Black Man (38 page)

In the taxi, they sat with a frigid thirty centimeters of plastic seat between them and stared from opposite side windows at the passing frontages. Outside, the sun was on its way up into a sky of flawless blue, striking the early-morning chill out of the air and lighting the white volcanic stonework of the old town almost incandescent. Traffic already clogged the main streets, slowed passage to a jerky crawl.

“We’re going to miss our fucking flight,” she said grimly.

“Ertekin, this place has a dozen flights a day to Lima. We’ve got no problem getting out of here.”

“No, but we’ve got a big fucking problem making the Oakland suborbital out of Lima if we miss this flight.”

He shrugged. “So we wait in Lima, catch a later bounce to Oakland. This guy they’ve found is dead, right? He’s not in a hurry.”

She swung on him. “What the fuck were you doing back there?”

“Working a source, what did it look like?”

“To me? Looked like you were winding up to beat a confession out of her.”

“I wasn’t looking for a confession. I don’t think she knows about our little reception committee last night.”

“Shame you didn’t think to find that out before you cut loose on the hired help.”

Carl shrugged. “They’ll live.”

“The one out in the courtyard may not. I checked him on my way in. At a guess I’d say you fractured his skull.”

“That’s hardly the point.”

“No, the point is that I told you we were
done
here. I told you we were going to stay put in the hotel until we were ready to fly out. The point is that you told me you would.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She said something in Turkish under her breath. He wondered whether to tell her the truth: that he had slept, but not for very long. Had stung himself awake with dreams of Elena Aguirre muttering behind him in the gloom of
Felipe Souza
’s cargo section, had thought for one icy moment that she stood there beside the bed in the darkened hotel suite, staring down at him glitter-eyed. He’d dressed and gone out, itching to do violence, to do anything that would chase out the remembered powerlessness.

Instead, he told her: “She knows Merrin.”

Momentary stillness, a barely perceptible stiffening, then the scant shift of her profile from the window, a single, sidelong glance.

“Yeah, right.”

“I ran a long list of names on her, mostly victims from your list. Merrin’s was the only one that got a reaction. And when I moved on to the next name, she relaxed right back down again. Either she knew him before he went to Mars, or she knows him now.”

“Or she knows someone else with that name, or did once.” She’d gone back to looking out of the window. “Or it sounded like something or someone she knew, or you’re mistaken about the way she reacted. You’re chasing shadows and you know it.”

“Someone tried to kill us last night.”

“Yeah, and on your own admission Jurgens knows nothing about it.”

“I said she didn’t
seem
to.”

“Like she
seemed
to know Merrin, you mean?” She looked at him again, but this time there was no hostility. She just looked tired. “Look, Marsalis, you can’t have it both ways. Either we trust your instincts or we don’t.”

“And you don’t?”

She sighed. “I don’t trust
this
.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, this?”

“It means this fucking dive back to the visceral level all the time. This throwing your weight around and pissing people off and pushing until something breaks loose and gives us someone new to fight.

Confrontation, escalation, fucking death or glory.” She gestured helplessly. “I mean, maybe that worked for Project Lawman back in the day, but it isn’t going to cut it here. This is an investigation, not a brawl.”

“Osprey.”

“What?”

“Osprey. I’m not American, I was never part of Project Lawman.” He frowned, flicker of something recalled, too faint now to get back. “And another thing I’m not, Ertekin, just so you keep it in mind. I’m not Ethan.”

For a moment, he thought she’d explode on him, the way she had the night before on the highway, with the corpses draped across the stalled and blinded jeep. But she only hooded her gaze and turned away.

“I know who you are,” she said quietly.

They didn’t speak again until they reached the airport.

They made the Lima flight with a couple of minutes to spare, got into the capital on time, and confirmed their places on the Oakland suborb an hour before it lifted.

Time to kill.

Quiet amid the bustle and vaulted space of the Lima terminal, Sevgi faced herself in a washroom mirror.

She stared for what seemed like a long time, then shrugged and fed herself the syn capsules one at a time.

Dry-swallowed and grimaced as they went down.

Alcatraz station. Special Cases Division.

By the time she got there, the superfunction capsules had kicked in with a vengeance. Her feelings were her own again, vacuum-packed back into the steel canister she’d made for them. An icy detachment propped up focus and attention to the detail beyond the mirror.

Another fucking mirror,
she noted.

But this time she sat behind the glass and watched the scene in the interview room on the other side.

Coyle and Rovayo and a woman who sprawled leggily in the chair provided, wore formfitting black under a heavy leather jacket she hadn’t bothered to take off, and watched her interrogators with energetic, gum-chewing dislike. She was young, not far into her twenties, and her harsh-boned, Slavic face carried the sneer well. The rest was pure Rim mix—short blond hair hacked about in a classic Jakarta shreddie cut that didn’t really suit her, crimson Chinese characters embroidered down the leg of her one-piece from hip to ankle, the baroque blue ink of a Maori-look skin-sting curled across her left temple. Her voice, as it strained through the speaker to the observers’ gallery, was heavily accented.

“Look, what you fucking want from me? Everything you ask me, I give you answers. Now I got places I got to be.” She leaned across the table. “You know, I don’t show up for shift tonight, they don’t pay me.

Not like you public sector guys.”

“Zdena Tovbina,” said Norton. “Filigree Steel co-worker. They got her off video archive from the building where this guy used to live. Seems she came looking for him when he didn’t show up for work two shifts running.”

“Nice of her. Shame Filigree Steel didn’t think to do the same thing.”

Norton shrugged. “Fluid labor market, you know how it is. Apparently they did call him a couple of times, but when he didn’t call back, they just assumed he’d moved on. Hired someone else to fill his shifts. These security grunts make shit, staff turnover’s through the roof. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Unionize, maybe?”

“Ssssh.”

In the interview room, Alicia Rovayo was pacing about. “We’ll inform your shift manager if we need to keep you much longer. Meantime, let’s go over it one more time. You say you didn’t actually
know
anything was wrong with Driscoll.”

“No, I knew was something wrong. Something wrong was he saw inside of that ship.” For just a moment, Zdena Tovbina looked haunted. “When we saw, we all got sick. Joey was first, but we all saw what was there.”

“You actually saw Driscoll vomiting?” Coyle asked from his seat.

“No, we heard.” Tovbina tapped her ear twice, graphically. “Squad net. Radio.”

“And later, when you saw him?”

“He was quiet. Would not talk.” A phlegmatic, open-handed gesture. “I tried, he turned away from me.

Very male, you know.”

“These guys went in masked,” Norton murmured. “Minimal stuff, upper-face goggle wrap, but they were smearing anticontaminants as well. You beginning to see where this is going?”

Sevgi nodded glumly. She glanced across the gallery at Marsalis, but he was focused wholly on the woman beyond the glass.

“When was the last time you actually saw Joseph Driscoll?” Coyle asked patiently.

Tovbina all but ground her teeth in frustration. “I have
told
you. He went back on Red Two shuttle.

Climbed in by mistake. We were all shaken. Not thinking right. When we’re back at base, I looked for him in squad room. He was already gone.”

“Oh yeah,” breathed Marsalis. “He was gone all right.”

“Where’d they find the body?” Sevgi asked.

“Caught up in deep-water cabling a hundred and something meters down, on the edge of one of these bioculture platforms they’ve got out there. It’s pretty much the area where
Horkan’s Pride
came down, allowing for drift. Whoever threw Driscoll over the side weighted him around the legs with a couple of bags of junk from the
Horkan’s Pride
galley. Probably made them up in advance. Took him down fast and clean, heading for the seabed until he hit something that snagged him. Pure chance a repair crew was out that way yesterday.”

“Did he drown?”

“No, looks like he was dead before he went into the water. Crushed larynx, snapped neck.”

“Fuck. Weren’t these guys wearing vital signs vests?”

“Yeah, but no one checks them, apparently. Staffing cuts, Filigree Steel eliminated the deck medics on their shuttles sometime last year when they went up for retender.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, market forces, don’t you just love them. Oh yeah, and there are a lot of smaller contusions on Driscoll, some abrasions, too. Forensics reckon he was stuffed inside one of the disposal chutes up near the kitchen section, then dumped straight out into the ocean. A couple of those hatches at least would have been on the submerged side of the hull. No one would have noticed.”

Sevgi shook her head. “Blowing an outer hatch should have shown up on a scanner somewhere. Takes power. Either that, or you have to use the explosive bolts like he did with the access hatches, and that would have made a noise, even submerged.”

“There’d be plenty of power in the onboard batteries,” said Marsalis distantly. “You wouldn’t need the bolts. And by the look of it, these people were too busy puking their guts up to be watching their screens for low-level electrical activity.”

He sat back and puffed out his cheeks.

“Our boy Merrin really played this one.” He shook his head. “A thing of beauty, really.”

Norton shot him an unfriendly look.

“So.” Sevgi wanted to hear someone say it, even if it was her. “Merrin walks out of there as Driscoll. Steals his gear, masks up, and slips aboard the wrong transport in the general confusion. Think that was deliberate, or did he just luck out?”

Marsalis shook his head again. “Deliberate, absolutely. He’d be paying attention for that stuff.”

“He makes it back to the base, gets
off
the base somehow. I’d guess that’s not hard. Got to be a hundred different outs for someone with Merrin’s training. Security’s going to be focused on incoming personnel anyway, not the graveyard shift going home. And with all this breaking loose, everyone’s running around like a Jesusland snake-handling meet.” She stopped. “Wait a minute, what about the quarantine?”

Norton sighed. “Fudged. They applied it, made the announcement on the way back. Everyone through the nanoscan. Apparently”—irony lay heavy on the word—“no one at Filigree Steel realized Driscoll didn’t take the scan.”

Marsalis grunted. “Or by the time they realized, it was too late and they just covered their arses.”

“Yeah, well, in any case, quarantine cleared inside the first couple of hours. Some biohazard outfit down from Seattle, they checked the hull for contaminants before it was towed. If someone at Filigree Steel was covering their asses, they knew they were safe by lunchtime.”

Sevgi nodded gloomily. “And by the time we’d get to digging any deeper with Filigree Steel, Ward shows up dead so we assume that’s how Merrin got ashore, and we don’t bother. What a fucking mess.”

“It’s classic insurgency technique,” Marsalis said. “Misdirect, cover your tracks.”

“Can you sound a little less fucking impressed, please.”

In the interview room, they were done. Zdena Tovbina was escorted out, ostentatiously checking her watch. Rovayo stayed behind, played a long, weary glance through the one-way glass to the gallery as if she could see the three of them sitting there.

“That’s all, folks,” she said.

“He planned this.” Sevgi was still talking to make herself believe it. “He opened up the cryocaps and ripped the bodies apart to create a fucking
diversion
.”

“Yeah.” Marsalis got up to leave. “And you guys thought he’d just gone crazy.”

Coyle and Rovayo had been busy. There was a full CSI virtual up and running for Joey Driscoll’s death, including a gruesomely modeled corpse-recovery site. They stood, briefly, in fathomless, lamplit blue and Driscoll peered down at them out of the tangled cabling, one puffy hand waving gently in the current. A CSI ’face reached up helpfully and pulled in magnified detail that Sevgi, syn or no syn, could really have done without. Driscoll’s eyes were gone, and the earlobes, the mouth eaten back to a lopsided harelip snarl, and the whole swollen face gone waxy with adipocere seepage through the skin from the subcutaneous fat layers beneath. Sevgi’d seen worse, much worse, fished out of the Hudson or the East River every so often, but it was all a long time ago, and now the illusion of floating beneath the waterlogged corpse in the depths of the ocean kept triggering an impulse to hold her breath.

“You said Forensics have been over the apartment,” she said. “Any chance of seeing that?”

Coyle nodded. “Sure. We all done here?”

“I think so,” said Norton uncomfortably.

Marsalis nodded impassively.

“Full shift, datahome six,” Coyle told the ’face, and the drowned blue murk amped up to a blinding flash of white, then soaked back out into the somber colors of cheap rental accommodation. Driscoll’d either been saving for something better, or maybe didn’t rate home environment as much of a budget priority.

The furniture was functional and worn; the walls carried generic corporate promo artwork from what looked like a string of different employers. A window gave them a view of what must be an identical apartment building twenty meters away across an alley.

Sevgi breathed in relief.

“You got matching genetic trace?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Rovayo pointed, and all around the room tiny scuffs of transparent red lit up on the furniture and fittings. “He was definitely here. Used the place for a couple of days at least.”

Marsalis went to the window and peered out. “Any sightings? Eyewitnesses?”

The female Rim detective frowned. “Not much from witnesses, no. These blocks are purpose-built for immigrant labor. Tenant turnover’s high, and people keep pretty much to themselves. There’s some security video from the corridors, but not much of that, either. It looks like he took out most of the surveillance equipment in the building right after he got here. They didn’t get around to fixing it for a couple of weeks.”

“Pretty standard,” Marsalis muttered.

“Yeah, right,” Coyle growled. “And I suppose you don’t got immigrant labor slums in the Euro-fucking-Union.”

The black man flickered a glance at him.

“I was talking about the surveillance takedown. Pretty standard urban penetration procedure.”

“Oh.”

“You want to see some of what we did get?” Rovayo asked. She was already gesturing a viewpatch screen into existence on the empty air. Marsalis shrugged and shifted from the window.

“Sure. Can’t hurt.”

So they all watched at a foreshortening camera angle as Merrin walked gaunt and hollow-eyed through the lobby, stared thoughtfully up at the lens for a moment, and then walked on again. Sevgi, watching Marsalis as well, thought she saw the black man stiffen slightly as Merrin seemed to look up at them all from the screen. She wasn’t sure what he saw there to tighten him like that; maybe just a worthy opponent. For her, the moment flip-flopped abruptly in her head, Merrin looking up, the corpse of Joey Driscoll looking down, corpse and killer, little windows opening out of time to let the dead and destructive peer in. Fucking virtual formats. Copied worlds, no place for anything but ghosts and the machine perfection of the ’faces drifting between, administering it all with the inhuman competence of angels.

She wondered suddenly if that was what the paradise the imams talked about would be like. Ghosts and angels, and no place for anything human or warm.

“We’ve got a problem here,” she said to dispel the sudden, creeping sense of doom. “If this is how Merrin got off
Horkan’s Pride,
then—”

“Yeah.” Coyle finished it for her. “How does he end up at Ward BioSupply the same afternoon, painting the dock with Ulysses Ward’s blood?”

“More important than
how,
“ said Marsalis quietly. “You might want to wonder
why?
“

Coyle and Rovayo shared a look. Sevgi wrote the subtitles.
Who knows why the fuck an unluck twist does anything?
She wasn’t sure if Marsalis caught it, too.

Norton cleared his throat. “Ward
was
out there. The satellite footage and the filed sub plans prove it.

We’ve assumed that was coincidence, his bad luck he happened to be in the region. He rescued Merrin from the wreck and got murdered for his kindness.”

“Big assumption,” said Marsalis, less quietly.

“We didn’t assume anything.” Irritable tiredness in Rovayo’s voice. Now that Sevgi thought about it, neither of the Rim cops looked as if they’d had a lot of sleep recently. “We ran background checks on Ward at the time. COLIN-approved security n-djinn. There’s no evidence of a link to Merrin, or Mars generally.”

“There is now. Maybe you just didn’t dig deep enough.”

Coyle bristled. “What the fuck do you know about it? You some kind of cop all of a sudden?”

“Some kind of, yeah.”

“Marsalis, you’re full of shit. You’re a licensed hit man at best, and from what I hear you weren’t even very good at that. They bailed your ass out of a Florida jail for this job, right?”

Marsalis smiled faintly.

“We’ll go back to Ward,” Rovayo said quickly. She’d stepped subtly into the space between the two men, body language a blend of backing Coyle up and defusing the situation. Sevgi made it as instinctive—you couldn’t brawl in a virtuality, but Rovayo seemed to have forgotten where they were.

“We’ll change the protocols, maybe run it through a different n-djinn. We’ll go deeper until we find the link. Now, it’s a given that they knew each other. So it’s probably a safe bet that Ward went out there with the specific intention of bringing Merrin back.”

Coyle nodded. “Only Merrin won’t play ball. He doesn’t show, after what’s happened to him in transit from Mars, he doesn’t trust Ward or anybody else who’s in on this thing. And Ward has a limited window before Filigree Steel shows up; he doesn’t have time to search the hull for the guy he’s supposed to be collecting.”

“Or,” offered Rovayo, “Ward climbs down into the hull and when he sees the mess, he freaks and runs.”

“Yeah, could work that way, too.” Coyle grimaced. “Either way, Merrin finds his own way out, then goes looking for Ward anyway. You know what that sounds like to me? Revenge.”

Sevgi turned to look at Marsalis. “That make sense to you?”

“Well, you know us thirteens.” Marsalis glanced across at Coyle. He burlesqued a caricature Jesusland drawl. “We’re all
real
irrational when someone pisses us off.”

Coyle shrugged it off. “Yeah. What I heard.”

“Merrin’s just endured seven months in transit,” Norton pointed out. “He’s had to resort to cannibalism to survive. All because someone messed up his cryocap thaw. If he blamed Ward for that—”

“Or if Alicia here is right, and Ward did freak and run—” Coyle gestured. “Come on, however you look at it, this twi… this guy isn’t going to be in the most forgiving of moods. This is payback, pure and simple.”

“Marsalis.” Sevgi tried again. “I asked you what you think. You want to answer my question?”

He met her eyes. Face unreadable. “What do I think? I think we’re wasting our time here.”

Coyle snorted. Rovayo laid a hand on his arm. The black man barely looked in their direction. He took a step across the virtual apartment, faced the screen where Merrin was locked in freeze frame walking away, slipping out of the security camera’s angle of capture.

“He was clear,” he said slowly. “He’d beaten your half-arsed private sector security effort, he’d left them puking their guts up exactly as planned. He’d run rings around them, misdirected everyone’s attention, and then disappeared into local population, just the way he was trained. Going back for Ward meant exposing himself, coming out into the open again.” A long, speculative stare across at Coyle. “When you’re operational in enemy territory, you don’t take risks like that for some kind of revenge kick.”

“Sure,” said Coyle. “Your kind, you’d just let that be. Let the people who abandoned you out there in space get away with it.”

“Who said anything about getting away with it?” Marsalis grinned unpleasantly. “My
kind
know how to wait, cudlip. My
kind
would let the people who did this live with the knowledge that we’re coming, let them wake up every day knowing—”

“What did you call me?” It had taken Coyle a moment or two to grasp the unfamiliar insult he’d just been handed.

“You heard me.”

“Will you two knock it off,” snapped Sevgi. “Marsalis, you’re saying this isn’t revenge. Then what is it?”

“I don’t know what it is,” the black man said irritably. “I’m not Merrin, and contrary to what our friend here thinks, not everyone with a variant thirteen geneprint thinks exactly alike.”

Norton stepped into the breach. “No, but you were trained similarly, and that must count for something.

You say his training wouldn’t allow an impulse of revenge. What would it dictate in this situation?”

“Maybe he just needed to shut Ward up,” Rovayo said. “Cover his retreat. If Ward talked—”

Sevgi shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. Ward isn’t far enough up the chain of command. Self-made biosupply magnates don’t swing the weight to get things done on Mars, even in California. If Ward was a part of this, he was a small cog. They hired him to fish Merrin out of the Pacific and hand him on. End of function. He didn’t know anything that he hadn’t already been told.”

“Right,” said Coyle slowly. “But he must have known his chain of command, or at least his nearest contact. We’re looking at this the wrong way around. Merrin didn’t go to Ward to shut him up, he went to make him talk. To get the names of the people who were giving the orders.”

Norton looked suddenly hopeful. “You think Merrin got his hit list out of Ward?”

“Unlikely.” Marsalis prowled the virtual apartment like someone looking for a hidden exit somewhere high up. “The way Merrin’s been hopping the border back and forth, he’s working off either partial or sequential knowledge. Whatever he got out of Ward, it wasn’t his hit list.”

“Or maybe just not the whole list,” said Norton hopefully. “Maybe Ward had the first couple of names.”

“There are no links from Ward to Whitlock,” Rovayo pointed out.

“Or Montes,” said Coyle.

Norton sighed. “Right. Or any of the Jesusland kills, as far as we can tell. Shame, it would have been nice to find ourselves getting somewhere for a change.”

“Yeah, well, for that you’ve got to be looking in the right place.” Marsalis gestured around the apartment.

“And like I said before, we’re wasting our time here.”

Coyle’s lip curled. “Then perhaps you’d care to tell us how we could more profitably employ that time.”

“Outside of going back to the altiplano and coming down hard on Manco Bambarén?” A shrug. Marsalis caught Sevgi’s eye, clashed gazes like swords. “Well, you could start by asking yourselves why this corpse shows up now, all of a sudden, just as we’re cracking the ice off the
familias
. You could wonder why it’s taken nearly six months for someone to go sniffing around the aquaculture environs of the crash site—”

“Who the fuck is Bambarén?” Rovayo wanted to know. She shuttled a glance between Norton and Sevgi. Sevgi shook her head wearily.
Don’t ask
.

Meanwhile, Coyle’s sneer had made it to a full-blown grin. “The reason it’s taken
four
months to find this corpse—fucked-up, gene-enhanced paranoia aside—is that the outfit that run routine maintenance on Ward BioSupply’s deep-water platforms are mobile contractors with a biannual contract. Daskeen Azul. They’re based out of a co-op factory raft called
Bulgakov’s Cat,
and they come by here just about every six months to do the work. They just got here.”

“You think I’m paranoid?” asked Marsalis, with the same gentle smile he’d used on Coyle earlier.

The big Rim cop snorted. “Are you shitting me? You people were fucking
designed
paranoid, Marsalis.”

Norton cleared his throat. “I think—”

“Nah, let’s just lay this out where we can all see it.” Coyle jabbed a finger at the thirteen. “In case you missed it, Marsalis, I don’t like your kind. I don’t like what you are, and I don’t think you should be walking around in public without a wolf-trap cuff on. But that’s not my call.”

“No, it’s not,” said Norton. “So why don’t we—”

“I’m not done yet.”

Marsalis watched the Rim cop quietly. Measuring, Sevgi realized. He was measuring the other man.

“This is a Rim States police investigation,” Coyle said. “Not some black ops slaughter ground out in the Middle East. We’re in the business of catching criminals, not murdering them—”

“Yes. You don’t seem to have caught Merrin yet, though, do you?”

Coyle bared his teeth. “Cute. No, we haven’t caught this one yet. But we will. And when we do—”

“Roy.” It was the first time Sevgi could remember hearing Rovayo use her partner’s first name. “Crank it down, huh?”

“No, Al, I’m sick of the assumptions here. This has got to be said.” Coyle looked pointedly at Sevgi and Norton on his way back to staring down the thirteen. “If your COLIN masters here decide they want Merrin summarily executed when we’ve done our job and brought him in, well then I guess we’ll come to you for your professional expertise. Meantime, why don’t you just curb your fucking twi… gene-enhanced tendencies and let us work?”

Wall of silence. The last of the words seemed to hit it like pebbles off evercrete. It was a space, Sevgi realized with syn-sharpened surety, that outside virtual would have filled with violence the way blood rises to fill a wound. Marsalis and the Rim cop were wired eye-to-eye, like nothing else existed around them. She caught something in Rovayo’s face she couldn’t define. The other woman seemed locked up, an impossible step away from doing something. Norton wavered, helpless exasperation in the way he twitched. And she, Sevgi, watching the situation decay like—