Thirteen

  “Want some?”

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t know. Someone gave it to me. In case I needed to celebrate.” He put the blunt in his mouth and crunched the ember end to life. Drew in smoke, coughed a little. “Here, try. Not bad.”

  She took it and drew her own toke. The smoke went down sweet and silty, enhanced dope and an edge of something else on it. She held it in, let it go. Felt the cool languor of the hit come stealing along her limbs. All sorts of knots seemed to loosen in her head. She drew again, let it up quicker this time, and handed the blunt back to him.

  “So tell me why you’re not happy,” she said.

  “Because I don’t like being played, and this whole fucking thing was a setup from the start.” He smoked in gloomy quiet for a while, then held the blunt up and examined the burning end. “Fucking monster myths.”

  “Eh?”

  “Monsters,” he said bitterly. “Superterrorists, serial killers, criminal masterminds. It’s always the same fucking lie. Might as well be talking about werewolves and vampires, for all the difference it makes. We are the good, the civilized people. Huddled here in our cozy ring of firelight, our cities and our homes, and out there”—a wide gesture, warming to his theme now—“out in the dark, the monster prowls. The Big Evil, the Threat to the Tribe. Kill the beast and all will be well. Never mind the—”

  “You going to smoke that, or not?”

  He blinked. “Yeah, sorry. Here.”

  “So you don’t think we’ve killed the beast?”

  “Sure. We’ve killed it. So what? That doesn’t give us any answers. We still don’t know why Merrin came back from Mars, or what the point of all these deaths was.”

  “Should have asked him.”

  “Yeah, well. Slipped my mind at the time, you know.”

  She stared at the toes of her boots. Frowned. “Look, maybe you’re right. Maybe we don’t have the answers yet. But the fact we don’t know what this was about doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be happy we’ve stopped it.”

  “We didn’t stop it. I already told you, this whole thing was set up.”

  “Oh come on. Set up how? Rovayo says you took Daskeen Azul totally by surprise. They weren’t expecting this to happen.”

  “We were early.”

  “What?”

  He took the blunt from her. “We were early. They didn’t expect me to push so hard, they were maybe going to let this play out sometime next week.”

  “Let what play out next week?” Exasperation slightly blurred by whatever they were smoking. “You think Merrin planned to let you kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “He certainly didn’t fight as hard as I expected him to. I mean, I got lucky in the end, but the whole thing felt, I don’t know. Slack. Anyway, that’s not the main point. Ren could have come in at any point and tipped the balance. She wasn’t injured; all I did was knock her on her back.”

  “So? She just cut her losses, got out while she could.”

  “After partnering this guy for the last four months? I don’t think so. Ren was a pro, it was stamped right through her. The way she moved, the way she stood. The way she looked at you. Someone like that doesn’t panic. Doesn’t mistake one unarmed man for a RimSec invasion.”

  “Did you tell her you were a thirteen?”

  He gave her a tired look.

  “Well? Did you?”

  “Yeah, I did, but—”

  “There you are then.” She bent one knee, eased around to face him more. “That’s what panicked her. Look, Marsalis, I’ve been around you when the fighting starts, and it scares me. And I know what a thirteen really is.”

  “So did she. She’d been caretaking one for the last four months, remember.”

  “That’s not the same as facing one in combat. She’d have a standard human response to that, a standard—”

  “Not this woman.”

  “Oh, you think you’re an expert on women, do you?”

  “I’m an expert on soldiers, Sevgi. And that’s what Ren was. She was someone’s soldier, the same someone who hired Merrin out of Mars. And whoever that someone was, for whatever reasons, they were getting ready to sell him out. Maybe because he’d served his purpose, maybe because we were getting too close to the truth down in Cuzco. Either way, this”—he nodded back toward the CSI buzz on the slope above them—“all this was a planned outcome. COLIN with its boot on the corpse of the beast, big smiles for the camera, congratulations all around. Fade out to a happy ending.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she muttered.

  “Really?” He plumed smoke up at the nanofiber vault. “And there I was thinking you were a cop.”

  “Ex-cop. You’re confusing me with Rovayo. You really ought to try and keep the women you fuck separate in your head.”

  She took the blunt from him, brusquely. He watched her smoke for a couple of moments in silence. She pretended not to notice.

  “Sevgi,” he said finally. “You can’t tell me you’re happy to walk away, knowing we’ve been played.”

  “Can’t I?” She met his eyes. Exploded a lungful of smoke at him. “You’re wrong, Marsalis. I can walk away from this happy, because the fucked-up psycho who cut Helena Larsen into pieces and ate her is dead. I guess for that, at least, I should thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Yeah. And maybe we don’t know why Merrin came back, and maybe we’ll never know. But I can live with that, just like I lived with more unsolved cases than you’ll ever know when I worked Homicide. You don’t always get a clean wrap. Life is messy, and so is crime. Sometimes you just got to be happy you got the bad guy, and call time on the rest.”

  He turned away to look at the sea. “Well, that must be a human thing.”

  “Yeah. Must be.”

  “Norton’ll be pleased.”

  She rolled her head sideways, blew smoke, nailed him through it with another look. “We’re not going to talk about Tom Norton.”

  “Fine. We’re not going to talk about Norton, we’re not going to talk about Ren. We’re not going to talk about anything inconvenient, because you’ve got your monster and that’s all that matters. Christ, no wonder you people are in such a mess.”

  Anger ignited behind her eyes.

  “Us people? Fuck you, Marsalis. You know what? Us people are running a more peaceful planet now than the human race has ever fucking seen. There’s prosperity, tolerance, justice—”

  “Not in Florida, that I noticed.”

  “Oh, what do you want? That’s Jesusland. Globally, things are getting better. There’s no fighting in the Middle East—”

  “For the time being.”

  “—no starving in Africa, no war with China—”

  “Only because no one has the guts to take them on.”

  “No. Because we have learned that taking them on is a losing game. No one wins a war anymore. Change is slow, it has to come from within.”

  “Tell that to the black lab refugees.”

  “Oh, spare me the fucking pseudo-empathy. You could give a shit about some Chinese escapee you never met. I know you, Marsalis. Injustice is personal for guys like you—if it didn’t happen to you or someone you think belongs to you, then it doesn’t touch you at all. You don’t—”

  “It did fucking happen to me!”

  The shout ripped loose, floated away in the immensity of the vaulted space. She wondered if the RimSec CSI crew heard it. His hands were on her shoulders, fingers hooked into her flesh, head jutting close, eyes locked into hers. They hadn’t been this close since they fucked, and something deeply buried, some ancestor subroutine in her genes, picked up on the proximity and sent the old, confused signals pulsing out.

  It was the part of herself she most hated.

  She kept the locked stare. Reached up and jabbed the lit ember of the blunt into the back of his hand.

  Something detonated in his eyes, inked out just as fast. He unhinged his fingers with a s
nap. Backed off a fraction at a time. She drove him back with her eyes.

  “Keep your fucking hands off me,” she hissed.

  “You think—”

  His voice was hoarse. He stopped, swallowed and started again.

  “You think I can’t empathize with someone out of the black labs, some gene experiment made flesh? I am them, Sevgi. I mean, what do you think Osprey was? I am a fucking experiment. I grew up in a controlled environment, managed and checklisted by men in fucking suits. I lost—”

  He stopped again. This time, his eyes slid away from hers. A faint frown furrowed his brow. For a split second she thought he was going to weep, and something prickled at the base of her own throat in sympathy.

  “Motherfucker,” he said softly.

  She waited, finally had to prompt him. “What?”

  Marsalis looked at her, and his eyes were washed clean of the rage. His voice stayed low.

  “Bambarén,” he said. “Manco fucking Bambarén.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was fucking with me, back at Sacsayhuamán. He thought they took Marisol—my surrogate—away from me when I was fourteen. But that’s Lawman. In Osprey, they did it at eleven. Different psych theory.”

  “So?”

  “So he was too close to the detail. It wasn’t just the age, it was the other stuff. He was talking about men in uniforms, debriefing in a steel trailerfab. Osprey’s handlers all wore suits. And we never had any trailers, the whole place was purpose-built and permanent.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe he’s read about it. Seen footage.”

  “That’s not how it sounded, Sevgi. It sounded personal. As if he’d been involved.” He sighed. “I know. Thirteen paranoia, right?”

  She hesitated. “It’s pretty thin.”

  “Yeah.” He looked away from her. Seemed to make an effort: she saw his mouth clamp. He met her eyes again. “I’m sorry I grabbed you like that. Thought I had that shit locked down.”

  “’sokay. Just don’t do it again. Ever.”

  He took the blunt from her, very gently. It was down to the stub and smoldering unequally from where she’d stabbed his hand with it. He coaxed a little more from it, drew deep.

  “So what’s going to happen now?” he asked, voice tight with holding down the smoke.

  She grimaced. “Aftermath, like I said. We’re going to be chasing the detail for months, but they’ll start to fold the case priority away. Someone somewhere’s going to figure out how to knock off some major unlicensed Marstech again, and we’ll get switched to that. File Merrin for a rainy day.”

  “Yeah. What I thought.”

  “Look, let it go, Carl.” Impulsively, she reached out and took his hand, the same hand she’d scorched. “Just let go and walk away. You’re home free. We’ll look at the familia thing, who knows, maybe we’ll get somewhere with it.”

  “You go down there without me, all you’ll get is killed.” But he was smiling as he said it. “You saw what happened last time.”

  She flickered the smile back at him. “Well, maybe we’ll be a bit less full-frontal in our approach.”

  He grunted. Held up the dying blunt, querying. She shook her head, and he just held it there between them for a moment or two. Then he shrugged, took one last toke, and pitched it out through the cradle forks, down the long slope to the water.

  “You chase that aftermath,” he said.

  “We will.”

  But out beyond the vault of starboard loading, the waves were starting to pale, black to gunmetal, as the early light of a whole new day crept in.

  CHAPTER 40

  B ack at the hotel, he opaqued the windows against the unwelcome dawn. Jet lag and fight ache stalked him through the darkened suite to the bed. He shed his clothes on the floor and stood staring down at them. s(t)igma, the back of the inmate jacket reminded him in cheery orange. Sevgi Ertekin stood in his thoughts and waved—she’d walked him up to the helipad on Bulgakov’s Cat and seen him off. Was still standing there with one arm raised as the Cat dropped away below and behind the autocopter, visible detail blurring out.

  He grimaced, tried to shake the memory off.

  He ripped the bed open irritably, crawled in, and tugged a sheet across his shoulder.

  Sleep came and buried him.

  The phone.

  He rolled awake in the still-darkened room, convinced he’d only just closed his eyes. Steady blue glow digits at the bedside disputed the impression: 17:09. He’d slept through the day. He held up his wrist, peering stupidly at the watch he’d forgotten to take off, as if a hotel clock could somehow be wrong. The wrist ached from the fumbled blow he’d hit Merrin with. He turned it a little, flexing. Might even be—

  Phone. Answer the fucking—

  He groped for it, dragged the audio receiver up to his ear.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Marsalis?” A voice he should know but, sleep-scrambled, didn’t. “Is that you?”

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  “Ah, so it is you.” The name came just ahead of his own belated recognition of the measured tones. “Gianfranco di Palma here. Brussels office.”

  Carl sat up in bed, frowning.

  “What do you want?”

  “I have just been speaking to an agent Nicholson in New York.” Di Palma’s perfect, barely accented UN English floated urbanely down the line. “I understand that COLIN have no further use for your services, and that they have arranged that all charges against you in the Republic will be dropped forthwith. It seems you will be returning to Europe very shortly.”

  “Yeah? News to me.”

  “Well, I don’t think we need to wait around on formalities. I’ll have an UNGLA shuttle dispatched to SFO tonight. If you would care to be at the suborbital terminal around midnight—”

  “No I wouldn’t.”

  “I am sorry?”

  South Florida State swirled up into his mind, like dirty water backing up from a blocked drain. A sudden decision gripped him, cheery as the lettering on his S(t)igma jacket.

  “I said you can fuck off, di Palma. Write it down. Fuck. Right. Off. You let me sit in a Jesusland jail for four months and I’d still be there for all the fucking efforts you made to get me out. And you still owe me expenses from fucking January.” And just like that, out of nowhere he was furious, trembling with the sudden rage. “So don’t think for one fucking moment I’m going to jump into line just because you finally got your dick out of your own arse. I am not done here. I am very far from done here, and I’ll come home when I’m fucking good and ready.”

  There was a stiff pause at the other end of the line.

  “You understand, I assume,” said di Palma silkily, “that you are not authorized to operate without UNGLA jurisdiction. Of course, your time is your own to dispose of, but we cannot agree to you having any further professional contact with COLIN or the Rim States Security Corps. In the interests of—”

  “What’s the matter with you, di Palma. Don’t you have a pen there? I told you to fuck off. Want me to spell it?”

  “I strongly advise you not to take this attitude.”

  “Yeah? Well, I strongly advise you to go and get a caustic soda enema. Let’s see which of us takes direction best, shall we.”

  He broke the connection. Sat staring at the phone for a while.

  So. Planning to pay for our own suborb ticket, are we? And look for a new job when we get back?

  It won’t come to that. They need me worse than di Palma’s dented pride.

  They don’t need you worse than a breach of the Accords. Which is what it’s going to be if you pick up that phone again and call Sevgi Ertekin. You heard the man. Any further professional contact.

  The phone sat in his hand.

  Just go home, Carl. You gave them their monster, got another notch on your belt, right up there next to Gray. Thirteen liquidator, top of your game. Just take that and ride it home, maybe even bluff it into a raise when you get back.

&nb
sp; The phone.

  Come on, leave her alone. You’re not doing her any favors, pushing this. Let her walk away like she wants to.

  Maybe she doesn’t really want to walk away.

  Oh, how very alpha-male of you. What’s next, form an Angry Young tribute band? People got to lead their own lives, Carl.

  He tightened his fingers on the smooth plastic of the receiver. Touched it to his head. His whole body ached, he realized suddenly, a dozen different small, jabbing reminders of the fight with Merrin.

  Merrin’s done, Carl. All over.

  There’s still Norton. Lying fuck tried to have you killed in New York, maybe down in Peru as well.

  You don’t know that.

  He’s right next to her still. She starts asking awkward questions, he could have her hit the same way he tried with you.

  You don’t know he did that. And anyway, he’s a little too dewy-eyed around Sevgi Ertekin to let anything like that happen to her, and you know it.

  He grunted. Lowered the phone and stared at it again.

  Give it up, Carl. You’re just looking for excuses to get back inside something you never wanted to be a part of in the first place. Just cut it loose and go home.

  He grimaced. Dialed from memory.

  Sevgi took the call on her way through a seemingly endless consumer space. Late-afternoon crowds clogged the malls and the open-access stores, crippled her pace to limping. She had to keep slowing and darting sideways to get past stalled-out families or knots of dawdling finery-decked youth. She had to queue on escalators as they cranked their slow, ease-of-gawking trajectories up and down in the dizzying cathedral spaces of racked product. She had to shoulder through gathered accretions of bargain hunters under holosigns that screamed reduced, reduced, reduced to this.

  It had been the same fucking thing all day, everywhere she went in the upper levels of Bulgakov’s Cat. The temptation to produce badge and gun to clear passage was a palpable itch in the pit of her stomach.

  “Yeah, Ertekin.”

  “Alcatraz Control here. I have a patched call for you, will you take it?”

  “Patched?” She frowned. “Patched from where?”

  “New York, apparently. A Detective Williamson?”