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.