Thirteen

  Quiet in the softly lit conference room. He could feel Ertekin’s gaze on him like a touch. He looked at his hands.

  “You said he’s killed twenty others apart from this one.”

  Norton fielded it. “Seventeen confirmed, genetic trace material recovered at the scene. There are another four we’re not so sure about. That’s not including the people he murdered and ate aboard Horkan’s Pride.”

  “Yeah. You got this stuff mapped out? Where he’s been?”

  He didn’t look up, but he felt the glance run between them again.

  “Sure,” said Norton.

  He worked the dataslate deck and the image of Toni Montes’s blood went away. In its place, continental North America glowed to life, stitched with highways and slashed red along the excision lines of the Rim States and the Union. The map was punched through with seventeen black squares and four gray, each checked against a thumbnail victim photo. Carl got up and went to the wall for a closer look. The Angeline Freeport marker showed a laughing Toni Montes, hair styled up for some party and an off-the-shoulder gown. He touched it gently, and detailed data scrolled down beneath. Mother, wife, real estate feed host. Corpse.

  He looked at the other images pockmarking the map. They were mostly similar, careless snapshots, lives caught in the living. In a couple of cases, the image was an ID holoprint, but mostly it was smiles and squints for the camera, close-cropped to cut family members or friends from the frame. The faces looking down were a mix of races and a range of ages, midthirties all the way up to one old man in his late sixties. Married, single, with children, without. Work ranging from datasystems specialties to manual labor.

  They had nothing in common but the continent they lived on and the fact they were dead.

  He moved back to the West Coast. Norton did something to the dataslate, and a Bay Area blowup slid out on top of the main map. The Horkan’s Pride splashdown was marked in a not-to-scale box just off the coast, eleven faces and names stacked on top of one another beside it. Then three more red squares, all clustered around San Francisco and Oakland. Carl stared at the grouping for a moment, aware, at some level, that something didn’t gel. He frowned, touched and read the scroll-down data.

  Saw the dates.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Ertekin moved up behind him. Abruptly, he could smell her. “He came back. Two kills, same day Horkan’s Pride hits the water. Then he’s gone, across the frontier into the Republic. Next stop Van Horn, Texas, June 19. Eddie Tanaka, shot to death outside a cathouse on Interstate 10. And then he’s back in the Bay Area again, nearly four months later, October 2, killing this Jasper Whitlock. What does that suggest to you?”

  “He forgot his wallet?”

  “There you go. I knew there was some reason we hired you.”

  Carl twisted and gave her a reproachful look. Something happened in the line of her mouth. He breathed in lightly, trying for her scent again. “He’s working off partial data. However he came up with this hit list, he didn’t have all the names at the start. Why cross into Jesusland in June when he’s got to come all the way back and do this guy, uh, Whitlock, later. And now we’ve got Montes, she’s down in the Angeline Freeport. That’s a short run down from the bay, and no frontier checks. He’s making this up as he goes along.”

  “Right. What we figured, too.” Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. “If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All aboveboard, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.”

  “Question is where from?” Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. “He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?”

  “No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled-organ deal.”

  Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. “In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.”

  “Well…”

  Ertekin scowled. “We already chased that connection,” she told Carl. “Tanaka’s got no official medical standing, in the Republic or anywhere else. He was a biohazard engineer by trade—”

  “Rat catcher,” supplied Norton.

  “Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than—”

  “Catching rats.” Carl nodded slowly. “Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeastern Texas, northern Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia, and northern Florida. Have you got any ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?”

  The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map, too, and the scattered faces of the dead.

  “He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,” said Norton soberly.

  CHAPTER 14

  T he sounds of shouting dragged her awake.

  For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl-gray light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.

  On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.

  “Yeah?”

  Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. “Hear the fans?”

  “I’m awake, aren’t I?”

  “Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.”

  “So.” She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. “Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.”

  “Better than that.” There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. “He went to the media feeds. We’re all over Good Morning South.”

  “Ah, fuck.” Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. “You think we can still get out of here okay?”

  “Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.”

  “Got to be Parris.”

  “Yeah, well, in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty-deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Diefor-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.” She could hear him grinning again. “We’re not just trying to evade Republican justice anymore, Sev. We’re harboring an abomination before the Lord.”

  “Great. So what do we do?” Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirtsleeve. “Fly home the old-fashioned way? COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “And they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky when we hit Republic airspace, are they?”

  Norton said nothing. Sevgi remembered her profiler cups halfway through seaming her shirt shut. She sp
lit the seam back open, peered around on the floor.

  “Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously think—”

  “Okay, no, they probably won’t shoot us down. But they might force the pilot back to a landing at Miami International and take us off the plane there. We’re not popular in these parts, Sev.”

  “Not fucking popular anywhere,” she muttered. She caught the translucent gleam of a p-cup at the foot of the bed. She fished it up between two fingers and pressed it up under the weight of her right breast. “All right, Tom. What do you want to do?”

  “Let me talk to Nicholson.” He rode out her snort. “Sev, he may be an asshole, but he’s still responsible for operations. It doesn’t look any better for him than for us if we end up slammed in some Miami jail.”

  Sevgi prowled the darkened room looking for the other p-cup. “Nicholson won’t get in a fight at state legislature level, Tom, and you know it. He’s too much of a political animal to upset people with that much clout. If Tallahassee gets in line behind this thing, we’re going to be left twisting in the wind down here.”

  Another hesitation. Outside, the sounds of the crowd surged like distant surf. Sevgi found the cup under the bed, dug it out, and fitted it awkwardly, left-handed, under her left breast. She sat on the edge of the bed and started seaming her shirt shut again.

  “Tell me I’m wrong, Tom.”

  “I think you are wrong, Sev. Nicholson is going to see this as interference with his COLIN Security authority, and at a minimum it’s going to make him look bad. Even if he doesn’t take on Tallahassee directly himself, he’ll kick it upstairs with an urgent-action label attached.”

  “And meanwhile, what? We sit tight here?”

  “There are more unpleasant places to be stranded, Sev.” He sighed. “Look. Worst-case scenario, you get to spend the day on the beach with your new pal.”

  “My new…” Sevgi took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. The little screen was an innocent matte gray. Norton hadn’t enabled the v-feed. “Fuck you, Tom.”

  “It was a joke, Sev.”

  “Yeah? Well, next time you’re down on Fifth Avenue, get yourself a new fucking sense of humor.”

  She killed the call.

  From the landward observation tower, it didn’t look like much. Several hundred variously dressed men and women milling about in front of the facility gate while off to the left a suited, white-haired figure declaimed from behind a portable plastic ampbox podium. A couple of amateurish, hastily scrawled holo-placards tilted about in the air above the crowd. Teardrops and a few old-style IC vehicles were parked back along the access road, and people leaned against their flanks in ones and twos. Early-morning sunlight winked and glinted off glass and alloy surfaces. A couple of helicopters danced in the sky overhead, media platforms by the look of their livery.

  It didn’t look like much, but they were a good two hundred meters back from the gate here; the noise was faint, and detail hard to see. Sevgi had worked crowd control a few time as a patrol officer, and she’d learned not to make snap judgments about situations involving massed humanity. She knew how quickly it could turn.

  “…may have the form of a man, but do not be deceived by his form.” The words rinsed up from the podium sound system, still relatively unhysterical. Whoever the preacher was, he was building up slowly. “Man is made in the image and love of God. This. Creature. Was made by arrogant sinners, by shattering the seed God gave us in His wisdom. The Bible tells us…”

  She tuned it out. Squinted up at one of the helicopters as it banked.

  “No sign of the state police?” she asked the tower guard.

  He shook his head. “They’ll show up if those clowns start charging the gate, not before. And only then because they know we’re authorized to use lethal force if there’s a line breach.”

  His face was impassive, but the sour edge in his voice was unmistakable. The name on his chest tag read kim, but Sevgi guessed Korean American was close enough to Chinese for a common bitterness to find roots. Back before Secession, the Zhang fever mobs hadn’t been all that selective in their lynchings.

  “I doubt it’ll come to that.” She faked a breezy confidence. “We’ll be out of your hair before lunchtime. They’ll all go home after that.”

  “Good to know.”

  She left him staring out across the COLIN defenses at the crowd and made her way back down the caged staircase to the ground. There was an ominous quiet around the facility, in contrast with the noise outside. They’d suspended nanorack operations while the crisis lasted, and the storage hangars were all closed up. Tracked freight loaders ten meters broad squatted immobile on the evercrete aprons and access paths, like massive, scalped tanks, abandoned at the end of some colossal urban conflict. Their mortarboard lifting platforms were all empty.

  At the other end of the complex, the ’rack thrust up into the cloud cover like a god-size fire escape. It made everything on the ground feel like toys. They’d built Perez early on, back when Mars was still a barely scratched desert and Bradbury a collection of pressurized ’fabs. Now it looked used and grim, all mottled grays and blacks and overstated support structure. Compared with the cheery, brightly colored minimalism at Sagan or Kaku, Perez was a relic. Even for Sevgi, who didn’t like the ’racks whatever fucking color they came in, it was a melancholy sight.

  “Ever been up?”

  She looked around and saw that Marsalis had gotten within two meters of her back without giving himself away. Now he stood watching her with a blank speculation that reminded her of Ethan so much, it sent shivers up from the base of her spine.

  “Not this one, no.” She nodded vaguely northward. “They trained me in New York. Kaku ’rack, mostly. I’ve been up Sagan and Hawking as well, and what they’ve built of Levin.”

  “You don’t sound overenthusiastic.”

  “No.”

  It made him smile. “But the money’s good. Right?”

  “The money’s good,” she agreed.

  He looked away, toward the gate. The smile faded out.

  “Is all that noise out there for me?”

  “Yes, it is.” She felt oddly embarrassed, as if the Republicans on the other side of the wire were acquaintances whose bad behavior she had to cover for. “Blame your old friend Parris. Apparently he took exception to your departure after all. He’s fed the whole thing to the local media.”

  “Smart of you to bring us here last night, then.”

  She shrugged. “I worked witness protection for a while. You learn never to take anything for granted.”

  “I see.” He seemed to consider for a moment. “Are you people going to give me a gun?”

  “That’s not part of the deal. Didn’t you read the fine print?”

  “No.”

  It brought her up short. “You didn’t?”

  “Ever spent time in a Jesusland justice facility?” He put on a gentle smile, but his eyes were hard with memory. “It’s not the sort of place you quibble over detail if they come to let you out.”

  “Right.” She cleared her throat. “Well, the fine print says that you’re retained by COLIN in an advisory capacity, not for actual enforcement. So, ah, you don’t need a gun.”

  “I will if our Jesusland friends decide to storm the fences.”

  “That’s not going to happen here.”

  “Your confidence is inspiring. Can we fly out of here?”

  “It doesn’t look like it. Tom’s working the diplomatic angle, but it’ll be awhile before we know if we can take the risk. In this part of the world, the Air Nationals tend to shoot first and sift wreckage afterward.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that.” He turned away from the powered fences and the gate, looking out across the shimmering surface of the Atlantic. “Speaking of which, any idea why the skycops in the Rim didn’t shove a heatseeker up Horkan’s arse when it crossed the line? I hear those boys are pretty jumpy, too, and it must have profiled pretty much like a threat.”

  ??
?Local COLIN liaison talked them out of it, apparently.”

  “Yeah?” Marsalis raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes. Relations with the Rim are pretty good these days. It’s not like down here. We negotiated a direct AI interface last year, high-level trust protocols, minimal buffering. The Sagan n-djinn mapped the trajectory and shunted it straight to the Rim Air Authority. No blocks, no datachecks above basic. It cleared the buffers in a couple of nanoseconds.” Sevgi spread her hands. “Everyone’s happy.”

  “Especially Merrin.”

  She said nothing. The sporadic chanting at the gate reached them between gusts of wind coming off the ocean. After a couple of seconds, Marsalis started away from her in the direction of the water. He didn’t speak or look back. It took her his first three steps to understand he’d been waiting for her to continue the conversation, and now that she hadn’t he was leaving.

  “Where are you going?” It came out a lot less casually than she would have liked.

  He stopped and turned back to her. “Why?” he asked gravely. “Am I in some kind of protective custody?”

  Fuck it. “No, it’s just.” She gestured awkwardly. “In case I need to find you later, in a hurry.”

  He weighed it, the way he had the comment about her work for WP.

  “I’m going for another walk on the beach,” he said. “Want to come?”

  “Ah…no.” She hesitated. He was waiting. “I need to go over the Montes crime scene while we’ve got the time. See if there’s anything that jumps out.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “No, but you never know. I’ve been looking at Merrin’s handiwork for the last four months, Angeline PD haven’t. There might be something.”

  “No direct data interface there, then?”

  “No. Technically, they’re not part of RimSec. It’s the Freeport legislation, Angeline PD have autonomy, they work pretty much like any city police department over in the Republic.”