The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  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 organised 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 middle man 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 nor does Merrin’s. Any associative search Colony ran on Merrin would have stopped at Danvers. The Horkan’s Pride n-djinn only went further 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 a while. 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 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 sub-culture 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 kilometres away. Ten-minute comms 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 co-operating 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 set-up, here and on Mars. They’ve got all the standard prejudices against people like me.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But. About three years ago I ran into a thirteen who tried to forge an alliance with what’s left of the altiplano chapters. Guy called Névant, French, ex-Department Eight special insertion unit. Very smart guy, he was an insurrection specialist in Central Asia. Warlord liaison, counter-intelligence, all that shit. Given time, he might have got 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 Névant, this smart guy, and you took him back.’ Ertekin got to her feet and went to stare out of 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 round.

  ‘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. Three 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. Névant 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 enquiry, be my guest and dig one up. But Névant’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.

  ‘Merrin’s holed up in the UN building with a nuclear device,’ suggested Carl brightly. ‘And enough delegates held hostage to eat his way through to Christmas.’

  Norton nodded. ‘I’m glad you’re having a good time. Wrong guess. You’re all over the feeds. Thirteen saves COLIN director, slaughters two.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’ Ertekin’s shoulders slumped. ‘All we needed. How the hell did that happen?’

  ‘Apparently, some anal little geek at one of the city feeds had a fit of total recall. Got our friend here’s face off the crime-scene footage, face reminded him of something, he matched it with the trouble down in Florida.’ Norton pointed. ‘Or maybe it was that jacket. Hard to miss, and it’s not exactly high fashion. Anyway, the geek rings up the twenty-eighth precinct and asks some leading questions. Evidently he got lucky. He either talked to someone really co-operative or someone really dumb.’

  ‘Fucking Williamson.’

  Norton shrugged. ‘Yeah, or whoever. You’ve got to bet half an hour after Williamson got back to the twenty-eighth, every cop in the precinct house knew they had a thirteen walking the streets. And probably saw no reason on Earth to shut up about it. In their eyes, it’s a basic public safety issue. They know they’ve got no leverage with us, they’d be more than happy to let the feeds do their demonising for them.’

  ‘Demonise?’ Carl grinned. ‘I thought I was up there for saving Ortiz.’

  ‘And slaughtering two,’ said Ertekin wearily. ‘Don’t forget that part.’

  ‘They’re asking for a statement, Sev. Nicholson says he figures you’re it. Former NYPD detective and all that, should make it easier to play down any anti-COLIN feeling the twenty-eighth may have stirred up.’

  ‘Oh thanks, Tom.’ Ertekin threw herself back into her chair and glared up at Norton. ‘A fucking press conference? You think I haven’t got anything better to do than talk to the fucking media?’

  Norton spread his hands. ‘It isn’t me, Sev. It’s Nicholson. And the way he sees it, no, you don’t have anything better to do right now. What do you want me to do, tell him you had to go out of town?’

  Carl met her eyes across the room. He grinned.

  PART III

  AWAY FROM IT ALL

  ‘The limited brief of this report notwithstanding, it is imperative to acknowledge that we are dealing here with actual human beings and not some theoretical model of human behaviour. We should not then be surprised to encounter a complex and potentially confusing mass of emotional factors and interactions, nor should it perplex us to discover that any genuine solution may well need to be sought beyond the current scope of our enquiry.’

  Jacobsen Report August 2091

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  COLIN Istanbul was on the European side, up near Taksim Square and nestled in amongst a forest of similar purple or bronze glass towers inhabited mostly by banks. At night, a skeleton security staff and automated guns kept the base levels open, lit in pools of soft blue, for whatever business might crop up. The Colony Initiative, to paraphrase its own advertising hype, was an enterprise on which the sun never set. You never knew when or where it might need to flex itself fully awake and deploy some geopolitical muscle. Best always to remain at standby. Sevgi, who associated Taksim primarily with the murder of her grandfather and great uncle by overzealous Turkish security forces, stopped in just long enough to collect keytabs for one of the COLIN-owned apartments across the Bosphorus in Kadikoy. Pretty much anything else she needed, she could access through her dataslate. Talking to Stéphane Névant was in any case not going to be a COLIN gig.

  The less official presence he can smell on you, the better, Marsalis told her. Névant’s special, he’s one of the few thirteens I know who’s come to an accommodation with external authority. He’s emptied out his rage. But that doesn’t mean he feels good about it. Be best if we don’t poke a finger in that particular blister.

  The same limo that had collected them from the airport rolled them down to the Karakoy terminal, where t
he ferries to the Asian side ran all night. Sevgi shrugged off the driver’s protests about security. Riding round via the bridge was going to take as long or longer than waiting for the ferry, and she needed to clear her head. She hadn’t wanted to come here, wanted still less to be here with Marsalis. She was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t have folded and taken the press conference after all.

  They’d watched it broadcast on New England Net, while the mid-afternoon THY suborb spun them up from JFK and dropped them on the other side of the globe. Norton, looking sober and imposing in his media suit. TV audiences still loved a solid pair of shoulders and a good head of hair above pretty much anything they’d actually hear coming out of a speaker’s mouth, and Tom Norton excelled in both areas. He really could, Sevgi was convinced, have run for office of some sort. He fielded the questions with exactly the right measure of patrician confidence and downhome good humour.

  Dan Meredith, Republic Today. Is it true COLIN are now employing hypermales as security?

  No, Dan. Not only is it not true, it’s also deeply flawed as an assumption. Inclusive gesture to the whole room. I think we’re all aware what a hypermale would look like, if anyone was actually criminally stupid enough to breed one.

  Ripple of muttering among the gathered journalists. Norton gave it just long enough, then squashed it.

  Hypermale genetic tendency is, to put not too fine a point to it, autism. A hypermale would make a pretty poor security guard, Dan. Not only would he likely not recognise signs of an impending attack from another human being, he’d probably be too busy counting the bullets in his gun to actually fire them at anything.

  Laughter. The footage swung momentarily to Meredith’s face in the crowd. He offered a thin smile. Ladled urbane southern irony into his voice.

  I’m sorry, Tom. Leaving aside the fact we all know the Chinese have bred super-autists for their n-djinn interface programmes, that’s not what I meant. I was referring to variant thirteens, which most normal Americans would call hypermales. Hypermales like the one you admit was present at today’s attempt on Alvaro Ortiz’s life. Are you employing any of those as security guards?