Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Will who?”

  “Yeah, right. Forget it.”

  He didn’t know how much truth she was telling. Certainly, things had been fraught once they saw what he’d done to Dudeck. The intervention squad didn’t quite stunwrap him on the spot, but it was a close thing. He spent three hours in the faintly ammoniac-perfumed gloom of the riot holding cells, was hauled out, marched summarily across to admin, and then marched just as rapidly back as, he supposed, competing authorizations whiplashed back and forth. It took another two hours to get him out of the hole permanently, by which time it was dark and the admin block was down to a skeleton crew of caretakers and security.

  Norton and Ertekin came and went, in and out of doors to offices he never got to see inside. They barely glanced his way. Shift change came and went. At one point, a CO came and took his picture, took it away without comment. Carl let it all wash over him. When they were all done, he signed the documents they gave him, changed back into his own clothes, and, guessing it would be cold in New York, blagged an inmate jacket from the yawning night clerk. It was a use-faded gray-black, not a bad color in itself, but one sleeve was flashed with a line of orange chevrons and across the back was the customary sigma logo and name in the same glaring color. As with a lot of old stock, some tagging freak wit had taken a dye squirt to the lettering, dumping in a long jagged lowercase t after the S. He shrugged and took it anyway. Miami PD had impounded his gear from the hotel when they busted him, and he didn’t suppose he’d ever see it again. UNGLA were apparently still negotiating for the return of the Haag gun and its load. Point of principle, point of pride. No one really believed they’d win. He shouldered his way into the jacket, rolled up the short personal effects strip that went with the clothes he’d been arrested in, and walked out.

  Fuck the accessories, Carl. You’re halfway home.

  A grim-faced Norton stayed at his side all the way to the innocuous hired teardrop in the parking lot, opened the backseat for him, and closed it again as soon as he was in. Ertekin came out of the admin building a couple of minutes later, muttered something to her partner, and then got in behind the wheel. When Norton was in beside her, she fired up the engine and steered the car out of the prison gates on manual. Neither of the COLIN officers spoke to Carl at all.

  Warden Parris, if he was still on site, never showed.

  A couple of hundred meters down the exit highway, Norton was already on the phone, checking the Miami suborb terminal for departures north. Not surprisingly, there was nothing flying this late.

  “Hotel?” he’d asked Ertekin.

  She shook her head “Parris is way too pissed. I don’t want to wake up to a VCC warrant tomorrow morning because he called some friend in Tallahassee during the night. We need to get back on our own turf.”

  Norton went back to the phone. A couple of hours later, they were rolling through a security gate and into the nanorack facility environs. Powered fences glinted off across the Florida flatland, watchful men and women in coveralls prowling back and forth in the gloom. The low-light headgear they wore made them look like insect aliens from a low-budget stage show. Carl spotted the colin insignia on an upper arm, on the badge of a beret. Safe haven. He could see the tension drain almost visibly out of his two rescuers.

  Now, out on the beach with sand between his toes and his own clothes on his back for the first time in four months, he could feel a similar easing in himself. A sudden self-knowledge slopped in him, the awareness of how clenched he’d become, and the faintly scary slide as he let it go increments at a time. He’d been here before a few times: the bridge of the Felipe Souza, crackling suddenly with transmission from the incoming rescue boat; stepping off the elevator platform at the bottom of the Hawking nanorack and onto ground that sucked at him with a full g; getting out of the teardrop taxi in Hampstead and looking up at Zooly’s new pad, checking the street corner sign, wondering if this could really be it, if maybe he’d gotten her instructions wrong—and then seeing her come to the huge picture window and grin down at him, dimly seen through the tree-shadowed glass. The slip in your guts that tells you it’s okay, you can let go now.

  “Tell me something, Ertekin.” The words came out of his mouth like exhaled smoke, pure unguarded conversation. He didn’t much care what she thought or said in reply—just talking and knowing it wasn’t going to get him shanked was the point. “You’ve worked for COLIN a couple of years, right?”

  “Two and a half.”

  “So who’s senior? You or Norton?”

  He got the look again, but muted. Maybe she could hear the lack of cabling in his voice. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “No? So how does it work?” He gestured. “Come on, Ertekin. We’re just talking here. It’s a beach, for fuck’s sake.”

  The twitched corner of a smile, but he got the feeling it wasn’t for him. He gestured again.

  “Come on.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you.” She shook her head. “One in the morning, the man wants to talk office politics. Works like this. Norton’s an accredited COLIN investigator, a troubleshooter. Got a dozen years in, he went straight to them after law enforcement training in some upstate college. It’s a good career move: COLIN pay way over average and most of the work isn’t what you’d call hazardous. You’re looking at anticorruption task forcing, chasing down local government scams on COLIN property, Marstech licensing breaches, that sort of thing.”

  “Not much serial homicide then.”

  “No. When things get heavy, they mostly hire muscle from private military contractors like ExOp or Lamberts. Where it’s legally messy, they pull local PD liaison. That was me. I came in on a couple of Marstech hijacks where COLIN staff got killed, seconded from NYPD Homicide. They liked the work I did for them, Norton was moving up to a senior post, he needed a permanent partner with bloodwork experience, so.” She shrugged. “Like that. They offered me the job. The money was a lot. I took it.”

  “But Norton still ranks you?”

  Ertekin sighed. Looked out to sea.

  “What?’

  “Thirteens. You’re all so fucking wired for hierarchy. Who’s in charge? Who’s at the top? Who do I have to dominate? Every detective I ever shared an office with, it—”

  She stopped.

  For a moment, he thought Norton was there, coming down the beach toward them from the bunkhouse. The mesh cranked, rustily. He flicker-checked the beach, saw nothing. Went back to her face and found her still staring out at the ocean.

  “It what?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said evenly. “Yeah, Norton ranks me. Norton knows COLIN inside and out. But he’s not a cop and I am.”

  “So he defers to you?”

  “We cooperate.” She left the sea and met his eyes. “Strange concept for someone like you, I know. But Norton’s got nothing to prove.”

  “And a thick head of hair, right?”

  The lyric left her looking blank. He guessed she was too young to really remember Angry Young and the Men. Carl owned their last album because, hey, who over the age of forty didn’t, the download went triple platinum as soon as it hit the open stacks. But Ertekin would have been barely out of diapers at the time. He’d only just been old enough himself to take it on board when Angry Young blew his brains out all over the fittings of a Kilburn recording studio. Making a Mess. Right. Black-comic sly and London-gutter cool to the last. He sometimes wondered if Angry Young had known what would happen to sales of Making a Mess when he put the barrel of the frag carbine in his mouth that afternoon, grinned—apparently—at the sound man, and flipped the trigger. Whether he had in fact begun to guess when he’d scrawled out the title track and lyrics a year earlier.

  “What’s his hair got to do with it?”

  “Well, it’s hardly male-pattern baldness, is it?”

  “Hardly….” She got it. “Oh you’re fucking kidding me. You cannot be serious. Marsalis, you don’t have male-pattern baldness.”

  “No. But I’m
not human.”

  It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.

  “You quoting somebody there?”

  “Well, yeah.” He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. “Your guys, for a start.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “My guys?”

  “Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?”

  “For your information,” she said thinly, “the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.”

  Carl shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland Baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh excuse fucking me.” He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place. You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it. He pushed out a laugh. “I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ‘93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disemboweled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the shahuda hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.”

  “The shahuda are not—”

  “Yeah, yeah. The shahuda are not representative. Heard it. Just like the gladius dei don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity, either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.”

  “You’re talking about fanatical mino—”

  “Look, Ertekin.” He found this time the laugh was genuine. “I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group-solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?”

  “I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.”

  “Good. Let’s not, then.”

  They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white-noise hiss as they sucked back.

  “How come you knew I was Turkish?” she asked him finally.

  He shrugged. “Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.”

  “What were you doing in Turkey?”

  “What do you think.”

  “The tracts?”

  He nodded somberly. “Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorized. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?”

  “No, I’m from New York.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Sorry. I meant—”

  He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand toward them, and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.

  “Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.” The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, henna-red hair cut short and stylish. flip. Body a graceless tangle in disarrayed skirt and blouse, limned in crime scene white on a polished wood floor. “Shot to death in her home in the Angeline Freeport this evening.” flip. Close-up morgue shot. Face bruised at the mouth, makeup smeared, eyes blown black by the pressure of the head shot that had killed her. The entry wound sat in her forehead like a crater. flip. “Children were out at a swimming class with the father. The house is smart, wired into a securisoft neighborhood net and upgrade-paid for the next three years. Either Merrin broke in with some very sophisticated intrusion gear, or Toni let him in.” flip. Body detail, one mottled flank and the sexless sag of a breast. “There was a fight, he knocked her around, put her on the floor more than once. A couple of her ribs were broken, there’s substantial bruising pretty much everywhere. You saw the face. Blood traces everywhere, too; CSI got it off the couch in the other room, the walls, too, in a couple of places.” flip. Red smears on stucco cream. “Most of it’s hers. Seems like he really went to town.”

  “Did he rape her?” Carl asked.

  flip.

  “No. No detectable sexual assault.”

  “Same as the others,” said Sevgi quietly. “Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.”

  flip.

  “Siloam Springs,” Norton supplied. “Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?”

  “No, I don’t remember.” Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. “We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.”

  Norton shrugged. “Time enough to decide it was a shithole, though, right?”

  “Oh shut up. It’s all Jesusland, isn’t it?” Ertekin rubbed at an eye and nodded at the projection wall. “Why’d they flag this one up?”

  The sequence of images had frozen on another section of pale cream wall, Rorschach-blotched with blood and tissue. A tiny red triangle pulsed on and off in the corner of the screen.

  “Yeah, Angeline PD couldn’t work this one out.” Norton prodded the dataslate on the table. On the screen, a block of forensic data floated down onto the picture. “When Merrin finally killed this woman, he shot her standing upright in the next room. High-velocity electromag round; it went right through her head and into the wall behind. The angle suggests he was standing right in front of her. That’s what doesn’t fit. Dying on her knees when she’s finally got no more fight in her, yeah, that I can see. But standing up and just taking it, after the struggle she put up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Yeah, it does.” Carl paused for a moment, testing the intuition, the lines of force it flowed along. He knew the shape of it the way his hand knew the butt of the Haag gun. “She gave up before she was done, because he threatened her with something worse.”

  “Worse than beating her to death?” There was an icy anger in the rims of Norton’s eyes as he spoke. Carl couldn’t tell if it extended to him as well as Merrin. “You want to tell me what that would be, exactly?”

  “The children,” said Ertekin quietly.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Probably the husband as well, but it’s the children that would have clinched it. Playing to her genetic wiring. He told her he’d wait until the children came home.”

  “You can’t know that,” said Norton, still angry.

  “No, of course not. But it’s the obvious explanation. He got in through the house defenses. Either Montes knew him and let him in, or he gutted the software, in which case he’d been scoping the house well enough to know the systems, so he certainly would have known that there were children, that they’d be back soon. That was his leverage, that was what he used.”

  He saw the way a look went between them.

  “It works, up to a point,” Ertekin said, more to herself than anyone else. “But all it does is turn the question around. If
he was prepared to use a threat like that, why not use it from scratch? Why bother dancing around the furniture in the first place?”

  Carl shook his head. “I don’t know. But to me, the shot looks like an execution. The fight must have been something else.”

  “Interrogation? You think this was about extracting a confession?”

  Carl thought about it for a moment, staring into the border of glare and gloom where the side of the screen edged out on the wall. Recollection coiled loose like snakes—this woman seemed to dislodge memory in him practically every time she opened her fucking mouth. Back in the jail—did you ever think that?—it was the passageways of the Felipe Souza and the cold inevitability of his thoughts as he waited out the rescue. Now she had him again. The hot, tiny room in a nameless Tehran backstreet. Blocks of sunlight etched into the floor, the shadow of a single barred window. Stale sweat and the faint aroma of scorched flesh. Discordant screaming from down the hall. Blood on his fist.

  “I don’t think so. There are smarter ways of getting information.”

  “Then what?” pushed Norton. “Just straight sadism? Or is this some kind of übermensch thing? Brutalism by genetic right.”

  Carl met the other man’s eyes for a moment, just to let him know. Norton held his gaze.

  Carl shrugged. “Maybe it was rage,” he said. “For whatever reasons, maybe this Merrin just lost control.”

  Ertekin frowned. “All right. But then he just, what? Just calmed down and executed her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That still doesn’t make much sense to me,” said Norton.

  Carl shrugged again, this time dismissive. “Why should it?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, Norton, that at a basic biochemical level, you’re not like Merrin. None of you are. Down in the limbic system where it counts, across the amygdalae and up into the orbitofrontal cortex, Merrin has about a thousand biochemical processes going on that you don’t have.” Carl had meant to come across calm and detached—social aptitude routines had his body language and speech locked away from confrontational. But outside it all, the weariness in his own voice astounded him. He finished abruptly. “Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t have a map for where this guy is right now.”