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.