Black Man (25 page)

He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neo-Nordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something—his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism—or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.

Instead he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-djinn’s dreams.

The ’face had left him to his chair—a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him—and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place—at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three meters tall, two broad, and angled slightly backward at the base a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the djinn’s upheld arm. Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn’s unhuman associative processes.

He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognizable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of
Horkan’s Pride,
face unreadable.

Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.

Saw him request a lateral vision port unshuttered, the ships’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms on either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.

Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.

Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray.

Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matte-textured metal of a bulkhead.

Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.

Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.

There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn’t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard
Felipe Souza,
the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he’d been assured—
no really, it’s true, it’s in the programming—
was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.

Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn’t aware of letting show, a need he didn’t know he had.

Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.

Maybe it
was
what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.

He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.

The floating blue shredded figure returned.

“There is this,” it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her—just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in postrevival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.

“…not again,” she pleaded vaguely.

Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking—to yourself, for sanity’s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening—speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.

“Again, yes,” Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. “The cormorant’s legacy.”

The image froze.

“Cormorant,” said Carl, memory flexing awake.

“Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions,” said the djinn. “An association suggests itself. According to data from Wells region work camp rotations on Mars, both you and Merrin were acquainted with Robert P. Danvers, sin 84437hp3535. Yaroshanko-form extrapolation from this connects you both through Danvers to the Martian
familias andinas,
and, integrating with the term
cormorant
used here, with high probability to the sin-disputed identity Franklin Gutierrez.”

Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he’d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides.

“Well, well, well,” he said at last. “Gutierrez.”

“Never heard of him.”

Norton, preparing to be unimpressed. He was standing, close enough to Carl for it to be a challenge.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Carl agreed. He brushed past Norton, went to the office window, and stared out at the view. Smashed autumn sunlight lay across the East River in metallic patches, like some kind of chemical slick. “Franklin Gutierrez used to be a datahawk in Lima back in the mideighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In ’86, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution. It took them nearly a month to even realize he’d done it.”

Norton grunted. “Couldn’t have been that immaculate, if he ended up on Mars.”

Carl fought down a sudden urge to remove Norton’s vocal cords with his bare hands. He summoned patience from within, Sutherland style.
Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead
. He focused on the details of the view below. COLIN New York, perhaps in conscious locational echo of the UN territory, stood a couple of long blocks south of Jefferson Park, vaulted and cantilevered over FDR

Drive and looking out across the river. It was a fractal tumbling of structure that recalled nothing so much as a handful of abandoned segments from a huge peeled orange. Thin white nanocarb spidered over curves and angles of smoked amber glass, then swept down to brace elegantly amid the multi-level array of carefully tended walkways, paths, and gardens that linked each section into the whole site. You could stand here in the vaulted open-plan office suite Ertekin and Norton shared and look down across the whole thing, the gardens, the jutting edge of the mezzanine, and the river beyond. Carl’s gaze reeled back out to the water, and he suffered a sudden resurgence of a feeling from his first days back on Earth eight years ago, a time when the sight of any large body of water came as an abrupt, visceral shock.

Time with the
Horkan’s Pride
n-djinn had stirred him up, left him choppy and bleak with old memories.

So much for looking beyond.

“Yeah, they caught up with Gutierrez,” he said neutrally. “But they caught him spending the money, not stealing it. Keep that in mind. This guy had his weak points, but getting away with the game wasn’t one of them.”

“So they offered him resettlement?” Ertekin asked.

“Yeah, and he took it. You ever seen the inside of a Peruvian jail?” Carl left the broad roofward sweep of the window, turned back into the office and his new colleagues. “He ended up in Wells, running atmospheric balance systems for the Uplands Initiative. When he wasn’t doing that, he handled datacrime for the Martian
familias andinas
. I think it paid better than the day job.”

Norton shook his head. “If this Gutierrez has links with Mars organized crime, then we’ve already run him and his association with Merrin.”

“No, you haven’t.”

A swapped glance between Norton and Sevgi Ertekin. Norton sighed. “Look, Marsalis. One of the first things this investigation did was to—”

“Contact the Colony police, and ask them to run a list of associates for Merrin on Mars. Right.” Carl nodded. “Yeah. Makes sense, I’d have done the same. Just that it wouldn’t do any good. If Gutierrez had dealings with Merrin, they’re gone now, wiped off the flow like shit off a baby’s arse. All you’ll be left with is some minor association with a low-level middleman like Danvers. And men like Danvers rub shoulders with practically everyone who’s ever worked the Wells camps anyway. In other words, your business transaction is invisible. That’s how it works when Gutierrez does something for you.”

“And you know this how?”

He shrugged. “How do you think?”

“Gutierrez did something for you,” Ertekin said quietly. “What was it?”

“Something I’m not going to talk to you about. The point is, in dataflow terms, my connection with Gutierrez no longer exists, and neither does Merrin’s. Any associative search Colony ran on Merrin would have stopped at Danvers. The
Horkan’s Pride
n-djinn only went farther because it didn’t like the coincidence of two thirteens both making it back from Mars under uncommon circumstances
and
both having a separate, unrelated connection with a low-grade fence like Danvers. That’s Yaroshanko intuition for you. Very powerful when it works, but it needs something to triangulate off.”

“I still don’t see,” said Norton irritably, “how that gives you this Gutierrez.”

“On its own, it doesn’t. But the recollections the n-djinn has of Merrin include a couple of references to a cormorant.”

Norton nodded. “Yeah, we saw that first time around.
The cormorant legacy, leavings of the cormorant, wring that fucking cormorant’s neck
. We had our own reference n-djinns go over it.

Checked out Martian slang, and got nothing—”

“No, it’s not a Martian term.”

“Might be now,” Ertekin pointed out. “You’ve been back awhile. Anyway, we backed up into Project Lawman usage and thirteen argot in general. We still got nothing.”

“It’s Limeño.”

Norton blinked. “Excuse me?”

“It’s a Lima underground term. Pretty obscure, and old. Your n-djinn probably would have discounted it as irrelevant. Goes back to the early seventies, which is when Gutierrez was a young gun on the Andes coast datahawk circuit. Have you heard of
ukai
?”

Blank looks.

“Okay,
ukai
is a form of fishing where you use trained cormorants to bring up your fish. It’s originally from Japan, but it got big in the Peruvian Japanese community about fifty years back when the whole designer-breeding thing really took off.
Ukai
is done at night, and the cormorants dive with a ring on their throat that stops them from swallowing the fish. They get fed when they bring the catch back to their handler. See the imagery?”

“Contracted datahawking.” Ertekin’s eyes lit up with the connection. “The
familias andinas
.”

“Yeah. In those days the
familias
here on Earth were still a force to be reckoned with. Anyone starting out as a hawk on the South Pacific coast worked for the
familias,
or they didn’t work at all. You might end up a big-name
halcon de datos
. But you started life as a
cormoran
.”

Ertekin was nodding now. “Including Gutierrez.”

“Including Gutierrez,” he agreed, and something sparked between them as he echoed her words. “Later he got his rep, got his own gigs. Got caught.”

“And when he got to Mars, he found the
familias
waiting for him all over again.”

“Right. It’s like stepping back in time half a century there. The
familias
have a hold they haven’t had on Earth for decades. Apparently Gutierrez had to go right back into
ukai
work. Back to being a cormorant.” Carl spread his hands, case-closed style. “He bitched to me about it all the time.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d do the same with Merrin,” Norton said.

“Yeah, it does. Gutierrez had a thing about thirteens. A lot of people do on Mars, there’s a whole fetish subculture dedicated to it. It’s like the bonobo fan clubs here. Gutierrez was a fully paid-up member, fascinated by the whole thing. He had this pet analogy he liked to draw, between the thirteens and the Lima datahawks. Both supermen in their own right, both feared and hated by the herd because of it.”

Norton snorted. “Supermen. Right.”

“Well, it was his theory,” Carl said evenly. “Not mine. Point is, he went on and on about being reduced back to
ukai
status, about how I could understand that shit because of who I was, because of
what
I was. And he would have laid exactly the same line off on Merrin.”

“So.” Norton broke it up, stepped into the flood of light. “We call Colony, tell them to bring Gutierrez in and lean on him.”

Carl snorted. “Yeah, lean on him from a couple of hundred million kilometers away. Ten-minute coms lag each way. That interrogation, I want to watch.”

“I didn’t say we’d lean on him, I said Colony would.”

“Colony couldn’t lean on a fucking wall. Forget it. What happens on Mars doesn’t play this end. It’s not a human distance.”

Ertekin sank deeper into her chair, bridged her hands, and stared across the office. Light from the tall window fell in on her like the luminous sifting sunset rains on Mars. Carl’s woken memories came and kicked him in the chest again.

“If the
familias andinas
helped get Merrin out of Mars,” she said slowly, and mostly to herself, “then they could be helping him at this end as well.”

“Not the South American chapters,” Carl observed. “They’ve had a war with the Martian
familias
for decades. Well, a
state
of war anyway. They wouldn’t be cooperating with anything at the Mars end.”

Ertekin shook her head. “They wouldn’t have to be. I’m thinking about the Jesusland
familias,
and what’s left of them in the Rim. They pay lip service to the altiplano heritage, but that’s about it. This far north, they run their own game, and a lot of it’s human-traffic-related. I mean, the Rim squashed them pretty fucking flat after Secession, ripped their markets with the drug law changes, the open biotech policies.

Sex slaves and fence-hopping’s about all they had to fall back on. But they’re still out there, just like they’re still here. And in between, in the Republic, they still swing a hell of a lot of old-time weight.”

She brooded for a while.

“Yeah, okay. They’ve got the human-traffic software Merrin would have needed to get in and out of the Rim like that. Maybe they’ve got something going on with the Martian chapters, some kind of deal that gets them this Gutierrez’s services. The question is
why?
What’s their end of something like this? Where’s the benefit?”

“You think,” Norton ventured, “these are
familia
—sanctioned hits he’s carrying out?”

“They bring a thirteen all the way back from Mars to do their contract killing for them?” Ertekin scowled.

“Doesn’t make much sense.
Sicarios
are a dollar a dozen in every major Republican city. Prisons are full of them.”

Norton flickered a glance at Carl. “Well, that’s true.”

“No, this has to be something else.” Ertekin looked up at Carl. “You said this Gutierrez did something for you on Mars. Can we assume you had a working relationship with the
familias
as well?”

“I dealt with them on and off, yeah.”

“Care to speculate on why they’d do this?” She was still looking. Tawny flakes in the iris of her eyes.

Carl shrugged. “Under any normal circumstances, I’d say they wouldn’t. The
familias
run an old-time macho, conservative setup, here and on Mars. They’ve got all the standard prejudices against people like me.”

“But?”

“But. Several years ago, I ran into a thirteen who tried to forge an alliance with what’s left of the altiplano chapters. Guy called Nevant, French, ex-Department Eight Special Insertion Unit. Very smart guy, he was an insurrection specialist in Central Asia. Warlord liaison, counterintelligence, all that shit. Given time, he might have gotten something working up there, too.”

“Might have,” drawled Norton. “So it’s safe to say he wasn’t given time.”

“No. He wasn’t.”

“What happened to him?”

Carl smiled bleakly. “I happened to him.”

“Did you kill him?” Ertekin asked sharply.

“No. I tracked him to some friends he had in Arequipa, pulled the Haag gun on him, and he put his hands in the air sooner than die.”

“Bit unusual for a thirteen, isn’t it?” Norton cranked an eyebrow. “Giving up like that?”

Carl matched the raised brow, deadpan. “Like I said, he’s a smart guy.”

“Okay, so you busted this Nevant, this smart guy, and you took him back.” Ertekin got to her feet and went to stare out the window. He guessed she could see where this was going. “So where is he now?”

“Back in the system. Eurozone Internment Tract, eastern Anatolia.”

“And you want to go and talk to him there.” It wasn’t a question.

“I think that’ll be more effective than a v-link or a phone call, yes.”

“Will he see you?” Still she didn’t turn around.

“Well, he doesn’t have to,” Carl admitted. “The Eurozone internment charter guarantees his right to refuse external interviews. If this were an official UNGLA investigation, we could maybe bring some pressure to bear, but on my own I don’t carry that kind of weight. But you know, I think he’ll see me anyway.”

“You basing that on anything at all?” asked Norton.

“Yeah, previous experience.” Carl hesitated. “We, uh, get on.”

“I see. A few years ago you bust the guy, send him back to a lifetime in the Turkish desert, and as a result you’re the best of friends?”

“Anatolia isn’t a desert,” said Ertekin absently, still at the window.

“I didn’t say we were the best of friends, I said we get on. After I busted him, we had to kill a few days in Lima, waiting for transfer clearances. Nevant likes to talk, and I’m a pretty good listener. We both—”

A phone chirruped from Norton’s desk on the other side of the office. He shot a last glance at Carl, then strode across to answer the call. Ertekin turned from the window and nailed Carl with a mistrustful look of her own.

“You think I should let you back across the Atlantic at this point?”

Carl shrugged. “Do what you like. You want to pursue another line of inquiry, be my guest and dig one up. But Nevant’s the obvious lead, and I don’t think he’ll talk to me in virtual, because a virtual identity can be faked. Tell the truth, I wouldn’t trust it in his place, either. Us genetic throwbacks don’t like advanced technology, you know.”

He caught the momentary twitch of her mouth before she locked the smile reflex down. Norton came back from the phone call, and the moment slid away. The COLIN exec’s face was grim.

“Want to guess?” he asked.