CHAPTER 19

Sevgi was still shaking when the cops showed up. She felt an odd shame when the detective in charge, a lean dark man with hard bones in his face, finished talking with patrol and made his way across to her. He was bound to notice. Wrapped in an insulene recovery shawl, seated in the open rear door of the murdered limo and watching CSI go about their business, she felt drenched in her civilian status.

“Ms. Ertekin?”

She looked up bleakly. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Detective Williamson.” He flipped his left palm open. The NYPD holo twisted to blue-and-gold life, glistened at her like lost treasure. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’m fine.” She’d taken the syn that morning, in the shower, but it wouldn’t have kicked in yet even on an empty stomach. She groped after conventional resources, pulled herself together with a shiver. “I used to be on the force, I’m fine.”

“That so?” Polite, speculative. Williamson didn’t want to be her buddy. She could guess why.

“Yeah, eleven years. Queens, then Midtown Homicide.” She managed a shaky smile. “You guys are from the Twenty-eighth, right? Larry Kasabian still attached there?”

“Yeah, Kasabian’s still around, I think.” No warmth in the words. He nodded at Marsalis, who sat starkly on the steps of the building in his South Florida State inmate jacket, watching the crime scene squad go about their business as if they were a stage play put on for his benefit. “Patrol says you told them this guy’s a thirteen.”

“Yes.” She was cursing herself for it now. “He is.”

“And.” Brief hesitation. “Is that filed with anyone here in the city?”

Sevgi sighed. “We got in late last night. He’s a technical consultant for COLIN Security, but we haven’t had time to notify anybody yet.”

“All right.” But it clearly wasn’t all right. Williamson’s expression stayed cool. “I’m not going to pursue that, but you need to get him registered. Today. Is he, uh, staying with you?”

The implication sneered beneath the words. It felt like a slap. It felt like her father’s tirade when he found out about Ethan. Sevgi felt her own expression tighten.

“No, he’s not uh, staying with me,” she parodied. “He’s uh, staying in COLIN-account accommodation, just as soon as we can find him some. So do you think we can maybe just shelve the fucking Jesusland paranoia. And maybe get on with the police work at hand? How’d that be?”

Williamson’s eyes flared.

“That’d be just fine, Ms. Ertekin,” he said evenly. “The police work at hand is that this twist just killed two armed men in broad daylight, empty-handed, and he doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him. Now, maybe this is just my paranoia running away with me, or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned cop instinct, but something about that doesn’t chime in time.”

“He’s carrying a Mars environment systemic biohoist. And he was combat-trained from age seven up.”

Williamson grunted. “Yeah, I heard that about them. Bad to the bone, right? And you don’t think the men he killed here were combat-proficient.”

“You do?” Sevgi rapped her knuckles on the slug-riddled coachwork at her side. “Come on, Williamson, look at this shit. Combat-proficient? No, they just had guns.”

“Any reason you can think of that someone would send a low-grade spray-for-pay crew after a COLIN executive?”

She shook her head wordlessly. They weren’t after Ortiz, she knew inside. Ortiz just got in the way. They were here to kill Marsalis. Kill him before he gets any kind of handle on Merrin.

No reason to share that with Detective Williamson right now.

“And you told patrol you didn’t see the actual fight at all?”

She shook her head again, more definitely this time, getting traction. “No, I said I didn’t see much of it. Much of anything, I was on the ground—”

“Where he threw you, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.” The weight of his body on hers. “He probably saved my life.”

“So he saw them coming?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

Williamson nodded. “I’ll get around to it. Right now, I’m asking you.”

“And I told you I don’t know.”

There was a compressed pause. Williamson started again. “In the statement, you say you think there were three attackers. Or is that just what your twist friend over there told you?”

“No. I saw one take off toward the boulevard.” She indicated the shrink-wrapped corpses of the men Marsalis had killed. The black skater rig was clearly visible through the plastic. “And I can count.”

“Description?”

She looked up at him for a long moment. “Black-clad. Wearing a ski mask.”

Williamson sighed. “Yeah. Okay. You want to tell me about this other guy?”

He gestured at the third bundle on the pavement. The pale, blood-speckled face of Ortiz’s bodyguard gaped up wide-eyed through the plastic. They’d had to roll him onto his back to get Ortiz out from under and onto the wagon, and that was how CSI had wrapped him.

Sevgi shrugged.

“Security.”

“Did you know him?”

“No. Not my section.” It dawned abruptly on Sevgi why Williamson was so edgy. In theory, NYPD held the ground here, but under the Colony Initiative Act, she could take it from them pretty much at will. The sudden sense of the power she had gusted through her like insects in her belly. It wasn’t a clean feeling.

Williamson moved a couple of paces to stand over the dead bodyguard. He stared down at the man’s face. “So this guy covers Ortiz, right?”

“Yes, apparently.”

“Yeah, that’s his job. And our twist friend over there—”

“Do you want to stop using that fucking word?”

It got her a speculative look. The detective came back toward the limo. “All right. Security covers Ortiz. Your genetically modified friend over there covers you. You got any idea at all why he might have done that?”

Sevgi shook her head wearily. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Yeah, I will. But thirteens aren’t known for their honesty.” Williamson paused deliberately. “Or their self-sacrifice. Had to be something in it for him.”

She glared back at the detective, and maybe it was the syn coming on now, but she thought she could have blown Williamson’s head off if she had a weapon at hand. Instead she levered herself to her feet and faced him. “I’m done talking to you, Detective.”

“I don’t think—”

“I said I’m done talking to you.” No maybe about it, it was the syn. The anger drove her forward, but it was the drug that gave her the poise. Williamson was a head taller than she was, but she stood in his personal space as if she wore body armor. As if the last forty minutes hadn’t happened to her. The insulene shawl was puddled around her feet. “Someone a little less fucking Neanderthal, I’d be happy to liaise with. You, I’m done wasting time on.”

“This is a murder investi—”

“Yeah, right now that’s what it is. You want to see how fast I can turn it into a COLIN Security operation?”

His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

“You back off, Detective, leave me the fuck alone, and you can keep your investigation. Otherwise I’m going to pull the COLIN act on you, and you can go back and tell them at the Twenty-eighth they’ll be losing their jurisdiction.”

Behind the syn, there was a tiny trickle of guilt as she watched Williamson crumble, an empathy from her own years on the other side of the fence.

She crushed it. Crossed the street to Marsalis.

         

COLIN arrived in modest force about ten minutes later. A secure transit Land Rover rolled quietly into the marketplace, parting the crowds with a low-intensity subsonic dispersal pulse that set Sevgi’s teeth on edge even at distance. She hadn’t called Norton, so someone must have authorized the roll-out when the news about Ortiz broke. The police had been holding back accredited film crews and solo shoulderscope artists in the crowd for a while, and it would be all over the feeds by now.

The Land Rover came to a halt at the edge of the crime scene, with scant regard for the incident barriers the NYPD had strung. One armor-swollen corner of its bodywork broke the bright yellow beams and set off the alarm. Police uniforms came running.

“Subtle,” said Marsalis.

The Land Rover’s forward passenger door cracked, swung open at a narrow angle. Tom Norton stood up on the running board behind it, scanning the crime scene. Even at a distance, Sevgi could see how ashen his face was.

“Sev?”

“Over here.” She waved from the steps of the building, and Norton spotted her. He swung his door wider, stepped down, and closed it again. Brief words with the uniforms in his way, a display of badges, and they opened a path for him. Someone went to shut off the barrier breach alarm, and quiet soaked back into the street. The Land Rover backed up a couple of meters and sat there rumbling like the elegant tank it essentially was. The driver did not emerge.

“Overreacting a bit, aren’t we?” Sevgi asked as Norton reached them.

He grimaced. “Tell that to Ortiz.”

“Is he okay?”

“Relative to what? He isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. They’ve got him hooked up to half the life-support machines available over at Weill Cornell. Major organ damage, but he’ll have ready stock cultured somewhere. Family’ve been notified.” Norton looked sick as he stared around at the shrink-wrapped corpses. “What the fuck was he doing over here anyway, Sev?”

She shook her head.

“I think he was here to see me,” said Marsalis, rising to his feet for the first time since the assault. He yawned cavernously.

Norton eyed him with dislike. “All about you, huh?”

“NYPD are all over him, Tom,” said Sevgi, defusing. “Detective in charge hardly gave a shit about Ortiz, all he wanted to talk about was how come we’d got an unlicensed thirteen on the streets.”

“Right.” Norton sharpened on the new task. “What’s this detective’s name?”

“Williamson. Out of the Twenty-eighth.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“He’s already been talked to. That’s not what I meant. I think it might play better if we let this look like an attempt on Ortiz.”

“You think it wasn’t?” Norton blinked. He gestured at one of the dead assassins. “Skater crew, Sev. Track the limo through traffic, that’s standard gang operating procedure. Ten, twelve city murders a year the exact same way. What else are you going to make of this?”

Sevgi nodded at Marsalis.

“Oh come on. Sev, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been in town less than a day. Who knew we were here?”

“Makes no sense the other way around, either, Tom. These guys were street. A real ground-level hit squad. What are they doing coming after someone fiftieth-floor like Ortiz? Man wouldn’t know street if it bit him in the ass.”

“It just did,” Marsalis said, deadpan.

Norton spared him a hard look. Sevgi stepped in.

“Look, whatever just went down here, we had more than enough publicity we didn’t need in Florida. Let’s not have a repeat performance. Ask the cops to kill the thirteen angle, make sure the media don’t run it. For public consumption purposes, Marsalis here can be just another heroic COLIN bodyguard, identity protected so that he can continue his good work.”

“Yes,” said Norton sourly. “As opposed to being a dangerous sociopath who hasn’t actually done any work for us at all yet.”

“Tom—”

Marsalis grinned. It was like a muscle flexing. “Well, I did save your partner’s life for you. Does that count?”

“As far as I can see you saved your own skin, with some collateral benefits. Sevgi, if this Williamson is going to raise a stink about our friend here, we need to get you both out of here.”

“Now, there’s an idea.”

Marsalis’s voice was amiable, but something at the bottom of it made Sevgi look at him. She recalled the way he’d stared after the escaped assassin, the flat sound his voice made then as he told her Right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work. There was a finality to the way he’d said it that was like the silence following a single gunshot. And now, suddenly, she was afraid for Tom Norton and his dismissive flippancy.

“Sounds good to me, too,” she said hurriedly. “Tom, can we wire up the n-djinn from Horkan’s Pride at COLIN? Run a direct interface?”

Norton looked at her curiously, let his gaze slip to the black man at her shoulder and then back again. He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose we could. But what the hell for? MIT already handed down the transcripts.” He addressed himself directly to Marsalis. “They’re on file at the office. You can go over them if you want.”

“But I don’t want.” Marsalis was smiling gently. A small chill blew down Sevgi’s spine at the sight. “What I want, Tom, is to talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn.”

Norton stiffened. “So now suddenly you’re an expert on the psychology of artificial intelligence?”

“No, I’m an expert on the hunting and killing of variant thirteens. Which is why you hired me. Remember?”

“Yeah, and don’t you think that precious expertise might be—”

“Tom!”

“—better deployed going over the scenes of the crimes we’re trying to bring an end to?”

Still the black man smiled. Still he stood relaxed, at a distance that Sevgi abruptly realized was just outside Norton’s easy reach.

“No, I don’t.”

“Tom, that’s enough. What the fuck is wrong with you this mor—”

“What’s wrong with me Sev, is that—”

Two-tone rasp—a throat being ostentatiously cleared. They both stopped, switched their gazes back to Marsalis.

“You don’t understand,” he said quietly.

They were silent. The call for attention hung off the end of his words like a spoken command.

“You don’t understand what you’re up against.” The smile came back, fleeting, as if driven by memory. “You think because Merrin’s killed a couple of dozen people, he’s some kind of serial killer writ large? That’s not what this is about. Serial killers are damaged humans. You know this, Sevgi, even if Tom here doesn’t. They leave a trail, they leave clues, they get caught. And that’s because in the end, consciously or subconsciously, they want to be caught. Calculated murder is an antisocial act, it’s hard for humans to do, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable the capacity. But that’s you people. It’s not me, and it’s not Merrin, and it’s not any variant thirteen. We’re not like you. We’re the witches. We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context. You have to understand this: there is nothing wrong with Merrin. He’s not damaged. He’s not killing these people as an expression of some childhood psychosis, he’s not doing it because he’s identified them as some dehumanized, segregated extratribal group. He’s just carrying out a plan of action, and he is comfortable with it. And he won’t get caught doing it—unless you can put me next to him.”

Norton shook his head. “You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.”

“I know he fed off the passengers.”

“No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.” Norton took a steadying breath. “You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.”

It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.

“Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,” he said finally. “But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.”

Norton grinned mirthlessly. “Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.”

“It’s not enough.”

“So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.”

That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. “Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?”