CHAPTER 53

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

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

         

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

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

“Yeah, you should be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They ask about anything else?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Got an exit strategy for Ortiz yet?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

         

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

“Mules coming down.”

“Yeah, so I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You think…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You want me to call it in?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I know that.”

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

“I’m here to see the witch.”

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

Pistaco.

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

Deep, throat-clearing cough, spiteful shredding whine.

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

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

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

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

Over.

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

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

“Fuck!”

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

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

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

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

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

         

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

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

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

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

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

“Quiros said—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl and Norton swapped another look. Carl sighed.

“That’s a shame,” he said.

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

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

“Wait!”

         

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

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

Pause.

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

Shit.

Well, not like you weren’t expecting this.

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

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

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

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

Listen.

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

And everything stopped again.

This time for real.

         

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, but if they’re worried about—”

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

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

         

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

So far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His mouth twitched upward in echo.

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

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

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

Sevgi dead.

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

Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wherever she was right now.

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

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

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

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

Now let’s see if you can scare Onbekend.

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

He went downstairs to wait.

         

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

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

“It isn’t going to bring her back.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why are you going down there?”

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

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

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