Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  The beast is out.

  CHAPTER 52

  T he crash team were fast—less than two full minutes from when the micro-docs tripped under Ortiz’s skin and the sirens went off. But well before that, the COLIN Security detachment had heard the alarms and come through the door on general principles. They found Ortiz in his wheelchair, slumped over to one side, Norton and Marsalis standing staring at him.

  “Sir?” The squad leader looked at Norton.

  “Lock this whole floor down,” Norton told her absently. “Call in some more support to do it. I don’t want anyone, not even NYPD, getting up here without my say-so.”

  “But, but—”

  “Just do it.” He turned to Carl. “You’d better get moving.”

  Carl nodded, looked once more at Ortiz, and then stepped outside the unconsciously tightening ring the security detachment had formed around the body. He headed out of the room without looking back, out of the suite and into the corridor where he met the crash team head-on, all lifesaving speed and resuscitation gear, gurney and white coats, dedicated emergency room doctor and all.

  He stood aside to let them pass.

  Outside the hospital, he walked rapidly away, two blocks west and four south, lost himself in the sun-glinting brawl and bustle of the city. He peeled off his S(t)igma jacket, pulled his pack of phones from it, then balled it up inside out and dropped it into the first recycling bin he saw. The cold bit through his shirt, but he had COLIN-approved credit in his pockets, and he had time.

  He stopped on a street corner, checked his watch, and calculated traveling time to the JFK suborb terminal. Hoped Norton could hold up his end.

  Then he pulled a new phone loose from the pack, clicked it on, and waited for Union cover to catch up with it. With his other hand, he dug in his trouser pocket and tugged out the photo and list of scribbled numbers Matthew had hooked for him the night before.

  “Okay, Sev,” he murmured to himself. “Let’s do this.”

  She stepped into the gloom of the bar uncertainly, but with a certain confidence as well. They were, after all, on her home ground, Lower Manhattan, only a couple of blocks north of Wall Street and the NYPD dedicated Datacrime HQ. She hadn’t had to come far.

  Two short steps in to let the door hinge shut behind her, and she scanned the room. He raised a hand as her gaze passed down the line of booths along the sidewall opposite the bar. She didn’t respond to the wave, but she headed over. The single sodden suit, marooned on a stool at the end of the bar with his nth martini and no friends, gave her an unsubtle once-over as she passed him. Carl supposed she was worth the look. Long-limbed and well-shaped under her casual wear, shown off in her stride and the way she held herself. The single old-style bulb lamp in the middle of the ceiling burnished her hair golden as she passed beneath it, briefly lit the cheerleader good looks as well. She hadn’t changed much from the photo.

  “Amy Westhoff?”

  He raised himself out of his seat as she reached his booth, offered her his hand. She took it, gave him a searching look.

  “Yeah. Agent…di Palma, is it?”

  “That’s right.” He flashed his UNGLA ID, carefully held so she’d see the photo but not the name. Feigned a querying frown to distract her as he put the badge away again. “But I see you’ve come on your own?”

  She made a dismissive gesture as she seated herself on the other side of the table. The lie hurried out. “Yeah, well, my partner’s wrapped up with, uh, some other stuff right now. He couldn’t make it. Now, you said this is about the bust on Ethan Conrad four years back. I don’t really see how that can have anything to do with me, or with Datacrime.”

  “Well, it is only a stray lead. But then…can I get you a drink, maybe?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve got to go back on duty. Can we make this quick?”

  “Certainly.” Carl sipped at the Red Stripe in front of him. “In fact, my own jurisdiction in this matter is, should I say, rather loose. Obviously we’re not on UN territory here.”

  “Not far from it, though.”

  “No, true enough.” Carl put his drink down, let his hands drop into his lap. “Well then, I guess you’re familiar with the case. I understand you had some kind of relationship with Ethan Conrad, back before it was known what he was.”

  Tautly. “That’s right, I did. Well before anybody knew what he was.”

  “Ah, yes, quite. Well, it’s just that I’ve received information from an NYPD officer, an ex-officer in fact, Sevgi Ertekin. Would you have heard of her?”

  The waitress sauntered over, eyebrows raised, notepad not yet out of her apron pocket. It was early yet. Aside from the lonely broker, they had the place to themselves.

  “Get you guys any—”

  “We’re fine,” said Amy Westhoff curtly.

  The waitress shrugged and backed off. Carl gave an apologetic look. Westhoff waited until she’d gone back to the bar before she spoke again.

  “I knew Ertekin, vaguely, yeah. So what’s she been saying?”

  “Well, she said that you tipped off UNGLA about Conrad’s thirteen status because you were jealous that he’d left you, and that you then tried to call and warn him at the last minute. But were too late, obviously. Now—”

  “That fucking bitch!” But even in the low light, he could see that Amy Westhoff’s face had gone ashen.

  “You’d deny that then, I assume.”

  Westhoff lifted a trembling finger. “You go back to that raghead bitch, and you tell her from me—”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Sevgi Ertekin is dead. But she did give me a message for you, something she meant to do but couldn’t manage.”

  The blond woman’s eyes narrowed. “What message?”

  Then she flinched, yelped, reared back in the booth, and looked down at her trouser leg. She pressed on her thigh with both hands.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “That was a genetically modified curare flechette,” Carl said coldly. “It’s going to paralyze your skeletal muscle system so you can’t breathe or call for help.”

  Westhoff stared at him. Tried to get up from the table, made a muffled grunting sound instead and dropped back into her seat, still staring.

  “It’s a vastly improved variant on natural curare,” he went on. “You might call it the thirteen of poisons. I think you’ll last about seven or eight minutes. Enjoy.”

  He slid the Red Stripe over so it stood in front of her. Westhoff’s mouth twitched, and she slumped against the wall. Carl got up to go. He leaned in close.

  “Sevgi Ertekin wanted you dead,” he told her softly. “And now you are.”

  Then he eased out of the booth and headed for the door. On the way out, he looked across at the bar, where the waitress sat on a stool, fiddling with some aspect of her phone. As she glanced up at him, Carl fielded her gaze, rolled his eyes expressively, put on jilted, hurt, and weary. The girl pulled a sympathetic face, smiled at him, and went back to her phone. He reached the door, pushed it open, and let himself back out into the late-afternoon chill.

  He dropped the flechette gun down a grate on Wall Street, a little sad to see it go after the trouble Matthew had gone to in tracking down a suitably disreputable dealer for him, and the price the suitably disreputable dealer had screwed out of him when it became clear that Carl was in a hurry.

  Then again, it had served its purpose.

  Hope that was what you wanted, Sevgi.

  He called Norton from a cab on the way to JFK.

  “Can you talk?”

  “Yeah, I’m back at Jefferson Park. Where are you?”

  “Queensboro Bridge. On my way to the airport.”

  “You’re still here, in town?” Norton’s voice punched out of the phone. “What the fuck are you playing at, Marsalis?”

  “I had a couple of things to do. Am I still safe to fly?”

  Norton blew out a long breath. “Yeah, should be. I’ve got the NYPD hammering on my door and Weill Cornell
screaming about lawsuits, but so far the COLIN mandate is holding. Always knew there was some reason I took this job.”

  “That old-time corporate power, huh?” Carl grew serious. “Think they’ll try and nail you, though?”

  “Well, for now it’s my train set, so I’m fine. And anyway, I was in the bathroom, remember. No idea what was going on till you called me and there’s Ortiz, dead in his chair.”

  “Sounds kind of thin.”

  “It is kind of thin. But this is the most powerful nongovernmental body on the planet we’re talking about, and right now they’ve got my back. Quit worrying about me, Marsalis. You want to help, just get your ass out of Union jurisdiction right now.”

  “On my way.”

  He hung up and looked out the taxi window. Ribbed light blipped through the steel lattices of the bridge structure as they headed out over the span, strobed across his face and turned the air in the cab alternately dusty and dimmed. Back across the East River, Manhattan made its block graph skyline against a cold, perfect blue. The sun glowed and dripped like broken yolk off the top and down the side of one of the new black nanobuild towers. Departure clung to the shrinking scene like mist.

  The same obscure desire he’d felt staring at the Marin Headlands two nights ago came and stabbed him in the heart all over again. He could not pin down what it meant, could only give it a name.

  Sevgi.

  CHAPTER 53

  T he path down into Colca was a foot-pounded dusty white, in places barely an improvement over the loose scree and scrub it cut through. Initially, it straggled and twisted along the rim of the canyon like a recently unwound length of cable with the worst of the kinks still not out. It headed out of the village in a relatively straight line, followed the line of the canyon more or less, brushed up to the edge here and there, close enough to offer a dizzying view downward, then slid away again as if unnerved by the drop. A couple of kilometers out of town, the path skirted a desolate cleared space with a paint-peeled rusting goal iron at either end. It kinked a couple more times and then found and dropped into a wide basin-shaped bite in the canyon wall, riding the curve around and down like the track of a roulette ball made visible on its fall toward the luck of the numbers. Thereafter, it fell abruptly off the edge of the canyon, spilled down the flank of the valley in a concertina of hairpin turns that made grudging concession to the steep angle of descent, and arrived at last, in dust and sliding pebbles, at an ancient wooden suspension bridge across the pale greenish flow of the river.

  The bridge was not much more user-friendly than the path that led to it. The materials employed in its construction didn’t look to have been renewed in decades, and where the planking had cracked and holed, the locals had placed rocks so there was no downward view into the water that might scare the mules—which were still the only viable means of heavy transport down from the towns on the canyon rim. Infrastructural neglect was a general feature of the region—significant distance from the nearest prep camps meant no possible return on corporate funds deployed here, tourism was the only staple, and the tourists liked their squalor picturesque—but here the process had been allowed to run a little farther than elsewhere. Here visitors other than known locals were not encouraged, and tour companies had been persuaded to route their itineraries away to other sections of the canyon. Here, comings and goings on the path were watched by men carrying weapons whose black and metal angles gleamed new and high-tech in the harsh, altiplano sun. Here, it was rumored, there lived a witch who, lacking the normal human capacity to survive the whole of the dry season awake, must fall into an enchanted sleep before the end of each year and could only be roused when the rains came, and only then by the call and ministrations of her pistaco lover.

  “You cannot seriously be planning to go down there now.” Norton was shaking his head, but his tone carried less disbelief than weary resignation. He seemed to have lost all capacity for shock over the previous few days.

  “Better now than later,” Carl told him soberly. “The more the dust settles, the more chance Bambarén and Onbekend have to take stock, and for them I’m a big black mark in the negative asset column. They don’t know about Sevgi, but they know the work I do for UNGLA, and they know I know about Onbekend. And they’re both cautious men. Leave it long enough, they’re going to start wondering where I am and what I’m doing. But right now, they figure I’m scrambling for cover just like everybody else.”

  “Yeah, you should be.”

  “Getting hard to hold the line, is it?”

  “No, and that’s not what I meant. I’m just saying you need to think about what you’re going to do when this is over.”

  Carl stared out at the slow nighttime crawl of the cross-border traffic in the checkpoint lanes. “I’ll worry about that when it is over. Meantime—you made me a promise.”

  “And I came running, didn’t I?” Norton gestured around the stark, utilitarian space they had to themselves. “I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Not like I haven’t got other things to do, or more attractive places to be doing them.”

  He had a point. RimSec’s Immigration Division was widely recognized as the shitty end of the organization’s sprawling jurisdiction, and the unlovely interior of the observation lodge offered mute testimony. Gray pressed-carbon lockers stood ranked along the back wall; a random scatter of cheap tables and chairs crowded one half of the limited floor space, and a pool table clothed in garish orange baize took up the rest. A plastic rack held the warped and battered cues pinned to the wall like suspects, alongside a couple of vending machines whose wanly glowing display windows were racked with items that looked more like hazardous material in an isolation chamber than food or drink. Bleak LCLS panels in the roof, the long window of the observation port commanding its three-meter elevated view of the traffic. An unobtrusive back door led out to the cells.

  They’d been sitting there since before it got dark.

  Carl got up and prowled the room for the fifteenth time. He was beginning to think he could feel the soul of the place breathing, and it didn’t improve his mood much. The yellow-painted walls were institutionally uncared for, scarred in a hundred places at the pool table end with the memory of overzealous windup for irritable, jaw-rattling shots. Elsewhere forlorn-looking posters attempted to break up the monotony, everything from RimSec information flyers and mission statements to soft-porn printouts and announcements of local gigs and fiesta nights at clubs up the road in Blythe. None of it looked very appealing, less so than ever fifteenth time around.

  It wasn’t much of a place to say his farewells to Norton.

  “NYPD still giving you a lot of grief?” he asked.

  Norton gestured. “Sure, they’re pushing. They’d like to know where the hell you are, that’s for sure. Why you walked out like that. I’ve got you down as officially helping COLIN with its internal investigation, witness-protected as part of the deal. They don’t buy it, but hey, they’re just cops. They don’t get to argue with us about stuff like this.”

  “They ask about anything else?”

  The COLIN exec looked away. He’d never asked what Carl had found to do in Manhattan the rest of that day. “No, they haven’t. Why, is there something else I should know about?”

  Carl gave the question a moment’s honest consideration. “That you should know about? No. Nothing else.”

  The death of NYPD sergeant Amy Westhoff had made some headlines across the Union, he’d checked for it, but he doubted Norton had the spare time or energy to make any connection there still might be with Sevgi Ertekin. Four years was a long time, and he was pretty sure he’d covered his tracks when he called Westhoff. The woman’s guilt had done most of the heavy lifting for him.

  “If I’m honest,” said Norton tiredly, “I’m more worried about the Weill Cornell people than the police. There’s some serious finance lying about in that place, some people with access to high-level ears, and some seriously dedicated medical staff who don’t like losing their patients under
mysterious circumstances. Not to mention the fact that the Ortiz family’s personal physician has a consultant residency there.”

  “Did you have to pay off the crash team?”

  “No, they’re not the problem. They’re all juniors, looking to build careers, and they know what a malpractice suit can do to a résumé, even by association. I had them pronounce Ortiz dead at the scene and then chased them out, told them it wasn’t their responsibility any longer. You should have seen their faces—they were all very relieved to get out of that room.”

  Carl paused by a gig listing. FAT MEN ARE HARDER TO KIDNAP—BLYTHE MARS MEMORIAL HALL, NOVEMBER 25. Nearly three weeks away. He wondered briefly where he’d be when the Fat Men took the stage. Put the thought away, barely looked at.

  “Got an exit strategy for Ortiz yet?”

  Norton peered into the dregs of coffee gone two hours cold. “Variations on a theme. Unsuspected late-stage viral contamination from the bioware slugs he was shot with. Or interface incompatibilities; his body rejected the nanorepair suite he was implanted with, and he was too weak to survive the shock. Either way, you can be damn sure there’ll be no postmortem worth worrying about. Alvaro Ortiz is going to get a statesman’s funeral, eulogies over a tragic untimely death, and his name on a big fucking plaque somewhere. None of this is ever going to come out. That’s how we buy the family’s silence.”

  Carl gave him a curious look from across the room. Something had happened to Norton since he’d seen him last, something that went beyond the weary lack of capacity for surprise. It was hard to pin down, but the COLIN exec seemed to have taken to his new role as the Initiative’s fixer with a bitter, masochistic pleasure. In some obscure way, like a driven athlete with pain, he looked to be learning to enjoy the power he’d been handed. In the vacuum vortex created by the death of Ortiz and his brother, Tom Norton was the man of the hour, and he’d risen to it like a boxer to the bell, like the reluctant hero finally called to arms. As if, along with the young-patrician demeanor and the studied press-conference calm, this was just part and parcel of what he’d been made for after all.