recall what it was.

The quiet in the room settled in around him like a blanket, warming and soothing, inviting escape, exit from the mess and the grief, the slide down into the soft oblivion of long-deferred sleep…

He jerked awake.

The chime of the receiver, and his neck, cricked and aching.

The screen rezzed up again.

Gutierrez came through, panic-stricken and babbling.

CHAPTER 45

You’re clean.

He couldn’t work out what she meant, not really. He tried. He tugged at the tightly knotted intricacies of it while he sat in a pool of lamplight in the darkened offices at COLIN and played back the transcript of Gutierrez cracking wide open. He gave up exasperated, left it alone. Came back and tugged at it some more.

That leaves you. Carl. You’re clean.

He felt around the rough contours of it, but it was like searching for holds on one of the improbably towering cliff faces in the Massif Verne. Your fingers told you what was there, gave you something to hold on to or lever off, but that was immediate applicability, not the shape of the whole. It wasn’t understanding. He knew the moves that were coming, what That leaves you, you’re clean meant in terms of what she wanted him to do, but that no more told him what she believed about him, what she thought they were to each other, than a successful series of moves back on that Verne rock gave you a topographic map of the face.

It was like being back in the Osprey compound, puzzling over one of Aunt Chitra’s more obscure training koans.

You’re clean.

The phrase ticked in his head like a bomb.

Norton left, presumably to get some sleep before he collapsed. He offered no comment other than See you in the morning. His tone was hesitant, if not friendly then a close analog, buffered soft by exhaustion. Somewhere in the last few hours, the tension between them had shifted in some indefinable way, and something else was emerging to take its place.

Carl sat in the empty offices, listening to the transcript over and over, staring into space, until the floor he was on started to shut itself down for the night. Overhead lighting blinked out panel by panel, and the darkness beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows washed quietly in to fill the work spaces like dark water. Unused systems dropped into standby mode, screens locked to the COLIN acronym, and small red lights gleamed to life in the gloom. No one came up to see what he was doing. Like most COLIN facilities, the Oakland offices were manned around the clock, but by night the staffing went down to skeleton levels and an enabled smart system in the basement. Security was down there—Norton must just have told them to leave him alone.

Gutierrez confessed, hasty and disjointed, backing up, self-correcting, probably lying and embellishing along the way. A picture emerged anyway.

…someone in the familias…had to break ranks sooner or later…the war’s just fucking stupid…

…I don’t know, Marsalis, they didn’t feed me that much fucking information…just had to fake the guy through, that’s what I do, you know… At some point in the protracted, half-hour-gapped interrogation, something tipped over in Gutierrez. Fear, the dangled promise of COLIN protection, maybe some griping sense of betrayal for his time in custody, waiting for a familia rescue that hadn’t yet come—resentment built from smoldering, sparked, and finally flared into open, angry revolt…Look, I’m a fucking cormorant, man, a wire hire, it’s not like I’ve got blood with any of them, why are they going to tell me a fucking thing they don’t have to…

…well, obviously someone who stands to gain from a cessation of hostilities with Mars…you don’t need me to tell you that, right…

…yeah, yeah, jump the docking protocols, put the guy down off the California coast…

…no, they didn’t say why…like I said……yeah, of course I showed him how to jump-start the cryocap gel…how else was he going to survive a splashdown…

And with the resentment, a steadily leaking pool of self-pity and justification…yeah, fucking right, that was an accident. You think I planned to send him home awake like that? Think that’s the kind of work I do from choice? Should have woken up two weeks from home, not from Mars…fucking would have, too, if I’d had my way. I told them it was risky, killing the n-djinn two weeks into the trajectory, told them it might knock on and trigger the other stuff, but hey, why the fuck listen to the expert, what does he fucking know…

…because, if you shut the n-djinn down two weeks from home, COLIN Earth sends a rescue ship up to find out what the fuck happened. Guaranteed. They don’t want to take the risk of a docking fuckup, can’t afford the bad publicity. But if it shuts down two weeks into the trajectory, and then the ship runs silent but smooth all the way home, then they’re going to trust the auto systems and let it go. You know how those fuckers are about costs…

There were a couple of hours of it, even when you cut out the transmission delay. The datahawk’s resistance had gone like a dam wall failing. Carl went back through it, time after time, because the alternative was to start thinking about Sevgi Ertekin. He listened until what Gutierrez was saying started to rub smooth in his head, until it was just patterned noise, with no more meaning than the stamped geometric light and dark of windows, lit and not, in the other buildings outside the window.

He saw her walk back in through the door of the bar once more, wry grimace and the slow ooze of blood on her shoulder and sleeve. The kick in his throat when he saw it, the relief when she said she was okay, the—

…blood, said the transcript for the nth time…. not like I’ve got blood with any of them…

He frowned. Hit pause, rewind. The transcript gibbered backward, rolled again.

Gutierrez sulked once more. Look, I’m a fucking cormorant, man, a wire hire, it’s not like I’ve got blood with any of them…

He heard his own voice and Bambarén’s, worried at by the wind across Sacsayhuamán.

My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.

“Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that—

He sat up suddenly straight from his slump. He played it back again, listened once more to the juxtaposition he’d never spotted before.

That’s got to be it.

He reeled back some more, backed up through the datahawk’s rambling…. obviously someone who stands to gain from a cessation of hostilities with Mars…you don’t need me to tell you that, right…

Fucking got to be. He stared at the revelation as it unfolded in the LCLS blast of the desk lamp. Bambarén’s image-tight knowledge of Project Lawman’s weaning procedures. Greta Jurgens, boasting, Bambarén’s suave understated confirmation when called on it. The two items collided in his head.

…you’ve made a niche career out of coexisting with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.

I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you.

No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.

…someone who stands to gain…

…a sentimental attachment to ties of blood…

Fucking had to be.

The realization of how close to the mystery he’d been digging at the time came in across waves of tiredness and made him giddy with exhilaration.

All the time, all the fucking time we were that close. Just fucking wait till I tell—

Sevgi.

And then, abruptly, it was all worth nothing again, and all he had was rage.

He checked the files, rang Matthew with it.

“Gayoso.” The datahawk seemed to be tasting the name. “Okay, but it may take awhile, especially if people have been hiding things the way you say they have.”

“I’m not in a hurry.”

Slight pause at the other end of the line. “That’s not like you, Carl.”

“No.” He stared at his reflected self in the nighttime glass of the office windows. Grimaced. “I don’t suppose it is.”

More silence. Matthew didn’t like change, at least not among his human colleagues. Carl could feel his discomfort crawling on the line.

“Sorry, Matt. I’m kind of tired.”

“Matthew.”

“Yeah, Matthew. Sorry again. Like I said, tired. I’m waiting for some things to shake out at this end, so I’m in no rush for this stuff. That’s all I meant.”

“Okay.” Matthew’s voice went back to sunny as if he’d thrown a switch. “Listen, you want to know a secret?”

“A secret?”

“Yes. Confidential data. Would you like to know it?”

Carl frowned. He didn’t often use video when he talked to Matthew; the datahawk didn’t seem to like it much, for one thing, and for another the calls were usually purely functional, so it seemed pointless. But now, for the first time, he wished he could see Matthew’s face.

“Confidential data’s usually the reason I ring you,” he said carefully. “So, yeah. Let’s hear it.”

“Well, you’re in trouble with the Brussels office. Gianfranco di Palma is very angry with you.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes. He told me not to communicate with you anymore, not until you come back from the Rim.”

A slow-leaking anger trickled in Carl’s belly. “Did he now.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I notice you’re not doing what he told you.”

“Of course not,” Matthew said serenely. “I don’t work for UNGLA, I’m part of the interagency liaison. And you are my friend.”

Carl blinked.

“That’s good to know,” he said finally.

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Listen, Matthew.” The anger was shifting, colored with something altogether less certain. The flush of understanding he’d had earlier seemed to recede, drowning out by new factors. “If di Palma talks to you again—”

“I know, I know. Don’t tell him I’m checking on Gayoso for you.”

“Yeah, that.” Creeping sense of unease now. “But you tell him also that we’re friends, okay. That you’re my friend.”

“He’ll know that already, Carl. It’s obvious just looking at the data that—”

“Yeah, well he may not have looked too closely at the data, you know. You tell him you’re my friend. You tell him I said that, and that I told you to tell him that, too.” Carl stared somberly at the night outside. “Just so he’s clear.”

A little later, he let himself out of the building, looking for a cab to get him back to the hotel. He walked down through the cool of the evening on big successive rectangles of crystalline violet light from the street’s LCLS overheads. It felt like crossing a series of small theater stages, each one lit for a performance he refused to stop and give. His head was fogged with lack of sleep. Weary speculative whirl in there that just wouldn’t quit, still jostling for position with an expansive, freewheeling anger.

Fucking di Palma.

He didn’t realize how much rage must show on his face until he knocked into a street entertainer coming the other way and loaded down with what seemed like random pieces of junk. They cannoned, shoulder-to-shoulder, and his bulk sent her sprawling. The junk clattered and scattered right across the pavement. A single steel wheel from a child’s bike rolled away glinting in the LCLS, hit the curb, and keeled over abruptly in the gutter beyond. The entertainer looked up at him from where she’d fallen, face-painted features sullen.

“Why don’t you…”

And her voice dried up.

He stood looking down at the garish clown-masked face and rigid copper pageboy wig for a silent moment, then realized that his mouth was tight, jaw still set with undischarged anger at di Palma, at Onbekend, at a whole host of shadowy targets he still couldn’t clearly make out.

Yeah, none of whom is this girl. Get a grip, Carl.

He grunted and offered her his hand.

“Sorry. Wasn’t paying attention. My fault.”

He hauled her to her feet. The fear stayed in her eyes, and she snatched her hand away as soon as she was upright. He moved to help her gather up the scattered bits and pieces of her act from the pavement, saw how she flinched, was still afraid of this big, black man on the violet-paneled, deserted street. Gritty irritation flared through him.

“I’ll leave you to it,” he told her curtly.

He got the feeling she was watching him out of sight as he walked away. Something nagged at him about the encounter, but he couldn’t be bothered to chase the thread. A cab cruised by on the cross-street ahead, and he yelled and signaled. The sensors registered him and the cab executed a natty, machine-perfect U-turn across the oncoming traffic, pulling sedately in to collect him. The door hinged out.

He got in, low light and slit windows, leatherette fittings. The rush of memory from his cab ride the night before, the one that Sevgi Ertekin had spotted him getting into and followed, came and did him some tiny, inexplicable harm inside.

The generic female interface rezzed up. “Welcome to Merritt Cabs. What will—”

“Red Sands International,” he said roughly.

“The Red Sands chain operates on both sides of the bay. Which do you require?”

“San Francisco.”

“In transit,” the ’face said smoothly. The features composed, once again he thought of Carmen Ren and her generic Rim States beauty, the smooth—

The clown.

The fucking clown.

“Stop the cab,” he snapped.

They glided to a halt. He wrestled with the door.

“You want to fucking let me out?”

“The engagement fee is outstanding,” said the cab diffidently. “Regardless of trajectory, Merritt Cabs reserves—”

“I’m coming back, I’m fucking coming back. Just hold it here.”

The door clunked free and hinged. He spilled out, sprinted back up the crossstreet for the corner. Before he reached it, he already knew what he’d find. He cornered at speed anyway, ran on, back up the long line of crystalline violet stage panels, back toward the COLIN block.

The street was empty, just the way he’d known it would be. Bits and pieces of junk lay unrecovered exactly where they’d fallen. The bicycle wheel sat gaunt and canted, in the gutter. The face-painted woman was gone.

He pivoted about, scanned the street in both directions.

Pale crystalline stages, lit for performance, marching away in both directions. He stood in the pale violet fall of the LCLS, utterly alone. Tilting sense of the unreal. For one fragmented moment, he expected to see Elena Aguirre come drifting toward him over the narrow bands of gloom that interspersed the panels of light.

Come to collect him after all.

CHAPTER 46

They went over it in the garden.

Sevgi Ertekin’s choice: she would not be left out of the briefings. Still my fucking case, she said tightly when Norton protested. Carl guessed it had to be better for her than contemplating what was coming, and she seemed to have either finished or gotten fed up with al-Nafzawi. So they sat in the wooden chairs in the soft sunlight, listened to the brook behind them, and they all acted like Sevgi wasn’t going to die.

“Fucking face-painted,” she exploded, when Carl told them about his encounter the night before. “That bitch did the exact same thing to me back on Bulgakov’s Cat. She slammed into me coming around a support pillar. Had to be her. Why the fuck would she do that?”

“Listening in,” said Carl. “I went over to Alcatraz last night, immediately after. Set off every alarm in the place when I tried to get down to the shielded suites. They took a pinhead mike off my jacket. Size of a bread crumb, chamelachrome casing. Sticks on impact, practically everlasting battery.”

“Then there’ll be one on my clothing, too.”

“Most likely, yeah.”

“So this is Ren, still in the game?” Norton frowned. “That doesn’t make much sense. You’d think she’d be running. Down to the Freeport to get a new ID and a face change.”

Carl shook his head. “She’s smarter than that. Why go for major surgery when you can just slap on a layer of paint and a wig?”

“Yeah,” said Sevgi sourly. “You know how many street entertainers there’s got to be in this city. You see them fucking everywhere.”

“That doesn’t answer the question of what she’s doing hanging around,” Norton pointed out. “If her original assignment was to back Merrin up, then I’d say she’s out of a job.”

“I told you this wasn’t finished,” Carl said. “We took down Merrin a little early, but apart from that, whoever set this thing up is running exactly according to plan.”

Norton gave him a dubious look.

“Yeah, but according to what plan?” Sevgi said. “You say Gutierrez claims he was sending Merrin back as a Martian familia hit man—revenge killings for the enforcement violence back in the seventies. Manco Bambarén gets in on the act because he could use a change of leadership, get the chance to make the most of his relationships with the Initiative corporations. And then instead of taking down the Lima bosses, Merrin goes and hits a couple of dozen random citizens in Jesusland and the Rim. It doesn’t join up at all.”

“Gutierrez thought he was sending back a familia hit man.” Carl geared up for the revelation. “But there’s obviously another agenda here. For one thing, Bambarén’s tied in to this with a lot more than business interests.”

Another cranked eyebrow from Norton. “Meaning?”

“Meaning that Merrin’s genetic donor mother, Isabela Gayoso, is also Manco Bambarén’s real mother. Bambarén and Merrin were brothers. Well, half brothers.”

Sevgi sat upright in her chair, staring.

“No, fucking, way.”

“I’m afraid so. Isabela Rivera Gayoso, slum mother in Arequipa, gave genetic material to a visiting US Army medical unit who were on the scrounge down there with Elleniss Hall Genentech. I think they paid her fifty dollars. She gave her second family name, her mother’s surname, probably because she was ashamed. She also seems to have given a false sin, because the one on record with Elleniss Hall is a dead end. Or maybe they scrambled it somehow. I think back then they weren’t all that fussed about keeping tight records. The whole project was off the books anyway. On paper, Project Lawman didn’t exist.”

“I don’t believe this,” Norton said evenly. “The n-djinn searches would have turned it up.”

“Well, yeah, they might have, if there hadn’t been so much deliberate datafogging going on at the time. Like I told you when I came on board, Sevgi, we were all ghosts back then. Nothing concrete, nothing some overzealous journalist might be able to nail down. And they used early n-djinn technology to do the fogging, so it’s solid. When Jacobsen came along, some of the fog got lifted, but most of the Project Lawman records still belong to the Confederated Republic and they weren’t overly cooperative back when UNGLA were setting up. Our covert research guys are always turning up some fresh dirty little secret the US military buried somewhere and forgot about.”

“If that’s true, then how did you find all this out?”

“I asked one of our covert research guys. He did some digging for me last night, daytime back in Europe, came back to me this morning just before he went to bed. He says it looks like there was some covering at the other end of things as well, cheap datahawk stuff, probably Bambarén trying to bury the unpleasant family history once he got some influence. Having a mother who cooperated with the gringo military, opened her legs for them right up to the ovaries, so to speak—well, it isn’t exactly a good thing to have on your résumé if you’re planning to make it big in the familias down there.”

Norton sniffed. “I still fail to see how this research guy of yours could do something our n-djinns couldn’t.”

“Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that I was going in from the far end. Something Bambarén said to me, something about blood, just a feeling I had. I started with the assumption and asked my researcher to chase Gayoso down. I already had my connection. Your n-djinns would have been working the other way, probably off a broad-sweep trawl through the general dataflow with Merrin as their starting point, then a filter for relevance and more detailed follow-up. N-djinns aren’t human, they don’t do cognitive leaps the way we do. Like I said last week, Yaroshanko intuition’s a wonderful thing, but you have to have something to triangulate off. Your n-djinn data trawl’s only as good as your chosen filters, and I’m guessing they were Mars-or Rim-States-related.”

“Yeah, and Lawman-related.”

“Sure, and Lawman-related. But think about what that means—do you really think an n-djinn search running into the Project Lawman protocols is going to pay any attention to genetic source material? You’re talking about people who never met their offspring, never had anything to do with them. In Gayoso’s case, you’re talking about someone who was never even in the same country, never came within a thousand kilometers of the thing they made with her donated ovum. Genetic material is cheap as fuck, even now with Jacobsen in force. Back then, it meant less than nothing. No machine is going to see that as a lead worth pursuing; it never would have made it through the filters for follow-up analysis. You have to already know that the genes Isabela Gayoso handed on to her son are important before you can get the n-djinn to make the link. And like I said, she was never anywhere near him.”

Norton frowned. “Hold it. There was a deployment in Bolivia, wasn’t there? Back in ’88, ’89?”

“’Eighty-eight,” said Sevgi. “Argentina and Bolivia. But it’s disputed, a lot of the data says he might not have been there at all. It’s also got him down as leading a platoon in Kuwait City around the same time.”

“Yeah, but if he was there,” Norton argued, suddenly enthused, “that’d be a point of contact. That’s maybe when Bambarén finds out he’s got a brother he didn’t know about, and…”

“And what, Tom?” Sevgi shook her head irritably. “They meet, they have a few beers, and Merrin heads out for urban pacification duties in the Rim. Six years later he goes to Mars, and twelve years after that some Mars-end familia head cooks up some crackpot revenge assassination plan, chooses Merrin for the job, and Merrin turns around and says, Oh hey, I’ve got a half brother back on Earth who can help out with that. Come on, that’s not it. There has to be something else, something that ties it in tighter than that.”

“There probably is,” Carl told them. “I said there were a couple of reasons why your n-djinns failed and my researcher didn’t. Well, the second reason is that there’s been a whole lot more datafogging, and it dates from a lot more recently than all this ancient history. Someone out there is still very much concerned to keep this whole thing under wraps.”

“Someone who’s using Carmen Ren,” mused Sevgi. “Keeping her deployed.”

“That’s an angle,” Carl admitted.

“Did they destroy your pinhead bug?”

“No, still holding it. We could try to put it back in play, I guess. See if we can draw Ren in. But I don’t see it working, she’s too sharp for that. This much silence, she’ll know she’s been blown.”

“So where does that leave us?” Norton asked.

“It leaves us with Bambarén,” Carl said grimly. “We go down there and we stamp on him until he tells us what we want to know.”

“And Onbekend?” Sevgi asked, with a strange light in her eye.

Silence. Norton hurried in to fill it. “Checked that yesterday. I talked to Coyle. No record that fits with the descriptions you both gave. But Onbekend’s a name from the Netherlands, apparently it was Dutch bureaucracy’s get-out for anyone who didn’t have a fixed family name to go on their identity documents.” He grimaced. “It means ‘unknown.’”

Sevgi coughed out a laugh. “Oh very good.”

“Yeah, seems quite a few Indonesians ended up with it in the last century, because they didn’t have family names in the sense the Dutch understand the concept. It’s pretty common all over the Pacific Rim these—”

He stopped, because Sevgi’s cough hadn’t died away. It picked up, intensified until it shook her, feedback from the stimulus in the format triggering the real thing back in her hospital bed. The force of it bent her almost double in the chair, and then she flickered in and out of existence as her mental focus slipped. Carl and Norton exchanged a silent glance.

Sevgi’s presence flickered once more, then settled. She wheezed and seemed to get control.

“Are you okay, Sev?”

“No, Tom, I’m not fucking okay.” She drew a hard breath. “I’m fucking dying, all right? Sorry if it’s causing problems.”

Carl looked at Norton again, surprising himself with the sudden jolt of sympathy he felt for the other man.

“Maybe we’d better take a break,” he said quietly.

“No, it’s…” Sevgi closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Tom. That was unforgivable. I had no call to snap at you like that. I’m fine now. Let’s get back to Onbekend.”

They did, after a fashion, but the incident sat among them like another presence. The conversation ran slow, grew diffident, finally fell apart. Sevgi wouldn’t meet Norton’s eyes, just sat and twisted her fingers in her lap until finally the COLIN exec cleared his throat and excused himself with the pretext of calling New York. He blinked out with obvious relief. Carl sat and waited.

The twisted fingers again. Finally, she looked up at him.

“Thanks for staying,” she said softly.

He nodded at the surroundings. “It beats the garden they’ve got outside. Too arid, too stylized. This is very British, makes me feel at home.”

It got a short laugh, but carefully deployed this time.

“Has your father arrived?”

“Yeah.” Jerky nod. “He came in to see me this morning, before you and Tom got here. For real, in the hospital. They’re giving him a suite over in the staff dorms. Professional courtesy.”

“Or COLIN influence.”

“Well, yeah. That, too.”

“So how’d you get on with him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He, you know, he cried a lot. We both did. He apologized for all the fights about Ethan, the distance. A lot of other stuff. But—”

“Yeah.”

She looked at him. “I’m really scared, Carl.”

“I think you’re entitled to be.”

“I, I mean, I keep having these dreams where it’s all been a mistake. It’s not really a Haag slug. Or it’s not as bad as they thought, they’ve got an antiviral that can keep up. Or the whole thing was just a dream and I’ve woken up back in New York, I can hear the market outside.” Tears leaked out of her eyes. Her voice took on a desperate, grinding edge. “And then I wake up for real, and I’m here, in that fucking bed with the drips and the monitors and all the fucking equipment around me like relatives I don’t want to fucking see. And I’m dying, I’m fucking dying, Carl.”

“I know,” he said hollowly, voice stupid in his own ears. Numb for something to say, to meet her with.

She gulped. “I always thought it’d be like a doorway, like standing in front of a door you’ve got to go through. But it isn’t. It isn’t. It’s like a fucking wall coming at me and I’m strapped in my seat, can’t fucking move, can’t touch the controls or get out. I’m just going to fucking lie there and die.”

Her teeth clenched on the last word. She looked emptily out across the garden at the foliage on the fringes of the lawn. Her hands tightened to fists in her lap. Loosened, tightened again. He watched her and waited.

“I don’t want you to go down there after Bambarén and Onbekend,” she said quietly. She was still staring away into the sun-splashed foliage. “I don’t want you to end up like me, like this.”

“Sevgi, we all end up like this sooner or later. I’d just be catching you up.”

“Yeah, well there are ways and ways of catching up. I don’t recommend the Haag shell method.”

“I can handle Onbekend.”

“Sure, you can.” Her gaze switched back to him. “Last time you went up against him, as I recall, I had to bust in and save your life for you.”

“Well, I’ll be more careful this time.”

She made a compressed sound that might have been another laugh. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m not scared that Onbekend might kill you down there. This is selfish, Carl. I’m scared that you won’t come back. I’m scared you’ll leave me here, dying by fucking increments with no one to help.”

“I already told you’d I’d stay.”

She wasn’t listening. Wasn’t looking at him anymore. “Saw my cousin die that way, back when I was still a kid. Sex virus, one of the hyperevolved ones, she caught it off a soldier in the East. Nothing they could do. I’m not going to go through that. Not the way she went.”

“Okay, Sevgi. Okay. I won’t go anywhere. I’m right here. But I think it’s time you let me in to see you for real. In the ward.”

She shivered. Shook her head. “No, not yet. I’m not ready for that yet.”

“Staying in v-format is going to put a lot of strain on your nervous system. A lot of stress.”

Sevgi snorted. “That’s all you fucking know. You want to know what the strain is? I’ll tell you. Strain is lying back there in that fucking bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the machines they’ve got me hooked up to, feeling my lungs clogging up and all the needles they’ve stuck in me, aching every fucking place I can feel and no way to move unless someone comes to do it for me. Compared with that”—she gestured weakly at the garden—“this is fucking paradise.”

She looked at the hanging branches in silence for a while.

“They say it is a garden,” she muttered. “Paradise, you know. Garden full of fruits and the sound of water.”

“And virgins. Right? Seventy virgins each, or something?”

“Not if you’re a woman. Anyway, that’s for martyrs.” She pulled a face. “Anyway, it’s a crock of shit. Simple-minded post-Qu’ranic desert Islam propaganda. No one in the modern Muslim world with two brain cells to rub together believes that shit anymore. And who wants a fucking virgin anyway? You got to teach them every fucking thing. Like having sex with a fucking mannequin with its motion circuits shot up.”

“Sounds like you’re talking from experience there.” He grabbed the change of subject, glad of the chance.

It drew a crooked smile from her. “I’ve broken in one or two in my time. You?”

“Not that I know of.”

“That’s not very public-spirited of you. Somebody’s got to do it.”

He shrugged. “Well, you know, maybe I’ll still get out there and do my share, later on in life.”

Her smile faded, shaded out at the mention of the future, like the passing of cloud cover across the sunlit lawn. She shivered and hunched her body a little in the chair. He cursed himself for the slip.

“I was reading somewhere,” she said quietly. “They reckon in another thirty or forty years they’ll have v-formatting so powerful you’ll be able to live inside it. You know, the n-djinn just copies your whole mind-state into the construct and then runs you as part of the system. You just sedate the body and step through. They say you’ll even be able to go on living there after your body actually dies. Forty years away, they’re saying, maybe not even that long.” She grinned desperately. “Bit late for me, though, huh?”

“Hey, you’re not going to need that shit.” Floundering for a response. “You’re going to heaven, right? Paradise, like you said.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I really believe in paradise, Carl. You want to know the truth, I don’t think any of us do really. Deep down, down where it counts I think we all know it’s a crock of shit. That’s why we’re all so fucking determined to spread the good news, to shove it down other people’s throats. Because if we can’t make other people believe it, how are we going to stamp out the doubt in ourselves. And it’s cold, that doubt.” She looked at him, shivered as she said it. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Like November in the park, you know. Like winter coming in.”

He got up and went to where she sat, and tried as best he could to hold her. Blunt, glove-skinned sensation, like fistfuls of crushed velvet, like nothing real. No feeling of warmth, but as she shivered again he pulled her close anyway, and he held her head against his chest so she wouldn’t see how his jaw was clenched tight and his mouth had become a savage down-drawn line.

Like winter coming in.

CHAPTER 47

Sevgi lived four more days.

They were the longest days he could remember since the week he waited for Marisol to come back, believing somehow against everything the uncles told him that she would. He’d sat blankly then, as he did now at the hospital, detached for hours at a time, staring into space in classes he’d previously excelled in. He took the punishment beatings from the uncles with a stoic lack of response that bordered on catatonic—fighting back would do no good, he knew, would only ensure that he took more damage. Aunt Chitra’s pain-management training had come just in time.

Many years later, he wondered if that particular course hadn’t been deliberately scheduled for the months leading up to the removal of the surrogate mothers. There wasn’t much that happened in Osprey Eighteen without carefully considered planning. And pain, after all, as Chitra began the series of classes by telling them, came in many forms. Pain is unavoidable, smiling gently at their group, shaking each of them formally by the hand. Something of an unknown quantity after their other teachers, this small, hawkish-featured woman with skin like some fire-scorched copper alloy, cropped black hair, a figure that sent vaguely understood signals out to their prepubescent hormones, and dry, callus-edged hands that told those same hormones exactly how they’d better behave around her. Her grip was firm, her eyes direct and appraising. Pain is all around us. It takes many forms. My job will be to teach you how to recognize all those forms, to understand them, and to not allow any of them to keep you from your purpose. Carl had learned the lessons well. He dealt with the careful brutality the uncles were applying exactly as if it were one of Chitra’s worked examples. He knew they would not damage him beyond repair because all the Osprey Eighteen children had been told, time and time again, how valuable they were. He also knew the uncles would have preferred not to use physical violence to this extent. It was never a preferred method of discipline at Osprey, was only ever used to punish serious breaches of respect and obedience, and only then as a last resort. But every other punishment task they set Carl that week, he simply refused to carry out. Worse, he spat back his refusal in their faces, savoring the tug of disobedience like the pain of pushing himself on a run or a cliff climb. And when the measured violence came, he embraced it, shrugged himself into Chitra’s training like a harness, and faced the uncles with a blank fury they could not match.

In the end, it was Chitra who unlocked his efforts, just as she’d given him what he needed to shore them up. She came to him one gray afternoon as he sat, bruised and bleeding from the mouth, aching back propped against a storage shed near the helipad. She stood for a while without saying anything, then stepped into his direct field of vision, hands in her coverall pockets. He tried to look around her, shifted sideways, but it hurt too much to sustain the posture. She didn’t move.

In the end he had to look up into her face.

What’s your purpose, Carl? she asked him quietly. There was no judgment in either tone or expression, only genuine inquiry. I understand your pain, I see the ways in which you’ve tried to make it external. But what purpose do you have?

He didn’t answer. Looking back he didn’t think she ever expected him to. But after she’d gone, he realized—allowed himself to realize—that Marisol really wasn’t coming back, that the uncles were telling the truth, and that he was wasting his own time as well as theirs.

Waiting with Sevgi was different. He had her there with him. He had purpose.

He was still going to fucking lose her.

He met her father in the gardens, a big, gray-haired Turk with powerful shoulders and the same tigerish eyes as his daughter. He wore no mustache, but there was thick stubble rising high on his cheeks and bristling at his cleft chin, and he had lost none of his hair with age. He would have been a very handsome man in his youth, and even now—Carl estimated he must be in his early sixties—even seated on the beige stone bench and staring fixedly at the fountain, he exuded a quiet, charismatic authority. He wore a plain dark suit that matched the thick woolen shirt beneath it and the purplish smudges of tiredness under his eyes.

“You’re Carl Marsalis,” he said as Carl reached the bench. There was no question mark in his voice. It was a little hoarse but iron-firm beneath. If he’d been crying, he hid it well.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“I am Murat Ertekin. Sevgi’s father. Please, join me.” He gestured at the empty space beside him on the bench, waited until Carl was seated. “My daughter has told me a lot about you.”

“Care to give me specifics?”

Ertekin glanced sideways at him. “She told me that your loyalty cannot be easily bought.”

It brought him up short. The received wisdom about variant thirteen was that they had no loyalties at all beyond self-interest. He wondered if Ertekin was quoting Sevgi directly or putting his own spin on what she’d said.

“Did she tell you what I am?”

“Yes.” Another sidelong look. “Were you expecting disapproval from me? Hatred, perhaps, or fear? The standard-issue prejudices?”

“I don’t know you,” Carl told him evenly. “Aside from the fact that the two of you don’t get on and that you left Turkey for political reasons, Sevgi hasn’t told me anything about you at all. I wouldn’t know what your attitude is to my kind. Though my impression is that you weren’t too happy about Sevgi’s last variant thirteen indiscretion.”

Ertekin sat rigid. Then he slumped. He closed his eyes, hard, opened them again to face the world.

“I am to blame,” he said quietly. “I failed her. All our lives together, I encouraged Sevgi to push the boundaries. And then, when she finally pushed them too far for my liking, I reacted like some village mullah who’s never seen the Bosphorus Bridge in his life and doesn’t plan to. I reacted exactly like my fucking brother.”

“Your brother’s a mullah?”

Murat Ertekin laughed bitterly. “A mullah, no. Though perhaps he did miss his vocation when he chose secular law for a career. I’m told he was never more than an indifferent lawyer. But a self-righteous, willfully ignorant male supremacist? Oh yes. Bulent always excelled at that.”

“You talk about him in the past. Is he dead?”

“He is to me.”

The conversation jerked violently to a halt on the assertion. They both sat for a while staring into the space where it had been. Murat Ertekin sighed. He talked as if picking up the pieces of something broken, as if each bending down to retrieve a fragment of the past was an effort that forced him to breathe deeply.

“You must understand, Mr. Marsalis, my marriage was not a successful one. I married young, and in haste, to a woman who took her faith very seriously indeed. When we were still both medical students in Istanbul, I mistook that faith for a general strength, but I was wrong. When we moved to America, as it still was then, Hatun could not cope. She was homesick, and New York frightened her. She never adjusted. We had Sevgi because at such times you are told that having a child will bring you together again.” A grimace. “It’s a strange article of faith—the belief that sleepless nights, no sex, less income, and the constant stress of caring for a helpless new life should somehow alleviate the pressures on a relationship already under strain.”

Carl shrugged. “People believe some strange things.”

“Well, in our case it didn’t work. My work suffered, we fought more, and Hatun’s fear of the city grew. She retreated into her faith. She already went head-scarfed in the streets; now she began to wear the full chador. She would not receive guests in the house unless she was covered, and of course she had already quit her job to have Sevgi. She isolated herself from her former friends and colleagues at the hospital, frustrated their attempts to stay in touch, eventually changed mosques to one preaching some antiquated Wahhabi nonsense. Sevgi gravitated to me. I think that’s natural in little girls anyway, but here it was pure self-defense. What was Sevgi to make of her mother? She was growing up a streetwise New York kid, bilingual and smart, and Hatun didn’t even want her to have swimming lessons with boys.”

Ertekin stared down at his hands.

“I encouraged the rebellion,” he said quietly. “I hated the way Hatun was changing, maybe by then I even hated Hatun herself. She’d begun to criticize the work I did, calling it un-Islamic, snubbing our liberal Muslim or nonbelieving friends, growing more rigid in her attitudes every year. I was determined Sevgi would not end up the same way. It delighted me when she started asking her mother those simple child’s questions about God that no one can answer. I rejoiced when she was strong and determined and smart in the face of Hatun’s hollow, rote-learned dogma. I egged her on, pushed her to take chances and achieve, and I defended her to her mother whenever they clashed—even when she was wrong and Hatun was right. And when things finally grew unbearable and Hatun left us and went home—I think I was glad.”

“Does her mother know what’s happened?”

Ertekin shook his head. “We’re not in contact anymore, neither Sevgi nor I. Hatun only ever called to berate us both, or to try to persuade Sevgi to go back to Turkey. Sevgi stopped taking her calls when she was fifteen. Even now, she’s asked me not to tell her mother. It’s probably as well. Hatun wouldn’t come, or if she came she’d make a scene, wailing and calling down judgment on us all.”

The word judgment went through Carl like a strummed chord.

“You are not a religious man, are you?” Ertekin asked him.

It was almost worth a grin. “I’m a thirteen.”

“And thus genetically incapable.” Ertekin nodded. “The received wisdom. Do you believe that?”

“Is there another explanation?”

“When I was younger, we were less enamored of genetic influence as a factor. My grandfather was a communist.” A shrewd glance. “Do you know what that is?”

“Read about them, yeah.”

“He believed that you can make of a human anything you choose to. That humans can become what they choose. That environment is all. It’s not a fashionable view any longer.”

“That’s because it’s demonstrably untrue.”

“And yet, you—variant thirteens everywhere—were thoroughly environmentally conditioned. They did not trust your genes to give them the soldiers they wanted. You were brought up from the cradle to face brutality as if it were a fact of life.”

Carl thought of Sevgi, tubes and needles and hope withering away. “Brutality is a fucking fact of life. Haven’t you noticed?”

Ertekin shifted on the bench, turned toward him. Carl sensed that the other man was close to reaching out, to taking his hands in his own.

Groping for something.

“Do you really believe that you would have become this, that you were genetically destined to it, however you were raised as a child?”

Carl made an impatient gesture. “What I believe isn’t important. I did become this; how I got here is academic. So let the academics discuss it at great length, write their papers and publish, get paid to agonize. In the end, none of it affects me.”

“No, but it might affect others like you in the future.”

Now he found he could smile—a thin, hard smile, the rind of amusement. “There aren’t going to be any others like me in the future. Not on this planet. In another generation, we’ll all be gone.”

“Is that why you don’t believe? Do you feel forsaken?”

The smile became a laugh of sorts. “I think you’ll find, Dr. Ertekin, that the technical term for that is transference. You’re the one feeling forsaken. I haven’t ever expected to be anything other than alone, so I’m not upset when I find it to be true.”

Marisol sat in his head and called him a liar. Elena Aguirre ghosted past, whispering. He held down a shiver, talked to stave it off.

“And you’re missing a rather important point about my lack of religious convictions as well. To be a believer, you have to not only believe, you also have to want someone big and patriarchal around to take care of business for you. You have to be apt for worship. And thirteens don’t do worship, of anyone or anything. Even if you could convince a variant thirteen, against all the evidence, that there really was a God? He’d just see him as a threat to be eliminated. If God were demonstrably real?” He stared hard into Ertekin’s eyes. “Guys like me would just be looking for ways to find him and burn him down.”

Ertekin flinched, and looked away.

“She’s chosen you well,” he murmured.

“Sevgi?”

“Yes.” Still looking away, fumbling in a jacket pocket. “You will need this.”

He handed Carl a small package, sealed in slippery antiseptic white with orange flash warning decals. Lettering in a language he couldn’t read, Germanic feel, multiple vowels. Carl weighed it in his palm.

“Put it away, please.” Ertekin told him. The garden was starting to fill as students and medical staff came out on lunch break to enjoy the sun.

“This is painless?”

“Yes. It’s from a Dutch company that specializes in such things. It will take about two minutes from injection.”

Carl stowed the package.

“If you brought this,” he said quietly, “why do you need me?”

“Because I cannot do it,” Ertekin told him simply.

“Because you’re a Muslim?”

“Because I’m a doctor.” He looked at his hands again. They hung limp in his lap. “And because even if I had not taken an oath, I do not think I would be capable of ending my own daughter’s life.”

“It’s what she wants. It’s what she’s asked for.”

“Yes.” There were tears gathering on Ertekin’s eyelids. “And now, when it most matters, I find I cannot give her what she wants.”

He took Carl’s hand suddenly. His grip was dry and powerful. The tiger-irised gaze burned into Carl’s, blinked tears aside so they trickled on the leathery skin.

“She’s chosen you. And deep in my hypocritical, doubting soul, I give thanks to Allah that you’ve come. Sevgi is getting ready once more to push the boundaries, to cross the lines drawn by others that she will not heed. And this time I will not fail her, as I did four years ago.”

He wiped away the tears with quick, impatient gestures of his hand.

“I will stand with my daughter this time,” he said. “But you must help me, thirteen, if I am not to fail her again.”

The Haag complex rips through Sevgi’s system like vacuum in a suddenly holed spacecraft. Cells rupture, leak vital fluids. Debris flies about, her immune system staggers, flushes itself desperately, clings to the antiviral boosters Stanford fed her, and still it fails. Her lungs begin to fill. Her renal functions slow and must be artificially stimulated if her kidneys are not to explode. Tubes in, tubes out. The creep of waste products through her system begins to hurt.

She finds it harder to think with clarity for any length of time.

Only when the v-format was no longer viable, when she sputtered in and out of existence there like a disinterested ghost, did she let him see her for real.

He sat by the bed in shock.

For all he’d prepared himself, it was a visceral blow to see how the flesh had burned off her, how her eyes had grown hollow and her cheeks drawn. He tried to smile at her, but the expression flickered on and off his face, the way she’d flickered in virtual. When she saw, she smiled back at him and hers was steady, like a lamp burning through the stretched fabric of her face.

“I look like shit,” she murmured. “Right?”

“You’ve been skipping meals again, haven’t you?”

She laughed, broke up into coughing. But he saw the look in her eyes, saw she was grateful. He tried to feel good about that.

He sat by the bed.

He held her hand.

“Tell me a secret.”

“What?” He’d thought she was sleeping. The little room was dim and still, adrift in the larger quiet of the hospital at night. Darkness pressed itself to the glass of the window, oozed inward through the room. The machines winked tiny red and amber eyes at him, whispered and clicked to themselves, made vaguely comprehensible graphic representations, in cool shades of blue and green, of what was going on inside their charge. The night lamp cast a faded gold oblong on the bed where Sevgi made mounds in the sheet. Her face was in shadow.

“Come on,” she croaked. “You heard me. Tell me what really happened on Mars. What did Gutierrez do to you?”

He blinked, cleared his eyes from long aimless staring into the gloom. “Thought you’d already worked that out.”

“Well, you tell me. Did I?”

He looked back at it, bricks of his past he hadn’t tried to build anything with in years. It’s another world, it’s another time, Sutherland had said once. Got to learn to let it go.

“You were close,” he admitted.

“How close? Come on, Marsalis.” A laugh floated up out of her, like echoes up from a well. “Grant a dying woman a last wish.”

His mouth tightened.

“Gutierrez didn’t fix the lottery for me,” he said. “There’s too much security around it, too much n-djinn presence. And it’s a tough thing to do, fix a chance event so it does what you want and still looks like chance. Something like that, you’ve got to look for the weak point.”

“Which was?”

“Same as it always is. The human angle.”

“Oh, humans.” She laughed again, a little stronger now. “I guess that makes sense. Can’t trust them any farther than a Jesusland preacher with a choirgirl, right?”

He smiled. “Right.”

“So which particular human did you finesse?”

“Neil Delaney.” Faint flare of contempt as he remembered, but the years had bleached it back almost to amusement. “He was Bradbury site administrator back then.”

“He’s on the oversight council now.”

“Yeah, I know. Mars works well for some people.” Carl found himself loosening up. Words were flowing easier now, here in the low light at her bedside, just the two of them in the gloom and quiet. “Delaney was selling to the Chinese. Downgrading site reports, writing them off as low potential, so COLIN wouldn’t bother filing notice of action. That way, the New People’s Home teams could get in and stake their claim instead, without having to do the actual survey work.”

“Motherfucker!” But it was the whispered ghost of outrage; you could hear how she didn’t have strength for the real thing.

“Yeah, well. Helps if you just think of it as outsourcing—NPH buying COLIN expertise under the table, probably cheaper than they could afford to do the surveys themselves. In market terms, it makes perfect sense. There’s a lot of planet to cover, not many people to do it. And the Chinese were just doing what they’ve always done—dangling enough dollars in the right places to get the West’s corporate qualms to go belly-up.”

“Somehow I don’t think the feeds would have seen it that way.”

“No. That’s the way we put it to Delaney.” Carl reflected, found he still got a faint warm glow from the recollection. “It was a good sting. He caved in completely. Gave us everything we asked for.”

“He sent you home.”

“Well, he opened up the security on the lottery system for us. Gave Gutierrez a clear run at it. So yeah, I won the lottery.”

“And what did Gutierrez get?”

Carl shrugged. “Cash. Favors. We had a few other players on the team as well, they all got paid.”

“But only you got to go home.”

“Yeah, well. Only one cryocap up for grabs, you know. And it was my sting, my operation from the start. I put the crew together, I made it pretty clear from the start what I wanted out of the deal.”

“So.” She wheezed a little. He reached for the glass, held it to her lips, and cradled her head. The actions felt smooth with custom. “Thanks, that’s better. So you think Gutierrez was jealous. Fucked you after the event?”

“Maybe. Or Delaney asked him to do it, hoped I’d flip out before the rescue ship got there. You remember that guy who woke up on the way back from the Jupiter moon survey, back in the eighties? Spitz, or something?”

“Specht. Eric Specht. Yeah, I remember.”

“He went crazy waiting for the rescue. Maybe Delaney hoped the same thing’d happen to me. Who knows?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know Gutierrez sent me a very scared mail once I made it back to Earth, said he’d had nothing to do with it. So maybe it was just a glitch. Or maybe Delaney hired another datahawk. Then again, Gutierrez always was a lying little fuck, so like I said, who knows?”

“You don’t care?”

He twisted a little in his seat, smiled at her. “There’s no point in caring, Sevgi. It’s a different planet. Another world, another time. What was I going to do—go back there? Just for revenge? I’d put the whole of my last year on Mars into scamming my way back to Earth. Sometimes, you know, you’ve just got to let go.”

Beneath the covers, she drew into herself a little. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess that’s the truth.”

They sat in silence for a while. She groped for his hand. He gave it to her.

“Why’d you come back, Carl?” she asked him softly.

He made a crooked grin in the gloom. “Listen to what the Earth First people are telling you, Sevgi. Mars is a shithole.”

“But you were free there.” She let go of his hand, gestured weakly. “You must have known there was a risk you’d be interned when you got back. It’s pure luck they didn’t put you straight into the tracts.”

“Not quite. I bought some machine time before all this went down, before I put the Delaney sting together. I asked the n-djinn to look at the way lottery winners were treated when they got back, then extrapolate for a thirteen. The machine gave me a seventy—thirty chance they’d work some kind of special exemption in view of my celebrity status.” He shrugged. “Pretty good odds.”

“And what if the n-djinn got it wrong?” She craned forward in the bed, halfway to sitting up. The pale gold light fell on her face. Eyes intense and burning into his. “What if they just went ahead and interned your ass?”

Another shrug, another crooked grin. “Then I guess I would have had to break out and run. Just like all the other saps.”

She lay back, puffing a little from the effort.

“I don’t believe you,” she said when she’d gotten her breath back. “All that risk, just because Mars is a shithole? No way. You could have had the cash instead. Milked Delaney for pretty much anything you wanted out there. Set yourself up. Come on, Carl. Why’d you really come back?”

He hesitated. “It’s not that important, Sevgi.”

“It is to me.”

Footsteps down the corridor outside. A murmur of voices, receding. He sighed.

“Sutherland,” he said.

“Your sensei.”

“Yeah.” He lifted his hands on his lap, trying to frame it for himself. “See, there’s a point you get to with tanindo. A level where it stops being about how to do it, becomes all about why. Why you’re practicing, why you’re learning. Why you’re living. And I couldn’t get there.”

“You didn’t know why?” She puffed a breathless laugh. “Hey, welcome to the club. You think any of us know why we’re doing this shit?”

Carl let an echo of her amusement trace itself onto his lips, but absently. He stared across the shadowed bed and her form beneath the sheet as if it were a landscape.

“Sutherland says it’s easier for basic humans,” he said distantly. “You people build better metaphors, believe in them more deeply. He said I’d have to find something else. And until I did, I was blocked.”

“Sutherland’s a thirteen, too, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So how come he managed it?”

Carl nodded. “Exactly. He gave me a path. A functional substitute for belief.”

“And that was?”

“He told me to make a list, keep it to myself, and focus on it. Eleven things I wanted to do at some point in what was left of my life. Things it was important for me to do, things that mattered.”

“You didn’t go for the round dozen?”

“The number’s not important. Eleven, twelve, nine, doesn’t matter. Best not to make too long a list, it defeats the point of the exercise, but otherwise you just pick a number and make your list. I chose eleven.” He hesitated again, looked at her almost apologetically. “Nine of those, I realized I needed to be on Earth to do.”

The hospital quiet closed in again. He saw in the gloom how she turned to look out the window.

“Have you done them all yet?” she asked quietly.

“No. Not yet.” He cleared his throat, frowned. “But I’m getting through them. And it does work. Sutherland was right.”

For a few moments, she seemed not to be listening, seemed to have lost herself in the darkness outside the glass. Then, dry slide of her hair on the pillow, her head switched around to face him again.

“You want to hear a secret of mine?”

“Sure.”

“Three years ago, I planned to have someone murdered.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks about killing someone every now and then. But this was for real. I sat down and I mapped it out. I knew people back then, cops and ex-cops who owed me. There was this accidental-killing incident back when I was a patrol officer, only a couple of years in, all wide-eyed and innocent.” She coughed a little. “Ah, it’s a long story, not going to bore you with the details. Just this interrogation that went over the line one time. I was there, saw it go down. Guess you’d say I was complicit. Internal Affairs were certainly looking to paint it that way. Pressure came down, they wanted me to roll over in return for immunity. But they couldn’t prove I was in the room, and I didn’t leak. Stuck at that, half their case collapsed. So nine years later, that’s three years ago like I was telling you, there were guys walking around New York with a badge they owed me for. Other guys who didn’t go to jail when they should have. I could have done it, Carl. I could have set it in motion.”

She started coughing again. He lifted her, held a tissue to her lips until she cleared the shit that was sitting in her lungs, cleaned her mouth after. He fed her sips of water, laid her gently back down. Wiped the sweat of effort from her brow with another tissue, waited while her breathing stabilized again.

He leaned in closer. “So who’d you want to kill?”

“Amy fucking Westhoff,” she said bitterly. “Fucking bitch who killed Ethan.”

“You told me the SWATs took Ethan down.”

“Yeah. But someone had to leak this shit, someone had to find out what Ethan was and notify UNGLA liaison up at City Hall. You remember I told you in Istanbul, Ethan was seeing this cheerleader blonde in Datacrime?”

“Vaguely.”

“That was Westhoff. She showed up in the corridor outside my office the week Ethan moved in with me, screaming abuse, telling me I didn’t know what I was getting into. Saying she’d fuck with my life and Ethan’s if I didn’t back off.”

“You think she knew what he was?”

“I don’t know. Not then, I don’t think. If she’d known, I think she would have used it on him when he tried to move out.”

“Maybe she did, and he didn’t tell you.”

That stopped her, pinned her to a long pause while she thought about it. He tilted his head, trying to work a kink out of his neck.

“I don’t believe she knew back then,” Sevgi said finally. “Maybe she had her suspicions on and off. I think I did, too, if I’m honest about it, even before Keegan showed up and blew the whole thing. You know, if you’re a woman, it’s one of those things you can’t help thinking about sometimes. I mean, there’s so much scare stuff out there. All the warnings, all the sexy panic every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. The Truth About Thirteens, how to recognize one, what you guys are supposed to be like, how you’d act that’s different from a regular guy. Warning signs, free phone snitch numbers, public information postings, and then the fucking media aftermath every time. You know, I saw a woman’s magazine article once while I was waiting to see my lawyer. ‘Are You Sleeping with a Thirteen—Thirteen Telltale Signs That Let You Know.’ Fucking bullshit like that.”

She twitched about in the bed with the force of her frustration. Her breath came hoarse and agitated. Voice impatient.

“Anyway, whether she knew then or not, I know damn well she was keeping tabs on Ethan. And then, when we fucked up, when we got complacent after Keegan, she had her chance.”

“She knew about the pregnancy?”

“Yeah, well, we weren’t hiding that. I started showing seriously at three months, went on reduced duties at four. Of course she knew, everybody knew by then.” Sevgi stopped, waited until her breathing evened out again. “That wasn’t it. When we got pregnant, something in Ethan shifted. That was when he started trying to track down his genetic mother. He’d always talked about doing it, all this stuff about wanting to know who his real mother was, but with the baby—”

“So, not his surrogate then?”

“No. That was finished business, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted to see her again. Never talked about her to me. But he was hung up about finding Patti. The baby really kicked him into action.”

Carl saw the link. “You think he went to Westhoff to do the searches?”

“I don’t know. But he went to Datacrime, I know that much because he told me he was going to. They’ve got the best machines in the city for that kind of work, and he knew quite a few people there, not just Amy.” He saw the way her fists clenched where they lay on the bed. “But Amy knew. She came up to me on the street, congratulated me on the baby, said something about how it was great Ethan was getting back in touch with his family. I told Ethan that, but—” She rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “—like I said, we got so fucking complacent about everything.”

“Is there any actual evidence Westhoff tipped off UNGLA?”

“Enough to make a case?” He thought she smiled in the dimness. “No. But you remember I told you someone in the department tipped Ethan off that they were coming for him?”

“Yeah, you said a downtown number.”

“Yeah.” She was smiling, bleakly. “Datacrime is downtown. I talked to a Datacrime sergeant said Amy Westhoff was acting weird all that day. Upset about something, in and out of the office all the time. The call went out from another floor in the building, an empty office up on fifth, but she could have gotten there easily enough.”

“Could have. You said he had a lot of friends in Datacrime.”

“No one knew about the SWAT deployment. No one except whoever it was that tipped them off in the first place.”

“Did Ethan have any friends in the SWAT chain of command? Or in City Hall, maybe?”

“Sure, and they waited until the morning it was due to go down before they called. And they went all the way across the city to do it, to a downtown NYPD precinct house and a fifth-floor office that they just happened to know would be empty. Come on, Carl. Give me a fucking break.”

“And no one else picked up on this?”

Another weak smile. “No one wanted to. First off, it’s not a crime to turn in a thirteen to the authorities. You still see screen ads encouraging good citizens to do exactly that, every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. And then there’s the fact that Ethan was a cop, and to all appearances it looks like another cop ratted him out. That’s the kind of thing most people in the department would rather just forget ever happened.”

He nodded. He thought it might be starting to get light outside.

“So you planned to kill her. Have her killed. What stopped you?”

“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. Voice small and weary with the effort she’d been making. “In the end, I couldn’t make myself go through with it, you know. I’ve killed people in the line of duty, had to, to stay alive myself. But this is different. It’s cold. You’ve got to be so fucking cold.”

Beyond the window, the night was definitely beginning to bleach out. Carl saw Sevgi’s face more clearly now, saw the desolation in it. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead.

“Try to get some rest now,” he said.

“I couldn’t,” she muttered, as if trying to explain herself before a judge, or maybe to Ethan Conrad. “I just couldn’t do it.”

Rovayo showed up, off duty, with flowers. Sevgi was barely polite. The jokes she made about casual fucking, in a hoarse whisper of a voice, weren’t funny, and no one laughed. Rovayo toughed it out, spent the time there she’d announced she could, promised awkwardly to return. The look in Sevgi’s eyes suggested she didn’t much care one way or the other. Outside in the corridor afterward, the Rim cop grimaced at Carl.

“Bad idea, huh?”

“It was a nice thought.” He sought other matters, shielding from the coming truth behind the door at their backs. “You get anything from the crime scene?”

Rovayo shook her head. “Nothing that doesn’t belong to you, the dead guys, or a dozen irrelevant Bayview lowlifes. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.”

“Yeah, he was.” Carl brought recall to life, surprised himself with the stab of fury that accompanied the man’s half-familiar face. “You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.”

“Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s why we caught him so easily.”

Rovayo blinked. “I see you’re in a great mood.”

“Sorry. Haven’t had much sleep.” He glanced back at the closed door of Sevgi’s room. “You want to get a coffee downstairs?”

“Sure.”

Across the scarred plastic tabletop from her in the cafeteria downstairs, he asked mechanically after the Bulgakov’s Cat bust. There wasn’t much. Daskeen Azul weren’t shifting from their position. Merrin, Ren, and the others were employees who had usurped company policy and practice for their own illicit ends. Any attempt to incriminate owners or management would be fought right into court and out the other side. Warrants resisted, bail set and paid, legal battle joined.

“And we’ll probably lose” was Rovayo’s sour assessment. “Same day we made the arrests, some very heavy legal muscle showed up from the Freeport. Tsai’s going to take them on anyway, he’s pissed about the whole thing. But no one’s talking, they’re all either too scared or too confident. Unless someone in this crew rolls over for us, and fast, we’re going to end up dead in the water.”

“Right.” It came out slack. He couldn’t make himself care.

Rovayo sipped her coffee, eyed him grimly across the table, and said: “I’m only going to ask this once, because I know it’s stupid. But are they sure they can’t beat this thing she’s got?”

“Yeah, they’re sure. The viral shift moves too fast, we’re just playing catch-up. There isn’t an n-djinn built that has the chaos-modeling capacity to beat this. Haag system’s designed to take down a thirteen, and my immune system’s about twice as efficient as yours, so they had to come up with something pretty unstoppable.”

Rovayo grunted. “Nothing ever fucking changes, huh?”

“Sorry?”

“Arms industry, making a living scaring us all. You know a couple of hundred years ago, they built a whole new type of bullet because they thought ordinary slugs wouldn’t take down a black man with cocaine in his blood?”

“Black man?”

“Yeah, black. Black-skinned, like you and me. First they tie cocaine use to the black community, make it a race-based issue. Then they reckon they need a bigger bang to put us down, because we’re all coked up.” The Rim cop made an ironic gesture of presentation. “Welcome to the .357 magnum round.”

Carl frowned. The terminology was only vaguely familiar. “You’re talking about some Jesusland thing, right?”

“Wasn’t called Jesusland then. This is a cased round I’m talking about. Two hundred years ago, I did say.”

He nodded and rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, sorry. You did. I forgot.”

“Same thing happened another couple of hundred years before that. Automatic fire this time.” Rovayo sipped at her coffee. “Guy called Puckle patented a crank-action mounted machine gun designed to fire square bullets at the advancing Turkish hordes.”

Carl sat back. “You’re winding me up.”

“No. Thing was supposed to fire round bullets if you were fighting Christians, square if you were killing heathens.”

“Come on! There’s no fucking way they could build something like that back then.”

“No, of course they couldn’t. It didn’t work.” The Rim cop’s voice tinged grim. “But the .357 magnum did. And so does Haag.”

“Monsters, huh,” said Carl quietly. “How come you know all this stuff, Rovayo?”

“I read a lot of history,” said the black woman. “Way I see it, you don’t know anything about the past, you got no future.”

They aspirate her lungs, try to bring her breathing back up. She just lies there while they do it, before, during, and after, puddled on the bed in her own lack of strength. The whole process feels like the kicks of a midterm pregnancy, but higher up and much more frequent, as if in tiny, hysterical rage.

Memory brings tears, but they leak out of her eyes so slowly she runs out of actual feeling before they stop. She doesn’t have a lot of fluid to spare.

Her mouth is parched. Her skin is papery dry.

Her hands and feet feel swollen and increasingly numb.

When the endorphins they give her wear thin, she can track the passage of her urine by the tiny scraping pains it makes on its way to the catheter.

Her stomach aches from emptiness. She feels sick to its pit.

When the endorphins come on, it feels like going back to the garden, or the nighttime ride of the ferries across the Bosphorus to the Asian side. Black water and merry city lights. She hallucinates once, very clearly, coming into the dock at Kadiköy and seeing Marsalis waiting for her there. Dark and quiet under the LCLS overheads.

Reaching out his hand.

Surfacing from the dosage is pain, dragging her back like rusty wires, and sudden, sick-making fear as she remembers where she is. Lying drained, and seeping slowly in and out of bags. Stale sheets and the gaunt sentinels of the machines around her. And through it all, a racking, overarching, frustrated fury with the body she’s still wired and tied and bedded down into.

He tried to work.

Sevgi was out on the swells of endorphin a lot of the time, drifting there in something that approximated peace. He found he could step out and leave her in these periods, and he conversed with Norton in low tones, sitting in waiting rooms, or leaned against walls in the night-quiet hospital corridors.

“I remembered something this afternoon,” he told the COLIN exec. “Sitting in there, shit going through my head. When Sevgi and I went to talk to Manco Bambarén, he recognized this jacket.”

Norton peered at the arm Carl held out to him, the orange chevrons flashing along the sleeve.

“Yeah? Standard Republican jail wear, I guess any criminal in the Western Hemisphere’s got to know what that looks like.”

“It’s not quite standard.” Carl twisted to show Norton the lettering on the back. The COLIN exec shrugged.

“Sigma. Right. You know how many prison contracts those guys have in Jesusland? They’ve got to be the second or third biggest corporate player the incarceration industry has. They’re even bidding on stuff out here on the coast these days.”

“Yeah, but Manco told me he had a cousin who did time specifically in South Florida State. Now, maybe we can’t hack the datafog around Isabela Gayoso so easily, but we ought to be able to chase prison records and maybe dig this guy up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can use.”

Norton nodded and rubbed at his eyes. “All right, we can look. God knows I could use the distraction right now. You get a name?”

“No. Bambarén, maybe, but I doubt it. The way Manco was talking, this wasn’t anyone that close to home.”

“And we don’t know when he did time?”

“No, but I’d guess recently. Sigma haven’t held the SFS contract more than five or six years max. Sigma jacket, you’ve got to be looking at that time frame.”

“Or Bambarén misremembered, and his cousin did time in some other Sigma joint, somewhere else in the Republic.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Manco Bambarén’s memory. Those guys aren’t big on forgive and forget, especially not when it’s down to family.”

“All right, leave it with me.” Norton glanced back down the corridor toward Sevgi’s room. “Listen, I’ve been up since yesterday morning. I’ve got to get some sleep. Can you stay with her?”

“Sure. That’s why I’m here.”

Norton’s gaze tightened on his face. “You call me if anything—”

“Yeah. I’ll call you. Go get some rest.”

For just a moment, something indefinable passed between the two of them in the dimly lit width of the corridor. Then Norton nodded, clamped his mouth tight, and headed away down the corridor.

Carl watched him go with folded arms.

Later, sitting by her bed in the bluish gloom of the night-lights, flanked by the quiet machines, he thought he felt Elena Aguirre slip silently into the room behind him. He didn’t turn around. He went on watching Sevgi’s sallow, washed-out face on the pillow, the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breathing beneath the sheet. Now he thought Aguirre was probably close enough to put a cool hand on the back of his neck.

“Wondered when you’d show up,” he said quietly.

Sevgi washed awake, alone, left beached by the receding tide of the endorphins, and she knew with an odd clarity that it was time. The once vertiginous terror was gone, had collapsed in on itself for lack of energy to sustain it. She was, finally, more weary, more miserably angry, and more in pain than she was scared.

It was what she’d been waiting for.

Time to go.

Outside the window of her room, morning was trying to get in. Soft slant of sunlight through the gap in the quaint hand-pull curtains. Waiting between endorphin surges for night to drag itself out the door had seemed like an aching, gritty forever. She lay there for a while longer, watching the hot patch of light creep onto the bed at her feet and thinking, because she wanted to be sure.

When the door opened and Carl Marsalis stepped into the room, the decision was as solid in her head as it had been when she woke.

“Hi there,” he said softly. “Just been up the hall for a shower.”

“Lucky fucking bastard,” she said throatily, and was dismayed at how deep, how bitter her envy of that simple pleasure really was. It made her feelings over Rovayo look trivial by comparison.

Time to go.

He smiled at her, maybe hadn’t caught the edge in her voice, maybe had and let it go.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked.

The same question he asked every time. She held his gaze and mustered a firm nod.

“Yeah, you can. Call my father and Tom in here, will you?”

The smile flickered and blew out on his face. He stood absolutely still for a moment, looking down at her. Then he nodded and slipped out.

As soon as he was gone, her pulse began to pound, up through her throat and in her temples. It felt like the first couple of times she ever had to draw her weapon as a patrol officer, the sudden, tilting comprehension that came with a street situation about to go bad. The terror of the last decaying seconds, the taste of irrevocable commitment.

But by the time he came back with the other two, she had it locked down.

“I’ve had enough,” she told them, voice a dried-up whisper scarcely louder in the room than it was in her own head. “This is it.”

None of them spoke. It wasn’t like this was a surprise.

“Baba, I know you’d do this for me if you could. Tom, I know you would, too. I chose Carl because he can, that’s all.”

She swallowed painfully. Waited for the ache it made to subside. Hiss-click of the machines around her across the silence. Outside in the corridor, the hospital’s working day was just getting under way.

“They’ve told me they can keep me going like this for at least another month. Baba, is that true?”

Murat bowed his head. He made a trapped sound, somewhere between throat and chest. He jerked a nod. Tears fell off his eyes onto the sheets. She found suddenly, oddly, that she felt worse for him than she did for herself. Abruptly, she realized that the fear in her was almost gone, squeezed out of the frame with pain and tiredness and straightforward irritation with it all.

Time to go.

“I’m not going to go on like this for another month,” she husked. “I’m bored, I’m sick, and I’m tired. Carl, I told you this felt like a wall rushing at me?”

Carl nodded.

“Well, it isn’t rushing anymore. It’s all slowed down to sludge. I’m sitting here looking at where I have to go, and it looks like fucking kilometers of hard ground to crawl on my hands and fucking knees. I won’t do that. I don’t want to play this fucking game anymore.”

“Sev, are you—” Norton stalled out.

She smiled for him. “Yeah, I’m sure. Been thinking it through for long enough. I’m tired, Tom. I’m tired of spending half my time stoned, and the other half waking up in pain to realize I’m still not fucking dead, that I’ve still got that part to go. It’s time to just get on with it, just get it done.”

She turned to Carl again.

“Have you got it?”

He took out the slippery white packet and held it out to her. Light from the brightening morning outside came in and glimmered on the slick plastic covering. Letting go of the light was going to be the hardest thing. Sunlight broke in and danced about the room when they pulled the curtains each morning, and it was almost worth not quite being dead each morning because of it. It was what she clung to as she rode the long troughs and swells of dreaming and back-to-real every night. She’d hung on this long because of it. Might even have hung on a little longer, a few more mornings, if she wasn’t so fucking weary.

“Baba.” Her voice was tiny, she had to struggle to keep it even. “Is this going to hurt me?”

Murat cleared his throat wetly. He shook his head.

“No, canim. It’ll be like.” He gritted his teeth to keep from sobbing. “Like going to sleep.”

“That’s good,” she whispered breathlessly. “I could use some decent sleep.”

She found Carl with her eyes. She nodded, and watched him tear open the package. His hands moved efficiently, laying out the component parts of the kit. He barely seemed aware of the actions—she guessed he’d done similar on enough battlefields in the past. She glanced across to Tom Norton, found him weeping.

“Tom,” she said gently. “Come here and hold my hand. Baba, you come ’round here. Don’t cry, Baba. Please don’t cry, any of you. You’ve got to be happy I’m not going to hurt anymore.”

She looked at Carl. No tears. His face was black stone as he prepped the spike, held it up one-handed to the light, while his other hand touched warm and callus-fingered on the crook of her arm. He met her eyes and nodded.

“You just tell me when,” he said.

She looked around at their faces once more. Made them a smile each, squeezed their hands. Then she found his face again, and clung to it.

“I’m ready,” she whispered.

He bent over her. Tiny, cold spike into her arm, held there a moment by the overlaying warmth of his fingers, and then gone. He swabbed, applied something cool, and pressed down. She arched her neck to get closer to him, brushed her paper-dry lips across the rasp of his unshaven cheek. Breathed in his scent and lay back as the beautiful, aching warmth spread through her body, inking out the pain.

Waited for what came next.

Sunlight outside.

She wanted to look sideways at the slanting angle it made, but she was just too sleepy now to make the effort. Like her eyes just wouldn’t move in their sockets anymore. It felt like a weekend from her youth in Queens, crawling into bed Sunday morning just past dawn, weary from the long night out clubbing across the river. Taxi home, girlish hilarity leaching out to a reflective comedown quiet as they cruised through silent streets, dropping off along the way. Creeping up to the house, scrape of the recog fob across the lock, and of course there’s Murat in pajamas, already up and in the kitchen, trying to look scandalized and failing dismally. She grins her impish grin, steals white cheese crumbs and an olive off his plate, a sip of tea from his glass. His hand cuffs through her hair, tousles it, and tugs her head gently into an embrace. Bear-hug squeeze, and his smell, the rasp of his stubble across her cheek. Then, climbing the stairs to her room, yawning cavernously, almost tripping over her own feet. She pauses at the top, looks back, and he’s standing there at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with so much pride and love in his face that out of nowhere it shunts aside the comedown weariness and makes her heart ache like a fresh cut.

“Better get some sleep, Sevgi.”

Still aching as she stumbles into bed, still half dressed. Curtains not properly drawn, sunlight slanting in, but no fucking way that’s going to stop her sleeping, the way she feels now. No fucking way…

Sunlight outside.

Aches and pains forgotten. The long, warming slide into not worrying about anything at all.

And the room and all that was in it went away gently, like Murat closing her bedroom door.

When it was done, when her eyes slid finally closed and her breathing stopped, when Murat Ertekin bent over her, sobbing uncontrollably, and checked the pulse in her neck and nodded, when it was over and there was, finally, no more left for him to do, Carl walked away.

He left Murat Ertekin sitting with his daughter. He left Norton standing trembling like a bodyguard running a high fever but still on duty. He left and headed down the corridor alone. It felt as if he were wading in thigh-deep water. Humans brushed past, moving aside for him, cued in by the blank face and the forced gait. There was no panic, no buzz of activity in his wake—Murat knew how to bypass the machines so they wouldn’t scream for help when Sevgi’s vital signs sank to the bottom.

They would know soon enough. Norton had promised to deal with it. That was his end—Carl had done what he did best.

He walked away.

The memories scurried after him, anxious not to be left behind.

“Don’t know what’s next,” she says, smiling as the drug takes hold. “But if it feels anything like this, it’ll do.”

And then, as her eyelids begin to sag, “I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.”

“Yeah, with all that fruit and the stream running under the trees there,” he tells her, through lips that seem to have gone numb. Voice suddenly hoarse. He’s the only one talking to her now. Norton is silent and rigid at his side, no use to anyone. Murat Ertekin has sunk to his knees beside the bed, face pressed into his daughter’s hand, holding back tears with an effort that shakes him visibly as he breathes. He summons strength to keep speaking. Squeezes her hand. “Remember that, Sevgi. All that sunlight through the trees.”

She squeezes back, barely. She sniggers, a gentle rupturing of air out through her lips, barely any actual sound. “And the virgins. Don’t forget them.”

He swallows hard.

“Yeah, well you save me one of those. I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up. We all will.”

“Fucking virgins,” she murmurs sleepily. “Who needs ’em? Gotta teach ’em every fucking thing…”

And then, finally, just before the breathing stops.

“Baba, he’s a good man. He’s clean.”

He smashed back the doors out of the ward, along the corridors people got out of his way. He found the stairs, plunged downward, looking for a way out.

Knowing there wasn’t one.

CHAPTER 48

Afterward, the COLIN exec came to find him in the garden. Carl hadn’t said he was going there, but it wouldn’t have taken a detective to work it out. The benches around the fountain had become a standard haunt for all of them over the past few days, familiar with habitual use. It was where they went when the weight of the hospital pressed down on them, when the antiseptic-scented, nano-cleansed air grew too hard and arid to breathe. Norton slumped onto the bench beside him like someone getting home to a shared house and hitting the sofa. He stared into the sunlit splash of the fountain and said nothing at all. He’d cleaned up, but his face still looked feverish from the crying.

“Any trouble?” Carl asked him.

Norton shook his head numbly. His voice came out mechanical. “They’re making some noise. The COLIN mandate should cover it. Ertekin’s talking to them.”

“So we’re free to go.”

“Free to…?” The exec’s brow furrowed, uncomprehending. “You’ve always been free to go, Marsalis.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Norton swallowed. “Listen, there’s the funeral. Arrangements. I don’t know if—”

“I’m not interested in what they do with her corpse. I’m going to find Onbekend. Are you going to help me?”

“Marsalis, listen—”

“It’s a simple question, Norton. You watched her die in there. What are you going to do about it?”

The COLIN exec drew a shuddering breath. “You think killing Onbekend is going to make things better? You think that’ll bring her back?”

Carl stared at him. “I’m going to assume that’s rhetorical.”

“Haven’t you had enough yet?”

“Enough of what?”

“Enough of killing whatever you can get your fucking hands on.” Norton came off the bench, stood over him. The words hissed out like vented poison gas. “You just took Sevgi’s life in there, and all you can think of to do is go look for someone else to kill? Is that all you fucking know how to do?”

Across the gardens, heads turned.

“Sit down,” Carl said grimly. “Before I break your fucking neck for you.”

Norton grinned hard. He sank onto his haunches, brought his face level with Carl’s.

“You want to break my fucking neck.” He gestured up. “Here it is, my friend. Right fucking here.”

He meant it. Carl closed his eyes and sighed. Opened them and looked at Norton again, nodded slowly.

“All right.” He cleared his throat. “There are two ways to look at this, my friend. See, we can do the civilized, feminized, constructive thing and work a long by-the-book investigation that may or may not lead us eventually back to Manco Bambarén and the altiplano and Onbekend. Or we can take your COLIN authorization and a little hardware, and we can fly down there and set fire to Manco’s machine.”

Norton levered himself upright again. He shook his head. “And you think that’s going to make him cave in? Just like that?”

“Onbekend is a thirteen.” Carl wondered fleetingly if he shouldn’t try harder with Norton, lever his voice up out of the dead tone he could hear in it. “Manco Bambarén may have hired him, or he may just be doing business with the people who did, but whatever the connection is, it’s not blood the way it was with Merrin. Manco’s going to see Onbekend and me as two of a kind, monsters he can play off against each other for whatever best result there is. He gave me Nevant three years ago to get me off his back, and he’ll give me Onbekend for the same reason. In the end, he’s a businessman, and he’ll do what’s good for business. If we make it bad enough for business to hold out, then he’ll cave in.”

“We?”

“Slip of the tongue. I’m going anyway. You can come with me or not, as your nonvariant conscience sees fit. Be easier for me if you did, but if you don’t, well.” Carl shrugged. “I promised Gutierrez I’d go back to Mars to kill him, and I meant it. The altiplano’s a lot easier gig than that.”

“I could stop you.”

“No, you couldn’t. First sign of trouble from you, I’m on an UNGLA bounce out of here. They practically tried to drag me onto the shuttle last week. They’ll jump at the chance if I call them. Then I’ll just double back to Peru on my own ticket.”

“COLIN could still make your life very tough down there.”

“Yeah, they usually do. Occupational hazard. It never stopped me before.”

“Hard man, huh?”

“Thirteen.” Carl looked at him levelly. “Norton, this is what’s wired into me, it’s what my body chemistry’s good for. I am going to build a memorial to Sevgi Ertekin out of Onbekend’s blood, and I will cut down anyone who gets in my way. Including you, if you make me.”

Norton sank back onto the bench.

“You think that’s just you?” he muttered. “You think we don’t all feel that way right now?”

“I wouldn’t know. But feeling and doing are two very different things. In fact, there’s a guy back on Mars called Sutherland who tells me humans have built their entire civilization in the gap between the two. I wouldn’t know about that, either. What I do know is that an hour ago in there”—Carl gestured toward the hospital—“Murat Ertekin felt he wanted to put his daughter out of her misery. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. I won’t judge him for that, just like I won’t judge you for not coming with me, if that’s the choice you make. Maybe this stuff just isn’t wired into you people as deep. That’s what they told us at Osprey, anyway. That we were special because we were able to do what the society that created us no longer had the stomach for.”

“Right,” Norton said bitterly. “Believe everything the recruiting poster says, why don’t you.”

“I didn’t say I did, I said that’s what they told us. I don’t necessarily think they were right. This much is true—it certainly didn’t work out well, not for us or for you people.” Carl sighed. “Look, I don’t know, Norton. Maybe the fact that you don’t have the stomach for single-minded slaughter anymore, the fact that you’re forgetting how to do it—maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it makes you a better human being than me, a better member of society, a better man even. I wouldn’t know, and I don’t care because for me it isn’t relevant. I am going to destroy Onbekend, I am going to destroy anyone who stands in my way. Now, are you coming with me or not?”

In the hotel, he found mundane things to do. The last four days of Sevgi’s life had frozen his own existence in its tracks; he’d done nothing awake but sit by her and wait. He’d been in the same set of clothes since the night she was shot, and even the Marstech fabrics were starting to look shabby. He bundled them up and sent them for cleaning. Ordered something similar from the hotel catalog and wore it out into the street when he went looking for a phone. He supposed that he could have gotten phones easily enough from the hotel along with the clothing, but a habitual caution stopped him. And besides, he needed to walk. Away from or toward what, he wasn’t quite sure, but the need sat in the pit of his empty stomach like tiny bubbles, like frustration rising.

“Bambarén’s cousin’s a bust,” Norton had told him on their way back into town. The COLIN exec slumped in the back of the autocab as if broken at the joints. “So if you’re looking for a way in, that isn’t it. We got a name, Suerte Ferrer, street hook Maldición, string of small-time stuff on the fringes of the Jesusland familias. Did his three years in South Florida for gang-related, but he’s out right now and he’s dropped right off the scope.”

“The n-djinns can’t find him?”

“He’s gone to ground somewhere in the Republic, and I can’t get an n-djinn search in there without causing a major diplomatic incident. We’re not exactly flavor of the month since we sprung you from South Florida State.”

“You don’t think you can get local PD to cooperate?”

“Which local PD?” Norton stared emptily out of the window. “As far as our information goes, Ferrer could be in any of about a dozen different states. And besides, Jesusland PD don’t have the budget to run their own n-djinns.”

“So they hire one out of the Rim.”

“Yeah, they do that. But you’re talking about major expenditure, and half these departments are struggling just to make payroll and keep their tactical equipment up to date. You’re looking at decades of slash-and-burn tax cuts in public services across the board. There is no way, in that climate, I can start ringing up senior detectives across the Republic and asking them to buy n-djinn time to track down some minor-league gangbanger they’ve never heard of with no warrant out and no suspicion of anything other than being related to someone we don’t like.”

Carl nodded. Since leaving the hospital, he’d found himself thinking with a faintly adrenalized clarity that was like a synadrive hit. Sevgi was gone now, shelved in some space he could access later when he’d need the rage, and in her absence he was serene with vectored purpose. He looked back down the chain of association to Ferrer and saw the angle he needed.

“Norton.”

The COLIN exec grunted.

“How easy would it be for you to get access to unreleased Marstech?”

On the northern fringes of Chinatown, more or less at random, he found an unassuming frontage with the simple words clean phone picked out on the glass in green LCLS lozenges. He went inside and bought a pack of one-shot audio-phones, walked out again and found himself standing in the cold evening air, abruptly alone. In the time he’d been in the shop, everyone else seemed to have suddenly found pressing reasons to get off the street. He suffered an overpowering sense of unreality, and a sudden urge of his own to go back into the shop and see if the woman who’d served him had also disappeared, or had maybe ceded her place behind the counter to a grinning Elena Aguirre.

He grimaced and glanced around, picked out Telegraph Hill and the blunt finger of the Coit Tower on the skyline. He started walking toward it. The smoky evening light darkened, and lights began to glimmer on across the vistas of the city. He reached Columbus Avenue, and it was as if the city had suddenly jerked back to life around him. Teardrops zipped past in both directions, the muted chunter of their motors filling his ears. He joined other human beings at the crosswalk, waited with them for a space in the traffic flow, hurried with them when it came, across to Washington Square. More life here, more lives being lived. There was a softball match just packing up in the center of the grass, people headed home from under the spread of the trees. A tall, gaunt man dressed in ragged black stopped him and held out a begging bowl in hands that spasmed and shook. There was a sign in Chinese characters pinned to his shirt. Carl shot him a standard-issue get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way look, but it didn’t work.

“Bearliunt,” the man said in a hoarse voice, pushing the bowl at him. “Bearliunt.”

He met hollowed-out eyes in a stretched parchment face. He held down the easy-access fury with an effort.

“I don’t understand you,” he told the derelict evenly. He jabbed a finger at the Chinese script. “I can’t read this.”

“Bearliunt. Rike you. Needy Nero.”

The eyes were dark and intelligent, but they darted about. It was like being watched by something avian. The bowl came back, prodding.

“Bearliunt. Brack Rab from.”

And Carl felt understanding pour down the back of his neck like cold water, like Elena Aguirre’s touch. The man nodded. Saw the recognition.

“Yes. Brack Rab from. Bearliunt. Rike you.”

Chilled out of nowhere, fucked up in some indefinable way, Carl reached into his pocket and fished out a wafer at random. He dumped it into the bowl without checking for denomination. Then he shouldered past the man and headed away fast, toward the rising slope of Telegraph Hill. When he got out of the park, he looked back and the man was staring after him, standing awkwardly with one arm raised stiffly like some kind of scarecrow brought barely to life. Carl shook his head, not knowing what he was denying, and fled for the tower.

He got to the top, out of breath from the speed he’d climbed.

The tower was closed up; he had the place to himself apart from a young couple propped against the seaward viewing wall in each other’s arms. He stood and watched them balefully for a while, wondering how much he might also look like a living scarecrow in their eyes. Finally they grew uncomfortable, and the girl tugged her boyfriend away toward the exit stair. He was a muscular boy, tall and handsome in a pale Nordic fashion, and at first he wasn’t going to go. He stared back at Carl, blue eyes marbled wet with tension. Carl concentrated on not killing him.

Then the girl leaned up and murmured in the blond boy’s ear, and he contented himself with a snort, and they left.

Somewhere inside Carl, something clicked and broke, like ice in a glass.

He went to the wall and looked out across the water. Watched the lights glimmer on the Alcatraz station, out along the bridge, over at the shoreline on the Marin side. Sevgi was there in all of it, a thousand memories he didn’t need or want. He blew hard breath through his nose, pulled one of the phones loose from the pack, and dialed a number he’d never expected to need.

“Sigma Frat House,” said a jeering voice. “This ain’t the time to be calling neither, so you leave a message and it better be a fucking good one.”

“Danny? Let me speak to the Guatemalan.”

The voice scaled upward, derisive. “Guatemalan’s sleeping, motherfucker. You call back in office hours, you hear?”

“Danny, you listen to me very carefully. If you don’t go and wake the Guatemalan up right fucking now, I’m going to hang up. And when he hears that you took some fucked-up decision about what he did and didn’t need to hear, all on your own pointed little head, he’ll have you bunking with the Aryans for a reward, I fucking guarantee you.”

Incredulous silence.

“Who the fuck is this?”

“This is Marsalis. The thirteen. Couple of weeks back I carried one of your shanks into the chapel after Dudeck, remember? Then I walked out the front gate. I’ve got something out here for the Guatemalan he’s going to like. So you go wake him up and tell him that.”

The voice at the other end went away. Soft, prison-wall static sang in the space it left. Carl stared across the hazed evening air in the bay, screwed up his eyes, and rubbed a tear out of one corner with his thumb. Grumbling voices in the background, then the bang of someone grabbing the phone. The Guatemalan rumbled down the line, amused and maybe slightly stoned.

“Eurotrash? That you?”

“Like I told Danny, yeah.” Carl picked his angle of entry with care. “Dudeck out of the infirmary yet?”

“Yeah, he is. Moving a little slow right now, though. You do good work, Eurotrash, I gotta give you that much. Dudeck what this is about? You feelin’ nostalgic, calling to talk about old times?”

“Not exactly. I thought we could do a little business, though. Trade a little data. They say you’re a good man to see for that. So I’ve got something I need to know, you can maybe help me with it.”

“Data?” The other man chuckled. “Seems to me you told me you’d hooked up with the Colony Initiative. You telling me I got data that COLIN don’t?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, yeah.”

There was a long pause.

“Want to tell me what my end of this is, Eurotrash?”

“Let’s see what you’ve got first. You remember a low-grade familia gangbanger came through SFS on a three-spot, got out a couple of years ago?”

Another rumbling chortle. “Niggah, I remember a whole graveyard of those andino boys. They bounce in and out of this place like they tied to it on a rubber line. Muscle up sooooo proud to the brothers and the Aryans and every other fucker that’ll look them in the eye, and mostly they get stretchered out again. So which particular skull you picking over?”

“Name of Ferrer, Suerte Ferrer. Likes to call himself Maldición. He went out walking, so he’s either tougher or smarter than average. That ought to ring some bells.”

“Yeah, Maldición. Smart, I’m not convinced on, but he certainly fit tough. Sure. Think I could be induced to remember that boy.”

“Good. You think you could be induced to tell me where he is now?”

“You talking about where he is outside population?”

“Yeah, it looks that way.”

A thoughtful, spreading pool of quiet on the line again. Carl could smell the reek of mistrust it gave off. The Guatemalan’s voice came back slow and careful.

“I been in here nine long years, Eurotrash. Terror and organized crime, they slammed me away for both. What makes you think I’m in any position to know anything about what goes on outside?”

Carl let his tone sharpen. “Don’t get stupid on me, I’m not in the mood. I cut a deal with COLIN, not drug enforcement or the morals committee. This isn’t some hick Jesusland entrapment number. I want Ferrer found, and if possible delivered over the fenceline to the Rim. I’m willing to pay COLIN prices for the service. Now can we do each other some good, or not?”

The Guatemalan missed a beat, but only just. “I heard…COLIN prices?”

“Yes, you did.”

Another pause, but this time it thrummed with purpose. He could almost hear the whir as the Guatemalan made calculations and guesses.

“Moves on the outside come a lot higher-priced than in population,” the other man said finally, and softly.

“I imagined they would.”

“And cross-border delivery, well.” The Guatemalan made a noise with indrawn breath that sounded like spit steaming off a hot griddle. “That’s topping out the favors list, Eurotrash. Big risks, very high stakes.”

“Unreleased Marstech.” Carl dropped the words into the pool of quiet expectation at the other end of the line. “You hear what I’m saying?”

“Not a lot of use to me in here.” But now you could hear the excitement cabled beneath the Guatemalan’s casual tone.

“Then I guess you’ll have to spend it outside somehow. Maybe buy yourself some big favors at legislature level. Maybe just lay down a little future growth here and there. Man like you, I’m sure you’d know better than me how to find the best investment options for your capital. Now, you going to find Maldición for me or not?”

Silence again, tight with the promise of its own brevity. Carl twitched a sudden look over his shoulder, tingle of alarm. Gloom across the space behind him back to the steps up to the tower. Dark bordering shrubs and foliage. Nothing there. He worked his shoulders and felt the unreleased tension of days locked up there. The Guatemalan came back.

“Call me in two days,” he said calmly. “And think of a very big number.”

He hung up.

Carl folded the phone and listened to the faint crackle as the internal circuitry fired and melted. He let out a long breath and leaned on the wall, shoulders hunched. The tension gripped his neck like muscled fingers. The soft mounds of the Marin coast rose on the other side of the bay. He stared at the final orange leavings of dayglow on their flanks, filled with an obscure desire he couldn’t pin down. The phone casing was warm in his hand from the meltdown, the air around him suddenly chilled in contrast.

“You’re looking in all the wrong places, thirteen.”

The voice sent him spinning about, combat stance, gripping the phone in his hand as if it could possibly serve him as a weapon.

She stood at the borders of the trees, and he knew the shiver of alarm he’d picked up earlier was the sensation of her watching him. She came forward, arms spread, hands open, palms turned upward with nothing on them. He knew the poise, knew the voice. Looked for the face paint and saw that this time she hadn’t bothered.

“Hello, Ren.”

“Good evening, Mr. Marsalis.”

Carmen Ren came to a halt about three meters away. Feet set apart on the evercrete in cleated boots that promised steel beneath the curve of the toes. Black pilot-style pants with thigh pockets sealed shut, plain gray zipped jacket with a high collar that pointed up the elevated planes of her face, hair gathered simply back off the pale narrow face. He looked her up and down for weaponry, saw none she could access in a hurry.

He straightened out of the fighting crouch.

“Very wise,” she said. “I’m here to help.”

“So help. Sit down cross-legged with your hands on your head and don’t move while I call RimSec.”

She peeled him a brief smile. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling that generous.”

“I didn’t say you had a choice.”

Something moved in her eyes, the way she breathed. The smile floated back onto her face, but this time it was the adrenal veil, the prelude to fight-or-flight. She telegraphed it to him with an odd, careless abandon that was curiously like the offer of open arms. Abruptly he wasn’t very sure that he’d be able to take her.

He cleared his throat. “That’s very good. How’d you do that?”

“Practice.” The smile went away again, pocketed for later use. “Are we going to talk, or are you going to get all genetic on me?”

He thought back to Nevant. Broken glass and blood. The nighttime streets of Istanbul, walking back to Moda and—

He put a tourniquet on it, twisted hard. Grimaced. “What do you want to talk about?”

“How about I hand you this case in a bento box?”

“I told you already I’m not a cop. And anyway, why would you do that? Last time I checked, you were playing on Manco Bambarén’s team.”

He was watching her face. No flicker on the name.

“The people I work for hung me out to dry,” she said. “You want to ask yourself why I left you and Merrin to fight it out?”

He shrugged. “Off the sinking ship in your little rat life vest. I assume.”

“You assume wrong.”

“Want to back that up? You know, with evidence?”

“Right here.” She patted her jacket pocket. “We’ll get to it in a moment. First, why don’t you play back the fight in starboard loading for me. Think it through.”

“I think I’d rather just see this evidence.”

A thin smile. “You knock me down, take the others back inside, and use their numbers against them.” She mimed a pistol grip. “You take Huang’s sharkpunch, use it on him and Scotty, that’s Osborne to you, the Jesusland kid. So I hear both of them go down while I’m still on the floor, but that’s all it takes me to get back on my feet and there you are, mixing it up with Merrin and all that Mars-side tanindo shit. Now, you really think I didn’t have time to swing back in there and pull you off him? Come on, Marsalis. Work the gray matter. I had all the time in the world, and keeping Merrin alive was my job.”

Hairline crack of unease. “Keeping Merrin alive?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Someone paid you to shadow him?”

“Shadow him?” She raised an elegant eyebrow. “No, just get him aboard the Cat. Hook up with Daskeen Azul and keep him there, look after him until further notice.”

The crack ran out, split wide, from unease to splintering confusion.

“You’re saying…you’re telling me Merrin’s been locked down on Bulgakov’s Cat the last four months? He hasn’t been anywhere else?”

“Sure. Took us about a week to get him there from Ward’s place, but since then? Yeah. Just a handling gig. Why?”

The quarry face of what he knew blew up. Detonated from within, multiple blasts in the thin Martian air and the building roar after, rock shattering and slumping, sliding down itself into rubble and dust. He glimpsed the new face of what was behind, the new surface exposed.

Onbekend’s face.

The trace familiarity about the features, the certainty he knew them from somewhere, had seen them before or features very like them.

Rovayo’s voice floated back through his head. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.

Yeah, he was. You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.

Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.

The enormity of it towered above him like the sky.

I’ve seen data, said Sevgi, the first day he met her, 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. Sevgi in the prison interview room. He remembered the scent of her as she spoke and his throat locked up. Her voice ran on, wouldn’t get out of his head. 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.

The idiot pattern of the murders. Death in the Bay Area, then Texas and beyond, and then back to the Rim all over again, months later. No sense to the double-back, unless…

Unless…

“Onbekend,” he said tightly. “Do you know him?”

“Heard the name.” Amused quirk in the corner of her mouth. “But it means—”

“I know what it means. Are you working with anyone who has that name?”

“No. I was working with a guy called Emil Nocera, and with Ulysses Ward, before Merrin went genetic and slaughtered them both. After that, I used Scotty to ride shotgun and pulled some contacts elsewhere.”

“What contacts?”

“Just contacts. No one I see any reason to hand over to you. They’re peripheral, they don’t count. Rimside plug-ins for the people who hired me.”

Carl thought back to the boy with the machete, the gibbering religious abuse.

“You sold Osborne some story about me?”

“Not as such.” Ren looked suddenly tired. “I told him Merrin was the, what do you call it, the second coming? Christ returned and hiding because a black man was out there, coming to do him harm. Mix-and-match imagery, cooked it up from what I knew about Jesusland ideology and the way Osborne was rambling.”

Very Christ-like, he remembered saying when he saw Merrin’s file photo. Very Faith Satellite Channel.

He nodded. “I can see how that would work.”

“Yeah, well. Jesuslander, you know. Seemed like a nice enough kid deep down, but you know what that old-time religion will do. Wasn’t hard to sell him the concept, half those people live their whole fucking lives waiting for their Savior to show up. They’d jump at the chance for a walk-on role.” She shrugged, perfectly. “Plus, he was hot for me and concussed from a smack in the head he got from Merrin in the fight at Ward’s place. Poor little fucker never stood a chance.”

“So I’m the black man.”

She pulled a face. “Yeah, you just showed up and fit the role a little too well.”

“Tell me about.” Carl stirred through his recollections again, the fight in the nighttime mall. “You didn’t send him after me then?”

“No, that was all his idea.” Ren’s tone was sour. “Thought it up all on his own, and I wasn’t there to stop him. Wasn’t for that, we might all have gotten off the Cat quietly while RimSec were still clumping about up on deck trying to lock us down.”

“You have any idea why you were supposed to bodyguard Merrin?”

“None. I’m strictly for hire. Got the word he’d be coming in, emergency splashdown, and Ward goes out to collect. My end was just keep him safe for a few months, they were going to need him later. We were going to do that at Ward’s place, but it seems Merrin had a few trust issues after what he went through aboard Horkan’s Pride.”

“Yeah. Understandable. So how’d you talk him down?”

“Initially?” Ren grinned. “With ninjutsu.”

“And after that?”

The grin stayed. “How do you think?”

“Really? Osborne and Merrin? How’d you make that work?”

Another elegant shift of the gray-fleeced shoulders. “Playing handmaiden to Christ, I get to do what I like in Scotty’s eyes. Or at least, he sells it to himself that way as long as he can, because he doesn’t want the rest of it to go away. Maybe that’s what really went wrong when you showed up. Who can tell?”

“And Merrin?”

“Well, I’d say Merrin never quite came back from that ride he took home on Horkan’s Pride. I’d been bracing myself for all the usual arrogant thirteen bullshit when he arrived.” She shook her head. “Not much sign of it. I wouldn’t say he was broken, but I’m not sure he ever straightened out what was really going on. I rammed it home that if he made waves, he was just going to blow cover, and I guess he was smart enough to take that much in. He had covert training, right?”

“Yeah. Field experience, too.”

“So. Something to hang on to, I guess.”

Carl felt the sequence of the fight rise up in his mind again. Slurred tanindo, the slack, not-quite-committed feel to the moves, the lack of force. Almost as if Merrin were still half back on Mars and living a lesser gravitational pull. As if he’d never really made it home after all.

“So, you had any field experience?” he asked Ren.

“Not as such.”

“Not as such, huh?” Carl glanced out across the bay to Marin. The light was almost gone now. “Who the fuck are you, Ren?”

“That’s not what matters here.”

“I think it is.”

She stared at him for a couple of seconds in the gloom. Put together a throwaway gesture.

“I’m just some guy they hired.”

“Just some guy. Right. With ninjutsu technique good enough to beat an ex-Lawman. Try again. Who are you?”

“Look, it’s simple. Forget whatever skills I picked up on my way around the Pacific Rim. I got hired here, in California, to do a handling job, because that’s what I do. I did my job, I handled the mess when Merrin boiled over, and I kept him covered. Then, when the heat got turned up high again, my scumbag client cut me loose. And now I’m looking for payback.”

“I thought you were here to help.”

“I am. My payback is handing you the people who cut me loose.”

“Not good enough.”

“I’m sorry, it’ll have to do.”

“Then go peddle your grudge to someone else.”

He turned his back and leaned on the seaward wall. Stared at the lights out across the water, tried hard not to think of Istanbul, and failed. Under certain superficial differences, the two cities shared an essence you couldn’t evade. Both freighted with the same distilled dream of shoreline, hills, and suspension spans, the same hazy sunlit air and rumble by day, the same glimmer on water at evening as ferries crisscrossed the gloom and traffic flowed in skeins of red and pale gold light across the bridges and through the street-lamp-studded veins of the city. What was in the air there was here as well, and he felt it catching in his throat.

He heard her boots move behind him. Footfalls on evercrete, closing the gap. He looked out at the glimmer of lights.

“Kind of careless tonight, aren’t you?’ She draped her arms on the wall, mimicked his posture about a meter off to his left.

He shrugged, didn’t look at her. “I figure if you want to feed me some information, it doesn’t pay you to take me out. You were going to do that, you would have done it awhile ago.”

“Fair analysis. Still a risk, though.”

“I’m not feeling very risk-averse right now.”

“Yeah, but you’re being fucking choosy about who you take your leads from. Mind telling me why?”

He tipped a glance at her.

“How about because I don’t trust you any farther than I would a Jesusland preacher with a choirboy? You’re handing me what looks like half a solution, Ren. And it doesn’t match up with what I already know. To me, that stinks of deflection. You want me to believe you’re really ready to sell out your boss? Tell me who you are.”

Quiet. The city breathed. Reflected light trembled across the water.

“I’m like you,” she said.

“You’re a variant?”

She squinted at the blade of her outstretched hand. “That’s right. Harbin black lab product. Nothing but the best.”

“You some kind of bonobo then?”

“No, I am not some kind of fucking bonobo.” There were a couple of grams of genuine anger in the way her voice lifted. “I had sex with Merrin and Scotty for my operational benefit, not because I couldn’t keep my hands off them.”

“Well, you know what?” He kept his voice at a drawl, not really sure why he was pushing, just some vague intuitive impulse to feed the anger and keep Ren off balance. “The real bonobo females, the pygmy chimps in Africa? That’s what they do a lot of the time, too. Fuck to calm the males down, keep them in line. I guess you could call that operational benefit, from a social point of view.”

She got off the wall and faced him.

“I’m a fucking thirteen, Marsalis. A thirteen, just like you. Got that?”

“Bullshit. They never built a female thirteen.”

“Right. Tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.”

She stood a meter off, and he saw her force the anger back down, iron it out of her stance, and put it away. Shiver of unlooked-for fellow feeling as he watched it happen. She leaned on the wall again, and her voice came out cool and conversational.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Marsalis, to wonder why Project Lawman failed so spectacularly? Has it occurred to you that just maybe cramming gene-enhanced male violent tendency into a gene-enhanced male chassis is overloading the donkey a little?”

Carl shook his head. “No, that hasn’t occurred to me. I was there when Lawman blew apart. What went wrong was that thirteens don’t like to do what they’re told, and as soon as the normal constraints come off, they stop doing it. You can’t make good soldiers out of thirteens. It’s that simple.”

“Yeah, like I said. Overloading the donkey.”

“Or just misunderstanding the concept of soldier.” He brooded on the outline of the Marin Headlands against the sky, watched the neat, corpuscular flow of red dotted lights funneling off the bridge and into a fold in the darkened hills. “Anyway, speaking of soldiering, if Harbin put you together, gave you the genes and the ninjutsu, I’ve got to assume that means you belong to Department Two.”

He thought she maybe shivered a little. “Not anymore.”

“Care to explain that?”

“Hey, you asked who I was. No one said anything about a full fucking résumé.”

He found he was smiling in the gloom. “Just sketch it out for me. Bare bones, enough to convince. One thing I don’t intend to be is a cat’s paw for the Chinese security services.”

“You’re starting to piss me off, Marsalis. I told you I don’t do that shit anymore.”

“Yeah, but I’m a naturally untrusting motherfucker. You want me to murder your boss for you? Indulge my curiosity.”

He heard her breath hiss out between her teeth.

“Late ’96, I worked undercover to crack a Triad sex-slave operation in Hong Kong. When we finally hit them, it got bloody. Department Two aren’t overly concerned about innocent bystanders.”

“Yeah, I heard that about them.”

“Yeah, well I took the opportunity of all that blood and screaming to step out quietly. Disappeared in the crossfire, crossed the line. Used the contacts I’d made to hook a passage to Kuala Lumpur, and then points south.” An odd weariness crept into her voice. “I was an enforcer in Jakarta for a while, played in the turf wars they had going against the yakuza, built myself an Indonesia-wide rep. Headed south again. Sydney and then Auckland. Corporate clients. Eventually the Rim States, because that’s where the real money is. And here we are. That sort out your curiosity for you?”

He nodded, surprised once again by the twinge of kinship he felt. “Yeah, that’ll do for the CV. But I do have one more question, general point of information you could clear up for me.”

Weary sigh. “And that is?”

“Why bother with me? You’re lethal as shit, well connected, too. Staying one step ahead of RimSec and making it look easy. Why not go in and take this faithless fuck out for yourself. Not like you don’t know where he is, right?”

She was silent for a while.

“It’s a simple question, Ren.”

“I think I’ve told you enough. In the end, you’re an UNGLA bounty hunter. You take me down, it puts food on your table.”

“I already know what you are,” he said roughly. “You see me reaching for a Haag gun?”

Voice not quite even on those last two words. Her head tilted, as if she maybe caught the tremor. She examined the blade of her hand again.

“You’ve made a career of betraying your own kind. No reason why you’d stop now, is there?”

“Ren, let me tell you something. I’m not even sure I still have my license.” Memories of di Palma flitted through his head, the prissy bureaucratic superiority of the Agency. “And even if I do, first thing I plan on doing when I get back is turn it in.”

“Change of heart, huh?” It wasn’t quite a sneer.

“Something like that. Now answer the question. Why me?”

More quiet. He noticed the chill in the air for the first time. His eyes kept sliding back to the Marin hills, the disappearing stream of traffic headed north. As if there were something there waiting for him. Ren seemed to be making calculations in her head.

“Two reasons,” she said, finally. “First, he’s likely to be expecting me. You, he’s got no reason to watch for.”

“If I were standing where you are, that kind of risk wouldn’t be enough for me to hand things over to a proxy.”

“I know. But you’re a male thirteen. I’m a little smarter than that. For me it’s enough to know that it’ll get done. I don’t have to be there and smell the blood.”

“Maybe I’m smarter than you think. Maybe I just won’t do it.”

He saw her smile. “Well, we’ll see.”

“You said two reasons.”

“That’s right.” Now she was the one looking out across the water. Her voice tinged with something that might have been embarrassment, might have been pride. “It seems I’m pregnant.”

The silence seemed to rush them, like dark fog coming in off the bay. The noises of the city, already faint, receded to the edge of perception. Carl placed his hands flat on the stonework of the wall, peered down at them in the gloom.

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Is it Merrin’s? Or machete boy’s?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t much care. And neither will your Agency friends. It’s enough that the mother’s a certified thirteen, without worrying about the father as well. They’ll send everything they’ve got after me. I need to be leaving, Marsalis. Bowing out and heading somewhere safe.”

“Right.” He folded his arms against the chill, turned to face her. “On the other hand, you do have one major advantage over the Agency.”

“Which is.”

“They don’t even know you exist.”

And somewhere in his head, Sevgi Ertekin’s voice.

Baba, he’s a good man. He’s clean.

Carmen Ren regarded him narrowly. “That’s right. Right now, they don’t know I exist.”

Carl looked away across the bay again. Something was aching in his throat. Sevgi, Nevant, all the others. His whole life seemed to pulse with grief.

“They aren’t going to hear it from me,” he said.

CHAPTER 49

It felt strange, walking into the Human Cost Foundation’s offices for real. Memories of the v-format clashed with the actual architecture of the reception space and the corridors leading off it. There was no Sharleen sitting there, no one in the waiting area at all, and the walls were a paler, colder blue than he recalled. The artwork he remembered wasn’t there, and the prints and Earth First shout-out posters that had replaced it seemed grubby and tired. Jeff, when he came out to greet them, looked similarly worn.

“In the flesh,” he said, hugging Norton briefly at the shoulders. “Nice surprise.”

Norton hugged back. “Yeah, strictly business, I’m afraid. Come to pick your professional brains again. This is Carl Marsalis. Marsalis, my brother Jeff.”

Jeff shook the thirteen’s hand without a blink. “Of course. Should have recognized you from the feed photos. Do you want to come through?”

They took a different corridor from the one Norton remembered in the virtual offices, and of course it didn’t blur out the way it had in the format. They passed doors with cheaply lettered plastic signs that hinted at the foundation’s daily round: TRAUMA COUNSELING, COAST GUARD LIAISON, HARASSMENT RESPONSE, FUNDING… Through one open office door, Norton glimpsed a stout Asian woman looking sleepily into the middle distance and drinking from a Styrofoam coffee cup. She half raised a hand as they passed, but said nothing. Otherwise, the place seemed to be deserted.

“Quiet this morning,” Marsalis said.

Jeff glanced back across his shoulder. “Yeah, well, it’s early yet. We’ve just ridden out a major funding crisis, so I sent everyone home with instructions to celebrate and come in late. In here.”

He let them into the office marked with the simple word directorate, closed the door carefully behind them. Changes from the virtual here, too: the décor was a higher-powered blend of reds and grays; the sofa was the same but had been turned so its back was to the window and there was space to walk around behind it, a low coffee table in front. Ornaments had moved around, been replaced. The photo of Megan was gone from the desk, there was a smaller one of the kids instead. Jeff gestured at the sofa.

“Grab a seat, both of you. How are COLIN treating you, Mr. Marsalis?”

The thirteen shrugged. “Well, they got me out of jail in Jesusland.”

“Yeah, I guess that could count as a pretty good opening offer.” Jeff came around to the sofa and seated himself facing both of them. He put on a weary smile. “So what can I do for you guys?”

Norton shifted uncomfortably. “How much do you know about the Harbin black labs, Jeff?”

Raised brows. His brother blew out a long breath.

“Well, not a whole lot. They keep that end sewn up pretty tight. Long way north, a long way from the sea. Very high security, too. From what we can piece together, it’s where the high-end product comes out.”

“You ever meet a variant from the Harbin labs?” Marsalis asked. “Human Cost ever handle any?”

“Christ, no.” Jeff sat back and rested his head on one hand. He seemed to be giving it some thought. “Well, certainly not since we’ve been set up in our current form anyway. I mean, before we got state funding, back before my time, they might have, I could check the files. But I doubt it. Most of the escapees we get are failed variants from the experimental camps. They don’t quite let them go, but they don’t much care what happens to them, either, so it’s easier for them to slip out, grab a fishing boat or something, maybe stow away. Anyone coming out of Harbin, though, they’d be very highly valued, and probably very loyal as well. I doubt they’d be interested in running, even if security was lax enough to let them.”

“I met one last night,” said Marsalis.

Jeff blinked. “A Harbin variant? Where?”

“Here. In the city.”

“Here? Jesus.” Jeff looked at Norton. “You see this as well?”

Norton shook his head.

“Well.” Jeff spread his hands. “I mean, this is fucking serious, Tom. If someone out of Harbin is here, chances are they work for Department Two.”

“No.” Marsalis got up and went to the window. “I had quite a long talk with her. She bailed out of Department Two awhile back.”

“So.” Jeff frowned. “Who’s she working for now?”

“She’s working for you, Jeff,” said the black man.

The moment hung in the room, creaked and turned like a corpse at the end of a rope. Norton was watching his brother’s eyes, and all he needed to see was there. Then Jeff jerked his eyes away, twisted about, stared up at Marsalis. The thirteen hadn’t turned from the window. Jeff looked at the broad back, the jacket lettered with s(t)igma, the lack of motion. He swung back to his brother.

“Tom?”

Norton reached into his pocket and produced the phone. He looked into Jeff’s face and thumb-touched the playback.

“Guava Diamond?”

“Still holding.”

“We are unable to assist, Guava Diamond. Repeat, we are unable to assist. Suggest—”

“You what? You bonobo-sucking piece of shit, you’d better tell me I misheard that.”

“There are control complications at this end. We cannot act. I’m sorry, Guava Diamond. You’re on your own.”

“You will be fucking sorry if we make it out of this in one piece.”

“I repeat, Guava Diamond, we cannot act. Suggest you implement Lizard immediately, and get off Bulgakov’s Cat while you can. You may still have time.”

Pause.

“You’re a fucking dead man, Claw Control.”

Static hiss.

They all listened to the white-noise emptiness of it for a couple of moments, as if they’d just heard the last transmission of a plane going down into the ocean. Norton thumbed the phone to off.

“That’s you, Jeff,” he said quietly. “Tell me it’s not.”

“Tom, you know you can fake a voice like that as easily as—”

He jammed to a halt as the black man’s hands sank weightily onto his shoulders from behind. Marsalis leaned over him.

“Don’t,” he said.

Jeff stared across the sofa space at Norton. “Tom? Tom, I’m your fucking brother, for Christ’s sake.”

Norton nodded. “Yeah. You’d better tell us everything you know.”

“Tom, you can’t seriously—”

“Sevgi is dead!” Suddenly he was yelling, trembling, throat swollen with the force of it, memories of the hospital swirling. “She is fucking dead, Jeff, because you hid this from me, she is dead!”

Marsalis’s hands stayed where they were. Norton gritted his teeth, tried to master the shaking that would not stop. He clamped his mouth tight, breathing hard.

“Bonobo-sucking piece of shit,” he got out. “She called you right, didn’t she, Jeff. She knew you well.”

“Tom, you don’t understand.”

“Not yet, we don’t,” said Marsalis. He lifted one hand, slapped it down again on Jeff’s shoulder, encouraging. “But you are going to tell us.”

“I.” Jeff shook his head. “You don’t understand, I can’t.”

Marsalis lifted his head and looked directly at Norton. Norton felt something kick in his stomach, something that made him feel sick but was somehow a release as well. He nodded.

The black man hooked one hand into Jeff Norton’s throat, dragged him back against the sofa. His fingers dug in. His other arm wrapped around Jeff’s chest, pinning one arm, holding him in place. Jeff made a shocked, choking sound, flailed about on the sofa, tugged at the thirteen’s grip with his only free hand. Marsalis grabbed the flapping arm at the wrist and held it out of the way. Jeff heaved, flopped, could not get loose.

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” said Marsalis coldly. It was the same voice that Norton had heard him use, in Quechua, on Gutierrez. “Someone is going to bleed for Sevgi Ertekin. Someone’s going to die. Right now, we’ve got you. You don’t give us someone else, then you’re it. You try keeping what you know from me, RimSec are going to find you floating in the bay with every bone in your body broken and both your eyes put out.”

Norton watched, made himself watch. Jeff’s gaze clawed frantically at him, out of a face turning blue. But Sevgi’s fading was crowded into his head like someone shouting herself hoarse, and it kept him pinned in his seat, watching.

“You killed her, Jeff,” he said, and his voice had a quiet, reasonable tone to it that felt like the rising edge of madness. “Someone’s got to pay.”

“Onbekend!”

It was a strangled grunt, barely recognizable. Marsalis caught it while Norton was still sorting meaning out of the crushed syllables. He unhinged his grip on Jeff’s throat and chest, hauled on the arm he’d captured at the wrist, dragged it up and around so Jeff was forced flat to the sofa. Marsalis leaned over and pressed the side of Jeff’s head down hard into the fabric, dug into the other man’s temple with his knuckles. Jeff coughed and gagged, whooped for breath, eyes flooded with tears.

“What about Onbekend?” Norton asked.

The dizzying sense of insanity had not gone. It circled him like a street gang. He wondered, in the midst of the revolving horror of it all, if this was what it felt like to be a thirteen, if this was what you had to embrace to live the way Marsalis did and Merrin had. He wondered how easy it would be to let go, and if you could ever find your grip again afterward.

Jeff made raw panting sounds.

“What about Onbekend?”

“All right, I’ll tell you, I’ll fucking tell you.” Jeff’s voice cracked. He stopped trying to get loose. He lay on the sofa, swallowing breath, leaking slow tears onto the fabric. “Just let me up. Please.”

Again, Marsalis flickered a glance at Norton. Norton nodded. My brother’s not a soldier or a thug, he’d told the thirteen the previous night. He’s not physically tough that way, he won’t stand up. Just let me call it. We’ll get everything we need from him.

Marsalis hauled Jeff into a sitting position on the sofa. He moved and took up a position by the desk. Folded his arms.

“Let’s hear it, then.”

Jeff’s eyes went from the black man to his brother. Norton stared back.

“Tom…”

“You heard him, Jeff. Let’s hear it.”

Jeff Norton seemed to collapse in on himself. He shuddered. Marsalis and Norton exchanged a glance. Norton lifted a hand in his lap. Wait. Jeff rubbed his hands over his face, dragged them back through his hair. He sniffed hard, wiped his eyes. Yeah, cry, Jeff, Norton caught himself thinking, with a violence that rocked him to the core. Cry like the fucking rest of us have been. Like Sevgi and me and Marsalis and Megan and Nuying, for all I fucking know, and who knows how many others. Want to play alpha male, big brother? Welcome aboard.

Jeff dropped his hands. He dredged up a weak smile, pinned it in place. Playing himself to the cheap seats once again.

“Look, you have no idea how deep this goes, Tom. Onbekend’s not just some random thirteen—”

“Yeah, he’s Merrin’s twin,” Marsalis said flatly. “We already got that far. You had Carmen Ren hold Merrin safe while Onbekend went around leaving genetic trace at crime scenes all over Jesusland and the Rim. Come the right time, Merrin shows up conveniently dead and takes the rap for it all. The question is why? Who were all these people?”

Jeff closed his eyes. Sighed. “Can I have a drink, please?”

“No, you can’t have a fucking drink,” said Marsalis. “We just got through agreeing to let you live. Count your fucking blessings and talk.”

Jeff looked at his brother, pulled a weary face. Norton made the connection—Jeff had to have his props. Cheap-seat appeal.

“Sure. I’ll get you a drink, Jeff,” he said gently. He met the black man’s disbelieving look, made the tiny raised-hand gesture again. “Where d’you keep it?”

“Wall cabinet. There’s a bottle of Martell in there and some glasses. Help yourselves.” Jeff Norton turned to look at Marsalis. “He’s got you jumping pretty neatly to the line for a thirteen, hasn’t he?”

Marsalis looked down at him. A faint frown creased his brow. “You want to get that looked at.”

“Get what looked at?”

Norton looked around from the open bar cabinet just in time to see the black man’s fist snap out from the waist. Short, hard, and full force into Jeff’s nose. He heard the cracking sound it made as the cartilage broke. Jeff bucked and screamed. His hands flew to his face again. Blood streamed out between them.

“Get that looked at,” said Marsalis tranquilly.

Norton spotted a box of tissues on the desk. He hooked it up and carried it across to the sofa with the bottle of cognac and a single glass. He set everything down on the coffee table, tugged a tissue loose, and handed it over to his brother.

“Don’t fuck around, Jeff,” he said quietly. “He wants you dead bad enough to taste, and I’m not that far behind him. Here, clean yourself up.”

Jeff took the tissue, then a couple more from the box. While he stanched the blood flow from his nose, Norton poured into the single glass. He pushed the cognac across the tabletop.

“There’s your drink,” he told his brother. “Now make it good.”

“Scorpion Response,” he told them.

Carl nodded. “Claw Control. Right. You’re still using the call signs, you sad fuck. What were you, Jeff, backroom support? You sure as fuck weren’t the front end of anything as nasty as Scorpion.”

“You’ve heard of these guys?” Norton asked him.

“On the grapevine, yeah. Ghost squad in the Pacific Rim theaters, supposed to be one of the last covert initiatives before the Secession.” Carl looked speculatively down at Jeff Norton. “So let’s hear it, Jeff. What was your end?”

“Logistics,” the Human Cost director said sulkily. “I was the operations coordinator.”

“Right.”

“When the fuck was this?” Norton stared at his brother. “You didn’t even move out here until ’94. You were in New York.”

Jeff Norton shook his head wearily. “I was out here all the time, Tom. Back and forth, Union to the Rim, Rim to Southeast Asia. We had offices all over. Half the time, I wasn’t home more than one weekend in five.” He took the blood-clotted tissues away from his nose, dumped them on the coffee table, and grimaced. “Anyway, how would you have known? We saw you what, once a month, if that?”

“I was busy,” said Norton numbly.

“The way I heard it,” Carl said. “Secession should have been the end of Scorpion Response. Supposed to have been wound up like all the other dirty little bags of deniability the American public didn’t need to be told about. That’s the official version, anyway. But this is the seventies, a good few years before they would have been employing you, Jeff. So what happened? They go private?”

Jeff shot him a startled look. “You heard that?”

“No. But it wouldn’t be the first time a bunch of sneak op thugs couldn’t face early retirement and went to the market instead. That what happened?”

“Scorpion Response were retained.” Jeff was still sulking. More tissues, tugged up from the box on the table. Carl watched him impassively.

“Retained by who?”

Norton had the answer for that already. “The Rim States. Got to be. They’ve just cut loose, the Pacific arena’s their future. Anything that gave them an edge had to be worth hanging on to, right?”

“That’s right, little brother.” Jeff moved the tissues from his nose long enough to knock back a chunk of the cognac. “Starting to see the big picture now?”

“Toni Montes,” Carl said. “Jasper Whitlock, Ulysses Ward, Eddie Tanaka. The rest of them. All Scorpion personnel?”

“Yeah. Not those names, but yeah.”

“And Onbekend.”

“Yeah.” Jeff Norton’s voice shaded with something. Carl thought it might be fear. “Him, too. Some of the time. He came and went, you know. On secondment.”

“But not Merrin?”

The Human Cost director sneered. “Onbekend was Merrin to us. We didn’t know about the other one, no one knew there were two.” He looked down into his glass. “Not until now.”

Carl paced across the office to the bar. He stared down at the assembly of bottles and glasses. The Bayview tavern mapped itself onto his vision, drinking with Sevgi Ertekin, stolen whiskey from behind the bar, and the stink of gunfire still hanging in the air. He felt the swift skid of anger in his guts, wanted to smash everything in the cabinet, take one shattered bottle by the neck, go back to Jeff Norton with it and—

“N-djinn search on the victims turned up no connections among them,” he said tonelessly. “Which means you must have used some very high-powered Rim n-djinn capacity of your own to bury these people in their new lives. Now, I can only see one reason why anybody would bother to do that.”

“You were winding up.” Realization etching wonder into Tom Norton’s tone. “Shutting the whole operation down and scattering.”

Carl turned back to face the sofa, empty-handed.

“When, Jeff? When, and why?”

Jeff Norton glanced across at his brother. “I’d have thought you’d be able to work that one out for yourself, Tom.”

The COLIN exec nodded. “You came out here, took up the Human Cost job in ’94. They were burying you, too. Had to be sometime around then.”

Jeff put down his latest clump of bloodied tissue, reached for more. There was a thin smile playing about his lips. A little more blood trickled down into the grin before he could soak it up.

“Little earlier in fact,” he said. “Thing like that has quite a momentum once it’s rolling, it takes awhile to brake. Say ’92 for the decision, early ’93 to cease operations. And we were all gone by the following year.”

Carl stepped closer. “I asked you why.”

The Human Cost director stared back up at him, dabbing at his nose. He seemed still to be smiling.

“Can’t you guess?”

“Jacobsen.”

The name fell off his lips, dropped into the room like an invocation. The era, ’89 to ’94, blazed across his memory in feed-footage flicker. Riots, the surging crowds and lines of armored police, the vehicles in flames. Pontificating holy men and ranting political pundits, UNGLA communiqués and speeches, and behind it all the quiet, balding figure of the Swedish commissioner, reading from his report in the measured tones of the career diplomat, like a man trying to deploy an umbrella in a hurricane. Words swept away, badly summarized, quoted, misquoted, taken out of context, used and abused for political capital. The awful, creeping sense that it did, after all, have something to do with him, Carl Marsalis, Osprey’s finest; that, impossible though it had once seemed, some idiot wave of opinion among the grazing cudlips really did matter now, and his life would be affected after all.

Jacobsen.

Oh yes, affected after all.

Covert heroes to paraded monsters in less than five years. The bleak pronouncements, the bleaker choices; the tracts, or the long sleep and exile to the endless tract of Mars, jostled toward one or the other by the idiot mob, like a condemned man swept forward toward a choice of gallows.

And the cryocap, chilly and constraining, filling slowly with gel as the sedatives took his impulse to panic away from him, the same way they’d taken his discarded combat gear at demob. The long sleep, falling over him like the shadow of a building a thousand stories tall, blotting out the sun.

Jacobsen.

Jeff Norton leaned forward for his glass again. “That’s right, Jacobsen. We weren’t sure what the Accords would actually look like in ’92; it was all still at a draft stage. But the writing was pretty fucking clearly on the wall. Didn’t take a genius to see the way things were going to fall.”

“But.” Tom Norton, shaking his head. “What’s that got to do with anything? Okay, you had Onbekend. But all these other people—Montes, Tanaka, and the rest. They weren’t variants, they were ordinary humans. You were an ordinary human. Why should Jacobsen have mattered?”

Carl stood over the Human Cost director and saw, vaguely, the shape of what was coming.

“It mattered,” he said evenly, “because of what they were doing. Right, Jeff? It wasn’t the personnel, was it? It was what Scorpion Response did. What was your purview, Jeff? And don’t ask me to guess again, because I will hurt you if you do.”

Jeff Norton shrugged and drained his cognac.

“Breeding,” he said.

His brother blinked. “Breeding what?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Tom, what do you think?” Jeff gestured violently, nearly knocked over the bottle. The cognac seemed to have gone to his head. “Breeding fucking variants. Like your friend here, like Nuying. Like everything we could lay our hands on over there.”

“Over there?” Carl asked from the depths of an immense, rushing calm. “You’re talking about the Chinese mainland?”

“Yeah.” Jeff kept the tissues loosely pressed to his nose, worked the cork on the bottle one-handed, poured himself another tumblerful. “Scorpion Response had been running covert operations into Southeast Asia and China since the middle of last century. It was their playground, they got in and out of there like a greased dick. The new mandate just meant going in and getting what looked like promising material. Pre-Jacobsen, variant science still looked like the way to go. The Chinese were still doing it full-on, no human rights protest to get in the way, they were getting ahead of the game. We aimed to even up the race.”

Carl saw the way Tom Norton was looking around the office, dazed, stark disbelief smashed through with understanding.

“Human Cost. Promising material. You’re talking about people? Jesus Christ, Jeff, you’re talking about fucking people?”

His brother shrugged and drank. “Sure. People, live tissue culture, cryocapped embryos, lab notes, you name it. Small-scale, but we were into everything. We were a big unit, Tom. Lot of backing, lot of resources.”

“This is not possible.” Norton made a two-handed gesture as if pushing something away. “You’re telling us Human Cost was…you ran Human Cost as a, as some kind of pirate genetic testing program?”

“Not exactly, no. Human Cost was the back end, shell charity to cover the operation here in the Rim. It was a lot smaller then, back before we had official state funding, before I came out here to run it officially. Back then it was a guerrilla outfit. Couple of transit houses here and there, some waterfront industrial units down in San Diego. Scorpion Response were the sharp end, gathering the intelligence, going in and getting the goods.” Jeff stared through his brother at something else. “Setting up the actual labs and the camps.”

“Camps,” Norton repeated sickly. “Black labs, here in the Rim? I don’t believe you. Where?”

“Where do you think, little brother? Where do the Rim stick anything they don’t like the smell of?”

“Jesusland.” Carl nodded to himself. “Sure, why not? Just preempting Cimarron and Tanana, after all. Where’d you set up shop? Nevada? That’s nice and close to the fenceline. Utah, maybe?”

Jeff shook his head. “Wyoming. Big place, barely any population. No one to see what’s going on, no one to care, and state legislature in that part of the world will take your hand right off at the wrist if you offer good money for use of the land. We just told them it was another gene-modified crop project.” Still, the glassy, through-everything stare. “I guess that’s even the truth when you get right down to it, right? So. We took a couple of hundred square kilometers, power-fenced it in. Minefields and scanners, big corporate keep out notices.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I saw it once. I saw it working, all working perfectly, and no one out there knew or cared.”

“What happened to it all when you folded?” Carl asked quietly.

“Can’t you guess?”

The black man kicked out, smashed into Jeff Norton’s shin just below the knee. The Human Cost director yelped and hunched over. Carl grabbed his head by the hair and smashed his face down on the coffee table. Pulled back, smashed again—

Then Tom Norton was in his way. Restraining hands on him, pushing him back.

“That’s enough,” the COLIN exec said.

Carl nailed him with a look. “Get your hands off me.”

“I said that’s enough. We need him conscious.”

At their feet, Jeff huddled away from the blows, curled up fetally on the floor space between coffee table and sofa. Carl stared at Norton a moment longer, then jerked a nod. He dragged the Human Cost director back to the sofa and dumped him there. Bent so he was eye-to-eye with him.

“I told you not to make me guess again,” he said evenly. “Now what happened to the Wyoming camp when Scorpion folded?”

“All right.” The words burst out of Jeff Norton like a dam breaking. His nose had started bleeding again, was leaking into his cupped hands. “We torched it, we fucking torched it, all right? Scorpion went in, they killed everyone, the subjects and the hired staff. Then they mined it, blew it up, and burned everything to the ground. Left nothing but the ashes.”

In his mind, Carl saw how it would be, the sporadic clatter of small arms, the wailing panic and truncated shrieks, dying away to quiet and the crackle of flames. The ripcord string of crunch-thump explosions through the camp as the placed charges went up. And later, walking away, the fire on the darkened skyline in the distance when you turned to look back. Like Ahvaz, like Tashkent, like the hotels in Dubai. The age-old signal. The beast is out.

“And no one said anything?” Norton asked, disbelieving.

“Oh Jesus, Tom, have you been listening to any fucking thing I’ve said?” Jeff sobbed out a snot-thickened laugh. “This is the Republic you’re talking about. You know, Guantanamo syndrome? Do it far enough away and no one gives a shit.”

Carl moved back to the desk and leaned against its edge. It wasn’t interrogation procedure; he should keep proximity, keep up the pressure. But he didn’t trust himself within arm’s reach of Jeff Norton.

“Okay,” he said grimly. “Scorpion Response ties all these people together, gives them a dirty little secret to keep, and Scorpion Response buries their details so there are no links left on the flow. None of that explains killing them all now, fourteen, fifteen years later. Someone’s cleaning house again. So why now?”

The Human Cost director lifted his bloodied face and bared his teeth in a stained grin. He seemed to be shaking, coming apart with something that was almost laughter.

“Career fucking progression,” he said bitterly. “Ortiz.”

CHAPTER 50

They caught a crack-of-dawn Cathay Pacific bounce to New York the following morning. Carl would have preferred not to wait, but he needed time to make a couple of calls and plan. Also, he wanted Tom Norton to sleep on his choices—if he could sleep at all—and face the whole thing in the cold light of a new day. All things considered, he was playing with better cards than he’d expected, but Norton was still an unknown quantity, all the more so for the way things had finally boiled down at the Human Cost Foundation.

At the airport, Norton’s COLIN credentials got them fast-tracked through security and aboard before anyone else. Carl sat in a preferential window seat, waiting for the shuttle to fill, and stared out at an evercrete parking apron whipped by skirling curtains of wind-driven rain. Past the outlines of the terminal buildings, a pale, morose light was leaking across the sky between thick gunmetal cloud. The bad weather had blown in overnight and looked set to stick around.

Forecasts for New York said cold, dry, and clear. The thoughts in his head were a match.

The suborb shuttle shifted a little on its landing gear, then started to back out. Carl flexed his right hand, then held it cupped. Remembered the smooth glass weight of the ornament from the Human Cost director’s desk. He glanced across at Tom Norton in the seat next to him. The COLIN exec caught his eye—face haggard with the demons that had kept him from sleep.

“What?”

Carl shook his head. “Nothing. Just glad you’re along.”

“Leave me the fuck alone, Marsalis. I made a promise. I’ll keep it. I don’t need your combat bonding rituals.”

“Not about bonding,” Carl looked back at the window. “I’m glad you’re here because this would have been about a hundred times harder to do without you.”

Brief quiet. In the window, the terminal building slid out of view as the shuttle turned to taxi. He could feel Norton hesitate.

“That wouldn’t have stopped you, though,” he said finally. “Would it?”

Carl rolled his head to face front, pressed back into the seat’s cushioning. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep, either. Elena Aguirre had sat in the darkened corners of his hotel room on and off all night, pretending to be Sevgi Ertekin and not quite pulling it off.

“Not in the end, no.”

“Is that how you do it?” Norton asked him.

“Do what?”

“Become a thirteen. Is that what it’s about, just not letting yourself be stopped?”

Carl shot him a surprised look. “No. It’s about genetic wiring. Why, you feeling left out?”

“No.” Norton sank back in his seat as well. “Just trying to understand.”

The shuttle trundled steadily out toward the runway. Rain swept the windowpane, smeared diagonal with the wind. Soft chime—the fasten webbing sign lit on the LCLS panel above their heads, complete with animated instructions. They busied themselves with the thick, padded tongues of fabric. Like the siren-song lull of v-format prep, Carl usually had a hard time with how it felt once the webbing had him in its grip—it triggered tiny escape impulses across his body that he had to consciously hold down with Osprey-trained calm. But this time, he finished smoothing the cross-folds over one another, drew a deep breath, and found, with a shock like trying to walk up a step that wasn’t there, that he felt nothing at all. Only the sense of anchored purpose, soaking coldly through him like the woken mesh.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the man at his side. “About your brother. I’m sorry it had to work out this way.”

Norton said nothing.

Across the aisle and back, a soft but urgent chiming signaled that some idiot had failed to web up correctly. An attendant appeared and hurried down past them to help out. The shuttle’s motors picked up their idling whine, began to build force. On the LCLS panel, soft purple lettering in Chinese, then English, then Spanish, then Arabic, swelling forward, fading out. On station.

Carl glanced at the silent COLIN exec. “That’s part of the reason you’re here, right?”

“Sevgi’s the reason I’m here.” Norton’s voice came out tight.

The engines outside reached shrieking pitch; the shuttle unstuck and hurled itself down the runway. Carl felt himself pressed back into the cushioning once more, this time with outside force beyond his own strength.

He closed his eyes and gave himself up to it.

They hit the sky on screaming turbines. The suborbital fuel lit and kicked them up around the curve of the world. The webbing hugged them tight and close.

“Fucking Ortiz,” said Norton loudly, beside him.

In the judder and thrum of the trajectory, it wasn’t clear if he was talking to the man or just about him. And this time his tone was loose and hard to define, but somewhere at the bottom of it Carl thought he could hear something like despair.

Norton hadn’t really been surprised when Jeff spat the name out, but not because it wasn’t a shock. Simply, surprise wasn’t an option anymore: the glandular wiring that would have supplied it was running surge-overloaded, had been since the previous evening when Marsalis played him Jeff’s phone conversation and told him about Ren. And it certainly shouldn’t have mattered to him more than his own brother’s betrayal.

Somehow it did.

He still remembered the change when Ortiz came fully aboard at Jefferson Park, when the slim, dynamic Rim politician’s post morphed from consultative policy adviser to actual Americas policy director. He remembered the sudden sense of stripping down as layers of bureaucracy were lashed into efficiency or simply fired down to skeleton staffing levels. He remembered the way the little fiefdom people like Nicholson and Zikomo ran for cover. The new hires and promotions, Andrea Roth, Lena Oyeyemi, Samson Chang. Himself. The tide of change and the clean air it seemed to bring in with it, as if someone had suddenly opened all the windows facing the East River.

On another day, some other time, he would have called the bringer of this news a liar to his face, would have refused to believe.

But there was too much else now. The old landscape had burned down around him, Sevgi, Jeff, the aftermath of the Merrin case—it was all on fire, too hot to touch anywhere without getting hurt.

“It was Tanaka’s fucking idea from the start.” Jeff, laying it out. Bloodied nose stanched once more, this time with torn twists of tissue pushed up each nostril, a freshened tumbler of cognac, and, now, slightly slurring tones. “He comes to me two, two and a half years ago with this stupid fucking scheme. We can take Ortiz for some serious extra cash if we just threaten to go public on Scorpion Response.”

“Why you?” Marsalis asked.

Jeff shrugged. “I was all he had. When we scattered back in ’94, there were no links, no looking back. I was the only one apart from Ortiz who kept my identity, the only one with any public profile. Tanaka—he was called Asano back then, Max Asano—sees me on the feeds, this conference in Bangkok on the Pacific Rim refugee problem. So he sneaks across the fenceline, tracks me to the house over in Marin, and lays it out for me. He’s got it all set up, the discreet clearing accounts in Hawaii, the back-sealed financial disconnect, the whole method. It’s all there for the taking.”

“Ortiz?” Norton still could not make it fit. “Alvaro Ortiz ran Scorpion Response? Why the hell would he get involved in something like that?”

Jeff shot him a weary look. “Oh grow up, Tom. Because he’s a fucking politician, a power broker with an eye to the main chance. He always has been. Back then, just after Secession kicked in, he was just a junior Rim staffer looking for an edge. He got Scorpion Response handed to him and he worked it as far as it would carry him, which was pretty much up to policy level. When Jacobsen came in and the oversight protocols looked too stiff to risk anymore, he folded Scorpion up ahead of time and moved on to getting elected to the assembly instead. That’s how you do it, Tom. Stay ahead of the game, know when to get out and keep your eyes open for the next opportunity.”

“The next opportunity being COLIN.”

“Yeah, that’s right, little brother.” Jeff’s expression turned hooded and resentful. “Fucking Ortiz does seven years of elected office in the Rim, which he then bargains into a consultancy with the Colony Initiative. Another six years there, he climbs to the top of that tree as well, and now they’re talking about the UN.”

“Ripe for the plucking,” said Marsalis.

“Yeah, well, that’s what Tanaka thought.” Jeff swallowed brandy, shivered. “See, he figures there are twenty or thirty ex-Scorpion personnel scattered about North America with their new identities, so Ortiz can’t know who the blackmail’s coming from, and he can’t very well set out to find and kill them all. Plus he’s got access to COLIN-level funds these days, he can skim a few million off here and there, make the payments easily. It’s the line of least resistance.”

“But that’s not Ortiz,” said Norton automatically, startled.

“No. That’s what Tanaka missed.”

“And so did you,” Marsalis pointed out. “Why did Tanaka need you in the first place? Why not take his demands straight to Ortiz?”

Another shrug. “He said he wanted a buffer. I don’t know, maybe he just wanted a friend, someone to work with. It’s got to be tough, right? Living a cover identity for the rest of your life. Covering for a past you can’t ever tell anyone about.”

Marsalis stared at Jeff like something he wanted to smash. “Oh, you’re breaking my fucking heart. So how come it took this Asano-Tanaka-whatever guy over a decade to get around to blackmail?”

“I don’t know,” Jeff said tiredly. “Scorpion personnel all got seed money for going away, all part of the deal. But not everyone knows how to handle that. Maybe a decade was what it took for Tanaka to piss his stake away. Or maybe he just got unlucky a couple of years back and lost what he’d made. You slip financially in the Republic, there’s not a lot of help out there to get you back on your feet.”

“Right. So this washed-up ex-sneak-op petty crook comes to you with some wild-eyed scheme for putting pressure on one of the most powerful men in American corporate and political life. And you just go along with it?”

Jeff drained his glass again, sat hunched forward over it. “Sure. Why not? It could have worked.”

“This I’ve got to fucking hear. Worked how?”

Jeff reached for the bottle. “Tanaka’s idea was, he sends the blackmail demand to me, and I take it to Ortiz as if I’m scared. I steer Ortiz toward paying up, point out the smart move, and offer to act as a conduit so he stays clean.”

Norton shook his head. “But that’s not Ortiz. He wouldn’t just…Christ, you should have known that, Jeff. Why didn’t you see it?”

Jeff gave him a hunted look. He uncorked the cognac.

“Why do you think, little brother? I wanted the fucking money.”

“Yeah, but you must have—”

“Just fucking don’t, Tom. All right?” The bottle slammed down, the pale liquid slopped and splashed up through the open neck. Jeff’s voice scaled upward, defensive to bitter fury. “What do you know about my life anyway? It’s okay for you, with your fucking COLIN badge, your promotion that I set up for you, your fucking loft apartment on Canal Street, and your no-ties, no-costs jet-set fucking life. You know what I make here at Human Cost? For fourteen-hour days, six and sometimes seven days a week, you know what I fucking make? I’ve got two kids, Tom, a wife with expensive tastes, no pension plan yet. What do you know about all this, Tom? You float, you fucking float through life. So don’t come to me telling me what I should or shouldn’t have known. I wanted the money, that’s it. I was in.”

Norton stared at him, too numb to pick up pieces and make them fit. It was too much, too much of his world blown open.

“I don’t live on Canal Street, Jeff,” he said stupidly. “I never did. It’s Lispenard. You should know that.”

“Don’t fucking tell me what I should know!”

“Why don’t you tell us what went wrong,” Marsalis suggested. “Ortiz wouldn’t roll over, right?”

“No.” Jeff reached for the bottle again. “At first, yes. He transferred some funds of his own, told me to make an interim payment and play for more time. Then, when Tanaka’s next demand came in, he just sat me down and told me what we were going to do.”

Marsalis nodded. “Wipe out everyone who could be doing it.”

“He.” A helpless gesture. “He’d kept tabs on them all. I didn’t know that, but he knew where every single one of them was. Or where they’d started out from, anyway. Some of them had moved around, he said, so it’d take a little time to track them down. But one way or another, they all had to go. I sat there, Tom, I couldn’t fucking believe what I was hearing. I mean.” Jeff’s voice turned almost plaintive. “We hadn’t asked for that much, you know.”

“It wasn’t the money,” Norton said distantly.

Marsalis reached over and took the bottle out of Jeff’s trembling hands. He poured into the tumbler. “UN nomination a step away. You fucked with the wrong patriarch just when he could least afford it.”

“Yeah.” Jeff sat and looked at the drink the thirteen had just made him. “That’s what he said. There’s too much at stake here, Jeff. We can’t be exposed now. We have to get tough. I tried to talk him down, tell him it wasn’t so much money. But he didn’t care. I told him he’d get caught, that nobody could get away with killing that many people, that many ex-special-op guys. You’d need a whole team of people to bring it off, and then they’d have the same goods on you as the original blackmailers.”

“Or,” said Marsalis, “you bring in the one member of the old team you can trust to get it done. The one person who also can’t afford the word to get out, and who won’t let nostalgia and camaraderie get in the way of doing the job. The one person who’s wired for it—a thirteen.”

Jeff just nodded, let the black man talk. He was emptied out.

“Everyone thinks Merrin’s gone to Mars,” Marsalis went on, nodding what might have been approval. “A thirteen called Merrin did go to Mars. So that makes the other Merrin, Onbekend, pretty invisible back here on Earth. He’s pulled his own disappearing act, found a surrogate brother down on the altiplano, a safe haven. A sideline in playing pistaco for his brother now and then, when the local bad guys need scaring, but the rest of his time’s his own. Until suddenly here’s his old boss banging on the door, telling him it’s all about to end. Some ungrateful fuck from the old team is threatening to blow everything wide open, and the only way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to go back and wipe out every member of the old team left alive. Does Onbekend want the work?” Marsalis spread his hands. “Probably not, but what choice does he have? If Ortiz isn’t going to pay, the blackmailers are going to get angry and the word on Scorpion Response is going to get out. And there’s just no telling how far that thread can unravel. Whatever Onbekend’s managed to swing for himself down on Manco Bambarén’s patch is under threat. There’s a good chance he’s going to the tracts, because if they do find him it’s that or a bullet. Feel free to contribute, Jeff, if I’m getting any of this wrong.”

“No, you’re right.” Jeff sipped at his drink, held it in both hands before him, staring into space. “When Ortiz went to Onbekend with it, he saw what had to happen right away.”

Marsalis grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. “Clean sweep, huh? Just like Wyoming all over again.”

“It was the only way,” said Jeff.

“Okay, but Onbekend isn’t stupid. He knows he isn’t going to get away with murdering thirty-odd ex-sneak-op soldiers and not leave some trace of himself at least at a couple of the crime scenes. And once that genetic trace gets into the system, he’s as fucked as if he’d let Ortiz’s blackmailers go ahead and blow the whistle. Because the only living thirteen who’s supposed to have that geneprint is on Mars. So if it shows up around a stack of murder victims in the Rim or the Republic, all hell is going to break loose. That’s what he fronts Ortiz with, that’s the sticking point.”

“And Ortiz is at COLIN,” said Norton wonderingly.

“Right. So he hatches the perfect alibi for Onbekend. Not only will they bring Merrin back from Mars to account for any genetic trace that crops up, they’ll set him up as the fall guy for the whole set of murders. Hold him in reserve while Onbekend gets the killing done, and then have him die in some plausible way and leave him for RimSec to find. With finesse, they could even set it up so RimSec get him pinned and kill him themselves. Medals all around, and no one looks too closely at the aftermath, because it’s so fucking neat. After all, you can’t argue with genetic trace, and there’s your monster, dead in the dirt.”

Norton looked at his brother and could not name the feeling that seeped into him. He hoped it was pity.

“No wonder Ortiz paid up at the start, Jeff,” he told him. “He had to have time to put all this in place. He had to get Merrin back here, before Onbekend could go to work.”

“And Onbekend came over the Texas border and started with Tanaka.” Marsalis nodded. “He could have stopped right there, if he’d only known. But he doesn’t know, doesn’t get the chance to get it out of Tanaka, maybe wouldn’t even have been able to afford to trust him even if he did, so he’s committed. He kills his way across the Republic, because those are the easiest ones—underfunded police departments, low-grade data tech, highest murder rate on the planet, and a massive underclass to hide out in. He only heads on to the Rim when the easy work is done, moving slower now because he’s got RimSec to contend with. But still, Jasper Whitlock and Toni Montes, he’s getting through them, probably only a handful left, and then…”

They both turned to look at Jeff Norton.

“What happened?” Marsalis asked him softly. “You lose your nerve, playing both ends against the middle? Thought maybe Ortiz had worked you out, knew you were part of it after all? You start to think maybe Onbekend’s last bullet was going to be for you?”

“No!”

“Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“Then what happened in New York?” Norton peered at his brother’s face. “Someone had Ortiz shot. Sure as hell wasn’t Tanaka, he was already in the ground. That leaves you, Jeff.”

Jeff looked away.

“They were Tanaka’s,” he muttered. “Dead hand insurance. If anything went wrong, he’d given me this Houston number, in case he didn’t have time to set it off before he ran. Or in case he…didn’t make it. The contract was already paid, I just had to call to set it in motion.”

“Waited long enough, didn’t you?” Marsalis coughed out a laugh. “Or did it take this crew of geniuses four months to get from Texas to the Union?”

Norton snapped his fingers. “Whitlock.”

He saw the way his brother flinched at the name. Oh Christ, Jeff. Made it into words so he’d have to hear it, so he’d believe it.

“Onbekend came across the fenceline into the Rim States and he killed Whitlock, October 2. You must have caught it on the feeds, recognized Whitlock’s face.”

“Yeah, right here in the Bay Area.” Marsalis whistled long and low, mock concerned. “Just a little too close for comfort, right, Jeff?”

“So you made the call,” Norton said flatly.

“All right, yes, I made the fucking call!”

Marsalis grunted. “And it all comes grinding to a halt. Onbekend on hold, at least until he finds out if Ortiz is going to live or die.”

“It was right after Whitlock you called me,” Norton realized suddenly. “Suggested I get Marsalis out of Jesusland and hire him. What was that, just a little added pressure, keep Onbekend on his toes?”

Amazement on the black man’s face. “You got me out of South Florida State, Jeff? I owe you for that?” A chuckle broke out of him. “Oh man, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I got sick of waiting,” Jeff snapped, voice tight with sudden, puny fury. “A week after I called the Houston crew and nothing. I didn’t know anything about them, how good they’d be—”

“They weren’t very good,” said Marsalis somberly.

“Yeah, well, I thought maybe they’d gotten caught at the fence, trying to get into the Union. Or maybe just faded with the cash and walked. I had no fucking way of knowing, Tom. I was scared. I knew you wouldn’t bring UNGLA in, I tried to persuade you, thought maybe that’d scare Ortiz into pulling the plug. But you wouldn’t do it.” Jeff looked across at Marsalis. “I thought maybe he’d scare Ortiz instead.”

Norton saw the black man walk to the desk and pick up a paperweight Jeff had brought back from a trip to England when he and Megan were first married. He weighed it in his hand.

“There’s just a couple more things I’d like to know, Jeff,” he said absently. “Then we’re done.”

“Yeah?” Jeff tugged at his drink. Grimaced as it went down. “What’s that?”

“Ren. She didn’t know anything about Onbekend. Where does she come into this?”

“No. She’s freelance, we’ve used her in the past. I pulled her in because we needed someone who knows the Rim systems. Ortiz wanted to keep the Merrin end of things separate from the rest.”

“And Daskeen Azul. They’re your people?”

A shrug. “Associates. You know how it works, Human Cost did them some favors in the past, they owed us.”

“So who sent them up to find that corpse in the nets? You?”

Jeff shook his head. “Onbekend. He heard from down south that you and this COLIN cop were poking around. Told me to bring the denouement forward.”

Marsalis came back to the sofa, paperweight in his hand. He was frowning. “Against Ortiz’s orders?”

“Ortiz was in the hospital.” Jeff gestured wearily. “No one knew which way to jump. You ever met Onbekend?”

“Briefly.”

“Yeah, well, when he tells you to do something, you don’t argue with him.”

Marsalis hadn’t lost his frown. “And the soldiers?”

“What soldiers?”

“Someone sent a uniformed death squad after Ertekin and me. They pulled us over between Cuzco and Arequipa.”

“I don’t know anything about that. Maybe someone panicked down there.”

“Bambarén,” the thirteen said softly. He crouched to Jeff’s eye level. “Do you think Manco Bambarén knows that Merrin existed? The other Merrin?”

“I don’t know Manco Bambarén from a hole in the fucking ground.” Jeff stared bitterly back at Marsalis. He seemed completely drunk now. “How the fuck would I know what he does or doesn’t know?”

“That’s unfortunate,” said the black man softly. “Tell me, Jeff, did you set Onbekend on me when I got back from Bulgakov’s Cat?”

“No! That wasn’t me, I swear. Onbekend wanted you out of the picture, I think he’d maybe talked to Ortiz, but he was furious about something else anyway. I told him it was better to let things lie, but he wouldn’t listen. You don’t understand what he’s like. Once he’s decided, he doesn’t listen to anything or anyone who gets in his fucking way.”

“Right. And I don’t suppose you know where I can find him now, do you?”

Jeff knocked back the rest of his drink. Shrugged. “You guess right. Last I heard, he was on his way back to the altiplano with a shoulderful of holes from a Marstech gun.”

“You treated him here?”

“At a Human Cost walk-in clinic, yeah. Over on Carmel.”

Marsalis came smoothly back to his feet. Norton saw how the thirteen’s fingers tightened on the paperweight, saw the heft in the arm. He stepped swiftly across, blocked Marsalis body-to-body. His eyes locked with the black man’s stare.

“No,” he said, very quietly. “Please.”

Marsalis stood coiled. His voice came back, also barely above a murmur. “Don’t get in my way, Norton.”

“He didn’t kill Sevgi.” Norton looked back at where Jeff sat slumped in one corner of the sofa, staring listlessly into his empty glass. He barely seemed aware of the other two men. “Look, you want to go after Onbekend, I’m with you. Ortiz, too, if that’s what you want. But this is my brother, Marsalis.”

“He’s going down anyway, Norton. He’ll do thirty years in a RimSec facility for this, minimum. I’d be doing him a favor.”

But a little of the tension seemed to drain from the thirteen’s stance. Norton raised his hand, palm-out. The small gesture for enough.

“Marsalis, please. I’m asking you for this. He’s my fucking brother.”

Marsalis stood there locked for a moment longer. It was like facing off against a wall.

“Ortiz, and Onbekend,” he said, as if checking a list.

Norton nodded. “Whatever you need.”

And the moment passed. Marsalis let go; Norton saw it go out of him like dark water down a drain. He shrugged and lobbed the paperweight down into Jeff’s lap. Jeff jolted with the shock, dropped his empty glass, fumbled with both hands to catch the spherical ornament before it rolled to the floor.

“Fuck d’you do that for?” he mumbled.

“You’ll never know,” Marsalis told him. Then, turning away to the door, voice trailing back. “Keep him here, Norton. Don’t touch the phones, or use yours in here. We’ll need to freeze and store their whole net as it is. I’ll clean-call Rovayo from the street, get a RimSec CSI squad over here. Going to make her day—this should be enough to lever the Cat bust wide open all over again.”

“Right.”

He paused at the door, looked back. “And don’t forget. We’ve got an arrangement now.”

Norton listened to him walk away down the corridor. Then he turned back to face his brother. Jeff looked disinterestedly up at him.

“What now?”

Sudden, pulsing rage, up from the soles of his shoes and into the space behind his eyes. He bit it back as well as he could.

“You know,” he said, almost evenly. “I told Megan about you and Nuying.”

Jeff gaped up at him, eyes cognac-veiled and confused.

“Maybe that’s simplifying it. I guess you could say she got it out of me. Or maybe not that, either, maybe we both wanted it said and we just helped each other get it out. If I’m honest, I think she already had a pretty good idea something was going on.”

Clumsily, his brother started to get up.

“You fucking traitor,” he said thickly.

“Stay in your seat, Jeff.” Suddenly, the rage came washing up out of him, would not be contained. “Because if you don’t, I will fucking kill you myself.”

And now, here it was. The moment that had been festering inside him for over two years. His brother blinking at him, like a deer staring into the headlights.

He drew in breath. He really was going to do this.

“You want to know what Megan did when she found out?” Another hard breath. “She fucked me, Jeff. We went to some motel up near Novato, and she fucked me raw. All afternoon and night. Best sex I ever had.”

And now Jeff came flailing up out of the sofa, roaring, fists swinging. Norton blocked, twisted, and punched his brother in the side of the face. The first time he’d used his enforcement training in better than a year. It felt creakily unaccustomed, but it felt unexpectedly good as well. The blow connected solidly, put Jeff down, crawling half on the sofa, half on the floor. Norton grabbed him by the back of the collar, balled fist raised again.

And stopped.

No. You’re not Carl Marsalis.

Fist slowly unflexing, dropping away. He let go of the collar. Overpowering urge to shake himself, like a drenched dog. Instead he stepped away, leaned against the edge of his brother’s desk.

“This is going to be hard on her,” he said, still breathing unevenly. “Megan and the kids. But don’t worry. When they send you up to Quentin Two for what you’ve done here, I’ll make sure she’s okay. I’ll take care of her.”

A low, grinding howl came up out of his brother’s throat as he propped himself up on the sofa, as if he’d swallowed broken glass. Norton felt a peculiarly comfortable calm settling into place on his shoulders. His breathing eased.

“We’re good together, Jeff. She laughs when she’s around me. We’ll work something out.”

“Fuck you!” Spat out like blood.

There was a timid tap at the door. Norton glanced up, surprised. “Yeah?”

The door opened and the stout Asian woman peered around the edge. “Mr. Norton, are you…?”

She stared, eyes wide.

“It’s okay,” said Norton hurriedly. “I’m Jeff’s brother, Tom. Jeff’s been under a lot of strain recently. I’m sure you’ll have noticed. It’s, uh, it’s gotten pretty bad.”

“I, uhm—”

“He really needs to be alone right now, just with family, you know. We’ve made the calls. If you could—”

“Yes, of course, uhm…” She looked across at Jeff where he now sat on the floor with his back to the sofa. Blood-flecked tissue in his nose, face smeared with tears and rage, uncapped bottle on the table in front of him. “Mr. Norton, I’m so sorry, if there’s anything at all I can do…”

Jeff Norton stared back at her.

“It’s okay, Lisa,” he said dully. “Everything’s going to be fine. Could you show my brother where we keep our medical records from the Carmel clinic.”

“Yes, of course.” Imbued with a solid purpose, Lisa seemed to grow visibly stronger again. “You’re quite sure that—”

Jeff dragged up the husk of a smile. “Quite sure, Lisa.”

He turned to look at his brother, and there was an odd note of triumph suddenly in his voice. “Go ahead, little brother. You want to see something I kept back from your thirteen friend?”

Lisa vacillated in the doorway. Norton stared at Jeff.

“This is about Onbekend?”

“Just go look, Tom.” He saw Norton’s hesitation and chuckled. “What am I going to do, make a dash for the airport while you’re gone? Seriously, go look. This is something I saved just for you. You’re going to love it.”

“It’s, uh.” Lisa gestured along the corrior. “This way.”

“Jeff, if you knew something else about Onbekend, you should have—”

“Just go fucking look, will you!”

So he went, left the door ajar and followed Lisa out into the corridor. In the doorway, he paused and turned, looked hard at his brother, pointed at him.

“You stay right there.”

Jeff snorted, rolled his eyes, and reached for the bottle of Martell.

Down the angled corridor, tracking Lisa’s stolid progress, floating behind the eyes with all that he was still trying to assimilate. He wondered vaguely if Marsalis hadn’t gone out into the street as much to clear his head as to keep the call to RimSec clean.

They were almost at the door marked carmel street clinic when the single shot slammed behind them, so flat and undramatic that at first he mistook it for the sound of the door to Jeff’s office, the exit he hadn’t bothered to close.

CHAPTER 51

They had Alvaro Ortiz in a monitored convalescence suite on the newly nanobuilt upper levels at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was tagged with microdoc subdermals that would broadcast a scream to the hospital system if his life signs dipped in any way, the receptionist explained with an enthusiastic smile, and he had panic buttons in the bathroom, next to his bed, and on his wheelchair. A full crash team and a dedicated emergency room doctor were retained at all times on idle, specifically for the patients on these levels. Norton thanked her, and they went upstairs. A COLIN Security detachment was on duty outside the suite, two hard-faced men and a woman who met them out of the elevator with professional tension that evaporated when they recognized Norton. Carl let them pat him down anyway, not sure if it was his thirteen status or just procedure that made them do it. The more relaxed they were, the better. Norton told the squad leader not to bother seeing them in, they’d be fine. Mr. Ortiz knew they were coming.

The doors to the suite hummed smoothly back and they walked through. Ortiz was in a wheelchair in the living room, parked by the floor-to-ceiling windows. He wore loose gray silk pajamas, held a book apparently forgotten in his hands, was lost instead in contemplation of the view out across the cubist thickets of the city to the park. He looked thin and breakable in the chair, the tanned face hollowed out to a worn gray, the grizzled hair gone to white in places. He didn’t appear to have heard the door open, and he didn’t turn as they stepped into view from the entryway hall. Carl wondered if he already knew why they’d come.

“Ortiz,” Norton said harshly, moving a step ahead.

Ortiz prodded at the chair’s arm controls, and it coasted silently around on the spot to face them. He smiled, a little forcedly.

“Tom Norton,” he said, as if it were a philosophical question that had been troubling him. “I’m so very sorry to hear about your brother, Tom. I’ve been meaning to call you. And Carl Marsalis, of course. I still haven’t had the chance to thank you for saving my life.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

“Ah.” Something happened to the planes of the ravaged face. “Well, I didn’t imagine that this was a social call.”

“Jeff talked.” Norton was trembling with the force of what he’d carried inside him across the continent. “Scorpion Response. Wyoming. The whole thing. So don’t you tell me you’re sorry, you piece of shit. You did this, all of it. You’re the reason Jeff is dead.”

“Am I?” Ortiz didn’t seem to be disputing it. He placed his hands palm-to-palm in his lap, pressed them together, maybe to hold down his fear. “And so you’ve brought your avenging angel with you. Well, that is fitting, I suppose, but I should warn you this chair has—”

“We know,” Carl said bleakly. “And I’m not here for Norton’s benefit. I came for Sevgi Ertekin.”

“Ertekin?” A frown crossed Ortiz’s face, then cleared. “Oh yes, the officer you stayed with in Harlem when we had you released. Yes, she died, too, didn’t she. A few days ago. I’m afraid I’ve not been keeping up very closely with—”

“She didn’t die.” Carl held down the fury with distant, trained reflex. His voice was quiet and cold, like the faint bite of winter in the New York air outside. “Sevgi Ertekin was killed. By your avenging angel, Ortiz. By Onbekend. Merrin. Whatever you call him. She died saving my life.”

“I am…very sorry about that as well.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“For you? No, I don’t imagine it would be. I assume there was some.” Ortiz frowned. “Some connection between you and this Ertekin.”

Carl said nothing. The words would take him nowhere.

“Yes, there must have been. You people care about so little in the end, need so little, of the material world and of other people. But when you do choose to own something or someone, when you consider that something or someone to be yours…”

“Yes, then,” said Carl. “Nothing else matters.”

He met the COLIN director’s eyes, saw the way they flinched away.

“I’m afraid,” said Ortiz shakily, “that events have run rather out of control in my…my absence from the bridge, as it were. Your involvement, Onbekend, other changing factors. Had I not been removed so unexpectedly from managing the operation, perhaps things would not have become so tangled. I truly regret that, you must believe me.”

“You still would have murdered over twenty men and women,” said Norton violently. “Just to save your political fucking neck.”

Ortiz shook his head. “No, Tom, that isn’t—”

“Don’t fucking use my name like we’re friends, you piece of shit!”

Carl put a hand on Norton’s arm. “Keep it down, Tom. We don’t want your security breaking the door down on us.”

The COLIN exec jerked away from him, looked at him as if he were contagious. In front of them, Ortiz was talking again.

“—was not for me, personally. You must understand that. I’m a wealthy man, and I have access to even greater wealth through other channels if I need it. I could have afforded to pay off your brother and his accomplice—”

Norton stared. “You knew? You knew he was part of it?”

“I suspected.” Ortiz coughed a little, hunched over in the chair. He cleared his throat. “His story seemed feeble, I thought it was likely he was involved, but…we were once close associates, Tom. Friends, even. You must know I promoted you on his request, just the way I promoted him to Scorpion Response twenty years ago.”

Norton’s voice came through his teeth. “Am I supposed to be fucking grateful to you now?”

“No, of course not. That’s not what I’m saying. Listen to me, please. I suspected Jeff, I didn’t know for sure. But I did know that if I unleashed Onbekend on the others, whoever they were, Jeff would fold. If he had been involved, I knew he’d give me no more trouble. Even in the old days, even with Scorpion Response, he was a logistical manager, a facilitator. Not an operative, not a killer. Jeff never had the stomach for those things.”

Norton grinned savagely down at him. “That’s all you know. My brother sent those skaters to kill you. My brother got me to hire Marsalis out of South Florida State to crank up the pressure on you and Onbekend. He was playing you just like you played him.”

“Is that so?” An attempted smile wavered on the COLIN director’s face for a moment. “Ironic, then, that he provided both the agents of my death and the means to foil them. Ironic, too, that you, Mr. Marsalis, should both save my life and then bring everything tumbling down around me. But then, that has always been the double-edged blade that your kind offered us, from the very beginning. Variant thirteen, the avatars of purified violence, our saviors and our nemeses.”

Carl listened to the lilt of imagery in Ortiz’s voice and thought abruptly of Manco Bambarén’s mannered speeches on pistacos and human history. He wondered idly what genes the two men might share.

“Where is Onbekend?” he asked bluntly.

“I’m afraid I don’t know.” Maybe Carl twitched forward, because Ortiz’s voice tightened a little with anxiety. “Really, I don’t. Believe me, if I knew—”

“Jeff Norton said he’d gone back to the altiplano. Back to Bambarén. That’s where you would have contacted him in the beginning to set this up, right?”

“Yes, but through Bambarén’s organization. In the end, I could only leave messages. It was he who came to me, here in New York one night, like a ghost through the security around my home.” Ortiz stared away through the window and shivered a little. “Like something I had summoned up. I should have known then, all those lessons our myths and legends scream at us, time and again. Never summon up what you cannot control.”

“You must have had direct contact with him after that,” Carl said pragmatically. “You set him on me in San Francisco, after the Bulgakov’s Cat arrests.”

Ortiz tried another smile. It guttered and died. “Believe me, Mr. Marsalis, I tried harder than you’ll ever know to prevent that. I am not an ungrateful man, and you had saved my life. But once decided, Onbekend is a force of nature. You had already threatened the object of his affections in Arequipa; he would not take less than your death. I tried to move you out of range, I had UNGLA attempt to recall you, but it seems you are in your way no less stubborn than any other of your kind. You would not shift. And Onbekend was closing on you too fast for me to do anything else.”

The shock sparked in him. “You had di Palma call me?”

“Yes, Mr. Marsalis.” Ortiz sighed. “And not only then. From the very beginning, Gianfranco di Palma had instructions to remove you from the proceedings as rapidly as possible. We had simply not expected you to be so tenacious in a fight that was not your own.”

Carl remembered the UNGLA clinic in Istanbul. Mehmet Tuzcu and his diplomatic attempts at extraction. His own refusal to shift, the weak fistful of reasons he threw out, like sand in his own eyes. But it had always been Sevgi Ertekin, he knew, even then.

“Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?” he asked distractedly.

“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.”

Norton was dealing with something else, staring at Ortiz. “You’re pulling favors with UNGLA already? You’ve got your hooks in that far?”

“Tom, I have a secure nomination for secretary general. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by this time next year, if you let me live.” The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer. “Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard? You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and cooperative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all of that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation-state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.”

Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium. See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself.

“One more year,” said Ortiz urgently. “That’s all I need, and I can continue that work from the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the General Assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past—not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, superannuated men and women of violence hiding from their own pasts, set in the balance against the hope of a better future for all of us.”

Carl thought briefly of Toni Montes, imagined her fighting Onbekend with the decayed vestiges of her combat skill, then letting go and dying to keep the thirteen away from her husband and children. He wondered if she’d thought of smoking ruins in Wyoming as she stood there waiting for the bullet, or only the children she would never see walk through the door again.

He wondered what he’d have to picture when the time came for him.

Elena Aguirre, whispering behind him.

The quiet, filling him up…

“You’re full of shit, Ortiz.” The rasp of Norton’s voice pulled him out of it. “You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were running Scorpion Response.”

“No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time.” Ortiz, pitching his tone raised but reasonable. Arguing his point in good faith. “You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.”

Norton jolted forward, face tight with rage. He gripped the arms of Ortiz’s wheelchair, pushed it back half a meter before the autobrake cut in. Carl saw tiny specks of spittle hit Ortiz in the face as the COLIN exec yelled at his boss.

“A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker? Covert ops in other people’s countries? Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?”

Carl pulled him back. “Get a grip, Tom. This isn’t what we’re here for.”

But the force had already gone out of Ortiz’s face, like a candle flame blown out by Norton’s rage. Suddenly the wheelchair held only an ill old man, shaking his head in weary admission.

“I…was…young. Foolish. I have no defense. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time. You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that our universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are.” Ortiz shifted his gaze to Carl, grew animated once more. “There is a future on Mars, Mr. Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will need the variants, we will have to become a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programs. I only sought to equalize the pressure, so when the explosion, the realization finally came, it would not rupture our society apart from the differential.”

Carl nodded. “Yeah. Let’s get back to Onbekend.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“What does it matter what I believe? It won’t change what you’ve done. How did Onbekend find out he was Manco Bambarén’s half brother?”

Ortiz sighed. “I really don’t remember details of that sort. It was a long time ago. Yes, possibly, he used Scorpion Response time and resources to track down his sourcemat mother, discovered who she was, and saw the angle. The work we were doing in Wyoming may have sparked his interest. It is through Scorpion channels that he discovered he had a twin, that I do know, so quite possibly he found Isabela Gayoso the same way. And I know that when he wasn’t seconded to us, Project Lawman deployed him in a covert capacity in Bolivia on at least one occasion, so he would perhaps have had opportunity then as well. All I can tell you is that when the time came to dissolve the Scorpion operation, he already had his place in the sun prepared. He knew that his twin had accepted Mars resettlement, and that Scorpion Response would be wiped from the flow by n-djinn. And Bambarén had made a place for him in his organization. It was a perfect disappearing act.”

Yeah, until Stefan Nevant shows up trying to sell Bambarén a pistaco threat he already has blood-related access to and drawing down attention they could really all do without. Poor old Stefan, right on target. Better intuition than you ever knew. No wonder Bambarén turned you over so fucking fast. All you were going to do was lead an UNGLA squad right to his half brother’s door.

And no wonder Bambarén freaked when we showed up, set it all in motion all over again. I thought I’d offended him when I talked about exemplary executions in some village square somewhere. Must have nailed something Onbekend did for him, too close to the truth for comfort.

He thought I was playing with him. Thought I’d come for his brother.

He thought of Sevgi Ertekin, propped against the side of the COLIN jeep, hands in pockets, jacket hooked back. The casual reveal of the shoulder-holstered Marstech gun, the telegraphed warning to Bambarén not to fuck up.

Sevgi, you should have been here to hear all of this. We were so fucking close after all.

But you would have told me not to gloat, it’s not attractive.

He focused hard on the man in the wheelchair. “Is Isabela Gayoso still alive?”

“No, she died some years ago. Onbekend mentioned it to me in passing when we met in New York. She grew up in crushing poverty, it seems, and of course these things tend to take their toll later in life. From what I hear, Bambarén himself was lucky to survive his childhood. Neither of his siblings did.”

“Does Bambarén know he has a second half brother?”

“No. We did not involve him. Onbekend has enough familia presence these days to make the contacts we needed at Bradbury and Wells, and to be convincing when he did. It took some time, but he convinced the Martian chapters that there is a wedge opening between the Lima clans and the altiplano.” Ortiz’s shrunken shoulders lifted under the gray silk of the pajamas. “From what I understand, it’s not far from the truth.”

“And Merrin never knew who was hiring him, either?”

“Merrin was never aware that he had a twin in the first place. As I said, it was only through Scorpion Response intelligence that Onbekend discovered what had been done. Merrin never would have had access to the data. And you’ve seen Onbekend; he changed his face when he went underground back in ’94. No resemblance any longer.”

Carl thought about the echo in the features he’d seen the night Sevgi was shot. “No, there is a resemblance. If you look for it.”

“Well, as I understand it the actual hiring was filtered through the Martian familia machine anyway. I doubt Merrin and Onbekend ever actually saw each other across the screen. The familias knew only that this was a personal matter, that the people at this end had chosen this particular man, Merrin, and that if they could not recruit him, there would be no deal.”

“And Merrin?” Norton wanted to know. “What was he told?”

Another fragile shrug. “That he had friends here on Earth who wanted him back, who would provide him with a new identity and the resources to disappear in comfort. We made it a very attractive package.”

The COLIN exec shook his head numbly. “So Onbekend just sold out his brother? His twin?”

“Sacrified him, yes. What of it?” Ortiz gestured. “They had never known each other, never met. What bond could there be?”

“That’s not the point!” But now Norton was looking at Carl. “He was his brother, for Christ’s sake!”

“That is the point, Tom,” Carl told him quietly. “Thirteens don’t do abstract allegiance. It’s not part of our makeup.”

“But…Bambarén.” Norton held out his hands. “That’s an abstract blood tie.”

Ortiz made an arid chuckling sound. “Yes, one that Onbekend has exploited to great benefit.”

“Bambarén got used,” said Carl, looking down at Ortiz. “Just like everybody else. Just like Scorpion Response, just like Human Cost. Just like Onbekend and Merrin. You got everybody dancing.”

“Mr. Marsalis, please understand—”

Enough.

Carl grabbed Ortiz under the arms and hauled him out of the chair in a single violent motion. The other man seemed to weigh almost nothing, but that might have been the mesh kicking in, or the rage. Ortiz kicked and struggled, but feebly. Carl held him in what felt for a moment like an embrace, stepped back clear of the panic-wired wheelchair, and laid the COLIN director carefully down on the polished wood floor.

“Wait, you can’t—”

But Ortiz’s voice was as weak as his struggles. Carl knelt and pressed a hand to the COLIN director’s chest to hold him still. He leaned over him, face impassive.

“I know you, Ortiz,” he said. “I’ve seen your kind making your speeches from every pulpit and podium on two planets, and you never fucking change. You lie to the cudlips and you lie to yourself so they’ll believe you better, and when the dying starts you claim regret and offer justification. But in the end, you do it all because you think it’s your right, and you do not care. If you really suspected Jeff Norton, if you knew what kind of man he was, you could have squeezed him for the names, dealt with whoever it was—”

“It was Tanaka,” Norton said, standing over Ortiz. “Only Tanaka.”

Carl nodded. “You could have stopped this thing as soon as it started. But what Tanaka and Jeff Norton could do, so could someone else sooner or later. So could any of the ones who knew about Wyoming, any of the ones who were left, and it could happen at any time. No matter what position you achieved, Scorpion Response was going to hang over you to the grave. You’d never be safe. So you saw a chance to clean house, and you took it, at whatever cost.”

And now Carl found a small truth seeping up inside him, an understanding.

“You know, Ortiz, you would have made a pretty good thirteen. All you ever lacked was the strength, the power, and that, well, I guess you can always find a mob of cudlips to supply that for you.”

“All right.” Ortiz stopped struggling. The force came back into his voice. He spoke clearly and urgently. “Listen to me, please. If you kill me now, I have alarm systems attached to my body. They’re under the skin, inside me, you’ll never find them. There’ll be a crash team here in minutes.”

“I won’t need that long,” Carl told him.

Ortiz broke. His face seemed to crumple, his eyes closed, blinked open moist with tears.

“But I want to live,” he whispered. “I want to go on, I have work to do.”

Cold, cold pulse of rage. He felt his face move with it. “So did Sevgi Ertekin.”

“Please believe me, Mr. Marsalis, I truly do regret—”

Carl leaned closer. “I don’t want your regret.”

Ortiz swallowed, mustered control from somewhere.

“Then, I have a request,” he husked. “Please, at least may I phone and speak to my family first. To say good-bye.”

“No.” Carl hauled the COLIN director up onto his lap, locked an arm around the man’s neck, positioned his free hand against the skull. “I’m not here to ease your passing, Ortiz. I’m here to take what you owe.”

“Please…”

Carl jerked and twisted. Ortiz’s neck snapped like rotten wood.

Soft, chiming sirens went off everywhere in the suite, the wail of distressed cudlip society. Man of substance down. Rally, gather, form a mob.

The beast is out.

CHAPTER 52

The crash team were fast—less than two full minutes from when the micro-docs tripped under Ortiz’s skin and the sirens went off. But well before that, the COLIN Security detachment had heard the alarms and come through the door on general principles. They found Ortiz in his wheelchair, slumped over to one side, Norton and Marsalis standing staring at him.

“Sir?” The squad leader looked at Norton.

“Lock this whole floor down,” Norton told her absently. “Call in some more support to do it. I don’t want anyone, not even NYPD, getting up here without my say-so.”

“But, but—”

“Just do it.” He turned to Carl. “You’d better get moving.”

Carl nodded, looked once more at Ortiz, and then stepped outside the unconsciously tightening ring the security detachment had formed around the body. He headed out of the room without looking back, out of the suite and into the corridor where he met the crash team head-on, all lifesaving speed and resuscitation gear, gurney and white coats, dedicated emergency room doctor and all.

He stood aside to let them pass.

Outside the hospital, he walked rapidly away, two blocks west and four south, lost himself in the sun-glinting brawl and bustle of the city. He peeled off his S(t)igma jacket, pulled his pack of phones from it, then balled it up inside out and dropped it into the first recycling bin he saw. The cold bit through his shirt, but he had COLIN-approved credit in his pockets, and he had time.

He stopped on a street corner, checked his watch, and calculated traveling time to the JFK suborb terminal. Hoped Norton could hold up his end.

Then he pulled a new phone loose from the pack, clicked it on, and waited for Union cover to catch up with it. With his other hand, he dug in his trouser pocket and tugged out the photo and list of scribbled numbers Matthew had hooked for him the night before.

“Okay, Sev,” he murmured to himself. “Let’s do this.”

She stepped into the gloom of the bar uncertainly, but with a certain confidence as well. They were, after all, on her home ground, Lower Manhattan, only a couple of blocks north of Wall Street and the NYPD dedicated Datacrime HQ. She hadn’t had to come far.

Two short steps in to let the door hinge shut behind her, and she scanned the room. He raised a hand as her gaze passed down the line of booths along the sidewall opposite the bar. She didn’t respond to the wave, but she headed over. The single sodden suit, marooned on a stool at the end of the bar with his nth martini and no friends, gave her an unsubtle once-over as she passed him. Carl supposed she was worth the look. Long-limbed and well-shaped under her casual wear, shown off in her stride and the way she held herself. The single old-style bulb lamp in the middle of the ceiling burnished her hair golden as she passed beneath it, briefly lit the cheerleader good looks as well. She hadn’t changed much from the photo.

“Amy Westhoff?”

He raised himself out of his seat as she reached his booth, offered her his hand. She took it, gave him a searching look.

“Yeah. Agent…di Palma, is it?”

“That’s right.” He flashed his UNGLA ID, carefully held so she’d see the photo but not the name. Feigned a querying frown to distract her as he put the badge away again. “But I see you’ve come on your own?”

She made a dismissive gesture as she seated herself on the other side of the table. The lie hurried out. “Yeah, well, my partner’s wrapped up with, uh, some other stuff right now. He couldn’t make it. Now, you said this is about the bust on Ethan Conrad four years back. I don’t really see how that can have anything to do with me, or with Datacrime.”

“Well, it is only a stray lead. But then…can I get you a drink, maybe?”

“No, thank you. I’ve got to go back on duty. Can we make this quick?”

“Certainly.” Carl sipped at the Red Stripe in front of him. “In fact, my own jurisdiction in this matter is, should I say, rather loose. Obviously we’re not on UN territory here.”

“Not far from it, though.”

“No, true enough.” Carl put his drink down, let his hands drop into his lap. “Well then, I guess you’re familiar with the case. I understand you had some kind of relationship with Ethan Conrad, back before it was known what he was.”

Tautly. “That’s right, I did. Well before anybody knew what he was.”

“Ah, yes, quite. Well, it’s just that I’ve received information from an NYPD officer, an ex-officer in fact, Sevgi Ertekin. Would you have heard of her?”

The waitress sauntered over, eyebrows raised, notepad not yet out of her apron pocket. It was early yet. Aside from the lonely broker, they had the place to themselves.

“Get you guys any—”

“We’re fine,” said Amy Westhoff curtly.

The waitress shrugged and backed off. Carl gave an apologetic look. Westhoff waited until she’d gone back to the bar before she spoke again.

“I knew Ertekin, vaguely, yeah. So what’s she been saying?”

“Well, she said that you tipped off UNGLA about Conrad’s thirteen status because you were jealous that he’d left you, and that you then tried to call and warn him at the last minute. But were too late, obviously. Now—”

“That fucking bitch!” But even in the low light, he could see that Amy Westhoff’s face had gone ashen.

“You’d deny that then, I assume.”

Westhoff lifted a trembling finger. “You go back to that raghead bitch, and you tell her from me—”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Sevgi Ertekin is dead. But she did give me a message for you, something she meant to do but couldn’t manage.”

The blond woman’s eyes narrowed. “What message?”

Then she flinched, yelped, reared back in the booth, and looked down at her trouser leg. She pressed on her thigh with both hands.

“What the fuck was that?”

“That was a genetically modified curare flechette,” Carl said coldly. “It’s going to paralyze your skeletal muscle system so you can’t breathe or call for help.”

Westhoff stared at him. Tried to get up from the table, made a muffled grunting sound instead and dropped back into her seat, still staring.

“It’s a vastly improved variant on natural curare,” he went on. “You might call it the thirteen of poisons. I think you’ll last about seven or eight minutes. Enjoy.”

He slid the Red Stripe over so it stood in front of her. Westhoff’s mouth twitched, and she slumped against the wall. Carl got up to go. He leaned in close.

“Sevgi Ertekin wanted you dead,” he told her softly. “And now you are.”

Then he eased out of the booth and headed for the door. On the way out, he looked across at the bar, where the waitress sat on a stool, fiddling with some aspect of her phone. As she glanced up at him, Carl fielded her gaze, rolled his eyes expressively, put on jilted, hurt, and weary. The girl pulled a sympathetic face, smiled at him, and went back to her phone. He reached the door, pushed it open, and let himself back out into the late-afternoon chill.

He dropped the flechette gun down a grate on Wall Street, a little sad to see it go after the trouble Matthew had gone to in tracking down a suitably disreputable dealer for him, and the price the suitably disreputable dealer had screwed out of him when it became clear that Carl was in a hurry.

Then again, it had served its purpose.

Hope that was what you wanted, Sevgi.

He called Norton from a cab on the way to JFK.

“Can you talk?”

“Yeah, I’m back at Jefferson Park. Where are you?”

“Queensboro Bridge. On my way to the airport.”

“You’re still here, in town?” Norton’s voice punched out of the phone. “What the fuck are you playing at, Marsalis?”

“I had a couple of things to do. Am I still safe to fly?”

Norton blew out a long breath. “Yeah, should be. I’ve got the NYPD hammering on my door and Weill Cornell screaming about lawsuits, but so far the COLIN mandate is holding. Always knew there was some reason I took this job.”

“That old-time corporate power, huh?” Carl grew serious. “Think they’ll try and nail you, though?”

“Well, for now it’s my train set, so I’m fine. And anyway, I was in the bathroom, remember. No idea what was going on till you called me and there’s Ortiz, dead in his chair.”

“Sounds kind of thin.”

“It is kind of thin. But this is the most powerful nongovernmental body on the planet we’re talking about, and right now they’ve got my back. Quit worrying about me, Marsalis. You want to help, just get your ass out of Union jurisdiction right now.”

“On my way.”

He hung up and looked out the taxi window. Ribbed light blipped through the steel lattices of the bridge structure as they headed out over the span, strobed across his face and turned the air in the cab alternately dusty and dimmed. Back across the East River, Manhattan made its block graph skyline against a cold, perfect blue. The sun glowed and dripped like broken yolk off the top and down the side of one of the new black nanobuild towers. Departure clung to the shrinking scene like mist.

The same obscure desire he’d felt staring at the Marin Headlands two nights ago came and stabbed him in the heart all over again. He could not pin down what it meant, could only give it a name.

Sevgi.