Thirteen

  “So did you get anything useful out of Nevant?” He wasn’t sure if she’d caught him looking, but there was haste in the tone of her voice. He went back to watching the pavement ahead.

  “I’m not sure,” he said carefully. “I think we need to go and talk to Manco Bambarén.”

  “In Peru?”

  “Well, I don’t see him taking up an invitation to New York in a hurry. So yeah, we’d have to go there. Apart from anything else, it’ll suit his sense of things. It’s his ground.”

  “It’s your ground, too, isn’t it?” He thought she smiled. “Planning to disappear into the altiplano on me?”

  “If I was going to disappear on you, Ertekin, I would have done it awhile ago.”

  “I know,” she said. “I was joking.”

  “Oh.”

  They reached the end of the block, took a left turn in unison to beat an obvious cul-de-sac. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed her lead, or vice versa. A hundred meters farther on, the street ended at a steep bare slope set with dirty white evercrete steps and a cryptic sign inscribed with the single word moda. They climbed in hard-breathing silence.

  “That cuff,” she said as they spilled out at the top, then had to grab her breath back before she went on. “You knew Nevant was wearing it.”

  “Never really thought about it.” He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I knew it’d be there. It’s standard tract procedure.”

  “It didn’t stop him trying to kill you.”

  “Well, those things are slow acting. Probably take the best part of twenty minutes to sever his foot completely. Sure, I might have gotten my hands on it in the tumble, tried to trigger it, but while I was wasting my time doing that, old Stefan would have buried that knife in my spine.” He paused, reviewing the fight. “Or my eye.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” There was a hot exasperation in the way she came back at him, an edge of tone that tugged in the base of his belly and dripped a slow, pooling tumescence into the length of his prick.

  “Well, what do you mean then?”

  “I mean he knew there was a risk he’d lose a foot, not to mention bleed to death trying to get away. And he still tried to kill you.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her Are you sure you dated a thirteen, I mean a real one? He bit it back, walked on. Modest gene-stunted cottonwood trees sprouted at intervals from squares cut out of the pavement along this end of Moda. Their branches broke the streetlighting as it fell, formed a soft mosaic of light and dark underfoot.

  “Look,” he said experimentally. “First of all, Stefan Nevant wasn’t planning on getting away anywhere. He came to kill me, that’s all. Us genetic warriors are pretty focused about these things. If he had managed to ice me, he would have stood up afterward as quiet as a Jesusland housewife while you and Battal restrained him, and he would have gone back out to the tract a happy man.”

  “But that’s fucking stupid,” she flared.

  “Is it?” This time he stopped on the pavement, turned toward her. He could feel his own control coming unmoored, feel it seep into his voice, but he couldn’t tell how much was this, how much was the mouth-itching display of her standing there wrapped in streetlight and shadow, tumbled hair and long mobile mouth, jut and swell of breasts under the dark sweater, tilt of hips, long-legged in the canvas jeans despite the flat-soled boots she wore them with. “I put Nevant in the tract. He was out and I brought him back, to a place he’ll never leave except hobbled the way he was today. He’ll never breed, or have sex with anyone who isn’t a paid tract whore or an UNGLA employee cruising for twist thrills. He knows, to within a couple of thousand square kilometers, exactly where he’ll die. You think about that, and then you ask yourself whether it might not be worth the risk of losing a foot—which he’d get a biocarbon prosthetic for anyway, under the rules of internment—you ask yourself whether that might not be a price worth paying to put out the light in the eyes of the man who fenced him in.”

  “Worth dying for?”

  “You forget: there’s no death penalty in Europe, even for thirteens.”

  “I meant you might have killed him.”

  Carl shrugged. “I might. You’re also forgetting that Nevant was a soldier. Kill or be killed is pretty much the job description.”

  She locked her gaze on his.

  “Would you have killed him? If we hadn’t gotten there first?”

  He stared at her for a moment, then, swift as the fight, he stepped in and hooked an arm to her waist. Her feet shifted on the pavement, she leaned back and lifted one long fingered hand. For fragments of a second he thought she would strike him, then the fingers clenched in the collar of his jacket and dragged his face close. She bit into his mouth, thrust in a coffee-tasting tongue. Made a deep, soft sound as his free hand molded to her breast, and dragged him back into the shadows of an apartment house entryway.

  It was like the mesh, a rising tide in blood and muscle. He tore at her clothing, unseamed the canvas jeans and forced them down to her knees, got his hand inside the slip of lace cotton she wore beneath. She gasped at the touch, already moist. With his other hand, he pushed up the sweater, forced it over the swell of the breasts, and fingered loose one of the profiler cups. The breast sagged into his hand. He buried his face in the flesh, as if drinking water out of his cupped palm. His mouth slurped up the nipple, sucked it to the roof of his mouth. In the tight trap of her cotton panties and inner thighs, his fingers worked the moistness apart. She shuddered, groped vaguely at the swollen lump in his trousers, finally got both hands on his belt and opened it. He flopped out, tightened to fully erect in the cool air. She laughed, short and throaty as she felt the length of his prick, ghosted an open palm up and down the underside of it.

  Four months in Florida jails, nothing female you could touch. He felt himself sliding down the long hard slope of it, made his mouth unfasten from her breast with an effort of will, left the fingers of his other hand where they were and squatted, trying to pull one of her boots off. She saw what he was trying to do, laughed again, shook her leg impatiently up and down, stamping the air, angling her foot to get it loose. No luck—the boot stayed on. He caught a glancing blow from her knee in the side of his face. Grunted and shook his head.

  “Oh shit, I’m sorry.” She stopped, bent toward him. His fingers slipped loose, damp. “Look, stop, wait.”

  She twisted away, something that was almost judo, pushed him upright and against the wall in her place. She tore her jacket off arm by arm, stowed it in a wad at his feet, and dropped to her knees on it. Wide, split-mouth grin up at him, and then she bent over the head of his prick and sucked it in. Her curled fingers slipped up and down the shaft. Her mouth moved. His hands slapped flat on the shadowed wall at his sides, crooked as if he could claw into the evercrete with his nails. He thought then that was it, grabbed the moment, but something had hitched up inside him, would not let go. The orgasm subsided, rocked away, just out of reach.

  She felt the change, made a muffled, querying noise and went to work in earnest, mouth and fingers; he felt himself climbing the curve again, but knew again he would not make it. His hands uncurled, came loose from the wall, hung there. He stared at the shadows.

  “Hey,” she said softly.

  “Look, I’m—”

  “No, you look.” Sudden instruction in her voice, it hooked his gaze downward and she grinned up at him. With her left hand, she gathered her exposed breasts up and together. She gripped his shaft hard in the other hand, pushed the glans back and forth in the press of her cleavage. He felt something leap violently in his chest. She grinned again, bent her head and spat gently, drooled spit onto the head of his prick and then, still gripping hard, pushed the wet-gleaming flesh back between her breasts, rubbed it there, in and out, in and out, for the ten or twenty more seconds it took before he felt the furious heat come raging up through him, no hitch now, no stopping…

  And out.

  He made a noise like a drowning man hauled
back aboard, like the sound he’d made the day the rescue ship hailed Felipe Souza for the first time, and he sagged back against the wall, then slid down it, as if shot. He felt her fingers let go, stickily, felt her gathering her disordered clothing together, and put out his hand.

  “Wait.”

  “We should go, it’s—”

  “You’re going. Nowhere,” he said unsteadily. “Stand up.”

  He pushed her upright again, where she’d been, against the wall, and this time he crouched, slid hands up the insides of the long thighs to part them, pulled the scrap of lace cotton firmly to one side, and sank his tongue in her as deep as it would go.

  Back at the apartment, he did it again, this time on the bed where he’d seen her asleep that morning. Pulled up close to breathe her scent, one hand raising the cushion of her buttocks up so the lips of her cunt met his mouth like a mismatched kiss, the fingers of his other hand deep inside her and the breadth of his tongue lapping up against the rubbery switch of her clit. He felt a carnivore itch rising in him, a deep thirst that was only partly slaked when she bucked and flexed across the bed and clamped hands and thighs around his head as if she could push him by sheer force inside her.

  She flopped, panting, face rolled sideways, eyes closed, gone, and he gathered her under him and slid into her to the hilt of his newly swollen-tight erection. Her eyes flew open, and she said oh, just that single sound, lightly, delightedly, fresh hunger rolling on the edge of the syllable.

  And then it was like the hard evercrete steps they’d taken up to Moda, steep and stiff breathing and no speech at all on the long, steady climb together to the top.

  CHAPTER 28

  “H e did what?”

  Norton glowered out of the screen at her, disbelief and anger struggling for the upper hand on his face.

  “Ended up in a fight with Nevant,” said Sevgi patiently. “Relax, Tom, it’s already happened. There’s nothing anybody could have done.”

  “Yes there is. You could have refused to let him have his way.”

  “Let him have his way?” She felt the faint stain of a blush start in her neck. All the places Marsalis had bitten softly into her flesh were suddenly warm again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means Marsalis suddenly decides he needs to fly out to the other side of the globe, and you just lie down for it. Our cannibal friend is killing people in America, not Europe. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that Marsalis is looking for a way to get home without fulfilling his contract.”

  “Yes, that occurred to me, Tom. Quite awhile ago in fact, back when you were happy to stick him in an unguarded New York hotel for the night.”

  Pause. “As I recall, I was going to put him up at my place.”

  “Whatever, Tom. The point is, we hired Marsalis to do a job. If we aren’t going to trust him to do it, then why did we bother springing him in the first place?”

  Norton opened his mouth, then evidently thought better of what he was going to say. He nodded. “All right. So having beaten up Nevant, what does our resident expert want to do now?”

  “He’s talking about Peru.”

  “Peru?”

  “Yes, Peru. Familias andinas, remember. He got leads from Nevant that point back to the altiplano, so that’s where we need to go.”

  “Right.” He cleared his throat. “So, Sevgi, you think we’re actually going to do any investigating at all in the places the crimes are being committed? You know, I was never a cop, but—”

  “Fuck it, Tom.” She leaned into the screen. “What’s wrong with you? This is the twenty-second century. You know, global interconnection? The integrated human domain? We can be in Lima in forty-five minutes. Cuzco a couple of hours later at worst. And back in New York before the end of the day.”

  “It is the end of the day,” said Norton drily. “It’s past midnight here.”

  “Hey, you called me.”

  “Yeah, because I was getting kind of alarmed at the silent running, Sev. You’ve been gone two days without a word.”

  “Day and a half.” The retort was automatic, but in fact she wasn’t sure who was closer. Her sense of time was shot. Crossing the Bosphorus seemed weeks in the past, New York and Florida months before that.

  Norton didn’t seem disposed to argue the toss, either. He glanced at his watch, shrugged.

  “Fact remains. You stay gone much longer, Nicholson and Roth are going to start barking.”

  She grinned. “So that’s what you’re pissed about. Come on, Tom. You can handle them. I saw the press conference. You played Meredith and Hanitty like a pair of cretins.”

  “Meredith and Hanitty are a pair of cretins, Sev. That’s the point. Whatever you say about Nicholson, he’s not stupid, and he’s our boss, and that goes double for Roth. They won’t wear this for long. Not without more payback than your new playmate’s hunches.” Norton’s gaze flickered across the quadrants of the screen, scanning the space over her shoulders. “Where is wonderboy, anyway?”

  “Asleep”—she caught herself—“I’d guess. It’s a pretty antisocial hour here as well, you know.”

  In fact, when the phone rang, she’d rolled over in the bed and felt a shivery delight as she found the bulk of him there at her side. The frisson turned into a jolt as she saw, at a distance of about ten centimeters, that he was awake, eyes open and watching her. He nodded in the direction of the ringing. COLIN apartment, he said, I figure that’s for you. She nodded in turn, groped over the side of the bed for her T-shirt, and sat up to pull it over her head. She could feel his eyes on her, on the heavy swing of her breasts as she completed the move, and it sent another quiver of jellied warmth through her. The feeling stayed as she blundered out to the phone.

  “On COLIN’s endeavor, the sun never sets,” quoted Norton, deadpan. “Anyway, if you’re going to Peru, you’ll need an early start.”

  “Have you talked to Ortiz?”

  He grew somber. “Yeah, earlier today. They put him through to a v-format for about ten minutes. Doctors won’t run it for longer than that, they say the mental strain’s the last thing he needs. They’ve got nanorepair fixing the organ damage, but the slugs were dirty, some kind of trace carcinogen, and it’s fucking up the new cell growth.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “We’re all going to die, Sev. But from this, no, he won’t. They’ve got him stabilized. Still a long road out, but he’ll make it.”

  “So what did he say, in the virtual?”

  A grimace. “He told me to trust your instincts.”

  They got a late-morning suborb to La Paz—like most nations aligned with the Western Nations Colony Initiative, Turkey ran connections to the altiplano hubs every couple of hours. Sevgi had the COLIN limo pick them up at the door. No leisure to ride the ferries this time around.

  “We could have waited for the Lima hook,” Marsalis pointed out as they neared the airport at smooth, priority-lane speed. “Less rush that way. I’d have time to buy those clothes you were bitching about.”

  “I’m under instructions to rush,” she told him.

  “Yeah, but you know there’s a good chance Bambarén might be in Lima, anyway. He does a lot of business down the coast.”

  “In that case, we’ll go there.”

  “That’ll take some time.”

  She gave him a superior grin. “No, it won’t. You’re working for COLIN now. This is our backyard.”

  To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling indigenas, one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armored Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the no-parking zone. Beyond was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun—a Beretta Marstech, with two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it. Welcome to La Paz, the woman said, with or without ir
ony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech-level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang & Olufsen data/coms portal sat unobtrusively in the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.

  They stood at opposite ends of the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning—they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now the predawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load. Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.

  “Want to eat?” she asked.

  He shot her a glance she recognized. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Food,” she said primly. “All I’ve eaten in the past day is that simit.”

  “Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb-traveler lifestyle.”

  “Do you want to eat or not?”

  “Sure. Whatever they’ve got.” He went to the Bang & Olufsen, checked the welcome-screen protocol, and fired the system up. She shook her head, took a last look at the view, and went to order from the next room.

  Midway through scanning the services menu, she accidentally brought up the health section. Her eye caught on the subheading tab stimulants and synaptic enhancers, and she realized with a slight jolt that she hadn’t taken any syn for the best part of twenty-four hours.

  Hadn’t wanted any.

  The first time Carl wanted Manco Bambarén’s attention, three years back, he’d gotten it by the simple expedient of sounding out the tayta’s business interests and then doing them as much rapid damage as he easily could. It was an old Osprey tactic from the Central Asian theater, and it transferred without too much trouble.