Black Man (56 page)

“I didn’t say you had a choice.”

Something moved in her eyes, the way she breathed. The smile floated back onto her face, but this time it was the adrenal veil, the prelude to fight-or-flight. She telegraphed it to him with an odd, careless abandon that was curiously like the offer of open arms. Abruptly he wasn’t very sure that he’d be able to take her.

He cleared his throat. “That’s very good. How’d you do that?”

“Practice.” The smile went away again, pocketed for later use. “Are we going to talk, or are you going to get all genetic on me?”

He thought back to Nevant. Broken glass and blood. The nighttime streets of Istanbul, walking back to Moda andHe put a tourniquet on it, twisted hard. Grimaced. “What do you want to talk about?”

“How about I hand you this case in a bento box?”

“I told you already I’m not a cop. And anyway, why would you do that? Last time I checked, you were playing on Manco Bambarén’s team.”

He was watching her face. No flicker on the name.

“The people I work for hung me out to dry,” she said. “You want to ask yourself why I left you and Merrin to fight it out?”

He shrugged. “Off the sinking ship in your little rat life vest. I assume.”

“You assume wrong.”

“Want to back that up? You know, with evidence?”

“Right here.” She patted her jacket pocket. “We’ll get to it in a moment. First, why don’t you play back the fight in starboard loading for me. Think it through.”

“I think I’d rather just see this evidence.”

A thin smile. “You knock me down, take the others back inside, and use their numbers against them.”

She mimed a pistol grip. “You take Huang’s sharkpunch, use it on him and Scotty, that’s Osborne to you, the Jesusland kid. So I hear both of them go down while I’m still on the floor, but that’s all it takes me to get back on my feet and there you are, mixing it up with Merrin and all that Mars-side
tanindo
shit. Now, you really think I didn’t have time to swing back in there and pull you off him? Come on, Marsalis. Work the gray matter. I had all the time in the world, and keeping Merrin alive was my job.”

Hairline crack of unease. “Keeping Merrin alive?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Someone paid you to shadow him?”

“Shadow him?” She raised an elegant eyebrow. “No, just get him aboard the
Cat
. Hook up with Daskeen Azul and keep him there, look after him until further notice.”

The crack ran out, split wide, from unease to splintering confusion.

“You’re saying… you’re telling me Merrin’s been locked down on
Bulgakov’s Cat
the last four months?

He hasn’t been anywhere else?”

“Sure. Took us about a week to get him there from Ward’s place, but since then? Yeah. Just a handling gig. Why?”

The quarry face of what he knew blew up. Detonated from within, multiple blasts in the thin Martian air and the building roar after, rock shattering and slumping, sliding down itself into rubble and dust. He glimpsed the new face of what was behind, the new surface exposed.

Onbekend’s face.

The trace familiarity about the features, the certainty he knew them from somewhere, had seen them before or features very like them.

Rovayo’s voice floated back through his head.
This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good
.

Yeah, he was. You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.

Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.

The enormity of it towered above him like the sky.

I’ve seen data,
said Sevgi, the first day he met her,
that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometers apart on the same day, eyewitness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories are true
. Sevgi in the prison interview room. He remembered the scent of her as she spoke and his throat locked up. Her voice ran on, wouldn’t get out of his head.
Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo-deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City
.

The idiot pattern of the murders. Death in the Bay Area, then Texas and beyond, and then back to the Rim all over again, months later. No sense to the double-back, unless…

Unless…

“Onbekend,” he said tightly. “Do you know him?”

“Heard the name.” Amused quirk in the corner of her mouth. “But it means—”

“I know what it means. Are you working with anyone who has that name?”

“No. I was working with a guy called Emil Nocera, and with Ulysses Ward, before Merrin went genetic and slaughtered them both. After that, I used Scotty to ride shotgun and pulled some contacts elsewhere.”

“What contacts?”

“Just contacts. No one I see any reason to hand over to you. They’re peripheral, they don’t count. Rimside plug-ins for the people who hired me.”

Carl thought back to the boy with the machete, the gibbering religious abuse.

“You sold Osborne some story about me?”

“Not as such.” Ren looked suddenly tired. “I told him Merrin was the, what do you call it, the second coming? Christ returned and hiding because a black man was out there, coming to do him harm. Mix-and-match imagery, cooked it up from what I knew about Jesusland ideology and the way Osborne was rambling.”

Very Christ-like,
he remembered saying when he saw Merrin’s file photo.
Very Faith Satellite Channel
.

He nodded. “I can see how that would work.”

“Yeah, well. Jesuslander, you know. Seemed like a nice enough kid deep down, but you know what that old-time religion will do. Wasn’t hard to sell him the concept, half those people live their whole fucking lives waiting for their Savior to show up. They’d jump at the chance for a walk-on role.” She shrugged, perfectly. “Plus, he was hot for me and concussed from a smack in the head he got from Merrin in the fight at Ward’s place. Poor little fucker never stood a chance.”

“So I’m the black man.”

She pulled a face. “Yeah, you just showed up and fit the role a little too well.”

“Tell me about.” Carl stirred through his recollections again, the fight in the nighttime mall. “You didn’t send him after me then?”

“No, that was all his idea.” Ren’s tone was sour. “Thought it up all on his own, and I wasn’t there to stop him. Wasn’t for that, we might all have gotten off the
Cat
quietly while RimSec were still clumping about up on deck trying to lock us down.”

“You have any idea why you were supposed to bodyguard Merrin?”

“None. I’m strictly for hire. Got the word he’d be coming in, emergency splashdown, and Ward goes out to collect. My end was just keep him safe for a few months, they were going to need him later. We were going to do that at Ward’s place, but it seems Merrin had a few trust issues after what he went through aboard
Horkan’s Pride
.”

“Yeah. Understandable. So how’d you talk him down?”

“Initially?” Ren grinned. “With ninjutsu.”

“And after that?”

The grin stayed. “How do you think?”

“Really? Osborne
and
Merrin? How’d you make that work?”

Another elegant shift of the gray-fleeced shoulders. “Playing handmaiden to Christ, I get to do what I like in Scotty’s eyes. Or at least, he sells it to himself that way as long as he can, because he doesn’t want the rest of it to go away. Maybe that’s what really went wrong when you showed up. Who can tell?”

“And Merrin?”

“Well, I’d say Merrin never quite came back from that ride he took home on
Horkan’s Pride
. I’d been bracing myself for all the usual arrogant thirteen bullshit when he arrived.” She shook her head. “Not much sign of it. I wouldn’t say he was broken, but I’m not sure he ever straightened out what was really going on. I rammed it home that if he made waves, he was just going to blow cover, and I guess he was smart enough to take that much in. He had covert training, right?”

“Yeah. Field experience, too.”

“So. Something to hang on to, I guess.”

Carl felt the sequence of the fight rise up in his mind again. Slurred
tanindo,
the slack, not-quite-committed feel to the moves, the lack of force. Almost as if Merrin were still half back on Mars and living a lesser gravitational pull. As if he’d never really made it home after all.

“So,
you
had any field experience?” he asked Ren.

“Not as such.”

“Not as such, huh?” Carl glanced out across the bay to Marin. The light was almost gone now. “Who the fuck are you, Ren?”

“That’s not what matters here.”

“I think it is.”

She stared at him for a couple of seconds in the gloom. Put together a throwaway gesture.

“I’m just some guy they hired.”

“Just some guy. Right. With ninjutsu technique good enough to beat an ex-Lawman. Try again. Who are you?”

“Look, it’s simple. Forget whatever skills I picked up on my way around the Pacific Rim. I got hired here, in California, to do a handling job, because that’s what I do. I did my job, I handled the mess when Merrin boiled over, and I kept him covered. Then, when the heat got turned up high again, my scumbag client cut me loose. And now I’m looking for payback.”

“I thought you were here to help.”

“I am. My payback is handing you the people who cut me loose.”

“Not good enough.”

“I’m sorry, it’ll have to do.”

“Then go peddle your grudge to someone else.”

He turned his back and leaned on the seaward wall. Stared at the lights out across the water, tried hard not to think of Istanbul, and failed. Under certain superficial differences, the two cities shared an essence you couldn’t evade. Both freighted with the same distilled dream of shoreline, hills, and suspension spans, the same hazy sunlit air and rumble by day, the same glimmer on water at evening as ferries crisscrossed the gloom and traffic flowed in skeins of red and pale gold light across the bridges and through the street-lamp-studded veins of the city. What was in the air there was here as well, and he felt it catching in his throat.

He heard her boots move behind him. Footfalls on evercrete, closing the gap. He looked out at the glimmer of lights.

“Kind of careless tonight, aren’t you?’ She draped her arms on the wall, mimicked his posture about a meter off to his left.

He shrugged, didn’t look at her. “I figure if you want to feed me some information, it doesn’t pay you to take me out. You were going to do that, you would have done it awhile ago.”

“Fair analysis. Still a risk, though.”

“I’m not feeling very risk-averse right now.”

“Yeah, but you’re being fucking choosy about who you take your leads from. Mind telling me why?”

He tipped a glance at her.

“How about because I don’t trust you any farther than I would a Jesusland preacher with a choirboy?

You’re handing me what looks like half a solution, Ren. And it doesn’t match up with what I already know. To me, that stinks of deflection. You want me to believe you’re really ready to sell out your boss?

Tell me who you are.”

Quiet. The city breathed. Reflected light trembled across the water.

“I’m like you,” she said.

“You’re a variant?”

She squinted at the blade of her outstretched hand. “That’s right. Harbin black lab product. Nothing but the best.”

“You some kind of bonobo then?”

“No, I am not some kind of fucking bonobo.” There were a couple of grams of genuine anger in the way her voice lifted. “I had sex with Merrin and Scotty for
my
operational benefit, not because I couldn’t keep my hands off them.”

“Well, you know what?” He kept his voice at a drawl, not really sure why he was pushing, just some vague intuitive impulse to feed the anger and keep Ren off balance. “The real bonobo females, the pygmy chimps in Africa? That’s what they do a lot of the time, too. Fuck to calm the males down, keep them in line. I guess you could call that operational benefit, from a social point of view.”

She got off the wall and faced him.

“I’m a fucking thirteen, Marsalis. A thirteen, just like you. Got that?”

“Bullshit. They never built a female thirteen.”

“Right. Tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.”

She stood a meter off, and he saw her force the anger back down, iron it out of her stance, and put it away. Shiver of unlooked-for fellow feeling as he watched it happen. She leaned on the wall again, and her voice came out cool and conversational.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Marsalis, to wonder why Project Lawman failed so spectacularly? Has it occurred to you that just maybe cramming gene-enhanced male violent tendency into a gene-enhanced male chassis is overloading the donkey a little?”

Carl shook his head. “No, that hasn’t occurred to me. I was there when Lawman blew apart. What went wrong was that thirteens don’t like to do what they’re told, and as soon as the normal constraints come off, they stop doing it. You can’t make good soldiers out of thirteens. It’s that simple.”

“Yeah, like I said. Overloading the donkey.”

“Or just misunderstanding the concept of soldier.” He brooded on the outline of the Marin Headlands against the sky, watched the neat, corpuscular flow of red dotted lights funneling off the bridge and into a fold in the darkened hills. “Anyway, speaking of soldiering, if Harbin put you together, gave you the genes and the ninjutsu, I’ve got to assume that means you belong to Department Two.”

He thought she maybe shivered a little. “Not anymore.”

“Care to explain that?”

“Hey, you asked who I was. No one said anything about a full fucking résumé.”

He found he was smiling in the gloom. “Just sketch it out for me. Bare bones, enough to convince. One thing I don’t intend to be is a cat’s paw for the Chinese security services.”