Black Man (60 page)

“Yeah, right here in the Bay Area.” Marsalis whistled long and low, mock concerned. “Just a little too close for comfort, right, Jeff?”

“So you made the call,” Norton said flatly.

“All right, yes, I made the fucking call!”

Marsalis grunted. “And it all comes grinding to a halt. Onbekend on hold, at least until he finds out if Ortiz is going to live or die.”

“It was right after Whitlock you called me,” Norton realized suddenly. “Suggested I get Marsalis out of Jesusland and hire him. What was that, just a little added pressure, keep Onbekend on his toes?”

Amazement on the black man’s face. “
You
got me out of South Florida State, Jeff? I owe
you
for that?”

A chuckle broke out of him. “Oh man, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I got sick of waiting,” Jeff snapped, voice tight with sudden, puny fury. “A week after I called the Houston crew and nothing. I didn’t know anything about them, how good they’d be—”

“They weren’t very good,” said Marsalis somberly.

“Yeah, well, I thought maybe they’d gotten caught at the fence, trying to get into the Union. Or maybe just faded with the cash and walked. I had no fucking way of knowing, Tom. I was scared. I knew you wouldn’t bring UNGLA in, I tried to persuade you, thought maybe that’d scare Ortiz into pulling the plug.

But you wouldn’t do it.” Jeff looked across at Marsalis. “I thought maybe he’d scare Ortiz instead.”

Norton saw the black man walk to the desk and pick up a paperweight Jeff had brought back from a trip to England when he and Megan were first married. He weighed it in his hand.

“There’s just a couple more things I’d like to know, Jeff,” he said absently. “Then we’re done.”

“Yeah?” Jeff tugged at his drink. Grimaced as it went down. “What’s that?”

“Ren. She didn’t know anything about Onbekend. Where does she come into this?”

“No. She’s freelance, we’ve used her in the past. I pulled her in because we needed someone who knows the Rim systems. Ortiz wanted to keep the Merrin end of things separate from the rest.”

“And Daskeen Azul. They’re your people?”

A shrug. “Associates. You know how it works, Human Cost did them some favors in the past, they owed us.”

“So who sent them up to find that corpse in the nets? You?”

Jeff shook his head. “Onbekend. He heard from down south that you and this COLIN cop were poking around. Told me to bring the denouement forward.”

Marsalis came back to the sofa, paperweight in his hand. He was frowning. “Against Ortiz’s orders?”

“Ortiz was in the hospital.” Jeff gestured wearily. “No one knew which way to jump. You ever met Onbekend?”

“Briefly.”

“Yeah, well, when he tells you to do something, you don’t argue with him.”

Marsalis hadn’t lost his frown. “And the soldiers?”

“What soldiers?”

“Someone sent a uniformed death squad after Ertekin and me. They pulled us over between Cuzco and Arequipa.”

“I don’t know anything about that. Maybe someone panicked down there.”

“Bambarén,” the thirteen said softly. He crouched to Jeff’s eye level. “Do you think Manco Bambarén knows that Merrin existed? The other Merrin?”

“I don’t know Manco Bambarén from a hole in the fucking ground.” Jeff stared bitterly back at Marsalis.

He seemed completely drunk now. “How the fuck would I know what he does or doesn’t know?”

“That’s unfortunate,” said the black man softly. “Tell me, Jeff, did you set Onbekend on me when I got back from
Bulgakov’s Cat
?”

“No! That wasn’t me, I swear. Onbekend wanted you out of the picture, I think he’d maybe talked to Ortiz, but he was furious about something else anyway. I told him it was better to let things lie, but he wouldn’t listen. You don’t understand what he’s like. Once he’s decided, he doesn’t listen to anything or anyone who gets in his fucking way.”

“Right. And I don’t suppose you know where I can find him now, do you?”

Jeff knocked back the rest of his drink. Shrugged. “You guess right. Last I heard, he was on his way back to the altiplano with a shoulderful of holes from a Marstech gun.”

“You treated him here?”

“At a Human Cost walk-in clinic, yeah. Over on Carmel.”

Marsalis came smoothly back to his feet. Norton saw how the thirteen’s fingers tightened on the paperweight, saw the heft in the arm. He stepped swiftly across, blocked Marsalis body-to-body. His eyes locked with the black man’s stare.

“No,” he said, very quietly. “Please.”

Marsalis stood coiled. His voice came back, also barely above a murmur. “Don’t get in my way, Norton.”

“He didn’t kill Sevgi.” Norton looked back at where Jeff sat slumped in one corner of the sofa, staring listlessly into his empty glass. He barely seemed aware of the other two men. “Look, you want to go after Onbekend, I’m with you. Ortiz, too, if that’s what you want. But this is my brother, Marsalis.”

“He’s going down anyway, Norton. He’ll do thirty years in a RimSec facility for this, minimum. I’d be doing him a favor.”

But a little of the tension seemed to drain from the thirteen’s stance. Norton raised his hand, palm-out.

The small gesture for
enough
.

“Marsalis,
please
. I’m asking you for this. He’s my fucking brother.”

Marsalis stood there locked for a moment longer. It was like facing off against a wall.

“Ortiz, and Onbekend,” he said, as if checking a list.

Norton nodded. “Whatever you need.”

And the moment passed. Marsalis let go; Norton saw it go out of him like dark water down a drain. He shrugged and lobbed the paperweight down into Jeff’s lap. Jeff jolted with the shock, dropped his empty glass, fumbled with both hands to catch the spherical ornament before it rolled to the floor.

“Fuck d’you do that for?” he mumbled.

“You’ll never know,” Marsalis told him. Then, turning away to the door, voice trailing back. “Keep him here, Norton. Don’t touch the phones, or use yours in here. We’ll need to freeze and store their whole net as it is. I’ll clean—call Rovayo from the street, get a RimSec CSI squad over here. Going to make her day—this should be enough to lever the
Cat
bust wide open all over again.”

“Right.”

He paused at the door, looked back. “And don’t forget. We’ve got an arrangement now.”

Norton listened to him walk away down the corridor. Then he turned back to face his brother. Jeff looked disinterestedly up at him.

“What now?”

Sudden, pulsing rage, up from the soles of his shoes and into the space behind his eyes. He bit it back as well as he could.

“You know,” he said, almost evenly. “I told Megan about you and Nuying.”

Jeff gaped up at him, eyes cognac-veiled and confused.

“Maybe that’s simplifying it. I guess you could say she got it out of me. Or maybe not that, either, maybe we both wanted it said and we just helped each other get it out. If I’m honest, I think she already had a pretty good idea something was going on.”

Clumsily, his brother started to get up.

“You fucking traitor,” he said thickly.

“Stay in your seat, Jeff.” Suddenly, the rage came washing up out of him, would not be contained.

“Because if you don’t,
I will fucking kill you myself
.”

And now, here it was. The moment that had been festering inside him for over two years. His brother blinking at him, like a deer staring into the headlights.

He drew in breath. He really was going to do this.

“You want to know what Megan did when she found out?” Another hard breath. “She fucked me, Jeff.

We went to some motel up near Novato, and she fucked me raw. All afternoon and night. Best sex I ever had.”

And now Jeff came flailing up out of the sofa, roaring, fists swinging. Norton blocked, twisted, and punched his brother in the side of the face. The first time he’d used his enforcement training in better than a year. It felt creakily unaccustomed, but it felt unexpectedly good as well. The blow connected solidly, put Jeff down, crawling half on the sofa, half on the floor. Norton grabbed him by the back of the collar, balled fist raised again.

And stopped.

No. You’re not Carl Marsalis.

Fist slowly unflexing, dropping away. He let go of the collar. Overpowering urge to shake himself, like a drenched dog. Instead he stepped away, leaned against the edge of his brother’s desk.

“This is going to be hard on her,” he said, still breathing unevenly. “Megan and the kids. But don’t worry.

When they send you up to Quentin Two for what you’ve done here, I’ll make sure she’s okay. I’ll take care of her.”

A low, grinding howl came up out of his brother’s throat as he propped himself up on the sofa, as if he’d swallowed broken glass. Norton felt a peculiarly comfortable calm settling into place on his shoulders.

His breathing eased.

“We’re good together, Jeff. She laughs when she’s around me. We’ll work something out.”

“Fuck you!”
Spat out like blood.

There was a timid tap at the door. Norton glanced up, surprised. “Yeah?”

The door opened and the stout Asian woman peered around the edge. “Mr. Norton, are you…?”

She stared, eyes wide.

“It’s okay,” said Norton hurriedly. “I’m Jeff’s brother, Tom. Jeff’s been under a lot of strain recently. I’m sure you’ll have noticed. It’s, uh, it’s gotten pretty bad.”

“I, uhm—”

“He really needs to be alone right now, just with family, you know. We’ve made the calls. If you could—”

“Yes, of course, uhm…” She looked across at Jeff where he now sat on the floor with his back to the sofa. Blood-flecked tissue in his nose, face smeared with tears and rage, uncapped bottle on the table in front of him. “Mr. Norton, I’m so sorry, if there’s anything at all I can do…”

Jeff Norton stared back at her.

“It’s okay, Lisa,” he said dully. “Everything’s going to be fine. Could you show my brother where we keep our medical records from the Carmel clinic.”

“Yes, of course.” Imbued with a solid purpose, Lisa seemed to grow visibly stronger again. “You’re quite sure that—”

Jeff dragged up the husk of a smile. “Quite sure, Lisa.”

He turned to look at his brother, and there was an odd note of triumph suddenly in his voice. “Go ahead, little brother. You want to see something I kept back from your thirteen friend?”

Lisa vacillated in the doorway. Norton stared at Jeff.

“This is about Onbekend?”

“Just go look, Tom.” He saw Norton’s hesitation and chuckled. “What am I going to do, make a dash for the airport while you’re gone? Seriously, go look. This is something I saved just for you. You’re going to love it.”

“It’s, uh.” Lisa gestured along the corrior. “This way.”

“Jeff, if you knew something else about Onbekend, you should have—”

“Just go fucking look, will you!”

So he went, left the door ajar and followed Lisa out into the corridor. In the doorway, he paused and turned, looked hard at his brother, pointed at him.

“You stay right there.”

Jeff snorted, rolled his eyes, and reached for the bottle of Martell.

Down the angled corridor, tracking Lisa’s stolid progress, floating behind the eyes with all that he was still trying to assimilate. He wondered vaguely if Marsalis hadn’t gone out into the street as much to clear his head as to keep the call to RimSec clean.

They were almost at the door marked carmel street clinic when the single shot slammed behind them, so flat and undramatic that at first he mistook it for the sound of the door to Jeff’s office, the exit he hadn’t bothered to close.

They had Alvaro Ortiz in a monitored convalescence suite on the newly nanobuilt upper levels at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was tagged with microdoc subdermals that would broadcast a scream to the hospital system if his life signs dipped in any way, the receptionist explained with an enthusiastic smile, and he had panic buttons in the bathroom, next to his bed, and on his wheelchair. A full crash team and a dedicated emergency room doctor were retained at all times on idle, specifically for the patients on these levels. Norton thanked her, and they went upstairs. A COLIN Security detachment was on duty outside the suite, two hard-faced men and a woman who met them out of the elevator with professional tension that evaporated when they recognized Norton. Carl let them pat him down anyway, not sure if it was his thirteen status or just procedure that made them do it. The more relaxed they were, the better.

Norton told the squad leader not to bother seeing them in, they’d be fine. Mr. Ortiz knew they were coming.

The doors to the suite hummed smoothly back and they walked through. Ortiz was in a wheelchair in the living room, parked by the floor-to-ceiling windows. He wore loose gray silk pajamas, held a book apparently forgotten in his hands, was lost instead in contemplation of the view out across the cubist thickets of the city to the park. He looked thin and breakable in the chair, the tanned face hollowed out to a worn gray, the grizzled hair gone to white in places. He didn’t appear to have heard the door open, and he didn’t turn as they stepped into view from the entryway hall. Carl wondered if he already knew why they’d come.

“Ortiz,” Norton said harshly, moving a step ahead.

Ortiz prodded at the chair’s arm controls, and it coasted silently around on the spot to face them. He smiled, a little forcedly.

“Tom Norton,” he said, as if it were a philosophical question that had been troubling him. “I’m so very sorry to hear about your brother, Tom. I’ve been meaning to call you. And Carl Marsalis, of course. I still haven’t had the chance to thank you for saving my life.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

“Ah.” Something happened to the planes of the ravaged face. “Well, I didn’t imagine that this was a social call.”

“Jeff talked.” Norton was trembling with the force of what he’d carried inside him across the continent.

“Scorpion Response. Wyoming. The whole thing. So don’t you tell me you’re sorry, you piece of shit.

You did this, all of it. You’re the reason Jeff is dead.”

“Am I?” Ortiz didn’t seem to be disputing it. He placed his hands palm-to-palm in his lap, pressed them together, maybe to hold down his fear. “And so you’ve brought your avenging angel with you. Well, that is fitting, I suppose, but I should warn you this chair has—”

“We know,” Carl said bleakly. “And I’m not here for Norton’s benefit. I came for Sevgi Ertekin.”

“Ertekin?” A frown crossed Ortiz’s face, then cleared. “Oh yes, the officer you stayed with in Harlem when we had you released. Yes, she died, too, didn’t she. A few days ago. I’m afraid I’ve not been keeping up very closely with—”

“She didn’t die.” Carl held down the fury with distant, trained reflex. His voice was quiet and cold, like the faint bite of winter in the New York air outside. “Sevgi Ertekin was killed. By
your
avenging angel, Ortiz. By Onbekend. Merrin. Whatever you call him. She died saving my life.”

“I am… very sorry about that as well.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“For you? No, I don’t imagine it would be. I assume there was some.” Ortiz frowned. “Some connection between you and this Ertekin.”

Carl said nothing. The words would take him nowhere.

“Yes, there must have been. You people care about so little in the end,
need
so little, of the material world and of other people. But when you do choose to own something or someone, when you consider that something or someone to be yours…”

“Yes, then,” said Carl. “Nothing else matters.”

He met the COLIN director’s eyes, saw the way they flinched away.

“I’m afraid,” said Ortiz shakily, “that events have run rather out of control in my… my absence from the bridge, as it were. Your involvement, Onbekend, other changing factors. Had I not been removed so unexpectedly from managing the operation, perhaps things would not have become so tangled. I truly regret that, you must believe me.”

“You still would have murdered over twenty men and women,” said Norton violently. “Just to save your political fucking neck.”

Ortiz shook his head. “No, Tom, that isn’t—”

“Don’t fucking use my name like we’re friends, you piece of shit!”

Carl put a hand on Norton’s arm. “Keep it down, Tom. We don’t want your security breaking the door down on us.”

The COLIN exec jerked away from him, looked at him as if he were contagious. In front of them, Ortiz was talking again.

“—was not for me, personally. You must understand that. I’m a wealthy man, and I have access to even greater wealth through other channels if I need it. I could have afforded to pay off your brother and his accomplice—”

Norton stared. “You knew? You knew he was part of it?”

“I suspected.” Ortiz coughed a little, hunched over in the chair. He cleared his throat. “His story seemed feeble, I thought it was likely he was involved, but… we were once close associates, Tom. Friends, even.

You must know I promoted you on his request, just the way I promoted him to Scorpion Response twenty years ago.”

Norton’s voice came through his teeth. “Am I supposed to be fucking grateful to you now?”

“No, of course not. That’s not what I’m saying. Listen to me, please. I suspected Jeff, I didn’t know for sure. But I did know that if I unleashed Onbekend on the others, whoever they were, Jeff would fold. If he had been involved, I knew he’d give me no more trouble. Even in the old days, even with Scorpion Response, he was a logistical manager, a facilitator. Not an operative, not a killer. Jeff never had the stomach for those things.”

Norton grinned savagely down at him. “That’s all you know. My brother sent those skaters to kill you.

My brother got me to hire Marsalis out of South Florida State to crank up the pressure on you and Onbekend. He was playing you just like you played him.”

“Is that so?” An attempted smile wavered on the COLIN director’s face for a moment. “Ironic, then, that he provided both the agents of my death and the means to foil them. Ironic, too, that you, Mr. Marsalis, should both save my life and then bring everything tumbling down around me. But then, that has always been the double-edged blade that your kind offered us, from the very beginning. Variant thirteen, the avatars of purified violence, our saviors and our nemeses.”

Carl listened to the lilt of imagery in Ortiz’s voice and thought abruptly of Manco Bambarén’s mannered speeches on
pistacos
and human history. He wondered idly what genes the two men might share.

“Where is Onbekend?” he asked bluntly.

“I’m afraid I don’t know.” Maybe Carl twitched forward, because Ortiz’s voice tightened a little with anxiety. “Really, I don’t. Believe me, if I knew—”

“Jeff Norton said he’d gone back to the altiplano. Back to Bambarén. That’s where you would have contacted him in the beginning to set this up, right?”

“Yes, but through Bambarén’s organization. In the end, I could only leave messages. It was he who came to me, here in New York one night, like a ghost through the security around my home.” Ortiz stared away through the window and shivered a little. “Like something I had summoned up. I should have known then, all those lessons our myths and legends scream at us, time and again. Never summon up what you cannot control.”

“You must have had direct contact with him after that,” Carl said pragmatically. “You set him on me in San Francisco, after the
Bulgakov’s Cat
arrests.”

Ortiz tried another smile. It guttered and died. “Believe me, Mr. Marsalis, I tried harder than you’ll ever know to prevent that. I am not an ungrateful man, and you had saved my life. But once decided, Onbekend is a force of nature. You had already threatened the object of his affections in Arequipa; he would not take less than your death. I tried to move you out of range, I had UNGLA attempt to recall you, but it seems you are in your way no less stubborn than any other of your kind. You would not shift.

And Onbekend was closing on you too fast for me to do anything else.”

The shock sparked in him. “
You
had di Palma call me?”

“Yes, Mr. Marsalis.” Ortiz sighed. “And not only then. From the very beginning, Gianfranco di Palma had instructions to remove you from the proceedings as rapidly as possible. We had simply not expected you to be so tenacious in a fight that was not your own.”

Carl remembered the UNGLA clinic in Istanbul. Mehmet Tuzcu and his diplomatic attempts at extraction. His own refusal to shift, the weak fistful of reasons he threw out, like sand in his own eyes.

But it had always been Sevgi Ertekin, he knew, even then.

“Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?” he asked distractedly.

“So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.”

Norton was dealing with something else, staring at Ortiz. “You’re pulling favors with UNGLA already?

You’ve got your hooks in that far?”

“Tom, I have a secure nomination for secretary general. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by this time next year, if you let me live.” The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer. “Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard?

You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and cooperative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all of that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation-state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.”

Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium.
See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself
.

“One more year,” said Ortiz urgently. “That’s all I need, and I can continue that work from the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the General Assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past—not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, superannuated men and women of violence hiding from their own pasts, set in the balance against the hope of a better future for all of us.”

Carl thought briefly of Toni Montes, imagined her fighting Onbekend with the decayed vestiges of her combat skill, then letting go and dying to keep the thirteen away from her husband and children. He wondered if she’d thought of smoking ruins in Wyoming as she stood there waiting for the bullet, or only the children she would never see walk through the door again.

He wondered what he’d have to picture when the time came for him.

Elena Aguirre, whispering behind him.

The quiet, filling him up…

“You’re full of shit, Ortiz.” The rasp of Norton’s voice pulled him out of it. “You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were running Scorpion Response.”

“No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time.” Ortiz, pitching his tone raised but reasonable. Arguing his point in good faith. “You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.”

Norton jolted forward, face tight with rage. He gripped the arms of Ortiz’s wheelchair, pushed it back half a meter before the autobrake cut in. Carl saw tiny specks of spittle hit Ortiz in the face as the COLIN exec yelled at his boss.

“A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker?

Covert ops in other people’s countries? Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?”

Carl pulled him back. “Get a grip, Tom. This isn’t what we’re here for.”

But the force had already gone out of Ortiz’s face, like a candle flame blown out by Norton’s rage.

Suddenly the wheelchair held only an ill old man, shaking his head in weary admission.

“I… was… young. Foolish. I have no defense. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time.

You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that
our
universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are.” Ortiz shifted his gaze to Carl, grew animated once more. “There is a future on Mars, Mr. Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will
need
the variants, we will have to
become
a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programs. I only sought to equalize the pressure, so when the explosion, the
realization
finally came, it would not rupture our society apart from the differential.”

Carl nodded. “Yeah. Let’s get back to Onbekend.”